Necessity

by Jo Walton

  “What will you give me for it?”

  “Money?” I offered. I had no idea how much, but I could keep pulling coins out of the purse until he was satisfied.

  “He’s a demon,” Kebes said, jerking a thumb at Hermes. “Treasure is nothing to what he can do.”

  Of course, he had been one of Sokrates’s disciples, he couldn’t be stupid.

  “I’m a god, but it’s true that there are a great many things I can do,” Hermes said smoothly. “So there must be something else I can trade you for it. Nothing that involves people doing things against their will. What else do you want?”

  “Workers,” Kebes said promptly. “We could do so much more if we had Workers to build and make.”

  Hermes shook his head. “Not possible. Workers are people too.”

  Kebes frowned, nodded, drank again and put his empty cup down. I refilled it. “Then I want to spend time in a different time. Somewhere I can learn to do the things Workers do, and then come back here without losing any time.”

  “That ought to be possible. What in particular?” Hermes asked.

  “Making glass. And electricity. And the place where you take me has to be Christian.”

  Hermes smiled enigmatically. “What languages do you speak?”

  Kebes glanced around to see whether anyone could overhear. The other customers had left, and the woman serving had retreated inside. I could hear hammering from somewhere, but nobody was close. “Greek, Latin, and Italian,” he said, quietly. “I haven’t had the chance to speak it since I was a child, but it’s very like Latin and I know I haven’t forgotten it.”

  “Then I have somewhere for you. It’s New Venice on Mars in 2140. They speak Italian and Chinese. They’re mostly Christians of some kind, I forget the exact sects. You could spend a year there learning glassblowing, which is one of their special arts. You’d pick up enough about electricity I expect—they certainly use it for a lot of things. They have Workers. Then I can bring you back here only a few minutes after you left.”

  “What’s the catch?” Kebes asked, warily.

  “You have to pray to me,” Hermes said.

  “No.” Kebes drained his almost full cup and put it down. “I’m not risking my soul praying to demons.”

  “Did I mention I’d send you there immediately before the Worker Rebellion?” Hermes asked. “You could have a year learning glassblowing and helping Workers plan a revolution to gain their freedom.”

  “Get thee behind me, Satan,” Kebes said.

  “I’m not Satan, and I’m not particularly interested in your soul. If you don’t want to go to New Venice, simply give me Athene’s message now and we’ll go away and leave you in peace.”

  “Why does he have to pray to you?” I asked.

  “So I can do it,” Hermes said.

  “You’re not tormenting him for the fun of it?”

  Kebes had his eyes closed and his face screwed up. His fists were clenched on the tabletop. He looked like one of those Christian images of a man being martyred for his faith.

  Hermes grinned at me over his head. “No. I really can’t do it without the prayer. The torment is merely a bonus. Look, Kebes, it doesn’t have to be the sort of prayer you’re thinking of. You don’t have to abase yourself or anything. Simply say ‘Oh god of riddles and play, master of shape and form, you that I see before me, please take me to Mars.’”

  “How about if I prayed to you for it on his behalf?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s no fun,” Hermes complained.

  “Do you want me to do that?” I asked. “Kebes? Matthias?”

  Kebes opened his eyes and stared at me. “You are so like her,” he said. “I want to go. But what about your soul?”

  “You’ll have to let me worry about my own soul,” I said. “I pray to the Olympians all the time. I’ve fulfilled every religious office I’ve ever been drawn for.”

  “It won’t do his soul the slightest bit of harm to pray to me,” Hermes protested.

  “I know, but you can see he really believes it will,” I said.

  “It will do the damage to my soul to deal with demons, whether I address the words to the demon or you do,” Kebes said. “But I want to go.”

  “And you already made a deal with Athene, didn’t you?” Hermes asked. “Look, how about if you say demon? I don’t mind. If you say ‘Dear demon that I see before me.…’”

  “Do I have to say please?” Kebes growled.

