Necessity

by Jo Walton

  “They probably don’t spare a thought for Plato’s Republic.”

  “I do,” he said. “As well as working on my new theory of the universe.”

  “Newer than the New Concordance?” I wondered whether to tell him now what had been going on among the Ikarians on Plato.

  “The New Concordance arose out of realizing that the Republic wasn’t working, couldn’t work, because Plato was wrong about the nature of the soul. The philosophical soul can feel love, in addition to desiring the Good. Love isn’t simply a way towards opening the soul to God. So I had to rethink everything. They were doing the same in Psyche, coming to different conclusions but working on the same basis. If Plato had been right about that, it would all have worked properly. The problem on Kallisti was that we got overfocused on tweaking practical reality.”

  “Do you still think all the authorities agree with each other?”

  “They do if you look at them the right way. They were all trying to reach the truth, and it’s amazing how much congruence there is. But I have lots of new information. My new theory is an attempt at integrating that.”

  “How long is it, in your personal time, since you last saw me?” I asked. I really wanted to know, and to ask it conversationally. It was why I was sitting on the wall instead of taking him outside time and straight back into his cell.

  He wrinkled his brow. “I can’t say. A lot of it was outside of time. And China. And France. A long time. Decades at least.” So perhaps Athene’s personal time was similarly long, since they had been working together. Interesting. Good. Maybe she hadn’t only been using me all the time, maybe she had truly intended to meet me when she made the offer, and then later realized it would fit with her rescue plan. I hoped so. “I’m working on a theory of time, too. Jathery has been very helpful.”

  “Jathery—” I was speechless. “You know he’s an alien god? And that he and Athene have gone out into Chaos and are trapped there?”

  “What was that word? Alien?”

  “Intelligent people who evolved on other planets. We’ve only started to use it to mean that since we’ve been on the planet Plato and had to deal with them all the time. But I’d assumed you’d know it.”

  He shook his head. “So there are people on other worlds? And Jathery is one of their gods? Wondrous! I want to go there.”

  He’d want to reconcile all their theories with Platonism and Christianity and make one huge synthesis. “Athene knows. You couldn’t tell?”

  “Jathery didn’t seem as if she’s from another planet. Are you sure Athene knows?”

  I sighed, and my anger rose up again. “Athene certainly knew. She messed about making a half-alien demigod to give me a message, creating a living being with a perplexed soul, when she could have simply given the message to me directly and explained what was going on. She could have trusted me. She should have!” I sat there on the wall and waited, calm on the surface but still utterly livid. This was all so completely unnecessary.

  Pico looked extremely uncomfortable at that. “She used you.”

  “Yes! She used me as if I’d been of no account. And not only me.” I glared at the stone coping of the well. I wasn’t used to being treated that way. Granting equal significance to others was something I had only learned, slowly and painfully, over the course of my mortal life. Being granted it was something I was so accustomed to that I felt affronted when I was not. That was interesting to consider. I stepped out of time and considered it for a while, staring out from Olympos over the distant blue isles of Greece, until I was calm and fully understood my anger and affronted pride. Then I slipped back to the moment in the cloister beside Pico. He hadn’t noticed my absence.

  “She might have thought you’d try to stop her,” Pico said.

  “I would have, of course. But she could have trusted me. There was no need for any of this.” I was calm now, but I hadn’t forgiven her.

  “Yes. Well. About the other thing,” he said.

  The church bells rang for Vespers, deafeningly close. The monk let go of the cat, set down his book, and straightened himself up. I spoke as soon as the bells were quiet enough for me to be heard. “I’d have taken you with me anyway. I wouldn’t leave anyone stranded, waiting indefinitely in Bologna. She needn’t have done it like this.”

  “I told her as much,” Pico said, with his open smile. “And even without your promise to take me with you, I’d have told you where Sokrates is.”

