Necessity

by Jo Walton

  Crocus caught the rope with the attachments at the end of one of his great arms. I saw the golden bee painted on it flash as it caught the light. I said Marsilia was an aristocrat, and she is, but compared to Crocus she was little better than me. Crocus was a Worker, a machine, huge and metallic, one of our two original Workers. He had huge arms, no head, and great treads instead of legs. He and Sixty-One were the only people who had been here for the entire history of the City. He had been a friend of Sokrates. He was a Gold, one of our philosopher kings. He was probably the most famous person on the planet who wasn’t a god. I had friends among the younger Workers, but I had never even spoken to Crocus.

  He tied the line rapidly and deftly around the bollard. “I can’t imagine what use he could ever have had for that skill,” Marsilia said in my ear.

  I was staring past him at Thetis, who was crying. It made her look lovelier than ever, beautiful and vulnerable and sad, in need of protection. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?” I asked.

  “Thee? It could be anything. She cries really easily.” She sounded much more irritated than sympathetic.

  “Why are you so unkind to her?” I asked.

  “Is that unkind?” Marsilia asked. “I try not to be. I love her. She’s my sister. But she’s all emotion and no thought, and I’m the opposite. It’s hard to be sisters. Everything seems to come so easily to her. Do you think if I looked like that, people would look at me the way you’re looking at her? Do you think I’d want them to?”

  “It’s hard to imagine you wanting them to,” I said.

  Marsilia snorted. The quay was near enough for her to spring ashore, and she did.

  “We can manage if you have a family emergency,” Hilfa said. I don’t know where he got expressions like that from.

  “Trouble?” she asked Crocus, ignoring Thetis.

  “News, and a complication,” he replied, in his slightly odd mechanical voice. Before either of them could say anything more, Thetis ran towards Marsilia, who braced herself and clutched her barely in time to prevent both of them falling over the edge of the quay into the icy water. “Grandfather’s dead,” Thetis said.

  That was news. Old Pytheas, Apollo himself. He was one of the Children, and so he must have been eighty or thereabouts, but he’d seemed well enough when I’d seen him singing at the Festival of Artemis a few days before. What did it mean for an incarnate god to die?

  Marsilia patted Thee’s back and made soothing noises. Hilfa went to fetch the cart to get the fish into the warehouse. I began to swing the heavy tubs of fish onto the hoist, to be ready when he came back with it.

  “Is this the news or the complication?” Marsilia asked Crocus. She sounded taken off balance. It must be strange to have a grandfather who’s a god. I wondered what she felt about him.

  “Neither,” he responded. “Though I should give you my condolences. The news and the complication are the same thing.” Because he didn’t have eyes, I had no way to tell where he was looking. I couldn’t tell whether he was paying any attention to me at all. I looked away from Marsilia and poor Thetis and saw Hilfa coming back with the cart. Dion was helping him push it over the cobblestones, and little Camilla came skipping along beside them. I was looking at them, and moving the tubs on their swivel along the sloping deck, and I almost didn’t take it in when Crocus said: “A human spaceship is in orbit.”

  “That changes everything,” Marsilia said, suddenly all practical, the way she was when we were out with the nets. “Thee, stop crying, it’s un-Platonic. I have to go.”

  “Marsilia! You can’t go off and worry about spaceships right after Grandfather has died,” Thetis said, outraged.

  “Oh yes I can,” Marsilia said. “And Dad will do the same.”

  “Neleus is already in the Chamber,” Crocus confirmed. “I came to fetch you for the sake of speed.”

  “Hilfa says you have a good haul!” Dion said, as he came up. “Joy to you, Marsilia, Thetis, Crocus.”

  Camilla ran to me and put her arms up to be swung onto the boat. I heaved her aboard and hugged her. “Gloaters!” she exclaimed. A human spaceship, I was thinking, recontact with the mainstream of human civilization at last. And Pytheas dead. Everything had changed and nothing had. Hilfa came aboard beside me. I swung the first tub up so that the fish that filled it cascaded down into the cool boxes on the cart in a swirl of red and black.

