The Just City

by Jo Walton

  Have I totally contradicted myself? I said I didn’t understand agape.

  I respected Simmea. I liked her. I needed her friendship. I knew she was in love with me, so in a way that made me the beloved if you wanted to think of it in those terms. Plato was always talking about two men, and everyone else who had written about it and considered men and women always makes the man the lover and the woman the beloved, but there’s no reason it has to be like that. Looking at it from that way round, it meant that she wanted to increase my excellence, which of course she did, always.

  Anyway, I cared about Simmea. I would have gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid hurting her. If she hadn’t been pregnant that night on the wall I’d have mated with her then, not because I lusted for her but because she lusted for me and I could have given her something she wanted. I did feel peculiar about her mating with other people, and specifically having somebody else’s baby. I was afraid the other people would hurt her, and I wanted to protect her. And I felt it was perfectly fine—indeed better, as I didn’t want her—that we didn’t have sex; but if she was having sex with anyone it ought to be me. Also, I was going to ask Athene to make sure nobody even considered exposing her baby. If she was going to go through all that, there ought to be a result worth having. Even with Nikias, whose scansion was as heavy as lead. And I’d decided that her next baby would definitely be mine. That would be a hero worth having!

  Some of these feelings were not ones I would have had without being incarnate. Most of them weren’t, in fact, because if I had all my powers I wouldn’t have needed her in the same way, and I might never have put in the time to come to know her. I needed her because I was incarnate and she was helping me so much with that.

  We’ve established, I think, that what Plato knew about love and real people could have been written on a fingernail paring. Look how well his arrangements for having “wives and children in common” were going. Practically nobody was comfortable with it, and almost everybody was violating it in some way or other. We had long-term couples, and dramatic breakups, and casual sex, and cautious dating. We just had it all in secret. The masters either didn’t know or turned a blind eye.

  (And before I leave the subject of Platonic love, you remember the bit in the Symposium where Socrates reports Diotima’s conversations with him about love? Do you picture them side by side in bed with the covers pulled up to their waists? I always do.)

  A few days after the conversation on the wall, Klio, Simmea, Sokrates and I went back to the robot recharging station after dinner one evening. This trip was Klio’s idea. She wanted Sokrates to talk to the robots without Lysias and she wanted to tell him some things. She’d talked to him and suggested it, and he’d said we should go too. I think he’d also suggested bringing Kebes and she’d put her foot down on that one, because she half-believed that Kebes might have been hoaxing everyone with the flowers, and she didn’t want him to know any more about the robots than he did already.

  At that point, I had no idea whether or not the robots were sentient. I’d assumed they weren’t, because otherwise what was the point of having them instead of slaves? But I didn’t know where Athene got them from, and certainly there were times way up there that had sentient robots. We’d never have colonized Titan without them, and even Mars would have been hard work. And I realized vaguely that there must have been a time when robots were just becoming sentient, and these particular robots might have come from there, if Athene had chosen the best ones that weren’t sentient, which would be just like her.

  I didn’t go and ask her, although I thought about it. The reason I didn’t was that I enjoyed seeing Sokrates tackling a puzzle, and it was more fun when I didn’t already know the answer. With many of the available puzzles—the nature of the universe, the purposes of the masters, Athene’s plans—I did know the answers. Watching him take on one where I really didn’t know was fascinating. It was adorable to see him introduced to the concept of zero. But watching him go after potential artificial intelligence was priceless. That alone would have been worth all the time I spent in the city.

  Sokrates had written down the serial numbers of all the robots that were present the first night he went in, and he checked them all. Some of them were different, and he noted them. He greeted each one and asked it a few questions. This took about an hour. Then Klio pointed out the ones that refused to move, and he tried talking to them. He asked them questions and got Klio to translate the questions into English.

  “Why do you want to stay in here and not go out to work? Do you like your work? Do you like the feeding station? What do you want to do?” He went down the row, speaking like that to each one, varying what he said from time to time.

  “How do you give them orders?” he asked Klio.

  “Well, we can give them verbal orders for simple things, things they already understand. But if it’s something new and complicated, we use a key.”

  “A key?” Sokrates said. “What sort of key?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. She went off to a locker at the back of the room and came back with a box containing little chips of metal and coloured plastic about as small as they could be and have human fingers pick them up—very similar to the ones I’d seen when I’d been on Mars for the concert that time.

  “And you show the key to the worker?” Sokrates asked. “And then it obeys?”

  “Essentially,” Klio said. “It goes in this panel.”

  She touched a panel on the robot’s side, which slid open. She put the key into a recessed slot.

  “You put it directly into its liver,” Sokrates said, turning to me. “Never mind your thought about head injuries. The liver is indeed the seat of intelligence!”

  Klio laughed, then stopped laughing. “I suppose it is about where a liver would be…”

  It was. I blinked.

  “Let’s not take this as evidence one way or the other until we know whether the workers are intelligent,” Simmea said, wisely. “What does the key do?”

