Andr. Does that mean I have less than half your wisdom?
Soc. No. But it may mean you love life a bit more than I, and for very different reasons.
Andr. You disagree, then, with Heraclitus, and his view that old and young are the same?
Soc. The "Weeping Philosopher"? His short bursts are provocative, but they lack sustained reasoning.
Andr. Could not a judgement or an insight be true, even if did not benefit from detailed reasoning or the support of evidence?
Soc. Yes, I suppose someone not versed in philosophy could make a true statement.
Andr. Are you familiar with the observation of Heraclitus that a river both changes all the time and remains the same?
Soc. Yes, and I doubt any amount of reason or evidence could either prove or refute it. Does it have some logical connection to our consideration of hemlock, or to our different ages?
Andr. Heraclitus' observation about rivers, applied to time, is the basis of the knowledge that made my visit to you possible, and which I promised earlier I would explain to you.
Soc. I would be interested in learning more about such knowledge.
Andr. If we accept that time is like a river, and we see some merit in Heraclitus' claim that a river both changes and stays the same, then perhaps time changes and remains the same, as well. Far in the future, people discovered how to build devices that exploited this property of time, which allowed them to travel between future and past, past and future, as if they were the same--
[Athens, 404 BC]
Alcibiades put down the manuscript and scratched his scalp. These words were very similar to the conversation Heron and he had conducted about travel through time, in their hurried journey to the River Maeander. Was Heron somehow Andros, despite his being older than half of Socrates' age? Alcibiades also wondered about the words of his mentor -- they at once seemed like Socrates and did not. But Alcibiades could not tell why. To read rather than hear his mentor's voice seemed strange indeed ....
Alcibiades had been in Athens for a month since his presumed death. He had stayed away from everyone he knew, most importantly Socrates. The events of that night and the next day had been so incredible that they seemed a dream. He was grateful that Ampharete had given him a copy of this manuscript, for these weighty words on the thin scroll were his only proof that his recollections were real...
But Alcibiades would have known that anyway, he realized, even with no proof in his hands. No dream, no recollection of a dream, could have left so searing an impression....
No -- he took what he had heard and learned that evening and day, what he saw anew every time he read this manuscript, very seriously. Especially about time travel.
He had returned to this unremarkable house halfway between Piraeus and Athens -- unremarkable on the outside, extraordinary beyond comprehension on the inside -- several times. He had always taken great care to make sure no one else was around. But he also knew that carefully hidden eyes could elude even the greatest care....
Now he rose and walked to the doorway, and looked outside, as far and acutely as he could. It was a little past sundown, and the sky was weak. Nothing had much clarity or color. He was very hungry, and started to leave--
He heard something -- no, he sensed it -- behind him, back in the house. He turned around. The air almost seemed to be spinning inside itself, like a little current going in reverse against the bigger current around it. He looked more intently. The effect was becoming more pronounced. It was just above where the chairs had been...
Safety ... Ampharete had mentioned something in those last moments, which he had recited over and over again like a precious poem, about dangers in departures and arrivals. Heron had also written about them in the scroll he had put in his hand in Phrygia. Alcibiades walked outside the house.
Now he stopped and listened as carefully as he had been looking... He thought he heard something, inside. Not a wet, whoosh sound, but an aftermath of a clack, what was left of a sea-bird's cry after the bird had flown almost out of sight....
He listened for more. He cupped his ear... He heard steps.
He walked back inside the house, his hand on the hilt of his weapon.
A young, dark-haired man smiled at him. "My name is Jonah. I have news of the future."
"How do I know it is not death you seek to convey to me?" Alcibiades kept his hand on his sword. But it relaxed, a little. He could see that the young man carried no visible weapon. Nor did he seem especially strong. But who knew what techniques of injury the future had invented.
"I wish only to talk," Jonah said. Alcibiades realized Jonah had the same odd accent as Heron. That was no proof of good intentions, but it made Alcibiades feel a little more comfortable. He regarded the young man. "You come from the time of Heron?"