  Marsilia looked up. “Dion, how lovely to see you. I have a crisis. If I borrow Jason, could you and Hilfa manage the unloading?”

  “Borrow me?” I asked, jumping ashore, leaving Hilfa and Camilla aboard. “What for?” I couldn’t imagine how she might need me in dealing with a strange human culture, but of course I was prepared to do my best.

  Marsilia detached Thetis from her shoulder and gave her a gentle push towards me. “Can you take Thee home?” Ah, of course. She didn’t need help with the big problem, but with the immediate human problem. Well, that was more to my scale.

  “To Thessaly,” Crocus interjected.

  “You should come too, Marsilia,” Thetis said. I put my arm around her. Hilfa was already tipping the next tub of fish into the cart.

  “I will come, and so will Dad, as soon as we’ve dealt with this crisis,” Marsilia said.

  “But I’m sure there’s a plan for dealing with it, and what does it matter anyway?” Thetis asked. “You can’t put politics ahead of family.”

  “There has been a plan for this meeting since the consulship of Maia and Klio, but the question is whether people will follow the plan in the face of events,” Marsilia said. “This is one of the most important things that has ever happened, Thee. Oh, it’ll be so wonderful to talk to them.”

  “Perhaps,” Crocus said, cautiously.

  “You don’t think so?” Marsilia asked, sounding surprised.

  “I knew the Masters longer and better than you did,” Crocus said. “I have apprehensions about what recontact could mean. I have watched the generations maturing in the Cities, and seen how each one is more Platonic than the last as we grow further from other human cultures. Plato was wrong to want to start with ten-year-olds. They should have started with babies. The Children remembered their original cultures too well. Your father’s generation, the Young Ones, were the first generation to know nothing but the City. And your generation are in an even better position. These days we take the pursuit of excellence for granted, and go on from there. Each new generation so far has been better. Perhaps recontact with the human cultures that have developed from the ones the Masters came from will indeed be wonderful. I hope so. But I have reservations.”

  “But we’ll have so much to share with them,” Marsilia said. “We’ve developed so much. And we have the works of classical civilization that were lost to them. We have everything we’ve learned about applying Platonism and reconciling it to other systems. The aliens didn’t know anything about Plato until we explained to them. But the humans are bound to be excited.”

  “This is a whole new civilization,” Crocus said. “We know less about them than we do about the aliens. In some ways they will seem more familiar, yes, and we will share some cultural referents. In other ways they might surprise us more. They might have very different priorities. Many of the Masters came from times that did not value the classical world as it should be valued. I remember Klio and Lysias talking about what misfits they had been in their own times. And Lysias, who came from the mid-twenty-first century, was the last Master. Nobody from any time later than that had read the Republic in Greek and prayed to Athene to help set it up, or they would have been here. No Workers ever did. That isn’t a good sign. Besides, there were other human civilizations, on other continents of Earth, which had their own philosophical traditions and might not know or care anything about Platonism.”

  “I don’t care about Platonism either, or the aliens. And whatever they’re like, they’ll still be there tomorrow, and going off to a debate on the day when Grandfather has died is heartless,” Thetis
said.

  “I’m consul. I think Grandfather would agree I should be there. And I really do have to go,” Marsilia said, climbing up onto Crocus’s back and taking hold of the braided blue and black web of harness that hung there. “Dion, Jason, thank you.”

  I wanted to thank her as she and Crocus disappeared up the hill. This was the closest I had ever been to Thetis, and I was going to go with her all the way to Thessaly.

  3

  MARSILIA

  I was woken the morning of the day when it all began by my daughter Alkippe bouncing on my stomach. It may not be the best way to wake up, but it’s far from the worst one. “Why are you still asleep?” she asked. I was often up before she was, up and washed and dressed and getting on with my morning. Now the sun was high, and casting a bright square of red-gold morning light on the foot of the bed, but I felt as if I could do with another whole night’s sleep.

