The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “How does that work?” Simmea asked. “Being outside time, but having your own personal time?”

  “It’s a Mystery,” I said.

  “By which you mean you don’t understand it?” Sokrates asked.

  “By which I mean it’s an actual Mystery that maybe Father understands and the rest of us just live with. There are lots of things the gods don’t understand.” I smiled. “And we can work on that. The three of us. This is so wonderful.”

  “Is this what you came here for?” Sokrates asked.

  “What? To have a dialogue with you about things the gods don’t understand? Wouldn’t that have been a marvellous reason? But no, I never thought of it. I told you. I wanted to be a mortal to learn about volition and equal significance.”

  “But you could have done that anywhere,” he said. “Athens would have taught you that, or Troy for that matter. Why here?”

  “It seemed like such an interesting idea,” I said. “And Athene did tell me you would be here, and I have always been your friend.” I looked at Simmea. “I wanted to grow in excellence.”

  “But you’re already a god,” Simmea said.

  “There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”

  She nodded, attuned to that idea with every fiber. It was so good to have her back. The weeks she’d been sunk in postpartum depression had been horribly difficult for me. I kept wanting to tell her things, to hear her ideas about them. It reminded me too much of death. Mortal death is such a hard thing. Yes, there’s rebirth of the soul, but the soul isn’t the personality. It doesn’t share memories. I try to visit my mortal friends sparingly so that I can keep having times when I can visit them. Bach’s sixty years of continuous inspired music happened over thousands of years of my own life, and there are still some few days I’m saving where I could drop in and chat. (It’s a calumny about those the gods love dying young. Fate and Necessity are real constraints, but apart from them we do our best for our friends.)

  “And you thought you could become your best self here in the city?” Sokrates asked.

  Simmea was nodding.

  “I thought I could increase excellence, and it would be interesting,” I said. “I wanted to see what happened here.”

  “And you are truly here,” Sokrates said.

  “Assuredly, Sokrates, that is the case,” I said, mockingly. “I can’t resume my powers except by dying and taking them up again.”

  “But Athene has all her powers,” Simmea said. “She was using them to intimidate me.”

  “To intimidate you!” It was rare to see Sokrates lose his temper, but he came close now.

  “I told her if she didn’t trust me as a gold of this city to keep my word, then what had she been doing? And she accepted that.”

  “Why was she there?” Sokrates asked, still angry.

  “I needed divine intervention to heal Simmea, and as I was just saying, I didn’t have any.” I shrugged.

  “We can all call on the gods,” Sokrates said.

  “But it’s a question of whether they’re listening. Having some power helps it get through.”

  Simmea looked at me with eyes full of worship, just like always, but still with that edge that meant she was absolutely ready all the same to beat me in debate or in the palaestra. “I’m so glad to be healed. It was so horrible not caring about anything.”

  “If I’d had my powers and you’d asked me, I could have healed you with a touch, without asking anyone anything. It was unbearable to see you suffering and not to be able to do that.”

  “But an essential part of human experience,” Sokrates said.

  “I stuck it out for two months,” I said. “And it’s not an essential part of human experience to know you could do something to help and choose not to do it. Athene didn’t want to help, I had to beg her. That isn’t easy for me.”

  “Would she talk to me?” Sokrates asked.

  “I’m sure she would. Hasn’t she already? She brought you here. You’re her votary as well as mine.”

  “I mean would she talk to me the way you are talking to me?”

  “I’d be very surprised if she would,” I said. “She’s here, but she’s not incarnate. She’s still detached.”

  “Would she debate me? In front of everyone?”

  “On what?” I asked. He seemed very focused on the idea.

  “On the good life. The Just City.”

  Simmea laughed. “I’d love to see that.”

  “Everyone would,” Sokrates said. “Will you ask her? I’d really like to initiate a series of debates with her.”

  “When she has calmed down a bit,” I said. “And when we’ve sorted out the issue of the workers a bit more.”

  “What’s going on with them?” Simmea asked. “They’re really thinking and wanting things?”

  “They can choose the better over the worse, thus clearly demonstrating that they have souls,” Sokrates said. “The whole city is in turmoil over it.”

  “If they have souls, I don’t know whether they’re like human souls,” I said.

  “It would be logical for them to come from the same pool of souls,” Sokrates said. “Man and woman, animal and worker. You said there’s no shortage. And Pythagoras believed that every soul had a unique number, and that when those numbers added up again the soul would be reborn.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If they each have a unique number then we’re certainly not going to run out soon. But as far as I know, the souls are reborn when they find their way through the underworld, not when numbers add up. But numbers might be adding up without my being aware of it. There certainly do seem to be patterns in the world.”

  “The workers each have a unique number,” Simmea pointed out.

  “That’s true, and it’s inscribed over their livers,” Sokrates said. He looked at me.

  “Minds are in the brain, truly,” I said. “Souls are harder to locate.”

  “Ikaros has some interesting beliefs,” Sokrates said, carefully.

  I laughed. “He does.”

  “He thinks man is the greatest of all things, being between animals and gods and partaking of both natures.”

