The Just City

by Jo Walton

  Kebes smiled. “Actually, they are easy to tell apart. They’re numbered. Lysias showed me once, when I was helping him.” When he was going through his period of making Lysias think that Kebes would begin to strive for excellence through his encouragement, I thought. “The numbers are very small, down on their side, above the tread. They’re long. But they’re all different. So we can tell them apart, by checking the numbers.”

  “Are they numbered in Latin or Greek?” Sokrates asked, leaning forward, urgently interested.

  “Neither,” Kebes said. “They’re numbered in numbers.”

  Sokrates looked blank.

  “You know, zeroic. Like page numbers in books,” I said. I pulled a book out of the fold of my kiton and showed him. It happened to a bound copy of Aeschylus’s Telemachus.

  “Those are numbers?” he asked. “How do they work?”

  I wrote them down in the dust, from one to ten, and showed him. “That’s all there is to it. For twenty, or for a hundred—”

  He understood it at once. “And you have all known this all this time and never mentioned it to me?” he said.

  “It never occurred to me that you didn’t know,” I said.

  “Pah. My ignorance is vast and profound. I like to know at least what I do not know.” He traced the numbers again. “Zero. What a concept. What a timesaver. What vast realms of arithmetic and geometry it must reveal. I wish Pythagoras could have known it, and the Pythagoreans of Athens.” Then, like a hound who had started after the wrong hare, he got immediately back on track. “So the workers are labelled with this?”

  “That’s right,” Kebes said. “All of them.”

  “Who did this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What is the purpose?”

  “Telling them apart. That’s how Lysias uses it, anyway.”

  “Did you note the number of the one planting bulbs?”

  “Sorry, no, it didn’t occur to me.”

  Sokrates sighed, sat back and absently ate a handful of olives.

  “So the numbers are like names?” I suggested. “That seems to argue against them being people. Why not give them names?”

  “Maybe there are too many to name?” Pytheas suggested.

  “How many of them are there?” Sokrates asked, licking olive oil off his fingers.

  We all shrugged. “Lots,” Kebes said. “I was surprised how many when I saw them at their feeding station.”

  “They eat?” Sokrates asked.

  “They eat electricity, Lysias said.”

  Sokrates bounced to his feet. “Come on, show me this feeding station!”

  I swallowed an olive hastily. We set off, with Kebes leading the way and Sokrates close behind.

  Pytheas walked beside me. “This is crazy,” he said.

  “Sure. Kind of fun, though. And what if they actually were thinking beings with plans?”

  “They’re not. They’re tools. Everyone knows that.” Pytheas looked a little unsettled.

  “What everyone knows, Sokrates examines,” I said.

  Kebes led us to a block on the east side of the city, between the streets of Poseidon and Hermes, not far from the temple of Ares. The whole block was one square building, relatively unexciting. I’d never particularly noticed it. There was a lot in the city that was empty, awaiting a later purpose, or used by the masters for unknown purposes. I wasn’t especially curious about most of it. This building had decorative recessed squares set all around it at ground level. There were no windows. A key-pattern frieze ran around the top. There was another key pattern over the door.

  “What now?” Sokrates asked.

  “Now we wait for a worker, because Lysias has a key but I don’t. But you’ll see when a worker comes.” Kebes leaned back on his heels. I squatted down and ate more raisins. Pytheas and Sokrates began to debate volition, and whether workers could be considered to have it.

  “Ah, here we go,” Kebes said, when the sun was beginning to slide towards dinner time.

  A bronze-colored worker came down the street. “Joy to you,” Sokrates said. “I am Sokrates. Do you have a name?” It ignored him utterly and approached the building, not by the door but directly at one of the recessed squares. The square slid open in front of it and it vanished inside.

  “Did you see that?” Sokrates asked.

  “That’s what they do,” Kebes said. “Inside there are sockets and they plug themselves in to eat electricity. When they’re full, which takes several hours, they unplug themselves and come out again.”

