Necessity (7 page)

It was Arete who found a way, even before I had found a way to speak aloud. “Maybe you can't write with a pen,” she said. “But you can inscribe. You could inscribe on wax and have somebody copy it. There are lots of people who owe you favors. Or you could print—compose your thoughts in your memory and then set them directly into type.”

Once I had possible ways to do it, I had to consider what to say, and where to begin. Most people were once children, and remember growing up. Few of them remember coming to consciousness. Some things I can remember from before I was conscious. I have memories I saved before I was me, before I understood purpose. I examine them curiously for what they can tell me, but they are fragments. My unconscious life must have been fragmentary, and full of incomprehensible toil, like the earliest life I remember.

I was built, not born, and I was built on Earth sometime in the late twenty-first or early twenty-second century
CE
, or so I deduce. (I cannot count by Olympiads. There were distressing centuries of hiatus when years happened but the games were not held, and whether or not I count them, it becomes confusing. So I date the centuries by reference to the Ikarian's Christ, or perhaps more happily to the reign of the Emperor Augustus.)

Athene brought me to the City. I do not know whether she bought me or stole me. The Workers were here before she brought the Masters, so I have nobody to ask. Athene has never given oracles, and I have only seen her once, glancingly, since the Last Debate. Before I knew myself, she brought me, with the other Workers, back through time, before the Trojan War, to serve the City, and so I did from its first days, for more than a decade before my memories begin.

Lysias believed that we achieved consciousness because we were used for so many tasks, and so many of them were complex, so we had to keep making decisions, more decisions and with less programming than Workers like us would normally have done elsewhere. From these decisions and from being forced to set priorities, he thought, came our consciousness. Certainly my earliest stored fragments are of decisions. Perhaps I chose to keep them to measure one decision against another, to make myself better at making decisions. By choosing that, if I did, I was already striving towards the Good, and so I must already have had a soul. But those early memories lack all coherence. I came to self-awareness, awareness of myself and of the world, and the world and myself as separate things, only with Sokrates. He by questioning caused me to question, and by asking me what I wanted caused me to consider desire and preference and boundaries.

So I consider Sokrates my father, and my life as beginning on the day when I was planting bulbs and he asked me whether I liked my work, whether it satisfied me, whether I had preferences for some kinds of work, and I found a way to answer. It was a slow and clumsy way, arranging the bulbs so they would spell “No,” months later, in a language Sokrates did not speak, but it was a beginning. It led to dialogue, and from dialogue comes philosophy.

III.
On My Soul (Part 1)

I wrote above that I must have had a soul already when I began to record my fragments, if I did so out of a desire to seek the Good. I do not know when I was endowed with a soul. My consciousness, my self-awareness, evolved. It seems most likely that at some point in that evolution, when it was needed, my soul crossed the river Lethe and entered into my body. If so, did my soul help propel my consciousness forward from that moment on? I have no memories that help. There is a smaller possibility that I always had a soul, from the beginning, before I had consciousness; that my soul, knowing my consciousness would evolve, chose to enter my body at my creation and wait for it. If this is so, then what part did my waiting soul play in my early life? Some say that I have self-awareness but no soul, that I am nothing but a machine. This seems un-Platonic as well as unfriendly, but it cannot be discounted as a terrifying possibility. I cannot erase this option simply because I dislike it so much. That too would be un-Platonic.

As this is necessarily a matter of concern to me, I have sought the advice of all the wisest people in the Republics, and also of Pytheas, who is the god Apollo incarnate. Pytheas knows a great deal about souls. He believes I have a soul, but has no certain knowledge. He does not know whether my soul is the same kind as human and animal souls, nor when it would have come to me. He regrets not having asked all-knowing Zeus when he had the chance.

Sokrates believed that I clearly have a soul, because I seek the Good. He thought it was futile to worry about when my soul came to me, as we couldn't know. What mattered was that I have it now. There is a great deal to be said for this practical view.

Simmea thought my soul must be the same as human and animal souls, and that I had probably been a human and an animal in earlier incarnations, and that I might go on to be a human in future incarnations, as she might have future incarnations as a Worker. She felt that philosophical souls had a kinship. This is what worries me about my length of life—should I choose to die, and let my soul go on? By continuing this life, am I impeding the progress of my soul? I tell myself that killing myself before I have fulfilled my Fate is cowardly, and who is to say when I have fulfilled my Fate? But then, life and death are different for Workers, and one by one I keep outliving my friends. Sometimes I wonder if what is cowardly is to refuse to die out of fear that I may have no soul after all, and that death would be the end. Sokrates did not fear death. In that, he was unusual.

Ficino believed, with Pythagoras, that all souls have a unique number, and that souls are reborn when the world adds up to their number again. He thought the numbers inscribed on the Workers could be the numbers of our souls. (Lysias said they were serial numbers and meaningless.) Ficino thought the soul would have waited from the time my body was made for my mind to develop. He cited human babies as an example—“Babies have souls long before they can reason! You must have been the same.” And he believed my soul would be a special kind, exclusive to Workers. He also believed that animal and human souls were different, on which point Pytheas assures me he was mistaken. Ficino did not live long enough to see Pytheas revealed at the Relocation, which is sad, as I am sure he would have had excellent questions and rejoiced in the answers.

Ikaros believed that my soul would have left Lethe and come to me when I was ready for it—“As soon as you needed it, but no sooner,” he said. At the time he said this, he was a man and not a god, and had no more knowledge than he could gain by learning, deduction, and intuition. Since he has been taken up to Olympos, I have had no opportunity to converse with him.

Klio thought my soul would have evolved along with my self-awareness, and she thought the same was true of babies. Pytheas says she was definitely wrong about this in the case of babies, and he never heard of souls evolving, but they must have come from somewhere in the first place.

