The Plot to Save Socrates (Sierra Waters Book 1)

by Paul Levinson

  "Alcibiades told me about your visit."

  "You see, I've been thinking about this. I think both of you should come forward to this time. Board an airship back to New York. Live your life, enjoy your life, together. Why risk dying, needlessly?"

  Sierra shook her head no, slowly. "We won't die."

  "You can't be sure of that," Appleton responded. "But we can be sure that Socrates cannot survive, will not survive, even if he goes with Andros -- surely you understand why. If you stay enthralled in this, you will have risked your life for nothing!"

  "Have you actually seen Socrates die? The real Socrates, not a double?"

  "No," Appleton said. "But I need not have seen that to know that Socrates cannot survive .... Think about it: Have you seen any change in the world, even the smallest, since you and I and your colleagues started dashing around in time?"

  "If we rescue Socrates and leave his double to die, we won't see any changes until Socrates appears at some other time in history. Perhaps he'll be taken to the far future, beyond your time or mine."

  Appleton considered. "True, if he is taken to a future beyond yours. But how can you be sure that is the reason, and not simply that he -- despite your best efforts, despite jeopardizing your own life -- will not survive?"

  "We can't decide this argument by logic," Sierra said, "only by seeing what actually happens if Socrates is really rescued, and what happens afterward.... Heron and Thomas seem convinced--"

  "Are they?"

  Sierra said nothing, then, "I suppose I don't know Heron well enough to be certain about anything regarding him."

  Appleton shook his head. "If I am wrong, and you go back to New York, and live your life, then who will be hurt by that? If it is written in some book of inevitability that Socrates is to be saved, then someone else can do it, will do it, and you will be safe. You and Socrates will both live. Alcibiades, too. But if I am right, and you go back to that night--"

  "I'm not going back to that night."

  Appleton looked at her, hoping to be hopeful.

  "I'm not going back to New York, either -- not yet."

  "Where are you going, then?"

  "Back to Alcibiades."

  "Good--"

  "And we'll approach that night at the prison together."

  Appleton shook his head sadly. "I fear nothing of value can come out of that attempt. And you'll be risking--"

  "If anyone is going to die in the attempt to save Socrates, it will be Alcibiades, not me," Sierra said, voice raw with emotion. "He is dead already, in one universe. I want to make sure he stays alive in this one."

  "Then save him! Don't let him die like your friend Maxwell--"

  "That's exactly what I'm trying to do!"

  "Take him to New York, then, not the prison."

  "I'll never convince Alcibiades to stay away from Socrates," Sierra responded. "He's a very stubborn man. He--"

  Sierra and Appleton noticed a light flickering on the wall. "I believe that means someone has entered the restaurant," Appleton said. "I saw it flicker about an hour before you arrived -- I opened the door of this room, just a crack, to see who was out there. It was just a delivery of wine, but--"

  "You think this could be Heron?" Sierra asked.

  "I don't know. It could be--"

  Sierra hugged him again, impulsively. Then she let go,and ran to one of the chairs. "Please, do what you can to give me a few moments, if it is Heron out there--"

  Appleton walked towards her--

  "Please--" she repeated.

  He stopped. He struggled with emotions that were pulling him, literally, in two different ways. "Yes," he said, hoarsely, after a long moment. "I'll do what I can."

  "Thank you," she said, seated in the chair, leaning over the control panel. She looked up one last time at Appleton. "What will you do, after I leave, if..."

  "If I can still move, of my own volition? I don't know," Appleton said. "Maybe take the sky back to New York, and then a chair to my own time and family.... I doubt I'll publish anything about this, or even speak of it to anyone, for now." He closed his eyes, and saw the nineteenth-century Hudson, flowing in blues and greens outside his window. His missed his past. "I'm sure it will seem as if I hadn't been gone at all..."

  * * *

  [Athens, 400 BC]

  Sierra's chair reached its destination in a pounding pulse beat. The bubble retracted. She took a deep breath and walked on what she prayed was a 402-BCE or thereabouts dirt floor.

