The Just City (19 page)

“How could it make it worse if—” I decided to use her example rather than my own. “—if we saved Constantinople?”

“Without the fall of Constantinople bringing manuscripts to Italy, there might have been no Renaissance. Constantinople hadn't done much for civilization throughout the Middle Ages. It had held on, that's all. It hadn't built anything new, produced any new and truly wonderful books or art or scientific discoveries. The flowering of the Renaissance, on the other hand…” She spread out her hands.

“Is it like the bit in the
Iliad
when Zeus is deciding whether to let Patroklus die or live for a bit longer, and Patroklus kills all those other people, who clearly don't matter to Zeus even though Patroklus and Achilles do?” I'd recently been allowed to read the unexpurgated Homer.

“Just like that.”

“Then my family didn't matter?” I hated that thought.

“They mattered. Everyone matters. But not everything is bound by fate. Everyone has their own fate, that they chose before they were born. But they're just choosing a chance of filling out as much as they can of the shape of it. What actually happens is up to the choices they make—well, until they come right up to the edges, where they run into Necessity. Necessity is the line drawn around what anyone can do. Life is full of randomness and chance and choices, and only some things matter to fate. The difficulty is knowing which things.” She sighed. “I talked to Krito once about why most of the male masters here were old when most of the women were young. It seems it's because men achieve so much more in their lives, and they couldn't be missed from them until they were near to death, whereas most women might as well not exist for all the individual contribution most of us get to make to history.”

I thought about that. “Some of the women are older. Lukretia of Ferrara is. And Aristomache of Olympia must be at least fifty.”

“Aristomache translated Plato into the vernacular in Boston in eighteen eighty-three,” Septima said. “She published it anonymously. Nobody in her time would have trusted a woman as a scholar. But her translation helped a lot of young people discover philosophy. She couldn't come until she'd finished it, and until after a friend of hers had written a poem to her.” Septima shook her head. “I really like Aristomache. She really
deserves
to be here.”

“And some of the men are younger,” I said. “Like Lysias, and Ikaros.”

“Oh, Ikaros,” she said, her eyes softening at the thought of him. “He deserves to be here too. He died before he had the chance to do what he could have done. But he's spending so much time with Sokrates now. He hardly ever has time to talk to me.”

“Do you ever think the masters envy us?” I asked.

“Yes. They obviously do. Who wouldn't?”

It was so strange to hear her certainty, after spending so much time talking to Sokrates. “I think this is the best place, too,” I said.

“Even if we can't go and fix time?” she asked.

“Not even Necessity knows all ends,” I quoted. She laughed. I found myself yawning. “Perhaps I should go to bed now.”

“Good night, Simmea,” Septima said, and went back into the library.

For a moment I wanted to run after her and tell her that I knew she was Pytheas's sister and ask about their childhood together. She was a very reserved person, difficult to get to know. I seldom saw her except in the library. That was one of the most intimate conversations I'd ever had with her. But when I imagined telling her that Pytheas had told me their secret I could only picture her pulling away. I watched the doors swing shut behind her, then walked slowly back through the city towards my bed.

 

17

M
AIA

“Did you ever wonder why Plato isn't here?” Klio asked one evening in the Year Seven as we were walking back after a debate. She and Axiothea had their arms around each other. They were an established couple now. Lysias was walking beside me. He and I were not so much a couple as friends who did on occasion share eros—the true note of our relationship was definitely philia. As far as eros goes, silphium always worked so far, for me and for the other female masters, though I always fretted about it.

“I suppose he didn't pray to be here?” I suggested.

“He knew it wouldn't work. He never intended it to be tried seriously. He was just trying to provoke debate.”

“Well that may be true, but that doesn't mean we're wrong to want to try it,” Lysias said. “And it is working.”

“It's mostly sort-of partly working,” Klio said.

