by Jo Walton
“And she’s been there for two years, since she gave us Hilfa?”
“No.” I glanced at Hermes. He seemed to be stable again. He smiled at me in a kinder way. “It is hard to follow, I know. We have no idea how long she has been there. She could have gone into time this afternoon, stepped into your life of two years ago and given you Hilfa then, and then directly after that she could have gone to Lucia four thousand years before and given his part of the puzzle to Kebes. Or it could have been centuries for her. We don’t know when she did this, in her own time frame, only that she’s there now.”
“And we’re outside time and there’s no hurry?” The very idea of hurrying seemed alien to the air we were breathing.
“Well—normally that would be true. But I don’t want to stay bound by Necessity any longer than I have to—it’s exceedingly unpleasant. And we don’t know if there’s time where Athene is, or if so how it works, or what’s happening to her there, and whether duration there has any connection to how things work here, or in time. So actually we should collect our puzzle pieces as rapidly as we can.”
“And do you have any idea why she did it this way—giving different people the pieces instead of leaving it all with Hilfa?”
“It does seem most peculiar, doesn’t it? Even using Hilfa. I sincerely hope it was explained in that letter my big brother wouldn’t let me see, and that it was a good explanation too. The Enlightenment, ugh.”
“I’ve never heard of the Enlightenment. What’s so awful about it?” I asked, curious.
“The wigs.” He shuddered and gestured with both hands an armspan from his head, and for an instant I saw a huge elaborately curled monstrosity, with a Saeli face peeking out beneath. My stomach lurched. I quickly looked back up into the peacefully waving branches. “They all wore the most appalling powdered wigs, all the time, huge ones, men and women.”
He was much too frivolous for me. He was right to think he was better suited to Thee. “Well, we’re not going there,” I said, briskly. “But I don’t know the exact year the City was founded, I’m afraid. Athene never told us.”
“We’ll go to the Thera eruption and work back,” he said. “I think you’d better try negotiating with Kebes in the first instance. You have more of an idea of their culture. Normally I’d take the personal time to learn, especially as it’s so interesting. As it is, it might be better if you make the first approach.”
I nodded without looking away from the fascination of the branches weaving across the sky. “All right. But what should I offer him?”
“Tell him you’ve come to collect whatever Athene gave him, that ought to be enough. And if not, try the gold in your new purse.”
“I suppose that might work,” I said. Everything I’d heard about Kebes made him seem likely to be sufficiently corrupt to accept a bribe.
“Failing that, we can offer to teach him some inappropriate songs,” Hermes said. I could hear the amusement in his voice. “What do they wear?”
“Kitons,” I said. I looked down at my cold-weather fishing gear. The Amarathi-made waterproof jacket seemed terribly out of place in the beautiful golden sunlight of this grove. “I should have changed before we left.”
“Appearances are easy,” Hermes said, and as fast as that we were both wearing kitons, his pale gold and mine red, both with embroidered borders in a blue and gold book-and-scroll pattern exactly like the one Pytheas had been wearing, and both pinned with identical gold pins. Mine had been on my jacket collar before. Hermes seemed solidly and completely himself now, as much himself as the trees were themselves. “Red is a good color for you. You should wear more red.”
I didn’t say it didn’t matter what I wore because I’d never be Thetis so I might as well not make any effort. I didn’t say that I had dreamed about him for the last eight years, and I hadn’t even known he was a god. I did not in fact say anything. I looked down and saw the kiton and the loam I was sitting on. Then I rubbed the kiton between my fingers. It felt combed almost smooth, like good Worker-woven wool. “Isn’t this supposed to be the World of Forms?” I said. “The true reality outside the cave we live in that only feels like reality? So how can you change things here?”
“That’s only a Platonic thought experiment, an analogy.”
“Are we in the third hypostasis? The hypostasis of soul?” The Ikarians and the Neoplatonists of Psyche believed that there were five layers of reality, and that things could change in the lower three.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Hermes said. “Things don’t age and die here, but they can change and grow. And I haven’t truly changed your clothes, only the appearance of them. It’s still your rain suit really.” He stood up. “Come on.”
“But I can feel it,” I objected.
“It’s simply sensation,” he said. “That’s as easy to change as any other sense.” He held out a hand, and I took it. It felt real, he felt real, but so did the wool of the red kiton which I knew was an illusion.
He pulled me to my feet, and once again there was no sense of transition. We were standing in the glade on Olympos and I was enjoying the touch of Hermes’s hand, and then we were floating in the air above an immense volcanic eruption. It was night. A great plume of flame was billowing up through the air below us in red and gold and orange and all the colors of fire. I had seen plenty of eruptions, but never from this close, and never below me. The fire flickered and changed shape against the darkness. We weren’t falling, or moving at all, but the fire seemed to be reaching up great greedy arms toward us. I hate to confess such a loss of control, but I screamed.
Then we were back in the glade. I was still gasping and shuddering. I bent over, taking deep breaths as my stomach lurched, afraid I might throw up. Hermes took no notice. “Northeast Lesbos, you said? Let’s try fifty years.”
