The Just City (24 page)

“You're all philosophers,” Sokrates said, gently. “It's perhaps a demonstration of Plato's principle that philosophers will be best at ruling the state, to take three hundred of you and nobody else and give you a state to run.”

“Plato doesn't say any random philosophers from different schools and all across time,” Lysias protested. “And only about half of us are philosophers. The rest are classics majors and Platonic mystics. Besides, Plato does specifically say that the city needs all kinds of people. The philosophers are just intended for the guardians, not doing the whole thing, organizing the food supply and keeping things running and looking after the workers.”

“But the end result is that nobody here really understands whether the workers have intelligence and free will or not.”

The worker beside Sokrates did not move, and showed absolutely no sign of having intelligence and free will. It could have been a chair or part of the wall. I looked for the number on the worker and found it, above the tread as Kebes had said. It was nine digits long. Above that, on its lower back, about where the liver might be on a human, was a slightly inset square that reminded me of the squares on the outside of the building.

“If the workers do have intelligence and free will, then there's a real issue here,” Klio said. She patted the worker. It did not respond.

“Slavery,” said Sokrates. “Plato allowed slavery, did he?”

“Free will and intelligence are different things,” Pytheas pointed out.

“Different things?” Sokrates repeated. “We've been discussing them together, but is it possible to have one without the other?”

“Very possible. There are logic-machines in my time that can play games of logic so well that they beat a human master of the game,” Klio said. “That can be considered intelligence. But they don't have volition or anything like it. They are machines that simulate intelligence. The way these prioritize their tasks, and come here to recharge, simulates intelligence.”

“And it's very easy to see volition without intelligence in animals and small children,” Lysias said.

Klio nodded. “Developing one seems almost possible, but both at once? Surely not. But choosing to plant the bulbs so they would answer your question would take both.”

“Explain to me about the bulbs,” Lysias said.

“I was attempting to have a dialogue with a worker, asking if it liked its work and if there was any work it preferred and that kind of thing, while it was planting bulbs last autumn,” Sokrates said. “Today the crocuses it planted came up, and they spell
no
in Latin.”

“In English,” Klio corrected, pushing her hair back behind her ears. “Which seems more plausible, except for understanding the questions in Greek.”

“Did anyone else witness this?” Lysias asked.

“I did,” I said. “Both parts of it.”

“And so did I,” Kebes said.

“Kebes was the first to recognize the word this morning. And we investigated the other patches of bulbs in other places in the city, and they are all arranged in rows, not in anything resembling letters.”

“From which direction did they read as letters?” Lysias asked.

“North to south,” I said, after it seemed that Kebes and Sokrates were having trouble remembering. “And that was the direction the worker was facing as it planted them.”

“It does sound as if it would take both,” Pytheas said. He looked hopefully at the worker sitting so stoically plugged into the socket.

“Unless Simmea or Kebes went back and rearranged the bulbs to play a trick,” Lysias said.

“I would never do such a thing!” I said, hotly indignant.

“Neither would I!” Kebes said, but I could see that Lysias didn't believe him.

“It's certainly the most logical explanation,” Klio said. She sounded relieved.

“I shall consider that explanation and continue to explore the question,” Sokrates said. “Will you permit me to continue recording the numbers of the workers here, so that I can tell if I've talked to one before?”

Lysias and Klio looked at each other. “I suppose it can't do any harm,” Klio said.

“But you must promise not to keep coming back in here through the worker doors,” Lysias said. “It could be dangerous. You can talk to them in the city.”

“How is it dangerous?” Sokrates asked. “Do you think I'm going to plug myself into the sockets?” He laughed when he saw our faces. “I promise I won't plug myself into the sockets, or slip under a worker's treads, or any such thing. Is that good enough?”

“I'll stay and help,” Lysias said. “The rest of you can get to your dinners.”

I was about to offer to help, but Sokrates nodded. “If you'll talk to me while we work,” he said. “I'm exceedingly interested in what you know about intelligence and volition. Do the workers actually want things?”

“Come on,” Klio said, gathering the rest of us up. “Do you want to eat in Sparta?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It's bean soup.”

“Delicious! We haven't had bean soup in Florentia since last month.” Pytheas came with us. Kebes grunted and went off alone.

“He really didn't like it when Lysias said that,” I said after he had left.

“He wouldn't do that,” Pytheas said.

“I thought you'd think he would. You're usually ready to say anything bad about him.”

“He's an unmannerly lout and he doesn't pursue excellence, and I don't like the way he talks to you, and I don't like what he says in our debates on trust.” Pytheas glanced at Klio. “But he has honor. And he really cares about Sokrates. He wouldn't play a trick on him.”

“Do you agree, Simmea?” Klio asked.

“I do agree. But I can see that nobody who doesn't know Kebes well will believe that.”

“Kebes doesn't speak English,” Pytheas said. “Greek and Latin and Italian, he said.”

“You're supposed to forget any other languages you had before you came here,” Klio clucked.

“Well, you can forget that I said that,” Pytheas said. “Forgetting a language isn't easy.”

I nodded. “I'd like to believe that I came out of the soil on the day I started to learn to read, but I can't really forget ten years of memories. They're dim, and I don't often think of them, but they're not gone.”

“Your children will have no such memories,” Klio said. “It'll be easier for them.”

“To return to the point,” Pytheas said, though we were drawing near the Spartan hall now. “Kebes doesn't speak English. If he had replanted the bulbs he could have made them say
no
in Greek or Latin, but not English. And doing it in Greek would have been simplest, and Sokrates would have understood it.”

Klio nodded. “And by the same logic, it can't have been any of the other children either.”

“None of the children speak English?” I asked.

Pytheas raised his head as if he were waiting to hear how she would answer. “You're all from the Mediterranean, and there are no English-speaking countries there.”