We came to my door and I opened it. “Wine? Cake?” The debate about whether it was appropriate to take food out of the eating halls had been decided in favor, as long as the food was always shared. We all went in and I fetched the wine and the mixer. Lysias took the cups out and distributed them, while Axiothea took the cushions off the bed and put them on the floor. I mixed the wine—half and half as we always drank it, on Plato's recommendation.

“It's working. We have children who love philosophy, who think a debate between Manlius and Tullius is the best imaginable way to spend an evening. I envy them sometimes,” Lysias said, as I put little nut cakes on a plate.

“Me too,” I said, passing the plate to Axiothea and sitting down on the floor beside Lysias. He and I leaned on the bed, and the other two against the wall, on the pillows. “I envy them. And even more I envy the next generation. The babies that will be born here. The native speakers, as you said once, Klio. Our children will do better at giving them the Republic than we did for our children, because we're a pile of crazy idealists from all over time, and our children grew up here.”

“Sokrates thinks we're wrong,” Axiothea said. “He's teaching all sorts of people to question all sorts of things. When I first heard what he thinks about Plato, it really rocked me.”

“Sokrates doesn't believe in the Noble Lie,” I said, sipping my wine.

“Sometimes it's necessary, but I'd prefer to avoid it too,” Lysias said quietly.

“When a doctor—” Axiothea began.

“We all know the argument,” Klio interrupted.

“Would you have the Noble Lie debate with Tullius or Ficino?” Axiothea asked.

“Debate it in Chamber, you mean?” Lysias asked. “Maybe.”

“How about in public?” I asked.

“That would be tantamount to telling the children we've lied to them,” Klio said.

“We're going to have to tell them sometime. Before we all die and they need to run things for the next generation,” Lysias pointed out. “They're not supposed to read the
Republic
until they're fifty, and then only the golds.”

“We'll need to tell some of them. Some carefully selected subset.” Axiothea shook her head. “The real problem is all the old men who don't want to let anything go.”

“Tullius,” I said.

“Not just Tullius. Others too. They're men, they're from societies where men have the power, they're older, they're used to being the people giving orders. They come here and they find out that they're famous to people from future centuries. They're not going to want to give that up, even to Philosopher Kings.” Klio frowned. “They don't like debating me or Myrto. And Aristomache has stopped trying, even though she's one of the sharpest minds here.”

“Ikaros will debate you,” Lysias said.

“Oh, Ikaros!” She looked quickly at me. “I think he has the opposite problem. Here he's just like us. He isn't the kind of famous he'd have wanted to be. He didn't have the chance to be. But he's brilliant. He wants his posterity to be here.”

“I think that's unfair,” Lysias said. “When I heard that Pico della Mirandola was here, I was just as excited as when I heard that Cicero and Boethius were. And Ikaros is happy to be known by philosophers. He didn't care about wide fame as long as the best people knew about him.”

“I'd never heard of him,” I said.

“Me neither,” Axiothea said. “But I'm a mathematician.”

“And I wasn't anything,” I said.

“You were a scholar in a world that wouldn't let you be,” Klio said, reaching over and patting my hand. “That's a lot more than nothing. But I think I'm right about what Ikaros thinks about his posterity.”

“I think most of us want our posterity to be here,” I said. “Our legacy. I certainly do. And you know, in the normal course of time the old men will die off and there will be a time when we are old but alive and we can make the decisions about what to hand on to the children and when.”

“I thought of that when Plotinus died last year,” Klio said. “But when the children are fifty I'll be nearly eighty, and even you will be almost seventy.”

“And our posterity will not be here,” Axiothea said. “We have no posterity. Athene told us that in the beginning. Doing it has to be enough.”

“It's enough for me,” I said.

“I don't think it's enough for Ikaros, now Plotinus is dead,” Klio said.

“What more could he want? We're living the good life. We're building the Just City,” Lysias said. “We knew from the beginning that it wasn't going to last, that it couldn't. We're all making sacrifices for that.”

“Like what?” Axiothea asked, pouring more wine.

“Like working so hard, and not having children,” Lysias said.

“But working hard is mostly fun, and all the children are our children,” I said.

