“But you’ll come to the meeting tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, resignedly.
“Then I should go if I’m to catch the tide,” I said. “I’ll have to run as it is. I’ll see you all here after dinner tonight.”
“Have fun fishing,” Ikaros said. “And thank you for your questions. We’ll spend a happy afternoon thrashing out points of definition.”
“Oh really?” Porphyry asked. “Can I come fishing instead?”
“If you really want to and Jason doesn’t mind,” I said, seeing he was in earnest. “Do you know how to fish?”
“I go out all the time at home. I find it so relaxing, and of course it’s doing something really useful too.”
“I think exactly the same,” I said, pleased. “Come on!”
So we left Ikaros and Sokrates to their argument and ran down to the harbor to meet Jason and Hilfa. “There’s much more going on than anyone has told me,” Porphyry said, as we ran.
“I can tell you if you want,” I said, reluctantly.
“No, I don’t want at all. It’s delightful being in the dark for once. It’s such a nice change.” He laughed, panting, then we saved our breath for running. Down below we could see some boats going out already with the tide, but Phaenarete was still waiting at the quay when we came up alongside.
20
APOLLO
Once the door closed behind the rest of them, the three of us stood alone in Hilfa’s sitting room, looking at each other uncomfortably. Then Arete sighed, and took up the papers and read through them again, silently. “I feel Necessity pressing hard on me,” Jathery said. The spell of gla words had no effect on either of us, but I could feel the power gla was putting into them, to make us trust gla. Gla looked all Saeli now, with the greenish skin and the bright lids and the strange knobbly joints that didn’t bend the way human joints bend. The patterns on gla skin were not random, as on mortal Saeli, but formed changing letters in an alien alphabet that perhaps Arete could read.
“Don’t push me,” I said. “I’ve agreed to let you come with me, for Alkippe as much as for the aegis of Necessity, but that doesn’t mean I like you or want anything more to do with you than I have to. And afterwards you’ve agreed to abide by Father’s judgement.”
Gla glared at me.
Arete began to read aloud.
When she had finished, I looked at Jathery. “That seems possible,” I said.
“This is what Athene and I prepared, for the two of us to go,” Jathery said. “How did she do it alone?”
“I’ve read you all she wrote,” Arete said.
“She obviously didn’t want us to know that, and did want us to work together,” I said.
“Well, we can do that,” gla said, scowling. Gla face was much more flexible and human than any normal Saeli face could be. It made me wonder how much time gla had spent around humans, and with Athene.
“I know you can do it. What I’m worried about is you getting back,” Arete said, and her voice quavered. She dashed away tears from her eyes and hugged me. “See you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow evening,” I said.
Arete nodded. “I’ll talk to Porphyry, if necessary. But I hope very much to see you instead.”
We stepped out of Hilfa’s sitting room and out of time.
I’m not going to tell you the details of Athene’s instructions for how to get out from Avernus. She went to a lot of trouble to hide them, and for extremely good reasons. We followed them, and they worked, and we found ourselves … out there.
Where time and space are all and one, and self
Is smeared out over every where and when,
And memory, and soul, and stars, and dust,
Future and past and I and now and then
All merge, all melt together, beautiful,
Impersonal, and yet a point of view,
All greatness of the universe at once
Impinging, blossoming, becoming true.
So everything that’s ever been and done
Is now, encompassing, and truly whole,
All happening, all past, all that’s to come,
Each atom’s heart, each world, each grain, each soul.
Each planet spiralling around its sun,
Each quark, and growing leaf, and galaxy,
Each word, and molecule, and falling stone,
And every mortal choice and destiny.
Where I am all, in all, all is in me,
Timeless, entire, all suns, all life, all love,
All words and music one, the endless dance,
Reflecting, knowing, here, below, above.
And art and consciousness reflect, engage,
When spread across all time and space as one
Subjective, glorious, a strange bright joy,
A vaster wonder, and a deeper fun.
Only one soul emerged to being here
To be the point of view the atoms need
To be the consciousness that knows itself,
To be awareness, the essential seed.
Our Father’s soul, diffused across the void,
Perceiving all, not knowing what he knew,
In bliss complete, observer and observed,
Knowing, alone: imagined change, and grew.
Out here, where every moment touches now,
Conceived of life, and brought forth other souls,
And shaped the spheres of mind and soul and time
Where we with time could live and set our goals.
Each nebula and every lepton matter
And every soul will choose, and care, and mind
Can heal potentials into what is known
Not simply glorious, but graced and kind.
In time to know ourselves, to change, to learn,
For souls to grow through lives, to gain the scope,
Of consciousness, out here where all is one
Where Zeus invented change, and with it, hope.
Nourished, sustained, by this eternity,
Part of its endless moment’s boundless bliss
We live our little lives to stretch our souls,
And conscious, here, make real all that is.
Thus in this no-time, every time in one,
Many in harmony make up one voice,
Where only Father sang, we all sing now:
A miracle of time and free-won choice.