  She had no way to confirm the date in this house. They didn't hang calendars on refrigerators in this age. She did not know where Alcibiades was, except he was not here. She knew the location of most of his hideaways, but since she couldn't be positive of the date, she thought it didn't make sense to look for him in any of them. Who knew who else might be there right now.

  The agora was the logical place to learn the date.

  She found the stash of local clothing and changed.

  * * *

  The sun was bright and kind. The air was rich, salty, exciting -- like a big Marguerita come to watercolor life. Jimmy Buffet, one of her favorite old-time singers, would have fit right in here...

  She approached a peddler on the road. "Do you know Socrates?" she asked him. That would be a good way of homing in on the date -- or, at least, the important aspect of the date for her, which was arriving after she had left Alcibiades but before the death of Socrates.

  The man squinted at her. His face creased in a thousand lines. He walked past her.

  I guess I can take that for a no, she thought -- or perhaps he didn't understand my Greek.

  She next encountered two men, who looked to be in their twenties. Their garb said they were reasonably well off, likely of the merchant class. They smiled at her, copiously.

  She returned the favor. These seemed better prospects than the peddler. "Do you know if Socrates is speaking, anywhere in the polis?"

  They stopped. One looked, bemused, at Sierra. The other laughed.

  "Socrates?" the bemused one responded. "If he is speaking somewhere, it is to himself. No one pays attention to that annoying old man."

  "No, why not?" Sierra asked, still smiling. Good, this at least meant Socrates was alive, and she had not arrived too late to help Alcibiades on that night before the hemlock. She regretted that she had left Alcibiades at all.

  "Socrates licks the behinds of the aristocracy, everyone knows it," the one who had been laughing told her. He had stopped laughing now, but looked pleased at himself that he dared to utter such a coarse phrase to a woman he did not know.

  "So Socrates is not corrupting the morals of Athenian youth?" Sierra asked. So much for the main charge that would be brought against him at his trial -- though there was no way of knowing if these two specimens were representative of anyone other than themselves.

  This time they both laughed. One started to ask if she would like to join them for some late-afternoon wine--

  "Thank you," she interrupted him. "A very gracious offer that I would otherwise accept gladly, but I do have an appointment with someone in the agora."

  He started to say something else. Sierra gave him and his friend her maximum amplitude smile, and walked briskly away towards the marketplace.

  * * *

  She approached Athens, and glanced at the remnants of the long walls. She had noticed them when she and Alcibiades and Heron had first walked this path from Piraeus. They seemed to spring from the earth like stubborn thumbs of stone, awaiting the tender hand of someone to hold them and make them live for centuries. Konan would do that, if she remembered correctly, in 393 BC. Just as she aimed to do about Alcibiades.... Everything here breathed his presence. Even the architect, Hippodamus of Miletus, who had designed these walls. Miletus meant Alcibiades to her, too....

  The sun was weakening as she entered the agora. The aromas and breeze upon her face were more vivid than anything she saw. But she looked anyway, everywhere. She saw no one familiar...

  Loo
king at people, of course, invited their attention. It was unwanted by Sierra until--

  "Excuse me. I could not help but notice your gaze." He was a man about the age of the duo on the road. Except he was calm and serious.

  "I am sorry," she said. "I ... was looking for someone."

  "Who? Maybe I know him."

  Sierra considered. She couldn't say Alcibiades, because he was supposed to be dead. She shook her head. "It is ... private. But thank you for your good offer." She started to walk away--

  "Take a chance with me. Take a chance with the cosmos," he said. "Mention his name. Maybe I can help you."

  "I..." She shook her head again, and walked a step further--

  "I will take the chance, then," he said. "Is it Alcibiades you seek?"

  She regarded the young man. He had broad shoulders.

  "Are you Ampharete? He described you to me quite carefully, and you look like his description. But words and images are not the same, and the first can never do full justice to the second."

