The Just City

by Jo Walton

  10

  SIMMEA

  In Year Five of the city, when we were all nominally fifteen, it was finally Florentia’s turn to learn astronomy. I’d been looking forward to it ever since Axiothea told us that it would involve more geometry. We began one crisp autumn afternoon in the Garden of Archimedes on the western edge of the city, where the big orrery and telescopes were. There were only nineteen of us. Astronomy wasn’t considered essential, and as always we were short of masters. Only those selected could pursue it.

  I enjoyed the orrery, and calculating the motions of the planets. Archimedes’s own orrery was there, with his gearing, and another, not as beautiful, which Axiothea said was Keplerian and which showed the motion of the planets as ellipses. When darkness fell I enjoyed seeing the planets exactly where we had predicted they would be. I loved looking through the telescope and learning how to adjust it. Kebes was there, and my close friend Laodike, but not Pytheas. Delphi had studied astronomy the season before.

  That first night they showed us all the spectacular things—the moons of Jupiter and the extra sisters in the Pleiades and the great galaxy of Andromeda. Walking back through the dimly lit city, I bade joy of the night to Laodike when we came to her house, which was Thyme, on the street of Demeter. Kebes came up beside me as we walked on. Our ways lay together almost all the way back. His sleeping house was Violet, which lay just beyond Hyssop, on the street of Hera. “You really enjoyed that.”

  “I did.” I was still bouncing with excitement. “Just think. We can tell where Mars will be in a thousand years. In ten thousand years.”

  “Who cares?”

  I looked at him blankly. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “I care.”

  “Lucia,” he said, very softly. I started guiltily at the name. He stepped closer as we came to a sconce on the wall of the temple of Hestia. I could see his eyes glint. “Don’t you see it doesn’t matter? We’re never going to Mars. Humanity may, one day. It may already have gone there, in the far future that they won’t tell us about. But we’ve been deliberately brought into a sterile backwater of history where nothing we do can achieve anything.”

  “We’ve been lucky enough to be brought to the Just City to have the one opportunity of growing up to be our best selves, Matthias,” I said, saying his old name as deliberately as he said mine.

  “Oh, you’re hopeless,” he said, walking on into the darkness. “They brought us here against our will, all of us. But you’ve swallowed it all whole. They’ve made you over into one of them.”

  “And you aren’t prepared to trust that anyone has good intentions, or anything at all!”

  Just then a voice came from what I had taken for a statue of an old man next to a pillar on the steps of the temple. “What aren’t you prepared to trust?” he asked Kebes.

  “You,” Kebes blurted.

  “Me?” the old man asked, coming out into the street and falling into step with us. “Well, you don’t know me, you’ve never seen me before, I am a stranger who has only just come to this place, you have no reason to trust me. But you have no reason to distrust me either, so it seems that the maiden is correct in her assessment that you trust nothing. How did you come to such a position?”

  “From meeting a great deal of deception,” Kebes said.

  “Then you are judging a stranger by your past experience of humanity, that they are untrustworthy, and assuming that I am the same?”

  “Yes,” Kebes said.

  “Well, and you believe that the maiden is the opposite, that she is overly trusting?”

  Kebes looked at him sideways and said nothing. The old man turned his bright gaze on me. There was something about the way his bright dark eyes met mine that reminded me of Ficino. But he really was a stranger, which was astonishing. I had never seen strangers come to the city since we had all come here at the beginning, over the course of a few days, five years before. There were masters I knew more or less well, and many of the children in other halls I barely knew at all, but after this time in which we had all been in the city they were all generally familiar to me by sight. This old man was entirely new to me. “So, do you trust everything as the youth says?”

  “No,” I said. “I trust what I have found trustworthy.”

  “And do you trust me?”

  “I do,” I said. It was true, up to a point. I did instinctively feel that I could trust him. But this was a dangerous conversation. Although he was a stranger, he was an old man and must therefore be a master, and the real subject that Kebes and I had been discussing was about trusting the masters. Kebes could get into serious trouble if they knew what he had said. When he had run away before he had been a boy, now he was a youth on the edge of manhood. He’d be showing them that he hadn’t changed, that they couldn’t trust him. He could be punished.

  “On what basis do you judge me trustworthy? Because I am a stranger to you just as much as to the youth here, who does not trust me enough even to enter deeply into dialogue with me.”

  I thought hard about what I wanted to say, and spoke the truth but phrased it carefully. “I trust you because you wish to have a dialogue to discover the truth. And I trust you because you remind me of Master Ficino.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. “Ficino would like that!” he said. “So you judge me by your previous experience of humanity and it has been good, so you are in all ways the opposite of your companion.”

  “No, wait. I don’t have a good opinion of all humanity, but of Ficino, whom you resemble. And from what you say it seems you know him well, which gives me an even better opinion of you.”

  “I have met him. I would not say I know him well. In what particulars do I seem to you to resemble him?”

