Necessity

by Jo Walton

  “If he is, would he look like Grandfather, or like his statues?” I asked, simultaneously horrified and fascinated.

  “I have no idea,” Dad said.

  Klymene shuddered.

  “Hey, he forgave you,” Dad said. I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “And I forgave him,” Klymene said, shaking her ancient head. Then she saw my frown. “Old history, Marsilia. Don’t worry about it.”

  “We will probably vote on the treaty tomorrow. Now I will go to talk to the ship,” Crocus said. “They may need me to translate, though I fear I will not understand the subtleties.”

  “I thought you said you knew English?”

  “What does it mean, to know?” Crocus asked, an extremely characteristic question from him. “I have not heard it spoken since I became myself. The occasional word from Lysias or Klio, yes, but we all preferred to speak Greek. Greek is the language of my soul. Greek has philosophical clarity. But English is stored in my memory. It is a command language.”

  “I hope it’s not too painful to speak,” I said.

  “That’s why it’s important that I go and relieve Sixty-One,” he said.

  “We’ll come along and join you there in an hour or so,” Dad said.

  “Joy to you both.”

  “Joy to you, Crocus,” I said, and Dad echoed me. Klymene climbed up onto his back, and they trundled off towards the spaceport.

  “He seems much like everyone else, only big and metallic, and then suddenly he comes out with something like that,” I said, when he had rolled out of earshot.

  “Going off to share the work to spare Sixty-One the pain,” Dad said. “He’s the best of us all.”

  We walked towards Thessaly. Dad had his cloak tightly wrapped against the chill, though I was snug enough in my fishing clothes. “I wonder if they’ll have any Workers on the space human ship, and what they’ll be like. The other Workers, the younger ones who came to consciousness here on Plato, are different from Crocus and Sixty-One,” I said.

  “Well, we were expecting consciousness with them, educating them for it, like bringing up babies. As I understand from Father, what happened with the original Workers was completely unexpected—nobody but Sokrates imagined that they might be people rather than tools. That had to have had an effect on how they turned out.” Dad sighed. “Still, people are different from each other, but they also have a lot in common, whether they’re Workers or aliens or humans. What really matters is their souls.”

  I couldn’t help saying it. “I sometimes feel I have more in common with Crocus than I do with Thee.”

  “Well, metal can be stronger than blood,” Dad said. “That reminds me. I heard today that Selagus is appealing the decision.”

  I blinked. “That’s the first time for ages.” Usually people who don’t agree with their classification flounce off to another city, often Sokratea, where they don’t have classes at all. Sometimes they come back later and accept it after all. Outright appeal against classification is allowed, but rarely happens.

  “It could be messy, and it could come up for judgement on your watch,” Dad said.

  “Thanks for warning me. I’ll look up the procedure and consult. I suppose there will have to be a committee?”

  “Yes, and you should be really careful who you choose for it. There should be one Ikarian, so Selagus can’t claim religious prejudice, but no more. It’s so awkward. We’ve only ever had a handful of reclassifications. We should go through them together soon and consider precedents.” Dad was frowning.

  “I can’t understand why he doesn’t want to be a Gold. He could still work at his embroidery.” I thought of my work on the boat.

  Dad shook his head. “I suppose he doesn’t want the responsibility. If so, that might be a sign that he’s right, and he should have been a Bronze all along.”

  We sighed simultaneously. Choosing classifications was the hardest part of political work. If we made a mistake, we’d lose a citizen, or worse, bind somebody where they’d be unhappy as well as unproductive. Every year we lost some people when they were classified, and while we often gained more than we lost as others joined us from other cities, it always felt like a failure. And when the newcomers chose to take our citizenship examinations, they were the hardest of all to classify, because we didn’t know them as well. I sometimes welcomed it when newcomers chose to live here as metics instead, though that had its own complications. Athenia still didn’t allow metics, but all the other cities did now.

  As we came up to the Temple of Hestia, the doors opened and a crowd came out and went off down the street. “Is there a festival I didn’t know about?” I asked, surprised.

  “I expect they went to pray for reassurance,” Dad said. “People do that sometimes, when things are uncertain. They want the gods to listen and help. I sometimes think they’d be less inclined towards that kind of thing if they knew more gods.”

  “They do know them, though?” I protested.

  “Not as well as we do, having them in the family.” He sighed. “If Father is in Thessaly tonight, and godlike, he’ll be different. Don’t be surprised.”

  I didn’t ask how he’d be different. I’d met Athene once. “It’s such a strange thought, him dying and maybe being there anyway.”

  “The only time he talked to me about it, before he went up against Kebes, he said he’d come back a heartbeat later and get revenge,” Dad said. “He didn’t say what he’d look like, and that’s the only time I remember him talking about it, when he knew his life was on the line. He didn’t imagine living out forty more years on a planet full of black rocks and volcanoes. None of us could have imagined it.”

  “I love this planet,” I said. “I think it’s beautiful.” I was used to older people complaining about it.

  “We all love Plato, whether we like it or not, but we still couldn’t have imagined it,” Dad said.