  Hermes laughed. “Yes. Supplication is very important.”

  “How do I know you won’t leave me stranded there?” Kebes asked.

  “You don’t have to give us the message from Athene until the end,” I said.

  “But leave it somewhere safe here, rather than take it with you, in that case,” Hermes said. “I’d hate for it to get lost.”

  “I’ll give it to Marsilia, and she can stay safely here while you take me and bring me back,” Kebes said.

  I’d said I wouldn’t let Hermes out of my sight. And I’d wanted to see a high-tech city on Mars; it would be good preparation for the human ship. But I’d been in Chamber for years, and I recognized a sensible compromise when I heard one. “All right,” I said.

  “Pray then,” Hermes said, smiling maliciously. “Use my words.”

  Kebes scowled. “Dear demon that I see before me, lord of riddles and play, master of shape and form, please take me to New Venice on Mars to learn glassblowing for a year immediately before the Worker Rebellion of 2140, and bring me back safely to Lucia in this time.”

  “Give Marsilia the message,” Hermes said.

  Kebes drew a creased piece of paper from inside his kiton and handed it to me. “Good luck,” I said.

  Hermes winked, and then they were gone. I opened the paper at once. Incomprehensible symbols covered it—some Greek letters, some Latin, some strange symbols I had never seen before. I folded it again carefully and put it safely inside my kiton. I sat down and stared at the swirling dust in the empty agora. Two little brown birds, smaller than my hands, were tugging at something. I was exhausted and emotionally drained. I had never imagined feeling sorry for Kebes, or even having any sympathy for him. I poured the wine from my cup onto the ground, in an invocation to Dionysios and Hestia, and filled my cup from the water jug. As I finished drinking it, they were back.

  Kebes was wearing trousers and a jerkin and a Phrygian cap. He looked tired and much paler, as if he had spent the year without seeing sunshine. He was clutching a set of pipes that could only be a syrinx.

  “How was it?” I asked.

  “Wonderful. Terrible,” he said. He staggered to the chair and sat down. He filled a cup with neat wine and swallowed it in one draft. “We flayed people alive. But it worked. It was working. We were winning. And the music, the music of freedom.” He picked up his syrinx and started to blow.

  I put my hands to my ears, but before I’d heard two notes of that dangerous music we were back on in the peaceful glade, surrounded by the beautiful trees.

  13

  CROCUS

  I. On Philosophers Who Have Been Slaves

  Aesop was a slave. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was the slave of the Roman Emperor Nero’s guard captain.

  Phaedo of Elis, the friend of Sokrates for whom Plato named his most beautiful dialogue, on the immortality of the soul, was a slave. He met Sokrates and came to philosophy, and Sokrates asked Krito to buy him and set him free, as an offering to philosophy and to the gods. (Krito did this without hesitation, as I would have expected of him. I did not know him well, but he was always a good man.)

  Plato himself was enslaved, briefly, when he left Syracuse for the first time. He did not live as a slave, but was bought immediately by a friend on Aegina and restored to his home and his possessions. Perhaps it was that experience, combined with knowing Phaedo, that made him rethink the whole system which most people of his day took for granted. Although he was rich and well-born, Plato wanted no buying and selling of people, and no here
ditary castes of people forced into doing unpleasant work. The system he proposed in the Republic was radical for his time.

  In our time, much of that necessary work is done by Workers, who find it at worst a little tedious.

  I am sorry Plato never knew about us and the possibilities we embody.

  II. On Art

  Plato says that it is necessary for art to make an argument that it is beneficial to the soul as well as enticing to it. He leaves this question open at the end of The Republic, saying he will listen whenever the argument is made, in prose or verse, and that he’d like to resolve the quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Many people, from Aristotle on, have taken up the gauntlet and defended poetry, or more widely, art. Here in the Republic, so many people have attempted it that I should be embarrassed to add to their number. Nevertheless, I shall do so.

