The Plot to Save Socrates (Sierra Waters Book 1)

by Paul Levinson

  Andr. Yes.

  Soc. In what manner is your world different from mine, that Ithaca and Syracuse are close in yours?

  Andr. My world is the future.

  Soc. Are you saying your city is more advanced in the crafts of transport than this one, and you possess there a new means of conveyance, some swift ship, which permits more rapid travel between Ithaca and Syracuse, and that is why you contend that they are close?

  Andr. There are new means of transport in my world, but they are not the most profound reason why I say the two cities are close.

  Soc. Cities? Ithaca is an island, not a city.

  Andr. Yes, in this world. Your world. Your time.

  Soc. Your time is different from mine? Different from this time? And that is what you meant when you said your world is the future?

  Andr. Yes.

  Soc. You claim to have travelled here from the future? Forgive me. I appreciate your visit at this very late hour. But only a god or a liar would make such a claim. And my fellow Athenians who have sentenced me would be happy to tell you what I think of the gods.

  Andr. I assure you, I am neither god nor liar.

  Soc. Traveling from one age to another cannot be the same as traveling from one place to another, in the same time. I think the two -- time and space -- are very different.

  Andr. That is true.

  Soc. I do not understand how such travel across time could be possible.

  Andr. Could we return to that question later, and consider now how I might help you, were such travel possible?

  Soc. You wish to proceed on the basis of an impossible premise? I suppose such a conversation is preferable to thinking about the hemlock.

  Andr. My point, precisely.

  Soc. Is your world, then, the same as this world, except that your world is in the future?

  Andr. I would say so, generally, yes.

  Soc. Then, if that is true, you would know that I have indeed died -- that I will die, in the next few days. For, that, truly is what I intend to do.

  Andr. We know, in my world, that a body identified as Socrates indeed died after hemlock was ingested. I am here to convince you that that body need not be yours.

  Soc. So far, although I can only be grateful for your ingenuity and good intentions, I cannot say that I am persuaded.

  Andr. May I continue my attempt?

  Soc. If you wish.

  Andr. Let us look again, then, at the nature of souls and life, and examine, if you will, the nature of copies. Do you agree that a statue could be made of you, of such precise resemblance that it could be mistaken for you when viewed at a distance?

  Soc. Yes, I have seen such statues of others. When painted with colors of proper hue, they can quite easily be mistaken for the human being whose image they embody, especially when viewed in dim lighting, in twilight or pre-dawn hours, or, as you say, at a distance.

  Andr. Good. Do you think it possible, then, that such a statue could be made of someone -- of you -- but comprised not of stone but of living material?

  Soc. Yes, I have on occasion seen fine work of that sort constructed not of stone but of wood. Is that what you mean?

  Andr. The replica I have in mind for you would be comprised of something closer to wood than stone, yes.

  Soc. But no one, on close examination of a wooden replica of me, could possibly mistake it for me, or my body. Wood is material that is no longer alive; my body is still alive. I suppose there would be more similarity between wood -- material, once alive, from a tree -- and my body, once dead, and no longer alive.

  Andr. Yes.

  Soc. But, nonetheless, surely no one could confuse a wooden replica of me, however well rendered, with my dead body.

  Andr. No -- no one could confuse those two. But in the case of wood, could you imagine a branch, pulled from a tree, that was still in part alive?

  Soc. Yes. It could be placed in water, and might live for a time. Or, depending upon the tree, its branch could be placed in soil, where it might take root, and eventually give rise to a new tree.

  Andr. Exactly. Now, do you suppose it possible for flesh to exist in that same relationship to your body, as a branch newly pulled from a tree?

  Soc. Flesh taken from a living body is to that living body, as a branch pulled from a tree is to the tree?

  Andr. Yes.

  Soc. But the branch would be mistaken by no one for the tree. Nor would flesh be confused with an entire body, dead or alive.

  Andr. True. But just as that branch, properly planted, and if it was from the right kind of tree, could yield an entire tree, would you grant that flesh, taken from a body and properly treated, could be grown into an entire body?

