by Jo Walton
Pytheas frowned. “Even if she is the anchor that keeps all of us safe? Necessity has given us this tie, when we’re venturing into danger. Having Necessity on our side can only help.”
“But Alkippe!” Her bright eyes, her wriggling body, her inquiring mind, her bold soul, I wanted to say, and couldn’t find the words to make them understand. Pytheas knew her and how marvelous she was, but Hermes had only seen her for a few minutes.
“Where do you believe Athene is?” Hermes asked Pytheas.
“Possibly she’s in the Underworld. That would be all right. Strange, but all right.”
“Ah. And because of the way when we go there we only perceive Hades and those souls with whom Hades thinks it’s good for us to interact, we can’t tell that she’s there?”
Hermes nodded as if this made sense.
“Perhaps.” Pytheas was frowning. “But I suspect she’s not there, and that she has gone into the Chaos before and after time.”
Hermes wavered for a moment—I was staring right at him and that’s the only way I can describe it. It was like when you’re watching the shadow of a train you’re in falling on the ground, and then suddenly there’s a hill and the shadow is nearer and bigger for a moment, and then it’s back on the plain, racing along. “I can’t find her from outside time either,” he announced. “And I tried to catch her at the Panathenaia, but I couldn’t.”
“But you weren’t there,” I pointed out.
“No. You didn’t see me, so I couldn’t be visible. And she wasn’t there for an instant that you and Thetis weren’t.” He paused, and looked assessingly at Pytheas. “Do you think we should go to Father now and tell him everything?”
“First, we should talk to Hilfa and discover what message she left for us,” Pytheas said.
“And you really think I need to stay bound by Necessity?” Hermes asked. “It’s like having a sharp stone in my shoe.”
“That stone might be our shield,” Pytheas said.
“I am not letting you out of my sight again until you go back there and ensure Alkippe is real,” I said to Hermes. I had never felt more strongly about anything in my life.
“I’d agree to that, but you are mortal, and not caught in Necessity’s jaws. Alkippe already only has one parent. What happens to her if I have to go into danger and you don’t survive?”
I looked at him in incomprehension. “I’d happily give my life for hers, if need be. And she’d be safe here. I wasn’t suggesting taking her with us.”
Pytheas was smiling his enigmatic smile. “You’re seeing Platonic motherhood, which is different from anything you’re used to. Marsilia is telling you we’re in the City, and here children with one parent or no parents at all are at no disadvantage.”
“Yes. If my parents and Thetis couldn’t manage, though I’m sure they could, Alkippe could grow up in a nursery and pursue her own excellence. It’s not like the little orphan in Homer.” I didn’t have much context for how children grew up elsewhere. His assumption that she would suffer neglect if I died disconcerted me. There’s a lot of variety in how we do things on Plato, but that wouldn’t happen in any of our cities. Bringing up children to be their best selves is something we all agree is crucial. In those cities with no nurseries, a child whose family died in a catastrophe would be immediately adopted into another family.
“This is a strange place,” Hermes said. “Well, you can stay with me if you feel so strongly about it. Here. A votive gift.” He handed me something. I looked down at it. It was a little purse of soft leather, with a drawstring. Puzzled, I opened it. “It’ll never be empty, unless you shake it out,” he said. “And the coin you pull from it will always be enough to pay for what you want.”
I took out a coin and turned it in my fingers. I had seen coins before; they use money in Lucia. My other hand rose to my neck, to my gold pin on my jacket collar. It was forbidden to me to have gold, other than the Gold in my soul and the pin that symbolized it. I couldn’t think of a more useless gift, but I imagined it was well intended. As well as travel, Hermes was patron of the marketplace, commerce, and thieves. I decided to talk to him about our trade negotiations when there was a chance, in case he had interesting ideas. “Thank you,” I said, politely.
Pytheas was frowning. It was so strange to see him, the same but different. He was definitely my grandfather, but he seemed to be about my own age. “Marsilia is part of my family. If any harm comes to her, you’ll answer for it.”