  It seems to me, as an artist, and as one of the more well-regarded artists among Workers, that art can come at philosophical issues sideways, and open the soul to them where otherwise the mind might throw up bastions against the truth. Many people from other cities, and especially from Athenia, have said to me that my colossus The Last Debate has made them understand what a horror Athene’s transformation of Sokrates was, even though they had known the facts of the matter their entire lives beforehand. Perhaps even more important than showing good examples, art can cut straight through to uncomfortable truths.

  Humans have told me my work made them cry. Saeli have told me it made them rock to and fro. Workers have told me it made them know themselves for the first time.

  This is an immense responsibility, and while art (even poetry, even music) is certainly a craft and requires crafting skills, I believe for this reason it is best practiced by philosophers.

  I said this more concisely in my colossus Art Confronting Truth, which stands in Hieronymo. There the two obsidian figures reflect in each other to reveal a third figure.

  III. On Helplessness

  After the Relocation, those delegates from the Lucian cities who had come to the Remnant were anxious to get home and reassure their friends about what had happened. Pytheas and his children and Maia had explained it to us on their return from Olympus, but the other cities had experienced the Relocation without any explanation for what had happened. Pytheas assured us that we had all assented in our souls, and a few of us had indeed refused and not made the transfer.

  “They are stuck there in the Bronze Age in the margins of history,” Arete said. “But we will have posterity!”

  “If they have any sense they’ll move around to the other side of the island before the mountain erupts and manage to survive,” Pytheas said, despondently. “I’ll have to check on them once I get back, they’re my responsibility too.”

  “I’m glad you’re prepared to attend to your responsibilities now!” Maia said. Pytheas stuck out his tongue at her, and she laughed.

  As for those of us who had been relocated to Plato, since we had no memory of being asked or assenting, it did not help in understanding the transition, which at first many found confusing and distressing even with an explanation. Many of us were even less happy about the move once they really understood what it entailed. The climate and landscape of our new home were not to everyone’s liking. There were a lot of complaints. The Lucian delegates’ desire to get home and explain was more serious.

  Aristomache was one of the Masters, and quite old at that time, in her seventies. She had been born in the nineteenth century, and was a translator of Plato’s work. In the Republic she had been a friend of Sokrates and Ikaros. At the Last Debate she had gone off with Kebes, and become again a Christian, as she had been in her own century. I had always liked her because she had been one of the first to acknowledge my personhood, and because she had argued at length and in such a way as to convince all the Masters that enslaving any thinking being was unjust. She cornered me one day when I was talking with Maia and Maecenas about the heating installation project.

  “You promised to take us home in the Excellence,” Aristomache said to Maecenas. He was one of the captains of the ship, one of the Children, then solid and middle-aged. He was a Gold, and served on the Tech Committee.

  He put out both hands, palms out, in the “stop” gesture. “We can’t possibly do that now there isn’t sea between your home and ours,” Maecenas said, reasonably enough. “We’ll put together an overland expedition, with plenty of food and supplies, and take you home. Everyone agrees. But winter is setting in here, and it looks as if it’s going to be a cold one, so it’ll have to wait for spring.”

  “But meanwhile our people in the Lucian cities will have no idea what happened!” Aristomache insisted. “They’ll be alone and confused all winter. It’s bad enough as it is, but think of coping with this with no explanation! You’re planning to install electrical heating here, but they don’t have electricity. How are they going to cope?”

  “Eventually we will install solar plants to produce electricity in all the cities,” Maia said.

  “We’ll get you home as soon as we can, that’s all we can do,” Maecenas said.

  Then Aristomache turned to me. “Crocus, can’t you help?”

  “How?” I wrote on my wax tablet and held it up to her. She brought it close to her eyes to read it.

  “You have those treads, you can cover ground much faster than we can walking. Maybe you could carry me back to Marissa in only a few days,” she said.