  "Who are you?"

  "I am Plato, one of his loyal students. I, or someone like me, has been watching for you in the agora for months now. Alcibiades was hoping that you might return."

  * * *

  Sierra let Plato take her to Alcibiades. She tried to say as little as possible during the 30-minute walk, aware that her companion was a giant conduit to all future history, arguably one of the most important people who had ever lived...

  If he lived. If not ... well, Sierra couldn't even begin to fathom the twisted consequences...She hoped Plato couldn't hear her heartbeat. She struggled to keep it from drowning out her every thought...

  What had Plato done in the original history -- the history of the world she had grown up in, before she had been drawn into this? Not much was known about him in these years...

  What had Alcibiades told him? Whatever it was, Sierra thought she could rely on Alcibiades not to have told Plato anything which could compromise their situation -- or the whole subsequent history of the world--

  "You are quiet and thoughtful," Plato said. "In my experience, that is unusual for a woman."

  Alcibiades loathed Plato -- or what he would become. What had happened that would change that? "And is it in your experience that generalizations about a category or class of people or things apply, inevitably, to all members of that class?"

  Young Plato smiled very slightly. "Are you a philosopher, Ampharete? If so, you are the first woman philosopher of my acquaintance."

  And could she really trust Plato? Perhaps he had deluded Alcibiades in some way, and Alcibiades's dislike of Plato would be justified, after all, by some kind of treachery Plato was about to pull, on her and Alcibiades.... "I studied philosophy," she said, "does that make me a philosopher?"

  "I would say no," Plato replied. "Philosophers have many students, and most are not themselves philosophers."

  "Are you a philosopher, then? Is your friend, Alcibiades?"

  "You can ask him yourself," Plato said. "He is in that dwelling." Plato pointed to a nondescript two-story house, about a hundred feet down the road. Ampharete had not seen it before. "As for my opinion," Plato continued, "I would say Alcibiades is more a king, in training, than a philosopher. Though perhaps there is no contradiction in the two pursuits."

  "And you? Would you call yourself a philosopher?"

  "It is not for me to call myself anything -- it is for others to decide," Plato said. "Socrates says that love of anything in excess -- including knowledge -- can lead to bad results. For if you love something that much, then you can easily come to love its mere appearance, and then you are only fooling yourself."

  "How is Socrates? Have you seen him, recently?" Sierra could not contain her question.

  Plato looked at her with nearly a smile in his eye, and then at the dwelling, which they now were about to enter. "He is fine. He was here, talking with Alcibiades, just last evening."

  * * *

  They entered the house. It looked -- and felt -- small, about fifty square feet. Sierra dared not ask if Socrates might be in the house. She would find out soon enough.

  She walked down the narrow hall with Plato. Who would she be more thrilled to the core to see in the next moment -- Alcibiades or Socrates? She had not even completely caught her breath or wits yet about Plato--

  "Ampharete--"

  And the instant she heard that voice speak her name, she had her answer--

  He stroked her face with the soft part of his thumb, and pulled back an inch or two to look at her. "You were away longer than you intended. I know you did not want that."

  Plato will see this, some part of her brain thought. She didn't care ... it didn't matter .... everything had changed. History had changed the moment they rescued Alcibiades. Just as she had told him many times.... Every word that he or anyone who knew him now spoke was writing a new page of history. So the Plato she had been reading all of her life might well be altered, had to be altered, in some small way informed and re-formed by what Plato just saw, or thought he saw, her tongue caressing Alcibiades' .... Good, that was a better history, a better world, if only for that. Her goal, her job now, was to make this the history that lasted, that stuck, that took. The history that everyone into perpetuity would know...

  She looked around.

  "Plato left," Alcibiades said. "You met him in the agora?"

  She nodded.

  "It was almost coincidence," Alcibiades continued. "I hope you weren't too surprised. I decided to include Plato in my circle just a few months ago. I thought it was safer to have him inside, and close to me, than outside, and close to who knew what or whom."