“Besides,” I said, “Kebes wasn't ready to believe the worker had really communicated. If it had been a hoax he'd have been trying to get Sokrates to believe it, not arguing against it.”

“Not necessarily, depending on how well he knows Sokrates,” Klio said. We were at the door of the Spartan hall, which Klio held open for us. We went inside. The room was full now.

“We fetch our own soup from the urn,” Klio explained. I took a bowl and filled it. I also took a little roll of barley bread and a piece of smoked fish from the trays laid out. The soup was lovely, warming and filling, full of onions and beans.

“If Kebes didn't do it, then I have another thought,” Klio said, when I was nearly done eating. “There are workers that go to the feeding station and won't leave again. Lysias tries to give them new orders, but nothing works except taking out the piece of them that makes decisions and replacing it. We're running extremely low on spares. If they really are developing volition and that's a symptom of it, then what have we been doing?”

“Cutting out their minds?” Pytheas asked. “How gruesome. Could you put them back?”

“Yes … I think so. But we need the workers. We've been saying for years that we have to reduce our dependence on them, but nobody's ever willing to do it. They do so much, and some of it we can't do. We can't manage if they just sit in their feeding stations and feed and don't work.”

“Maybe those are the ones Sokrates should be talking to,” Pytheas said. “Have you finished? Shall we go back and suggest this?”

“Lysias is going to resist hearing this argument,” Klio said. “It would make him feel he has done bad things—without intending to, but done them nonetheless. He doesn't know Kebes.”

“It's worse than that, he does know Kebes, and he knows bad things about him,” I said.

“What bad things?” Klio asked.

“What Pytheas said. That he doesn't pursue excellence. And I think he might have mocked Lysias when he was trying to be his friend. He's never going to believe that he has honor and wouldn't trick Sokrates.”

“Lysias knows Kebes mocked him?” Pytheas asked.

I nodded. “I believe he does.”

“He's really not going to want to hear it,” Klio repeated. “Let's not go back there now. Don't worry. I'll talk to Sokrates.”

 

23

M
AIA

We had more than a thousand babies born in the month of Anthesterion, and it strained our resources to the utmost.

Plato wrote in the
Republic
that defective babies, and babies of defective parents, should be exposed. It was the standard practice of the classical world to expose unwanted babies—just to leave them out in a waste place where they might be rescued or, more often, just die. There was no blood guilt on the parents, they just left the child, they didn't kill it. The children froze to death or were eaten by animals … or occasionally rescued. Stories like Oedipus, and Theseus, and Romulus and Remus are of exposed babies who came back to find the family that had abandoned them. There were other stories too, which I hadn't heard before I came to the city, ghost stories.

I know that in my own century it was the practice for midwives to kill badly deformed babies—or just allow them to die instead of helping them to survive. It did seem the kind option. But the thought of exposing even deformed infants made my heart ache.

We had kept careful records of all the “marriages,” so carefully planned out with an eye to eugenics. (Klio and Lysias shrank from that term, but would never tell me why.) We took the babies into the nurseries as they were born. There was a nursery shared between Florentia and Delphi, so Axiothea and I worked together there—Ficino and Atticus left it to us. We called in Charmides when we really needed to. He was exhausted too, as our only real doctor. We defined all the babies we saw as excellent and passed them over to the nurses—men and women of iron status. One was Andromeda, whom I'd always liked.

Then in the middle of the night in the third week of the baby-rush, when we were already exhausted, there was one with a harelip. Axiothea had been with the mother while I was with another girl just starting her labor. She called me and I joined her in the private room, where she showed it to me.

Axiothea and I looked at each other in mute horror. The child had a cleft palate too. “It's fixable,” Axiothea said.

“Not here,” I said. “And Plato says…”

“I know,” she said. “Are you going to do it?” There was a mute appeal in her eyes.

“Yes,” I said, refusing to shrink from the duty. I wrapped the baby in a cloth and held it against my shoulder. It was a girl, which made things somehow worse. I was here to make the lot of women better, after all. “You look after things here.”

I went out of the nursery and walked through the city to the north gate, the one near the temple of Zeus and Hera. I walked quickly and held the baby tenderly, but she started to wail. She was such a little scrap of a thing. I walked on up the mountain, with some thought of taking her up to the top and throwing her into the crater. There was no hope of rescue here. No shepherd in want of a child was going to come along. There was nobody on Kallisti but us. There were wolves, but wolves wouldn't be able to feed her, even if they really did feed babies. With that lip she wouldn't be able to suck, and with the hole in her mouth she'd choke if she could.

She wasn't heavy, but she was awkward to carry. I was exhausted before I made it halfway up the mountain. I left her by the roots of a rowan tree, near a spring. I commended her soul to Athene and prayed that she might be reborn whole. She had been quiet for the last part of my walk, but when I put her down she started to wail loudly. I could hear it halfway back to the city. It cut off abruptly. I wondered if she had fallen asleep, or whether she was lying there still and terrified in the darkness, or whether a wild animal had taken her—a wild boar? A wolf? I took two steps back up the hill before I forced myself to stop. This was ridiculous. I was a disgrace to philosophy. I had done what I had come to do, what Plato told me to do, the standard practice of the ancient world. It was to protect the city, to make us better. All the same, I was still weeping when I came back into the city.

It was dawn. The wind came chill from the sea. The sky was paling and the birds waking. It was the point where late winter becomes early spring—the first of the flowers were coming up. Everything said beginnings, but for that poor harelipped baby there was nothing but an ending.

Of course, this was when I saw Ikaros. I hardly ever saw him now. He had dropped out of the Tech Committee in favour of something more exciting. “Maia, what's wrong?”

“Nothing, really,” I said. “Just a deformed baby that had to be exposed, and my soft heart.”