Necessity (2 page)

“For Father,” I said. I was puzzled. I wondered why Father had sent this message. He must have known that I wouldn't neglect Plato. I didn't understand why there was any urgency about it. But I'd do it, of course. Nobody understood how Father knew anything, or how he prioritizes. Nor, for that matter, did we have any idea how he experiences time. He was there before it, after all. Mortals find it difficult to understand how we understand time, living outside it, but that's simple, compared to how it is for Father.

We're bound by our own actions, and, naturally, whether we're in or out of time, by Fate and Necessity. There's no getting around them. They make changing time extremely hard, and harder when we get away from our core concerns. And we're limited by Father's edicts, but only in so far as we respect them. They don't have the same inevitable force. If I got caught up with Fate or Necessity it wouldn't really be a matter of choice—resisting a force like that is almost impossible, even for me. But I could simply ignore Father's message if I wanted to. It was usually a terrible idea to ignore such things, because Father does know more than the rest of us and generally means well, and also because he could have made my life a misery if I went against him. There was this one time at Troy—but that's a different story. But it's not like being caught up with Necessity, which is a compulsion on the soul.

“What's this I hear about you playing my gift upside-down to beat somebody playing Athene's syrinx?” Hermes asked.

Hermes had invented the lyre when he was three days old, as a way to win my friendship after stealing some of my cows. He'd given it to me. He'd also promised never again to steal anything else of mine, a promise I didn't quite trust him to keep. He was much too fond of playing tricks.

“Yes, I played the lyre upside-down,” I acknowledged. “Won the contest that way, too.” The whole messy business seemed long ago and almost unimportant. I do enjoy being an Olympian and having a proper perspective.

“It sounds like something I'd do.”

“Feel free to teach yourself to play it that way,” I said, and grinned at him.

“Well, joy to you with all of it,” wing-footed Hermes said, smiling as he departed.

So, with no foresight or warnings, and with one last longing look at the glowing disk (which would after all still be there and about to form into a sun whenever I wanted to come back into time at this moment to watch), I left too.

I was going to Plato, of course I was. I accepted Father's message that playtime was over, whether I liked it or not. But I wasn't quite ready. Another little while—another long subjective time—watching suns would have been exactly what I needed, but I wasn't going to disobey Father to that extent. I didn't want to mess up whatever mysterious plan he had, which presumably needed me to be still a little off balance. But I did have something to do first, something that would hardly take any personal time and couldn't possibly make any difference, and which would make a good transition. I had a date with Athene.

The date in question was 1564, the day in the spring of that year when the orange tree in the courtyard of the Medici Laurentian Library bloomed. Athene had arranged it herself, the last time I had seen her, on Olympos, at the time of the Relocation, when Zeus moved the Cities from Bronze Age Greece to Plato. It had been a peace offering, after everything that had happened. “When you get back,” she had said. This would mark me being back. We could meet on neutral territory, in an extraordinary year, and after we'd talked I might feel better equipped for taking care of Plato. I wanted to see her. There were several things I wanted her to explain, and other things I wanted to explain to her. Parts of it I knew she'd never understand, but other parts of it she was the only person who ever could understand.

I hadn't talked to her in decades, and while decades might often pass without our talking, these years had been full of things I wanted to share with her. Her experiment in setting up Plato's Republic had had unexpected results, and had produced something genuinely new and of interest to both of us. The culture on Plato wasn't the ideal Republic Plato had described. As I'd said to Maia long ago, we all live on somebody's dunghill. But it was a completely different kind of human culture, one steeped in Platonism and philosophy and the dream of the classical world. And it was out there in the twenty-sixth century, vibrating with philosophical passion and full of people at least trying to lead the Good Life. I wanted to know what she thought about that, and share my thoughts. Creating Plato's Republic had been Athene's idea, after all, and lately I'd been wondering if there had been more to it than simply to see what happened and have somewhere to take Ikaros. Pico. I wanted to see him again too. I wanted to see his face when I told him what the Ikarians had made of his New Concordance since his apotheosis.

