“Gla can see, you understand, where it is dark to us,” Hilfa said. “And if gla tells us to do something, it is perhaps because gla can see, or perhaps because gla likes to trick us. That is how Jathery is always. We are right to be afraid.”
“Much of what gla has taught us is good,” the kelp-picker objected. “Gla likes power, yes, and enjoys playing tricks, and gla wants knowledge, but gla is concerned for us, not like other gods.”
One of his pod behind said something in Saeli.
“They want to go and tell Aroo that Jathery was here,” Hilfa said. “It is a good idea.”
“Aroo knows,” I said. “Well, I think she does. She saw gla in Thessaly when gla was disguised as Hermes.”
“She would have recognized gla,” Hilfa said. He said something long in Saeli, and the kelp-gatherers all nodded.
“We will go and talk to her, and to Afial, and tell them all that,” the sitting one said, getting to his feet. “And you can tell Sokrates anything else he needs to know.” The whole pod left, in silence.
Sokrates picked up his soup, though it must have been cold by now. He sipped it. “So on your planet-of-origin your gods interfere?” he asked.
“Not with everyone all the time, but a great deal, yes, from what I have heard,” Hilfa said. “And everyone lives in fear of them. Here we do not name them in case they hear and arrive. I don’t know if that could really happen or if it is an incorrect belief.”
“So you believe that unless you speak their names, they won’t follow?” Sokrates asked.
“It has worked so far,” Hilfa said.
“Did you tell the kelp-gatherers that right now Jathery is headed off into Chaos?” I interrupted. I was still a little shaken from the threat of violence, conveyed in nothing more than the shift of shoulders and tilting of heads, so abruptly present and even more swiftly dissipated.
Hilfa shook his head slowly. “Aroo doesn’t need to know that.”
Sokrates frowned. “I’m not in favor of keeping things secret.”
“What would happen if Zeus unmade time?” Hilfa asked.
“I don’t know, you should ask Ikaros. But as I understand it, everything would cease to exist,” Sokrates said. “As Pytheas suggested, perhaps he’d make another, better attempt at imposing order on the universe, or perhaps everything would remain chaotic.”
I shuddered.
“What would it feel like?” Hilfa asked.
“I don’t know. It would be interesting to find out, don’t you think?”
“It makes me feel cold all through to think that could happen at any moment,” I said.
“Pytheas did seem to be worried about it, so I suppose it might. But cheer up, Jason.” He beamed at me, his whole face crinkling up around his eyes, which almost disappeared in the creases. “We have immortal souls.”
“I don’t find that thought very comforting in the circumstances,” I said. Hilfa nodded emphatically.
“Well, given that we have immortal souls, which we now really know unquestionably that we do, there are only three possibilities. Either we’d forget everything and start fresh, never having known anything else, or we’d go on from where we are with the way souls learn and grow and keep on growing in the new universe. Or of course, this universe could keep on existing and our souls would keep on growing and learning here. Those are all three pretty good choices when you think about it.” Sokrates nodded cheerfully to himself.
“But I like this world. I like being me. I like my life,” I protested.
“Well, I like my life too, but I expect we’d also like our lives in a new universe,” Sokrates said. “And if we do remember in any way, then it would be extremely interesting to compare. Pythagoras remembered being Euphorbus, and a peacock.”
“What is a peacock?” Hilfa asked.
“That animal in the mosaic in the palaestra of Palymra,” I said. “The one with the big tail.”
“It’s a bird,” Sokrates said. “You don’t have them here?”
“No birds on Plato at all,” I said.
At that moment Arete came in, and Sokrates got up. “I’ll go and see my old friend Crocus,” he said. “Joy to you both. See you tomorrow.”
“I belong on Plato,” Hilfa said as we collected the bowls and stacked them at the back of the room.
“I’m really glad you’re staying,” I said.
“So now can we form a pod?” he asked, as we walked out of the side room and into the main part of the temple.
