Necessity

by Jo Walton

  I went up to the library—directly, stepping into that wonderful room from outside time, to avoid the effect of Michelangelo’s deliberately daunting staircase. I looked around. I was accustomed now to the library in the City, with its controlled temperature, electric lights, and all the books of the ancient world rescued from the Library of Alexandria in multiple neatly printed copies. But this was more moving—the high windows giving light to work, the patterned tiles on the floor, the wooden benches with the books chained to them and scholars sitting reading and working. The books themselves were mostly hand-copied texts, preserved through time, saved from the ruins, written out painstakingly. They lost Homer for a time, but they got him back. Ficino had worked here. They had the oldest and most complete copy of the Aeneid. These books were here because people had cared about them, individually, cared enough to copy them and pass them forward across centuries and civilizations, hand stretching out to human hand through time, with no surety that any future hand would be waiting to receive the offering. All the texts from antiquity that had survived the time between were in this room. But Athene wasn’t.

  It was inexplicable. I had the day right, but she wasn’t here. She couldn’t have forgotten! Perhaps I had. It had been forty years for me, and perhaps I had confused the year. If so, there was no use guessing. I’d have to go and find her, in her own library, or wherever she was. I patted the sloping wood of the nearest bench, putting a little of my power into it so that those who worked there would see more clearly. It was such a beautiful room, about as close to perfect as any mortal thing can be. I stepped out of time.

  Once outside time, I felt for Athene. It’s difficult to describe. Usually when I do it, I get a sensation like an itch that leads me towards whoever I’m looking for, like a compass, if one were the needle. This time, I got nothing at all.

  Of course, the first thing I thought was that this was a power I hadn’t tested since I had taken up my godhood again, and that I’d lost the ability, or forgotten how to do it. It was distressing. No, that’s not strong enough. Even in my proper self, it felt horrible to think that I might have damaged myself, made myself limited, permanently lost parts of my abilities. I stepped back into time and sat in the courtyard until my sun warmed away the chill that thought brought. I wanted to change, but I wanted to grow more excellent, always: better, not worse. Experiencing the physical decay that went with old age had been bad enough. But with those losses I could tell myself not only that it was temporary, but that I was understanding humanity better by learning about what they went through. There would be no advantage to this.

  I stepped out of time again and felt for Athene once more. Still nothing. I tried Artemis. To my intense relief, I sensed her immediately. She was on the moon, at a time when people lived there and had built temples to her. I tried Athene again, and again felt nothing. Aphrodite was on Olympos. Hera was in classical Argos. Dionysos was in Hellenistic Baktria. Hephaistos was in his forge. Hades was in the Underworld. Hermes was in the marketplace in Alexandria. But no matter how many times I tried, Athene was nowhere to be found.

  Strange as it was that I couldn’t locate her, it was stranger still that she hadn’t shown up when she was supposed to meet me. That wasn’t like her at all. I was worried. I couldn’t imagine what could have happened to prevent her. Fate and Necessity might tangle us up, but we’re still there. I reached for her again. Where could she possibly be? She didn’t seem to be anywhere in or out of time. Could she be dead? How? It didn’t bear thinking of.

  2

  JASON

  I’m only a Silver, so don’t expect too much. My name is Jason, of the Hall of Samos and the Tribe of Hermes. I was born in the Year Forty-two of the City, eleven years after the Relocation. I work on a fishing boat. I haven’t written anything long since I qualified as a citizen thirteen years ago. These two days I’m going to tell you about changed my life completely. Since Fate caught me up in great events, I’ll do my best to set things down clearly, in case it can do anyone good to read about what happened and what we all said and did.

  Amphitrite had been kind, and we’d had a good haul that day, lots of ribbers and a few red gloaters, big ones. They were all heading north with the winter currents, so we simply had to stay in place and use the fine nets to scoop them out. We joked about sticking our hands into the water and pulling out a fish, the kind of day that redeems all the other days where we came home with thin hauls or none. Plato’s a hard planet for humans, and we depend on the catch to have enough protein.