  Soc. You mean, inserting a severed arm into some special soil, such that an entire body would come forth? I have never heard of such a thing, outside of stories of the gods, and you already know my opinion of gods and men and their stories.

  Andr. Are you acquainted with the story of Cadmus, who raised soldiers from the teeth of dragons sown in the soil?

  Soc. Yes. It is at best a useful myth.

  Andr. Suppose I were to tell you that one way in which my future world is different from this one is that we can make some of those mythic tales come true?

  Soc. You can raise soldiers from the teeth of dragons?

  Andr. No, but we can raise dragons from the teeth of dragons, if the teeth have been preserved in the right way. We call them 'dinosaurs' -- 'terrible lizards'. We can sometimes take something from the teeth -- their essence -- and insert it in a very special kind of soil--

  =============================

  Sierra sighed. That was where the fragment ended. She looked again at the Preface--

  Her outer doorbell sang. Damnit. Who could that be, this time of night? She looked at her watch -- 12:17am/4 April 2042. She touched another device on her couch, and flicked on her guest display, on the far wall. Jesus -- she'd forgotten completely about Max-- No, actually, she had not forgotten. He wasn't due back in New York until tomorrow evening--

  The bell sang again. She cursed, put down the dialog, and buzzed him in.

  He was up the stairs of her brownstone, and at her door, on the second floor, in seconds. She turned from the screen and walked to the old-fashioned peephole in her door. She peered through it, just for good measure. She had to admit, Max looked good.

  She opened the door.

  He walked in grinning, a present of some sort in one hand, a bottle of wine in the other.

  "I thought you were coming back tomorrow," Sierra said.

  "I got an upgrade to an HST," Max said, still smiling. "Long story, short flight -- 45 minutes in the air!"

  "I didn't know they had hypersonic service from Iceland," Sierra said. She realized that her voice sounded a little icy, too.

  Max seemed undaunted. "Well, that's part of the long story. A friend of a friend at the conference I was attending said I could get a free upgrade -- part of some promotion Iceland is doing -- if I took an overnight flight tonight. Except, of course, with that quick jump into the atmosphere and back, I was here in New York well before I left Reykjavic. Incredible timing -- I thought I'd surprise you!"

  Sierra nodded. "Bad timing, for me."

  "Am I interrupting something?" Max asked, finally getting it.

  "Yeah, but not what you think."

  Max managed another smile. "Oh, I'm sure I know what I'm interrupting -- the dissertation, right? Look, I'm sorry. I know how hard you're working on it--"

  Sierra looked at him. She felt a little bad, now. He did look appealing, standing there with wine and a gift. "All right, come on in, but not for long."

  They walked to the kitchen table. Max put his package and bottle down. He reached for her.

  Sierra had forgotten that she was wearing only a robe, and partially open, at that. Make that two things she had forgotten tonight-- no, she had not forgotten about Max's arrival, he had come home a day sooner than expected. But she didn't realize she ha
d forgotten about the open robe until Max put his arm around her, on the inside of the robe. The crook of his arm brushed against the underside of her breast. His hand moved slowly down the small of her back. She knew this would be a little bit longer than "not for long"...

  * * *

  She brought him up to date on the whole bizarre evening, in interludes of conversation over several hours.

  "The Millennium Club?" Max said, with something between admiration and awe. "I'm still in touch with one of the profs on my doctoral committee -- he took me there to lunch last year. They have holdings in Greek and Latin to rival Harvard's." Max was an Assistant Professor of Analogic Studies at Fordham University himself, and by virtue of that expertise, had more than a passing knowledge of the ancient world and its modes of communication. "You know, I never bought that Socrates just allowed himself to die, when Crito was giving him a way to escape."

  "I've always felt the same way," Sierra said, playing absently with Max's hair. "Why not opt to live, and continue your critique, your philosophy? But, you know, time travel and cloning -- that's what the 'visitor' was hawking -- no way they could have been available in Socrates' time, outside of science fiction."

  "Time travel's a tall order in any time," Max said, "no doubt about that. But if it's ever worked out in some future time, then people would be able to get back to our time, Socrates' time, any time, probably just as easily -- the arrival time would likely make no difference, once the technology became available."