“What?” I kept thinking the day couldn’t hold any more surprises, and then finding that it could.
“I have fulfilled my purpose and should be free now. I can change my name and take oath and form a pod. Arete said I belonged here, and Marsilia said she’d argue for me to take oath. So we can form a pod now,” Hilfa said. The statue of Amphitrite looked as surprised as I felt.
“You do belong here, and you should certainly take oath if that’s what you want, and I know that Saeli live in pods, but what does that have to do with me?” I asked.
“The two of us, and Marsilia, that’s three, and Thetis, four,” he said, waving his free hand. “We need one more to be five. A pod. A family. Maybe Dion? Though he’s so much older.”
“Marsilia and Thetis—look, Hilfa, this isn’t how it works. And humans don’t make pods of five. You should make a pod with Saeli, surely. Don’t you want children?”
“There are children already,” Hilfa said. “Camilla, and little Di. And Alkippe. You could make more. And I could have children.”
“Not with humans,” I said, sure of myself on that. “You’d need a Saeli pod for that, like I said.”
“No. I would need an egg, that’s all. Pods are about childraising, not genetics.”
“But where would you get an egg?” I asked. “Athene isn’t going to give you one in a box.”
He laughed his learned laugh and started walking again, out of the temple and into the chill of the street. “No. I would fertilize one in my body, or find one in the sea.”
“The sea’s not full of Saeli eggs, is it?” I looked out towards the peaceful starlit water as if expecting to see it suddenly swarming with young Saeli.
“Yes, it is. Most Saeli don’t want babies most of the time, and so they discharge eggs swimming. Fish eat many of them, but many survive. But don’t worry, none will hatch unless brought out and touched with the right … I don’t know the word. The right touch. By one of my gender.”
I thought of all the times I’d seen Saeli swimming, and shuddered at no more than the thought of how cold the water was. “Do people know this? Do the consuls know that the sea is full of Saeli eggs?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I expect so. You should ask Aroo, or the Saeli who first settled here. I do not know what they explained.” Hilfa shook his head. “But while it would be nice to have a Saeli child, it is not necessary for the pod. If you don’t want one, I can help with the human children.” He already did.
“I can see you’ve been thinking about this a lot, but it isn’t a human kind of thing,” I said.
“Pod formation is difficult, and we have come so far on the road together. I want to form a pod with you. You are my friends. The other Saeli don’t like me. You saw that earlier with that pod of kelp-gatherers. They think I am an orphan, that I was an egg somebody of my gender brought out and raised without a pod and then abandoned. It happens occasionally. It is disapproved of, in our culture, though they say there are other Saeli cultures where only those of my gender raise children and there are no pods.”
“Well, maybe the crew is something like a pod,” I said. This hadn’t been what I expected when he’d started to work with me, but I did care about him and I didn’t want to trample over hopes he’d clearly been holding close for some time. “I do think of you as being almost like a brother. And if you were to raise an egg, I’d certainly help.” I thought of all the times he’d helped get the kids to eat in the mornings, and helped Dion limp along to Samos, our eating
hall, even carrying him a few times on icy days. “But that doesn’t mean that Thetis and Marsilia are involved. This isn’t how it works with humans.”
“But you want Thetis and Marsilia wants you.” He sounded entirely matter of fact. “I don’t understand.”
No, he certainly didn’t understand! “Marsilia works with us, but this isn’t how we organize things,” I said. “I do feel as if you’re family, Hilfa, and I think from what she said earlier that Marsilia does too, and likely Thee does as well, but even so that doesn’t mean we’re going to arrange a pod.” I suspected that, far from wanting me, Marsilia had come to work on my boat to keep an eye on Hilfa.
“They have marriages with multiple adults in the City of Amazons,” Hilfa said. “And they have fishing there too. Thetis could work in a nursery there, but I think Marsilia needs to be here for politics.”
