The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “Not necessarily, depending on how well he knows Sokrates,” Klio said. We were at the door of the Spartan hall, which Klio held open for us. We went inside. The room was full now.

  “We fetch our own soup from the urn,” Klio explained. I took a bowl and filled it. I also took a little roll of barley bread and a piece of smoked fish from the trays laid out. The soup was lovely, warming and filling, full of onions and beans.

  “If Kebes didn’t do it, then I have another thought,” Klio said, when I was nearly done eating. “There are workers that go to the feeding station and won’t leave again. Lysias tries to give them new orders, but nothing works except taking out the piece of them that makes decisions and replacing it. We’re running extremely low on spares. If they really are developing volition and that’s a symptom of it, then what have we been doing?”

  “Cutting out their minds?” Pytheas asked. “How gruesome. Could you put them back?”

  “Yes … I think so. But we need the workers. We’ve been saying for years that we have to reduce our dependence on them, but nobody’s ever willing to do it. They do so much, and some of it we can’t do. We can’t manage if they just sit in their feeding stations and feed and don’t work.”

  “Maybe those are the ones Sokrates should be talking to,” Pytheas said. “Have you finished? Shall we go back and suggest this?”

  “Lysias is going to resist hearing this argument,” Klio said. “It would make him feel he has done bad things—without intending to, but done them nonetheless. He doesn’t know Kebes.”

  “It’s worse than that, he does know Kebes, and he knows bad things about him,” I said.

  “What bad things?” Klio asked.

  “What Pytheas said. That he doesn’t pursue excellence. And I think he might have mocked Lysias when he was trying to be his friend. He’s never going to believe that he has honor and wouldn’t trick Sokrates.”

  “Lysias knows Kebes mocked him?” Pytheas asked.

  I nodded. “I believe he does.”

  “He’s really not going to want to hear it,” Klio repeated. “Let’s not go back there now. Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Sokrates.”

  23

  MAIA

  We had more than a thousand babies born in the month of Anthesterion, and it strained our resources to the utmost.

  Plato wrote in the Republic that defective babies, and babies of defective parents, should be exposed. It was the standard practice of the classical world to expose unwanted babies—just to leave them out in a waste place where they might be rescued or, more often, just die. There was no blood guilt on the parents, they just left the child, they didn’t kill it. The children froze to death or were eaten by animals … or occasionally rescued. Stories like Oedipus, and Theseus, and Romulus and Remus are of exposed babies who came back to find the family that had abandoned them. There were other stories too, which I hadn’t heard before I came to the city, ghost stories.

  I know that in my own century it was the practice for midwives to kill badly deformed babies—or just allow them to die instead of helping them to survive. It did seem the kind option. But the thought of exposing even deformed infants made my heart ache.

  We had kept careful records of all the “marriages,” so carefully planned out with an eye to eugenics. (Klio and Lysias shrank from that term, but would never tell me why.) We took the babies into the nurseries as they were born. There was a nursery shared between Florentia and Delphi, so Axiothea and I worked together there—Ficino and Atticus left it to us. We called in Charmides when we really needed to. He was exhausted too, as our only real doctor. We defined all the babies we saw as excellent and passed them over to the nurses—men and women of iron status. One was Andromeda, whom I’d always liked.

  Then in the middle of the night in the third week of the baby-rush, when we were already exhausted, there was one with a harelip. Axiothea had been with the mother while I was with another girl just starting her labor. She called me and I joined her in the private room, where she showed it to me.

  Axiothea and I looked at each other in mute horror. The child had a cleft palate too. “It’s fixable,” Axiothea said.

  “Not here,” I said. “And Plato says…”

  “I know,” she said. “Are you going to do it?” There was a mute appeal in her eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, refusing to shrink from the duty. I wrapped the baby in a cloth and held it against my shoulder. It was a girl, which made things somehow worse. I was here to make the lot of women better, after all. “You look after things here.”

