“I was born in Amasta, a farming village near Alexandria, but I grew up in the Just City. My parents called me Lucia, after the saint, but Ficino renamed me Simmea, after the philosopher. Saint Lucy and Simmias of Thebes aid and defend me now!”
Whatever I had expected this was not it. I read the paragraph again. I had never known that her birth name was Lucia, nor guessed that she would have called on Saint Lucy. How little I had known her after all! But this was treasure, an autobiography. Many people in the city wrote one; there was a kind of fashion for them. Simmea had never told me she was writing one. I felt a little hurt, and yet still excited. She would be bound to talk about me. I could see our relationship from her perspective. It was the closest I could come now to talking to her. And yet I hesitated. Lucia, Saint Lucy—what if reading this proved I didn’t know her after all? What if she didn’t love me? But I knew she had. It was unquestionable. She had said once that she loved me like stones fall downward. I wanted to read her annals of our life together. I wouldn’t be able to show it to anyone except our Young Ones, because she was sure to have revealed that I was Apollo. How well I remembered her discovering it, that day in the Temple of Asklepius. How angry she had made Athene! What terrible consequences that had had! And it was all my fault. Yet even so, even in all its consequences that included the metamorphosis of Sokrates and the collapse of the First Republic, I still smiled to remember how well she had dealt with discovering who I was.
I read that first paragraph again, and this time I went on. I was brought up short again reading her pondering whether it might have been a better path to happiness for her to have lived out her life in the Egyptian Delta. “No,” I said aloud. I was astonished that she could even have considered that. Had I really known her? She had wanted, fiercely wanted, to be her best self, and surely her best self could only have been in this place and time?
I sat on her bed beside her chest, leaning back against the wall, and read the whole first notebook. When I read that she had said my name to Ficino in the slave market, I had to put the book down because I was sobbing too hard to go on. The first book brought her up to her arrival in the Just City and learning to read. Kebes was all through it, but she did not yet mention me as Pytheas. Every time I saw his name I felt a pang of jealousy. Kebes had known her name was Lucia—it didn’t suit her at all. She was Simmea, the name was perfect for who she was. Lucia sounded soft and hesitant, while Simmea’s mind had been like a surgical instrument. I remembered her smiling at me. Kebes was nothing. Matthias, she said his original name was. Well, he was gone. I didn’t know whether or not to believe that he’d been responsible for the raid in which she had been killed. We hadn’t heard anything from him for such a long time. Nobody knew where he was, or cared anything about him.
I took up the second notebook. I touched the letters of her name where she had written them in both alphabets. Simmea, not Lucia. I knew, with my rational self, that if I’d ever asked her what her childhood name had been she would have told me. That she never had showed how trivial it was, not how important. I turned the second book over in my hands. There were twelve books. If I read one a month they could last me a year, and for that long I could have a little more of her. If I had been my proper self that was what I would have done, one a month, or even one a year. But in mortal form, with emotions that pounded in my veins and clutched at my stomach, I could not bear the suspense of not knowing what she had written. I opened the second notebook.
It began with her learning to read, and to love Botticelli. It was far on into it before she mentioned me, and the time she taught me to swim. I was hurt that she had disliked me before she knew me, and then charmed by her description of that swimming lesson, which I remembered very well. I was surprised she was attracted to me so soon. The second book ended with our agreeing to be friends. I picked up the third, hesitated only for an instant, then opened it.
By the time Arete came to find out why I hadn’t been in Florentia for dinner I had read all but the last volume, and was up to the conversation we had with the Workers outside Thessaly. I remembered that time so well; Sokrates, and the robots becoming entranced with philosophy, and Simmea discovering my true identity. It was so exciting. It had felt as if we could unravel all the Mysteries and remake the world. The words were still engraved in the paving stones outside, I walked on them every day. “Read. Write. Learn.” And she belonged to the city and wanted it. And yes, she loved me, she saw me clearly and loved me. But I had always known that. I hadn’t known she felt unworthy of me whether I was god or mortal. And I never doubted that what she wrote was the truth. She never said that she held the truth above me—she didn’t need to. It was axiomatic to Simmea. That was the thing about her that was so hard to put into a song.
