The Philosopher Kings (12 page)

“You can't help them, it could break history,” Maia said.

I turned to her, surprised out of myself. The deck lights had just come on, giving everything a warm golden glow. “What do you mean break it?”

“If Kallikles taught them how to make iron it could change everything. Not that village, maybe, but imagine if the Trojans had iron weapons and the Greeks only bronze! Trying to help them could ruin everything!”

Ficino laughed, and we all turned to him. “We don't know that. It could be what sets history right. Nobody knows much about what happened in Greece before the Trojan War. Maybe the Age of Iron began because Kallikles taught these primitives how to make it.”

“I don't actually know how,” Kallikles admitted.

“I expect it's in the library.” Erinna said. I wanted to turn to look at her, and I normally would have, but I kept still.

“We could send out expeditions to teach them medicine and technology,” Kallikles said. “We could really help them.”

“That would be wonderful,” Erinna said.

Maia tutted. “And if Troy had iron and didn't fall?”

I was breathless again at the thought. I had imagined Ficino going to Troy's aid despite knowing they would lose, now I imagined him going and changing everything.

“And what would happen then?” Ficino asked. “A different history starting from here where Troy never falls and Rome is never born? I don't think that's possible. We're here, we're free to act, anything we do is already part of history. We won't change everything. We're embedded here. We're in a secret forgotten part of history, but history can't be changed. We know what's coming. We're safely tucked in the margins of history. Athene saw to that.”

“You have a lot of faith in her still,” Maia said, sharply.

“In Providence,” Ficino said. “If these people need help and we can give it, perhaps that should be part of our mission. If we're going to do it then it's already part of what we will do. And it might relieve some suffering.”

“But what would happen if we tried to change history?” Erinna asked. “If we deliberately did something—if we told Paris what would come of him stealing Helen. If we told Helen?”

“They'd do it anyway. Lovers are idiots!” Ficino said. I felt my cheeks heat again. “It would be better to warn Priam about the wooden horse.”

“I wonder if they're discussing helping the village in the council now?” Phaedrus mused.

“I wonder what Father's saying,” Kallikles said.

“Why aren't you on the council?” Ficino asked Maia.

“It's only six people, so they can make decisions quickly,” she said. “But why aren't you?”

“They're all Children,” Ficino said. “There aren't many Masters on this expedition, and while there are plenty of Young Ones, you wouldn't expect them to have positions of responsibility yet.” He turned to Kallikles. “You should tell your father what you've been saying to us, about wanting to help. It's a question for the whole Chamber back home, but it's a question we shouldn't forget.”

“And we should debate whether what we do can change history,” Maia said. “It's another thing we should have asked Athene while we had the chance.”

“I'll definitely tell Father,” Kallikles said. “But if we can change things, it wouldn't necessarily make them worse. We could make them better.”

“But it's all connected. We can't change anything without changing everything. If Priam knew about the wooden horse, there would be no Rome,” Maia said.

I resolved to ask Father about history as soon as I could safely get him alone.

The ship stayed at anchor that night. I didn't go down to my hammock beside Erinna. I wrapped myself in my cloak and slept on deck, badly. When I was awake I fretted about my inappropriate response to Erinna's hand. She had meant friendly comfort, and my body had undoubtedly felt lust. I wrestled with the twin horses of my soul, as Plato urges. When I fell asleep, I dreamed about history as a broken rope, lashing about and pulling the sails out of trim as the ship prepared for a storm. Every time I woke the real ship was barely moving beneath me, and I fretted about my feelings for Erinna. I liked her. I respected her. She was a wonderful friend. Maybe I even loved her. She seemed to like me, but of course not in any inappropriate way. She was four years older than me. Then every time I slept again it was the same dream, the cut rope, the uncontrollable sails, the oncoming storm clouds. A light rain woke me an hour before dawn, a little early for my watch but I got up anyway, re-draping my blanket into a cloak to keep off the weather.

Only a few of the Nyx watch were awake, as the ship at anchor didn't need much attention. We nodded to each other. One of them was my brother Neleus, who came forward to wish me joy of the morning. “Do you know where Father is?” I asked him.

“Asleep down below, I think. But he'll be up soon.” Neleus nodded to the east where the sky was starting to pale. Father inevitably woke at sunrise. Naxos was a dark bulk immediately to the north of us. The rain was chilling me. I walked over to the rail. Neleus walked beside me. “They're out there somewhere,” he said.

My mind was full of Erinna and the Naxians, and I frowned at him, puzzled. “Who?”

“The Goodness Group,” he said, his hands clenching into fists. “We'll find them. We'll avenge Mother. I know you want that as much as I do.”

I put my hand on his arm. “I grieve for Mother, but I don't know whether vengeance will help.”

“It'll help me,” he said. “I feel I let her down.”

“Oh Neleus, you didn't,” I said.

“She was always so exacting, and I didn't meet her standards.” He was staring out over the dark water, not looking at me.

“It's true what Father said. She loved you. I often felt I didn't meet her standards either.”

“You and I are all that's left of her now,” he said, turning toward me.

“Well, genetically,” I agreed. “But all the people she taught, all the pictures and sculptures she made, that lives on.” For as long as the City lives, I thought. Not into posterity, because there is none. Unless we can change history. If we can change history, then her legacy could really last.

Father came up from below, yawning. I waved to him and he came over to us. “Joy to you both,” he said, and we repeated the wish.

“I need to know something about how the universe works,” I said.

He looked over to the little island he had been looking at the day before. “There'll be a temple there one day,” he said, quietly. “A temple to me. It'll be there by Homer's day. We're here early. But I don't know exactly when.”

