Necessity (32 page)

“Out on the
Excellence
, getting it ready for a trip to Amazonia,” Dad said.

Arete stood up. “Where are you going?” Alkippe asked.

“I'm going home to sleep now,” Arete said.

“Are you going to fly?” Alkippe asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said, smiling down at Alkippe. “I'll be back this evening. I'll see you in Thessaly after dinner.”

“Thank you for all your help with English,” Slif said.

Arete went off towards the kitchen, carrying her dishes.

“Is the space human language difficult?” I asked Slif.

“No, English is much like Greek in structure, but with odd tenses and conditionals and a very large vocabulary,” Slif replied. “It shows signs of being a creole originally, a merger of two or more different languages from the same family. Such often keep the vocabulary of both parent languages with different shades of meaning. Also, it has borrowed a great deal of technical vocabulary from Latin and Greek. The spelling is bizarre. It's fascinating. But it's not elegant.”

“It sounds like a kind of clicky buzz to me,” Akamas said. “I can see that it has borrowed some words from Greek, but I think they'd have done better to borrow the entire language and be clear. Or why didn't they stick to Latin? English comes from Britannia, originally, apparently, and they spoke Latin there in Tacitus's day. I don't understand this desire people seem to have to be constantly changing things.”

They had both finished eating, so they bade us joy and left. They were going to catch up on sleep, and I envied them the opportunity.

“Where's Pytheas?” Alkippe asked as soon as they had gone.

“We don't know. He and Jathery went off together. They'll be back tonight,” I said, praying that they would, that Jathery would go back and conceive her, that the world would be safe for her to grow up. “Now eat your porridge, don't play with it.” I'm not Thetis. I don't cry easily. But this conversation kept bringing a lump to my throat.

“Who's Jathery?” Alkippe asked.

“He's the one we thought was Hermes,” I said.

Dad looked at me sideways. “That wasn't Hermes?”

“No, as it turns out that was Jathery, a Saeli trickster god,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. A night's sleep had done me good, but it was still an uncomfortable thought, and I didn't want Dad to worry about it. Klymene put her old hand on mine. I looked at her, and she smiled consolingly. I don't know how she knew there was anything wrong.

“I thought he wasn't like the way I thought Hermes would be,” Alkippe said, triumphantly.

“Well, that was extremely clever of you,” I said. I hadn't guessed at all.

“Where's Thetis?” Dad asked, clearly looking for a way to change the subject. “I was expecting her to come in with you.”

“
Finally
,” Alkippe said, bouncing on the bench. “She said
if
you asked to tell you that she'd gone down to the harbor to see Hilfa and collect the books for Ikaros before she goes to the nursery, and she'd see us all here at dinner like always.”

“Right,” Dad said, suddenly paying a lot of attention to scraping his bowl.

“Last night, Auntie Thee was with Jason and Her- and Jathery. I thought Jason was your friend?” Alkippe asked me.

“I work with Jason and Hilfa, but that's no reason he can't be Thetis's friend too. They did their shake-up year and took their oaths together when they were ephebes,” I said. And even if Thetis didn't exist, Jason would never have looked at me. I knew that. There was no sense in the way I kept wanting people who couldn't see me that way. Plato was right as usual: keep sex for the Festival of Hera and stick to friendship the rest of the time. “People have lots of friends, not only one.”

“I have lots of friends,” Alkippe said. “But I like Camilla best.”

“That's because she goes to a different palaestra so you don't see her every day so she feels special,” Dad said.

The other children in the hall were all leaving, or getting ready to leave. “Eat up, you don't want to be late,” I said. Alkippe took three huge bites of porridge, eating as much as she had in the rest of the meal put together. She leapt to her feet. “Are you sure you've had enough?”

“I'll take a pear,” she said, and stuffed one inside her kiton before running off to spend the rest of her day with the other children, learning all the things Plato prescribes for excellence, the things I had recommended to Phila. I took the last pear myself and cleared the dishes. Then Dad and Klymene and I went to Chamber.

I love the way Chamber looks, black and white stripes. It was almost glowing in the morning sunlight.

