The Just City (23 page)

Sokrates unveiled his plan, in which the three of us were to do nothing but go around talking to every worker we saw, in Latin, while he did the same in Greek. “Do any of you know any other languages?”

“A little Coptic, if I still remember any,” I said.

“Italian,” Kebes said. “It's like simple Latin without the word endings.”

Pytheas spread his hands. “I was born in the hills above Delphi. How would I have encountered anything but Greek?”

“How indeed?” Sokrates muttered. “I believe I can recruit Aristomache into this project,” he said. “She speaks two other languages of Europe. I forget their names now, but she told me so. With all those languages it may be easier to get them to answer.”

“Or they may not,” I said. “And we're going to look awfully silly trying to have dialogue with workers.”

“As cracked as me,” Sokrates agreed cheerfully. “Report any results, positive or negative. But results might be slow—like the bulbs.”

“If they can speak, why don't they?” Kebes asked.

“I don't think they can speak. This is just a theory, but I suspect they can hear and move and think without being able to speak. They have no organs of speech, no mouths, no heads. But they have things like hands, and they may be able to write. That one found a way.”

“They have nothing like ears either, how do you know they can hear?” I asked.

“I conjecture that they have the ability to hear because the response to my questions suggests that it heard them. I conjecture they have understanding for the same reason.” Sokrates shook his head. “I think it would be wrong to consider them people, but we don't have a term for anything like them. Thinking beings that aren't human! How wonderful if they are able to reason and communicate!”

“Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?” Kebes put in.

“In their livers, obviously,” Sokrates said. “What makes you think minds are in the head?”

“Closest to the eyes,” Kebes said.

“And people with head injuries are often damaged in their minds, while people with liver injuries continue to think perfectly well,” Pytheas added.

“Huh.” Sokrates touched his head. “But they have no heads, and you've all been assuming that the head is the seat of intelligence and therefore that's why you're all so reluctant to consider that they might be intelligent. Well, now. Perhaps you're right, and perhaps I am. They might help sort it out.”

“They're made of metal and glass,” Pytheas said.

“So?” Sokrates looked puzzled.

Pytheas shook his head, defeated.

“The next problem is that there's no way to tell them apart! Have you ever found one?”

I shook my head. “They sometimes have different hands. But I don't know if they change them or if it's always the same hands on the same ones. And of course some are bronze-colored and some are iron-colored.”

Pytheas nodded. “What Simmea said. I've never tried to distinguish them.” Whatever it was Sokrates had imagined he knew about them clearly didn't amount to much.

Kebes smiled. “Actually, they are easy to tell apart. They're numbered. Lysias showed me once, when I was helping him.” When he was going through his period of making Lysias think that Kebes would begin to strive for excellence through his encouragement, I thought. “The numbers are very small, down on their side, above the tread. They're long. But they're all different. So we can tell them apart, by checking the numbers.”

“Are they numbered in Latin or Greek?” Sokrates asked, leaning forward, urgently interested.

“Neither,” Kebes said. “They're numbered in numbers.”

Sokrates looked blank.

“You know, zeroic. Like page numbers in books,” I said. I pulled a book out of the fold of my kiton and showed him. It happened to a bound copy of Aeschylus's
Telemachus
.

“Those are numbers?” he asked. “How do they work?”

I wrote them down in the dust, from one to ten, and showed him. “That's all there is to it. For twenty, or for a hundred—”

He understood it at once. “And you have all known this all this time and never mentioned it to me?” he said.

“It never occurred to me that you didn't know,” I said.

“Pah. My ignorance is vast and profound. I like to know at least what I do not know.” He traced the numbers again. “Zero. What a concept. What a timesaver. What vast realms of arithmetic and geometry it must reveal. I wish Pythagoras could have known it, and the Pythagoreans of Athens.” Then, like a hound who had started after the wrong hare, he got immediately back on track. “So the workers are labelled with this?”

“That's right,” Kebes said. “All of them.”