We were standing at the foot of a hill, by a sea so blue it almost hurt my eyes. The gentle slopes of the hills were covered with olive trees, but there were no buildings or any other signs of civilization. “Is this the place?” Hermes asked. Two grey and white birds startled into flight as he spoke. They were much bigger than the jay I had seen on Olympus. I watched them fly off, circling over the water and calling to each other raucously. I couldn’t tell whether this was the right spot. “Zeus moved the cities to Plato, not the locations. So I don’t know. If I see buildings I ought to recognize them.”
“Could be earlier, could be later. Let’s try earlier.” The shadows shifted a little, and the birds vanished, but nothing else changed. Then the shadows shifted again and we were standing by a busy harbor, full of little fishing boats with colored sails. More of the grey and white birds were flying around them, squawking indignantly. A woman with a basket of fish almost bumped into me, and when I apologized she told me to look where I was going. Two naked children pulled themselves out of the water right in front of me, dripping. “How about this?” Hermes asked. “Those buildings are really anachronistic. It’s a good thing they got taken off to your planet.”
“Yes, I think this is it,” I said. I looked around me, trying to picture the colors as they would be lit by our redder sun, and the spaces between the pillars filled in. “If I’m right, I think we should go up that way to come to the agora.” I pointed. “But the Goodness isn’t here, the ship. From what Dad said, I think Kebes usually stayed near the ship. We could ask somebody.”
“There’s a mouthwatering smell of cooking fish coming from over there,” Hermes said. “We could buy some and ask.”
They used money in Lucia, of course. Money is un-Platonic and leads to injustice and inequality and immoderate behavior—nobody doubts this. Whenever we’re having trade negotiations with the Lucians they admit this and agree, and then keep talking in terms of money. It’s the same with the Amarathi. It’s supposed to be only a medium of exchange and accounting, but I think it must be a way of viewing economics that’s very hard to shift.
We took a step, and I staggered. My balance was all wrong. Hermes
looked at me impatiently. I took another step. Gravity difference, I realized. I’d heard the Saeli talking about how different planets had different gravity. I’d never realized that Earth and Plato were different. I felt slightly heavier. I put my shoulders back and took a deep breath. Hermes led me, following the smell, which was coming from a little house on the quayside. Earth. Apart from the oddness of gravity, and the vividness of the colors, it didn’t seem much different. I kept reminding myself I was in Greece, in Lucia when it was one of the Lost Cities. In the Remnant at this moment, my parents were children. They might not even have met. It was warm, but no warmer than it might be at home in the middle of summer.
Inside the house were tables where people were sitting eating, like any eating hall at home. An old man was grilling fish over coals. I had been wanting fresh fish earlier, but these were different from the fish I knew. They were silvery, not black or red, and shaped like the fish I had seen on mosaics, the shape of an elongated alpha, with flat tails and tiny jaws.
“Skubri and wine,” Hermes said, because I was standing frozen in place staring at everything. The old man looked at us incuriously and gave us hot fish on flatbread and cups of wine. I paid him from my purse, and he gave me change, a custom I remembered from when I was in Lucia at home, in my past and this Lucia’s future. It made me feel more confident. It was strange and yet familiar, something I had mastered as a traveler, and this was merely more travelling.
“Do you know if Matthias is in town?” I asked.
“No, he’s gone with the Goodness, he won’t be back until spring,” the old man said.
“Thanks.”
“Strangers in town?” the old man asked.
“Yes,” I said, again pleased with the familiar. I’d had this conversation over and over when I’d spent my year in Lucia. “From—” and then I remembered that if I told the truth, or even an amended version of the truth and pretended to be from Kallisti in this time, I’d be in serious trouble. “From Petra.” It was a settlement about two days’ walk away, on the other side of the island. I hoped he wouldn’t know everyone there.
“Come round on a fishing boat?” he asked.
“Mmm,” I said, then took my plate and left before he asked which boat and how long it took.
We sat down at an empty table. The sun was streaming in through the window, and I could see dust motes dancing in the beam, exactly the way they did at home. I had adjusted to the gravity, which wasn’t all that different after all. I took a bite of the fish, which was a bit bland and over-sweet, though perfectly cooked.
“I thought he was called Kebes?” Hermes asked.
“He was called Matthias here. Kebes was the name Ficino gave him, from Plato.” I realized that Hermes wasn’t touching his fish and stopped eating. “Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked.
“I can only eat for ritual purposes,” he said. “It’s a pity, because it smells so good.”
“Ritual purposes? You mean sacrifices?” We sacrificed animals to the gods on some special occasions, burning the fat and skin and then eating the meat.
“Sacrifices, yes, or to accept hospitality.”
“So since I bought that, if I were to offer it to you as hospitality, you could eat it? Because I’m forbidden from eating alone, and I’m really hungry.”
“Thank you, I accept,” he said. “We are guest-friends now.” He took a bite of the fish. “Oh that’s good.”
“What were we before?” I asked.
“Well, you are my votary,” Hermes said, smiling. “And I suppose we’re acquaintances who have a child—what do you call that relationship in your cities? Ex-spouses?”
“No, it usually is friendship,” I said.