  I went out of the nursery and walked through the city to the north gate, the one near the temple of Zeus and Hera. I walked quickly and held the baby tenderly, but she started to wail. She was such a little scrap of a thing. I walked on up the mountain, with some thought of taking her up to the top and throwing her into the crater. There was no hope of rescue here. No shepherd in want of a child was going to come along. There was nobody on Kallisti but us. There were wolves, but wolves wouldn’t be able to feed her, even if they really did feed babies. With that lip she wouldn’t be able to suck, and with the hole in her mouth she’d choke if she could.

  She wasn’t heavy, but she was awkward to carry. I was exhausted before I made it halfway up the mountain. I left her by the roots of a rowan tree, near a spring. I commended her soul to Athene and prayed that she might be reborn whole. She had been quiet for the last part of my walk, but when I put her down she started to wail loudly. I could hear it halfway back to the city. It cut off abruptly. I wondered if she had fallen asleep, or whether she was lying there still and terrified in the darkness, or whether a wild animal had taken her—a wild boar? A wolf? I took two steps back up the hill before I forced myself to stop. This was ridiculous. I was a disgrace to philosophy. I had done what I had come to do, what Plato told me to do, the standard practice of the ancient world. It was to protect the city, to make us better. All the same, I was still weeping when I came back into the city.

  It was dawn. The wind came chill from the sea. The sky was paling and the birds waking. It was the point where late winter becomes early spring—the first of the flowers were coming up. Everything said beginnings, but for that poor harelipped baby there was nothing but an ending.

  Of course, this was when I saw Ikaros. I hardly ever saw him now. He had dropped out of the Tech Committee in favour of something more exciting. “Maia, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, really,” I said. “Just a deformed baby that had to be exposed, and my soft heart.”

  “The poor little mother,” he said at once.

  I had not thought about the mother, going through all that for nothing. “At least she won’t know,” I said. “She’ll think they’re all hers.”

  “How could she not know? She’ll look for the one with the deformity.”

  “We’ll tell her it was cured,” I said. “If she saw it. I don’t know whether she did. I’ll find out.”

  He nodded. Then he turned and walked along with me. “You’re siding with Lysias about trying to use the workers less.”

  “He and Klio say they’re being overburdened and they’ll break down. There are things they’re essential for, that we’ll need them for for a long time.”

  “The question is what’s essential. Well, isn’t that always the question?” He smiled brilliantly at me. “We should set up a committee especially for that.”

  I was exhausted and wrung out. “Talk to Lysias,” I said. “I don’t really know enough of the details. None of us understand the workers properly; they come from a time ahead of everyone here.”

  “We could just ask Athene for more,” he suggested.

  “We don’t know how far her patience runs. Besides, I haven’t seen her for ages, have you? She probably has a lot more to do than collect workers for us.”

  “I haven’t seen her. Sokrates really wants to talk to her,” he said. “Speaking of her, do you remember that conversation we had about Providence?”

&nbs
p; I couldn’t believe that he was mentioning it casually like that. “You mean the night you raped me?”

  He patted my arm and smiled at me. “Call it that if you want. But do you remember the conversation? About not being able to reconcile Christianity with the presence of Athene?”

  “Of course I do,” I snapped.

  “Well, I was naive, I think. Since then I’ve been working on it, and I have found a way to make it all fit together.”

  I stared at him. “Really?”

  He looked smug. “Well, if Athene—if the Greek gods are actually angels in one of the lower heavens, and if those angels have a considerable amount of autonomy, then it all works, that she should have brought us here and that the persons of the Trinity should still be there at the apex.”

  “But she’s Athene!”

  “Why shouldn’t she be? Wasn’t God there before the birth of Christ, and mightn’t he have used appropriate angels? It makes more sense that he would. I always thought the classical gods must have been some kind of angels.”

  I thought about it. “But why would he use her now? To Christians? I was a faithful churchgoer. You were a monk.”

  He looked irritated. “I told you I wasn’t a monk. I was just dressed as a Dominican because I was dying. I never took any vows.”

