by Jo Walton
I echoed her greeting.
“I will certainly give you Athene’s message, but first allow me to welcome you and make you my guest-friends. You must dine with me.”
Hermes nodded graciously.
“And I would love to converse with you,” she went on, emboldened by this permission.
“There is much I may not reveal,” Hermes said.
“Of course,” Phila said. Her eyes slid towards me. “Will you introduce your companion?”
“This is Marsilia of the Hall of Florentia and the Tribe of Apollo, Gold of the Just City,” Hermes said. I was surprised he knew those details, I’d never told him.
“Oh!” Phila looked delighted. “You come from Athene’s City of wisdom!”
Surely that would be Athenia, where they were still trying to do the Republic exactly the way Plato wrote it. Maybe my rival consul Diotima should have been here instead. Though maybe not, thinking how terribly she would have handled Kebes. “I come from the original city that Athene founded,” I temporized.
“Is it true that there women live as freely as men?”
“Yes,” I said, with no hesitation. That’s true of all our Cities but Psyche.
Phila smiled. She wasn’t beautiful, her bones were too big, but she had a wonderful smile. “And they are philosophers, despite what Aristotle says?”
“Aristotle was a jerk,” Hermes said.
Phila and I laughed. I touched my gold pin. “Some of us are philosophers,” I said. I was, of course, though I didn’t often think of myself that way. I worked on the boat and in Chamber for the good of the City, as we all did in our own ways. I took being a philosopher too much for granted. I swore to do better with that in future.
“Aristotle is the only philosopher I have met. He taught Alexander and my brothers, but he had no time for me. Here and now it is not possible. Women are almost invisible. We live knowing all we do will be forgotten,” she said, not so much saddened as resigned.
“It’s not true. I have read about your deeds,” I said.
“In a book written about me? Or one written about my father, or my brother Kassandros?”
“Your husband,” I admitted. “But—”
“My husband?” she interrupted me, surprised. “But he’s so young. So the Antigonids will win out over the Antipatrids? I wouldn’t have expected that.”
“We should not tell you such things,” Hermes said, looking at me reproachfully.
“Of course not. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to entice secrets from you,” Phila said, not sounding in the least regretful. She clapped her hands, and two servants appeared, a man and a woman both dressed in grey. They bowed to her. “Bring food,” she commanded.
“Here, mistress?” the woman asked.
“Yes, here, of course here, what did you think I meant by bring? And for three people.” They hastened back inside. Phila looked chagrined. “I’m sorry. It’s infuriating how stupid slaves can be. I should have brought more people with me from Macedon. If you haven’t trained them yourself you can’t do anything with them, you have to spell out every single thing or they get it wrong.”
I didn’t know what to say. I liked Phila, but she owned slaves, and what’s more she couldn’t have managed without them, nobody could at that level of technology. It was one thing to read about it and another to see it. Hermes was murmuring something about it being no inconvenience. The slaves came back carrying chairs. I sat down in the chair offered me. “Thank you,” I said. The slave ducked away from me. His cringe reminded me of the serving woman in Lucia, but it was much worse, more exaggerated. “Aristotle was wrong about slaves too,” I said.
Phila frowned. “There are many people whose minds are not capable of higher thought,” she said. The slaves brought wine, and cups in red-figure ware, very fine, as good as anything I had seen at home, and set them beside the statue. A young boy, not quite old enough to be an ephebe, came out and began to mix the wine.
“Yes, and Plato agreed with that, people who should be classified Iron and Bronze. My sister is an Iron.” The slaves came back with a table and a cloth, which they spread over it before scurrying back in. “It should be determined by aptitude, not accident of birth.”
“Marsilia,” Hermes began, in a warning tone.
“Does this displease you?” Phila asked him, deferentially.
“This is important,” I said.
“Very well, speak freely,” Hermes said, with a sigh.
“Then perhaps, ideally, it should be determined by aptitude,” Phila said to me. She looked uneasily at the slaves now as one set down oil and bread, and the other cheese and preserves. I was impressed how quickly they had brought us such a substantial meal. “But in practice, our lives are determined by where we are born.”
“Some people have to do the heavy work, but it’s wrong for one person to own another,” I said.
“How could we make them do it, if we didn’t own them?” she asked.
“You could pay them,” I said, with only a hazy idea how this could work, or how payment motivated people to do work they disliked. “Or you could find people who enjoyed that work.”
She snorted. “It may be unjust, but it couldn’t be changed.”
“But you could change it. You have power.” The boy brought us cups of wine. I took mine and held it in my hand.
“I?” Phila shook her head. “My father had power. My brother does. My father-in-law, my husband. Not I. I could free my own slaves, but then I’d need to buy more. And my family would think I was insane and lock me up if I freed them all.”
“You could make conditions better for them, and give them education,” I suggested.
“Widening education is one of my intentions, once things are established and the wars are over,” Phila said, taking up her own wine. “Drink, eat, be welcome, my guest-friends.”
I took a polite sip of wine then set my cup down. It was smooth, but mixed strong, as I had suspected it might be. I took a piece of bread and dipped it in the oil. “Widening education seems like a truly good idea, and a fine place to start,” I said. The bread was chewy, and made of stone-ground wheat. Who had ground it?
