Necessity (19 page)

“I didn't mean to imply that we should abandon her out there, but rather to inquire why she is in need of our rescue, how can she be beyond her own resources,” Sokrates explained calmly. “And if she should be in such need, then what resources do we have that she does not, that we can help her if she has gone beyond them?”

As if on cue, Hermes and Marsilia reappeared at that moment. Hermes was grinning, and Marsilia was frowning. Marsilia seemed to have been frowning a lot since all this started, and it wasn't characteristic. She's a serious person, yes, but on a normal day on the boat her brows might not draw down at all. Now she looked as if she might never relax then again. She moved away from Hermes. I saw her eyes widen as she recognized Sokrates and Ikaros.

“Do you have Athene's notes?” Pytheas asked Hermes.

“Marsilia has them,” Hermes said. He looked at her expectantly. She pulled three pieces of paper out of her inside pocket, put one of them back and held the others up.

“Here,” she said.

Hermes leaned against the wall, staring over at Pytheas. “Do you have yours?”

“Yes. But I can't read them.”

“No more can I,” Hermes said. “They're in some kind of code. Maybe with time I could figure it out.”

“It will be much faster if I get Arete,” Pytheas said, and vanished.

“This is my sister Marsilia,” Thetis said, moving around refilling winecups again. “Marsilia, Hermes, Ikaros and Sokrates.”

“You're not a fly anymore,” Hermes said.

“Apollo was kind enough to turn me back,” Sokrates said, frowning at him. “Who's Arete?”

“Pytheas and Simmea's daughter,” Ikaros said. “She can fly. And detect falsehood. She's wonderful. I expect she's grown up by now. It's hard to take in. Forty years.”

“Sixty years,” Sokrates said. “But it was thousands of years last time. At least it's never boring being a plaything of the gods.”

“Why is Apollo taking so long?” Hermes asked.

“I expect he has to explain to Arete,” Thetis said. “What's the hurry anyway?”

Marsilia, Ikaros and Hermes looked at her in astonishment.

“Thetis is right. Athene's not even in the same time as us. Why does it matter how long it takes?” Sokrates asked.

“We don't know whether there's time where Athene is, or how time works there, so there may be time pressure on our need to find her,” Ikaros said.

“And I am bound by Necessity, which is becoming increasingly difficult as more time passes for me,” Hermes said.

“Also there's a human spaceship up in orbit waiting for permission to land,” Marsilia said.

“A human spaceship?” Sokrates asked. “From where?”

“From Earth,” Marsilia said.

“We're not on Earth?” Sokrates asked.

Everyone fell over themselves explaining the Relocation to him. “I wouldn't have imagined I could be on a world circling another sun without knowing it, even inside, at night, with only little slit windows,” Sokrates said at last when he'd assimilated it. “And you called your new world Plato?”

“Yes,” Marsilia said.

“Of course they did,” Ikaros said.

“And why exactly did Athene bring you here from Greece?” Sokrates asked.

“Zeus brought them here, as I understand it,” Hermes said.

“Why did he do that?”

“So we could have posterity, they say,” Marsilia said. “And this human spaceship that's up there now is our first recontact with wider humanity, and it will give us that posterity.”

Pytheas reappeared with Arete. She immediately hugged Ikaros, who had leapt out of his chair as soon as he saw her.

“It's so good to see you!”

“You look so young!” Arete said.

“Fascinating as this reunion is, can we get on and read Athene's message?” Hermes asked.

Arete turned to Hermes, then stopped. She became completely expressionless for a moment, staring at him stone-faced, looking for that moment decidedly like her father. “Who in all the worlds of thinking souls are you?”

“Nobody asked,” he said. “I'm Jathery, of course. Not outside time with Athene, as you can see, but left behind as part of her precautionary system, like the rest of you.”

“Gla ordered me not to tell,” Hilfa said. He took another step back and sat beside me on the bed. I put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly.