Jonah nodded. "From the great city of Alexandria, yes. And recently from places much further away.... I know this is the city of Athens. Does Socrates still live?" Jonah took a step towards Alcibiades.
"Stay where you are." Alcibiades gripped his sword.
Jonah stopped. "I wish only to talk to you," he repeated.
Alcibiades looked around the room. He stared at the chair in which Jonah presumably had arrived. It was a temptation. But where would he take it? To the night of Socrates' death, as Heron had wanted? Alcibiades knew that he needed more knowledge before he traveled to that event, unescorted.... This young man could be a source.... But this place did not seem safe now. Who knew who else might arrive out of the empty air in those chairs.... Alcibiades finally nodded to Jonah. "Not here," he said, and gestured to the doorway.
Jonah walked through first. Alcibiades followed, hand still on the hilt of the sword.
* * *
The two entered a drab, drafty inn for dinner. Alcibiades did not trust Jonah enough to take him to any of the secret places in which Alcibiades had been living and hiding.
"I have cut my beard and arranged my hair in a way that I am not likely to be recognized," Alcibiades said. "And the value of this poor food is that no one I know is likely to be here. I am sorry that you have to be subjected to it."
Jonah bit into a dark, tough bread. "I have tasted far worse in the future. Much of the food in that world tastes like it was made of cloth or straw."
Alcibiades shook his head, then smiled crookedly. "On the other hand, the women are extraordinary. Would you agree?"
"Yes."
Alcibiades looked at him. "You know her," he stated, quietly.
"Yes."
"Did she ask you to come back to Athens, and talk to me? I had assumed you were here on Heron's instructions."
Jonah swallowed his bread, and sipped some soup. "I do not know if she would want me to tell you this. I am not even sure she knows that I know this..."
"Yes?"
"She will die, sometime in the future."
"Everyone will die."
"No, I mean, she will be murdered, horribly. She will be beaten by a group of religious fanatics, and her flesh--"
Alcibiades held up his hand. "That is enough."
"I am sorry," Jonah said, and ate more bread.
"When will this happen?"
"About two-and-a-half centuries after the time of my origin, in my city, near my magnificent, helpless library..." Jonah's voice thickened.
"I will not let that happen," Alcibiades said.
"It has already happened ... already will happen ... the whole world of the future beyond the time of her murder knows that she was brutally killed. The most intelligent, beautiful woman of her time. The daughter of the last chief librarian of Alexandria..."
"Was Ampharete really his daughter?"
"No. She says she originally lived more then two millennia from now."
Alcibiades considered. "Was Ampharete her name ... when she was killed?"
"No. She was called Hypatia."
"Then how do you know with such conviction that the two were the same person?"
Jonah put down his bread. "I was
there, several months before the murder. I saw her. Ampharete ... had rearranged her face, but she did not change her voice, or her ... manner. Ampharete and Hypatia who was murdered are the same person. And so is Sierra Waters, which is her original name."
Alcibiades clenched his fist in anger. His voice rose. "You were there? You knew that Ampharete was this Hypatia?" Alcibiades realized he was shouting. Fortunately, the only other patron of the inn, an old man with unkempt grey hair, had passed out on his table. "And you did nothing?" Alcibiades managed to keep his words a little less loud, though his emotion was scalding.
"I was there months before the murder," Jonah repeated. "I did not know then that she was going to be murdered. I left to go to the future, as my mentor had instructed. When I found out about her death, I tried to get back there, to save her...."
"And?"
"And the passage through time was blocked."
"By whom?" Alcibiades asked, though he thought perhaps he knew.
"Heron is the likely one," Jonah said, in a strangled voice.
"You picked a fine mentor," Alcibiades said, venomously.
"He picked me -- but he is no longer my mentor, now."
