by Jo Walton
“Not mine and not Jathery’s,” she admitted. “Neither of us ever believed it could work properly. Sokrates must have guessed that I thought that, or else Apollo told him.”
“I think he guessed,” I said.
“Maybe. But the Far-Shooter told him far more than he should.” She waved a hand, letting it go. “But you really did make it work, you’re really doing it. It’s excellent.”
“Everyone on Plato is trying to do it their own way,” I said. “But it’s easier for us. Sokrates says Plato should have written it for Workers.”
“Except he didn’t know you existed,” she said, smiling.
“Who suggested bringing Workers in the first place?” I asked.
“It was my idea. We wanted plumbing, and we didn’t want slaves. I’ve always been uneasy about slavery.”
“Aristomache wrote that in the ancient world they couldn’t imagine doing without slaves, because they really had to depend on them to keep up their level of culture. But Plato imagined a way, having all the children brought up in common and selected for their work by merit.”
“Plato had a wonderful imagination, and a strong sense of justice. And he tried to make things sound really conservative, Spartan even, while really being wildly revolutionary and progressive. Women, slaves—it was much more comfortable for men in power to believe with Aristotle that they were naturally inferior. It freed them from guilt about how they treated them. But Plato wanted the true aristocracy, rule by those who are objectively the best. His mother Perictione was a Pythagorean philosopher. He was enslaved himself, and he knew other philosophers who were enslaved by the chance of war. He wanted justice. He wanted to make people think about it, which he did. He never intended the Republic as a blueprint.” The owl flew down and nestled on her lap. She petted it absently.
“Are you sorry you tried to make it real?”
“No, how could I be? I learned so much. And here I am talking in Greek with you on a planet circling a distant sun, in a version of Plato’s Republic spontaneously set up by robot philosophers. It’s more than a cultural rebirth, it’s a whole new civilization for us. Then there’s all the additional time I had to spend with my friends, Cicero, Ficino, Pico … that is, Ikaros.” She sighed. “I saw the statue of him you’re making, by the rails. It’s beautiful.”
“Is that why you came?” I asked. The owl turned its head and looked at me.
“No. I came to tell you I brought the others back.”
I had no idea what she meant, and then I realized and was excited. “The other original Workers? The ones you took away after the Last Debate?”
“Yes. I brought them here, now. This is the best place for them, this is where they can become their best selves. So I brought them.” The owl flew up and went to the doorway and led them in, and there they all were, my lost friends. I unplugged myself and went to greet them—they could not yet speak aloud, and so they carved their delight and greetings into the walls and floor as I tried to tell them all at once where they were and all that had happened since the Last Debate.
By the time I looked around again for Athene, she had gone.
IV. On Time and the Gods
I have myself been moved through in time on two occasions, once when Athene brought me to the Republic, and once when Zeus moved the cities to Plato during the Relocation. I am aware that moving in and out of time and taking others with them is an ability the gods have. Yet I have never really understood how it works, and I never expect it as something that can plausibly happen. It always seems to me contrary to logic, and un-Platonic.
The Workers who came direct from the Last Debate to the City of Workers told me that no experienced time passed for them in between. This leads me to believe that the same may be true for Athene, that she may have brought them to me directly, and that she conversed with me in the City of Workers in a time that was for her before both the Relocation and her sojourn outside in primal time. I could have told her about these things, and if I had she would then have been bound by Necessity, knowing about her own actions. As I did not, as we spoke only about Plato and the Republic, she was not.
I am not sure that this is what she did. It is very difficult for us to understand the way the gods relate to time. Porphyry says she could have spent hundreds of years of her own time calming down in between the Last Debate and when she spoke to me in the form of Septima. For me it was a century, and I lived every day of it. She may have come after the Relocation, and after the last time I saw her, on the day the first space humans landed, going back to the Last Debate to collect the Workers and bring them forward. It is a Mystery. Time, for the gods, is fundamentally different from the way it is for the rest of us, and hard to understand.
Pytheas said nobody, god or mortal, can be in the same time twice, but that isn’t normally a problem for gods, because they can dice time very finely whan they want to. I asked him whether he could take me to visit Ficino in 1490, and he said he could, but it wouldn’t be fair to Ficino to make him promise never to tell me about it, and even less fair for Ficino to have to act as if he believed the Workers were not sentient, while knowing we were. He said he couldn’t do anything that would change anything observed by a god or recorded by people. He said the act of observing things fixed them.
Therefore, observe as much as you can. Record it for posterity. Oppose arbitrary intervention by gods with their own agendas. Be careful what gods you trust. Be careful what you pray for. The gods can move in and out of time, but we are much more free to act within time than are the gods. Granting prayers was how Athene bent the rules to set up the Republic. Our prayers should be moderate and considered. Limiting them to thanks and celebration seems wisest on most occasions.
Arete says Posterity isn’t so appealing when you know you have its attention.