  "Your circle?"

  "Yes. A small group, mostly old friends, that I have been gathering to help me with Socrates. Some good fighters, some good thinkers, some both--"

  "Is Socrates here?"

  "No. He was here last evening."

  "So ... he knows?"

  "He knows that I am alive, of course," Alcibiades replied. "But I have not yet told him about the trial, his death sentence, about Andros, whoever he is..."

  "How many years to the trial?" Sierra asked.

  "Months now, not years," Alcibiades replied. "Six months."

  Tears welled in Sierra's eyes. "I did not want to be gone that long. Almost two years...."

  "But you are here with me now."

  * * *

  They made love ... had a simple dinner ... made love again.

  "Those chairs are hopelessly imprecise," Sierra said.

  "You are still unhappy about the six months? It could have been worse. You might have arrived six months from now, or six months after that, or five years ago..."

  "I know."

  "It is probably inevitable, given the nature of miracles," Alcibiades said. "You become accustomed to the miracle, you almost take it for granted, so you want more perfection from it. That is the way with all tools.... And the chairs are only tools, miraculous tools...." He pulled her closer to him, so her hair fell on his face. "This would not be possible without the chairs," he said softly. "I can have no complaints about them in that regard."

  "I do not want you to go through with this," Sierra said. "You are likely to get killed."

  Alcibiades laughed. "It has been that way for a long time -- I already was killed once, if memory serves--"

  "That is why it is especially likely that you will be killed again."

  "The cosmos cleaning up after itself? Keeping things tidy?"

  "It has been suggested, by poets and physicists -- philosophers of nature -- that you cannot escape your fate," Sierra replied. "The universe resists all attempts to alter its lines of time..."

  "You expect me to walk away from this? But I am not supposed to be here now, whatever I do. If you are right about the fates being vexed by attempts to change history, I am their prey now, whether I try to save Socrates or not."

  "Saving Socrates would be a worse affront than you just living. He has had far more impact than.
.."

  "Than I have had? I agree. That is precisely why I want my survival to mean more than I ran and I schemed...." Alcibiades rolled over and away from Sierra.

  "I do not belong here in this world, either," Sierra said, gently. "You and I are two odd numbers. Perhaps, added together, away from here, we will be an even number. More pleasing to the universe."

  Alcibiades smiled and turned back to her. "You are certainly pleasing to me." He kissed her. "Perhaps we should ride the chairs 150 years into the past and steal old Pythagoras from Samos -- he would have been impressed with your numerical reasoning."

  "I am not saying we have to run away," Sierra said. "I just do not want you there on that Andros evening ... Maybe there are other ways of saving Socrates -- perhaps we can prevent him from being put on trial altogether."

  Alcibiades shook his head. "The dangers to history would be insurmountable. You know that. At this moment, a few handfuls of carefully selected men, including Plato, know that I am here. Socrates knows I have survived. At the last minute, when the death of Socrates is imminent, I will tell them more. I may tell Socrates more, sooner. But to work to try prevent him from being brought to trial? That would require me or my intermediaries to contact, attempt to influence, many kinds of people -- over whom I have very little control. I would be better off just murdering his accusers, before they have the chance to make their allegations."

  "What is wrong with that?"

  Alcibiades chuckled. "I should count myself lucky that you care for me."

  "I am trying to make sure that you are not the one who is murdered," Sierra said.

  "If I killed those men, others would arise to take their place," Alcibiades said. "It is a mistake to think that just certain individuals killed Socrates -- no, Athens killed Socrates." Alcibiades sighed. "There are more sides of this than you may realize. I have even discovered-- Wait, let me show you something."

  Alcibiades rose, and walked to the far side of the little bedroom. He returned with a scroll.

  Sierra opened it:

  Socrates. What time is it?

  Visitor. The dawn broke a little while ago.

  Socrates. I must have been sleeping. I did not see you enter.