Alcibiades tried to calm himself. He partially succeeded. He took a deep breath. "What are his motives? Why is he so dedicated to saving Socrates? I truthfully am skeptical of anyone so devoted to such a selfless goal."
Jonah shook his head sadly. "He is an inventor. To him, the possibility of perfecting history is like perfecting one of his wondrous devices. He will continue to tinker, to do whatever is necessary, to make the process work. Nothing else is of consequence to him now."
* * *
Alcibiades decided that he trusted Jonah enough to offer him shelter in one of his many hideouts. Besides, the only way Alcibiades could be sure that Jonah did not follow him to his dwelling tonight was to kill him, and Alcibiades neither distrusted nor disliked Jonah nearly enough to do that.
Alcibiades did not attempt to seduce Jonah, though he found him attractive enough and was reasonably sure Jonah would have been receptive. Alcibiades's situation was already complicated -- he did not want to risk adding sexuality to the mix. Or perhaps he was just getting old....
The two began strategic temporal planning in the morning.
"We have one chair now available to us here," Alcibiades said, "as a result of your journey. But we cannot take it to save Ampharete from destruction, because the way to the year in which that happened is blocked."
"Yes," Jonah replied.
"But presumably you or I could take it to five years from now, to help prevent the death of Socrates."
"You would be a better person to undertake that journey than I," Jonah said.
Alcibiades did not contest the point. "Do you know if Ampharete was ... will be ... there? Or had she already been ... killed?"
"I do not know if she was there with Socrates," Jonah replied, "but I am sure that Hypatia was killed afterwards....When I saw Ampharete as Hypatia, she looked a little older. Still beautiful as the early afternoon, even with her face remade, but older."
"If there is a chance that Ampharete will be there with Socrates, then that could be our moment -- perhaps our only opportunity -- to save her. Rescue two birds of passage with one magical net."
* * *
Alcibiades and Jonah paced the small room.
"What was the outcome of Andros' proposal to Socrates?" Alcibiades asked. "Do you know?"
"The dialog says Socrates said no. But--"
"I know. I meant, do you have any first-hand knowledge, or even reports from anyone who actually was there in the prison, about what happened? Dialogs and the events they describe are not always the same."
"Heron believes Socrates might have gone with Andros in the end," Jonah answered. "This might be more of a hope, a plan, on Heron's part, than actual reality. I am not sure."
"You were not there on that night."
"No, I was not. That is why I do not know if Ampharete was there."
"Does anyone else share Heron's ... impression of success?" Alcibiades asked.
"Thomas also conveyed it to me," Jonah replied.
"Ah, yes, the mysterious Thomas. Ampharete thinks very highly of him."
"Ampharete was his student," Jonah responded. "Her assessment of his capacity may have been shaped by that perspective."
"You do not share her view?"
"I do not know him well enough to make a reliable judgement," Jonah replied.
"How did you come to meet him? Where did it happen?"
Jonah closed his eyes as if to see his past more clearly. "Ampharete came to Alexandria the first time, as Ampharete.... I first met her then. She showed Heron the Andros manuscript, and he went off to Athens to seek the truth. Ampharete and I followed, but our ship was blown in the wrong direction, far to the west. Ampharete convinced Melqat, its captain -- he was a coarse man but a fine seaman -- to take her across a great ocean, further west. I sailed east, to Athens, where I found Heron. But he was a different man...."
"In what way?"
"He was older, less pleased by contemplation, more driven by his goals," Jonah replied. "Heron told me more than five years of his life had passed since he and I had last been in contact, even though it had been less than five weeks for me. He asked if I would be willing to sail across the great ocean to the west. He told me it would take a year. He wanted to know exactly what Ampharete had seen and accomplished. He wanted me to help put her on the path...."
"The path?"
Jonah nodded, said nothing. Then, "yes, the path that would lead her to you, in Phrygia...."
Alcibiades sped through conflicting emotions.
"Heron was my mentor," Jonah proceeded. "I agreed to his request. He chartered a boat for the voyage. But he did not accompany me."
