Maia was smiling through tears. Neleus nodded at me.
“And would you go back and die with the city you care for so much?” Zeus asked, his great dark eyes fixed on mine.
“You know I would. I know how temporary death is. My soul would go on with what it learned in the Just City, as we all would. Don’t take that away from us.”
Ikaros was staring at me, his lips parted. “You said you weren’t an angel,” he said.
“God is a better term,” Zeus said, absently. “She has free will, and limited knowledge. And there is no such thing as omnipotence, and omniscience is extremely overrated. As for omnibenevolence, I’m sure you realize by now that we’re doing our best. And time is a Mystery, by which I mean you are welcome to make up your own theories and I’ll be grateful if any of them come close to being a useful analogy.”
“I’ll work on it,” Ikaros said. He looked at Athene. “I’ll work on it with Sophia’s help.” Athene was smiling at him, but he looked away from her, to me. “And I will always pursue excellence.”
Zeus’s gaze ran over my brothers. He looked down at Father, who was still clutching his knees. “Get up, son. I won’t do it. Though I can’t see where, under Fate and Necessity, the place can go. She wants posterity, you know.”
“Mortals all want posterity,” Father said, getting up and settling back on the grass next to Zeus. “It’s some compensation for forgetting when they go on to new lives. Mortality is so strange. You should try it sometime. It’s so very different in practice.”
“I look forward to hearing you sing about it.” Zeus put his hand on Father’s shoulder.
“They have equal significance, you know,” Father said. “All of them. They all matter to themselves, to each other.”
“I know. I wondered how long it would take you to figure that one out.”
Father leaned back on his hands. “There will be songs. A lot of songs.”
“Good. These are things the gods need to understand. If I am to send the lava—”
“Yes. Send me back to die with the city.” Father didn’t hesitate.
“And I,” Maia said, instantly.
“And I,” my brothers chorused.
“And I,” Ikaros said, only a heartbeat later.
“It’s not even your city anymore, you’ve just been given a research project by ever-living Zeus, you’re on Olympos with the gods, and you’re asking to go back to die?” Athene asked, incredulous.
“If it’s going to perish that way, I should go with it. And all of Kallisti is the Republic, all the different cities are our own visions of the Just City, and choices we have opened up in our interpretations.” Ikaros nodded to Porphyry, who grinned at him.
“Don’t worry, he won’t do that either,” Porphyry said.
Deep-browed Zeus turned his gaze on Porphyry. “Won’t I, grandson? How do you know?”
“You’re trying to find a way, by Fate and Necessity, to give us posterity. And I see one!”
“Oh Porphyry, you have your powers! Are they prophetic?” I asked.
“I’d much rather be able to fly,” Porphyry said. “And I don’t know whether it’s prophetic power, or just being outside time, but I can see time from the outside, and I see the threads and patterns of it, so I see where we could go.”
“What useful skills your children have,” Zeus said, to Father. “Did you think at all what you were doing with a whole clutch of them? Setting up your own pantheon? Will you go back with them even if it’s not to fiery destruction?”
“I’ll live out this life until this body dies, and then come home to Olympos,” Father said. “When this body dies, whether that’s in ten minutes from the volcano or in fifty years from old age.”
“You’ll be cleaning up this mess for a lot longer than fifty years,” Zeus said. “And you too,” he added, to Athene. “You’ll be out there getting your hands dirty, not tucked away in your library.”
“If that is your judgment,” Athene said.
“Show me what you have found, Porphyry,” Zeus said.
Porphyry stood up and walked over to Zeus. He put his hands together, then pulled them apart, as if doing a cat’s cradle, but without string. Something glimmered between his fingers. I thought for a moment it was one of the blue and gold bell-headed flowers, but there was nothing there. “Here,” Porphyry said, indicating the emptiness between his fingers. “And a little while before the ships arrive from Earth, do you see?” Zeus peered into the nothingness, then laughed. Thunder rolled around the mountain.
“That’ll do,” he said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s an era far in the future, in the twenty-fifth century, when humanity has just discovered faster-than-light travel,” Porphyry said. “They’re just rediscovering all the civilizations on planets that were settled more slowly than light. There aren’t complete records of who went where. Some of them are very strange. We can be one of them. We won’t look much odder than the others. It’s long after the Republic was written, so why shouldn’t a group of people have tried it?”
“Nobody ever has,” muttered Zeus.
“We’d have a divine origin story, but nobody would have to pay any attention. And the ships will come, and they can discover us, and we can rejoin the human mainstream, with all our books and art and theories. It will be a mystery, but only a small one, nothing to prove anything.”
“Why do you keep so secret?” Neleus asked. “Why can’t we give them proof? People want so much to know and to understand.”
“It’s better for humanity to allow us to work out our own theories, our own destiny. If we know it changes everything,” Ikaros said.
