The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “He was trying to write the truth, to discover the truth, even if he put his own words into your mouth,” I said.

  “And do you think he found the truth?” he asked.

  I paused, looking back at Crocus, still raking the sand. “I think he often did, and more important, I think he invited us all into the inquiry. Nobody reads Plato and agrees with everything. But nobody reads any of the dialogues without wanting to be there joining in. Everybody reads it and is drawn into the argument and the search for the truth. We’re always arguing here about what he meant and what we should do. Plato laid down the framework for us to carry on with. He showed us—and this I believe he did get from you—he showed us how to inquire into the nature of the world and ourselves, and examine our lives, and know ourselves. Whether you really had the particular conversations he wrote down or not, by writing them he invited us all into the great conversation.”

  “Yes, he did get that from me,” Sokrates said. “And he did pass that down to you. And, as I understand it, the world would certainly have been different and less good without that spirit of inquiry.”

  “It must be so strange to see your own legacy,” I said.

  “Strange and in many ways humbling,” Sokrates said. He patted my arm. “You should go, or your weaving students will be wondering where you are. Don’t forget to tell Simmea I miss her and hope to see her soon.”

  He walked off up the street and I went on to my own work.

  30

  SIMMEA

  “Are you all right? Say something,” Pytheas said after I’d been staring at them for a long moment.

  “I’m all right. I’m cured,” I said. “But I—. You. How, why?”

  They looked at each other for an instant, and then back at me. There might be gods who couldn’t have deduced what I meant from that, but these two were not among them. “Asklepius told her?” Septima asked. “Why?”

  “Nobody told me. I worked it out. It was obvious. I turned around and saw you and I knew.”

  “Half the masters know about you anyway,” Pytheas said. “And Simmea won’t tell anyone.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “You knew I helped to set up the city. Now I’m living in it for a little while, and still helping. It needs my help.” Septima frowned. “Is my brother right? Will you keep this secret?”

  “Why is it a secret?” I asked.

  “So I can live here quietly, without any fuss, and experience it normally,” she said.

  I thought about Septima, about her strange halfway status in the library. Was she experiencing it normally? It didn’t seem so, especially if half the masters knew who she was. Yet anyone would naturally want to live in the city, and without undue attention. “I won’t tell the children who you are,” I said.

  “Good enough,” Pytheas said.

  Septima—Pallas Athene—turned to him. “That’s not your decision.”

  “Yes it is,” he said.

  “Why?” She seemed to get taller as she spoke.

  “Simmea’s my votary. I take full responsibility for her. You can trust me that she’ll keep her word.” All this time Pytheas kept his eyes on his sister and did not even glance at me.

  “You are behaving irresponsibly and taking stupid risks,” Athene snapped. “I was against this intervention from the start, but you couldn’t wait. Your votary. Is she now? Ask her if she is. You’re besotted with her. It’s Daphne all over again.”

  “I am,” I said, full of my new-found clarity, and not considering whether it was a good idea to intervene.

  “You are?” She towered above me now. She had a great helmet and a shield on her arm. “Do you even know what it means?”

  “If he’s Pytheas, I’m his friend. Since he’s the god Apollo, I’m his votary. But you can trust me to keep my word without his guarantee. You know me well enough for that. I have always served you well. And I am a gold of the Just City. You helped to set it up. If you can’t trust my word, what have we been doing here?”

  Pytheas laughed. Athene turned on him angrily, then shook her head and shrank back down into her Septima form. “I’ll trust your word,” she said. “As a gold of this city and my brother’s votary.” She stalked off down the street, her hair flying behind her in the breeze.

  I looked at Pytheas. “You’re the god Apollo? You told me we were doing agape! You said you needed me.”

  He blinked. His expression was surprisingly reminiscent of the moment in the palaestra when I’d beaten him up. “It’s because I’m Apollo that I need you,” he said. “You help me so much.”

  I took a step towards him. “And you didn’t tell me because?”