"I assume you found the special chairs at the end of that voyage?"
"Yes, and more," Jonah said. "A river that was salty even far upstream of its mouth. Cliffs so sheer and sharp of edge, they looked as if they had been cut by a master builder. There were barbarians living in the forests who resembled people from the Far East, yet I had traveled almost due west."
Alcibiades reflected. "Pythagoras of Samos argued that the Earth is a sphere. Anaximander of Miletus placed his map of the Earth on a cylinder. Perhaps what you found in the West shows this was a wise choice." Alcibiades' thoughts swirled ... from Pythagoras and music to Miletus and Ampharete....
"Eratosthenes, closer to my time, offered measurements for the circumference of the Earth, which he believed to be round," Jonah said. "By the time of Thomas O'Leary, everyone was sure this was true -- people had actually left this planet, and looked back at it from the sky."
Alcibiades walked to the door, opened it, and squinted at the late morning. "You have left the Earth, to walk through the zodiac?"
"Not I," Jonah said. "But the people of the future, of Thomas O'Leary's age.
"I suspect that age would be incomprehensible to me," Alcibiades said. "But you have yet to tell me how you came to meet Thomas O'Leary."
"Heron described him to me. Heron wanted me to make sure that Ampharete took the right journey. That required my befriending Thomas, in the year that his people called 1889. Heron told me where to find the chair at the end of the ocean. He told me how to use it, to arrive in the time of Thomas."
Alcibiades shook his head slowly at the immensity of what he was being told.
Jonah continued. "I suspect you might well find yourself at home with much of the logic, even the knowledge, of that age. Much of it arose from this time."
Alcibiades regarded Jonah. "Your former mentor said the same."
"The main difference in the ages resides in the devices," the younger man replied, "the manner in which the knowledge is applied in the real, physical world. This was already clear when I became Heron's student."
Alcibiades gaped at the sky. "Which do you suppose is stranger," he asked, "to walk upon the sky, or talk to me now?"
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"Our conversation," Jonah replied without hesitation, "my presence in your world... Travel across any distance, even to the sky, is just an extension of what we already do. Birds travel to the sky every day. But travel from one time to another is something very contrary to nature. It threatens to make a mockery of all existence."
"I think you are right," Alcibiades replied. "Should we forget about Socrates, then, and live our lives as if none of this time travel had already occurred? No, I do not believe I could ever do that."
"It is too late to forget about Socrates," Jonah said. "Too many feet have been set into motion."
"We might make things worse, by being there, and unwittingly contributing to an unfortunate outcome," Alcibiades mused.
"By not being there we might also contribute to a bad result, and we would have no way of refining and possibly improving our actions," Jonah replied. "If we were absent, all we would be was absent, with no room for corrections."
"And how do you propose the two of us get there, with just one chair?"
"I propose that I take the chair," Jonah said. "I have served my purpose here with you now -- I have told you what I wanted to convey, what you needed to know about Ampharete and the peril that awaits her. There is nothing more I can do here. You, on the other hand, may yet have some further role to play, back here, on the road to the death or the rescue of Socrates -- despite what Heron told you."
Alcibiades looked at sky, again. "I think you are right about that, too," he said, eventually.
* * *
The two walked quickly back to the house which contained the chair.
"You must stay outside," Jonah said, "or go outside before I use the chair."
Alcibiades nodded. "I know. I will stay outside."
Jonah started to say something--
Alcibiades hugged him. It was a strange, hybrid hug, born in the mixture Alcibiades felt of sharing the same helpless fate with Jonah, of feeling connected to him, but also suspicious of someone he hardly knew, and angry that Jonah had somehow manipulated Ampharete, and therefore Alcibiades too....
Suspicion chose his words. "Can I trust you?" Alcibiades asked, hoarsely, dangerously.
The Plot to Save Socrates (Sierra Waters Book 1) Page 16