  We had come to Hyssop house, and I stopped in the pool of light from the sconce over the door. “Not in superficial details. For instance, he habitually wears a red hat and your head is bare. I trust Ficino, but because of that I would not necessarily trust any man in a red hat. You are both old men, but that’s not important either. I wouldn’t necessarily trust any old man without evidence of his trustworthiness. Your eyes are like Ficino’s, and eyes are the mirror of the soul, or so I have read. Therefore I will say that your soul, in so far as I can discern it in the short time we have been conversing, resembles Ficino’s, and on what better grounds could one assess the trustworthiness of a man than on his soul?”

  “A good and thoughtful answer,” the old man said. “And a reasonable basis for trust, don’t you agree, young man?”

  “If I trusted Master Ficino it might be a good reason to trust you too,” Kebes said, stressing the word “master” ironically.

  The old man nodded. “I see you have both been already studying logic and rhetoric.”

  “No,” I said, my hand on the door. “We don’t begin to study rhetoric until next spring, after the festival, when we will be sixteen. But I have been reading about it.”

  “You are begining to study rhetoric tonight,” the old man said. “What are your names?”

  “Simmea,” I said.

  “Kebes,” said Kebes, reluctantly.

  The old man looked sad for a moment. “I had friends with those names once,” he said. “Men of Thebes. Did they give you those names when you came to the city? Because I thought I heard you use another name just now in the street.”

  “It is forbidden,” I whispered.

  “Is it?” the old man asked. “Then I shall forget I heard them, and use my old friends’ names when I address you. I had not been invited to join your conversation but invited myself along, so I should disregard anything I should not have overheard before you began to speak with me willingly. But now I shall recruit you to converse with me and be my friends, if you will. My name is Sokrates the son of Sophronikos.”

  “Of course it is,” I said. I didn’t know how I hadn’t guessed it before. “I thought you were dead.” I had wept for him, reading the Apology.

  “I should have been dead, but for my friend
Krito, who thought it good to overrule my own wishes and the will of my daemon and drag me off here, for whatever good I might do. What would I do in Thessaly? I asked him, and yet here I am, will I or not. Now, Kebes, do you see yourself any closer to finding yourself trusting me?”

  Kebes shook his head in astonishment. “Perhaps,” he said.

  “And you, Simmea, are you further from it?”

  “No. I trust you more than ever, now that I know you are Sokrates.”

  “You can’t trust everything that ass Plato wrote,” Sokrates said. It was astonishing to hear somebody refer to Plato as an ass, after five years of hearing him revered almost as a god. I gasped. Sokrates laughed. “It is late. You should go in to bed,” he said. “And you should meet me tomorrow. When are you free? Oh, I forgot, you are never free, are you? All of your time is accounted for. I shall request of our masters that they permit me the use of some of your time, so that you may begin to study rhetoric with me.”

  Then he nodded gravely to me and went off down the street, taking Kebes with him. I stared after him. There was no reason Sokrates should not be here. And yet it seemed fantastical, dreamlike. I could see his profile as he turned to speak to Kebes. Sokrates! And here against his own will.

  11

  MAIA

  I hadn’t intended to, but I took the gymnastic training so that I could teach in the palaestra. I didn’t ever want to be helpless again. Once I got used to it, I liked it. My arms and legs developed muscles in unexpected places. I wrestled with the other women and learned how to break holds and how to use my body as a lever. Of course, Ikaros took the same training, and he was still stronger than I was.

  Ikaros mostly left me alone. He acted hurt when he did talk to me and I was cold to him. He was conducting a spectacular public Platonic relationship with old Plotinus, the leader of the Neoplatonists. Plotinus was much older than Ikaros, but still handsome, very dignified with his white beard and flowing hair. They acted as if they were Sokrates and Alkibiades in the Symposium, at least in public, and Ikaros seemed happy. Atticus asked me whether I thought they were as Platonic in private as in public, and confided that Tullius had asked him his opinion on the matter. Ikaros seemed to revel in being the subject of everyone’s gossip.

  I had occasional invitations from other men, especially once we all had our own houses. I always turned them down politely, and that was always the end of it. I was still working hard, still happy, but it no longer had that same wonderful glow. I had thought it was perfect, or almost so. I had thought these people were all my friends, my Platonic brothers and sisters. I had trusted them unthinkingly. Now I had learned to be wary.

  Eventually, everything was built and most of the initial decisions made, and we were ready to begin bringing in children and really getting started.

  The Committee on Children reported to the Chamber. Plotinus made the presentation. “We have decided that the best method is to send out ships to purchase slave children. They will be freed, and be glad to be rescued and be here.”

  Klio stood up, and was recognized. “Can’t Sophia find ten-year-olds who wish to be here?”

  Sophia, the goddess Athene, was sitting at the side of the hall. She had shrunk to normal human size, and generally went unarmed and wore a kiton like the rest of us. The owl was sometimes on her arm, and sometimes swooped about, alone and disconcerting, in the dusk. “Children don’t generally read Plato,” she said.

  “Nor do we want children who have read Plato. It would confuse them,” Plotinus said hastily. “We agreed that they wouldn’t be allowed to read the Republic until they are fifty, though they can start reading some other Plato once they are fifteen.”

  “How about slave children who wish to be free, and orphans who want homes?” Klio said.

