Necessity (22 page)

“I have brought Workers and plants,” Porphyry said. “I feel this intervention and going out of time to achieve it is entirely justified. Furthermore, it was sanctioned by Zeus. But in general I wish to keep his edicts and not bring things here from other times. Plato should be self-sufficient. That's not to say I won't help if it's absolutely necessary, if there's something we need and can't manage without that I've not thought of. But please don't pester me to fix things all the time.”

“That's almost exactly what Athene said,” Maia pointed out.

Porphyry looked uncomfortable. “At the Last Debate, one of the points Sokrates made was that the City was sustained by her direct power. I don't want people to say that now about me.” He hesitated and looked around the room, catching eyes here and there. “I have some prophetic ability, though I think of it more as an ability to see the patterns in things. We'll meet aliens, and then we'll meet humans from Earth in this time, far in the future of the time we came from. We will trade with them. We need to be ready for that. When the humans find us, I want them to think we colonized this planet the same way they colonized theirs.”

“My children will settle down into this world,” Pytheas said to me afterwards. “One day you'll worship them. They and their children will be your pantheon, appropriate to this place. But for now, let them grow up. Let them be human while they can. They'll be gods long enough.”

Eight years afterwards I thought of this conversation while I was working with Arete, educating a class in preparation for their oath-taking. This was the first class to contain Workers as well as human ephebes, and so I had been invited to help. I was enjoying the stimulation of all the questions they came up with.

“Plato thought of his system for humans, but it works very well for Workers,” Arete said as we watched the class go off debating noisily with each other, making necessary but not unnecessary distinctions between human and Worker.

“Yes. He could imagine humans who grew up in a Just City, but he could not imagine what it would be like for either Workers or gods,” I said. “But we all have souls that yearn for excellence and justice.”

Arete laughed with surprise. “We all do,” she said.

A little while after that, I was talking to Klio on a train ride where we happened to find ourselves together. Klio was another Master, younger than Aristomache and Lamprokleia but older than Maia. She came from the twentieth or twenty-first century, and had been a classical scholar there. We found ourselves talking about religion. Klio was an Ikarian, and she was still in the process of adjusting her ideas after the apotheosis of Ikaros. She was not disturbed by the direct intervention of Zeus in our affairs—she said she had always considered that he and Ikaros's primal God the Father were identical. “You don't need to come to the New Concordance from Christianity,” she insisted.

“I see no need of it,” I said. As the train sped across the black volcanic plains, with the distant mountains sending up sullen plumes or sudden hot blasts of flame, I explained to her how I had come to understand things. “Pytheas's children will one day be our pantheon, he told me so. And Arete agreed that their souls long for justice and excellence. They have grown up in the Republic. When that day comes that they are our pantheon and we worship them, we will have appropriately Platonic gods.”

“I wish Ikaros could hear that,” Klio said.

VI.
On Old Age

One day when I was in the middle of building a new colossus, I mentioned to Maia that Aristomache could not see my work, because her eyesight had deteriorated to the point where she could not see anything big or far away. This made her sad, and it made me sad too, that I could not share my art with her. She had never seen any of it, because I had made none before she left with Kebes, and by the time she came back her eyesight had failed. She could read and see things close up, but she said that the distance was only a colored blur.

“You should make something especially for her,” Maia said. “Something very small, but still characteristically part of your work.”

“That's a wonderful idea,” I said.

I incised an intaglio into a piece of porphyry the size of Maia's thumbnail. An intaglio is like an inside-out carving, you can press it into wax or plaster to make a raised impression.

The picture I made for Aristomache was of her, Pytheas, Simmea, Kebes, and Sokrates, examining an inscription I had carved around the eaves of the Mulberry sleeping house. Although the faces were barely the size of a grain of barley, I have lenses and carving tools fine enough to give them individuality and expressions. So I showed Pytheas's quizzical face, Aristomache with her mouth open in consternation, along with the way Sokrates liked to stand with his legs apart and his head tilted back, the way Kebes copied this, and the swell of Simmea's belly, since she had been pregnant with Neleus at that time.

