The Just City (33 page)

Pytheas laughed. “That was perfect, though she'll take a while to get over it. But I meant the other thing. That you're my friend and my votary.”

“Yes.” I stopped walking, and he stopped too. “But you know that. You knew that before. What else were we talking about up on the wall? Except for you not mentioning the fact that you're Apollo.”

“What it means for you to be my votary is that the other gods can't do anything to you without my permission,” he said.

“I know. And you can do anything you want. I have read about this.” We started walking again. We were quite close to Thessaly now. “I'm walking with the gods,” I said, and giggled. Then I stopped. “What's that?”

The marble slabs of the pathway stretching out before us, as far as Thessaly and further, stretching out up the street from there, were all cut with words. “It's the workers' halves of dialogues,” Pytheas said. “I did want to tell you, but you weren't listening to anything anyone said.”

“They're talking back?” I was delighted. “I knew it wasn't Kebes.”

“They're talking back to Sokrates at great length,” Pytheas said. “So it seems he was right and everyone else was wrong, not for the first time. They've had a major debate about slavery in the Chamber, and Sokrates is trying to persuade the workers to work, by first finding out what they want and then seeing whether we can offer it to them. It's all terribly exciting. Aristomache apparently made a wonderful speech about Plato and freedom.”

“She's great. I'm sorry I missed that. Did I miss anything else?”

“You'd have missed that anyway, it took place in closed Chamber. Sokrates told me about it afterwards.”

Just then we saw Sokrates, up the street a way past Thessaly. He was talking to a worker, who was carving replies into the marble. “Soon the whole city is going to be paved in Socratic dialogues,” Pytheas said. “It's so appropriate that I'm amazed they didn't think of it from the start.”

“It's wonderful,” I said, starting to read some of it. Just then Sokrates saw us, said something to the worker he was talking to and bounded towards us.

“Simmea!” he said. “Joy to you! How wonderful to see you restored to yourself.”

“It's wonderful to see you too. As for my restoration, it's divine intervention,” I said.

His keen eyes went from Pytheas to me. “I see. Perhaps we should go into the garden and sit down and talk about this?”

“That would be excellent, but do you have anything to eat? I feel as if I haven't eaten anything in half a year.”

Sokrates looked bemused as he opened the door. “I don't think I do. Maybe I have some lemons?”

Pytheas reached into the fold of his kiton and produced a goat cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves. Sokrates led the way through to the garden. I sat on the ground by the tree, getting down easily, in a way that I'd taken for granted until recently. Pytheas leaned on the tree and I leaned back against him as I often did here. Sokrates came out with three slightly wizened lemons and handed us one each. I broke off chunks of the cheese and started to eat it.

“Do you want to hear about my success with the workers, or should we discuss the nature of the gods?” Sokrates asked.

“He says he's Apollo and he always does his best for his friends, under the constraints of Necessity and Fate and other gods,” I said.

“I can still talk, you know,” Pytheas protested.

I stopped. “Go ahead then.”

“Is there anything new from the workers?” he asked.

Sokrates threw his head back and laughed, and I laughed too. Sokrates mopped his eyes with a corner of his kiton. “Why did you come here?” he asked.

“To talk to you,” Pytheas said.

“I didn't mean this afternoon, double-tongued one, though it's interesting that you want to talk to me about this now when you've been avoiding it for so long. Why did you come to the city? Unless you did that to talk to me?”

“That was part of the attraction,” Pytheas admitted. “But seriously, I wanted to experience being a mortal. I wanted to learn about volition and equal significance.”

“And have you been learning about them?” Sokrates asked.

“You know he has,” I said.

“Volition and equal significance,” Sokrates said. “What interesting subjects for a god to need to study!”

“You know we don't know everything. Well, except for Father.”

“It's just exactly what I've been thinking about with the workers,” Sokrates went on, as if Pytheas hadn't spoken. His eyes were very sharp. “Both of those things. The masters were not prepared to see them in the workers, as the gods were perhaps not prepared to see them in us?”

“I don't know what the other gods know about it. Athene knew.”

“Did she now? And still she chose to do this to us?”

Sitting as we were, I could feel Pytheas draw breath and then let it go before drawing breath again to speak. “Is this really the conversation you want to have with me?”

Sokrates laughed again, a short bark of a laugh. “Should I ask you instead what happens to souls before birth and after death?”

“I could tell you,” Pytheas said.

I sat up and moved to where I could see his face. “It's what Plato wrote in the
Phaedo
, isn't it?”

“That piece of misrepresentation,” Sokrates said, automatically, as he always did whenever that dialogue was mentioned.

“Close enough,” Pytheas said.

“Then we did choose,” I said.

“I certainly didn't,” Sokrates said.

“You don't know it, but you did. When your eyes were open, in the underworld, you chose a life that would lead you closer to excellence, and it led you here. And me. And Kebes, and I can't wait to tell him.”

“You can't tell Kebes,” Pytheas said, alarmed.

Sokrates was blinking. “No, I might have chosen my life to lead me to excellence despite the diversion here at the last minute,” he said.

“That doesn't hold for Kebes,” I said.

“Simmea, really, you can't tell him!”

“I know. I promised. But I'm right, aren't I? We chose, knowing, and then drank from Lethe and forgot. So, volition. How about the workers? Do they have souls?”

Pytheas started to answer, then stopped. “I don't know. I don't even have a belief on the subject. I thought not.”

“How could a being have desires, and plans, and think, and not have a soul?” Sokrates asked.

“How could a being made by men out of glass and metal have a soul?” Pytheas asked.

“How could a being made by women out of blood and sperm?” I countered. “Where did souls come from? How many are there?”