Neleus nodded slowly, recognizing that in himself.
“And knowing would fix one truth, and close off many paths to enlightenment,” Athene said. “You’re going to love the Enlightenment,” she said aside, to Ikaros.
“Posterity,” I said, to Zeus and Porphyry. “But another planet? I suppose a new world would be a fresh beginning.”
“A new world won’t be an empty blank any more than ten-year-olds are,” Maia said.
Zeus smiled at her. “True, and well deduced.” He looked at my brothers. “New planets need their own pantheons, and it seems we have one all ready.” He turned to Ikaros. “It has to do with place. Place is much more important to deity than you’ve ever considered. You should get out more. Travel.”
“On another planet?” he asked.
Zeus looked at Athene. “Were you planning to keep him as a pet?”
“There are a lot of wonderful times and places he hasn’t seen on Earth,” she said. “And then perhaps later other planets.”
Zeus waved his hand, and thunder rumbled nearby. “Do what you want. You will anyway. You agree, Ikaros? You’ll work with Athene?”
“If the City doesn’t need me.”
“The City will get along without you, on its new planet. And as well as going sightseeing with Athene, which I’m sure you’ll enjoy, there are Mysteries here you can be working on.” He looked at Maia. “How about you? Do you want to stay here or go on?”
“Go on,” she said.
“Good. The Republic will need you. You’ll be directing it in a few years, you know, you and Crocus. And then you.” He indicated Neleus. Lightning danced around his head. “Philosopher kings. It won’t be easy.”
“It hasn’t been easy so far,” Maia said.
“I swore that same oath,” Neleus said. “Fight bravely, judge fairly, contribute to the best of my abilities. We all did. We all want to go.”
I was looking at Neleus, and so were my other brothers as he spoke for them, and for a moment it was the way it had been before the voyage, when we had seen that we were all one thing, and he was another. But now, on Olympos, we looked to him for leadership. We had our powers. But he was the most philosophical. And that made him the best of us.
“But another sun?” Father asked, sounding worried.
“You can ha
ve it,” Zeus said wearily. “Now, is there anything else before I send the pack of you back where you belong?”
32
APOLLO
Euripides puts it very well: Zeus brings the unthought to be, as here we see.
Before we left Olympos I took Athene aside and took care of a few details. I scrawled “Goodness” on the parchment map they gave Maecenas in Lucia, and gave it to her to put into her arm-rest so that I could find it there. “Any time between the Last Debate and last autumn. And if you get the chance, could you possibly take the head of Victory and donate it to the Louvre so the poor thing can be back in one piece again? Oh, and for goodness’ sake, get us some more robots,” I said.
“Porphyry will get you robots,” she said. “Father’s going to be loading me down with work here.”
“But you’ll have Pico to help. He’s going to love your library. And learning all the new languages.” Behind us, he was hugging Maia, and Porphyry, and to my surprise, Arete.
“Thank you for speaking up for me,” Athene said, stiffly.
“It was nothing,” I said. I had felt sorry for her, exposed that way. “I know what it’s like to love a mortal.”
“It’s not the same,” she said, automatically. “Did you think of doing that with Simmea? Taking her outside time, where you could keep her young?”
“Sooner or later her soul would have wanted to go on,” I said, gently, because it would happen with Pico too, sooner or later, unless he became a god. Perhaps he would. He had the right kind of mind. Father had noticed that at once. We could do with a god with an excellence of fitting facts together into complex theories, especially if he could generalize it to things other than metaphysics. Now that I’d seen it, it seemed obvious. Athene didn’t have any children, so none of her areas of responsibility ever got passed along to anyone else. I really liked the idea of Pico as a god of synthesis.
“But did you want to?”
“I’m glad in a way that I didn’t have to make that choice. Simmea’s mortality was so much a part of who she was, and my incarnation so much a part of our relationship, that I don’t know what it would have been if I’d brought her here.” She’d have started to analyze everything. It would have been wonderful. I wished I had brought her, and Sokrates too. But mortal souls need to grow and go on, that’s part of the marvel of them, part of what we love about them. If Pico became a god, which I was now sure was Father’s plan all along, he would lose some of what made Athene love him, and lose the opportunities his soul would have had to transform. Who could tell what wonderful people Ikaros might become, given the opportunity? How much he might contribute to the excellence of the world? Still, there wasn’t any point saying that to her and risking spoiling what they had for now. He had to make his own choices.
“But you knelt in supplication to Father rather than let her life never have been.”
“Yes,” I said, simply. I hadn’t cared what it cost me.
She nodded. “Maybe it’s not so different. Agape.”
“Thank you for setting up the Republic, so I could learn what agape was,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m glad it was worth it. Have fun on the new planet. They’re bound to call it Plato. What else could they possibly agree on?”