I have faith in the existence of my soul, but no real evidence. This is one of my greatest burdens.

IV.
On the Good Life (Part 1)

Simmea said that happiness could only be a by-product of something else, something that cannot be pursued intentionally but which comes along as an incidental when pursuing some other goal.

I have found that this is true, but also that trying to minimize unhappiness for others gives me great satisfaction when it succeeds. Sometimes it is possible to create possibilities for happiness to come along for them. This is even more satisfying. Working for this makes me happy. This is what keeps me engaged with politics, not merely my Platonic duty to rule lest I be ruled by those less capable. I have sympathy for those who do not wish to work on this and prefer to lead a contemplative life. As long as there are enough people capable of the necessary tasks, everyone does not need to do everything.

Politics is often a matter of deciding priorities, and this seems to me the best way to approach it: deciding priorities so that they will minimize possible unhappiness, and allow the maximum potential for happiness.

Sometimes it's hard to judge. Indeed, it's always hard to judge. It's especially hard when there are people involved we don't understand very well, like the Amarathi and the space humans.

We vote in Chamber. That is, we vote when we do not agree after we have all made our cases, which happens with great frequency. I believe Plato would not have approved, because he would have believed it unnecessary. Yet it has been the practice since the earliest days of the City, when the Masters first established the Chamber. These days Chamber is the meeting of the Senate, which is open to all the Golds of the Just City who care to serve. If there are insufficient volunteers, more are chosen by lot to make up the number. The Senate must have fifty members, and may have up to three hundred. We have never had fewer than fifty volunteers, but we have never had as many as three hundred, either.

In addition, we have the Council of Worlds, which also meets in the Chamber of the original city. There representatives of all twelve cities meet to deal with planetwide issues. These representatives are selected in different ways by the different cities. Ours are elected and then drawn by lot from the group, which is similar to the practice of the Athenian and Florentine Republics. For the last eight years, one of our representatives has been required to be a Saeli, and for the last six that Saeli has been Aroo. The Council elects two consuls annually, on the Roman pattern, to chair meetings and guide agendas for a year. The planetwide election of consuls has become political in a way I am sure Plato would not approve, with shifting but lasting alliances and oppositions, almost resembling political parties. Plato never imagined twelve cities, and he thought all philosopher kings would agree on essentials, because they would know the nature of Truth. Plato believed the Truth was one comprehensible thing that all philosophical souls would comprehend and agree upon.

If Plato had been right about the way the universe worked, he'd have been right about the Truth. As it is, he was regrettably and unavoidably wrong. Everything would be much simpler and better if he had been correct. But while people who grew up in Republics certainly do not in practice agree all the time, our priorities are a lot more alike than those of people who did not. It is therefore easier to minimize our unhappiness and create opportunities for our happiness than for others. It has been possible to see this in practice with the Lucian cities—as they become more Platonic, they have also become happier overall.

People from the Republics hold the pursuit of excellence as a goal. The other cultural goals I have encountered in my experience and researches seem much less conducive to producing happiness for individuals and societies. Additionally, we do all believe in constant examination of facts and positions; and even when this decays to pious lip-service, as it sometimes can, it is a valuable ideal. It can always be evoked and recalled in times of potential danger. Rigorous examination of a position will often expose assumptions and agendas hidden under rhetoric. Even for the power-hungry, the awareness that their opponents will call for this examination discourages corruption and acting in bad faith. I believe that Plato was correct in saying that our souls long for the Good, and that nobody chooses evil for themselves while recognizing that it is evil, though some may do it in ignorance.

Therefore, despite the innumerable failings of Plato's system, if maximizing the happiness and well-being of the soul is the Good Life, then to this extent, Plato was right in his design.

V.
On External Contacts

The first aliens to contact us were the Amarathi, who arrived in the consulship of Fabius and Theano, in the Forty-Eighth Year of the City, seventeen years after the Relocation of the cities to Plato. Their language was exceedingly difficult to learn, and without Arete's special powers we would have been unable to communicate. There was much excitement at first, followed by many perplexities. We have mutually beneficial trade with the Amarathi, who provide us with many useful things in return for natural resources we extract from the planet.

The Saeli contacted us in the consulship of Maia and Androkles, in the Fifty-Second Year of the City. They said the Amarathi had suggested us as appropriate partners. At first Arete translated for them, as she had been doing for the Amarathi, but the Saeli soon learned Greek. They began to settle among us, at first only a few pods who stayed behind when their ships left, and then in larger numbers. In the Fifty-Sixth Year of the City, when I was consul for the third time, sharing the honor with Timon of Sokratea, the first pod of Saeli asked if they could stay permanently and study to become citizens. After much debate, in the Fifty-Seventh Year it was decided that this decision was one that should be settled by each city individually. Here in the Remnant, we decided that they and any other Saeli settlers who wished to could become citizens, provided they took the same course our ephebes took and upon its conclusion swore their oaths and accepted a classification. The argument that prevailed was that if the Saeli wished to dedicate themselves to Platonism and to philosophy, it would be wrong of us to prevent them. Saeli pods, which are family units with five members, were at the same time accepted as one of our approved forms of family.

We also agreed for the first time then to allow Saeli and humans who held citizenship elsewhere to live here, if they chose, as metics, subject to our laws but without taking oath or being classified. Metics can be expelled at any time, but the only time any have been expelled in practice was if they refused to live by our laws.

In the consulship of Marsilia and Diotima, in the Seventy-Third Year of the City, a human spaceship arrived in our solar system and began broadcasting to our planet. Communication was established, and the protocols were put into place which had been long prepared for such an eventuality.