  “But you were a Christian?”

  “I still am. And so can you be. The truth is wonderful and more complex than we thought, that’s all. I remembered that you wanted to have those stories here. Well, maybe we can.”

  “Does Sokrates agree with you?” I asked.

  “Sokrates finds the idea of Providence fascinating,” he said. “And he agrees that man is the measure of all things. But he isn’t very interested in Christianity. He agrees that knowing Athene is real and takes an interest in us changes everything. And he thinks that it would be interesting to debate my nine hundred theses. Actually, I have almost two thousand now.”

  “Well, good luck debating them,” I said.

  “It’s not going to be easy getting enough of us to agree,” he said. “Would you support such a debate?”

  I wasn’t sure. “I suppose so. But I find it uncomfortable to think about. If God—how do you reconcile Christian morality? You were pretty scathing about it when we talked about this before.”

  “It’s complicated, but I have it all worked out,” he said. “Athene is just carrying out God’s will.”

  I wondered what she would think of that. She was so real and so much herself. But what were angels anyway? What were gods? We came to the turning. “I have to go this way now.”

  “It was nice to see you Maia. I never get to see you these days.” He patted my arm again. “We must talk about this some more, soon.” He went off down the street of Poseidon with a casual wave. I stared after him. He had at least taken my mind off the poor baby, dying up there on the mountain.

  I went back to the nursery. Andromeda was just coming on duty and Darius was just leaving. “Axiothea left a note for you,” he said. The note said that the girl in labour had delivered safely and easily, and that Axiothea was going to Klio’s to sleep and if I needed her I could find her there.

  “Everything all right?” he asked.

  “Fine. You go to bed.” He went off gratefully. “Only the one more baby?” I asked.

  “Yes. We have thirty-three,” Andromeda said. “It’s a good number. We have mothers coming in to feed them every hour.”

  “And how many more babies due?”

  “In Florentia and Delphi? Four. And then, of course, there will be all the ones born in four months’ time.” She smiled. “It’s so exciting. I’m so glad I got chosen to train for this.”

  “You’re a great person to be doing it.”

  “And maybe next time I’ll be having a baby myself. Only I’ll be able to care for it myself, won’t I, as I know how?”

  I stared at her, nonplussed. “The idea is that all babies will be in the nurseries. You’ll care for your own among all the others.”

  Her face fell. “I thought I could take it home.”

  “It would disturb all your house sisters,” I said, gently. “They’re better here, really.”

  “My sisters wouldn’t mind.” But she sighed and got on with her work.

  “I’m going to sleep, I’ve been up all night. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in my house,” I said.

  “Will we ever have houses to ourselves the way you do?” she asked. “Because if I did, I could take my baby home and it wouldn’t bother anyone.”

  “It’s not the plan for you to have your own houses any time soon,” I said. “Don’t you like sharing with your sisters?”

  “Yes, but I don’t like Hyacinth as much as I liked Hyssop.” Just then a baby cried, and she was off to comfort it.

  “See you later,” I called, and went home. Although I was exhausted, I lay awake worrying. Were we the right people to be trying this experiment? Did we know enough about what we were doing? Was God still there above Athene, as the circle of sky stood above the Pantheon? Should I pray to him, and to Jesus, or continue praying to Athene? Could Ikaros truly have forgotten the rape and only remembered the conversation? Was that a bad thing? I’d wanted the conversation and not wanted the rape, after all. Why did I have a house to myself when Andromeda shared with six others? They weren’t children any more, and there were new children, and keeping mothers and children apart wasn’t as easy as Plato had thought. When it came down to details, so little was.

  24

  SIMMEA

  There was another festival of Hera. Even fewer of the men took part, as even more of the women were unavailable. There was some grumbling. I was drawn with Nikias of Pisa, another near stranger. We managed well enough—I was getting more used to it, and wasn’t as nervous as I had been on the previous occasions. I liked Nikias. He made me laugh. As with Aeschines, we became friends through the marriage and remained friends afterwards. And as with Aeschines, he asked me if I’d be willing to go off to the woods with him. “We got along very well,” he said. “You liked it. We could do it some more.”