  “Yesterday was a long day,” I said.

  “It can’t have been longer than nineteen hours. That’s how long days are.” Alkippe had that didactic tone kids always get when they’re beginning to learn how to muster facts for an argument.

  “When people say they had a long day, they mean they made part of the night into day and didn’t get enough sleep. Or that a lot of things happened so it was an extremely busy day.” I yawned.

  “It’s not a very precise term.”

  “When people are talking about how they feel, precision isn’t always what you want. You asked me why I was still asleep, and the answer is because I felt I had a long day. It doesn’t matter how many hours it was; what matters is how it felt, and so why I was still sleepy.”

  “Why did it feel long?” she asked.

  “Well I had lots of meetings, and lots of fishing. It’s the time of year when fishing is the best, and that means it’s more work. It’s good really.”

  “Sosothis says that people should only do one job, the job for which they’re best suited. He says that’s what Plato says, and that doing two jobs is un-Platonic.” She looked unhappy. I’d heard this often enough from other people already.

  “Working on the boat with Jason and Hilfa is my recreation,” I said.

  “But maybe you wouldn’t be so tired if you didn’t do it?”

  “I wouldn’t, but I wouldn’t have so much fun either. And we might not have as much fish, and fish is good. So I’m going to carry on doing it whatever Sosothis says, or anyone else either. People complained about it when I was running for consul, but they elected me anyway, so there we are.” I could still hardly believe I was consul, consul in my year, at thirty-five, elected to planetary office at the youngest possible age.

  “Let’s wash together!” Alkippe said, bouncing. She grinned at me, and I saw that she had lost a front tooth.

  “Yes, that will be fun.” She usually washed with Thetis. I rolled her around so that she was sitting on the edge of the bed. “You used to be small enough that I could swing you up off my stomach. Now you’re getting almost too heavy for me to roll.”

  “Was I really small? Was I as small as a walnut?”

  “When you were as small as a walnut you were inside my belly. When you first came out you were the size of both of Granddad’s hands put together. But you keep on growing and growing.” I smiled at her.

  “I’m seven and a half. Next I’ll be seven and three-quarters, then eight, then eight and a quarter, then eight and a half, then—”

  I stood and stretched as Alkippe demonstrated her grasp of counting by fractions, which was her favorite game this month. I prayed to Zeus, father of gods and men, that she would reach all those ages, and beyond them, ninety-nine and a half, ninety-nine and three-quarters … Her empty bed was a crumpled mess. Thetis’s bed against the far wall was neatly made. I couldn’t hear Ma and Dad moving around on the other side of the partition either. “We must be really late. Come on, quick!”

  We ran into the fountain room. “What are you doing today? Fishing or meetings? Or fishing and meetings?” Alkippe called.

  “Meeting this morning, if I haven’t missed it, and then fishing this afternoon.”

  “Granddad would have woken you in time so you wouldn’t miss the meeting,” Alkippe pointed out.

  “True.” She was so smart, she lapped up learning, and she had that kind of common sense too, like Ma, because she was absolutely right, Dad wouldn’t have let me miss the meeting.

  * * *

  My life was good and full of daily pleasures. In addition to the satisfactions of my political work, I had valuable and healthy work fishing, where I could see Jason every day and keep an eye on Hilfa. I enjoyed my food. I loved Alkippe more and more each day as she came to the age of reason. I had Dad’s full approval, and now that I had been elected I felt worthy of it. I made a real effort to get on with Ma and Thetis, and even though they sometimes seemed more alien to me than the Saeli, I had been doing better at this recently. So things were going along smoothly and my life was good. I’d hug Alkippe, or put my back into hauling nets with Jason and Hilfa, or get some groups to agree to a compromise in Chamber, and realize all at once that I was happy. I also felt I was doing what Plato wanted, though I suppose strictly speaking he wouldn’t have had me doing it until I was fifty.