  9

  MARSILIA

  Being outside time wasn’t at all the way I had imagined it. We were in Hilfa’s little house down near the harbor, and then the next moment without any sense of transition we were standing in a leafy glade. We were surrounded by unfamiliar kinds of trees, with leaves of the most intense green and red and gold I had ever seen. My focus seemed strange, as if whatever I was looking at was much closer than it should have been. Across the clearing, I saw a tiny purple flower growing at the foot of a tree, and I could see the shading of each petal, and the cracks in the bark of the tree behind. It seemed as if it were close enough that my breath would make the flower tremble, and yet I could also plainly see that it was several strides away from me. It was disconcerting. At the same time I could see the trees towering up around us, and although I could not name any of them I was sure, without knowing how I knew, that they were each a different species.

  “Where are we?” I asked. My voice came out as a cracked whisper.

  “We’re outside time,” Hermes said. “Sit down.”

  I obeyed, and sat down on the leaf-mould, which smelled rich and complex and almost overwhelming. “Are we on Olympos?” I asked.

  “Somewhere like that, yes,” Hermes said. “This is one of my places, outside time.”

  Something gold and blue darted across the clearing at head height. A bird! I had seen them represented, and I recognized it at once by the wings and beak. It felt so strange to be here, and yet perfectly natural. The air was pleasantly warm. I unsnicked my jacket.

  Hermes sat down beside me. I couldn’t quite look at him. He seemed to change under my gaze, now naked, now clothed, now a man, now a woman, for a disconcerting moment a Sael, now an old man, now a young girl. I looked back at the trees, which stayed the same from moment to moment, which seemed eternally solid and unchangeable, as well as incredibly beautiful. “Marsilia,” Hermes said. I nodded, staring up at the leaves. “Before we go to seek him, tell me about Kebes. Everyone seemed so uncomfortable at the mention of his name, even Apollo.”

  I focused on a five-pointed bright red leaf on a tree behind Hermes, took a breath, and organized my knowledge. It seemed easier than it usually was. Perhaps it was the air of the place. “Kebes was one of the original Children brought to the Republic. He hated it and was rebellious. After the Last Debate he ran away, stealing one of the ships.”

  “Wait, the Last Debate?”

  It seemed extraordinary that he could be unaware of something so fundamental to history. It was like hearing someone say “Wait, who’s Alexander? What’s Thermopylae? Who won at Zama anyway?” It would be like this, I realized, with the space humans, only ten times harder because they wouldn’t believe us and we didn’t want them to. And they’d have huge history-shaping events of their own in the centuries that we’d missed and know nothing about, and they’d be as surprised as this that we didn’t know them, and would look at us in amazement when we asked about them. As Hilfa had said, asking questions could be more revealing than we might want. Dealing with Hermes might be good practice for dealing with the space humans. “It was a debate between Athene and Sokrates. She turned him into a gadfly.”

  Hermes laughed delightedly. I was taken aback and glanced at him. He seemed fixed again in the form I thought of as Poimandros. I admired the interplay of dappled sunlight on his muscles. He really was the loveliest-looking man I’d ever seen, as well as the best in bed. Of course it was Thetis he wanted. Oh well. The trees were more beautiful anyway. And they stayed fixed in their forms. “
Serves him right. Nobody has ever read Plato without wishing to do the same. And you didn’t have any debates after that? Did you stop wanting to?”

  “I wasn’t born yet, but from what I hear they had twice as many debates as before. But Athene wasn’t there for them.”

  “And Kebes left too? With her?”

  It was my turn to laugh. “No, he hated her. He hated everything. He was no more than a big ball of hate from what I’ve heard.”

  Hermes twisted his lips in distaste, and then his face changed and seemed to be that of a broad-cheeked woman.

  I looked down and focused on the trefoil leaves of the tiny purple flowers. “He took a bunch of people and stole a boat. They founded the Lucian cities, all eight of them, helped out with people they rescued from wars in Greece. They imposed a kind of Christianity, and practiced torture.”

  Hermes laughed again, but I didn’t look up. I could see tiny hairs on the leaves. “Christianity more than a thousand years before Christ? I suppose this is an example of why Father forbids taking mortals out of time. I mean, Athene couldn’t have tried harder, she stuck you on an island that was going to be destroyed, and still all this happened.”