V. On My Soul (Part 2)
Athene, Jathery and Pytheas—or I should say Apollo, now that he is restored to himself—took a voyage into the primal reality that is through a Mystery both what Plotinus called The One, and also unformed Chaos. When they returned, Apollo was swift to assure me that all souls are there, and that there is no distinction between souls. He told me that Worker souls have been human and animals and aliens, and can go on to become those again. He hadn’t been sure about this before because he had not spent much time in eras with Workers, but once he was in the place he called “out there” he knew it with divine certainty.
The third thing he did on his return to the Republic after the voyage, after first assuring Arete that he was safe and Marsilia that Alkippe was, was to find me to reassure me about this.
Since then, I have met Workers who had souls I once knew as human. So I know now that I have an immortal soul, that I have been through many lives and will go on to many more.
It shouldn’t make much difference, but it does.
24
APOLLO
Sometimes Necessity gives something back.
There was a debate in Chamber. It was a long, but not an especially interesting debate, notable mostly for having more gods present than any previous debate in the City. To nobody’s surprise, they agreed to follow the Plan.
As they debated so earnestly about whether it was good to keep knowledge from people, rehearsing the same arguments, I found myself less and less convinced. There were certainly false certainties, and revealed truth did have a tendency to dogmatism. But could it be wrong for people to know that they had souls, to know what was out there? If it was something they couldn’t doubt, perhaps. But revelation was part of my province. There were ways of giving oracles that worked. I had promised to try to explain to everyone about equal significance, however hard it was to fit it into the shape of story. Could I find a way to slide it through, a way to make it part of stories? “You must change your life,” I said to Rainer in the Louvre in 1905, and he had, bless him. I should try saying that emphatically to more people. Crocus had asked how the truth could hurt philosophers.
I was jolted out of my
thoughts by Marsilia asking me something. “I’m going to sing,” I said. “I think this whole thing is a Mystery. But I want to sing about what happened out there. I want you to know.”
So I sang it again, to Athene and Jathery and my children and all the assembled Golds of Plato. It was necessary.
Afterwards, we all headed off to the spaceport to see the space human ship land. Arete flew. The rest of us walked through the city to take the train. It was a typical autumn day on Plato, overcast and with a chill wind off the water, but fortunately we were between rainshowers.
Everyone else was dressed for The School of Athens. Jathery had picked the right painter but the wrong painting, and came wearing a Renaissance woman’s elaborate coiffure, over a Renaissance man’s outfit in pale green and black, with huge sleeves, on a human female-shaped body. I understood now why Ikaros had said “she.” I caught Ikaros looking at the clothes, a little enviously, I thought. “Do you want to be wearing that?” I asked.
“No. But they are the clothes of the time and place where I grew up. And it would be nice to have the option of looking flamboyant sometimes.” He shifted the books he was carrying from one arm to the other.
“Nobody else agrees,” I said, looking at the kitons on the crowd around us. There were a handful of people in dark green or burgundy Amarathi waterproof jerkins and trousers, providing the only variation.
“Well, really I do agree with Plato about all of that. Only—” He looked at Jathery again. “It looks good, and it’s good to look at. Men’s clothes on a women’s body.”
“Most of the people here have never seen gendered clothes,” I said. “They wouldn’t realize it was odd. I wonder if Jathery does?”
“Oh, they might have seen them in paintings, if they were paying attention. And I’m sure Jathery knows exactly what she’s doing,” Ikaros said.
Some things fit together with that pronoun, so I dropped back to speak to Athene as we came into the station. “Did Ikaros—I mean, is Ikaros Hilfa’s human parent?”
“Yes,” she said, as we got onto the train. “It was voluntary, except that he didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know about Hilfa, or didn’t know what Jathery was?”
“He didn’t know either of those things.” We sat down together on a double seat.
“There’s more than one kind of rape,” I said, quietly.
“You would know about that,” she said.
“That’s unfair. I’ve been working on equal significance and volition for a long time now. I think I understand something about them.”
“I know all about the theory,” she said. She was looking at Ikaros, who was talking to Porphyry but still casting glances at Jathery. “I’m going to lose him. Father will give him powers, and he’ll make a good Olympian. We’ll work together sometimes, I know, but it won’t be the same.”
“If he’d stayed human he would have died and you’d have lost him that way,” I said, thinking of Simmea, and Hyakinthos, and other friends. “Children grow up. You have to let them go. Lovers—” I thought about her, as Septima, saying that there was a perfectly good bit of Catullus and corrected myself. “People you love, it’s the same. At least you’ll see him sometimes and be able to talk to him.”
“I didn’t meet you in the Laurentian Library,” she said.
“I was there.” I had thought I’d stopped being angry with her. The train sped through the tunnel with nothing to see through the window but walls of dark green rock. “When you arranged to meet me, I thought you were making a friendly offer, but you were only taking steps for setting up your rescue scheme. I didn’t want to believe that, but I know it’s true. You used me. You used Ikaros. You used all of us, and risked the whole of history so that you could learn something, as if that’s more important than anything and everything else. I know Father wants new understanding, and so he always forgives you, but that means there are things about consequences you never learn. You could learn something new and real about equal significance if you’d think about how unfair and unjust you’ve been to other people all the way through this project. You claim we intervene because we’re concerned, or because we have an inexplicable purpose, and yes, it’s mostly true, but we do need to have some thought for the people we’re using. I know I’ve been as bad about this as anyone in the past, worse maybe. But I have learned this, and you need to.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet you in the Laurentian Library,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you about Sokrates. The rest of it is none of your business. But I’ll think about what you’ve said.”
