“We don’t have all this fuss in Amazonia,” Porphyry said. “We do it individually, on our actual birthdays, in the agora, and our names are written down.”
“That sounds nice,” I said.
“But our ceremonies in Athenia are ten times more formal, and take days,” Alkibiades said. “And we have to do our examinations right there and then, with everyone watching, not quietly in advance the way you do. So think yourself lucky.”
I laughed. “If I wanted to live in Athenia or the City of Amazons I’d go there. I belong here.” Being away had made me realize how much I loved my city, every pillar, every word of the Workers’ dialogues carved into the marble flagstones, every patch of flowers in front of the sleeping houses.
When we came into the square in front of the Temple of Zeus and Hera, the two Archons were waiting on the steps between the two great statues of the gods that flanked the temple. The altar stood behind them, smoke rising from the sacrifice. The square was packed with all the envoys, and with people who had just showed up, and for all I knew some crazy oath-enthusiasts who went to every single ceremony for everyone. I noticed Ikaros and Aristomache with Sixty-One, standing together, engaged in dialogue. Maia went over to join them. All our family and friends faded back into the crowd, leaving the three of us who were candidates standing together in the center. One of the Archons made a welcoming speech, talking about the significance of citizenship and Plato and the city. I wasn’t listening properly. I was nervous. I felt it was hard to draw enough breath. I straightened my wreath, which was slipping into my eyes. The other Archon made a very similar speech, about the importance of young people and the significance of the community, and how the city was open to all and we had never turned anyone away—aimed at the visitors, I suppose. Then finally they got to it.
“Boas, bronze. Archimedes, iron. Arete, gold.” I hadn’t really doubted it, but it was a great relief nevertheless. Archimedes punched my arm, and I punched his back. We both had what we wanted. He was right, of course he was, we could trust them, they knew where we belonged. I could never have faced Father or my brothers if I hadn’t made gold. I had felt confident that I deserved it, except for that moment when the speeches seemed to be going on forever. I went up the steps and took my pin, the bee Mother had designed when she’d been younger than I was now. I pinned my kiton with it immediately, and saw the gold gleam against the cloth, the only gold I would ever own. I was so delighted that I couldn’t help smiling. Then I lifted off my wreath and knelt, with my back to the square, and the archon took the shears and cut off all my hair at the nape of my neck. I stood again and put the wreath back on. I felt odd without my hair; lighter. He had missed one strand, which tickled against my newly bare neck.
I went down two steps, as we had been instructed, and waited while Archimedes, and then Boas, were given their pins and had their hair cut in turn. Then the Archon took the mass of hair from all three of us and thrust it onto the smoldering fire on the altar. It blazed up at once and made a horrible stink, but she threw on some incense which soon masked that.
“You are no longer children,” the other Archon said, his voice booming. “Come here and swear your allegiance to the City.”
We went up one at a time in reverse order, Boas first and me last. I listened as the others swore. It was a great oath. I’d had it memorized for years, since my brothers took it. Boas swore, and the Archon marked his forehead with ash, then Archimedes did the same, looking awed and solemn now. Then it was my turn. I took the two steps up and moved just as they had done, so that I stood between the Archons. I was behind the altar for what would probably be the only time in my life unless I became an Archon. I set both hands palm-down on the marble top of the altar, careful to place them on either side of the sacrifice. The smoke of hair and incense was streaming straight up into a clear sky. I looked out through it over the crowd, seeing Father and my brothers watching, and Maia, who was wiping her eyes. I took a deep breath and spoke loudly and clearly, projecting to fill the space, as I had been taught when I was Briseis in the Dionysia.
“I swear by Zeus and Hera and Demeter and Apollo and Athene, by the figs and olives and barley and grapes, by the sea and the sky and the earth beneath my feet, that I will protect and defend the excellence of the Just City from all enemies, internal and external. I will fight bravely, judge fairly, and contribute to the best of my abilities. I will defend her laws and institutions, resist tyranny and foolishness, and the lures of wealth and honor, and strive ever to increase her excellence.”
