Necessity (3 page)

It's not only our City, the Remnant, that relies on the fish. We salt and smoke and freeze them and send them to the inland cities. Back in Greece, before Zeus brought them here, all the cities had been on islands in a warm sea, a deep blue sea with coasts close all around. (It's hard to imagine a warm sea, though I've seen enough pictures of it to have a good idea of the color.) Now we and the Amazons are on the coast of a cold ocean, which has islands and other continents that we've only partly explored. The other cities, still in the same positions relative to us and to each other, are scattered about inland on a volcanic plain. Fortunately the Workers have built the electric rail, so we can move goods and people relatively easily. And fish are an important part of that, and only we and the Amazons can fish, so we do. And because fishing is both important and somewhat dangerous, naturally it's classified as Silver.

Now, being properly Platonic, which we do try to be most of the time here in the Original City, that ought to mean everyone who works on a fishing boat is Silver. And most of the time that's true. But for fishing, you need a minimum of two people, and three or four is better. And at that time I had two crazy crew members who weren't Silvers at all. Hilfa is Saeli, which wouldn't stop him being a citizen and having a metal; plenty of Saeli have taken their oaths. But Hilfa was young, not that I had any idea what that meant for a Saeli. And at that time, he wasn't yet part of a pod the way most grown Saeli are. He had only been here for two years. He told me he was still studying—though whether he was studying us or fish or what, I didn't know. And I say “he” but that's not clear at all either. The Saeli need three genders to reproduce, but most of the time they don't take any notice of gender at all, and while they have a bunch of pronouns for different things, gender isn't one of them. Hilfa said “he” feels most comfortable for him in Greek, so that's what I used. What he has between his legs seemed to be a sort of scrunched-up green walnut shell. I saw it often enough, because on the boat he mostly wore a red webbing vest and nothing else, being as Saeli are pretty much comfortable naked in temperatures that make humans want to huddle up. Dion says in Greece we were comfortable naked, and what that says to me is that we should have stayed there and let the Saeli have Plato. Not that they're native here either; far from it. They showed up in a spaceship about twenty years ago, meaning twenty years after our Relocation. They first came here when I was ten. And weren't we pleased to see them after trying to deal with the weird Amarathi! Before we met the Saeli, dealing with the Amarathi was almost a full-time job for Arete, being as their language is so odd that she was the only one who could speak to them at all and have any hope of getting through.

So I had Hilfa on the boat every day, and he's maybe not as strong as a human, and sometimes he does things that make no sense, but he's better adapted to the temperatures, and he's keen, always at work on time and ready to stay on late if needed. It was Dion's decision to take him on, a year and a half ago, when Dion was still going out most of the time, before he broke his leg slipping on the icy deck last winter. (I told you it was dangerous.) Dion's lucky it was his leg and not his neck, and lucky Hilfa caught him before he slid off the side and into the water. I'd not been sure about Hilfa at first, but I'd come to appreciate him even before that. After that, of course, green hide or not, he might as well have been my brother.

My other crew member was even stranger, in her way. Marsilia's not an alien, but she's aristocracy. Not only that she's a Gold, which ought to mean she spends her time on politics and philosophy, not fishing; but her father's Neleus, and his stepfather is Pytheas. I wasn't going to refuse her when she came asking, was I? But truthfully, it wasn't so much because her dad had been consul umpty-ump times or her step-grandfather was a god in mortal form, or that she'd recently been elected consul herself. It was because I'd been in love with her sister Thetis since we were both fifteen and in the same shake-up class coming up to qualifications. Not that Thee had ever looked at me. I'd always been too shy to say anything to her about how I felt.