  The morning was all meetings, and there was an important debate scheduled for the evening. But in between, I went out on Phaenarete on the tide and had a delightfully busy afternoon hauling in fish. After a day out on the ocean, I had expected a couple of hours to get ready for the evening’s Council session. At the very least, I’d have appreciated a hot drink to warm myself up, and time to change into a formal kiton. As it was, Crocus collected me on the quayside and I had to take the chair in my fishy work clothes, on no notice, and deal with the most difficult and controversial of all topics—human recontact, and what the gods really want us to do. Oh, and Grandfather was dead, and I hadn’t had any time yet to think through what that meant.

  Chamber was filled with a babble of voices, human and Worker. Nobody was in the chair, and only a few people were sitting down. Everyone seemed to be waving their hands in the air and raising their voices. All the members of the Council of Worlds and half the Senate seemed to be here, crowding in together along with a few random concerned citizens—all Golds, of course. I looked at Crocus for help. Because he didn’t have a head I could never tell where his focus was, but he must have seen my glance. “You’re chair tonight, Marsilia,” he said.

  “That’s right,” Dad said. “You’re consul, take charge.”

  They had each been consul multiple times and knew much better than I did how to take charge of the Chamber. I’d have been vastly reassured with either one of them in the chair, and so would everyone else. But Dad was right. I’d be judged on how I acted in this emergency. I took a deep breath, wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my thighs, and walked down towards the chair. Maia had sat there, and Dad, and before them legendary figures like Ficino and Tullius and Krito. I was thirty-five years old, and I was consul. And it wasn’t ambition, or anyway not in a bad way. I didn’t only want the glory. I wanted to serve Plato. I might wish in my cowardly liver that somebody else were in charge in this crisis, but it was my responsibility, so I swallowed hard and did my job.

  “… any of Pytheas’s children!” Diotima was saying loudly, her voice cutting above the babble. She was my fellow consul. I had mixed feelings about her. Our names would be recorded together forever in the name of the year, though I didn’t know her well or like her much. She came from Athenia, and was polite and religious and conventionally Platonic. She was small and neatly made, with dark smooth hair, silvering now. She was fifty or so, since nobody can run for planetary office without having read The Republic, and Athenia, always stricter than everyone else, still did not allow their citizens to read it before they turned fifty. Here in the Remnant we read it as ephebes, as soon as we had taken our oaths of citizenship at sixteen, after our shake-up year at fifteen. Golds and Silvers have to read it, and the oth
ers can if they choose. It always surprises me how many people don’t bother, or give up part way through.

  I sat down in the chair. “Quiet,” I said, much too quietly. Crocus echoed me loudly, and everyone fell silent and stared at me. “I call this emergency session of the Council of Worlds to order,” I said. “Members of the Council and senators may remain. Others should leave.”

  A handful of people left. Everyone else sat down, higgledy-piggledy where they were, like stories of the earliest days of the Council eighty years ago when Sokrates had been here and regularly violated procedure. Some of the benches had been replaced since then, but many of them were the same. I found that both comforting and intimidating. Crocus rolled over and settled himself in the section where benches had been removed to make a space for Workers, and humans in wheelchairs.

  “Who has the details of what has happened?” I asked.

  Klymene, one of the Children, and the oldest person still serving on the Council, stood up. She was bony and wrinkled, and looked as if she were made of old tanned leather. Her hair was no more than a straggle of thin white strands stretched over her scalp. She had the log of our communication with the ship, and summarized it for us in her thin elderly voice. “They don’t speak Greek or Latin. We started off using Amarathi, and were at the point of asking Arete to help when Sixty-One worked out that they were speaking a variant of English, which it could mostly understand. So after a brief delay we were able to communicate with them that way. They are humans, not from Earth but from a planet called—” she squinted at the printout, holding it farther away from her eyes, “Marhaba, but they have been to Earth. They asked permission to land and wanted to know who we were. According to the plan, we told them the name of the planet and that our cities were founded seventy years ago. They have also been in communication with the Saeli ship in orbit.”