Necessity

by Jo Walton

  “Can that really be the purpose of life?” I asked.

  “We can’t trust gla,” Thetis said, decisively.

  “Even if we could trust what gla said, is that for Hilfa alone, all the Saeli, our pod, or for everyone?” Sokrates asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hilfa said. “It is like what many Saeli believe. Plato says excellence is the greatest good, but our culture, the religion we follow, has always put discovery first, science, knowledge.”

  “This is the religion that’s more like philosophy?” Sokrates asked.

  “Yes. Other Saeli cultures worship other gods and have other priorities. But those of us who went into space, with Jathery, value discovery. I have heard that the Amarathi prioritize ubiquity and connection over everything else.”

  “Perhaps it is meant for the Saeli, because gla gave me no hint of that when I was trying to talk to gla outside,” Sokrates said. “But how interesting. Learn, experience, comprehend?”

  “Pity gla didn’t stay around so we could ask gla now whether it’s for all of us,” Jason said.

  “Let’s ask Grandfather,” I said.

  “Or Athene,” Sokrates said, thoughtfully.

  Jason let go of my hand, and it tingled where he had been holding it. He had hugged me earlier, when he came in. I hadn’t meant to trick him into a form of marriage. I knew he was in love with Thetis. But since she was included, I hoped he didn’t mind too much. He seemed to be taking it very reasonably, thinking about the details, exactly like you’d expect from a Silver really. Though Sokrates was thinking about details too. We’d work it out.

  II. Thetis

  Everyone looked up as we went out into the garden. The night was growing chilly, though nothing like as cold as the night before. “What have you been up to?” Dad asked, his brow furrowing as his eyes passed over us.

  “We have been forming a pod,” Hilfa said, all at once like that with no warning.

  “What!” Dad could sound so cold and disapproving sometimes. I shrank back, then stopped myself. Never let them think you’re inferior.

  “Jathery was attempting to attack Hilfa,” Sokrates explained. “As pod members, we had the right to witness the interaction. Without that, gla would have done something unreasonable.”

  “Unreasonable! You probably did exactly what gla wanted,” Athene said, rolling her eyes.

  “I think so. I freed Hilfa. I freed all the Saeli,” Marsilia said to her.

  “You’ve been forming a pod with my daughters and Hilfa?” Dad looked at Sokrates as if he was about to erupt. Ikaros was grinning.

  “And Jason,” Sokrates said, reproachfully, waving a hand at Jason, who was standing next to me looking embarrassed. I took his hand defiantly. “The number five seems to have some significance to Saeli. I don’t know if this is empty numerology, or if it truly has a kind of Pythagorean significance.”

  “There have been human-Worker marriages,” Crocus said, as he and Grandfather came closer to join the group, no doubt attracted by the volume of Dad’s expostulation. It was still strange to see Grandfather looking not much older than me. I wasn’t used to it.

  Dad turned to look at Crocus, took a deep breath and calmed himself. I wish I could do that. I almost never lose my temper, but I’m always bursting out crying whenever I feel something strongly. “This is all very unexpected,” he said mildly, then turned back to me. “I don’t know what your mother will say.”

  “Unexpected for us too,” I said, which was an understatement. Ma would be fine with it if I were the one to explain it to her. We always understood each other. And she often said we should get married.

  “More importantly,” Sokrates said, turning to Athene. “Jathery told Hilfa that Zeus wants us to learn, experience and comprehend. Is that something he wants of everyone, or only the Saeli?”

  Athene exchanged a glance with Ikaros. “All of us,” Athene said. “Saeli, humans, gods, everyone.”

  “You told us you didn’t know what he wanted,” Sokrates said to Grandfather, with a tiny hint of accusation in his tone.

  “I didn’t know when I told you that, long ago, here in this garden. This is something we learned when we spoke to him now, after we came back from being out there.”

  “Out in Chaos?” I asked.

  “It isn’t Chaos. Well, it isn’t only Chaos,” he said.