  It was chilly and grey out on the ocean, spitting with rain. As we headed homewards around Dawn Point the east wind caught us. I fastened my jerkin up to my throat. The other boats coming in made positive signals. Everyone seemed to have had a good day. It was the kind of thing to cheer your liver. We passed a flatboat gathering suface kelp, which the Saeli like to eat, and even they signalled that they had a good haul.

  Our boat was called Phaenarete after a girl Dion had known who was killed in the Battle of Lucia. Dion had been the first one to sail her, so he’d had the choice of naming her. He had taught me everything I knew about handling boats, and fishing too, and a lot about how to live. We were as close as father and son, and closer than many such because we’d chosen each other. Dion was too old to go out regularly now, and Leonidas and Aelia were dead, so I was in charge of Phaenarete, and I had a crew of lunatics. Well, that’s not a kind way to put it, but that’s how I thought of them.

  Now, fishing is essential, everyone knows that, and it’s also reasonably dangerous—even if you know what you’re doing you can get caught out by a squall or an underwater eruption—or the usual kind of eruption, come to that. That’s what happened to Aelia and Leonidas five years back. Their luck ran out.

  It’s not really all that dangerous. Most days most of us come back. And we need the catch, we rely on it. There are no land animals on Plato, only what we brought with us, and the sheep and goats don’t thrive here the way they did in Greece, where they could graze on plants growing wild everywhere. Dion remembers Greece and talks about it sometimes, but it sounds strange to me, the idea of plants sprawling all over, plants nobody planted and nobody tends to. There’s none of that on Plato. Our plants take a lot of attention. We have to nurse them along. Keeping them alive is hard work for a lot of people, human and Workers. And we like eating them! But we want protein too, so we encourage the sheep and goats to give lots of milk and we don’t often eat them, only at special festivals. And so fish are very important, and fishing is important, and worth the risk.

  It’s not only our City, the Remnant, that relies on the fish. We salt and smoke and freeze them and send them to the inland cities. Back in Greece, before Zeus brought them here, all the cities had been on islands in a warm sea, a deep blue sea with coasts close all around. (It’s hard to imagine a warm sea, though I’ve seen enough pictures of it to have a good idea of the color.) Now we and the Amazons are on the coast of a cold ocean, which has islands and other continents that we’ve only partly explored. The other cities, still in the same positions relative to us and to each other, are scattered about inland on a volcanic plain. Fortunately the Workers have built the electric rail, so we can move goods and people relatively easily. And fish are an important part of that, and only we and the Amazons can fish, so we do. And because fishing is both important and somewhat dangerous, naturally it’s classified as Silver.

  Now, being properly Platonic, which we do try to be most of the time here in the Original City, that ought to mean everyone who works on a fishing boat is Silver. And most of the time that’s true. But for fishing, you need a minimum of two people, and three or four is better. And at that time I had two crazy crew members who weren’t Silvers at all. Hilfa is Saeli, which wouldn’t stop him being a citizen and having a metal; plenty of Saeli have taken their oaths. But Hilfa was young, not that I had any idea what that meant for a Saeli. And at that time, he wasn’t yet part of a pod the way most grown Saeli are. He had only bee
n here for two years. He told me he was still studying—though whether he was studying us or fish or what, I didn’t know. And I say “he” but that’s not clear at all either. The Saeli need three genders to reproduce, but most of the time they don’t take any notice of gender at all, and while they have a bunch of pronouns for different things, gender isn’t one of them. Hilfa said “he” feels most comfortable for him in Greek, so that’s what I used. What he has between his legs seemed to be a sort of scrunched-up green walnut shell. I saw it often enough, because on the boat he mostly wore a red webbing vest and nothing else, being as Saeli are pretty much comfortable naked in temperatures that make humans want to huddle up. Dion says in Greece we were comfortable naked, and what that says to me is that we should have stayed there and let the Saeli have Plato. Not that they’re native here either; far from it. They showed up in a spaceship about twenty years ago, meaning twenty years after our Relocation. They first came here when I was ten. And weren’t we pleased to see them after trying to deal with the weird Amarathi! Before we met the Saeli, dealing with the Amarathi was almost a full-time job for Arete, being as their language is so odd that she was the only one who could speak to them at all and have any hope of getting through.

