by Jo Walton
“I have lots of friends,” Alkippe said. “But I like Camilla best.”
“That’s because she goes to a different palaestra so you don’t see her every day so she feels special,” Dad said.
The other children in the hall were all leaving, or getting ready to leave. “Eat up, you don’t want to be late,” I said. Alkippe took three huge bites of porridge, eating as much as she had in the rest of the meal put together. She leapt to her feet. “Are you sure you’ve had enough?”
“I’ll take a pear,” she said, and stuffed one inside her kiton before running off to spend the rest of her day with the other children, learning all the things Plato prescribes for excellence, the things I had recommended to Phila. I took the last pear myself and cleared the dishes. Then Dad and Klymene and I went to Chamber.
I love the way Chamber looks, black and white stripes. It was almost glowing in the morning sunlight.
Diotima was in the chair. I took my place on the bench at the front, next to Aroo and Dad. We wished Aroo joy, and she wished us the same. The room felt quieter than normal, the usual buzzing as people settled in and greeted each other was more muted.
There’s a lot of honor involved in being consul, not merely the Roman tradition of the thing, and naming the years, but the fact that it’s a planetwide office and directly elected. But what it really amounts to is a lot of chairing meetings. Diotima and I took it in turns to chair meetings of the Council of Worlds, and we were judged on our ability to do that. She was impeccably turned out in a neatly embroidered kiton. Like everyone I’d ever met from Athenia, she was very properly Platonic and utterly unprepared to compromise. But she certainly knew how to run a meeting smoothly.
We began with a report from Klymene, where she explained at more length what I’d heard at breakfast. Aroo followed with a short report.
Diotima recognized Androkles next. He bounded down to the front to face us all. “I call to schedule a debate with the gods, on why we need to lie to the space humans about our origins and our experience of divinity. I don’t want to have this argument here and now, I want to call the gods here to make their case.”
“Our gods, or all the gods?” Hermia asked. There was a laugh.
“Well, our gods might come,” Androkles said. “Though Pytheas too, if he wants to; I heard he was back here last night, and that people saw Hermes in Thessaly. I’d welcome any gods who want to come and explain themselves in Chamber. Look, Athene started all this seventy years ago, an experiment, a whim as Sokrates said at the Last Debate. We’re here because of the gods. Zeus moved us to Plato directly. I’m quite prepared to believe there are good arguments for keeping quiet about this to the space humans. In fact, I think there probably are, and I can think of some of them for myself. I’ve been thinking about this all night. I think this Chamber deserves to hear the arguments and decide for ourselves. I think we’ll decide responsibly. I’m only opposed to accepting the word of the gods as—well, as divine writ, without any examination. That’s not the spirit in which any of our cities were founded.”
“What if Athene came?” Diotima asked.
“Athene most of all,” Androkles said. “There’s nothing we want more in Sokratea than for Athene to show up and finish arguing the Last Debate.”
But he was wrong. His mouth fell open, and everyone turned to see what there was behind us that he could be staring at. Crocus had come late to the meeting. And riding on his back, beaming at everyone, was Sokrates.
An hour later, after the meeting, Sokrates and I walked over to Thessaly to see Ikaros. I hadn’t yet learned that when you do anything with Sokrates you have to budget twice as much time as you expect it to take. He kept stopping and reading bits of inscribed debate on paving stones. “Weren’t you there for all that?” I asked.
“There are new bits,” he said. “I mean look at all this about classification. That must have been after the Last Debate. I wonder who they were talking to—Patroklus, maybe? Glaukon? It’s interesting that the Workers approve of classes, here anyway. Hmm. That’s not what I’d have said.”
“You mean we’ve been having debates and you missed it?” I teased.
He grinned up at me. “I’ve skipped over so much! Well, it was two thousand years the first time. This time, only sixty. And then we’ll all be catching up with the next thousand years or so once the space humans get down here.” He rubbed his hands together eagerly.
“You like it?” I asked.