  “That’s what Athene has been telling me,” Ikaros said. “How marvelous and unexpected. I have to rethink everything. I can’t wait to see it.”

  “You’re there,” Athene said.

  “Everyone is there. Everything,” Grandfather said. “I have a song about it. I’ll sing it tomorrow in Chamber.”

  “Do you want to sing before the session?” Marsilia asked. “The way you legendarily did to stop the art wars?”

  “Are you chair tomorrow?”

  “I am,” she said, apprehensively.

  “Who’s supposed to go first?” Pytheas asked.

  “Androkles. Then Porphyry and the others. Then Sokrates,” she said.

  “I’ll sing after Sokrates,” Pytheas said.

  “All right,” she said, biting her lip as if she wasn’t at all sure.

  “And Athene and I can debate, like at the Last Debate,” Sokrates said cheerfully, grinning at Athene, who smiled unrepentantly back. “For now, I only have one more question about what Zeus wants from us. What should we learn, experience, and comprehend?”

  “Everything,” Athene said.

  “Yourself,” Pytheas contradicted her at once. She glared at him. “Well, you should know yourself first, and then once you do, you can move on out to everything else,” he said.

  “Do I take it Zeus didn’t specify?” Sokrates asked.

  Ikaros laughed, and the owl flew off Athene’s arm at the sound and circled silently around the garden before perching back on her shoulder.

  “He didn’t specify, but he seemed to approve of what Athene has been doing,” Pytheas said.

  “So should we put knowledge ahead of excellence?” I asked.

  “No,” both of them said together, and the owl twisted its head around to stare arrogantly into my eyes.

  “Excellence must always be our priority,” Crocus said.

  “Pursuing excellence will lead to everything else,” Dad said.

  The gods, the owl, and Sokrates nodded in unison.

  “I’ll sing the song for you tomorrow, and then you’ll understand,” Grandfather said.

  “But that way Jason and Hilfa and I won’t hear it,” I said. “Or is it a song that only philosophers should hear?”

  Grandfather looked at me. “Do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Of course I do! How could anyone not want to know what the gods want of us?” I asked.

  “She is a philosopher too,” Sokrates said, and exactly as it had when he had made this claim the night before, it simultaneously filled me with happiness and confusion. I knew I wasn’t really a philosopher, not the way Marsilia was, but I did love wisdom, and I did want to know the answers to questions.

  “Everyone in the cities is more of a philosopher than even philosophers are elsewhere,” Athene said.

  “That’s one of the fascinating results of your experiment,” Ikaros said. “Did you intend it?”

  “Did Plato intend it?” she asked.

  “Plato divided people by class because he believed souls really divide up that way,” Ikaros said.

  “There are some people who are completely incurious, even here,” Athene said. “So to that extent he was right.”

  “But the education here encourages inquiry.” Ikaros was grinning.

  “I wondered about that, and about Plato’s intentions, and I let the Masters decide from the beginning where Plato was ambiguous, about how the Irons and Bronzes should live,” Athene said.

  “Montaigne suggests—”

  “Yes, but nobody had ever really—”

  “Abelard, but I suppose that doesn’t count. Heloise herself—” Ikaros was c
ompletely intent on Athene.

  “Kellogg says—” she interrupted.

  “Ah yes, but even when there’s a wide liberal arts education it’s limited, so—”

  “Boethius really managed to preserve so much of what was really valuable—”

  “And the Dominicans, except that they got—”

  “Yes, politics is always the problem. Marcus Aurelius couldn’t make Commodus—”

  “And Poliziano couldn’t make Piero, some people—”

  “Well, but Tocqueville—”

  The two of them went on, in half-sentences, following each other’s thought, interrupting each other, citing authorities, and the rest of us stood there listening. Even Sokrates stayed quiet. It wasn’t like a debate, because they finished each other’s thoughts so much that they grasped each other’s points before they were even made, and the rest of us couldn’t do that. I hadn’t heard of half the people they mentioned. It was like listening to a truly brilliant person thinking, except that they were thinking too fast for us to follow and that it was both of them, their minds meshing. You could tell they’d been working together for a long time. It was like warp and weft when a shuttle is flying across the loom as fast as a Worker can send it, the colors dancing through each other and the pattern emerging into clear sight as it changes from threads of color to a length of cloth.