  We were at Aroo’s house, and Dad scratched at the door. One of her podmembers answered it. Saeli live in pods of five adults, with assorted children. I’d never met any Saeli who didn’t live in a pod, except Hilfa, of course. The podmember wished us joy and called for Aroo, who came out at once to join us. “I have spoken briefly to the ship, and they are highly pleased with the news of better communication,” she said. “And I have found a technician who was already at the spaceport and who has reported to the communications room.”

  “Excellent,” Dad said. The three of us walked on towards Thessaly.

  4

  CROCUS

  I. Invocation to the Muses

  This is too hard for me, dear Muses, on!

  Come down to me, inspire me, leave your home,

  Leave Mount Parnassus, leave Eternal Rome,

  Leave the Castalian Spring, Mount Helikon,

  Leave all your goddess-joy and hither fly

  Here, where you’re needed, where my art is made,

  Where I, strange votive, beg you for your aid,

  On this far planet in a distant sky.

  Come to me, if you ever heard a heart,

  When Homer, Dante, Hesiod implored!

  Set down this tale in amber and in jet

  And bend our stubborn history to art,

  We’ll write these truths, as best we can record,

  To make these worlds, so good, be better yet.

  II. On My Coming to Consciousness

  For a long time, whenever I thought of joining my friends in writing an autobiography, there seemed to be only two options. I could engrave it in imperishable stone, which felt too permanent, almost hubristic. Or I could store it in memory, nothing but patterns of amber and jet, powered by Helios Apollo. That felt too transient. When I die, if I die, a matter which concerns me, my memory will die too. My memory is called “temp storage.” Lysias expanded it for me to the maximum possible, and I shall not run out of space for many human generations yet, but he could not change the way my memories are stored. “We don’t understand enough about it,” he said. “We
don’t really know how it is that you got to be self-aware. I did enough damage to you Workers already out of my ignorance, my half-knowledge. I don’t dare risk more. Temp storage was supposed to be a place for you to keep commands and information about tasks partially completed. How that developed into actual memory and desires and your self-awareness, I’ve never been able to understand.”

  It was Arete who found a way, even before I had found a way to speak aloud. “Maybe you can’t write with a pen,” she said. “But you can inscribe. You could inscribe on wax and have somebody copy it. There are lots of people who owe you favors. Or you could print—compose your thoughts in your memory and then set them directly into type.”

  Once I had possible ways to do it, I had to consider what to say, and where to begin. Most people were once children, and remember growing up. Few of them remember coming to consciousness. Some things I can remember from before I was conscious. I have memories I saved before I was me, before I understood purpose. I examine them curiously for what they can tell me, but they are fragments. My unconscious life must have been fragmentary, and full of incomprehensible toil, like the earliest life I remember.

  I was built, not born, and I was built on Earth sometime in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century CE, or so I deduce. (I cannot count by Olympiads. There were distressing centuries of hiatus when years happened but the games were not held, and whether or not I count them, it becomes confusing. So I date the centuries by reference to the Ikarian’s Christ, or perhaps more happily to the reign of the Emperor Augustus.)

  Athene brought me to the City. I do not know whether she bought me or stole me. The Workers were here before she brought the Masters, so I have nobody to ask. Athene has never given oracles, and I have only seen her once, glancingly, since the Last Debate. Before I knew myself, she brought me, with the other Workers, back through time, before the Trojan War, to serve the City, and so I did from its first days, for more than a decade before my memories begin.

  Lysias believed that we achieved consciousness because we were used for so many tasks, and so many of them were complex, so we had to keep making decisions, more decisions and with less programming than Workers like us would normally have done elsewhere. From these decisions and from being forced to set priorities, he thought, came our consciousness. Certainly my earliest stored fragments are of decisions. Perhaps I chose to keep them to measure one decision against another, to make myself better at making decisions. By choosing that, if I did, I was already striving towards the Good, and so I must already have had a soul. But those early memories lack all coherence. I came to self-awareness, awareness of myself and of the world, and the world and myself as separate things, only with Sokrates. He by questioning caused me to question, and by asking me what I wanted caused me to consider desire and preference and boundaries.

  So I consider Sokrates my father, and my life as beginning on the day when I was planting bulbs and he asked me whether I liked my work, whether it satisfied me, whether I had preferences for some kinds of work, and I found a way to answer. It was a slow and clumsy way, arranging the bulbs so they would spell “No,” months later, in a language Sokrates did not speak, but it was a beginning. It led to dialogue, and from dialogue comes philosophy.

  III. On My Soul (Part 1)

  I wrote above that I must have had a soul already when I began to record my fragments, if I did so out of a desire to seek the Good. I do not know when I was endowed with a soul. My consciousness, my self-awareness, evolved. It seems most likely that at some point in that evolution, when it was needed, my soul crossed the river Lethe and entered into my body. If so, did my soul help propel my consciousness forward from that moment on? I have no memories that help. There is a smaller possibility that I always had a soul, from the beginning, before I had consciousness; that my soul, knowing my consciousness would evolve, chose to enter my body at my creation and wait for it. If this is so, then what part did my waiting soul play in my early life? Some say that I have self-awareness but no soul, that I am nothing but a machine. This seems un-Platonic as well as unfriendly, but it cannot be discounted as a terrifying possibility. I cannot erase this option simply because I dislike it so much. That too would be un-Platonic.