Much of my work in those early years was historical and autobiographical. It was several years after that before I began to work on my series of Platonic responses, doing philosophy in the form of sculpture, or sculpture in the form of philosophy. Maia and Pytheas especially loved that work, but Aristomache was dead before I began it.

I went to Marissa myself to deliver my little intaglio. Aristomache was truly old by then. She could see it plainly, and it delighted her. We talked about Sokrates, and about the good intentions of the Masters in setting up the Republic, and about education. I had been in Marissa before, helping to make it fit for Plato, supervising young Workers who were not yet self-aware. Aristomache was not well enough that day to walk with me to the train, and later that year I was sent word that she was dead.

Then in the Sixtieth Year of the City, in the consulship of Baukis and Xenocrates, Maia had a stroke which left her half-paralyzed, unable to speak, and drooling. She had collapsed in the little garden outside her house, and nobody tried to move her. It was summer, but before I arrived someone had brought her winter kiton, embroidered with books and copies of Botticelli's flowers, and put it over her where she lay. Pytheas's son Phaedrus came, as he always did in cases where human doctors could do nothing. He took Maia's hand, and shook his head. “She's in there, but there's no healing this,” he said. Neleus was there too, bending over her, wearing Ficino's old red hat.

She grunted, harsh animal sounds, “Uhrr, utt, ay.”

I understood her, and went off to find Arete, in case she was calling for her and not merely restating a Platonic principle. Either would have been very characteristic for Maia.

Arete was in Thessaly. She flew off as soon as she heard, and Pytheas rode along in the webbing on my back. When we got back to Maia's house, Arete was engaged in a conversation where Maia uttered one painful-seeming syllable and Arete filled in the rest. She and Neleus were crouched at Maia's side, both in tears, though Maia was not.

“You were consul three times,” Arete said.

“What more could any classicist want?” Pytheas asked, dropping down and taking her free hand. “You have done good work in this life, and your soul will be certainly reborn as a philosopher.”

Maia's face distorted into a horrible grimace, and after a moment I realized that she was trying to smile. “Hhhh—” she said.

“Yes, Neleus will mix you the hemlock,” Arete said. Pytheas had insisted that I bring it from Thessaly. I gave the bundle of leaves to Neleus, and he took it. He stepped inside the house, and I could watch through the doorway as he crushed it fiercely into a cup and then poured in wine recklessly, as if he couldn't see what he was doing. He came back out, and Arete took the cup from his trembling hand and held it to Maia's lips. Then Pytheas stroked her throat, helping her to swallow. When Arete took the cup away, Maia grunted.

“No, I can't promise we won't mourn for you. Yes, we'll remember you, and so will all your pupils. Your legacy will live on,” Arete said.

“Joy to you, Maia,” I said. “I'm not done talking with you, but go on to a good life.”

There are no messages to give the dying to carry to the dead, or comfort or wisdom to take into new lives, for all souls must forget as they go through Lethe. I wished I could weep, in case the process gave some relief.

“Chh—” she said.

“She wishes you joy too, Crocus, and many years of making art and helping to lead the City and fruitful philosophy, and at last many joyful rebirths.”

She grunted again, and Arete laughed through her tears. “She says she's always thought it'll be so funny for her relatives to see her disappear as a young woman and reappear a second later as she is now. She says coming to the City has meant she's had a better life than she could ever have imagined.”

“Ah—” Maia said, and now even I understood her. Sokrates, dying in Athens, had asked Krito to offer a cock to Asklepius for his recovery from life. In the City, it was what almost everyone said when they felt themselves dying. Then she disappeared at the moment of death, as all the Masters and Children did, her body drawn back by Athene's power to the moment she had left to come to the City, leaving her cloak empty behind her.