  “It tells the worker that we need it to go out and look after the goats. It already understands what that means—how to watch for wolves, and how to milk the goats and make cheese and so on. The key tells it the priority. I could have given the order out loud in English to this one. But if I had one who had never looked after goats, I’d have to use the key, and the key would tell it what to do and also what it means.”

  “Those are clever keys,” Sokrates said, running his fingers through them. “Do the colors tell you which orders they hold?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Klio said. “And if the worker won’t take the order from the key, like these, eventually we swap out their … liver. Their memory. But we can’t do that so much, because we’re low on new memories.”

  “They refuse to work and you punish them by removing their memory?” Sokrates asked.

  “It’s not punishment. They’re not—we don’t think of them as being aware.” She looked guilty. “If they are, then we have behaved very badly to them.”

  “I think it would be better if you stopped removing memories for the time being,” Sokrates said.

  “There’s so little proof! And Lysias, who is the one who really needs to make that decision, won’t want to look at it. He distrusts Kebes, not without reason. And if he has to accept them as free-willed beings then he’ll have to accept a lot of guilt for the memories he has removed.” Klio looked distressed now.

  Sokrates nodded gravely. “He will indeed. It’s sad. But it’s not as sad as removing their memories. We might beat a recalcitrant slave, but that would heal.”

  “I think you should talk to Lysias. And after that I think you should talk to the Chamber.”

  “I agree,” Sokrates said. “But meanwhile, I should talk to these poor workers.” He looked at me and Simmea. “You can do likewise. Go and ask them my questions. Let me know if there’s a response.”

  “In Greek?” I asked.

  “Greek, or Greek and then English,” he re
plied, absently.

  “You know we don’t know English,” Simmea said.

  “I know you don’t,” Sokrates confirmed, looking only at her. Of course he guessed that I did, and didn’t want to expose me. Dear old Sokrates. He always was extremely good about that.

  “Should we try Latin?” she asked.

  “I don’t think there’s any point,” Klio said. “They won’t be programmed in Latin, and they won’t have heard it enough to have had any chance of picking it up.”

  “How could they have picked up Greek?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “Well, they can parse English, so they must have language circuits. Greek is a very clear and logical language, and it’s part of the same language family as English. So is Latin, incidentally; that’s why non and no are similar. So with hearing it so much I can just about believe that they might be able to figure out how to understand Greek.”

  “Why did it reply in English then?” Simmea asked.

  Klio shrugged. “It shouldn’t have been able to reply at all. The proper mode of interaction is that somebody gives it a command and then it carries it out to the best of its ability, pausing to recharge itself here when it needs to.”

  “They run on electricity?” Sokrates said. “Like the lights and the heat and cooling in the library?”

  “They really are machines, whatever else they might be,” Klio said.

  We went up and down the rows, checking numbers and asking the workers questions. They were the same questions, Sokrates’s questions. I longed for one of the workers to answer, especially after my body grew as tired of it as my mind. Eventually Simmea yawned so loudly that Klio heard, and sent us both to bed.

  Walking along with Simmea discussing what we’d just been doing was one of the basic patterns of our interaction, one of the ways that our relationship functioned, so of course we did that. “Do you believe now that they might be aware?” she asked.

  “I’m reserving judgement until there’s more evidence,” I said.

  “What do you think the Chamber will say?” She stretched—her pregnancy was giving her odd back pains. I put my arm around her, which she always found comforting.

  “They’ll agree with Lysias that Kebes did it, even though that’s definitely not the case. But if he really pushes it, then I think if it’s the full Chamber they’ll have to agree with Sokrates. I mean, some of them are irritated with him about this and that, but he’s Sokrates, after all. They’re here because they love Plato. And Plato revered Sokrates—though he clearly built his own version of him to revere after a while.” I smiled. “I think that’s funny, don’t you?”

  “I’ve been thinking that for ages,” she said. “Do you think he still wants to tear it all down?”

  “Sokrates? The city? Yes. Why do you ask that now?”

  I could see her face clearly in the light of a sconce above a sleeping house we were passing. She looked abstracted, and then as we moved and the shadows danced she looked maniacal. “I think the workers could be a lever for that,” she said. “I do wish one of them had answered though!”

  But it was months before they communicated with us again.

  26

  SIMMEA

  For the first four months I was queasy in the mornings. In the next four I grew huge, which made sleeping uncomfortable and walking a misery. I also suffered horribly from heartburn, which could be relieved only by a tisane of elderflowers. It was the hottest part of the year, the part where Demeter threatens to burn up the world unless Persephone is returned to her. Klymene showed me how to adjust my kiton, and Maia gave me a harness to stop my newly swollen breasts from chafing. I sweated more than I ever had, and was happy only in the sea. I couldn’t eat in the mornings and was ravenous by mid-afternoon. I craved cheese and fruit.