  “Certainly we can collect them. But I don’t know if I could find ten thousand and eighty such praying to me for deliverance,” Athene said.

  “They’d have to pray to you?” Ficino put in.

  Her grey eyes flashed, literally flashed, like light glancing off metal. “The gods are bound by Necessity, as you know.”

  “It’s just that going to slave markets and paying slavers for children seems distasteful,” Klio said.

  “We have, ah, decided that only men should go on these expeditions.” Plotinus stroked his beard. “As with the expeditions to rescue art, it’s not safe for women. But we’ve decided that all the men will take turns going, to be fair. Oh, but not you, of course, Lysias.”

  Lysias was an American whose family had come from China. He came from the mid–twenty-first century and was the only Asian in the Republic. I knew him quite well, as Klio had recently drafted him onto the Tech Committee. He nodded—it was obvious he’d be too conspicuous in a classical or medieval slave market.

  “The point is not who’s going, but whether we’re empowering slavery by buying children,” Adeimantas said. He was an old man from my own century, an Oxford professor who had translated Plato into English. I hadn’t spent much time with him; we weren’t on any of the same committees.

  There was a vigorous debate, ending in a vote, in which we narrowly decided to buy children, making sure they knew that they were free as soon as they came aboard our ships. The committee then explained which slave markets they would go to in which years. Athene would have to accompany each expedition, to which she agreed. Each expedition would bring in two hundred children, which meant it would take fifty to fill our quota. “You’ll never find two hundred ten-year-olds in any slave market,” Tullius said.

  “What we propose to do is to go to one market and buy all the available children of the right age, then move through time so that it seems as if we return every year, until the ship is full. Then we’ll bring the children home, and make another expedition to another market,” Plotinus said.

  Tullius sat down, satisfied. I looked at Klio and Axiothea. “Won’t that really be creating a demand?” I asked.

  “That question has been decided and gains nothing by being reopened,” Plotinus said, huffily.

  So we prepared to receive the children. Every dining hall was ready, named and furnished, with two masters assigned to it. Every sleeping house had a name and an associated flower. Every bed had a chest and every chest had two blankets, a comb, a belt, and an iron pin, the very minimum we felt they needed. We had food ready, and workers reprogrammed to make food for everyone. We had so many plans. Of course, they collapsed on contact with reality.

  The first children ran away the first night, ran off into the woods and had to be recaptured. After that we guarded the sleeping houses until the children were settled. We also instituted the watcher system, where one child in each house was responsible for the others and reported on them to a master. We kept them busy, which helped. Still some of them ran away from time to time. We brought them back and told them they would not be punished the first time. The Committee on Punishment was still in deliberations. Plato talks about punishments in some detail in the Laws, but he was thinking of adults, not frightened children. We tried to make them less frightened. Then another ship came, and we had four hundred children to three hundred of us.

  I had never imagined the chaos ten-year-olds could cause. I could never have thought of children setting their chests alight or trying to sail off the island in them. “It will settle down,” Lysias said when I was in despair. “They’ll police themselves once it’s working properly. We just need to get it started right.”

  “I think Plato was thinking of ten-year-olds as blank slates who know nothing,” I said. “These are anything but.”

  “He must have been a ten-year-old himself,” Lysias said.

  “Yes, but never a parent, was he?”

  The first months were total chaos. We had new batches of children coming every few days. I often felt close to despair. One boy ran away and got his leg crushed beneath a robot who was trying to round them up again. That was the absolute low point, when we hurt a child and made his life worse instead of bett
er.

  After a while we got better at managing them. It became almost routine. We’d divide up the arriving children by fourteens into cities that still had room. When there were girls for Florentia I’d show them their sleeping room, teach them how to shower and use the toilets, choose a watcher, and take them to Florentia for dinner. Then I’d spend the night sleeping outside the door to make sure they didn’t escape.

  Lysias was right that it did get easier. Keeping them busy all the time and too tired to keep awake and plot mischief helped. He himself was driven to exhaustion working in the palaestra—we really didn’t have enough young men. I was constantly exhausted myself, from being teacher and parent and continuing to sit on the organization committees. I didn’t have time to worry about anything except whether we were giving the children the right foundation, doing as Plato described. I worried about that all the time. “Ideally,” I kept saying, every time we had to compromise.

  “In the next generation we will have enough people,” Klio said. “These children will have children, and they’ll help us with them. In that generation, the generation who come along when we are old, we’ll see our Philosopher Kings, the native speakers of the language of the Republic.”

  “I have hopes for these children. Some of them are wonderful.”

  “The longer it’s established, the closer we’ll get to Plato’s design and the better it will work,” Klio said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She never let it grow long enough to braid neatly, and so except when she had just cut it, it was always falling into her face. “But I am worried about the workers. We’re overloading them. We don’t really have enough of them for everything we expect them to do. We’re going to have to find another way of doing some of those things before they break down. It’s ridiculous for them to rake the palaestras. Anyone could do that.”

  “When the children are sixteen we’ll assign some of them to farming and weaving and raking the sand too,” I said.

  “They could rake the sand now. Lysias and I are almost out of spare parts for the workers. We’re going to have to conserve them and use them for the essential things.”