I went with Arete to Florentia and sat with Ficino as I ate porridge and fruit. He talked to me but I barely listened. My mind was with Sokrates and Simmea and a time that was twenty years gone. I missed that sense of infinite possibility, like a bud coming to flower. Everything after the Last Debate had been compromised. I wanted to go back and read the last notebook, even though I knew now that it would end before our life together, that I would never know more than I knew now of what she had thought of our Young Ones, never read about our one long-anticipated mating. I looked at Arete, the product of that one sexual act, who was eating grapes and talking to Ficino. I felt my eyes mist with tears. I had read about Simmea’s matings with Aeschines and Phoenix and Nikias. I hoped the one time we had sex together had fulfilled her anticipations. I thought it had, and she said it had, but unless she had packed more into the last notebook than the others, I would never know for sure.
I wondered who she had written the notebooks for. Not for me. I was fascinated to read them, but I wasn’t their intended audience. Equally they were not for publication in the City and inclusion in the library, certainly not, because not only did she reveal the truth of my identity, but she explained things neither I not anybody else in the City would need to have explained. What audience had she imagined? They were written in lucid classical Greek. Who could read them? Anyone in classical antiquity and truly educated people for another millenium. I considered for a moment that once I was back in my true form, I could take them to Athens and leave them on Plato’s doorstep. My mouth twisted. I wouldn’t do it, but I was so tempted.
Phaedrus and Neleus were in Thessaly when Arete and I got back. I took the last notebook out of Simmea’s chest and saw their interested glances. Before they could inquire, I removed all twelve notebooks and tucked them into the fold of my kiton. Our Young Ones were definitely not Simmea’s audience for these, and I didn’t want them reading them. Her thoughts and feelings and intimate experiences weren’t for them. Arete was looking at me curiously. “Did your mother ever tell you her childhood name?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Wasn’t she always called Simmea?”
“Her parents called her Lucia,” I said. “But she never used it after she came here.”
“Lucia?” Neleus asked. “I never knew that.”
“It isn’t important,” I said as I went out. I was glad I’d told them. I didn’t want Kebes to be the only other person who knew it. Though Ficino would know it too, if he remembered. He probably didn’t remember—not that his wits were wandering like poor old Adeimantus, but he couldn’t possibly remember the original name every child had given him.
I took the notebooks to the library and sat in the window seat where Athene used to sit. It was dark outside, though the library was lit with electricity, and warmed with it as well. The library stayed at a constant temperature. Crocus and Sixty-One kept the electricity working now as they always had. They needed it themselves, of course. I wondered why Athene had left them when she took all the other Workers. She took the others to punish us, of course, to make us do without them and realize how difficult it would be. To live a life of the mind you need slaves or technology, and technology is unquestionably better. Now we compromised, eking out
the technology we had and working ourselves half the time. It didn’t leave us the leisure for philosophy we had before. A tired mind can’t think as well. But nobody who enslaves another can be truly free.
But why had she left Crocus and Sixty-One? Was it because she felt they had betrayed her in becoming philosophers? But surely that was the purpose of the City? They were Sokrates’s friends, and my friends now. Perhaps it was because those two had spoken up at the Last Debate, choosing the City? I didn’t know what she was thinking. I wondered whether I ever had. Athene seemed very far away as I sat on her seat in the library. People constantly debated why she had set up the City. I thought I knew that—because it was interesting, and because she could. When it ceased to be interesting she had abandoned it. I had projects like that myself. My oracle at Delphi was one of them. It had seemed as if giving people good advice would help everyone get on better. I hadn’t kidnapped people from across time to do it, but I had dragged a shipload of Cretans across the Aegean.