  “He forbids it? Then we’re breaking his edicts right now?” I did look up then. I’d never before realized the magnitude of what Athene had done.

  Hermes was looking like himself again. He nodded. “Well, technically. And we shouldn’t be using Necessity as a shield. I’m amazed Apollo even thought of that, he’s usually so law-abiding.”

  “You said it’s like a stone in your shoe?”

  “Like a sharp painful stone that half cuts off my foot at every step that isn’t in the direction Necessity wants me to go, back to conceive Alkippe and set time straight.” He shrugged. “But don’t worry. None of this was my idea, or yours either. It shouldn’t come to that and it should be all right, even if he’s angry. We can blame it all on Apollo and Athene. Now, tell me about Kebes.”

  I didn’t like the way he was approaching this, and I wasn’t reassured, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. I looked back up at the beautiful trees. One of them had black bark and tiny yellow leaves falling in long strips like hair. “After twenty years, we found Kebes again, and the Lucian cities. That’s when Pytheas entered into the musical contest with Kebes.”

  “Oh, I heard about that. Apollo won by playing the lyre upside-down, and then he flayed the other fellow to death. It doesn’t sound like him at all.”

  “He cheated,” I said.

  “Apollo?” Hermes sounded astonished.

  “No, of course not. Kebes. It was a contest for original composition, but he played a song Grandfather recognized from a future time.” I didn’t want to look away from the colors of the leaves, and the pattern the branches made.

  “How did Kebes know it?”

  “We don’t know. Pytheas checked, and he couldn’t have learned it from anyone who went to Lucia with him, though it’s possible he could have learned it from one of the other Masters before he left—though they were so decidedly strict about musical modes it seems unlikely.”

  “You really stick to only the Dorian and Phrygian, as Plato wrote?” Hermes asked.

  “Yes, of course we do. The other modes are bad for people’s souls.” I looked up beyond the tree branches at the sky, which was an intense shade of blue I’d never seen before.

  “And you don’t find it monotonous?”

  The answer to that one was very easy, as it’s actually laid out in Plato so I could simply paraphrase. “Do you find a diet of healthy food monotonous so that you’d go out and eat unhealthy food and tasty poisons and make yourself sick? How much more so for the soul.”

  Hermes laughed. “How pious you sound. Platonic piety.”

  I looked back at him. For an instant he looked like a dappled animal with big eyes, and then he was himself again. “Well, it seems very strange to me to be saying these things, which are truths that everyone agrees about. Even in Lucia these days they accept limitations on the modes of music. I don’t think even in Sokratea, where they question everything all the time, they question that. If anyone had ever doubted it, the example of what happened with the Lucians proved that Plato was right about this.”

  Hermes sat up a little and arched a brow. “Proved it? How?”

  “Well, it’s obvious. They played music in the Mixolydian mode, and they tortured people to death and plagiarized. It led their souls away from justice.”

  “It could be the other way around.”

  I considered that for a moment, staring off at the trees again and the veins on the little yellow leaves. “I suppose it’s possible. The torture and plagiarism could have led to harmful music arising. But that’s no better.”

  “There are a couple of good historical examples on Earth of changing the music and the whole culture changing. They’re much later than Plato though. One is Southern Gaul in the chivalric era, and the other is the phenomenon they call the Sixties.” He smiled. “They were both a lot of fun.”

  “So you agree Plato was right?” I asked, looking directly into his eyes, which for an instant had red and yellow Saeli lids, looking strange in his human face.

  “Well, maybe. But I think I’d get bored. And you’d be surprised how many people intoxicate themselves immoderately and eat things that are bad for them. Lots of people in other cultures don’t consider a party with quince paste and watered wine as exciting as you might.”

  I thought about that, and wondered again about the humans on the ship. Would they be eating unhealthy food and drinking unmixed wine and listening to soul-destroying music? If so, how could we help them understand? What if they tried to introduce such things on Plato? Would there be people who would be tempted? Young people, feeling rebellious, who could find ammunition to do themselves real and lasting harm? I could hear a chirping music now, sounding like a small child learning to sing. I looked around for it and saw the bird, sitting on one of the branches, its beak open and its throat distended. I had of course read about birds singing. The music it made was safely in the Dorian mode. “I don’t find the idea of food that’s bad for me at all appealing.”