  I nodded. “Yes. I didn’t really understand that until I was incarnate, but he does have a point. There are some wonderful things about being human.”

  “He thinks there are greater gods, and the Olympians are a circle of lesser divinities serving the greater ones. He thinks there are many such circles.” Sokrates raised an eyebrow.

  I hesitated. “Many circles is right; all human cultures have their own appropriate gods. But the only thing on top is Father. It isn’t a set of concentric rings the way Ikaros wrote—unless he’s changed his mind. I haven’t talked to him about it recently. He thought of it as a hierarchy with divinities subordinated to others. It isn’t like that at all. It’s a set of circles of gods pretty much equal to each other but with different responsibilities, and linked by Father.” I sketched circles in the dust, overlapping in the centre and a tiny bit at the edges.

  “And his thoughts about the divine son Jesus and his mother the Queen of Heaven, and sin and forgiveness and reconciling all religions with all other religions?”

  “Christianity is one of those circles.” I put my finger down in one. “Jesus is just as real and just as much Father’s son as I am. He’s one of the Elohim who incarnated. The eras when that was the dominant ideology in Europe tend to be a little inimical to me, but I do have friends there. And they made some wonderful art, especially in the Renaissance, which is where Ikaros comes from.”

  Sokrates rocked back on his heels. “You should explain these things to him.”

  “Tell Ikaros? The last thing he wants is certainty. About anything. That’s why he chose that name. And he’s a favorite of Athene’s. She wouldn’t like me interfering with him.” For that matter, I wondered how she liked his newest theories on religion.

  Simmea had
eaten a whole cheese and two lemons and was absentmindedly licking the chestnut leaves the cheese had been wrapped in. “What’s in the overlap between the circles?” she asked, pointing at where they touched at the edges.

  “Well, say there’s a man out on the edges of Alexander’s empire, in Bactria. And when he’s sick he prays to Kuan Yin, the Mother of Mercy, not to me. But when he’s composing poetry in Greek, it’s me he looks to. That’s the kind of case where the circles overlap, when cultures come together like that.”

  Sokrates nodded at the circles. “And what does your Father want, alone in the middle?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “None. I never have had. I wish I knew.”

  “Whereas what you want is to increase your excellence,” Simmea said.

  “And look after your friends,” Sokrates said, rocking back on his heels.

  “And increase the excellence of the world,” I added. “In any number of different ways.”

  “And what does Athene want?” Simmea looked up from the leaves to meet my eyes.

  “To know everything there is to know,” I said. They were silent for a moment, considering that. “I expect she wants to increase the world’s excellence too. But it’s knowing everything that she prioritizes.”

  “Do the gods have souls?” Sokrates asked, unexpectedly.

  “Certainly,” I said, surprised. “How else would I be here like this?”

  “You went down into the underworld and were reborn as a baby, in the hills above Delphi as you told me?”

  “Yes…” I didn’t see where he was going at all.

  “Then maybe you chose this life so that you could talk to us about the Mysteries.”

  I laughed, delighted at the thought. “I only wet my lips in Lethe.”

  “But wouldn’t that be enough to forget the future of the life you chose?” Simmea asked.

  “Yes—that’s why I did it. And in any case, we make choices and change everything. There’s Fate and Necessity, but no destiny, no Providence. Fate is a line drawn around the possibilities of a life. You can’t overstep that line, but as long as you stay within the lines you can do anything. You can concentrate on some parts of what’s possible and ignore others. Excellence consists of trying to fill out as much of what’s allotted as you can, but always without being able to see the lines Fate has drawn. Souls choose lives based on what they hope to learn. Say a man has been dismissive to women. He may choose to live as a woman next time, to learn that hard lesson. Or a slave owner might choose the life of a slave, when their eyes are opened. It’s not punishment. It’s a desire to learn and become better. They choose lives based on the hope of learning things. But it’s a hope. Nothing is inevitable. Choices are real all the way along. You could have hit me or walked away, and it’s nothing you or I chose before birth that affects that, it’s what you chose in that moment.”

  “Hit you?” Sokrates asked.

  “A fight we had once,” Simmea said, her cheeks glowing. “Or for that matter, earlier today.” She jumped up in one fluid motion, her old self again, no longer needing hauling up from the ground as she had. “I’m still starving, and it’s nearly dinner time. Come with me to Florentia, both of you, we can look at beautiful beautiful Botticellis and eat.”

  Sokrates and I got to our feet. “I can tell you about the workers,” he said.

  “Before we go out—you really won’t tell Kebes, will you?” I asked.

  Simmea looked down her nose at me. “He’d keep your secret. But I won’t tell anyone. I said I wouldn’t. You know you can trust me.”

  “And later we can consider your Mysteries,” Sokrates said.

  32

  SIMMEA

  We walked to Florentia and talked, and ate dinner and talked, and walked back to Thessaly and talked, and then Pytheas walked back to Hyssop with me in the dark, still talking. In addition to the questions of Pytheas and of the workers, it seemed that all ten thousand and eighty children and roughly three hundred masters in the city wanted to come up to wish me joy and tell me how pleased they were that I was better. That’s hyperbole, but only a little—it was good to know that I had so many friends and that I’d been missed.