Hermes nodded once.
Pytheas didn’t stop frowning. “We should go in and I should say hello to the rest of the family. They’ll hardly have had time to miss me. And then we should find Hilfa.”
“Why do we need to bother going inside first?” Hermes asked.
“I want to speak to Neleus. And we need Arete.”
“Hilfa speaks Greek,” I said.
“Doubtless, but whether or not you’ve discovered it, your aunt Arete has skills beyond flight and translation. Come on.” He took a step towards the door.
“Arete isn’t there. She’s at the spaceport,” I said.
Pytheas hesitated. “Then—”
“No, come on. It’ll be fun to see their faces,” Hermes said.
7
JASON
Now, if you were an incarnate god and you died and then resurrected and came back, the way Christians and Ikarians say Yayzu did, what would be the first thing you’d say the first time you saw your children?
Pytheas came in from the garden looking about my age, with all the silver gone from his hair. He was wearing a white kiton trimmed with a conventional blue-and-gold book and scroll pattern, and pinned with the pin that meant he was a Gold of the City. He went straight up to Neleus, and what he said absolutely flummoxed me. It was the last thing I’d have expected to hear in the circumstances. And I was right there. I can report his exact words, and they were: “Why didn’t you tell me about Hilfa?”
Neleus blushed at that, which meant that, given the color his skin was to start off, he turned almost purple.
“You were always telling us to sort things out for ourselves,” Neleus said. “You never wanted to hear anything about negotiations with the aliens.”
“You don’t think the name of Athene would have got my attention?”
“Too much of it,” Neleus said.
Hermes laughed aloud.
“And she had asked the girls specifically not to tell you,” Neleus went on. “Hilfa didn’t seem dangerous. We could have told you any time there was need. We didn’t tell my brothers or Arete either.”
“What’s this about Hilfa?” I asked. It wasn’t really my place to speak in that kind of company, and they’d been ignoring me so far, but I wanted to know what kind of trouble Hilfa had managed to find, so that I could help the dear dunderhead out of it. How could anyone imagine he might be dangerous?
And that’s why I found myself with Marsilia and Thetis and the two gods an hour later, after a lot of talking and a walk in the cold, on the green basalt street outside Hilfa’s house down by the harbor, three streets over from my own sleeping house. Neleus had gone off to take Alkippe to bed and then go himself to the spaceport, but all the rest of us were there. They had shared an unlikely story about Athene giving Hilfa to Marsilia and Thetis in a box, and beyond that a lot of questions and not enough answers. The only way to get the answers was to talk to Hilfa, seemingly. I insisted on coming along to look out for Hilfa, and Thetis backed me up until Pytheas gave in and let us come along, trusting her social judgement.
Down in the harbor, instead of sconces there’s a strip of light running along the sills of all the buildings, lighting everyone’s faces from underneath. On Hilfa’s street, where a lot of Saeli lived, the lighting ran a little green, which made Thetis and Marsilia look as if they were made out of gold, while Pytheas and Hermes seemed as if they were made out of marble. I could see this really well, because they all turned to look at me. I’d insisted on coming along; now they wanted me to announ
ce that we were there.
It was easier to do it than say anything, so I scratched on the door.
Hilfa appeared, wearing loose-woven dark-purple pants, with his chest and back bare. I had thought he would be disconcerted seeing a bunch of important people wanting to talk to him in the middle of the night—not that it was so late really, but I’d had a long day. Hilfa didn’t even blink. He invited us all in and apologized for not having enough chairs. He knew everyone except Hermes. Marsilia introduced them. To my surprise, Hermes said something to Hilfa in Saeli, which I took to be a greeting. Who would have thought he’d know it? He hadn’t used it to greet Aroo. Travel and trade, I thought; he’d probably run into Saeli on other planets where humans had contacted them.