I looked at the last notebook, XII. Had she stopped after the Last Debate? Why? Twelve seemed an extremely round number—and Simmea had distrusted numerology and suspiciously round numbers. It wouldn’t have been an accident. But it might be as far as she had reached. I’d seen her writing in notebooks fairly recently—it irked me that I couldn’t remember when exactly. The book might not be finished. I opened it and checked. It was full.
I read everything she had written in the last notebook. Then I sat staring unseeingly at the bookshelves. She hadn’t written about the Last Debate. She had written about the conversation we had in the Garden of Archimedes, which I remembered very well, and then about the last Festival of Hera, the one in which she’d been paired with Kebes. My fingers clenched into fists reading it. She had told me it hadn’t been so bad. She said she didn’t want to discuss it, and I hadn’t pushed her about it. She had never told me that he had raped her, or I’d have killed him. I really would. I was ready to kill him now. She wrote that it wasn’t rape, that she had consented, but I knew better. She had said no, and asked him to stop, and he had gone on. He had bruised her. She had gone there willingly, for the City, like the philosopher she was, and he had tried to take her into his fantasy.
I got up and paced the library furiously. I wanted to kill Kebes, now, immediately, with my bare hands, but I didn’t know where he was. Simmea had written that I’d have been upset, but she had no idea how upset I would have been. I had learned what rape was, what it meant. I was also furious with Athene for pairing her with Kebes. It had been aimed at me, and I knew it, and Simmea knew it too. I would have killed him and left his body for the dogs and kites. He had tried to own her, and he had hurt her, my Simmea, my friend, my votary. She had told him I didn’t try to own her, and she had told Sokrates that she and I wanted each other to be our best selves. It was true. Worship was easy, commonplace. Beautiful women were everywhere. People who understood what I was talking about and could argue with me as equals were incredibly rare. How could he have done that? And why didn’t she tell me? Was it connected to the reason she had stopped me saving her life?
I was also furious that he had called her a scrawny, flat-faced, bucktoothed Copt. It was true, and she cared so little that she had laughed, but it galled me that he had dared to say it to her, to try to hurt her that way, through her looks. I always put up with Kebes because he was Simmea’s friend, and all that time he had imagined he owned her, owned some imaginary person called Lucia. She was Simmea, Plato’s Simmea, as Sokrates had said to her, as close to Plato’s ideal Philosopher King as anyone was likely to get. She had never told me about that conversation either. She had told me about Sokrates’s plan for what turned into the Last Debate, but not about the rest of what she had written, and how they had talked about the way they both loved me.
I missed Sokrates. Not the way I missed Simmea, as if half of myself had been amputated so that I was constantly reaching out with a missing limb. I hadn’t entirely lost him, either; there were days of his life before he came to the City when I could still visit him, in Athens, once I was back to myself. But I missed being able to just talk openly with him. He would have had wise advice for this situation, and nobody else would. Nobody else could even understand it. There was nobody I could remotely imagine talking to about it, except Simmea and Sokrates, and I couldn’t have either one of them. Sokrates had flown to me, after Athene had transformed him into a gadfly, and perched on my chest for a moment, then he had stung me and flown away, and nobody had seen him since.
I went back to Athene’s window seat. Nobody was in sight. A few people had been in the stacks, but they had fled when they saw my face. (Even without far-shooting arrows rattling on my shoulder, my wrath can have that effect on people.) I sat down and opened Athene’s secret compartment under the arm-rest. All I was thinking was of hiding Simmea’s notebooks. I wasn’t expecting anything to be there. Athene had been gone for almost twenty years. She’d had plenty of time to cover any traces she wanted to cover. But as I slid the notebooks in I felt that there was something there, stiff parchment, not paper. I pulled it out, curious.
It was a map of the Aegean, hand-drawn and colored, dolphins and triremes drawn in islandless spots on the lapis sea, but with all the islands and coasts drawn accurately. Kallisti was shown round, which meant it was a current map. The labeling was in the beautiful Renaissance Greek calligraphy that everyone in the City had learned, along with the corresponding Italic hand. Our city was marked, but not the other four cities on the island. There were cities marked in other places, some of them known to me, others strange. We didn’t have any maps like this, but anyone could have made it without too much trouble. We had parchment, we had the tools for making illuminated manuscripts, we even had accurate maps.