I used to wonder sometimes how it was that Thetis and Marsilia were sisters. Thetis looks like a goddess—tall, but slight of frame, so her breasts look like every boy's dream of breasts, or maybe only mine, I don't know. She has a broad brow, hair the color of obsidian flowing down her back, soft brown eyes—well, I suppose to be fair Marsilia has the same eyes. But you don't notice them as much because Marsilia's face is flat, and she has jutting teeth. Their skin is the same velvety brown. But Marsilia's squat, with broad hips, which is good for the boat. She keeps her hair short, like most people. Thee looks fragile, but Marsilia can pull a full net out of the water. Marsilia definitely takes after Neleus, and so I'd think Thetis takes after their mother, but Erinna is the Captain of the
Excellence
, and anyone less fragile you have never seen. Even now, when she must be sixty, Erinna has muscles on her muscles, as they say.

It's funny when you think about it.

The way we interpret Plato's intentions here now, we have regular Festivals of Hera, where people get paired up and married for the day, and hopefully babies are born as a result. We also allow long-term marriage, and participation in our Festivals of Hera is voluntary, which it isn't in Athenia and Psyche. It wasn't here to start with. There was a while when we didn't have any Festivals of Hera, because of that, but we voted to reintroduce them on a voluntary basis years ago, I'm not quite sure when. It was after the Relocation, but before I was born. If you volunteer, you get matched up with a partner by lot, and you spend a day in bed together. All the children born from that festival are considered to be your children. When a woman has a baby, she can either choose to bring it up herself or give it to the nurseries to be brought up there, whatever she prefers. It's her choice, some do one and some do the other. Probably about half of us grow up in nurseries and sleeping houses, and the rest in families. I was festival-born myself. I don't have any idea who my parents were, and not much curiosity about it either. When I took my oath at sixteen, along with all the other sixteen-year-olds, everyone who had participated in that festival seventeen years before and was still alive came along to the procession and the feast afterwards.

So with the marriages at the Festivals of Hera, all the pairings are arranged within the same metal, always, because they say that's what leads to the best children. When it comes to other kinds of marriage, people are supposed to choose people of their own kind too, to keep the metals from mixing more than they're mixed already. But we're human, and the metals in our souls are already mixed up, the way metals are under the ground, and so although everyone tries to discourage you, it's not forbidden to marry someone of a different class. (Here, anyway. It is forbidden in some of the Lucian cities. In Athenia and Psyche they don't have marriage except for the Festivals of Hera, in Sokratea they don't have classes, and in Amazonia they have lots of orgies and hope for the best, or that's what I've heard, though I didn't see anything like that the one time I was there.) Even if you do have parents of the same metal, you can't tell how the kids will come out.

So anyway, Erinna and Neleus got married, way back, even though she's Silver and he's Gold. And they did mix up the metals, and Marsilia is Gold, as I said, and she works on my boat what time she's not too busy with Chamber affairs. But her sister Thetis is Iron, and she works with little children.

Looking at it that way, even though she's from a family with a god in it, I should feel Thetis is below me. I always felt the opposite, though, that she's infinitely above me. It's not that she's the most beautiful woman on the planet. But she's extremely beautiful, and—she's Thee. Every time I see her my blood pounds in my veins, and that has been the case since we were both fifteen and I first met her in Arete's communication class. I thought she didn't care about me at all. I figured she knew who I was—Jason who took his oath the same time she did and worked on the same boat her sister works on. I doubted she thought about me once a month. I didn't see her all that often. But when I did, even if I only caught sight of her in the agora, I was happy for days afterwards. I didn't want anything from her, simply for her to exist and for me to see her sometimes. Maybe this is the kind of love Plato talks about in the
Phaedrus
, I don't know. No, because I always knew I'd be only too delighted to make it carnal, if that could be an option. But I thought it couldn't, and there it was. What I thought is that it didn't do her any harm for me to feel this way about her, and it did me a lot of good, because it gave me something in my life that was special, that lifted it above the everyday.

Marsilia pulled one of the gloaters out of the tub as Hilfa and I set our tack. Once that was done there was nothing to do for the moment but glide smoothly into the harbor. “It's so big, and it looks so delicious. I could almost eat it right now, raw!” She mimed taking a bite.

I laughed. “I hope some of these get to the tables while they're still fresh and they don't decide to salt them all down. How about you? Do you fancy it, Hilfa?”