  “I’d never noticed this was here,” I said.

  “Nobody much comes down this street,” Kebes said. “There’s nothing here, and if you were at the corner you’d cut diagonally down the street of Apollo.”

  “You’ve been inside?” Sokrates asked.

  “Yes, with Lysias.”

  “We could follow a worker inside,” Sokrates suggested.

  “We’d be stuck there until one wanted to come out. We can’t open the doors without a key. It would be better to talk to them when they come out—they won’t be hungry then, and if they can talk they’ll be more likely to respond.”

  “I want to see inside,” Sokrates said.

  “All right. But we could get stuck there all night. Or you could ask Lysias or Klio. They have keys. I’m sure they’d let you in.”

  “If Lysias and Klio take care of them, that suggests that they come from their time. When is that?” Sokrates was bending down and poking at the square where the worker had disappeared. Nothing he did could move it. I touched it myself. It felt like solid stone.

  “The boring part of history,” I said. “The bit where nothing happened except people inventing things, Axiothea said.”

  “The part they don’t want us to know about! Excellent.” Sokrates kept on poking. Then a different square slid open and a worker emerged. “Joy to you! Do you like your work?” It ignored us. The panel started to slide shut, and fast as an eel, Sokrates darted through it.

  The three of us stared at each other and then at the smooth closed panel. “He needs a keeper sometimes,” Pytheas said.

  “Should we get Lysias?” Kebes asked.

  “How much trouble can he get into inside?” I asked.

  “Not much, I don’t think. He knows about electricity—I mean, he has a light in Thessaly. He’s not likely to stick his fingers into sockets. At least, I hope not. He can’t get into much trouble going up to the workers as they’re feeding and asking them if they like their work.” Kebes looked worried.

  “I think we have two choices: wait for a worker to go in or out and follow it in ourselves, or fetch Lysias or Klio and ask them to let us in,” I said. “We can’t just leave Sokrates in there.”

  “I think you should go and find one of them,” Pytheas said, to me. He tapped on the stone. Nothing happened.

  “It might be hours before another one comes,” Kebes said.

  “It’s almost dinner time. Klio will be at Sparta, and Lysias will be at Constantinople. I’ll go to him, you go to her,” Pytheas said, looking at me. Then he looked at Kebes. “You’ve been in there before. You wait here, and if you get the chance, go in.”

  Kebes hesitated, as if he wanted to dispute this, but it made such clear and obvious sense that after a moment he nodded.

  “Back soon!” I said, and set off running towards the Spartan hall.

  “Sokrates is doing what with the workers?” Klio asked, when I found her and panted out my story.

  “Trying to initiate dialectic with them,” I said. “But Kebes said he might stick his fingers in a wall socket, and I’m not absolutely sure he wouldn’t.”

  Klio sighed. The Spartan hall was appropriately bare and Spartan, but all the wood was polished to a high shine and the windows looked out over the sea. The smell coming from the kitchen suggested a rich vegetable soup. My stomach gurgled. “Come on then,” she said. “I suppose we should sort this out. What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with the
m?”

  “He’s Sokrates,” I said.

  “He’s like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear,” she said.

  “Well, but there were also the plants.”

  “Plants? No. Tell me on the way.” She pushed her hair out of her face and we set off.

  I explained to Klio about the bulbs as we walked. She frowned. “They really are just tools,” she said. “I can see how it’s difficult for you to see. They can make simple decisions, they can even prioritize to a certain extent. But they don’t really think. They have a program—a list of things they know how to do and a list of orders of what needs doing, and they just put those together.”

  “Do you know that or is it an opinion?” I asked.

  Klio frowned even more, twisting up her face. She was Axiothea’s good friend so I knew her quite well. She sometimes dropped in on our math class. She was one of the most friendly and approachable masters, and she never talked down to us. “I would say I knew it, but the affair of the flowers confuses me. They can hear, so it could have heard Sokrates’s questions. But they don’t know Greek.”