So I left that distant forming sun and stepped into time in Florence, in 1564, on the steps in front of the unfinished façade of the church of San Lorenzo. They were still waiting for Michelangelo to come and finish it, though he'd been dead for several months already. I remembered the inside of the church as a perfect Neoclassical space, but the outside now was rough and unfinished, jagged raw stone waiting for a facing it wouldn't get for another eight hundred years. The Florentines, having so much of it, weren't prepared to compromise on beauty. They'd wait for another Florentine artist of comparable skill to be born and finish it. An admirable perspective, if rare. I stepped inside for a moment to admire it—strangely, moving into the space always felt like going outside. The streets around San Lorenzo are narrow and crowded. Inside was full of light. The proportions were perfect, the pillars, the windows, the porphyry memorial set in the floor to celebrate the soul of Cosimo de Medici. I spared a fond thought for it, wherever it was, no doubt busily engaged in its new concerns. I felt perfectly at home in there. You'd hardly have known it was a Christian church.

I stepped back out of the church and walked around to the courtyard that led to the library. I didn't need to interact with anyone so I hadn't bothered to take a plausible disguise or find an excuse for visiting the library. I simply let the light flow around me and so became invisible. There were a few monks in the cloister. I sat down on the wall by the foot of the stairs that went up to Michelangelo's intimidating entranceway—one of the projects he had managed to finish. The sun was coming down into the courtyard, my own familiar golden sunlight. The scent of blossom from the tree was heady. Here too the pillars and proportions were perfectly right. But although the library was open, there was no sign of Athene. I sat there for a while enjoying the sunlight and the scent and thinking. It was quiet in the cloister, with distant muted street sounds, and close by only the humming of bees and the occasional swish of a monk's robe to disturb me. I didn't disturb them at all. If anything, I'd have looked like a brighter patch of sunlight.

After an hour of waiting, I stepped outside time, and checked the courtyard at other times throughout the day. When I still couldn't find Athene I tried the day before, in case, but the orange blossom wasn't quite out, and she wasn't there anyway.

I went up to the library—directly, stepping into that wonderful room from outside time, to avoid the effect of Michelangelo's deliberately daunting staircase. I looked around. I was accustomed now to the library in the City, with its controlled temperature, electric lights, and all the books of the ancient world rescued from the Library of Alexandria in multiple neatly printed copies. But this was more moving—the high windows giving light to work, the patterned tiles on the floor, the wooden benches with the books chained to them and scholars sitting reading and working. The books themselves were mostly hand-copied texts, preserved through time, saved from the ruins, written out painstakingly. They lost Homer for a time, but they got him back. Ficino had worked here. They had the oldest and most complete copy of the
Aeneid
. These books were here because people had cared about them, individually, cared enough to copy them and pass them forward across centuries and civilizations, hand stretching out to human hand through time, with no surety that any future hand would be waiting to receive the offering. All the texts from antiquity that had survived the time between were in this room. But Athene wasn't.

It was inexplicable. I had the day right, but she wasn't here. She couldn't have forgotten! Perhaps I had. It had been forty years for me, and perhaps I had confused the year. If so, there was no use guessing. I'd have to go and find her, in her own library, or wherever she was. I patted the sloping wood of the nearest bench, putting a little of my power into it so that those who worked there would see more clearly. It was such a beautiful room, about as close to perfect as any mortal thing can be. I stepped out of time.

Once outside time, I felt for Athene. It's difficult to describe. Usually when I do it, I get a sensation like an itch that leads me towards whoever I'm looking for, like a compass, if one were the needle. This time, I got nothing at all.