“Athene probably knows,” Pytheas said. “But I don't want to ask her while she's still angry. There were already people and they already had souls by the time I was born. As for how many, lots. Lots and lots. The underworld is practically solid with them.”

I looked at Sokrates, who was twisting his beard in his fingers and staring at Pytheas. “If you are present in the world, why do you keep so secret?” he asked.

Pytheas laughed. “Sokrates, I sent a keeper—a daemon to whisper in your ear every time you were going to do something dangerous for your whole life, and you call that keeping secret?”

“Why don't you do that for everyone?”

“I only have so many daemons, and not everyone can hear them, or wants to. I do it for my friends.” His eyes met mine for a second.

“And you can change time?”

“Only time that nobody cares about. Some bits of time are stiff with divine attention. Here, before the Trojan War, and on Kallisti, nobody was looking until Athene started this.”

“And the volcano will destroy the evidence,” I said. I had just put this together in my mind.

“Klio tells me that this island isn't round but a semi-circle by my own era,” Sokrates confirmed.

“I hope we'll have warning to leave in time,” I said. I looked at Pytheas.

He spread his hands. “I hope so too,” he said.

 

31

A
POLLO

I had always thought that if she knew she would be intimidated, but I should have known better. Almost everyone is intimidated, it's normal, it's why we go about in disguise so much. Being capable of intimidating people is useful. Being surrounded by people who are intimidated all the time is miserable and tiresome. I've always hated people grovelling too. I thought she'd change to me. But instead she immediately started to analyze the whole thing. It was wonderful. It was what I should have expected. It was then that I came to truly love her.

“So you don't know the future?” Sokrates asked.

“All of us here know a lot about the future,” I said. “I don't know my personal future. None of us do. Except maybe Father. Usually I live outside time, and I can go into time when I want to. So I know a lot about time, and it doesn't have future and past, it's just there, spooling out and I can step into it where I want to. Think of it like a scroll that I can open up anywhere. It lets me give oracles, though half the purpose of oracles is to be mysterious, not to give information. Sometimes it's a way of helping people, or just getting some information across. But usually it's a useless way of warning people, no matter how much I might want to. Anyway, right now I'm living in time, just the same as you are.”

“How does that work?” Simmea asked. “Being outside time, but having your own personal time?”

“It's a Mystery,” I said.

“By which you mean you don't understand it?” Sokrates asked.

“By which I mean it's an actual Mystery that maybe Father understands and the rest of us just live with. There are lots of things the gods don't understand.” I smiled. “And we can work on that. The three of us. This is so wonderful.”

“Is this what you came here for?” Sokrates asked.

“What? To have a dialogue with you about things the gods don't understand? Wouldn't that have been a marvellous reason? But no, I never thought of it. I told you. I wanted to be a mortal to learn about volition and equal significance.”

“But you could have done that anywhere,” he said. “Athens would have taught you that, or Troy for that matter. Why here?”

“It seemed like such an interesting idea,” I said. “And Athene did tell me you would be here, and I have always been your friend.” I looked at Simmea. “I wanted to grow in excellence.”

“But you're already a god,” Simmea said.

“There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”

She nodded, attuned to that idea with every fiber. It was so good to have her back. The weeks she'd been sunk in postpartum depression had been horribly difficult for me. I kept wanting to tell her things, to hear her ideas about them. It reminded me too much of death. Mortal death is such a hard thing. Yes, there's rebirth of the soul, but the soul isn't the personality. It doesn't share memories. I try to visit my mortal friends sparingly so that I can keep having times when I can visit them. Bach's sixty years of continuous inspired music happened over thousands of years of my own life, and there are still some few days I'm saving where I could drop in and chat. (It's a calumny about those the gods love dying young. Fate and Necessity are real constraints, but apart from them we do our best for our friends.)

“And you thought you could become your best self here in the city?” Sokrates asked.

Simmea was nodding.

“I thought I could increase excellence, and it would be interesting,” I said. “I wanted to see what happened here.”

“And you are truly here,” Sokrates said.

“Assuredly, Sokrates, that is the case,” I said, mockingly. “I can't resume my powers except by dying and taking them up again.”

“But Athene has all her powers,” Simmea said. “She was using them to intimidate me.”

“To intimidate you!” It was rare to see Sokrates lose his temper, but he came close now.

“I told her if she didn't trust me as a gold of this city to keep my word, then what had she been doing? And she accepted that.”

“Why was she there?” Sokrates asked, still angry.

“I needed divine intervention to heal Simmea, and as I was just saying, I didn't have any.” I shrugged.

“We can all call on the gods,” Sokrates said.

“But it's a question of whether they're listening. Having some power helps it get through.”

Simmea looked at me with eyes full of worship, just like always, but still with that edge that meant she was absolutely ready all the same to beat me in debate or in the palaestra. “I'm so glad to be healed. It was so horrible not caring about anything.”

“If I'd had my powers and you'd asked me, I could have healed you with a touch, without asking anyone anything. It was unbearable to see you suffering and not to be able to do that.”

“But an essential part of human experience,” Sokrates said.

“I stuck it out for two months,” I said. “And it's not an essential part of human experience to know you could do something to help and choose not to do it. Athene didn't want to help, I had to beg her. That isn't easy for me.”

“Would she talk to me?” Sokrates asked.

“I'm sure she would. Hasn't she already? She brought you here. You're her votary as well as mine.”

“I mean would she talk to me the way you are talking to me?”

“I'd be very surprised if she would,” I said. “She's here, but she's not incarnate. She's still detached.”

“Would she debate me? In front of everyone?”

“On what?” I asked. He seemed very focused on the idea.

“On the good life. The Just City.”

Simmea laughed. “I'd love to see that.”