“Can we change history?” I asked.

He and Neleus both stared at me. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Can things we do, here and now, change what will happen in the future?”

“Yes. Of course. But not things that the gods know about, not things that are already fixed.”

“So there's only one time?” I asked.

“Right. It's as if time's a scroll, and we haven't read all of it but it's all there, and once we've read it, that's fixed. But it all scrolls along in order when you're inside it. From outside, it's different.” His chin wavered. “I remember explaining it like that to Simmea and Sokrates.”

“So for instance we could teach the people on Naxos medicine and iron working and navigation and philosophy, and it wouldn't change the outcome of the Trojan War?” I asked.

“No.”

Neleus looked at me in astonishment. “What a great idea!” he said. “Let's do all that. Let's give them more choices and make all of their lives better.”

“It was Kallikles's idea, when he saw them yesterday,” I admitted. “But I agree: if it doesn't break history we have a moral obligation to help them.”

“Wait,” Father said. “It won't break history, but it can break you if you try to go against Fate and Necessity. And you can't teach philosophy to every starving peasant in the Aegean.”

“Why not?” Neleus asked. “Mother would have.”

Father stared at him for a moment. “She would have,” he admitted.

 

10

MAIA

One of the strangest things about the multiplication of cities after the Last Debate was that we were all doing variations of Plato's Republic, and so we came to feel that attempting to create Plato's Republic was the normal thing people did. It might have been different for some of the older Masters, like Ficino. I had only been nineteen when I came to the City, and the Children had been no more than ten. When I thought about it, of course, I remembered a world of people who went from one year to another without thinking twice about Plato, but I did not care to think about them often. There had been no place for me in that world. So the argument in my mind was never whether to set up the Just City, always how best to do it.

With the founding of the City of Amazons I found myself doing things for the second time, and trying to fix the errors we had made the first time. For the Children, of course, it was the first time, and they viewed the errors they had found growing up in the City quite differently from the way we Masters did. One of the first decisions we made was that there would be no more Masters and Children. We all agreed that the Children were much closer to what Plato wanted than we were. Nevertheless, we were the ones with the experience of setting up the original city, and with working on committees, and with making decisions. It was decided that Masters ranked with silvers, auxiliary guardians, but that we could serve on committees, which were otherwise for golds alone. The Children were used to deferring to us.

We had to work hard, without Workers, just to have enough to eat. All the same, we spent more time in debate than anything else. We debated everything in committees and then before the whole Assembly—and the Assembly here consisted of all those over eighteen, though they were not all equal within the Assembly. Irons and bronzes were given one vote each, silvers three, and golds four. The age of eighteen was chosen because it was the traditional age of adulthood in Plato's Athens. We would have gone with Plato's thirty, but nobody was thirty yet except for Masters. I was only a little over thirty myself. To start with we had practically nobody who was not an adult in our newly defined terms. A few of the Children had brought their Young Ones, and a few of them were pregnant. The first baby born in the City of Amazons was Euridike's Porphyry, born the first winter. I delivered him myself, the first baby I ever helped deliver who was not immediately taken away from their mother to grow up in anonymity.

Porphyry encapsulated in his tiny person our first two great debates—over names, and over families. Klio and some others wanted us all to take back our original names and allow eclectic naming of new babies. This divided everyone. Lysias and I were against it. “It's not that different, and I've been Lysias so long it feels like my real name now,” Lysias said, and I nodded.

“Why would I want to be Ethel? Ethel feels like another person, a person from another world. It has been more than ten years. I'm not Ethel anymore. I've grown up as Maia.”

“I can't think of you as Ethel,” Lysias agreed.

“And I don't think I even knew you were Li Xi,” I said. “It's a name from another culture. It would make you seem different from everyone.”

“I think Klio thinks that's a good thing, to point up the differences.”

For once Ikaros and I were on the same side. “Naming ourselves and our children from the classical world unites us; using naming customs from other times and places would divide us,” he said in debate. The vote was close, but we won. Porphyry was named after the philosopher, who had been one of us and had recently died. He was also named for the purple stone that had symbolized Roman technical prowess in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and thirdly for the idea of being
porphyrogenitos,
born to the purple, being the first baby born in the new city and the heir to our traditions. It was a lot of weight for a name to carry.

The other great early debate was over marriage and families. None of us wanted to carry on Plato's idea of arranged matings at festivals. We had all seen the misery and complications it caused. But some of us wanted traditional marriage and families, while others wanted to try other varieties of Plato's idea of having wives and children in common. I was torn on this subject. We Masters had been very loose about this. Klio and Axiothea might as well have been married, except that they were both women. Lysias and I had a friendship that included some sex. Ficino had been strictly celibate while openly admiring all the beautiful youths. Ikaros, in addition to his spectacular public Platonic relationship with Plotinus, had an ongoing private arrangement with Lukretia, and sex with anyone he could charm into lying down with him. We masters were not a good example. I felt that this was an area where Plato should perhaps have stayed with tradition.

This time Ikaros was firmly on the other side. He wanted to keep everything fluid and flexible, where people could live together if they chose but everyone should be available to everyone else with no exclusivity. Ikaros read Plato's passage on this aloud, very movingly. Many Children spoke about their love for each other and their desire to form families and bring up their own children. Lukretia expanded on Athene's point in the Last Debate about the damage done to cities and states by families and factions, with chilling examples from her own experience. Eventually we came to a kind of compromise where families would be permitted but not marriages or inheritance, and those families could be of any number and any gender, and could form and reform at will. Thus Porphyry was born into the family Euridike had formed with Castor, Hesiod, and Iris, although his father was Pytheas, who had stayed behind in the Remnant City.