  “That’s because you’ve never had any.” He was smiling and watching me through half-lowered lids.

  “Maybe. But I find the idea of music that’s bad for my soul terrifying,” I said honestly.

  “What if you hear some when we go to talk to Kebes?” Hermes asked teasingly.

  “I hope I don’t, but if I do, I’ll listen to proper music to get my soul back into harmony when I get home,” I said. I was afraid, but my fear was held at arm’s length. I was here for Alkippe, after all, and the thought of her made me strong. If she sang to me in her clear high voice it would drive out any dangerous music.

  “Very wise,” he said. “So Kebes sang a song and we don’t know where he learned it?”

  “He didn’t sing, he played it on a syrinx, a kind of multiple flute thing. We don’t know where he got the syrinx from, either. Grandfather says Athene invented it. But Kebes always hated Athene.”

  “Huh. So why did she choose him to have part of her puzzle?” Hermes asked.

  I looked back at the bird. It had stopped singing but was sitting looking back at me, head cocked. I could see every feather. I wondered if they were hard or soft. “It’s hard to imagine Kebes co-operating with Athene over anything. His religion teaches that she’s a demon. And she’s the one who set up the City in the first place, and Kebes hated the City and Plato. Or that’s what I’ve always heard, from Pytheas and Arete and Dad, who were there. Dad helped Pytheas skin Kebes after the contest. He says it was disgusting but he learned a lot about anatomy.”

  “Hmm. Where did this sanguinary musical contest happen? On Apollo’s volcanic cinder, or back in Greece?”

  “Greece,” I said, ignoring his rudeness about my home. “Lesbos, the northeast corner. A city called Lucia.” The bird was still looking at me. The tilt of its head reminded me of the Saeli b
ow. “Hermes, what kind of bird is that? It’s not an owl, is it?”

  He spun around quickly. The bird took alarm at his rapid movement, or perhaps his attention, and flew off, whirring through the branches. “No, it wasn’t an owl. It was a jay.”

  “Was it spying on us? Who do jays belong to?”

  “Probably not,” he said, leaning back. “And it’s gone now anyway. Go on. When did this contest happen?”

  I brought my attention back to the conversation. “Oh, before I was born. It was immediately before the Relocation. Forty years ago.”

  Hermes laughed. “We’re outside time, so there’s no ‘ago’ about it. But if it’s before Thera exploded then it’s more like four thousand years before the moment we stepped out of Hilfa’s sitting room.” He spread his hands demonstratively. I saw them as olive-skinned, and then black, and then green. I looked away at the trees, which stayed so reassuringly the same from moment to moment.

  “It makes me feel dizzy to think about it,” I admitted. “I don’t understand how this works at all.”

  “Time is like a place we can step in and out of. And we can be in time in many different times and places, though never twice in the same time. We’re outside time now. We could go back in to an instant after we left, either right now or after spending months or years of our personal experienced time here. Or we can go back in somewhere else, which is what we’re going to do, and later we can go back to your home time an instant after we left.” I kept my eyes on the vibrant green of the leaves as he spoke.

  “So what you call time is the material world, the sensible world?” I asked.

  “You could say that. And where we are now is another world, if you like, the next layer out.”

  The World of Forms, I thought. “And where is Athene?” I asked.

  “Where she really shouldn’t be. She should be either somewhere in time or here, and instead she’s gone around it. Underneath it. There was a time—well, not a time, and not a place either. But maybe it’s easier to imagine if you think of time as a place, a location. It’s hard to talk about. Long ago, Father … built both time, and Olympos like a shell around it. I don’t know how. Before that there was only him and Chaos. And they say that time will one day end, and after it there will be Chaos again. And that’s where Athene is, out in the primal Chaos that surrounds both time and Olympos.”