  “You were like a line-drawing,” Ficino said at dinner. “A thin rubbed cartoon of yourself.”

  “Asklepius restored me,” I said. That’s what I told everyone, and it was the truth. Axiothea thought the iron lozenges probably helped. Everyone was delighted. If I’d still been sick I’d have wept at all the emotion they poured onto me. As it was I ate voraciously, three helpings of pasta and two of shrimp. Kebes came in when I was on my second plate and came to sit with us, filling in details about the workers as Sokrates talked. “I’m so glad to be able to talk to you, Simmea,” he said. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you too,” I said, and it was true. “I was just too tired to care.”

  When I’d finished eating, I filled the fold of my kiton with apples and cheese for later. As I did it, I realised something else that had changed. “My breasts! They aren’t full of milk!” I pulled down the front of my kiton to examine them. They were back to their normal small size and they didn’t hurt. There were pale marks on the sides of them, similar to the ones on my stomach where the skin had stretched, but otherwise they were as they had been before the pregnancy.

  “Your melancholy must have been connected with the milk,” Ficino said. “How unusual. Well, there will be enough other mothers to feed all the babies, don’t worry.”

  I hadn’t been worried until then.

  As I pulled my kiton back up, I noticed Kebes looking away uncomfortably. I felt awkward. I hadn’t thought about it. Everyone had seen me naked in the palaestra, and this seemed no different.

  Late that night, after all the conversation, alone in bed in Hyssop, I tried to settle to sleep, and couldn’t. It was as if I’d slept all the sleep in my exhaustion and there was none left. Whenever I started to doze I’d suddenly remember that Pytheas was Apollo and start fully awake. Apollo! How could I not have noticed? Now I knew there were so many indications.

  Eventually I did manage to sleep. The next morning, immediately after eating two big bowls of lovely grain porridge with milk and honey, I went to the nurseries and explained to Andromeda that I had been cured of my lethargy and had no more milk to offer. She was incredulous even after she examined my breasts. She was pregnant herself now, and I sat with her for a little while, listening to her symptoms and being sympathetic. Then I went towards the palaestra. There was writing inscribed on the path, in Greek but in Latin letters.

  “Want to make build. Want to make art. Want to talk. Want to decide.” There was a manifesto, I thought. Sokrates had explained the night before that the workers were being provisionally considered people, but not yet citizens. Would they all be iron and bronze, I wondered, or might some of them become silver and even gold? If Sokrates befriended them, surely they would. I smiled at the thought.

  In the palaestra I exercised with weights, rejoicing in feeling back in form. Women who had given birth were not allowed to wrestle for six months, so I didn’t try, though I felt fit for it. I ran around and around and wasn’t winded. There was a chill wind blowing, but exercise soon warmed me. At last Pytheas came. He looked so delighted to see me that I ran over and hugged him, at which he looked even more delighted. “You’ve been exercising. Let me scrape you off,” he said.

  We went over by the fountain with oil and a scraper. Pytheas and I had oiled each other hundreds, thousands of times, but this time I was acutely aware of the sensations. It was as if my sense of touch, from being deadened, was now twice as alive. “I’m so glad you’re better,” he said.

  “Athene said it wasn’t a curse,” I said, as he scraped the oil off my legs. “But how could sickness affect my mind so that I lost all my animation?”

  “Your mind is in your body, and there are a lot of things happening in bodies with pregnancy,” Pytheas said. “It’s one reason many men have claimed women cannot be
philosophical.”

  “It’s true that I couldn’t be philosophical when I was like that.” I hated the thought. “I couldn’t be anything. I could barely manage to hold out my shape in the world.”

  “No. You couldn’t be. And you are sad one day every month, I have observed it.” Pytheas shook his head. “But the rest of the time you’re absolutely the most philosophical person I know, excepting only Sokrates.”

  “And I’ve lost my milk. Ficino said it must have been connected to the illness, perhaps making me ill.”

  “There are enough mothers still to feed the babies,” Pytheas said, scraping my breasts and stomach now. “Your little one won’t starve.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  He barely hesitated. “I have. He’s thriving.”

  “What did Ficino call him? No, wait, don’t tell me. I’m not sure I ought to know.”

  “Neleus,” Pytheas said, firmly. A good name, and I was glad to know. I swore in my heart to Zeus and Demeter that I wouldn’t act any differently towards him, but it was good to know in any case. “And your next son will be mine.”

  “I’m not sure I can face going through that again,” I said. “Not so much the pregnancy and birth as the sickness after, now that I’ve shaken it off.”

  Pytheas stopped scraping. “You’ll have to do it at least once more. All the women will have to have two children, and some of them will have to have three, because even if they’re not exposing them, some will surely die.” He sounded far too calm about it.

  “Well, if I have to then—wait, would a son of yours be a hero?”

  “Of course.” He sounded entirely confident.