We voted unanimously to name a mountain after her, which is the highest honor we give in the Republic. Maia left a great legacy and is remembered honorably by everyone. I still miss her.

The purpose of death I understand, though I worry about it in my own case. But I do not understand why the process has to be so indecorous and uncomfortable for humans.

 

14

APOLLO

All the time since I had read Athene's letter the question of where she might have put Sokrates had been tickling the back of my mind. It had to be somewhere I wouldn't guess, by definition, or I wouldn't need Pico to tell me where to find him. But he only spoke Greek, so it had to be somewhere Greek-speaking, and somewhere either obscure enough that nothing he did would be remembered, or somewhere so full of philosophers he wouldn't stand out. The second option seemed more like Athene. Pythagorean Kroton or Roman Alexandria were the likeliest choices, but of course she'd know I'd know that.

Athene was risking literally everything to gain knowledge of Chaos. That was bad enough. But the other reason her message had made me so incandescently furious was the way she used the threat to Sokrates to force me to rescue Pico. She could have trusted me. I'd have rescued Pico anyway. I hated being used and blackmailed, and even more I hated being blackmailed into doing what I would have done anyway because it was the right thing to do, and what I wanted to do. Even now I had calmed down, I was so furious with her that I considered writing a satire about all the most embarrassing things she had ever done, like the time she got into a snit about Paris not choosing her as the most beautiful, or the time she turned Arachne into a spider when she lost a weaving contest, or when she threw away the syrinx after inventing it because puffing out her cheeks made her look ridiculous.

I followed Pico to his cell, a small brick room which contained a low bed, a devotional painting of St. Benedict retreiving a rake from a pond (some ages have a really low bar for miracles), and a small chest, which, since it was Pico's, contained nothing but books. There he retrieved the paper Athene had given him from where it was neatly folded inside his copy of the
Republic
. He drew it out reverently and handed it to me. I opened it, glanced at it, and then at him. “Can you read this?”

“No. It's encoded to keep Athene's message safe,” he said.

Well, fortunately Arete has the ability to understand anything, because this meant nothing to me. “Let's get Sokrates and then collect the other piece.” I looked at him expectantly.

He shut his eyes and recited. “45 degrees, 45′ 45 North, 50 degrees 50′ 50 West, 15.10, 15th October, 151,151,151
ante urbe condita.
”

I was genuinely startled. “What? Where's that? Somewhere in the Jurassic? In the middle of the Atlantic—no, that's long enough ago that the continents aren't even in the same places! What's there?”

“A jungle, she told me. She didn't take me with her. I was in time for the Last Debate.”

“So was I—but you mean she didn't change him back? He's still a gadfly?”

“I think so. She gave me an extremely precise time and place.”

“She'd have to, for a fly! Why didn't she change him back?” I was aghast.

“I think she didn't want to face him. There aren't many people who can make Athene feel ashamed.”

“Has spending more time with her stopped you thinking she's perfect?” I asked.

Pico smiled. “No. She's perfect. But I do understand her better. She's the perfect Athene, and that includes a certain amount of pride and vanity and temper.”

“But surely—you know I'm not perfect!”

“But you are,” he said, picking out the books and piling them on the bed. “You are the perfect Apollo. You're the light. And both of you grow and change and become more excellent, while remaining perfect as you are. Perfection isn't static. It's a dynamic form.”

“Is this your new theory?” I asked warily.

“That part was in the New Concordance,” he said, smiling reminiscently. “Klio and I came up with it long ago.”

“So you think Athene is perfect in her imperfections? Including turning Sokrates into a fly and dropping him off in some swamp millions of years ago? Why didn't she simply take him to Athens where he could have bitten some of his friends?” He had bitten me, after his transformation, and then flown away. She must have caught him as soon as he was out of sight, and taken him to this location.

“I don't know. I told her you'd take me with you anyway, but she wanted to be sure.” He looked guiltily down at the books. Then he picked them up and tucked them under his arm. “Let's go.”