“Everyone needs to learn Greek, read Homer, the poets, philosophy, especially in the newly conquered lands,” Phila said. She loaded her bread with pickles and preserves, and Hermes did the same. I didn’t recognize some of the dishes.
“Excellent mushrooms,” Hermes said. Then the slaves came back laden with yet more food, cold slices of some kind of pale meat, little birds on skewers, many kinds of fruit, several kinds of fish, and more dishes of different kinds of sauce for dipping. There were also plates of pastries and little cakes of different kinds. I had never seen as many kinds of food on one table at the same time. Even for a festival this would have seemed excessive. There was enough food here to feed two sleeping houses at least. The bread I had taken seemed to swell and fill my mouth. She had read Plato, how could she want to eat this way?
“What else should people learn, when I establish schools?” Phila asked me.
I swallowed, with difficulty. “Gymnastics, music and mathematics. It’s all in Plato. Logic, when they’re older, and philosophy when they’re ready for it.”
“And you think there should be schools for girls too, and that they should be open to everyone?” She dipped a plum in honey and popped it into her mouth.
“Yes,” I said. “And you should remember that everyone has equal significance, even though we are all different. You may really need slaves, you’re right that I don’t understand the conditions here properly, but if you must have them, you should be aware that they are people, like you. It hurts you too if you don’t, it diminishes your soul to treat them that way.”
“My soul?” Phila asked, sounding astonished, as if she had never realized she had a soul until I mentioned it.
Hermes crunched up one of the little birds, and took up a pastry. “We should not tell you too much,” he said.
Phila dipped a slice of meat into
one of the sauces and bit into it. “Perhaps not, perhaps it is bad for us to know these things. You gave me a safe journey.”
Hermes smiled and took a bite out of his pastry, which oozed honey. The slave boy came up to refill our cups. I shook my head, as mine was still almost full.
“Now we are friends, it would be pleasant to count on such safe travel in future,” Phila said, carefully, her head a little on one side as she looked assessingly at Hermes.
He finished his pastry, then looked up at her and nodded.
“And the same for my family. It would be good not to worry about the hazards of travel for them.”
“You have a large family,” he remarked, staring down at a bunch of grapes he was turning between his fingers.
She glanced at me and back to him. “The Antigonids are my family now. Demetrios will be coming here from Athens soon. My husband, and my sons? It’s a small thing for you, but a great one for me.”
“I can do that, though it is greater than you think,” he said. “My blessing on all their voyaging, which will be remarkable.”
It would, too, I knew; the area the Antigonids controlled would move all over Greece and Asia Minor. But they’d never keep control anywhere for long, always needing to move. I wondered if this was a blessing or a curse. Hermes was smiling. He set down the grapes on the table and took up another of the skewered birds. He dipped it into a thick dark red sauce then put it in his mouth. We watched in silence as he crunched and swallowed it. I felt a combined horror and fascination, and absolutely no desire to eat one myself. “You keep a good table,” he said. “But you charge a high price to sit at it.”
Phila laughed. “Thank you,” she said. She clapped her hands. The slaves came running. “Water and a towel,” she said to them, with no more acknowledgement of their humanity than before. She looked at me. “I will think about what you have said, and dream of your city.”
The slaves brought a bowl of water, and she used it to wash the sauce off her fingers. Then she dried her hands carefully. The slave brought the bowl to me, and I dipped my fingers, although I had no need to. I tried to smile at the slave, but he would not meet my eyes. Phila drew a flat box out of her kiton. She opened it with a key. Inside was a leather pouch, and from inside that she drew out a folded sheet of paper, much like the one Kebes had given us. I took this one as she offered it to us, and glanced at it. It was covered with the incomprehensible writing, like the other, as I had expected. “Go in,” she said to the slaves, and as they scurried off, “I will free these three, who have waited on the gods.”
“It is a small thing for you, and it’s a drop in the ocean, but it will make a huge difference to those three people to be free. Thank you,” I said. “And try to remember you share humanity with them, and as Aristotle was wrong about women so he was wrong about slaves. And don’t forget about the importance of education.”
I tucked the paper inside my kiton with the other, and then, with no warning or sense of transition, we were abruptly back in Hilfa’s sitting room.
17
CROCUS
I. On First Contacts
I did not usually spend much time at the spaceport. It had been designed and built by Sixty-One, with the help of some of the other Workers, who were then only partway to self-awareness. Shuttles landed there from Amarathi and Saeli starships in orbit, and there were both automated and worker-operated facilities for loading and unloading. There were warehouses for storage, a station for the rail-link for passengers and supplies to the city, and a large observation and waiting space, with a curved glass window looking out over the field. There was also a communications, control, and administrative building. All these had been built on a suitable scale for Workers. It was a pleasant thing to have more buildings we could comfortably fit inside. The whole spaceport was set inside an old caldera, for sound deadening, and additional sound-deadening baffles had been erected around the rim. The rock of the mountains and the runways was black basalt, and Sixty-One had chosen to make the buildings out of the same material, except for the pillars and pediments and baffles, which were red scoria, fluted ionically. It gave the place a unified, distinctive feel. The frescoes in the admin building were all on space subjects—nebulas, galaxies, ringed planets; but the mosaic in the entrance hall was of Apollo in his sun-chariot.
