The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “You should insist that they sleep in their own beds,” I said.

  “I do. But it disrupts everybody. And even needing to keep insisting is disruptive. I wonder sometimes—well, that’s what I came to see you about.” She took a deep breath. “Who decided which metals were strongest in our souls?”

  “Ficino and I did,” I said. “With advice from other masters who knew you.”

  “Do you think you might have made any mistakes?” she asked.

  “We thought about it very hard and talked about it a lot, and we don’t think we did. Why are you asking? Is it because you think Auge and Iphis aren’t behaving like philosophers?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s me. This is so difficult.”

  “You’re only seventeen,” I said. “Nobody expects you to be perfect right away. You have new responsibilities, and they’re difficult, but you’re dealing with them. It can be easy to feel discouraged when things go wrong, but philosophy will help. And we weren’t just looking at how you are now, we were looking at how you’re going to develop.” It was why it had been so difficult and such a tremendous responsibility.

  “You don’t understand.” Klymene picked up an olive and turned it over and over in her hand, staring down at it. “Can I talk about before we came here?” she asked, not looking up.

  “You shouldn’t,” I said. “But you can if you really need to. If it will help me understand what you’re worried about.”

  “I was a slave,” she said, as if it cost her an effort to admit it. After she said it, she looked up from the olive at last to meet my eyes.

  “There’s no shame in that. You all were,” I said, surprised.

  “But I was born a slave. Most of the others were captured, or sold into captivity quite a short time before they were brought here. My mother was a slave, and I was born one and grew up one. All that time, I never even imagined being free. I think it did something to me. I think I have shackles on my soul and a slave’s heart, and I’m not really worthy to be a gold.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, gently. I ate a piece of cheese while thinking what to say. “You’ve been here for seven years, you’ve been trained. You were very young when you came. Nothing that happened before counts.”

  “Yes, it does,” she said. She was close to tears. “Can I please explain?”

  “Go on then,” I said.

  “My name has always been Klymene. I was born in Syracuse, at the time of the Carthaginian wars. My mother was a bath slave. She was Carthaginian. Her name was Nyra. I don’t know who my father was, but it was probably our master, whose name was Asterios.”

  I listened, trying to imagine a life like that. “Was he unkind to you?”

  “No, he petted me and indulged me when he saw me, which wasn’t all that often. He was Greek, of course. I look like my mother. I imagined I would grow up to have a life like hers, serving at the bath, sleeping with the master. It didn’t seem so bad. I carried water and bath oils. I was learning massage. I spoke Greek, and Punic, that was the slave language, and a little bit of Latin. Nobody taught me to read, though they easily could have. There were slave clerks in the house, but they were all men. They never thought of it. I never thought of it.”

  “For most of history it was really unusual for women to be taught to read,” I said. Nobody except Plato had seen that we were human. It still made me angry to think of all those wasted lives.

  “I was pretty, like my mother, and if I had dreams it was that some man would fall in love with me because of that and I could cajole him into treating me well. It’s what my mother did. What she was teaching me.” She shook her head and put the olive down on her untouched plate. “The overseer was called Felix. He terrorized us all. He had a dog on a chain at the door to the slave quarters. I hated to pass it, it always leapt at me snarling, and Felix laughed and said it would eat me up one day. But that’s not what happened.”

  “What did happen?” I got up and poured her a cup of wine, and one for myself. Imagining her early life was distressing; living through it must have been appalling. I thanked Athene in my heart that I had been so lucky.

  “When I was nine years old, my master caught my mother in bed with Felix. She had no choice about it. Felix had a dog and a whip, and what did she have? But Asterios didn’t see it that way. He didn’t punish Felix, he punished her. He whipped her in the courtyard in front of everyone, to punish her supposed lusts. Then, to punish her more, he had me whipped. And then immediately, the same afternoon, he dragged me down to the harbor and sold me onto a slave ship going east, where there would be no chance that my mother would ever see me again.” She picked up the cup and took a deep swallow. “He didn’t even say so to me. He said it to the slaver he was selling me to, and I heard. I wasn’t even a person to him. He shook me when I tried to speak, to remind him how he had always been good to me. And he slapped me hard when I bit his hand. I was just a thing to him, a thing he could use on my mother. He petted me to make her loving to him, and then he sold me away to punish her. He didn’t see me as human, let alone as a daughter. He had his real family on the other side of the house. I’d served at his real daughter’s baths. I wasn’t real, do you see?”