  Sierra considered. "Good point ... They've been working for years on some kind of artificial wormhole in California, haven't they?"

  "Yeah -- based on some equations that Kip Thorne worked out decades ago. But as far I know, it's all just theoretical."

  "Better than nothing," Sierra said, and kissed his neck. "Ok. But what about cloning?"

  "Growing a twin of Socrates?" Max shrugged. "Who knows … Socrates talks a little about perfect copies in the Cratylus. A bit reminiscent of your dialog. I do know that the ancients had a lot more knowledge than we give them credit for. So much was lost when the Library at Alexandria was burned -- and it happened more than once. So, granting that they didn't have lasers, or electron or even analog microscopes. But they understood farming. They understood deliberate breeding to improve crops and livestock. So, who knows what they knew -- maybe they knew how to put a swatch of human cells into some kind of medium, where it could grow into a clone. Anyway ... even if they didn't know squat about cloning, if this 'Andros' was really from the future, he could have brought back light-weight equipment with him -- hey, we have already have that, today."

  Sierra moved down, and kissed Max, full on the lips. He had a way of making the surely impossible seem less so. It was at times like this that she understood just why she let him in in the middle of the night.

  * * *

  She was in Thomas' office the next morning. "The librarians in ancient Alexandria make no reference to this, or anything like it. No other reference to anyone named 'Andros,' either," Thomas said, studying his copy of the fragment, while Sierra did the same with hers.

  "Jowett says the Alexandrian lists are unreliable," she replied.

  "Yeah, but he was saying they included shams and spoofs, not that they overlooked Platonic dialogs that were real."

  "Unreliable is unreliable," she maintained. "Lies of commission, lies of omission, just plain mistakes -- they all add up to the same thing."

  Thomas nodded, slightly.

  "The 'Ed.' is really more key than the Alexandrians, isn't he," Sierra continued. "We have only his word for it -- or hers -- about the carbon dating. The translation looks accurate enough, but we have only Ed's word about the original Greek words, as well."

  "You found fault with some of the translation?"

  "No big deal," Sierra replied, "but here, and here, for instance." She pointed to two places in the manuscript. "'Comprised' is a little overkill, pseudo-intellectual. 'Composed' would have been fine."

  Thomas chuckled, approvingly. "The translator is definitely a 'he'," he said.

  "You know him?"

  Thomas nodded.

  "That's why you have confidence that it's not a forgery?" Sierra asked.

  "I saw the original," Thomas replied. "I helped with the translation. 'Comprised,' if I remember correctly, was mine."

  * * *

  Thomas prepared roasted green tea. Sierra sipped, enjoying the aroma as much as the flavor.

  "The original manuscript was breathtaking," Thomas continued. "I was amazed it could survive so long, and in such good condition."

  "How'd they manage that?" Sierra asked.

  "Those Alexandrians were the cream of humanity, at that time," Thomas replied. "What a mix they were -- Greek culture, by way of Macedonia, situated in Egypt, under Roman rule by then. They had literacy rates exceeding anything until our nineteenth century. They had the basis of motion pictures, in persistence of vision toys. They had gadgets that ran on steam. Heron of Alexandria invented them both. And they apparently had ways of preserving documents in airless containers. They survived oxidation, but not the human stupidity that torched their great Library. But this one got away."

  "Ok, so the manuscript is real, at least regarding the creation of this copy in 400 CE. But how do we know that the person who made that copy was just copying and not really creating the fragment -- and the larger story, whatever that may have been -- from scratch? Let's face it, even if we knew for a fact that Plato wrote it, that doesn't mean the story is true. It could just be another of Plato's fictions -- another tale of Atlantis, right?"

  "Yes," Thomas allowed. "All of those points are well taken."

  "Why did you ask me to look at this fragment, now?" Sierra asked. She knew it wasn't necessary to voice the end of the sentence -- "now, when I'm moving so well on my dissertation" -- because Thomas of all people understood that.