“Friendship is good.” He looked at me seriously, then nodded. “It’s a strange custom.”
“It lets everyone start equal,” I said. “Otherwise, people inherit status from their parents.”
“But to do without that, you have to do what Plato says and have all the children grow up anonymous, don’t you? That was part of Plato’s vision.”
“About half of us in the City do grow up in nurseries not knowing our parents. And everyone in Athenia and Psyche,” I said. “And it is better that way for being equal, only as it happens lots of people like to live together and raise their own children. So the way we do it is a kind of compromise. We try hard not to consider the status of the parents, if we know it, when looking at the ephebe candidates. Those of us who are guardians are forbidden to discriminate in favor of our own children, and we never make decisions about what class they should be. We never serve on any committees that consider them. We do get family traditions and all that kind of thing, though we try not to. Our family is one of the worst, because of Pytheas being a god. But even so we’re not all Gold.” Though I was, of course. I felt very aware of my pin. I knew I had earned it through my own merit, but saying so would only make it seem worse.
“Hmm.” He finished the last bite of his fish and set down the backbone. “Let’s try catching Kebes in the spring.”
We walked out of the restaurant and I found myself in a cooler, lilac-scented day. There was a schooner tied up at dock among the fishing boats, the fabled Goodness of course, twin to our Excellence. It gave me a shock to see it. It was missing a mast, and patched on the near side in a lighter-colored wood, but nevertheless immediately recognizable. Ma was captain of the Excellence and I’d practically grown up aboard her, which is how I’d gained my love of sailing. From this angle, looking across to the grey-flecked sea, everything looked simultaneously familiar and bizarre. I now knew exactly where I was in the Lucia I knew, hundreds of miles from the ocean. But in this light, with the waves lapping, beneath a clouded sky, it reminded me much more of the harbor at home. It was almost as if I could have stepped onto the Phaenarete and headed out around the point with Jason and Hilfa.
“That’s his boat,” I said to Hermes as we strolled towards it. Walking in the slightly heavier gravity made me aware of how tired I was. I guessed by the light that it was morning here, but my body knew it was late at night after a busy day. One of the birds was perched on the rail of the ship. It took to the air as we came close.
“Ask if he’s aboard.”
“Is Matthias here?” I called to a sailor. He jerked a thumb backwards to where a burly man in a cap was leaning on the rail, in a stance that reminded me a little of Ma. “Someone for you, Matthias,” he called.
The man, who must be Kebes, met my eyes and straightened into immediate alertness. “No. Not again. Not for anything. Go away. I want nothing more to do with you. Leave me alone!”
“I suspect,” Hermes murmured, “that we had better try earlier.”
10
CROCUS
I. On the Physical Form of Chamber
Chamber is the first building I remember, and indeed it was the first building in the City. It was built by Workers under the direction of Athene before there were any humans here at all. The first gathering of the Masters, when Athene drew together all those who had prayed to her to allow them to help make the Republic real, took place inside it. I must have been there, and perhaps participated in the construction, but I do not remember. Like everyone else here now, I know because I have been told.
The Chamber was built, like most of the original city, from marble, and is as formally classical as any building there has ever been, with evenly spaced white Doric pillars and a fine pediment. Of course, like all such buildings, it was intended for the clement climate of Greece, to catch the zephyrs and be cooled by them. Once we found ourselves open to the winds of chilly Plato, where for half the long year the temperature hovers around the freezing point of water, the humans immediately urged us to fill the spaces between the columns and to install electrical heating. (Such heating was refitted almost everywhere, where before it had only been used in the library.) In the case of Chamber, the space between the pillars was filled with obsidian blocks up to about the height of a tall human, and the top with c
lear glass. It always fills me with quiet pride to see it—beautiful and appropriate to its use, built by Workers, refitted by Workers, and the place where I, in my first consulship, was accepted as one of Plato’s true philosopher kings.
II. On Pronouns
Although I do not have personal gender, I use masculine pronouns. This is because I was, like all Workers, assigned the neuter pronoun “it” when I was considered no more than a tool. This was changed to “he” when first Sokrates and then others came to see me as a person. To me, “he” is the pronoun of personhood. Other Workers have made other choices. We divide at 46%⁄37% he/it, with a 17% minority opting for “she.”
The Saeli have many pronouns for many things, and their pronouns reflect the different way they see the world. Arete tells me they have a pronoun for a person engaged in a form of work that will be finished soon, and a pronoun for a person engaged in a form of work that will not be completed for a long period of time. In addition to all the possible pronouns for people, they have special pronouns for gods, domestic animals, wild animals that can be hunted, and inedible wild animals. Aroo told me that a war was started long ago on their home planet when one Saeli used the pronoun for inedible wild animals to refer to the leader of another faction.
They do have personal gender, but their pronoun choice in Greek seems to be unaffected by that and simply a matter of personal choice, as with us.
III. On the Analogy of the City and the Soul
In the Republic Plato slid easily between the city and the soul, as if what is just and fair and right in one is the same in the other, as if a city is a macrocosm of the soul, truly, not as an analogy. We in the Republics have tended to follow him in this, perhaps without sufficient examination.