  “I told him that Latin was the language of civilization for centuries,” I said, reassuringly.

  She laughed. “Not the century our workers come from, unfortunately. But if it spelled out N and O, that’s no in English, which uses the Latin alphabet. English is the most likely language for the worker to know … or Chinese. But—in my own time, a worker couldn’t possibly be a thinking, volitional being. These come from a more advanced time. I suppose it’s just barely possible that they could have developed some kind of … but to understand Greek?” She shook her head.

  We turned into the street of Hermes. There was no sign of Kebes. “Either Lysias got here first or Kebes went in with a worker,” I said.

  Klio used her key to open the door. Inside it was surprisingly dull, after what I had been imagining. It didn’t look at all dangerous. It was like a warehouse full of workers, each plugged into a wall or floor socket. It was a big space, as it seemed from outside, stretching back for a long way. There was a hum in the air. I couldn’t see Sokrates, but I could see Kebes running down one of the aisles, so I followed him.

  Sokrates was sitting on the floor beside one of the workers, notebook and pencil in his hand, patiently asking it questions. He looked up when we reached him. “Ah, Simmea, Kebes, Klio, joy to you. I’d like you to record the numbers of all the workers here. I’ve done the first row and this row. If you’d like to address them in Latin, that would also be useful.”

  “Klio says they don’t speak Latin but they might understand something called English,” I said.

  Klio told Sokrates what she had told me. In the middle of it Pytheas and Lysias showed up. Lysias added to Klio’s explanation. “But I’m not an expert,” he said. “None of us is. I’ve been forced to be one. But before I came here, I never had much to do with them.”

  “You’re all philosophers,” Sokrates said, gently. “It’s perhaps a demonstration of Plato’s principle that philosophers will be best at ruling the state, to take three hundred of you and nobody else and give you a state to run.”

  “Plato doesn’t say any random philosophers from different schools and all across time,” Lysias protested. “And only about half of us are philosophers. The rest are classics majors and Platonic mystics. Besides, Plato does specifically say that the city needs all kinds of people. The philosophers are just intended for the guardians, not doing the whole thing, organizing the food supply and keeping things running and looking after the workers.”

  “But the end result is that nobody here really understands whether the workers have intelligence and free will or not.”

  The worker beside Sokrates did not move, and showed absolutely no sign of having intelligence and free will. It could have been a chair or part of the wall. I looked for the number on the worker and found it, above the tread as Kebes had said. It was nine digits long. Above that, on its lower back, about where the liver might be on a human, was a slightly inset square that reminded me of the squares on the outside of the building.

  “If the workers do have intelligence and free will, then there’s a real issue here,” Klio said. She patted the worker. It did not respond.

  “Slavery,” said Sokrates. “Plato allowed slavery, did he?”

  “Free will and intelligence are different things,” Pytheas pointed out.

  “Different things?” Sokrates repeated. “We’ve been discussing them together, but is it possible to have one without the other?”

  “Very possible. There are logic-machines in my time that can play games of logic so well that they beat a human master of the game,” Klio said. “That can be considered intelligence. But they don’t have volition or anything like it. They are machines that simulate intelligence. The way these prioritize their tasks, and come here to recharge, simulates intelligence.”

  “And it’s very easy to see volition without intelligence in animals and small children,” Lysias said.

  Klio nodded. “Developing one seems almost possible, but both at once? Surely not. But choosing to plant the bulbs so they would answer your question would take both.”

  “Explain to me about the bulbs,” Lysias said.

  “I was attempting to have a dialogue with a worker, asking if it liked its work and if there was any work it preferred and that kind of thing, while it was planting bulbs last autumn,” Sokrates said. “Today the crocuses it planted came up, and they spell no in Latin.”

  “In English,” Klio corrected, pushing her hair back behind her ears. “Which seems more plausible, except for understanding the questions in Greek.”