Of course, the first thing I thought was that this was a power I hadn't tested since I had taken up my godhood again, and that I'd lost the ability, or forgotten how to do it. It was distressing. No, that's not strong enough. Even in my proper self, it felt horrible to think that I might have damaged myself, made myself limited, permanently lost parts of my abilities. I stepped back into time and sat in the courtyard until my sun warmed away the chill that thought brought. I wanted to change, but I wanted to grow more excellent, always: better, not worse. Experiencing the physical decay that went with old age had been bad enough. But with those losses I could tell myself not only that it was temporary, but that I was understanding humanity better by learning about what they went through. There would be no advantage to this.

I stepped out of time again and felt for Athene once more. Still nothing. I tried Artemis. To my intense relief, I sensed her immediately. She was on the moon, at a time when people lived there and had built temples to her. I tried Athene again, and again felt nothing. Aphrodite was on Olympos. Hera was in classical Argos. Dionysos was in Hellenistic Baktria. Hephaistos was in his forge. Hades was in the Underworld. Hermes was in the marketplace in Alexandria. But no matter how many times I tried, Athene was nowhere to be found.

Strange as it was that I couldn't locate her, it was stranger still that she hadn't shown up when she was supposed to meet me. That wasn't like her at all. I was worried. I couldn't imagine what could have happened to prevent her. Fate and Necessity might tangle us up, but we're still there. I reached for her again. Where could she possibly be? She didn't seem to be anywhere in or out of time. Could she be dead? How? It didn't bear thinking of.

 

2

JASON

I'm only a Silver, so don't expect too much. My name is Jason, of the Hall of Samos and the Tribe of Hermes. I was born in the Year Forty-two of the City, eleven years after the Relocation. I work on a fishing boat. I haven't written anything long since I qualified as a citizen thirteen years ago. These two days I'm going to tell you about changed my life completely. Since Fate caught me up in great events, I'll do my best to set things down clearly, in case it can do anyone good to read about what happened and what we all said and did.

Amphitrite had been kind, and we'd had a good haul that day, lots of ribbers and a few red gloaters, big ones. They were all heading north with the winter currents, so we simply had to stay in place and use the fine nets to scoop them out. We joked about sticking our hands into the water and pulling out a fish, the kind of day that redeems all the other days where we came home with thin hauls or none. Plato's a hard planet for humans, and we depend on the catch to have enough protein.

It was chilly and grey out on the ocean, spitting with rain. As we headed homewards around Dawn Point the east wind caught us. I fastened my jerkin up to my throat. The other boats coming in made positive signals. Everyone seemed to have had a good day. It was the kind of thing to cheer your liver. We passed a flatboat gathering suface kelp, which the Saeli like to eat, and even they signalled that they had a good haul.

Our boat was called
Phaenarete
after a girl Dion had known who was killed in the Battle of Lucia. Dion had been the first one to sail her, so he'd had the choice of naming her. He had taught me everything I knew about handling boats, and fishing too, and a lot about how to live. We were as close as father and son, and closer than many such because we'd chosen each other. Dion was too old to go out regularly now, and Leonidas and Aelia were dead, so I was in charge of
Phaenarete
, and I had a crew of lunatics. Well, that's not a kind way to put it, but that's how I thought of them.

Now, fishing is essential, everyone knows that, and it's also reasonably dangerous—even if you know what you're doing you can get caught out by a squall or an underwater eruption—or the usual kind of eruption, come to that. That's what happened to Aelia and Leonidas five years back. Their luck ran out.

It's not really all that dangerous. Most days most of us come back. And we need the catch, we rely on it. There are no land animals on Plato, only what we brought with us, and the sheep and goats don't thrive here the way they did in Greece, where they could graze on plants growing wild everywhere. Dion remembers Greece and talks about it sometimes, but it sounds strange to me, the idea of plants sprawling all over, plants nobody planted and nobody tends to. There's none of that on Plato. Our plants take a lot of attention. We have to nurse them along. Keeping them alive is hard work for a lot of people, human and Workers. And we like eating them! But we want protein too, so we encourage the sheep and goats to give lots of milk and we don't often eat them, only at special festivals. And so fish are very important, and fishing is important, and worth the risk.