When Klymene and I reached the communications office, Sixty-One, Akamas and a Sael I didn’t know were there, all clustered around the transmission equipment. Akamas was one of the Bronze technicians whose usual job it was to communicate with incoming ships. He introduced me to the Sael. “Crocus, this is Slif. She’s here to monitor the communication and begin to learn their language.”
We wished each other joy. “The more people who know their language the better,” I said. I noticed that Slif was wearing a bronze pin. “You’ve settled here and taken oath?”
“Yes, with my whole pod,” Slif replied. “We like Plato very much. Usually we work helping to assemble solar panels, but I have some experience with languages and I was out here, so Aroo asked me to stay and help.”
“Good,” I said.
I told Sixty-One that I had come to relieve it of the burden of translation for a while. “Yes. Good. Arete was here for a while and I rested. Now I will go to the feeding station to recharge,” it said. “These space humans are strange indeed. They say the ship is called Boroda. They came from a planet called Marhaba. They know three human languages, Korean, Chinese and English. The only aliens they have met are the Amarathi.”
“The Amarathi trade extremely widely, we have encountered them everywhere we have gone, so if they have encountered any other intelligences at all, they are the most likely,” Slif said.
“Yes,” I said. I remembered our first contact with the Amarathi thirty years before, the first test of our open deception about our origins, and how difficult it had been even for Arete to communicate anything at all in a language developed by beings who had been sessile until after they invented technology.
Sixty-One left.
“What we’ve been doing,” Klymene explained, as she settled down again in one of the chairs, “is translating one exchange, discussing it, and then responding. We’re trying to keep them to our agenda.”
A voice crackled over the radio, in English. I could understand each word, but found myself translating it very awkwardly. “They say, ‘All right, Plato control, what quarantine procedures type do you say.’ That is, they say, ‘What kind of quarantine procedures are you talking about?’”
“Explain that we are worried about any new plagues or viruses that might have developed since we last had contact with humanity,” Klymene said.
I did so. “Do you have autodocs?” they asked.
We looked at each other, puzzled. “Do you know what that is?” I asked Slif.
She shook her head, slightly slower than a human would have, because Saeli have different musculature.
“Ask them for a definition,” Klymene said.
Akamas adjusted the radio to reduce the crackle, and we went on, slowly and haltingly with many pauses for translation and explanations. Autodocs seemed to be wonderful medical technology that could restore youth and health to humans for up to two hundred years, and which cured all disease. “I wonder if they would trade those to us,” Klymene said, looking down at her bony and age-spotted hand. The remaining Children were all eighty years old and fragile. The prospect of a technology that gave another hundred and twenty years of youthful life for them filled me with happiness.
After a long slow while, with many pauses for translation and discussion and incomprehension on both sides, when we had finished with the subject of quarantine and were starting to talk about how many people would come down in the initial contact, Neleus and Aroo arrived to join us.
“Wait up, Plato control, we have a shift change here,” the English voice said a few moments later, and I translated, and acknowledged to them that we would wait. I expected a pause, but they left the contact open so
that we overheard them talking. “The humans only speak Latin and ancient Greek, but they’ve got a couple of old robots who can handle English translations.”
There was a laugh. “Ancient Greek, who could have believed it!”
The first voice spoke dismissively. “Their founders must have been nuts.”
The other voice answered. “Well, our founders weren’t known for their sanity either. It’s not going to get in the way of profit.”
Then the contact went dead, as they must have become aware that we could hear them.
I translated this exchange for the others as best I could.
“My interpretation is that they think our origin story is funny, but not implausible,” Neleus said.
“That’s all according to plan,” Klymene said, and yawned hugely, a slightly disgusting biological thing humans sometimes cannot avoid doing when they are tired.
“This word ‘could,’ is it a time modifier?” Aroo asked.
I tried to explain the word, with a great deal of difficulty. “Very soon you will speak English better than I do,” I said.
“We Saeli have a talent for languages,” Aroo acknowledged, her violet and brown eyelids flicking over her eyes for an instant as she spoke.
“I wish I could listen to it again,” I said. “I constantly feel I am missing nuance.”
“You should be able to,” Aroo said. “That is a Saeli console, it records and echoes.” She showed Akamas, and he pushed buttons on the console, so that the voices repeated themselves over again in the same exchange.
“Useful,” Neleus commented.
“Nuts must mean insane,” not illogical, I said. “And I think you’re right, they accept our story.”
“What does profit really mean? You said benefits?” Neleus asked.
“Yes, I think so, something like that. It’s filed under economics. Economic benefits? The weightings in my word lists say it’s a really important concept, but I learned long ago never to accept other people’s priorities except in emergencies. We should ask them about that word, when we get the chance.”
Their contact crackled back to life, and Akamas adjusted it again, wincing. “So we’ve agreed we’re going to send down three people, is that correct?”