I laughed. “Have fun with Pico. Keep learning everything, and let me know all about it when you have the chance.”
“When you come back, I’ll meet you in the Laurentian Library on the first day the orange tree blooms in 1564.”
“It’s a date,” I said, touched, and turned back to where Father and Maia and my Young Ones were waiting.
The sun isn’t literally a winged chariot with two fiery horses. It’s literally a big ball of fusing hydrogen. But metaphorically and spiritually, it’s a chariot. My chariot. My new sun, which had no name, only a catalog number, and which is literally a slightly bigger and redder ball of fusing hydrogen, is metaphorically and spiritually a racecar. My racecar. We called it Helios, “the sun,” either because we’re an unimaginative people, or because we instinctively recognized that it had metaphorically and spiritually the same driver as the old Helios we’d left shining on Earth. It zips across the sky. The day is only nineteen hours long.
Father set the five Republics of Kallisti and the eight Lucian Republics down carefully on the new planet, without so much as bumping any of their art or architecture. He also took all the people who chose to go, which was everyone except for a scattering of stubborn idiots who stood alone to see their cities and civilization disappear around them. (And who do you think has to be their patron and look after them forever after? Well, did you think Athene was going to get stuck with it?) He set the cities down the same distance apart they had always been. It didn’t matter at all to Father that he put them on a rocky volcanic plain on the edge of a great ocean, or that many of them now had harbors that went nowhere. It looked exceedingly peculiar, but we coped.
Porphyry did indeed get us some new robots, and that helped a great deal.
Maia became the first leader of the City after the move, and she and Crocus were the first Consuls of the Senate of Plato, the council made up of representatives of all twelve cities. She helped lead us into the era of peace and exploration, and when the aliens came she was the first after Arete to learn their language. She was thrice Consul, and after she died we put that on her memorial stone, along with all her other achievements. As Father had predicted, Neleus led us after that. By then we were thoroughly involved with the alien confederation, and we’d persuaded a surprising number of aliens to strive for excellence and justice in a Platonic context before the human spaceships discovered all of us and things got complicated.
As for me, I kept writing songs, and learning things about myself, about mortal life, about my children and other people. I kept on striving toward excellence, for myself and for the world. All the worlds.
I could still see my chariot at night from our new home, a distant glimmer, shining to me across space and time, which are Mysteries, and in strange ways almost the same thing. I was glad I could see it. I would have been very sad without it. But I’d have managed. I managed without Simmea, after all.
Not even Necessity knows all ends.
THANKS
Ada Palmer gave the right answers to all my questions, lent me books, sent me useful links, and talked to me about Pico when she was supposed to be grading. Then, after all that, she read it and made brilliant suggestions. This book wouldn’t exist without her. Buy her books and listen to her music. You’ll be glad you did.
I’m very grateful to my husband, Emmet O’Brien, for putting up with me when I’m writing. Elise Matthesen spent much longer than she imagined we would in the Bronze Age Greece section of the National Museet in Copenhagen, not to mention snarky Apollo comments in Antwerp cathedral. Gillian Spragg and Lauren Schiller were a great help with references.
This book was read by Mary Lace and Patrick Nielsen Hayden while it was being written, and after it was finished by Bo Balder, Biersma, Maya Chhabra, Pamela Dean, Ruthanna and Sarah Emrys, Magenta Griffith, Steven Halter, Sumana Harihareswara, Madeleine Kelly, Nancy Kremi, Marissa Lingen, Elise Matthesen, Clark E. Myers, Kate Nepveu, Lydia Nickerson, Emmet O’Brien, Ada Palmer, Doug Palmer, Susan Palwick, Eliana Rus, Drew Shiel, Sherwood Smith, and Nicholas Whyte.
I’d like to thank Patrick for editing, his assistant Miriam Weinberg for wrangling, Teresa Nielsen Hayden for her sensitive and thoughtful copyedits, and everyone in Tor Production and Publicity and Sales who work so hard at the unglamorous part of publishing, without which we wouldn’t have any books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JO WALTON won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012 for her novel Among Others. Before that, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Tooth and Claw won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. The novels of her Small Change sequence—Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown—have won widespread acclaim. More recently, her novel My Real Children won the James Tiptree, Jr
. Award. A native of Wales, Walton lives in Montreal. You can sign up for email updates here.
BOOKS BY JO WALTON
The King’s Peace
The King’s Name
The Prize in the Game
Tooth and Claw
Farthing
Ha’penny
Half a Crown
Lifelode
Among Others
What Makes This Book So Great
My Real Children
The Just City
The Philosopher Kings
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
1. Apollo
2. Arete
3. Arete
4. Maia
5. Arete
6. Arete
7. Apollo
8. Arete
9. Arete
10. Maia
11. Arete
12. Arete