  “Because I didn’t want to have this conversation?” He tried a smile. “Because I really am trying mortality and to live here and experience the city?”

  “You’re the god Apollo,” I repeated. It was strange, simultaneously surprising and inevitable. “Of course you are. I’m an idiot. I don’t know why I didn’t figure it out before.”

  “I’m Pytheas,” he said. “That’s real too.”

  I took another step forward. “Can you turn back into a god at any moment, like Athene just did?”

  “No.” He looked awkward. “I wanted the authentic experience. The only way I can take my powers up again is by dying. I’m here for the long haul. And you’ve really helped me understand so much about how it works.”

  “She said you were taking stupid risks. Did she mean your becoming incarnate, or did she mean healing me?”

  He nodded. “Healing you. But that as well, because I had to ask her for help, without my own powers. You were trapped in your body, in your sickness. It was horrible. I couldn’t leave you like that for months or years.”

  “It really was horrible,” I agreed. “I didn’t care about anything. That was the worst. Worse than fainting all the time. Thank you for helping me.”

  “But you’re all right now?”

  “I’m starving, but I feel as good as I ever did. But I’ve had an awful shock.” He hadn’t moved, but I had closed the space between us and stood close in front of him. “You were taking stupid risks for me?”

  “It wasn’t all that—all right, yes, I suppose I was.” He met my eyes.

  “You’re a god.” A god. He was thousands of years old. He had unimaginable powers. And he was just standing there.

  “That doesn’t stop me being confused and wanting to learn things.”

  “Evidently not.”

  “Or truly liking you.” The strange thing was how little it changed the way I felt about him. I felt unworthy of him. But I had always felt unworthy of him. And there was still a vulnerability in his eyes. “Are you going to hit me?”

  I reached out and tapped his chest lightly. “If I’m going to hit you we should go to the palaestra. There are people passing, and this temple is open all around. They’d see us wrestling in here.” It wasn’t wrestling I wanted to do with him. It never had been. “But I think we should go to Thessaly.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “For one thing, it’s close. For another, Sokrates has been missing you. And thirdly, Sokrates knows. He’s the only one. I didn’t tell him. He recognized me.”

  “Of course he did. I was there. And that’s why he immediately started off on whether we can trust the gods.” I felt stupid for not understanding at the time.

  Pytheas took my hand. His hand didn’t feel any different from the way it always did—always when I was myself and cared about it, that is. “He can trust me,” he said. “And so can you.”

  I looked at him sideways. “Those the gods love … tend to come to terrible ends.”

  “That’s Father. And … some of the others, I suppose. But I do my best for my friends. I can’t do anything about Fate or Necessity, or directly against the will of other gods, but so far as I can, I always do my best for them.”

  We started walking together towards Thessaly. I thought through all the stories I knew about Apollo. “What about Nio
be?”

  “She badmouthed my mother. Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t punish my enemies.” He was looking at me sideways, awkwardly.

  “Well, being a god explains why you’re so hopeless at being a human being sometimes,” I said.

  He laughed. “I was so worried about you finding out. I can’t believe you know and it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “It makes a difference,” I said.

  “But you’re talking to me the same way?” He seemed tentative.

  “You’re still you.” That was what I felt very strongly. Pytheas was still Pytheas, the way he always had been. I just understood him better now. It was like the thing with Klymene. I didn’t feel that he’d been deceiving me, just that this was the thing he had kept quiet, a thing that helped me make sense of him. But the implications were still slowly sinking in. Maybe it was because my mind had been wrapped in wool for so long.

  “And what you said to Athene?” he asked.

  “That I’m a gold of this city and she’d better trust my word if she hasn’t been wasting her time here for eight years?”

  Pytheas laughed. “That was perfect, though she’ll take a while to get over it. But I meant the other thing. That you’re my friend and my votary.”

  “Yes.” I stopped walking, and he stopped too. “But you know that. You knew that before. What else were we talking about up on the wall? Except for you not mentioning the fact that you’re Apollo.”