“I hate missing it, but I love catching up. Think how many new arguments they’ll have come up with, how many new thoughts in a thousand years! I can hardly wait. Ikaros will try to synthesize them all into one system, but I want to hear what they are and point out all the holes.”
As we got nearer Thessaly, he speeded up a little, then stopped entirely. “Somebody came back and filled it all in,” he said. “What I said, what Simmea said. It reads like a proper dialogue.”
“Hasn’t it always been like that?” It had been like that as long as I could remember.
“No, the only thing written down was what Crocus said, and the other Workers. We humans spoke out loud. Though whoever did it remembers what we said accurately, not like Plato who was making most of it up even when he wasn’t making up the whole thing.” He tutted.
My uncle Porphyry opened the door of Thessaly. Porphyry lived in the City of Amazons so I didn’t see him very often. He was the most mysterious and divine of my uncles, and at the same time the most playful and childlike. When I was a child he had been my favorite uncle. He lived with his mother, and had no children of his own, but he loved to play with his nieces and nephews, and now with the new generation. At family gatherings he was often romping outside with the children, or telling stories to groups of them. As I’d grown up I’d grown shy of him, knowing how powerful he was, and sometimes seeing him do strange things that made me uneasy. In the last few years, seeing Alkippe’s delight in him had rekindled my old memories.
He stepped forward and took Sokrates’s hands. “Joy to you. I’m Porphyry.”
“Pytheas’s son by Euridike, and you live in the City of Amazons and Ikaros was your teacher,” Sokrates said. I had no idea how he could know all that. “And you’re a god and you fetched the new Workers.” Which told me that of course Crocus must have told him.
“That’s right.” Porphyry let go of Sokrates’s hands and nodded to me. “Good to see you again, Marsi.” Nobody had called me by that short name since I was a child, so it made me feel happy and young to hear it from Porphyry now.
“What happened to the tree?” Sokrates asked accusingly as soon as we’d followed Porphyry through the house and into the garden, where Ikaros was sitting by the herm. It was the kind of day when you wanted to sit outside, knowing winter was close and there wouldn’t be many more days when you could.
“Couldn’t take the winters,” Porphyry said. “It gets cold here. If it wasn’t for the vulcanism we wouldn’t be able to have vines and olive trees. Citrus can survive, but it takes a lot of looking after. We grow a lot more stone fruit, and apples and pears.”
I sat down in the grass. “We’ve voted to schedule a debate tomorrow morning in which the gods come to Chamber to explain the reasoning behind the plan for lying to the space humans,” I said. “Will you come, Porphyry? Dad says it was your plan originally.”
Porphyry did the creepy thing he does where he moves his fingers and his eyes go out of focus. I don’t know why it should be so creepy, because that’s really all it is. Anyone else could twiddle their fingers and stare vacantly at them and it wouldn’t bother me at all, but when Porphyry does it I always shiver. I did now, and I noticed Ikaros looking at me. Sokrates was staring at Porphyry’s fingers. “Yes, I’ll be there,” Porphyry said. He sat down beside Ikaros, and Sokrates sat down too, crossing his legs comfortably like a much younger man.
“Will you come too, Ikaros?” I asked.
He looked startled. “I’m not sure I’m qualified.”
I sighed and looked him in the eye. “You’re a Master, and therefore a member of Chamber and qualified to attend. There aren’t any other Masters still alive, but we didn’t feel it necessary to change the rules. And whether or not you’re a god is a matter of definition—and one that doesn’t matter because a substantial minority of our population worships you as one.”
“I saw the temple,” Ikaros said. He shook his head.
“What did you expect when you found a religion and then get bodily taken up into heaven in front of half the city?” Porphyry asked, teasingly.
“I’m surprised it became so popular,” Sokrates said. “I’d have thought it was too complicated.”
“I worked on it a lot more after the Last Debate, with Klio and other people. We had a great festival in the City of Amazons where everyone came and tried to refute my logic. You’d have loved it. It’s what I originally wanted to do in Rome. It was wonderful. But I’ve been working on the theory again since I’ve been with Athene and I’ve changed some things now I know more.” Ikaros stopped. “I suppose I should tell them.”