“Who did this?”

“I don't know.”

“What is the purpose?”

“Telling them apart. That's how Lysias uses it, anyway.”

“Did you note the number of the one planting bulbs?”

“Sorry, no, it didn't occur to me.”

Sokrates sighed, sat back and absently ate a handful of olives.

“So the numbers are like names?” I suggested. “That seems to argue against them being people. Why not give them names?”

“Maybe there are too many to name?” Pytheas suggested.

“How many of them are there?” Sokrates asked, licking olive oil off his fingers.

We all shrugged. “Lots,” Kebes said. “I was surprised how many when I saw them at their feeding station.”

“They eat?” Sokrates asked.

“They eat electricity, Lysias said.”

Sokrates bounced to his feet. “Come on, show me this feeding station!”

I swallowed an olive hastily. We set off, with Kebes leading the way and Sokrates close behind.

Pytheas walked beside me. “This is crazy,” he said.

“Sure. Kind of fun, though. And what if they actually were thinking beings with plans?”

“They're not. They're tools. Everyone knows that.” Pytheas looked a little unsettled.

“What everyone knows, Sokrates examines,” I said.

Kebes led us to a block on the east side of the city, between the streets of Poseidon and Hermes, not far from the temple of Ares. The whole block was one square building, relatively unexciting. I'd never particularly noticed it. There was a lot in the city that was empty, awaiting a later purpose, or used by the masters for unknown purposes. I wasn't especially curious about most of it. This building had decorative recessed squares set all around it at ground level. There were no windows. A key-pattern frieze ran around the top. There was another key pattern over the door.

“What now?” Sokrates asked.

“Now we wait for a worker, because Lysias has a key but I don't. But you'll see when a worker comes.” Kebes leaned back on his heels. I squatted down and ate more raisins. Pytheas and Sokrates began to debate volition, and whether workers could be considered to have it.

“Ah, here we go,” Kebes said, when the sun was beginning to slide towards dinner time.

A bronze-colored worker came down the street. “Joy to you,” Sokrates said. “I am Sokrates. Do you have a name?” It ignored him utterly and approached the building, not by the door but directly at one of the recessed squares. The square slid open in front of it and it vanished inside.

“Did you see that?” Sokrates asked.

“That's what they do,” Kebes said. “Inside there are sockets and they plug themselves in to eat electricity. When they're full, which takes several hours, they unplug themselves and come out again.”

“I'd never noticed this was here,” I said.

“Nobody much comes down this street,” Kebes said. “There's nothing here, and if you were at the corner you'd cut diagonally down the street of Apollo.”

“You've been inside?” Sokrates asked.

“Yes, with Lysias.”

“We could follow a worker inside,” Sokrates suggested.

“We'd be stuck there until one wanted to come out. We can't open the doors without a key. It would be better to talk to them when they come out—they won't be hungry then, and if they can talk they'll be more likely to respond.”

“I want to see inside,” Sokrates said.

“All right. But we could get stuck there all night. Or you could ask Lysias or Klio. They have keys. I'm sure they'd let you in.”

“If Lysias and Klio take care of them, that suggests that they come from their time. When is that?” Sokrates was bending down and poking at the square where the worker had disappeared. Nothing he did could move it. I touched it myself. It felt like solid stone.

“The boring part of history,” I said. “The bit where nothing happened except people inventing things, Axiothea said.”

“The part they don't want us to know about! Excellent.” Sokrates kept on poking. Then a different square slid open and a worker emerged. “Joy to you! Do you like your work?” It ignored us. The panel started to slide shut, and fast as an eel, Sokrates darted through it.

The three of us stared at each other and then at the smooth closed panel. “He needs a keeper sometimes,” Pytheas said.

“Should we get Lysias?” Kebes asked.

“How much trouble can he get into inside?” I asked.