Diotima was in the chair. I took my place on the bench at the front, next to Aroo and Dad. We wished Aroo joy, and she wished us the same. The room felt quieter than normal, the usual buzzing as people settled in and greeted each other was more muted.

There's a lot of honor involved in being consul, not merely the Roman tradition of the thing, and naming the years, but the fact that it's a planetwide office and directly elected. But what it really amounts to is a lot of chairing meetings. Diotima and I took it in turns to chair meetings of the Council of Worlds, and we were judged on our ability to do that. She was impeccably turned out in a neatly embroidered kiton. Like everyone I'd ever met from Athenia, she was very properly Platonic and utterly unprepared to compromise. But she certainly knew how to run a meeting smoothly.

We began with a report from Klymene, where she explained at more length what I'd heard at breakfast. Aroo followed with a short report.

Diotima recognized Androkles next. He bounded down to the front to face us all. “I call to schedule a debate with the gods, on why we need to lie to the space humans about our origins and our experience of divinity. I don't want to have this argument here and now, I want to call the gods here to make their case.”

“Our gods, or all the gods?” Hermia asked. There was a laugh.

“Well, our gods might come,” Androkles said. “Though Pytheas too, if he wants to; I heard he was back here last night, and that people saw Hermes in Thessaly. I'd welcome any gods who want to come and explain themselves in Chamber. Look, Athene started all this seventy years ago, an experiment, a whim as Sokrates said at the Last Debate. We're here because of the gods. Zeus moved us to Plato directly. I'm quite prepared to believe there are good arguments for keeping quiet about this to the space humans. In fact, I think there probably are, and I can think of some of them for myself. I've been thinking about this all night. I think this Chamber deserves to hear the arguments and decide for ourselves. I think we'll decide responsibly. I'm only opposed to accepting the word of the gods as—well, as divine writ, without any examination. That's not the spirit in which any of our cities were founded.”

“What if Athene came?” Diotima asked.

“Athene most of all,” Androkles said. “There's nothing we want more in Sokratea than for Athene to show up and finish arguing the Last Debate.”

But he was wrong. His mouth fell open, and everyone turned to see what there was behind us that he could be staring at. Crocus had come late to the meeting. And riding on his back, beaming at everyone, was Sokrates.

An hour later, after the meeting, Sokrates and I walked over to Thessaly to see Ikaros. I hadn't yet learned that when you do anything with Sokrates you have to budget twice as much time as you expect it to take. He kept stopping and reading bits of inscribed debate on paving stones. “Weren't you there for all that?” I asked.

“There are new bits,” he said. “I mean look at all this about classification. That must have been after the Last Debate. I wonder who they were talking to—Patroklus, maybe? Glaukon? It's interesting that the Workers approve of classes, here anyway. Hmm. That's not what I'd have said.”

“You mean we've been having debates and you missed it?” I teased.

He grinned up at me. “I've skipped over so much! Well, it was two thousand years the first time. This time, only sixty. And then we'll all be catching up with the next thousand years or so once the space humans get down here.” He rubbed his hands together eagerly.

“You like it?” I asked.

“I hate missing it, but I love catching up. Think how many new arguments they'll have come up with, how many new thoughts in a thousand years! I can hardly wait. Ikaros will try to synthesize them all into one system, but I want to hear what they are and point out all the holes.”

As we got nearer Thessaly, he speeded up a little, then stopped entirely. “Somebody came back and filled it all in,” he said. “What I said, what Simmea said. It reads like a proper dialogue.”

“Hasn't it always been like that?” It had been like that as long as I could remember.

“No, the only thing written down was what Crocus said, and the other Workers. We humans spoke out loud. Though whoever did it remembers what we said accurately, not like Plato who was making most of it up even when he wasn't making up the whole thing.” He tutted.