  So I had Hilfa on the boat every day, and he’s maybe not as strong as a human, and sometimes he does things that make no sense, but he’s better adapted to the temperatures, and he’s keen, always at work on time and ready to stay on late if needed. It was Dion’s decision to take him on, a year and a half ago, when Dion was still going out most of the time, before he broke his leg slipping on the icy deck last winter. (I told you it was dangerous.) Dion’s lucky it was his leg and not his neck, and lucky Hilfa caught him before he slid off the side and into the water. I’d not been sure about Hilfa at first, but I’d come to appreciate him even before that. After that, of course, green hide or not, he might as well have been my brother.

  My other crew member was even stranger, in her way. Marsilia’s not an alien, but she’s aristocracy. Not only that she’s a Gold, which ought to mean she spends her time on politics and philosophy, not fishing; but her father’s Neleus, and his stepfather is Pytheas. I wasn’t going to refuse her when she came asking, was I? But truthfully, it wasn’t so much because her dad had been consul umpty-ump times or her step-grandfather was a god in mortal form, or that she’d recently been elected consul herself. It was because I’d been in love with her sister Thetis since we were both fifteen and in the same shake-up class coming up to qualifications. Not that Thee had ever looked at me. I’d always been too shy to say anything to her about how I felt.

  I used to wonder sometimes how it was that Thetis and Marsilia were sisters. Thetis looks like a goddess—tall, but slight of frame, so her breasts look like every boy’s dream of breasts, or maybe only mine, I don’t know. She has a broad brow, hair the color of obsidian flowing down her back, soft brown eyes—well, I suppose to be fair Marsilia has the same eyes. But you don’t notice them as much because Marsilia’s face is flat, and she has jutting teeth. Their skin is the same velvety brown. But Marsilia’s squat, with broad hips, which is good for the boat. She keeps her hair short, like most people. Thee looks fragile, but Marsilia can pull a full net out of the water. Marsilia definitely takes after Neleus, and so I’d think Thetis takes after their mother, but Erinna is the Captain of the Excellence, and anyone less fragile you have never seen. Even now, when she must be sixty, Erinna has muscles on her muscles, as they say.

  It’s funny when you think about it.

  The way we interpret Plato’s intentions here now, we have regular Festivals of Hera, where people get paired up and married for the day, and hopefully babies are born as a result. We also allow long-term marriage, and participation in our Festivals of Hera is voluntary, which it isn’t in Athenia and Psyche. It wasn’t here to start with. There was a while when we didn’t have any Festivals of Hera, because of that, but we voted to reintroduce them on a voluntary basis years ago, I’m not quite sure when. It was after the Relocation, but before I was born. If you volunteer, you get matched up with a partner by lot, and you spend a day in bed together. All the children born from that festival are considered to be your children. When a woman has a baby, she can either choose to bring it up herself or give it to the nurseries to be brought up there, whatever she prefers. It’s her choice, some do one and some do the other. Probably about half of us grow up in nurseries and sleeping houses, and the rest in families. I was festival-born myself. I don’t have any idea who my parents were, and not much curiosity about it either. When I took my oath at sixteen, along with all the other sixteen-year-olds, everyone who had participated in that festival seventeen years before and was still alive came along to the procession and the feast afterwards.

  So with the marriages at the Festivals of Hera, all the pairings are arranged within the same metal, always, because they say that’s what leads to the best children. When it comes to other kinds of marriage, people are supposed to choose people of their own kind too, to keep the metals from mixing more than they’re mixed already. But we’re human, and the metals in our souls are already mixed up, the way metals are under the ground, and so although everyone tries to discourage you, it’s not forbidden to marry someone of a different class. (Here, anyway. It is forbidden in some of the Lucian cities. In Athenia and Psyche they don’t have marriage except for the Festivals of Hera, in Sokratea they don’t have classes, and in Amazonia they have lots of orgies and hope for the best, or that’s what I’ve heard, though I didn’t see anything like that the one time I was there.) Even if you do have parents of the same metal, you can’t tell how the kids will come out.

  So anyway, Erinna and Neleus got married, way back, even though she’s Silver and he’s Gold. And they did mix up the metals, and Marsilia is Gold, as I said, and she works on my boat what time she’s not too busy with Chamber affairs. But her sister Thetis is Iron, and she works with little children.