  “Like Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Athene said.

  “And that gets us back to Plato—”

  Sokrates laughed at that, and they stopped and became aware that the rest of us were still there. Grandfather was smiling. The rest of us were staring at Athene and Ikaros.

  “We were wondering whether it would be possible to have a city where everyone was a philosopher,” Ikaros explained.

  “But who would fix the latrine fountains?” Crocus asked.

  “Maybe the philosophers would do it as their recreation, the way Marsi fishes,” Jason suggested.

  Marsilia really grinned at him when he used her childhood name. It was lovely to see. I was coming to like this pod idea. If I was going to be married, I was glad it was going to be with a group of people, all of them kind, and that Marsilia would be there.

  “Things aren’t as divided up as Plato would have them,” Sokrates said. “I have learned much wisdom from craftspeople, and heard much windy bombast from supposedly wise men.”

  “I don’t want to be a philosopher king and have to make political decisions I don’t know anything about,” I said, quickly. “I know I’m an Iron. I love my work. But anyone would want to know what the gods want of us. I might not understand. But I would like to hear it.”

  Beside me Jason was nodding.

  “In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, he puts words into my mouth, as usual,” Sokrates said. “And they are more interesting than most such words, though I never said them. I am talking with this man, famous for his piety, and Plato depicts him quite as I remember him, as a bit of an ass. ‘Tell me then, oh tell me,’ Plato has me say, ‘What is the great and splendid work which the gods achieve with the help of our devotions?’ What is it, Pytheas, Athene? You say you care, about us, about the world. What are you doing? How can we help you? What is the great and splendid work?”

  “We have projects,” Grandfather said. “This city was one of Athene’s. I’m going to be working on more of them. You can definitely help, all of you. You can learn new things.”

  “But what is the great work?” Sokrates asked. “What is it for?”

  “I’ll have to sing it.”

  “Sing, Far-Shooter,” Athene said.

  And Grandfather sang, there in the garden of Thessaly, and we listened, and I did understand, as much as anyone human can. And although I wept, I was not the only one.

  III. Jason

  We were out in the garden of Thessaly, where so much of the history of the Republic has been made. A little while after Pytheas had sung. I realized that Marsilia and Thetis were both not-looking at me in the same way. They’d be talking, and looking somewhere, and then one of them would catch sight of me, or glance at me, perfectly normally, and then immediately look away as fast as they could. I’d probably have noticed either one of them doing it, but when it was both of them it wasn’t a thing I could overlook. And that got me thinking, as we were out in the garden talking to Neleus and Crocus and the gods. I kept thinking about what Hilfa had said, that I wanted Thetis but Marsilia wanted me. I’d never thought about Marsilia wanting me, or wanting anyone, really, she seemed so self-contained. She had her life in order. She didn’t behave as if she wanted me. We were friends, comrades. And she knew how I felt about Thetis; she teased me about it. But the way she wasn’t looking at me now, maybe she did want me, maybe like I wanted Thetis, and maybe we should have talked about this before. Well, we weren’t gods, we couldn’t go back and talk about it any earlier than now, but we could talk about it now. We go on from where we are.

  So after I’d worked this out, I waited until there was a suitable pause, and said: “I think our pod should go to Hilfa’s house and talk.”

  Then of course Sokrates wanted to argue with Athene, and Ikaros wanted to come along, and Marsilia said she needed to make plans with Neleus for the debate the next day, and Thetis said she was tired. Only Hilfa agreed with me. But I was persistent, so Neleus agreed to put Alkippe to bed, and Ikaros agreed he could wait until tomorrow, and off the five of us went.

  We walked through the gate and saw the starlight glimmering on the sea. The wind was coming up from the west, bringing clouds with it. The temperature was falling. There would be rain by morning.