Hermes bent forward from the waist with one hand extended and the other behind his back, and when gla straightened up again gla was a huge greenish-gold Saeli, dressed in a gold webbing vest like the red one Hilfa wore on the boat. The patterns on gla skin were a deep black and seemed to writhe and change as gla moved.

Nobody moved or spoke for a long moment. Then Marsilia made a retching sound and made a dash for the fountain room, looking seasick. The papers she had been holding scattered to the ground as she ran.

 

12

MARSILIA

Hermes turned to me a second later, on the same quayside on a blazing hot summer afternoon, hotter than it ever was at home. “He recognized you. So we had already successfully got Athene's note from him.”

“So am I caught up in Necessity's toils now as well?” I asked. I rubbed my eyes against the sun's glare reflecting off the harbor water.

Hermes looked intrigued. “Yes. But we can't use that as a shield the way Apollo wants me to use Alkippe, because we need Athene's explanation first, so don't worry, we can clear it up quickly.”

“But how does it work? Haven't these things we've done always been in time, so that even before we left Plato, even before I was born these things happened? We always spoke to Kebes earlier, and took Athene's message from him before that? If time can't change except in extreme circumstances when Zeus intervenes, isn't everything we do in time determined? Why are you uncomfortable about Alkippe, when it's all like that?”

“Well, things can change because of our actions. And once we know about them, we are bound to do them. It's uncomfortable because I know about Alkippe.” He hesitated, frowning a little. “It's like an itch I can't reach, until I set it straight, a painful spreading itch. Or maybe it's more like the feeling that I am constantly doing the wrong thing. I should be attending to that, so everything else I do feels bad and wrong. But it's only because I know. If I didn't know?” He shrugged. “I didn't know until I saw her, and it didn't bother me at all.”

“So it has to do with awareness, with consciousness?” I asked. “Divine consciousness, or any consciousness?”

“Only gods can go outside time, so mortal consciousness isn't usually a problem this way. Your lives unfold in time, you do what you want to do, you can't get tangled up in it unless we take you outside it, which Father wisely forbids.” He grinned.

Yet here I was, in a time that was both forty years and four thousand years before the time when I was born. “Can you change things on purpose?”

“Yes. But it gets harder the farther from our central concerns it is.”

“And how about getting tangled up in Necessity? Can that be deliberate?”

He looked uncomfortable. “No, not normally. Because it's the consequences of actions. Well, there are ways one can, but nobody would. It feels horrible enough when it isn't.”

“And what if you never went back to conceive Alkippe?” I asked, my deepest fear. “Would she cease to exist?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Nobody could withstand Necessity for long enough to find out. But maybe. We're banking on her being protection for us, being a shield. But if I should be stuck out there, or killed, then I don't really know what would happen to her.”

“Well, that's honest, thank you.” I blinked back tears. “You take it so lightly.”

“I don't know her as you do.”

I tried to put it more clearly. “I didn't mean that. I mean you seem to find everything funny, you keep laughing at things, and yet you say everything feels wrong.”

“That's my nature,” he said.

That didn't explain anything. “Let's get on with it. When are we now, exactly?”

“Five years earlier than when we spoke to Kebes before. The boat's there.” He gestured towards it. “
Goodness
. What a name!”

“What?” I was so used to it as a name that I'd never really considered it before. “It's a great name!”

“Very Platonic,” Hermes agreed, so I didn't understand his previous objection.

“Let's try again,” I said. We walked over to the
Goodness
, which was tied up at the same spot. The same sailor was standing in a slightly different place on the deck, coiling a rope. One of the grey and white sea birds was perched on the rail in almost the same place. “Is Matthias aboard?” I asked. It reminded me of rehearsing a play, but of course the sailor didn't recognize me, and didn't know his lines.

“Nope,” he said. “Went ashore.”

“Do you know where I could find him?”

The sailor looked from my face to my gold pin, and frowned. His pin was silver, I noticed. “Might be in the church,” he said, after a noticeable hesitation.