  “What it means for you to be my votary is that the other gods can’t do anything to you without my permission,” he said.

  “I know. And you can do anything you want. I have read about this.” We started walking again. We were quite close to Thessaly now. “I’m walking with the gods,” I said, and giggled. Then I stopped. “What’s that?”

  The marble slabs of the pathway stretching out before us, as far as Thessaly and further, stretching out up the street from there, were all cut with words. “It’s the workers’ halves of dialogues,” Pytheas said. “I did want to tell you, but you weren’t listening to anything anyone said.”

  “They’re talking back?” I was delighted. “I knew it wasn’t Kebes.”

  “They’re talking back to Sokrates at great length,” Pytheas said. “So it seems he was right and everyone else was wrong, not for the first time. They’ve had a major debate about slavery in the Chamber, and Sokrates is trying to persuade the workers to work, by first finding out what they want and then seeing whether we can offer it to them. It’s all terribly exciting. Aristomache apparently made a wonderful speech about Plato and freedom.”

  “She’s great. I’m sorry I missed that. Did I miss anything else?”

  “You’d have missed that anyway, it took place in closed Chamber. Sokrates told me about it afterwards.”

  Just then we saw Sokrates, up the street a way past Thessaly. He was talking to a worker, who was carving replies into the marble. “Soon the whole city is going to be paved in Socratic dialogues,” Pytheas said. “It’s so appropriate that I’m amazed they didn’t think of it from the start.”

  “It’s wonderful,” I said, starting to read some of it. Just then Sokrates saw us, said something to the worker he was talking to and bounded towards us.

  “Simmea!” he said. “Joy to you! How wonderful to see you restored to yourself.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you too. As for my restoration, it’s divine intervention,” I said.

  His keen eyes went from Pytheas to me. “I see. Perhaps we should go into the garden and sit down and talk about this?”

  “That would be excellent, but do you have anything to eat? I feel as if I haven’t eaten anything in half a year.”

  Sokrates looked bemused as he opened the door. “I don’t think I do. Maybe I have some lemons?”

  Pytheas reached into the fold of his kiton and produced a goat cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves. Sokrates led the way through to the garden. I sat on the ground by the tree, getting down easily, in a way that I’d taken for granted until recently. Pytheas leaned on the tree and I leaned back against him as I often did here. Sokrates came out with three slightly wizened lemons and handed us one each. I broke off chunks of the cheese and started to eat it.

  “Do you want to hear about my success with the workers, or should we discuss the nature of the gods?” Sokrates asked.

  “He says he’s Apollo and he always does his best for his friends, under the constraints of Necessity and Fate and other gods,” I said.

  “I can still talk, you know,” Pytheas protested.

  I stopped. “Go ahead then.”

  “Is there anything new from the workers?” he asked.

  Sokrates threw his head back and laughed, and I laughed too. Sokrates mopped his eyes with a corner of his kiton. “Why did you come here?” he asked.

  “To talk to you,” Pytheas said.

  “I didn’t mean this afternoon, double-tongued one, though it’s interesting that you want to talk to me about this now when you’ve been avoiding it for so long. Why did you come to the city? Unless you did that to talk to me?”

  “That was part of the attraction,” Pytheas admitted. “But seriously, I wanted to experience being a mortal. I wanted to learn about volition and equal significance.”

  “And have you been learning about them?” Sokrates asked.

  “You know he has,” I said.

  “Volition and equal significance,” Sokrates said. “What interesting subjects for a god to need to study!”

  “You know we don’t know everything. Well, except for Father.”

  “It’s just exactly what I’ve been thinking about with the workers,” Sokrates went on, as if Pytheas hadn’t spoken. His eyes were very sharp. “Both of those things. The masters were not prepared to see them in the workers, as the gods were perhaps not prepared to see them in us?”

  “I don’t know what the other gods know about it. Athene knew.”

  “Did she now? And still she chose to do this to us?”