“You don't want children of your own?” he asked.

I emphatically did not. “They wouldn't fit into the plan,” I said.

“You see,” Lysias said, spreading his hands.

“I don't feel we're making a sacrifice,” I said.

Klio nodded. “I think we're very lucky to be here. Though I never imagined when we started that I'd spend half my time working with workers.”

“Me neither,” Lysias groaned. “And some of them are refusing to leave the recharger, and I don't know what to do about it. I'd have taken a course on robotics if I'd had the least idea how much I'd need it. I was a philosopher. I just used them without thinking about it.”

“Are you sure you'd have been able to fit another course in?” Klio teased.

“It would have been a lot more use than German,” he said, and laughed. “Well, bless Athene for giving us the workers anyway, even if I wish she'd included some manuals and information on how they really work. Without them we'd be doing a lot of backbreaking work.”

“It is working, isn't it?” Axiothea said. “Mostly sort of, like you said. But we are making it work. We're proving Plato right.”

We grinned at each other and raised our cups in a silent toast.

 

18

S
IMMEA

The games came first. I didn't get through the heats except in swimming, where I came in third. Laodike won the long distance race for running in armor. I cheered so hard I almost lost my voice. Then Axiothea, who was next to me, pounded me so hard on the back she almost cracked a rib. Her good friend Klio of Sparta hugged both of us, and then hugged Laodike when she came up panting with the ribbons from her crown falling in her eyes. “A girl to win the race for running in armor,” Klio said, and her eyes were damp.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Why not indeed?” asked Axiothea. “Some people say men are stronger.”

“They often are, but women tend to have more endurance,” Laodike panted. “Running in armor is at least as much endurance as strength.”

The next day was the festival of Hera. I was up before dawn to help make flower garlands. The workers had brought masses of flowers down from the hills and piled them in each hall. In Florentia they were piled downstairs in the courtyard. Six of us twined them into seventy headdresses and thirty-five garlands, and we were barely done in time. Anemones have terrible stems, and hyacinths drop little bits everywhere—thank Demeter for long sturdy daisies and twining roses that look wonderful together, especially with a few violets tucked in. By the time everyone arrived for breakfast, we were finished and congratulating ourselves. I was famished and ate two bowls of porridge, a big handful of cherries and an egg. Maia hugged me on my way out. “Good luck,” she said.

I was afraid the festival was going to drag out like the festival where we were all named, but they had learned something and it did not. There was music and dancing, and names were drawn ten at a time and announced in bursts, maybe every ten minutes or so. Then we'd all dance again as those ten went up the temple steps in their headdresses to have garlands bound around their wrists as they were married for the day.

Dancing is always fun, and dancing with friends to music and without set patterns is even better. I had a strange nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach and I tried to dance it down. One hundred and twenty-six male golds, any of whom I could end up married to. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to have a baby. I looked cautiously at the black stone statue of Hera, facing the great seated ivory and gold Zeus across the temple steps. “Give me the good for which I do not know to ask,” I prayed.

I avoided both Pytheas and Kebes. I didn't want to think about either of them. Kebes was called early and matched with Euridike from Plataea. Ficino bound the wreath around their wrists and Kreusa called out the blessing. Euridike was blushing, which really showed up on her fair skin. I danced more vigorously. Pytheas hadn't been called yet. I could see him over on the far side of the agora in another dancing circle.

When my name was called my stomach clenched so hard I almost bent double. I let go of Klymene's hand and walked towards the steps with my friends calling after me—wishes of luck and happiness. I was paired with Aeschines, from Ithaka. I knew him only slightly. He was very dark-skinned with big lips, a Libyan like my grandmother. We stood together shyly as Ficino bound the garland around our wrists. It was not one of the ones I had made; every hall had brought a supply. This one had poppies and anemones twisted in a white ribbon. I stared at it to avoid meeting Aeschines's eyes. We walked down the steps carefully, and off through the crowd. I kept my eyes on the ground. I did not want to see or speak to anyone, most especially not Pytheas.