And being here is always, not an end,
There’s no before or after, all are here,
And all are elsewhere, with the universe
And nothing’s truly lost, so have no fear.
As Time was birthed, Fate and Necessity,
The guardians at the gate, the speed of light,
Emerged to keep both time and space apart
So souls in time could know themselves aright.
I didn’t seek for Knowledge, for I knew—
Was knowledge there, as she was Poetry,
And Love, and Guide, and Smith, and Trickster too,
Each full potential of all soul could be.
I couldn’t choose or change, there was no time,
Was all time, none, infinity was all,
Until Necessity took hold, and anchored, drawn,
One into three, our coming out a fall.
We landed with a jolt in the Underworld, at the bank of the river Lethe. (It’s full of brightly colored fish. I don’t understand why nobody ever mentions that. I suppose they must forget all about them.) I looked at Athene. There was nothing to say. Moments before, in the eternal moment, we had been entirely open to each other. I knew now why she hadn’t trusted me, and she knew that she could have, that I had learned the lesson that had been one of her many purposes in setting up the Republic. She knew I thought she was irresponsible, and I knew that she thought the gain in knowledge was worth any risk.
It was the same with Jathery. I understood gla now. Gla had wanted Platonism for the Saeli so much that gla had enticed Athene into the whole Rep
ublic plan. And all this was part of a wider plan in which gla intended to set them free, which was a goal I did respect. But gla also loved tricks for their own sake, and would rather do something a twisty way than a straight one. Hilfa had been gla idea, and the divided instructions. Meanwhile, Athene had believed that seeking out the different parts of the instructions in different parts of time would help prepare us, if we needed to seek her in Chaos. She had also thought that she was already prepared for it. Both of those were scale errors.
I did not long to be back out there, though I was separated from it. It is always there, and I am too, from the first photon to the last, and there is no difference. I wanted to laugh when I remembered that I had imagined it would be boring.
It’s always dark in the Underworld. A grey kind of grass grew here, on the slopes leading down to Lethe’s water. A breeze moved. It felt like being out of doors, though there were no stars, only endless darkness above. Behind us, in the caves, lay Hades’s chamber and the Fates, and beyond them the other rivers, the Styx and the Acheron. There were also innumerable mortal souls, waiting, choosing new lives, having their brief glimpse of eternity and then coming out again here, to cross this river and go on, forgetting. They were all around us, visible as shadows. Some of them pressed around us, either votaries of ours or simply drawn to anything here that had color and weight. One clung to my hand, drawn to me by love. It had last been a dolphin, and was going on to be a poet and a translator. From leaping joy in sun-spray and song, to the passing along of poetry, all to my glory, and through me to that wider wonder. I blessed the soul and called it friend, and set it down gently on the edge of the water. I kept my face turned away from the others until my eyes were free of tears.
When anybody visited the Underworld, the souls they met were not those of the recently dead, but those Hades thought it good for them to meet. I was grateful for that soul, as it was grateful to me. I did not visit the Underworld often. The only time I had seen Lethe before was when I had taken up my mortal life.
Jathery was the first to speak. “Are we going to drink?” gla asked. “I don’t believe they’d let us out the other way.”
“We’re in Fate’s domain here,” I said. Everything had that kind of inevitability it always did when Fate was involved, an inevitability like an underlining echo. It was very hard to resist. “You could perhaps go back and argue Necessity’s case, but I think the rest of us must go on, or we overstep.”
“We didn’t die,” Athene said. “But no, it is a kind of death, I see.”
“I don’t want to forget,” Jathery said. “But if I only wet my lips, perhaps I will remember.”
“If I forget, then it was all for nothing,” Athene said.
“I don’t think we’ll truly forget,” I said. It didn’t seem possible that we could. “But it might fade and seem less immediate, be like something learned.”
“Part of Him is always there,” Jathery said.
“Part of all of us is always there,” Athene said.
“But He is conscious of it.” Jathery rocked to and fro a little. “Unity and multiplicity, one and everything, below and above. And conscious of every movement from first to last, all the time.”
“Don’t ask me how Father can be aware of that and carry on a conversation,” I said. The idea was daunting. I’d never have understood it without going there.
“It wasn’t what we thought,” Athene said. “It wasn’t the Chaos before and after time. It was the One.”
“It was both,” Jathery said. “As I have long suspected.”
“Pico will be delighted.” Athene smiled. “He was there. Everyone was there. Is there. Will be there?”
Not even the aorist sufficed. “It’s a Mystery,” I said.
“I’m going through,” Jathery declared. Gla stepped down into the water. The fish swirled all around him, orange, and gold, and white and gold swirled with blue. Mortal souls clung close to him, then drank and drifted away across the stream and vanished. Gla scooped up some water in gla hand and took the tiniest sip.
“Do you remember?” I asked.
“Quite enough,” gla said.