“Marsilia definitely needs to be here.” We had reached my sleeping house and stopped outside it. “This isn’t going to work. Plato’s right. Friendship is best.”
“But a pod is friendship.”
“And Marsilia and Thee are sisters,” I said.
“Plato says brothers and sisters can marry if the gods allow it,” Hilfa said, looking up. “We could ask Arete. Or Pytheas.”
“No,” I said, as firmly as I could.
“Pod formation is always difficult,” Hilfa said, undeterred. “But we’re a good team. We’ll work it out.”
He walked off down the street towards his own house. It had been a long evening full of strange conversations, but that might have been the strangest of all.
19
MARSILIA
The next morning, Alkippe and I went to Florentia for breakfast, the way we did every day. I put on my best kiton, because there was a Council meeting. The meeting of the previous evening seemed to have happened long ago, because so much had happened since and my priorities had shifted so much. Even counting the extra time I had spent with Hermes collecting Athene’s messages, it couldn’t be more than a day and a half’s worth of hours, but it felt like years. Time was a strange thing even when it didn’t have gods messing about with it.
It was a beautiful day, with warm sunlight, though a chilly edge to the wind whispered that summer was over. Dad was sitting at our usual table, eating nut porridge with Arete, Klymene and a couple of Bronzes I didn’t know. We made our way across the room, greeting friends and the morning’s servers as we helped ourselves to porridge and fruit. Alkippe slid in next to Dad, and I sat opposite them, next to Klymene. Dad introduced the strangers as Akamas, the human, and Slif, the Sael. “We’ve been up all night at the spaceport,” Dad said. “Akamas works the communications there, and Slif has been starting to learn the space-human language.”
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Pretty much on track,” Klymene said. “I think they believe us, and I think their initial delegation will come down tomorrow morning. They’ll be three humans and six Workers. They have much better medical technology than we have—that’s something we haven’t been able to trade for with the Saeli or the Amarathi.”
“Sixty-One is back on duty translating now, and the new shift have taken over,” Dad said. “I’m going to go to the meeting and then sleep all afternoon.”
“I’ll be very very quiet if you’re sleeping in the afternoon,” Alkippe said. She was holding a spoonful of honey above her porridge bowl and turning it so that it fell in a slow spiral.
“You’ll be in the palaestra, so you can be as loud as you like,” Dad said.
Alkippe laughed and stirred her porridge. “I’d have to be very loud in the palaestra to wake you at home!”
Dad grinned back at her. “Maybe if you were wrestling and you brought somebody down with a big thud and a loud grunt!”
“Maybe if I was running in armor and ran very fast and really rattled!”
I felt so fond of them both as I listened to them burbling nonsense. This was how meals were supposed to be. A sufficiency of healthy food, and comfortable conversation. “How’s the other thing?” I looked at Arete.
“Everything’s fine so far. No news expected until tonight,” she said. She didn’t look worried, and I couldn’t ask more in front of the others, but I assumed that meant Grandfather and Jathery had set off all right.
“Well, that seems like good progress with the ship,” I said. “It’s wonderful to think we’re going to meet the space humans. So exciting!”
“I want to meet them too,” Alkippe said.
“It seems the space humans may be stranger than we thought,” Dad said.
I nodded, thinking of Phila. “I expect they will be different.”
“Will they look different, like the Saeli?” Alkippe asked.
“No, they’ll look like ordinary humans, probably, but they’ll have all kinds of axioms about what’s important that are different,” I said.
“Yes, that’s it,” Dad said.
“Have you asked what kind of government they have?”
“Yes, but we didn’t understand the answer very well,” he said.
“An oligarchy with some democratic features, but not much control,” Arete said, as she scraped her bowl.
I tried to imagine that and couldn’t.
“I wonder what kind of people they’d send out to explore?” Alkippe asked. “I think it would be a fun job.”