  "I wanted you to think about this," he replied, unhelpfully.

  "Yes, but why now?"

  "I'm going away, for a few days."

  She looked at him. His tone concerned her.

  "I have an aneurysm near my heart -- it's likely no big deal. But I had a by-pass and some digital reconstruction around the area five years ago, so any operation on the aneurysm now could be a little tricky. There's a new hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, where they specialize in this."

  "How long ... will you be gone?" Sierra asked.

  "Just the weekend, probably," Thomas replied. "So why don't you take that time to think about the fragment, decide if you'd like to get any more involved in it .... I have complete confidence that you'll be able to get back to your dissertation and finish it with distinction, if you decide to take a little breather on it, first."

  * * *

  She glanced fitfully at some of her notes for her dissertation that evening. "Phoenician alphabet comes to Greece around 900 BCE ... Greek alphabet written from right to left, like Semitic text, 900-600 BCE ... after 600 BCE, Greeks write left to right, top to bottom ... 403 BCE, Ionic version of Greek alphabet used by Athenians ... spurt in literacy ... approximately 400 BCE, Socrates denounces the written word, according to Plato's account in the Phaedrus ... 399 BCE, Socrates drinks the hemlock..."

  She focused on the last four entries, underlining them, circling them, in her mind. Those had always been the most intriguing sections of her dissertation. The Ionic alphabet comes to Athens, revolutionizes literacy there, aggravates Socrates but not Plato -- at least, not enough to stop Plato from writing -- and Socrates dies shortly after. Oh yeah, at the hands of the newly restored Athenian democracy, perhaps energized, solidified, by the written word. So Plato winds up hating democracy, because it killed his beloved mentor, Socrates -- or, actually, because Socrates allowed the death sentence to be carried out, refused Crito's good offer of escape. And Plato, lover of the written word, eventually crafts his masterpiece anti-democratic manifesto, The Republic, inspiration for everything from the totalitarian societies of the twentie
th century to the Islamic "republics" and the Far Eastern cyber-cities of the twenty-first -- government by the wisest, or at least those who deemed themselves the most wise...

  Yeah, that had always been the most fascinating part of her doctoral work, anyway, and now this damned untitled fragment with a new look at the final hours of Socrates ... Even if Thomas was right about its 400 CE authenticity, it was likely no more than some very early science fiction, myth-writing, anyway... But damn it, that was almost as fascinating, in its own right...

  She called Max. "How about we go away to my parents' place for the weekend? Bounce some ideas around?"

  Max was available.

  Then she called Thomas. But all possible numbers only yielded all possible voicemails. She didn't leave a message. That wasn't why she had called. She just wanted to wish the man well, tell him how much he meant to her. She knew he would never have drawn her into this fragment had his operation in Wilmington been assured of success.

  * * *

  Her parents had a little place on Sea Street, in Quivett Neck, near the town of Dennis, on Cape Cod Bay. But they were wintering on the Baltic Sea in NeoRome, formerly Romania. They had the time. Her father had been Chief of Detectives, NYPD, and had taken an early retirement. Her mother was Professor of Mathematics at Harvard, on sabbatical.

  Sierra and Max arrived just in time to see a purple sunset over the stippled grey-blue bay.

  "So, did Socrates ever see anything as beautiful," Max said softly. He ran his hand through Sierra's long dark hair.

  "Probably," she replied. "Piraeus has western views over water.... Certainly Plato did. He travelled as far as Egypt, after the death of Socrates, and spent lots of time in Sicily. He had to have seen at least a few suns swallowed by the sea."

  "You almost expect to see the steam rise," Max remarked.

  "Yeah," Sierra said. She turned to Max, stroked his face, then turned back to the smoldering sunset, which had a slice of orange floating in it now. "Do you think he took Andros up on the offer?" she asked.

  "In reality or in the story?"

  "At this point, I'll settle for the story."

  "Well, Socrates' rejection of Crito's escape plan seems pretty deep-rooted," Max said. "'Suffering is a better response to evil than committing another evil' -- didn't Socrates say something like that? And he thought running away was an evil."