The thing that surprised me was the circle marked in red ink around a city on the northeastern edge of the island of Lesbos. The handwriting was entirely different from the rest of the map, it was a scrawl and nobody’s neat penmanship. This was clearly a later addition, drawn in after the map was made. “Goodness” it said. The handwriting was immediately recognizable. It was mine.
8
ARETE
There’s nothing like the feeling of a ship under full sail. It’s as if the ship is alive, every rope and piece of wood responding to the wind and the will of the sailor. It feels like magic when you are part of it. Before the voyage I had never been on any craft for more than a few hours. I’d learned the use of tiller and sail on the little fishing boats. I had been taken around the island on the Excellence twice, once a circumnavigation when I was quite young, with all the Young Ones my age, and once a year ago when Mother was going with an embassy to Sokratea and she took me with her. That was the trip where I’d really made friends with Erinna. Before that, she’d just been somebody my brothers’ age who I saw around sometimes. On that trip we’d talked properly for the first time. I’d been fourteen and she had been eighteen. I knew she saw me as a child. All the same, when I came aboard for this voyage and she waved to me, my heart swelled.
When we left I was wild with excitement, not to avenge Mother but to be moving, exploring, doing something different. Then, as soon as the ship had left the harbor and stood out to deep water, I was filled with the calm joy of the wave, as I had been both the other times I had been aboard ship. Dolphins came alongside and followed us. The water was so clear that I could see the whole pod, and the rush of water breaking along the side of the ship, and the gold and black sand far below on the sea bed. Yet when I looked up and out the sea was, well, wine-dark as Homer puts it. The sea was a deep dark blue of precisely the same reflective luminosity as rich red wine. And the white wave foaming along the ship’s side broke it, and the dolphins surfacing, and the shore of the island. I looked back at the City, which looked as small as a model even from this little distance. Above it the mountain was smoking, as it often did. Perhaps there would be a little eruption, a new stream of lava snaking down the side. Or perhaps the great erup
tion would come, the eruption that would carve away half the island and destroy the City and everything. I hoped that wouldn’t happen while I was away.
Phaedrus came over to me where I stood by the rail looking up at the mountain. All three of my brothers who had asked to go had been accepted by the Chamber to make the voyage, Phaedrus, Kallikles and, thank Hera, Neleus. I don’t know what he’d have done if they had refused him. “Is there a god of volcanoes?” Phaedrus asked.
“Hephaistos?” I ventured. “He’s supposed to have his forge in one. That Titian picture in the temple, remember?”
“But his main area is making things, isn’t it?”
“Yes, overlapping with Athene on technology. She designs things and he implements them. Athene overlaps with a lot of people on a lot of things. Ares on war, Fa—Apollo on learning. I suppose knowledge does cover a lot of ground.” I looked at Phaedrus, who was still looking at the mountain as the Excellence sailed east. I lowered my voice, although nobody was near enough the overhear us. “Have you been talking to Father about how to become a god?”
He flushed. “You must have done the same or you wouldn’t know what I was thinking.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it,” I said. “But volcanoes seem like a huge area.”
“But there isn’t anyone specific for them. Poseidon has earthquakes, and the ocean. It’s hard to think of anything that’s vacant. I could specialize in volcanoes, learn about them. We’ve grown up next to one, after all.”
“But how would you do it?” I couldn’t imagine how such a thing could possibly work, how Phaedrus could go from the young man at my side to becoming a patron deity of volcanoes. I couldn’t picture the intermediate steps at all. “It’s hard to see how you could develop an excellence of volcanoes.” I looked at the plume of smoke, being blown on the same wind that was drawing the ship. “I was just hoping it wouldn’t erupt and destroy the city before we get back.”