We sat where we could. Hilfa scurried around putting all the lights on, which made the room very bright. Thetis and I sat on the bed, against the wall. Pytheas took one chair, and Marsilia the other, while Hermes leaned against the table. Then Hilfa made a dash into the little back room, which wasn’t much more than a big closet really. He brought out wine, and Marsilia got up to help him mix it and hand the cups around. He brought four matching red-pattern winecups, and two Saeli-style beakers. He gave one of those to me, with a smile, and kept the other himself. Mine was incised with geometric patterns in the porphyry inlay, so I couldn’t quite figure how he meant it. It might have been treating me as family, to have the other cup that didn’t match, or it might have been meant as an honor. There was no telling, and it wasn’t the time to ask. I decided it came out positive either way, and smiled at him over the brim. Other times when I’d had a drink at Hilfa’s place we’d used winecups, but there had never been more than three or four of us. It was a biggish room, with one small red-and-blue geometric rug, and the walls were painted white, with no frescos or other art. It had always seemed quite empty to me, until now, when I’d have thought it full if I hadn’t come straight from the press at Thessaly.
“Athene is missing,” Pytheas said as soon as we had all settled down and sipped our wine.
“Missing? Lost?” Hilfa asked, turning to him from where he had been putting down the wine bowl on the table. The swirls on his skin faded a little. Up to that moment I thought there had been some mistake, that Hilfa couldn’t be anything but what he seemed: a slightly puzzled Sael who had somehow wandered into all this by mistake. “Is she—” He hesitated. “Do I say she? Are there no special pronouns for divinity?”
“No, you simply say she,” Marsilia said. “Ikarians capitalize it when they write, but we use the same word.”
“Do you mean to say that She is lost?” Hilfa asked. I could all but hear the capital.
“Yes. What do you know about it?” Pytheas leaned forward, winecup forgotten in his hand and nearly spilling. Thetis gently took it from him and set it down on the tiles by her feet.
“I don’t remember anything before I hatched here, you understand?” Hilfa said. He seemed more confident and relaxed than normal. I thought I had been wrong to come; he didn’t need my help.
“That’s what you said at the time, but you could talk,” Marsilia said.
“I knew some things,” Hilfa said. “I don’t know how much is normal for newly hatched Saeli. I have not wanted to ask, because sometimes questions reveal too much about what you do not know, when you should.” He looked at Marsilia, with a twitch of expression that I thought meant apology. “I know that’s not the Socratic way.”
“The Socratic way regards deception very badly,” Marsilia said.
Hilfa inclined his head. “You told me not to reveal my origins.”
Marsilia sighed. “It’s true, we did.”
“Plato’s censorship and deception wars with Sokrates’s desire to question everything all the time,” Hermes said.
“We in the Cities have noticed this contradiction,” Pytheas said wearily. “Go on, Hilfa.”
Hilfa turned to Thetis, who was sitting next to me on the bed. “I remember you looking after me, and that is the first thing I remember. Before that there was no me. Let me fetch paper.”
“Paper?” Hermes asked.
“Quicker to do than to explain,” he said, and darted back into the little storeroom.
“I think he’s telling the truth,” Thetis said. The instinctive twitches of my own liver said the same thing. Saeli are hard to read, but I was used to Hilfa, and he didn’t seem to be prevaricating at all, even as he talked about dodging revelation.
Pytheas nodded. “I think so too. Hermes?”
Hermes was staring intently at the door through which Hilfa had vanished, and shook himself when he was addressed, the way Hilfa often did on the boat when I called him back from one of his reveries. “I sense no deception either,” he said.
Hilfa came back with paper, a standard sheaf of Worker-made letter paper. He set it down on the table. Hermes moved to give him room, and took up position leaning casually against the wall. Hilfa took a pen and wrote for perhaps a second. I don’t think I could have written my name in the time he spent writing. It didn’t look like he was writing, either; more like he was doodling. The pen danced over the paper, and then he was done. He walked over to hand it to Pytheas, and I could see it was covered all over in neat script, where I’d have counted on a sketch.
“I knew before I can remember that when She was lost, I should write that and give it to You,” Hilfa said.
“Do you know what it says?” Thetis asked.