It had been a bright sunny morning, but it clouded over as I was speaking so that the last words came out under a dark sky. I looked up from the altar as the Archon marked my forehead and saw that I was mistaken, I was simply in the shadow of a very tall man. Then I saw that it was the great ivory and gold statue of Zeus, but it had moved and was standing in front of me instead of at the side of the steps. And then I realized that it was not the statue but Zeus himself standing there, frowning down at me. I remembered too late what Father had said about attracting the attention of the gods. I took my hands off the altar and stepped back, as if that might make him disappear again. Of course, it did nothing.
“Granddaughter,” all-knowing Zeus rumbled, his voice like thunder. He looked around slowly, taking in the temple and the square and the people. Some had fallen to the ground. Most of them looked terrified. Ikaros looked absolutely thrilled and was bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement. Father took a step forward, my brothers close at his back. Zeus nodded at Father, and thunder echoed all around. “Where is Athene?” Zeus asked.
She appeared on the steps in front of us. She had her helmet and her shield and her owl, and she seemed to be perfectly composed. I had never seen her before, but I would have recognized her anywhere. There were statues and paintings and bas-reliefs of her all over the city, many of them done from life. “Joy to you, Father,” she said. “Be welcome to the Just City.”
“And when did you intend to tell me about this folly?” We were speaking Greek, of course. But that last word held double meanings, in other languages. As well as meaning foolishness, and thus the opposite of the wisdom that was Athene’s domain, it had the connotation of an anachronistic ruin built deliberately to enhance a landscape view. I bristled to hear the Republic described this way, not because it wasn’t true but because it hurt.
Athene did not flinch, but stood looking up at her father calmly. “In the fullness of time, when there was something to report,” she said.
“Come, let us discuss this,” Zeus said. He pointed at Father and my brothers. “And you can come too.” He pointed at Ikaros.
“Me?” Ikaros squeaked.
“Yes, you, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Count of Concord, Ikaros of the Amazons. You. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you when you profess to know so much about me? Come.”
Maia had her mouth open, as if she was about to say something. Ikaros grabbed her arm.
Erinna was stepping forward too, and the Archon was reaching for me, and then they were gone and I was standing on a sloping mountain meadow, green with soft spring grass and dotted with strange blue and golden bell-like flowers, nodding in the gentle breeze. It felt like Delos, only much more so.
31
ARETE
Father was there, and my brothers, and Zeus, and Athene, and Ikaros, and Maia, standing in a rough circle. I sat down at once on the soft grass, and so did everyone else, almost simultaneously. There was something strange about how everyone looked, as if perspective didn’t work properly here. Zeus and Athene both were and were not normal human sizes. They were much too big to be sitting in a circle with the rest of us, yet there they were, sitting right there, not taking up any more room, and not far away. Zeus was big enough to fill the mountain and the sky, and at the same time only a little taller than Phaedrus. It made me feel a little dizzy when I focused on him and anything else at the same time.
“Why did you bring Pico?” Athene asked Zeus
.
Zeus raised an eyebrow. “He’s the reason you did all this, isn’t he?”
I looked at Ikaros. He looked different, younger. His long hair was chestnut brown and his face was unlined. He looked only a few years older than my brothers. He was still clutching Maia’s arm. Maia also looked younger, very much the way she looked in her statue in Amazonia. She was staring at Athene. Ikaros opened his mouth as if he was about to say “Me?” again, but Porphyry put a hand on his shoulder and he subsided. Athene didn’t turn her head in his direction, but the owl was staring at him, and I felt she didn’t need to look at him to see him. I could also tell by the way he was looking delightedly at everything that he could see properly.
“It’s true I wanted somewhere interesting to take him. But he prayed to me for the Republic. They all did, all the Masters. And I could grant their prayers and help. It seemed like a good time and place for such an experiment.”
“It was meddling for your own vanity,” Zeus said, decisively. “And dragging Phoebus into it, where’s the sense in that?”
“I wanted to become incarnate to learn some things,” Father said. “Athene offered me the Republic as a time and place to do that. It was my free choice.”