  Looking at it that way, even though she’s from a family with a god in it, I should feel Thetis is below me. I always felt the opposite, though, that she’s infinitely above me. It’s not that she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet. But she’s extremely beautiful, and—she’s Thee. Every time I see her my blood pounds in my veins, and that has been the case since we were both fifteen and I first met her in Arete’s communication class. I thought she didn’t care about me at all. I figured she knew who I was—Jason who took his oath the same time she did and worked on the same boat her sister works on. I doubted she thought about me once a month. I didn’t see her all that often. But when I did, even if I only caught sight of her in the agora, I was happy for days afterwards. I didn’t want anything from her, simply for her to exist and for me to see her sometimes. Maybe this is the kind of love Plato talks about in the Phaedrus, I don’t know. No, because I always knew I’d be only too delighted to make it carnal, if that could be an option. But I thought it couldn’t, and there it was. What I thought is that it didn’t do her any harm for me to feel this way about her, and it did me a lot of good, because it gave me something in my life that was special, that lifted it above the everyday.

  Marsilia pulled one of the gloaters out of the tub as Hilfa and I set our tack. Once that was done there was nothing to do for the moment but glide smoothly into the harbor. “It’s so big, and it looks so delicious. I could almost eat it right now, raw!” She mimed taking a bite.

  I laughed. “I hope some of these get to the tables while they’re still fresh and they don’t decide to salt them all down. How about you? Do you fancy it, Hilfa?”

  Hilfa laughed his slightly forced laugh. He’d learned it the way he’d learned Greek. A laugh was a word to him, a part of human communication. I didn’t know whether the Saeli really laughed or not. I’d learned to read Hilfa’s expressions, a little, working with him for so long, and I thought one of them meant amusement, but I wasn’t sure. He knew I was joking about him eating a fish, but I didn’t know if he really understood
what a joke was, or why I might think it was funny to make one. “I don’t eat fish,” he said, seriously.

  “Silly Hilfa. Why do you work on a fishing boat if you don’t eat fish?” I teased.

  “I like the waves and the wind,” Hilfa said, seriously. I wondered whether he would stay and take oath or leave for another planet on some Saeli ship. I hoped he’d stay. I liked him. And he might. He liked the waves and the wind, after all.

  “We’re glad to have you working with us,” Marsilia said, as the jib came around a final time.

  “Also I can study the Platonic fish,” Hilfa said, entirely serious, as usual. “The radial symmetry of fish on this planet is fascinating. Everything in this ocean is symmetrical. I keep hoping we will one day pull something out that isn’t, but we never do.”

  “We’re never going to,” I said, thinking of mosaics of Greek fish and their strange stretched shapes. Then I saw Marsilia stiffen, staring at the quay.

  “Trouble,” she said, then shook her head at me as she saw me twitch. “Only for me. Probably some kind of political disruption. We’re signing a new foreign relations treaty, and maybe some of our negotiations came unstuck.” She let the gloater slide back into the tub. “It looks as if I’m going to have to rush off. Can you two manage unloading without me?”

  “Of course,” I said, without even a sigh. Knowing that she’d have to dash off to a crisis, or have one prevent her from showing up now and then, was all part of having Marsilia working for me. I wondered sometimes whether part of the attraction of working on the boat for her was the fact she couldn’t be interrupted while we were out at sea. But I knew a lot of it was that the sea was in her blood, from her mother—she too liked the waves and the wind.

  I was easing Phaenarete into dock, so I didn’t see who had come to interrupt Marsilia this time until we were ready to tie up. I got ready to toss the line, and saw to my astonishment Crocus standing ready to catch it. And behind him, wrapped in a silvery-grey cloak that rippled in the wind, stood Thetis. My breath caught, as always. I wished somebody would paint her like that, in that cloak, on a cloudy day, standing on the little grey triangular cobblestones of the quay, with the black stone warehouses with their slit windows all along behind her. If they did, I’d want them to put the painting in Samos, my eating hall, where I could stare at it whenever I ate. Thetis had a grace and poise like the nymphs in Botticelli’s Summer, but a far lovelier face.