  We came down into the harbor, and turned onto Hilfa’s street. It was less than nineteen hours since I’d been there before, but everything had changed. He opened the door and we all went in. Hilfa and Marsilia fetched wine and mixed it. This time we all had matching winecups. We stayed standing, slightly awkwardly, until we all had wine. Then Hilfa and Sokrates took the chairs, and the sisters and I took the bed. They sat together on one end, and I perched on the other end.

  “Well,” I said, and then started to giggle. It wasn’t the wine, it was how solemn everyone’s faces were as they turned them to me. Hilfa’s was always solemn, of course, but the others weren’t. “It seems to me there are a few things we need to talk about,” I said. “First, do we really want to form a pod, or were we only saying that to defend Hilfa?”

  “I want to form a pod,” Hilfa said at once. His markings were clear, and he seemed confident, indeed, the most relaxed of all of us.

  “I certainly won’t back out now,” Sokrates said.

  “I won’t back out either,” I said. “I think this is exciting and fun.”

  “I definitely don’t want to back out,” Marsilia said. “But I feel I rushed everybody into it. I should have thought faster about how to respond to Jathery.”

  “I do feel rushed into it,” Thetis said. “But I’m getting used to the idea, and I think I like it. I want to know if it’s real or not.”

  “That’s what I’m wondering too,” I said. I looked at the women, and saw two pairs of identical velvety brown eyes fixed on mine with completely different expressions. Thee looked worried and Marsilia looked as if she was remembering the bit of Plato that says you shouldn’t express your feelings.

  “I really like both of you,” I said. “I’d be thrilled to be married to either one of you, and both of you is better, because you’ve developed complementary virtues, and dividing you wouldn’t work so well. I’m not sure how pods are supposed to work, and the Saeli have three genders anyway. But I look forward to finding out, and finding out more about all of you. Hilfa’s already like a brother, and no family with Sokrates in it could ever be dull.”

  “Oh, Jason, you know I’m completely helpless before your beauty, but I’m an old man, and I have to live up to the reputation Plato gave me for chastity and moderation,” Sokrates said, batting his eyelids coquettishly. “And don’t think you can get around me because you called your boat after
my mother.”

  “You had three sons,” Marsilia said to him. “If the space human autodoc can make you young again, don’t think you can get away with that. And don’t say you’re helpless before my beauty, because I know I look like a philosopher.”

  “You look like my friend, your grandmother Simmea. She used to say that the interesting part of her head was on the inside.”

  Marsilia laughed. “It’s true for me too.”

  “But the inside is very interesting,” I said, and Thetis nodded.

  Hilfa was looking happy. It’s hard to say how I knew, because his face hardly moves, and he doesn’t convey his emotions in his expressions. His shoulders and knees seemed looser than normal, his head seemed more firmly seated on his neck, and his pink markings were standing out clear and distinct.

  “How are you doing, Hilfa?” I asked.

  “I am doing what I am supposed to be doing. Or do you mean how am I feeling? I am feeling safe.”

  Marsilia took a big sip of her wine, and looked at me over the rim of the cup. “I know how you feel about Thetis. But I’ve always really liked you.”

  “My pulse beats faster when I look at Thetis,” I said, looking at Thee and feeling it doing exactly that. “I don’t know why. It always has. Plato says acting on that kind of feeling is wrong, and I thought it didn’t do any harm if I kept it to myself. And you always seemed to have lots of admirers.”

  “Lots of admirers, yes, and I like to flirt with them, but I’m mostly interested in my babies,” she said. “But sooner or later I need to become acquainted with Aphrodite. Look what happened to Hippolytos. And I do like you. I’ve always liked you. I like talking to you. And I’ll like having babies of my own, I think.”

  I was amazed. “And I like talking to you too,” I said. Then I looked at Marsilia, who was biting her lip. “I like talking to you, too, Marsi, and if my pulse doesn’t speed up, well, I still feel really warm towards you.”

  “I like you too. And I have been to the Festivals of Hera, and always enjoyed it,” Marsilia said, and I thought she was blushing.