  “Doing it every four months is enough for me,” I said. I wondered if every pleasant coupling produced this suggestion, quite against the rules.

  “Nobody would know,” he went on.

  Whether because I was more relaxed or because Hera smiled or for some other reason, I became pregnant at that festival. Klymene and Makalla were as big as houses and constantly groaning about their bellies and their swelling feet and their sense of exhaustion.

  I was painting a fresco in Ithaka—by invitation. Aeschines suggested it first, and then Hermeios and Nyra, the masters there, formally asked me to do it. The fresco showed Odysseus coming into harbor, which I based on our own harbor. His ship was the Goodness. The dog Argo was visible on the quayside. I’d done the composition on paper first, and they had approved it. The whole thing filled a wall and was the most ambitious project I had ever done. It was fiddly, too, because the plaster dried so quickly and it was so hard to change anything. In the first month of my pregnancy the smell of the paint made me queasy.

  Sokrates inquired into parenthood, the duties and responsibilities. I held that the only duty of a parent was to see the child brought up as well as possible—which in the city meant giving it to those best trained for the purpose. Sokrates agreed that we ought to love all children as if they were our own, but disputed the value of the training and education the city would give, and immediately we were back on familiar ground from a new angle.

  Klymene’s baby was born the day before the feast of Hephaestus. When she went into labor in the middle of the night, I went for Maia. Maia helped her walk to the nursery. The rest of us lay awake, wondering how it was going. Four of us were pregnant, and the two who were not longed to experience it. “I can’t wait to get rid of this weight,” Makalla moaned.

  I started to do arithmetic. How many babies did the city need? Another ten thousand and eighty? If each woman had two babies we wou
ld have that. But we were supposed to keep on having festivals every four months, or so I believed. If half the women got pregnant—no, if a third—a quarter? I would have to ask Sokrates how this was supposed to work. It was a silly situation where every master had read the Republic but no children had, in case it impaired our ability to live it. We were living it—we should be able to read it now. We weren’t children any longer. We were having children of our own. We’d need to be guiding them by what Plato said. It was ridiculous to keep it from us.

  The next morning Klymene came back without the baby. Her belly didn’t look a great deal smaller, which surprised me. I’d expected her to go back to normal at once. “We are to go every day and feed them,” Klymene said, as if it were a comfort.

  “Was it a boy or a girl?” I asked.

  “A boy. The sweetest thing. He had black curls.” I wondered what my baby would look like, and if I would be sorry to leave it behind in the nursery.

  Makalla’s baby was born four days later. She went into labor in the afternoon, so I did not know until I went to bed and she was missing from Hyssop. “I heard her screaming while I was over there feeding,” Klymene said.

  “Screaming?” Auge asked, apprehensively, a hand on her belly.

  “Everyone screams, they say,” Klymene said, quite composedly. “I didn’t, except once near the end.”

  “How is your baby?” I asked.

  “They keep bringing me different ones to feed every time I go. I haven’t seen my own baby since the first day. Still, I suppose it’s for the best. It stops me getting too attached, Maia says.”

  “Don’t you want to be attached?” Auge asked.

  “I want him to be his best self. That means leaving him to people trained to bring him up. I wouldn’t have any idea what to do with a baby.”

  It was what I had said to Sokrates, but somehow it sounded different. And I knew if I brought that back to Sokrates, it would take us straight into the heart of the matter. Could we trust the masters? Could we trust Plato? Could we trust Pallas Athene? Trust them for what? Trust them to mean well and have our best interests at heart? Oh yes, I thought so. Trust them to know how best to bring up babies? That was a different question. And in seven months’ time, it was a question that I was going to have to answer. I put my arms around my belly as if that was going to protect the baby.