“What, walk in with a New Testament?” Porphyry asked.
“I’m not sure how the Ikarians would take that,” I said.
“They weren’t ever supposed to be Ikarians, or add me to the pantheon,” he said. “Things do get complicated.”
“Are you a god, then?” Sokrates asked.
“What is a god?” Ikaros threw back instantly. They both sat up and leaned forward eagerly. Sokrates looked like, well, a philosopher. Ikaros was, frankly, gorgeous, more gorgeous than even Jathery pretending to be Hermes, because he was more mature. But there was no question he was a philosopher too, with that avidity in his face, twin to Sokrates’s own.
“None of my old definitions will work, unless we allow that you and Porphyry and Athene are some other kind of being, and that there are unchanging unseeking perfect gods that are different,” Sokrates said.
“The One,” Ikaros said. “And I used the word angels in the New Concordance, for those other kinds of being. But perfection is a dynamic attribute.”
“How can it be? The nature of perfection—”
“Perfect things can become more perfect, endlessly.”
“Excellence, yes, but perfection implies completeness.”
Porphyry and I looked past them and smiled at each other. There was something satisfying to the soul in the way they so immediately became utterly absorbed in the argument. Sokrates caught the smile as Ikaros began to explain the nature of dynamic perfection, which was exactly the kind of abstraction Ikarians and Psycheans love. “Wait,” he said. “We’re arguing with each other when we have an expert here.”
“I’m not an expert,” Porphyry said, throwing up his hands.
“But you admit you are a god?”
“Yes…” Porphyry admitted, tentatively.
“Then you must know what a god is,” Sokrates said, with a brisk nod. “Please enlighten us.”
Porphyry shook his head ruefully. “Do you know what a human is because you are one? Or how souls work because you have one? There are many kinds of god, and I don’t know everything about it. It makes a huge difference who your parents were, and I’m not sure how. Gods are born with a heroic soul. Some have one or two parents who are divine, others do not.”
“What’s the difference between a heroic soul and any other kind of soul?” Sokrates asked.
“I don’t know, and Father—that is, Apollo—doesn’t know either. But there is a difference. We don’t know whether other souls evolve into heroic souls or whether they start off different. Apollo says there are always more heroic souls waiting to be born than suitable lives for them. He says all children of gods have a heroic soul.”
Alkippe, I thought, at once. I’d been so focused on getting Hermes, or rather Jathery, to go back and ensure she existed, that I hadn’t thought about her heroic soul. But certainly she showed that level of excellence.
“But that doesn’t necessarily make them gods,” Porphyry went on. “Look at my brother Alkibiades. He said he wanted to be an ordinary philosopher king like everyone else, and that’s what he is. He has a heroic soul, but he doesn’t want to be a god.”
“Is he excellent?” Ikaros asked.
Porphyry shrugged. “Yes, of course he is, but not exceptionally more excellent than you’d expect of a human born here and brought up by Pytheas and Simmea and who chose to move to Athenia as an ephebe. He’s faster and more beautiful than Neleus, but not a better philosopher.”
“Dad hates being used as the exemplary human,” I put in. “It always comes up in conversations about this kind of thing.”
“He’s such a useful example, though,” Porphyry said, smiling at me.
“And how about people who aren’t children of gods? Do they ever have heroic souls?” Sokrates asked.
Porphyry sighed. “We think so, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. Gods like to mate, is what Father says. So if there’s somebody with a heroic soul, it can be hard to know for sure who their father is.”
Alkippe, I thought, again. How could Jathery deceive me that way? But I wanted her to exist. So since I willed the end, I must will the means, deception and being trapped by Necessity and all.
“So that could be you,” Sokrates said to Ikaros.
Ikaros blinked. “They say it about you, and about Plato,” he said.
“Me!” Sokrates laughed. “What god would own me as his son? Silenos?”
“Apollo.”