“Well, mostly Silvers, I’d think,” Klymene said. “Maybe with some Golds in charge, and some Bronzes to run the technical side of the spaceship.”
“We don’t use Platonic classes at home, but that’s approximately how we crew our spaceships,” Slif said. “It’s the logical way of organizing things.”
“But they may have other kinds of people entirely,” Dad said.
“What kind?” Akamas asked.
“Tyrants. Timarchs. Oligarchs. Slaves. Remember that word profits?” Arete frowned down at her empty bowl.
“Where’s Grandma?” Alkippe interrupted.
“Out on the Excellence, getting it ready for a trip to Amazonia,” Dad said.
Arete stood up. “Where are you going?” Alkippe asked.
“I’m going home to sleep now,” Arete said.
“Are you going to fly?” Alkippe asked.
“Yes, I am,” she said, smiling down at Alkippe. “I’ll be back this evening. I’ll see you in Thessaly after dinner.”
“Thank you for all your help with English,” Slif said.
Arete went off towards the kitchen, carrying her dishes.
“Is the space human language difficult?” I asked Slif.
“No, English is much like Greek in structure, but with odd tenses and conditionals and a very large vocabulary,” Slif replied. “It shows signs of being a creole originally, a merger of two or more different languages from the same family. Such often keep the vocabulary of both parent languages with different shades of meaning. Also, it has borrowed a great deal of technical vocabulary from Latin and Greek. The spelling is bizarre. It’s fascinating. But it’s not elegant.”
“It sounds like a kind of clicky buzz to me,” Akamas said. “I can see that it has borrowed some words from Greek, but I think they’d have done better to borrow the entire language and be clear. Or why didn’t they stick to Latin? English comes from Britannia, originally, apparently, and they spoke Latin there in Tacitus’s day. I don’t understand this desire people seem to have to be constantly changing things.”
They had both finished eating, so they bade us joy and left. They were going to catch up on sleep, and I envied them the opportunity.
“Where’s Pytheas?” Alkippe asked as soon as they had gone.
“We don’t know. He and Jathery went off together. They’ll be back tonight,” I said, praying that they would, that Jathery would go back and conceive her, that the world would be safe for her to grow up. “Now eat your porridge, don’t play with it.” I’m not Thetis. I don’t cry easily. But this conversation kept bringing a lump to my throat.
“Who’s Jathery?” Alkippe asked.
“He’s the one we thought was Hermes,” I said.
Dad looked at me sideways. “That wasn’t Hermes?”
“No, as it turns out that was Jathery, a Saeli trickster god,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. A night’s sleep had done me good, but it was still an uncomfortable thought, and I didn’t want Dad to worry about it. Klymene put her old hand on mine. I looked at her, and she smiled consolingly. I don’t know how she knew there was anything wrong.
“I thought he wasn’t like the way I thought Hermes would be,” Alkippe said, triumphantly.
“Well, that was extremely clever of you,” I said. I hadn’t guessed at all.
“Where’s Thetis?” Dad asked, clearly looking for a way to change the subject. “I was expecting her to come in with you.”
“Finally,” Alkippe said, bouncing on the bench. “She said if you asked to tell you that she’d gone down to the harbor to see Hilfa and collect the books for Ikaros before she goes to the nursery, and she’d see us all here at dinner like always.”
“Right,” Dad said, suddenly paying a lot of attention to scraping his bowl.
“Last night, Auntie Thee was with Jason and Her- and Jathery. I thought Jason was your friend?” Alkippe asked me.
“I work with Jason and Hilfa, but that’s no reason he can’t be Thetis’s friend too. They did their shake-up year and took their oaths together when they were ephebes,” I said. And even if Thetis didn’t exist, Jason would never have looked at me. I knew that. There was no sense in the way I kept wanting people who couldn’t see me that way. Plato was right as usual: keep sex for the Festival of Hera and stick to friendship the rest of the time. “People have lots of friends, not only one.”