  “Did anyone else witness this?” Lysias asked.

  “I did,” I said. “Both parts of it.”

  “And so did I,” Kebes said.

  “Kebes was the first to recognize the word this morning. And we investigated the other patches of bulbs in other places in the city, and they are all arranged in rows, not in anything resembling letters.”

  “From which direction did they read as letters?” Lysias asked.

  “North to south,” I said, after it seemed that Kebes and Sokrates were having trouble remembering. “And that was the direction the worker was facing as it planted them.”

  “It does sound as if it would take both,” Pytheas said. He looked hopefully at the worker sitting so stoically plugged into the socket.

  “Unless Simmea or Kebes went back and rearranged the bulbs to play a trick,” Lysias said.

  “I would never do such a thing!” I said, hotly indignant.

  “Neither would I!” Kebes said, but I could see that Lysias didn’t believe him.

  “It’s certainly the most logical explanation,” Klio said. She sounded relieved.

  “I shall consider that explanation and continue to explore the question,” Sokrates said. “Will you permit me to continue recording the numbers of the workers here, so that I can tell if I’ve talked to one before?”

  Lysias and Klio looked at each other. “I suppose it can’t do any harm,” Klio said.

  “But you must promise not to keep coming back in here through the worker doors,” Lysias said. “It could be dangerous. You can talk to them in the city.”

  “How is it dangerous?” Sokrates asked. “Do you think I’m going to plug myself into the sockets?” He laughed when he saw our faces. “I promise I won’t plug myself into the sockets, or slip under a worker’s treads, or any such thing. Is that good enough?”

  “I’ll stay and help,” Lysias said. “The rest of you can get to your dinners.”

  I was about to offer to help, but Sokrates nodded. “If you’ll talk to me while we work,” he said. “I’m exceedingly interested in what you know about intelligence and volition. Do the workers actually want things?”

  “Come on,” Klio said, gathering the rest of us up. “Do you want to eat in Sparta?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It’s bean soup.”

&
nbsp; “Delicious! We haven’t had bean soup in Florentia since last month.” Pytheas came with us. Kebes grunted and went off alone.

  “He really didn’t like it when Lysias said that,” I said after he had left.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Pytheas said.

  “I thought you’d think he would. You’re usually ready to say anything bad about him.”

  “He’s an unmannerly lout and he doesn’t pursue excellence, and I don’t like the way he talks to you, and I don’t like what he says in our debates on trust.” Pytheas glanced at Klio. “But he has honor. And he really cares about Sokrates. He wouldn’t play a trick on him.”

  “Do you agree, Simmea?” Klio asked.

  “I do agree. But I can see that nobody who doesn’t know Kebes well will believe that.”

  “Kebes doesn’t speak English,” Pytheas said. “Greek and Latin and Italian, he said.”

  “You’re supposed to forget any other languages you had before you came here,” Klio clucked.

  “Well, you can forget that I said that,” Pytheas said. “Forgetting a language isn’t easy.”

  I nodded. “I’d like to believe that I came out of the soil on the day I started to learn to read, but I can’t really forget ten years of memories. They’re dim, and I don’t often think of them, but they’re not gone.”

  “Your children will have no such memories,” Klio said. “It’ll be easier for them.”

  “To return to the point,” Pytheas said, though we were drawing near the Spartan hall now. “Kebes doesn’t speak English. If he had replanted the bulbs he could have made them say no in Greek or Latin, but not English. And doing it in Greek would have been simplest, and Sokrates would have understood it.”

  Klio nodded. “And by the same logic, it can’t have been any of the other children either.”

  “None of the children speak English?” I asked.

  Pytheas raised his head as if he were waiting to hear how she would answer. “You’re all from the Mediterranean, and there are no English-speaking countries there.”

  “Besides,” I said, “Kebes wasn’t ready to believe the worker had really communicated. If it had been a hoax he’d have been trying to get Sokrates to believe it, not arguing against it.”