  By the ninth month I was more than ready to give birth and get it over with. One afternoon I was sitting in the shade at Thessaly, drinking elderflower tisane and sucking a lemon. Aristomache was there—she had brought the basket of lemons. Sokrates and Pytheas were also sucking lemons while debating what it meant to make choices, and what constrained choices. Aristomache and I put in a word now and then, but largely it was a debate between the two of them.

  “Apollo! What hyperbole!” Sokrates said. It always made Pytheas choke with laughter when Sokrates swore.

  “But seriously, correct information,” Aristomache began, when Kebes came dashing in, looking as if he’d been chased by the Kindly Ones.

  “What’s the matter?” Sokrates asked, getting up at once and putting his arm around Kebes.

  Kebes had been running so hard that he could hardly catch his breath for a moment. He leaned against Sokrates, and I could see that Sokrates, for all that he was old, had no trouble supporting him. “Workers. Message. Come and see!”

  “A message?” Sokrates jumped, but to his credit he did not immediately drop Kebes.

  “I can’t read it. It’s in that language.”

  That proved that Kebes hadn’t written it himself, I thought, except that it would be possible to argue that he was lying about not knowing English. Though if none of us knew English, that did change that. It could certainly be seen as suspicious that he was again the one to find the message.

  Pytheas helped me to my feet. He had become quite expert at bracing himself so I could haul myself up, and did it automatically now. Since we had had the conversation about agape, nothing had changed and everything had changed. It was as if acknowledging it had made a difference, as if naming transmuted. I was sometimes a little shy with him now.

  Aristomache folded a cloth over the lemons and set the basket in the shade. “I know English,” she said, getting up.

  Kebes led the way. He didn’t run, perhaps because he was winded or perhaps because he was aware that I could only waddle. Even so, his pace was too much for me and I trailed behind the others. Of course what Kebes had found was on the opposite side of the city—I could have guessed that. Even so, he must have sprinted all the way in the heat to have got so out of breath.

  “My friend Herakles lives in Mulberry,” Kebes said as we walked. “The mulberries have been ripe, and the birds have been all over the tree, and the house. It happens every year. The workers clean the guano off afterwards, because it looks so awful. This year when it was clean there was also an inscription, but he couldn’t read it. I came straight back here with him after he told me. I couldn’t read it either, not even no.”

  Mulberry was a perfectly ordinary seven-person sleeping house, down on the street of Artemis. The mulberry tree was splendid, one of the big ones with twisted branches. And indeed there was writing, in the Latin alphabet, inscribed neatly all around the eaves, where nobody except a worker could have reached without a ladder. I looked at it, assessing. Kebes could have done it on a ladder with a chisel, he’d had basic stone carving lessons at the same time I had. But it would have been a long job, and somebody would have been bound to notice.

  Meanwhile, Aristomache was frowning. “I can’t read it either,” she said. “It certainly isn’t English.”

  It wasn’t Latin either. “What other language could it be?” I asked. “Klio said something about the workers speaking English or Chinese. Does anyone know Chinese? Does it use the Latin alphabet?”

  “No, I don’t know it, and it doesn’t,” Aristomache said. “And I don’t think anyone here knows it, not even Lysias. China’s such a very different civilization.”

  “But they use the Greek alphabet?” I asked.

  “No, they have their own and I don’t know it,” Aristomache said, astonishing me. I knew there were a multiplicity of languages, but two alphabets seemed more than enough! “It doesn’t look like our letters at all. I suppose they might have transliterated it—” and then she laughed. “It’s Greek!”

  I looked at her in astonishment. “It’s certainly not!”

  “No, it is,” Pytheas said. “It’s Greek spelled out in Latin letters.”

  “What does it say?” Sok
rates asked.

  Kebes began to read it aloud, hesitating now and then when the worker had made some odd sound choice in using the wrong alphabet. “No, no, no, do not like work, do not like some work more, do not like feeding station, do not like, no, no, want to talk, want to make, do not want to work, do not want to animals, do not want to farms, do not want to build, not, not, do not want, no, no, no.” I could read it too, once I realized what I was looking at.

  “Which worker wrote this?” Sokrates asked, looking wildly around as if he thought the worker would be waiting.

  “No way to tell,” Aristomache said.

  “There may be a record,” Kebes said. “Somebody may know which one they assigned to clean this house.” He didn’t sound hopeful.

  “If they can do this they can hold a dialogue,” Sokrates said, beaming. “I can speak and they can inscribe their answers! Want to talk! Wonderful!”

  “Why did this one answer in this way now?” Pytheas asked. “And why up there?”

  “It’s where writing could be,” I suggested. “Lots of buildings have writing up there. They don’t say this kind of thing; they have uplifting mottoes or the names of the buildings, but that’s where inscriptions go. Perhaps it felt it could only write inside the lines?”

  “Just like the bulbs,” Sokrates said. “I should have asked every one different questions so I’d know which one answered me.”

  “Even you might have had trouble thinking of that many different questions,” Aristomache teased.

  “I think that settles the question of whether the workers have free will and intelligence,” Pytheas said.

  “Yes,” Kebes flashed at once. “Now you can stop thinking I did it.”