  “You were real,” I said. I was shaken. “You were absolutely real and you were a child and I’m so glad we rescued you from that.” I wished we could do the same for every slave there ever was, that we could buy them and bring them here to live free.

  “You rescued my body, but part of my soul is still there,” she said. “It’s why I ran, that time, with the boar, because I’m slave-hearted. And now I can’t keep order in Hyssop. I’m just no good.”

  “You’re keeping order. And you’ve worked and worked to become brave!” I wanted to hug her, but she held herself in a way that didn’t invite it.

  “Yes, but others didn’t have to do that,” she said, fiercely. “And I wonder what else there is like that about me, where my soul is still stuck there. With being the watcher, I keep wanting to cajole instead of being decisive. And that’s not the worst of it. I always thought like a slave. I wanted to please the masters, not to seek for the truth. I’d see Simmea arguing with Ficino, going after a point like a terrier, and at first I’d just be amazed that she dared, and that he didn’t slap her down for it. I don’t know how long it was before I understood that it was what he wanted.”

  “But you did understand,” I said.

  “Yes, but you don’t see. I still thought like a slave. I was trying to give you what you wanted, not trying to become my best self. And you didn’t see that, you didn’t, you made me a gold and I’m not fit to be a guardian, it was all pretense. I was pretending to be free, but in my heart I’m still a slave.”

  I tried to make sense of this. “Are you saying that you’re still trying to please us instead of striving for excellence?”

  She hesitated, and touched her belly. “No. I realized what I was doing and why it was wrong. My duty—wanting to do my duty, even when I could have got out of it without anyone knowing. Reading Plato, debating with Kebes about freedom and choices, and especially thinking about the baby, about him or her growing up in the city. I finally realized I am free. And I do love wisdom, and I do love the truth. I’ve been coming to that for some time. And I can’t build it on a lie. That’s why I’ve come to you now. To confess my deception. Before the baby’s born. I want to become my best self, and I don’t want to deceive you any more.”

  “Deception is a crooked road to truth, but that’s where it’s leading you,” I said, standing up.

  “What?” She looked up at me, confused.

  “You’re confessing your deception because in feigning loving truth you’ve truly come to love it,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And so you are worthy to be gold. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I made a mistake and was deceived, but Ficino saw into your soul. There are people whose souls are ideally suited from birth for them to be philosophers, but there are others whose souls h
ave to be trained, like vines on a trellis. We built the trellis in the city, and though you started twisted you grew straight.”

  “Like Simmea’s legs,” she said, utterly confounding me.

  “Simmea’s legs?”

  “When we came, Simmea’s legs were bandy. Now they’re straight and strong. You’re saying the same thing happened to my soul?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I hugged her hard. “Your children will start clean, without any bad memories or twisted beginnings. They’ll prove everything Plato believed, become what he wanted. We masters are helping you and you will help them and they will make the Just City.”

  She hugged me back. “I’m free,” she said, marvel in her voice.

  22

  SIMMEA

  One morning Kebes and I went from breakfast to follow Sokrates around the city as we often did. We found him questioning a worker planting bulbs outside the temple of Demeter. “Do you like your work? Do you feel a sense of satisfaction doing it? Are there some jobs you enjoy more than others?”

  “I don’t know why you keep doing that when you know they’re not going to answer,” Kebes said.

  “I don’t know that,” Sokrates said. “Joy to you, Kebes, joy to you Simmea! I know they haven’t answered yet, but I don’t know whether they might answer in the future. I don’t even have an opinion on the subject.”

  “Everyone knows they’re tools,” Kebes said.

  “They’re not like tools,” Sokrates said. “They’re self-propelled, and to a certain extent self-willed. That one is making decisions about where to space the bulbs, precise and careful decisions. Those are going in a row, look, and then that one at an angle. It’s deliberate, not random. It may be a clever tool, but it may have self-will, and if it has self-will and desires, then it would be very interesting to talk to.”

  “A tree would be interesting to talk to—” Kebes began, but Sokrates interrupted.

  “Oh yes, wouldn’t it!” We laughed and followed him on.