“We know what sons of Apollo look like,” Sokrates said, gesturing to Porphyry, with his chiselled features and bright blue eyes. Even for a man of sixty he was eye-catching, and like all my uncles he had been beautiful when he was younger. (Dad used to say he stopped being jealous of his brothers after Ma fell in love with him. I definitely shouldn’t ever tell them that she might be Kebes’s daughter.) “And Plato had a great broad forehead and a bit of a stoop!”
“You’re young,” I said, realizing it as I looked at Ikaros. “You look younger than you do on the temple frescos.”
He ran a hand through his long hair. “I was old and nearly blind. I grew young again on Olympos. I don’t know if it was Zeus or Athene or simply the place itself. I haven’t seemed to age at all since then. But I’ve spent a lot of time outside time.”
“It’s very strange being outside time,” I said, without thinking.
“Yes,” Ikaros said. “Interesting though.”
“Marsilia?” Porphyry asked.
“Jathery took me outside time last night,” I said. I didn’t want to explain everything to Porphyry until Jathery and Pytheas either came back or didn’t. But I knew how to distract him. “Jathery is Alkippe’s father. So when you’re giving her generation their choice of going to Olympos with you to get powers, you should ask her too.”
Porphyry nodded. “All right. That’s surprising. I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t know either until yesterday. It was a Festival of Hera. He said he was from Psyche. He looked human.”
Porphyry grimaced sympathetically. “Even I didn’t realize he was Jathery for a little while, yesterday.”
“Would being outside time be enough to make Ikaros young again?” Sokrates asked.
“It would make him his essential self. If that requires being young, then yes,” Porphyry said.
“I’ve wondered if it made me the age I was when I died,” Ikaros said. “The age I was when I came to the Republic, that is. As if only the time before counted.”
“But you didn’t really die,” Porphyry said. “If you did, you really are unquestionably a god. But you can’t have, you wouldn’t have aged or strained your eyes and gone blind. I remember you very well that way, and so it’s strange for me when I knew you as almost a father, and when I know you’re a grandfather, to see you looking younger than I am.”
“No, I didn’t really die,” Ikaros agreed. “Athene snatched me away an instant before death, and removed the arsenic that was killing
me.”
“But it didn’t take you to your essential age, because then you’d be back to being old again when you came back into time, wouldn’t you?” I asked. Was Jathery’s essential self that perpetual flicker? He had seemed human more often than Saeli.
“I think Athene fixed it,” he said.
“Are you her votary?” Porphyry asked.
“Of course I am,” Ikaros said.
“Then she could do that, I think,” Porphyry said. “I said I’m not really an expert.”
“I can’t go outside time on my own,” Ikaros said. “That means I’m not a god, or an angel. Gods live in the hypostasis of soul, in what you call ‘outside time,’ and step in and out of time, or the hypostasis of body, freely.”
“My brothers and Arete can’t go outside time on their own either. They’ll have to die and take up immortal bodies before they can. And I know nothing more about that. Father mentioned it, and he said it happens in the Underworld, and that’s all I know about it. I think gods who have two divine parents are born with divine bodies, but they can take up a mortal body later, the way Father did.”
“Are the hypostases real, then?” Sokrates asked.
Porphyry shrugged. “What do you mean, real? They’re a way of thinking about things that are very hard to put into words.”
“Aroo said spaceships go into the second hypostasis and come out again somewhere else and that’s how they travel in space. If they do that, could they travel in time too?” I asked.
“Yes,” Porphyry said. “They do. Stars are in different times.”
“But why don’t they return before they left?”
“Necessity prevents it,” Porphyry said.
I was going to ask more about Necessity, but Sokrates interrupted. “We have several points in favor of considering that Ikaros is not a god. What are the points for considering that you are one?”
“I’ve been working with Athene in a way that isn’t like anything I’ve ever heard or read about a mortal doing,” Ikaros said. “And she talks about giving me responsibilities and power. If she did that, I’d definitely be a god. But she says I’d have to die first, put down my mortal body, and I’m reluctant to do that. I think I am perhaps an apprentice angel.”