  Sitting as we were, I could feel Pytheas draw breath and then let it go before drawing breath again to speak. “Is this really the conversation you want to have with me?”

  Sokrates laughed again, a short bark of a laugh. “Should I ask you instead what happens to souls before birth and after death?”

  “I could tell you,” Pytheas said.

  I sat up and moved to where I could see his face. “It’s what Plato wrote in the Phaedo, isn’t it?”

  “That piece of misrepresentation,” Sokrates said, automatically, as he always did whenever that dialogue was mentioned.

  “Close enough,” Pytheas said.

  “Then we did choose,” I said.

  “I certainly didn’t,” Sokrates said.

  “You don’t know it, but you did. When your eyes were open, in the underworld, you chose a life that would lead you closer to excellence, and it led you here. And me. And Kebes, and I can’t wait to tell him.”

  “You can’t tell Kebes,” Pytheas said, alarmed.

  Sokrates was blinking. “No, I might have chosen my life to lead me to excellence despite the diversion here at the last minute,” he said.

  “That doesn’t hold for Kebes,” I said.

  “Simmea, really, you can’t tell him!”

  “I know. I promised. But I’m right, aren’t I? We chose, knowing, and then drank from Lethe and forgot. So, volition. How about the workers? Do they have souls?”

  Pytheas started to answer, then stopped. “I don’t know. I don’t even have a belief on the subject. I thought not.”

  “How could a being have desires, and plans, and think, and not have a soul?” Sokrates asked.

  “How could a being made by men out of glass and metal have a soul?” Pytheas asked.

  “How could a being made by women out of blood and sperm?” I countered. “Where did souls come from? How many are there?”

  “Athene probably knows,” Pytheas said. “But I don’t want to ask her while she’s still angry.
There were already people and they already had souls by the time I was born. As for how many, lots. Lots and lots. The underworld is practically solid with them.”

  I looked at Sokrates, who was twisting his beard in his fingers and staring at Pytheas. “If you are present in the world, why do you keep so secret?” he asked.

  Pytheas laughed. “Sokrates, I sent a keeper—a daemon to whisper in your ear every time you were going to do something dangerous for your whole life, and you call that keeping secret?”

  “Why don’t you do that for everyone?”

  “I only have so many daemons, and not everyone can hear them, or wants to. I do it for my friends.” His eyes met mine for a second.

  “And you can change time?”

  “Only time that nobody cares about. Some bits of time are stiff with divine attention. Here, before the Trojan War, and on Kallisti, nobody was looking until Athene started this.”

  “And the volcano will destroy the evidence,” I said. I had just put this together in my mind.

  “Klio tells me that this island isn’t round but a semi-circle by my own era,” Sokrates confirmed.

  “I hope we’ll have warning to leave in time,” I said. I looked at Pytheas.

  He spread his hands. “I hope so too,” he said.

  31

  APOLLO

  I had always thought that if she knew she would be intimidated, but I should have known better. Almost everyone is intimidated, it’s normal, it’s why we go about in disguise so much. Being capable of intimidating people is useful. Being surrounded by people who are intimidated all the time is miserable and tiresome. I’ve always hated people grovelling too. I thought she’d change to me. But instead she immediately started to analyze the whole thing. It was wonderful. It was what I should have expected. It was then that I came to truly love her.

  “So you don’t know the future?” Sokrates asked.

  “All of us here know a lot about the future,” I said. “I don’t know my personal future. None of us do. Except maybe Father. Usually I live outside time, and I can go into time when I want to. So I know a lot about time, and it doesn’t have future and past, it’s just there, spooling out and I can step into it where I want to. Think of it like a scroll that I can open up anywhere. It lets me give oracles, though half the purpose of oracles is to be mysterious, not to give information. Sometimes it’s a way of helping people, or just getting some information across. But usually it’s a useless way of warning people, no matter how much I might want to. Anyway, right now I’m living in time, just the same as you are.”