I followed. When I touched the water to my lips and tongue, I did not forget, but as I had suspected, my memory of it softened. It became no less felt or immediate, but more poetic, easier to compass and compare. I was extremely glad to reach the far bank, as glad as the mortal souls around me who were speeding off towards their new beginnings. Ahead I could see a thinning of the darkness.
“What would happen if I went through without drinking?” Athene called from the shadowed bank.
“Fate would catch you,” I said.
“Try it and see?” Jathery suggested.
She did. She stepped down imperiously and strode on boldly. Then she slipped partway across, fell under the water, and came up a second later, drenched and spluttering. “Fate had you by the heel,” Jathery said, laughing.
“Have you forgotten?” I asked, putting out my arm to help her out.
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she said, taking my hand. “Only it all seems distant, like you said, and also very emotional, felt not thought. Is it like that for you?”
“Well it was certainly very emotional,” I said, diplomatically. I wondered how much she had really lost.
She released my hand and we all began walking up the slope, away from Lethe. “Thank you,” she said, and she didn’t mean for the help out of the river. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you and made it so complicated. I thought you’d go to Father and I was afraid of what might happen.”
“Florent-Claude sends his love,” I said.
“I’ll go to Father now and tell him everything.”
“Do you want us to come, or would you rather see him alone?” I asked. There was a grey glimmer of true light ahead. We were almost out of the Underworld and close to Olympos.
“I can manage alone, but I’ll accept your offer of company,” she said.
“And you, Jathery? You can go and sort things out about Alkippe now. You probably have other things to do, too? Eggs to hatch, names to change, Saeli to fool? So we won’t see you again for a long time?”
The writing on Jathery’s skin shifted and changed, and I was sorry I couldn’t make it out, even if it probably now read “Apollo sucks.”
“I agreed to abide by Father’s judgement,” gla said. “As for Alkippe, no.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
Jathery blinked gla multicolored eyelids slowly. “I now feel Necessity forbidding me even more strongly than it compelled me before. Perhaps the existence of that child is the price we have paid.”
“No,” I protested. “You have to deal with that. It wouldn’t be right for Marsilia and Thetis and Alkippe to pay for what we have done. Necessity couldn’t require—” But of course it could, it could be that cruel. A bright philosophical child. Would they even remember she had existed? I felt much more sympathetic to Thetis’s wailing than I had been when I heard it.
“We can ask Father about that too,” Athene said.
We took a few more steps towards the light and then appeared in the meadow on Olympos where I’d last been at the time of the Relocation. The same blue and gold bell-shaped flowers were nodding among the grass, and Father was sitting in the same place, as tall as the mountains but no bigger than a man. We walked towards him through the tall grass. Jathery walked on the other side of Athene. I wondered how Father seemed to gla, whether gla saw Father as Saeli. Father looked at the three of us evenly. He saw us, and so he knew where we had been and why, he knew everything, he had always known, and now it came to his attention. I understood this so much better than I had before.
“I have a song,” I said, before anyone else said anything.
Father spread a hand granting permission, to a distant rumble of thunder. Athene and Jathery took their places on the grass, flanking him. I took up my lyre, my true immortal Olympian lyre which never—unlike the mortal ones I’d been making d
o with for so long—needed tuning. That might not be my favorite thing about being a god, but it’s close.
I sang about being out there, much as I have set it down here. I could see Father smile as I sang. Athene seemed to be listening very intently. I wondered again how much she remembered.
“Good boy, Phoebus,” he said, when I finished and sat down. “And now you understand why I told you not to go there.”
“We are there already,” Athene said.
Lightning flashed to and fro among the peaks.
“Why do you keep so much from us?” Jathery asked, gla face expressionless but with anguish in gla voice.
“You have to be ready,” Father said. “You have to discover things for yourselves.” He looked at me. “Are you planning to sing that? To mortals?”
“I’m going to sing it on Plato,” I said. “There are people there who need to hear it, and are ready to understand it. I’m going to sing it to Sokrates and Pico.”
“They have a meeting to interrogate the gods, before the human ship lands,” he said. “You should go and sing it there. And you two should show up at the meeting too.” He waved at Athene and Jathery. “They deserve a chance to engage you in dialectic, after all you’ve done. And then bring Pico here. It’s time.”
“Oh Father!”
He hadn’t said a word of reproach to her for breaking his edicts and going out there. And since she’d had no way to get back, she’d still be in that eternal moment if Jathery and I hadn’t gone after her. Yet she was immediately protesting his commands again.
“It’s time,” he repeated firmly. “His apprenticeship is over. And when he has his powers, you won’t have to worry about who’s going to rescue him from Bologna, will you?”
“No, Father.” She looked down.
“Have you learned from this?”
“I have learned many lessons, including some about who to trust,” she said, looking at Jathery and then at me.
“And you?” he asked Jathery.
“Oh yes, incalculably much,” Jathery said, but Father seemed more interested in reading the hieroglyphs writhing over gla skin.
“After the debate on Plato, you will spend a year as servant to Hermes, in payment for stealing his name and form,” Father said.