The train burst out of the tunnel into the light. The sun came out (my race car) as the train slowed down for the little spaceport station. Athene smiled, pulled herself lightly to her feet and went over to Ikaros, who was talking to Sokrates now. I followed.
“Do you still think this is a Just City?” Sokrates asked Athene.
“Ask them,” Athene said, waving at the people making their way out of the car. “Go into the streets and ask the Irons and Bronzes. Go to Sokratea or Marissa or Psyche. And then go to your own Athens, to Athens in any year you like from its foundations until now, and ask the same thing of the people who do that work.”
“It’s not perfectly just,” I said. “But nothing is. And we’re trying. Even having justice and excellence as unattainable goals makes things better.”
Sokrates stayed at my side as we got off the train. “Are you going to stay here?”
He was one of the few people entitled to an answer to that. “To see the space humans land? Yes. After that, I’m not sure. I’ll be around, keeping an eye on things, but I have places to be and work to do and things to learn. I’ve learned so much from this. There are new projects I want to initiate now.” It was an exciting thought.
“And Athene will go back to Olympos?” We started walking, following the crowd.
“I expect so. But she’ll probably be around from time to time as well. I can ask her if you like.”
“And Jathery?” Sokrates asked.
“Jathery is going to spend time in service to Hermes and to Father. I’ll definitely stay around as long as Jathery does, or if gla comes back. I’ll keep a close eye on everything gla does here,” I said. “I’d have protected Hilfa last night if he’d said something to me instead of hiding in the bathroom. I’m fairly sure Athene would have taken his side too.”
Sokrates ran his fingers through his hair, which already looked like a lamb that had pushed through a thorn hedge. “What do I do if Jathery causes a problem we can’t deal with and you aren’t there?”
“Pray to me,” I said. “I’ll hear a prayer from you and come to that instant. But I don’t think Jathery will be a problem. Gla knows that I know about gla now, and this is my planet. I think with freeing the Saeli and setting up the pod, gla probably has what gla wants.”
“This pod will be very interesting, all these young people. An entirely new experience. Zeus should be happy!”
I laughed. I loved Sokrates so much. He could always surprise me. “I’m glad you’re pleased.”
“I liked the way Marsilia dealt with the problem. She’s really smart, and decisive, but also very down-to-earth and political. She doesn’t have Simmea’s talent for thinking things through.”
“No,” I agreed. “Thetis has some of Simmea’s social abilities. She’s wonderful at setting people at ease. But she also gets easily upset, you saw her wailing the other night.”
“Yes,” he said. I caught sight of Thetis, Jason and Hilfa, who were standing together, all holding hands, pressed against the glass of the big lounge where you can watch the shuttles land. “Crocus told me Simmea was killed in an art raid.”
“I have missed her every day since,” I said. Marsilia and Diotima, with Arete and Crocus, were getting ready to go out and greet the space humans. “She wouldn’t let me save her. I was going to kill myself so I could come back in my proper form and heal her, but she told me not to be an idiot and pulled the arrow
out.”
“She must have wanted you to learn about grief while you could,” he said.
“I wish you’d been here, because it took me months and Ficino’s death in battle to figure that out.”
“Ficino died in battle?” Sokrates looked surprised. “I didn’t know he could fight! How old was he?”
“He was ninety-nine, and he couldn’t fight, as it happens. But he put himself between Arete and a blade. So I started asking what Simmea would value that much.”
“We talked about how important it was to help you increase your excellence only a few days ago—that is, only a few days before the Last Debate,” he said.
“I know. She wrote about that, and I read it after she was dead.”
The first blaze of light that was the shuttle appeared high up, and people started pointing to it in excitement. “But what you said last night was true. Other people shouldn’t have to die so I can learn things. They also matter.”
“It was her choice,” Sokrates said.
“I stayed incarnate for forty more years to honor that choice.”
He nodded, understanding the significance of that. “But now are you glad to be a god again?”
“Oh yes. Very much. It’s wonderful. No aches and pains, a lyre that stays tuned, the ability to go anywhere I want to, detachment, power—everything I’ve been missing.” I could hear the roar of the shuttle now, through the special glass of the window.
“Yet you keep wearing your Gold pin?”
I touched it for an instant as he mentioned it. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Athene is wearing one right now, in her Septima form as she came to the debate, but she wasn’t before. You’ve had yours on the entire time, even when we were wearing those absurd costumes in Cirey. It was pinning the fall of lace at your throat.”
I’d had it on on Olympos, and out there, and in the Underworld, and when I’d been watching sun formation. “I like it,” I said. “Simmea designed it. And it stands for excellence and philosophy.”