  A few months later, early in Gamelion, Kebes and I were walking along with Sokrates debating one morning when we happened to come back to the place outside the temple of Demeter where the worker had been planting bulbs when Sokrates asked it questions. A set of early crocuses had come up, deep purple with gold hearts. They were arranged in an odd pattern, two straight lines connected by a diagonal and then a circle. Sokrates glanced at them. “Spring after winter is always a joy to the heart,” he said, though he never seemed to feel the cold.

  Kebes frowned at them. “It’s almost as if—no. I’m being silly.”

  “What is it?” Sokrates asked.

  “Well, you remember the worker was planting bulbs here when you asked it questions? The pattern the bulbs are planted in looks like N and then O in the Latin alphabet, which is like the beginning of non, the Latin for no.”

  Sokrates stared at Kebes, and then back at the bulbs. “As if the worker were trying to answer me as best it could, with the materials it had? And as if it answered in Latin? Why would it do that, I wonder?”

  “Latin was the language of civilization in the West for centuries,” I said.

  “But it didn’t finish the word. Perhaps it ran out of bulbs. Or perhaps I’m imagining the whole thing,” Kebes said. “Seeing a pattern where there isn’t one.”

  “It must have understood my questions, to answer no,” Sokrates said, ignoring this. “My questions were in Greek.”

  “They were. It doesn’t make much sense,” I said. “But it does look deliberate. Let’s go on and see if it used this pattern in any of the other plazas.”

  It hadn’t. Lots of the plazas had crocuses, but all of them were arranged in four neat vertical rows.

  “What did I ask it?” Sokrates mused. “If it enjoyed its work?”

  “I think so,” I said. “If there was anything it preferred doing. A whole pile of questions at once, typical of you!”

  “So I can’t know which, if any, the no was intended to answer!” He ran his fingers through his hair, which was standing on end anyway. “Where’s Pytheas?”

  “I think he’s in the palaestra this morning.”

  “We must find him at once.” Sokrates set off rapidly in the wrong direction. Kebes and I got him turned around and walking just as fast towards the Florentine/Delphic palaestra.

  “Why do you want Pytheas?” Kebes asked as we trailed him.

  “The first time I asked about workers he said he had a belief that they were tools,” Sokrates said. “I want to know who told him that.”

  “Ficino told us that, on the Goodness when we came,” Kebes said. “Probably it was the same for him.”

  Sokrates stopped dead and stared at us as if he’d never seen us before. “I think it might be better if I spoke to Pytheas alone,” he said, and turned and walked off so fast that I’d have had to run to catch up with him.

  Kebes and I stared at each other. “What was that about?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Do you think the worker really was trying to communicate?”

  “Well, it seems unlikely on the face of it, but it also seems like a very unlikely coincidence that in only that one spot where Sokrates was trying to talk to the worker, the flowers should spell out something that could mean no. I’m almost more interested in why he acted like that about Pytheas. What would Pytheas know about workers that we don’t?”

  “Pytheas knows some very odd things sometimes.”

  “He reads a lot,” I said, defensively. “No, but what?”

  Kebes frowned. “When we’re talking to Sokrates, sometimes Pytheas says odd things, or sometimes he says ordinary things and Sokrates reacts oddly. Like when he mentioned his parents that time, and Sokrates acted as if he’d said something completely bizarre.”

  I remembered that. I shook my head. “That’s Sokrates behaving oddly, which … isn’t unusual for Sokrates. Do you think he’ll be in Thessaly this afternoon?”

  “I’ll be there to see,” Kebes said.

  “So will I. But first I have my math group. See you later!” I went off to join Axiothea and the others, puzzled.

  Sokrates was at Thessaly when I got there at our usual time. Pytheas was there before me, and Kebes arrived a moment or two later. “I brought some nuts,” he said, pulling out a twist of paper.

  “Raisins,” I said, pulling out a matching twist.

  “Olives,” Pytheas said, smugly, bringing out a whole jar of olives stuffed with garlic.

  “You bring a feast! And I as always can offer crystal clear water and the shade of my garden,” Sokrates said, leading the way out. It was a little chilly to sit outside, and I kept my cloak around me. Once we were seated and passing round the food, he began. “I believe I have discovered evidence of conversational thought among the workers.”

  “I’m not convinced,” Kebes said.

  “It’s not necessary to be convinced by one piece of evidence,” Sokrates said. “But it’s indicative that it might be worth further investigation.”

  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.”
r />   “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.