My uncle Porphyry opened the door of Thessaly. Porphyry lived in the City of Amazons so I didn't see him very often. He was the most mysterious and divine of my uncles, and at the same time the most playful and childlike. When I was a child he had been my favorite uncle. He lived with his mother, and had no children of his own, but he loved to play with his nieces and nephews, and now with the new generation. At family gatherings he was often romping outside with the children, or telling stories to groups of them. As I'd grown up I'd grown shy of him, knowing how powerful he was, and sometimes seeing him do strange things that made me uneasy. In the last few years, seeing Alkippe's delight in him had rekindled my old memories.

He stepped forward and took Sokrates's hands. “Joy to you. I'm Porphyry.”

“Pytheas's son by Euridike, and you live in the City of Amazons and Ikaros was your teacher,” Sokrates said. I had no idea how he could know all that. “And you're a god and you fetched the new Workers.” Which told me that of course Crocus must have told him.

“That's right.” Porphyry let go of Sokrates's hands and nodded to me. “Good to see you again, Marsi.” Nobody had called me by that short name since I was a child, so it made me feel happy and young to hear it from Porphyry now.

“What happened to the tree?” Sokrates asked accusingly as soon as we'd followed Porphyry through the house and into the garden, where Ikaros was sitting by the herm. It was the kind of day when you wanted to sit outside, knowing winter was close and there wouldn't be many more days when you could.

“Couldn't take the winters,” Porphyry said. “It gets cold here. If it wasn't for the vulcanism we wouldn't be able to have vines and olive trees. Citrus can survive, but it takes a lot of looking after. We grow a lot more stone fruit, and apples and pears.”

I sat down in the grass. “We've voted to schedule a debate tomorrow morning in which the gods come to Chamber to explain the reasoning behind the plan for lying to the space humans,” I said. “Will you come, Porphyry? Dad says it was your plan originally.”

Porphyry did the creepy thing he does where he moves his fingers and his eyes go out of focus. I don't know why it should be so creepy, because that's really all it is. Anyone else could twiddle their fingers and stare vacantly at them and it wouldn't bother me at all, but when Porphyry does it I always shiver. I did now, and I noticed Ikaros looking at me. Sokrates was staring at Porphyry's fingers. “Yes, I'll be there,” Porphyry said. He sat down beside Ikaros, and Sokrates sat down too, crossing his legs comfortably like a much younger man.

“Will you come too, Ikaros?” I asked.

He looked startled. “I'm not sure I'm qualified.”

I sighed and looked him in the eye. “You're a Master, and therefore a member of Chamber and qualified to attend. There aren't any other Masters still alive, but we didn't feel it necessary to change the rules. And whether or not you're a god is a matter of definition—and one that doesn't matter because a substantial minority of our population worships you as one.”

“I saw the temple,” Ikaros said. He shook his head.

“What did you expect when you found a religion and then get bodily taken up into heaven in front of half the city?” Porphyry asked, teasingly.

“I'm surprised it became so popular,” Sokrates said. “I'd have thought it was too complicated.”

“I worked on it a lot more after the Last Debate, with Klio and other people. We had a great festival in the City of Amazons where everyone came and tried to refute my logic. You'd have loved it. It's what I originally wanted to do in Rome. It was wonderful. But I've been working on the theory again since I've been with Athene and I've changed some things now I know more.” Ikaros stopped. “I suppose I should tell them.”

“What, walk in with a New Testament?” Porphyry asked.

“I'm not sure how the Ikarians would take that,” I said.

“They weren't ever supposed to be Ikarians, or add me to the pantheon,” he said. “Things do get complicated.”

“Are you a god, then?” Sokrates asked.

“What is a god?” Ikaros threw back instantly. They both sat up and leaned forward eagerly. Sokrates looked like, well, a philosopher. Ikaros was, frankly, gorgeous, more gorgeous than even Jathery pretending to be Hermes, because he was more mature. But there was no question he was a philosopher too, with that avidity in his face, twin to Sokrates's own.

“None of my old definitions will work, unless we allow that you and Porphyry and Athene are some other kind of being, and that there are unchanging unseeking perfect gods that are different,” Sokrates said.

“The One,” Ikaros said. “And I used the word angels in the New Concordance, for those other kinds of being. But perfection is a dynamic attribute.”