“And you’ve learned them, I see, and more besides. And you have a daughter. How very unlike you.” Zeus looked at me, and I met his gaze as best I could. He looked a little puzzled. I felt as if I should be terrified, but I wasn’t afraid at all. It wasn’t like the time on Delos where everything I did was under the control of Fate and I was going through a prescribed and required set of motions. I was entirely free to act and choose for myself. But I didn’t feel fear or anger, or anything at all really. Indeed, I felt preternaturally calm.
“My daughter Arete, my sons Kallikles, Phaedrus, Neleus, Euklides and Porphyry,” Father said, indicating us. I realized for the first time that Alkibiades wasn’t there, though he had been standing with the others. Was that because he had said he didn’t want divine powers? How did Zeus know? And how was Neleus here? He wasn’t really Father’s son.
“A place women can be excellent, eh?” Zeus said, punning on my name of course, not even the king of gods and men was above that. He seemed to hear a lot more than was said, because while I knew that Father usually only had sons because it was generally so unpleasant to be a woman, but the Republic was fair to both, Father hadn’t said anything to Zeus about that.
“Plato—” Athene said.
“Don’t start,” Zeus said. “After what you did to Sokrates?”
He stopped and looked at Ikaros. “To answer your unspoken question, I knew nothing about it until it was drawn to my attention by Arete just now, and now I know everything about it, as if I had always known.”
“Thank you,” Ikaros said. “And if you don’t mind me asking, why are you taking the time to explain this to me?”
“Because it’s better than overhearing your infernal conjectures,” Zeus said. As he laughed the mountain seemed to shake. Then he looked at Maia.
“And yes, this is Olympos, and you are correct that we are not perfect. And yes, Pytheas is Apollo.”
Maia nodded gravely. “Of course,” she said. “And Simmea knew, of course.” Father smiled at that.
“And you are here because Ikaros felt you were a deserving philosopher who had been right where he had been wrong,” Zeus went on.
“And since I was wrong, why from all the assembled citizens did you choose to bring me?” Ikaros was being very polite, but he didn’t seem afraid either. I wondered if calm was somehow in the air here.
“My wise daughter, in her chaste and foolish way, is in love with you. Only with your mind, I hasten to add. But I think it would be fair to say that she is in a state of unrequited agape with regard to you.”
“Father, we all have favorites,” my own father said. Maia laughed. Ikaros was staring at Athene in complete astonishment. “It helps to have conversations with them about it and find out what they want,” Father went on.
Athene looked up from her shield and rolled her eyes at Father. “It wasn’t that kind of thing. There’s no comparison. I just—he was so bright and so young and he did pray to me for it, and lots of other people had too, and it all seemed as if it would be so interesting and so much fun,” she said. “Nothing like your romances at all.”
“Not unrequited,” Ikaros said, passionately, as soon as she had finished speaking. “Never unrequited. I have loved and sought wisdom all my life—and you, Sophia, from the day I saw you.”
“Then why did you betray me?” she asked, her gray eyes hard as flint.
“With Sokrates? Or by saying you were an angel?” he asked.
“That there are multiple possible occasions does seem indicative of problems,” Zeus said.
“But I loved you all the time.” He didn’t look away from Athene, and he absolutely meant it.
“You betrayed me when, just before the Last Debate, you turned away from reason and said will and love could be enough, you didn’t need comprehension!” Athene said.
“Oh.” Ikaros looked abashed. “That was just a theory, and I was just wrong. Simmea said it was mystical twaddle, and I realized she was right as soon as I read Aquinas again. But even then I never stopped loving you.”
“I am reason, you idiot,” she said.
“I am human and make mistakes, but I always try again to serve you and be worthy of you,” Ikaros said. “You have always been my goal and my delight.”
“Touching as this is, we have serious business,” Zeus interrupted.
“He is my votary. He prayed to me when he could have been burned at the stake for it,” Athene said, turning to Zeus. “And others too. Ficino. Aristomache. Maia.” She gestured to Maia, sitting primly on the grass listening intently. “They loved our world, and their own worlds held too little to fulfill their souls. I wanted to see what they would do with their imagination of our world, and Plato’s vision.”