“No,” Hilfa said. He squatted down where he was, on the rug in the middle of the floor, sitting back on his haunches the way I had seen him do so often on the boat. It looked uncomfortable and unnatural, because human legs don’t bend comfortably that way, but I’d grown used to the fact that Saeli ones did. He was much greener than normal; the pinkish swirls that normally covered his skin only visible now in the center of his chest and back.
“Do you know where Athene is, or how she came to be lost?” Hermes asked, for the first time taking a sip of his wine.
“Not unless it says so there,” Hilfa said, gesturing to the paper. Pytheas was reading it intently and didn’t look up.
“Do you know what you are?” Thetis asked. I thought about Thetis and Marsilia opening the box Athene had told them not to open unless she was lost, and finding Hilfa inside. I understood why they had opened it. All the same, I wouldn’t have done it. You learn patience, fishing. Marsilia was starting to learn some now, working on the boat, but she hadn’t had a scrap of it when she’d first come to me.
“I don’t know. I think I am perhaps a hero.”
“A hero, the child of a god?” Marsilia was frowning. “One of the Saeli gods?”
“That is my guess,” Hilfa said, looking at Hermes, and then away. “But I can’t say. I don’t know where I come from, where I belong. I don’t want to go there. I like it here. I like the fish and the sea.”
“The wind and the waves,” I said. It was what he had said that afternoon.
He turned to me for a moment with the expression I thought was a real smile, then back to Marsilia. “I like Jason and Dion,” he said. “I like the boat. I like you and Thetis. I want to stay in the City. I want to take oath. I didn’t ask until now, because it wasn’t just until you knew.”
“Nobody’s going to make you leave—” Thetis began, setting down her empty winecup at her feet beside Pytheas’s full one.
“Don’t make any promises,” Marsilia said, cutting across her. “We will need to debate this. I think many of us will support Hilfa’s desire. I certainly will, but this is important.”
“What good is it you being consul, Marsilia, if—” Thetis began.
Pytheas looked up from the paper and stared at Hilfa. Simply by raising his head, he riveted all our attention, and Thee fell silent. His face was inscrutable, his lips slightly parted as if caught in the middle of a gasp or a smile.
“Are you going to share that with the rest of us?” Hermes asked.
Pytheas looked serenely at his brother. “She has go
ne beyond what lies outside time, into the Chaos of before and after, to discover how the universe begins and ends. She has done this with the help of a Saeli god of knowledge, Jathery. In case she had difficulty returning, she has left me the explanation of how to do this. Her explanation is divided into parts, each of which she has left with a different person, in a different place and time.” His voice was level, calm, and absolutely furious.
“Father will kill her,” Hermes said. He sounded awestruck and impressed. “He’ll hang her upside-down over the abyss for eternity with anvils on her fingers.”
“You know he never does anything to Athene,” Pytheas said, absently. “No, I think it’s worse than that. She’s broken Father’s edicts, obviously, but I think this time she might have gone too far and be up against Fate and Necessity.”
“What does that mean?” Thetis asked.
“It means she could be lost forever. And we might be too if we go after her,” Hermes said. He smiled at Thetis.
“Is this something Ikaros dreamed up?” Marsilia asked. “It sounds a bit like one of his ideas.”
“She worked on the idiotic plans with him, but she hasn’t taken him with her,” Pytheas said.
Hermes drained his cup and set it down decisively on the table. “We should locate the pieces of her explanation.”
“Maybe we should go to Father,” Pytheas said.
“But I’m safe from Necessity,” Hermes said. “And we should at least collect the pieces of her explanation first. When we have that, we’ll have a better idea of whether we could help her.”
“But we don’t need to. Father will already know how to do it,” Pytheas said. “And don’t you think this might be why he sent you to get me now?”
“It would be better if we can sort this out without him,” Hermes said. “At least, better to try.”
“Whatever he won’t do to Athene, he wouldn’t hesitate to do to us.”
“Why does Zeus never punish Athene?” Thetis asked unexpectedly.