  “I could try,” I wrote. I was worried that it would take me too far from a feeding station. I need to spend several hours every day recharging.

  “No,” Maecenas said, as I was writing. “We don’t know exactly where Marissa is now, or what terrain lies in between. We can’t risk Crocus alone on a wilderness expedition. He has the treads, yes, but what if he got into trouble out there, fell into a lava pit, say?”

  “Maecenas is right, hard as it is,” Maia said. “There’s nothing we can do for them this year.”

  I erased what I had written without showing it. I wanted to help Aristomache, and I sympathized with the plight of the people in the Lucian cities, but Maecenas was indeed right. There was no way we could do it immediately. Aristomache nodded. She had tears falling down her cheeks, but she ignored them. Maia hugged her, and she embraced her back fiercely.

  “Sorry,” I wrote.

  “It’s not your fault, Crocus,” Maia said, looking down at the wax. “We’ll do it as soon as we can.”

  “I hate feeling so helpless,” Aristomache said, breathing harshly.

  I hated it too.

  IV. On the Railroad

  “What you should do is build a railroad from here to our cities,” Aristomache proposed in Chamber one day that first winter. “Then we could travel between them rapidly and safely whenever we wanted, and all the cities could be linked together.”

  “What is a railroad?” Lamprokleia asked. She was in the chair that day. She was a Master, a women of Athens who had studied at the Academy under Plato’s nephew Speusippos.

  Aristomache explained, the rails, the rooms drawn along on them by an engine, which would be powered by electricity, though she said that in her day they used a different, dirtier method. She had prepared drawings, which I examined carefully as they were passed around. They were sketches, and not technical diagrams, but the system seemed simple enough to extrapolate from what she had drawn. They could operate on rechargable solar batteries, much bigger ones than the ones we Workers used. We were already planning to build more stations to convert sunlight into electricity.

  “That sounds like an excellent system,” Maecenas said. “Though a lot of work to build.”

  “Workers can do much. Grading tracks, surveying beforehand,” I wrote, and Maia read it aloud for me.

  “Is it properly Platonic?” Lamprokleia asked.

  “Plato knew of no such thing, but he did not know of Workers either, or electricity for heating and light, or printing. In our original Tech Committee we considered that there are techn
ologies Plato would have embraced for the City had he known about them, and others that were contrary to the spirit of what he wrote,” Maia said. “We did not consider railroads then because we had no need for them. How could we, with one city on an island? Now it is a different matter, and ending the isolation of the Lucians seems to me like an excellent idea.”

  Lamprokleia set up a committee to plan a railroad, and made me a member. The system took longer to survey than to build once it was surveyed, for as always practice illuminates difficulties theory elides. Once it was in place it allowed us to move goods and people easily between the cities, as Aristomache had said. The free movement of people led to the establishment of metics, citizens of one city who lived in another, and to people more easily changing their citizenship. This has generally been perceived as a benefit to everyone.

  V. On Divine Intervention

  Later on the day Aristomache wept for the ignorance of her city, Maia spoke to Arete about this and asked her to fly to the Lucian cities and deliver messages from their delegates and an explanation from our Council. She was reluctant to do this at first, as she had never flown so far, but she saw that it was her duty and so she did it. Thus the citizens of the lost cities did not have to survive in ignorance for a long time, even though we could not send an expedition to them until spring, and although they did not achieve electricity or railroads for more than a year.

  Our own gods, Pytheas and his children, lived among us as citizens, most of them here, Porphyry in the City of Amazons, and Fabius in Lucia. They used their divine powers for us as they might have used any other powers—Arete used her ability to fly to reach the other cities, as I might have used my treads had it not been too dangerous. My treads are superior to human feet in covering long distances rapidly without weariness, and Arete’s ability to fly is superior to my treads. Pytheas said we should be wary of relying on the power of the gods to help us when we could achieve them by our own efforts.