“Not much, I don't think. He knows about electricity—I mean, he has a light in Thessaly. He's not likely to stick his fingers into sockets. At least, I hope not. He can't get into much trouble going up to the workers as they're feeding and asking them if they like their work.” Kebes looked worried.

“I think we have two choices: wait for a worker to go in or out and follow it in ourselves, or fetch Lysias or Klio and ask them to let us in,” I said. “We can't just leave Sokrates in there.”

“I think you should go and find one of them,” Pytheas said, to me. He tapped on the stone. Nothing happened.

“It might be hours before another one comes,” Kebes said.

“It's almost dinner time. Klio will be at Sparta, and Lysias will be at Constantinople. I'll go to him, you go to her,” Pytheas said, looking at me. Then he looked at Kebes. “You've been in there before. You wait here, and if you get the chance, go in.”

Kebes hesitated, as if he wanted to dispute this, but it made such clear and obvious sense that after a moment he nodded.

“Back soon!” I said, and set off running towards the Spartan hall.

“Sokrates is doing what with the workers?” Klio asked, when I found her and panted out my story.

“Trying to initiate dialectic with them,” I said. “But Kebes said he might stick his fingers in a wall socket, and I'm not absolutely sure he wouldn't.”

Klio sighed. The Spartan hall was appropriately bare and Spartan, but all the wood was polished to a high shine and the windows looked out over the sea. The smell coming from the kitchen suggested a rich vegetable soup. My stomach gurgled. “Come on then,” she said. “I suppose we should sort this out. What made him imagine he could have a dialogue with them?”

“He's Sokrates,” I said.

“He's like a two-year-old sticking pencils in his ear,” she said.

“Well, but there were also the plants.”

“Plants? No. Tell me on the way.” She pushed her hair out of her face and we set off.

I explained to Klio about the bulbs as we walked. She frowned. “They really are just tools,” she said. “I can see how it's difficult for you to see. They can make simple decisions, they can even prioritize to a certain extent. But they don't really think. They have a program—a list of things they know how to do and a list of orders of what needs doing, and they just put those together.”

“Do you know that or is it an opinion?” I asked.

Klio frowned even more, twisting up her face. She was Axiothea's good friend so I knew her quite well. She sometimes dropped in on our math class. She was one of the most friendly and approachable masters, and she never talked down to us. “I would say I knew it, but the affair of the flowers confuses me. They can hear, so it could have heard Sokrates's questions. But they don't know Greek.”

“I told him that Latin was the language of civilization for centuries,” I said, reassuringly.

She laughed. “Not the century our workers come from, unfortunately. But if it spelled out N and O, that's
no
in English, which uses the Latin alphabet. English is the most likely language for the worker to know … or Chinese. But—in my own time, a worker couldn't possibly be a thinking, volitional being. These come from a more advanced time. I suppose it's just barely possible that they could have developed some kind of … but to understand Greek?” She shook her head.

We turned into the street of Hermes. There was no sign of Kebes. “Either Lysias got here first or Kebes went in with a worker,” I said.

Klio used her key to open the door. Inside it was surprisingly dull, after what I had been imagining. It didn't look at all dangerous. It was like a warehouse full of workers, each plugged into a wall or floor socket. It was a big space, as it seemed from outside, stretching back for a long way. There was a hum in the air. I couldn't see Sokrates, but I could see Kebes running down one of the aisles, so I followed him.

Sokrates was sitting on the floor beside one of the workers, notebook and pencil in his hand, patiently asking it questions. He looked up when we reached him. “Ah, Simmea, Kebes, Klio, joy to you. I'd like you to record the numbers of all the workers here. I've done the first row and this row. If you'd like to address them in Latin, that would also be useful.”

“Klio says they don't speak Latin but they might understand something called English,” I said.

Klio told Sokrates what she had told me. In the middle of it Pytheas and Lysias showed up. Lysias added to Klio's explanation. “But I'm not an expert,” he said. “None of us is. I've been forced to be one. But before I came here, I never had much to do with them.”