  As this is necessarily a matter of concern to me, I have sought the advice of all the wisest people in the Republics, and also of Pytheas, who is the god Apollo incarnate. Pytheas knows a great deal about souls. He believes I have a soul, but has no certain knowledge. He does not know whether my soul is the same kind as human and animal souls, nor when it would have come to me. He regrets not having asked all-knowing Zeus when he had the chance.

  Sokrates believed that I clearly have a soul, because I seek the Good. He thought it was futile to worry about when my soul came to me, as we couldn’t know. What mattered was that I have it now. There is a great deal to be said for this practical view.

  Simmea thought my soul must be the same as human and animal souls, and that I had probably been a human and an animal in earlier incarnations, and that I might go on to be a human in future incarnations, as she might have future incarnations as a Worker. She felt that philosophical souls had a kinship. This is what worries me about my length of life—should I choose to die, and let my soul go on? By continuing this life, am I impeding the progress of my soul? I tell myself that killing myself before I have fulfilled my Fate is cowardly, and who is to say when I have fulfilled my Fate? But then, life and death are different for Workers, and one by one I keep outliving my friends. Sometimes I wonder if what is cowardly is to refuse to die out of fear that I may have no soul after all, and that death would be the end. Sokrates did not fear death. In that, he was unusual.

  Ficino believed, with Pythagoras, that all souls have a unique number, and that souls are reborn when the world adds up to their number again. He thought the numbers inscribed on the Workers could be the numbers of our souls. (Lysias said they were serial numbers and meaningless.) Ficino thought the soul would have waited from the time my body was made for my mind to develop. He cited human babies as an example—“Babies have souls long before they can reason! You must have been the same.” And he believed my soul would be a special kind, exclusive to Workers. He also believed that animal and human souls were different, on which point Pytheas assures me he was mistaken. Ficino did not live long enough to see Pytheas revealed at the Relocation, which is sad, as I am sure he would have had excellent questions and rejoiced in the answers.

  Ikaros believed that my soul would have left Lethe and come to me when I was ready for it—“As soon as you needed it, but no sooner,” he said. At the time he said this, he was a man and not a god, and had no more knowledge than he could gain by learning, deduction, and intuition. Since he has been taken up to Olympos, I have had no opportunity to converse with him.

  Klio thought my soul would have evolved along with my self-awareness, and she thought the same was true of babies. Pytheas says she was definitely wrong about this in the case of babies, and he never heard of souls evolving, but they must have come from somewhere in the first place.

  I have faith in the existence of my soul, but no real evidence. This is one of my greatest burdens.

  IV. On the Good Life (Part 1)

  Simmea said that happiness could only be a by-product of something else, something that cannot be pursued intentionally but which comes along as an incidental when pursuing some other goal.

  I have found that this is true, but also that trying to minimize unhappiness for others gives me great satisfaction when it succeeds. Sometimes it is possible to create possibilities for happiness to come along for them. This is even more satisfying. Working for this makes me happy. This is what keeps me engaged with politics, not merely my Platonic duty to rule lest I be ruled by those less capable. I have sympathy for those who do not wish to work on this and prefer to lead a contemplative life. As long as there are enough people capable of the necessary tasks, everyone does not need to do everything.

  Pol
itics is often a matter of deciding priorities, and this seems to me the best way to approach it: deciding priorities so that they will minimize possible unhappiness, and allow the maximum potential for happiness.

  Sometimes it’s hard to judge. Indeed, it’s always hard to judge. It’s especially hard when there are people involved we don’t understand very well, like the Amarathi and the space humans.

  We vote in Chamber. That is, we vote when we do not agree after we have all made our cases, which happens with great frequency. I believe Plato would not have approved, because he would have believed it unnecessary. Yet it has been the practice since the earliest days of the City, when the Masters first established the Chamber. These days Chamber is the meeting of the Senate, which is open to all the Golds of the Just City who care to serve. If there are insufficient volunteers, more are chosen by lot to make up the number. The Senate must have fifty members, and may have up to three hundred. We have never had fewer than fifty volunteers, but we have never had as many as three hundred, either.

  In addition, we have the Council of Worlds, which also meets in the Chamber of the original city. There representatives of all twelve cities meet to deal with planetwide issues. These representatives are selected in different ways by the different cities. Ours are elected and then drawn by lot from the group, which is similar to the practice of the Athenian and Florentine Republics. For the last eight years, one of our representatives has been required to be a Saeli, and for the last six that Saeli has been Aroo. The Council elects two consuls annually, on the Roman pattern, to chair meetings and guide agendas for a year. The planetwide election of consuls has become political in a way I am sure Plato would not approve, with shifting but lasting alliances and oppositions, almost resembling political parties. Plato never imagined twelve cities, and he thought all philosopher kings would agree on essentials, because they would know the nature of Truth. Plato believed the Truth was one comprehensible thing that all philosophical souls would comprehend and agree upon.