Hilfa laughed his slightly forced laugh. He'd learned it the way he'd learned Greek. A laugh was a word to him, a part of human communication. I didn't know whether the Saeli really laughed or not. I'd learned to read Hilfa's expressions, a little, working with him for so long, and I thought one of them meant amusement, but I wasn't sure. He knew I was joking about him eating a fish, but I didn't know if he really understood what a joke was, or why I might think it was funny to make one. “I don't eat fish,” he said, seriously.

“Silly Hilfa. Why do you work on a fishing boat if you don't eat fish?” I teased.

“I like the waves and the wind,” Hilfa said, seriously. I wondered whether he would stay and take oath or leave for another planet on some Saeli ship. I hoped he'd stay. I liked him. And he might. He liked the waves and the wind, after all.

“We're glad to have you working with us,” Marsilia said, as the jib came around a final time.

“Also I can study the Platonic fish,” Hilfa said, entirely serious, as usual. “The radial symmetry of fish on this planet is fascinating. Everything in this ocean is symmetrical. I keep hoping we will one day pull something out that isn't, but we never do.”

“We're never going to,” I said, thinking of mosaics of Greek fish and their strange stretched shapes. Then I saw Marsilia stiffen, staring at the quay.

“Trouble,” she said, then shook her head at me as she saw me twitch. “Only for me. Probably some kind of political disruption. We're signing a new foreign relations treaty, and maybe some of our negotiations came unstuck.” She let the gloater slide back into the tub. “It looks as if I'm going to have to rush off. Can you two manage unloading without me?”

“Of course,” I said, without even a sigh. Knowing that she'd have to dash off to a crisis, or have one prevent her from showing up now and then, was all part of having Marsilia working for me. I wondered sometimes whether part of the attraction of working on the boat for her was the fact she couldn't be interrupted while we were out at sea. But I knew a lot of it was that the sea was in her blood, from her mother—she too liked the waves and the wind.

I was easing
Phaenarete
into dock, so I didn't see who had come to interrupt Marsilia this time until we were ready to tie up. I got ready to toss the line, and saw to my astonishment Crocus standing ready to catch it. And behind him, wrapped in a silvery-grey cloak that rippled in the wind, stood Thetis. My breath caught, as always. I wished somebody would paint her like that, in that cloak, on a cloudy day, standing on the little grey triangular cobblestones of the quay, with the black stone warehouses with their slit windows all along behind her. If they did, I'd want them to put the painting in Samos, my eating hall, where I could stare at it whenever I ate. Thetis had a grace and poise like the nymphs in Botticelli's
Summer
, but a far lovelier face.

Crocus caught the rope with the attachments at the end of one of his great arms. I saw the golden bee painted on it flash as it caught the light. I said Marsilia was an aristocrat, and she is, but compared to Crocus she was little better than me. Crocus was a Worker, a machine, huge and metallic, one of our two original Workers. He had huge arms, no head, and great treads instead of legs. He and Sixty-One were the only people who had been here for the entire history of the City. He had been a friend of Sokrates. He was a Gold, one of our philosopher kings. He was probably the most famous person on the planet who wasn't a god. I had friends among the younger Workers, but I had never even spoken to Crocus.

He tied the line rapidly and deftly around the bollard. “I can't imagine what use he could ever have had for that skill,” Marsilia said in my ear.

I was staring past him at Thetis, who was crying. It made her look lovelier than ever, beautiful and vulnerable and sad, in need of protection. “Do you know what's wrong with her?” I asked.

“Thee? It could be anything. She cries really easily.” She sounded much more irritated than sympathetic.

“Why are you so unkind to her?” I asked.

“Is that unkind?” Marsilia asked. “I try not to be. I love her. She's my sister. But she's all emotion and no thought, and I'm the opposite. It's hard to be sisters. Everything seems to come so easily to her. Do you think if I looked like that, people would look at me the way you're looking at her? Do you think I'd want them to?”

“It's hard to imagine you wanting them to,” I said.

Marsilia snorted. The quay was near enough for her to spring ashore, and she did.