I thanked him, then Hermes and I turned and walked away, up the steep hill in the blazing sunshine. I led the way towards the agora where I remembered the church standing in my own world. “Churches are a kind of Christian temple, and Kebes is some kind of permanent priest,” I remembered. “It's going to be really hard to talk to him, to be friendly I mean.” I wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When I'd been in Lucia before, the streets had been bustling. Now there was nobody in sight but an old man leading a laden donkey down the hill, and two little girls playing on a doorstep. The sea below was so still that birds were sitting floating on the water.

“You said he believes Athene is a demon. Will he think I am a demon too?” Hermes looked quite pleased at the thought.

“I expect so. The Ikarians say the Olympians are angels, and the Lucian church these days—I mean, in my own time, on Plato, has moved a lot closer to the Ikarians. I've never really paid that much attention—with Pytheas right there and his children being my uncles and aunt, and all of them saying Yayzu isn't anything different, it's hard to take contradictory beliefs seriously. Though the Ikarians claim it doesn't contradict at all.” We came to a beautiful, slightly old-fashioned sculpture of Marissa, which I remembered from when I was in Lucia in my past and its future. I gestured to it. “But why have only one goddess, instead of all of them?”

“It'll probably be best if we don't debate religion with him,” Hermes said.

“Should we tell him who we are?” I asked.

“If we don't, how will he know to give us Athene's message?”

“How will he anyway? She can't have known we'd be the ones to come. I mean she must have known Grandfather couldn't come, because of being in two times at once. So he'd have to send someone, but Athene wouldn't know who. She might have expected it would be Porphyry. He's the only one of my uncles who goes in and out of time.” Or I suppose he could have asked another of the Olympians. Hermes was only helping because he happened to be there, wasn't he? For the first time I wondered why he had come to Plato when he did.

“I wonder why Athene chose a time she knew Apollo couldn't reach? It can't have been accidental. She must have had a reason. I think we should say we come from Athene, to collect what she left with him,” Hermes said. “If he asks who we are, we should simply tell him the truth.”

“But we already know it didn't go well,” I said. “The way he reacted when he saw us.”

“If it's not going to go well, then nothing we can think of will change that,” Hermes said.

We walked on in silence as I pondered the ramifications of that. We soon came into the main part of the city and passed the sleeping house where I had stayed when I had spent my year in Lucia. It looked exactly the same, except that there was a pea vine covered in orange flowers growing up the white-painted wall which was new—or no, of course, old. The vine had probably died of cold before I was born.

“It's really quiet,” I said. “Where do you think everyone is?”

“Napping in the heat of the day,” he said, gesturing towards the latched shutters. “It's a normal thing in Greece. In summer everything gets done in the morning and the evening.”

“That makes sense, because it is really hot,” I admitted. “I'm not sure I've ever been this hot.”

“I might be able to help make you more comfortable.” My red kiton didn't change, but it immediately felt lighter. I wondered if the weight and warmth of my fishing clothes had been in it until then. After a moment, a little breeze sprang up, ruffling the water, now far below us, and evaporating the sweat from my face. Hermes smiled.

We came to the agora. A man and woman were sitting debating something at one of the tables outside the cafe, bending together over some papers. An old woman walked across the plaza carrying a whimpering toddler. Hermes wrinkled his nose at the freestanding wooden crucifix outside the church. I'd seen it before, so I pushed the door open and went inside.

It was cool and dark and smelled of something heavy and sweet. I stood still for a moment while my eyes adjusted. There were high windows with no glass, which had contained lovely stained glass scenes of the life of Yayzu when I'd seen them before. The inside of the church had been lit with electricity then, too, and there had been paintings and statues. Now it was mostly bare. There was a shadowed altar, with a cloth and a gold cross on it, and four rows of benches. I thought for a moment that the sailor was wrong, or that Kebes must have left, because I couldn't see anybody, then I realized that there was someone prostrate on the tiles in front of the altar. It seemed an uncomfortably intimate way to catch somebody unawares. I wished he had been on the boat. He must have heard the door creak as we came in, but he hadn't moved. I looked at Hermes for advice. He spread his hands theatrically. My job, of course.