“Plato’s Republic,” Zeus said. “Three hundred philosophers and classics majors. Ten thousand slave children. Lost artworks from all of time. Robots. The head of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.”
“All the books,” Ikaros put in. “We rescued all the books from the Great Library of Alexandria.”
“Of course you did,” Zeus said, his gaze still fixed on Athene. “You took Pico and Ficino and Atticus careering through time rescuing books and art, you turned Sokrates into a fly because he beat you in a fair argument, and you’d like me to regard this as something other than sheer unadulterated self-indulgence?”
“I have learned a lot I could have learned nowhere else,” Father said.
“I have lived a life I could have lived nowhere else, and I shall always be grateful to Athene for giving me my life,” Maia said.
“I accept your judgment,” Athene said, inclining her head to Zeus.
“My judgment. Yes. But how shall I judge what I shall do with it? They’ve already left the island and started to reach out. I can’t leave them there to tangle with history. For us, what’s done is done. But for them, it might be kindest if—”
“No! Please!” Father said. He flung himself down before Zeus, flat on his face, with his hands on Zeus’s knees. My sense of scale quailed, for in one way Zeus’s knees were as huge as mountain ranges, and in another Father, who was the same size he always was, could comfortably clutch them. Also, the posture was ridiculous, but Father managed to make it seem not only graceful but entirely natural. “Not the darkness of the oak! Don’t unmake them. I beg you, Father, not that.”
I had never before heard of the darkness of the oak. But as soon as I heard what Father said, I understood what it meant. Zeus had the power to undo time, to make things never have happened. He could do that with the city, unmake it. The Masters and Children would never have left their own times. The Young Ones would never have been born. The City would never have been more than Plato’s dream. The darkness of the oak. I shuddered.
Fear is a strange thing.
I had been afraid I wouldn’t qualify as gold, but I had not been afraid when all-knowing Zeus had appeared before me and carried me off outside time. I had sat through the debate so far listening to Athene being chided and been calm and interested. But as soon as Father said “the darkness of the oak” I was terrified—and yet still a little detached from my fear, observing it rather than being swept off in it. Was this what it was like to be a god?
“But why, Phoebus?” Zeus grumbled. “You’re outside time. You’d still remember what you’ve learned. Your children are here, even Neleus.” Neleus straightened Ficino’s hat as Zeus glanced at him. “And however much agape you felt for her, your woman is already dead. The whole thing is ludicrous. Their souls are going back where they came from. It has only been a few years. The darkness of the oak would be a mercy—”
“No,” Father said. “Please.”
“Bring down the volcano,” I said, seeing it all at once as a solution. Zeus’s eyes met mine over Father’s prostrate form, and again I felt that I puzzled him. “If we can’t go on, if you have to end it, bring down the lava and the fire and the death we have always known is coming, sweep it away, kill us all. But let it have happened! Wipe it out if you must, but don’t make it never have been.”
“Why?” Behind him lightning flashed around the snowy peak of Olympos.
“We were trying to do Plato’s Republic,” I said. “It may be ludicrous and impossible, it may seem foolish to you, but we were trying. We made compromises and adaptations, but we were all trying to increase our excellence, to increase the city’s excellence, and the world’s. You heard the vow I made, that’s why you came, because I called on you to hold the oath. We all made that vow. We may have fallen short, we may have made mistakes, we may have done it all wrong, but our goal was great. Athene set us there under the volcano so that we would have no posterity, and we accepted that—difficult as it is to accept. But we were what we were, we existed. We tried. Kill us now if that’s what’s necessary to preserve history, but leave us the effort we made, at least.” I thought of Mother, Ficino, Erinna, Crocus, the everyday life of the Republic, Alkibiades showing me the vines and saying he didn’t want divine power, the people of Psyche joining in raggedly on the last chorus of Father’s ode to peace. “We might not have been philosopher kings as Plato intended, but at least we made the attempt.”