The Philosopher Kings (19 page)

“So how did you go from one city to many cities?” Maia asked.

“We kept sending the ship out with a troop to rescue people, and eventually Lucia was running well and we had so many people that it seemed like a good idea to start a second city around the coast. Then we founded Marissa, here, when there was another war three years later, and we filled in the others. Usually the
Goodness
spends half the year sailing between the cities, trading, and the other half rescuing people and bringing them to whichever city needs people. We may found another city this year, on Ikaria. The
Goodness
tends to stay with a new city, and lots of experienced people stay to help things get going at first—people who know how to build and plant and everything like that. It takes quite a while for a city to get going properly. But Augustine is at that stage now, where it can grow naturally. We're ready to found a new city.”

“And how many of you—the Goodness Group—stay in each city?” I asked.

Aristomache refilled her cup, considering. “It depends. There are lots in Lucia, of course, which is still our main base. Then there are lots wherever a city is new and needs help. Otherwise, well, the ideal is to have our cities working alone. Marissa doesn't really need anyone from
Goodness
now. It could have local doctors and teachers.” There was a murmur from the locals at the table to the effect that they couldn't manage without her. “Nonsense,” she said, but she looked pleased. “I stay because I'm getting old and my friends are here. Terentius stays because he's married and his children are growing up here. But Marissa doesn't need us. Hektor could do my job, he's teaching most of the younger children as it is. And Ekate is as good a doctor as Terentius now, and she has an apprentice of her own. She may go to the new city on Ikaria if we do get it going this summer. Locals move around and share their expertise too.”

“So your ideal for your cities is self-sufficiency?” Erinna asked, swallowing another honey cake.

“It takes a while,” Aristomache admitted. “And they're not big cities, compared to the Just City, never mind the Boston I remember. Most of our cities are about a thousand people. Marissa has eight hundred citizens, and almost that many children.”

“Do the children have to pass tests to become ephebes?” I asked. I was thinking about my own looming adulthood tests, to be taken on my return.

“Just swear their confirmation oath,” Aristomache said. “And we sort them into Platonic classes, of course. And they can vote in the Assembly then, the golds and silvers, and they're eligible for election to the Council when they're thirty. And nine of the Council are elected Kings every three years, and they make up the Committee of Kings. You have tests?”

“We have an oath too, but we also have to pass lots and lots of tests in all sorts of things. And then we swear, and do our military training, and read the
Republic
, and after two years we can vote in the Assembly, when we're eighteen, all of us, not just the guardians. But only the guardians serve in Chamber. My brothers are all adults, and I'll become an ephebe this year.”

Maia was looking about the hall. It had frescoed walls that showed pleasant farming scenes with nymphs and shepherds lolling in fields and under trees, feasting on food very like the food we were enjoying. “You know, Plato was right,” she said.

This was such a characteristic remark for Maia to make that I giggled, and so did Erinna beside me. We might have been drinking too much of the excellent wine.

“What was he right about?” Aristomache said. “A great many things, indeed, but what specifically are you thinking of?”

“He's right that there was a golden age in his past when people in Greek cities governed themselves properly according to the precepts he described. Nobody has ever believed a word of it. But he was right. It happened. And this is it.” Maia laughed with an edge of hysteria. Ficino looked over to us, concerned. She took a sip of wine and went on. “It will deteriorate to timarchy, and then oligarchy, and so on, exactly as Plato wrote.”

“Well, maybe,” Aristomache said. “But for now it is the Good Life. For now it is definitely aristocracy. And besides, we're sure we've changed the world, introducing Christianity here and now, introducing civilized ideas and sanitation and medicine in the time before the Trojan War. We're not hiding away expecting everything we do to be destroyed by a volcano. Athene put us on Kallisti so we'd make no changes, cause no ripples, have no posterity. But we're out here making a difference, keeping the peace, helping the poor and the hungry. This is a new world. Maybe everything will be different and the Age of Gold won't vanish and there'll never be a Plato.”

Maia hesitated, and I remembered that she had worried about breaking history if we intervened in the Kyklades. Father had reassured me that it wasn't possible, but I couldn't pass that reassurance on, at least not with proper citations. It might not be all that reassuring anyway, to think that Plato was right about everything degenerating. She closed her mouth as if she'd changed her mind about speaking, and when she did open it again what she said was: “You're right to be rescuing people.”

Aristomache smiled at the rescued people around the table. “You know what you should do,” she said, looking back to us. “You should go to Lucia for Passion Week. In addition to the religious celebration we have a music festival. You'd love it. And that's when the majority of the people who left the city are together, in Lucia at Easter. If you want to find out what we've been doing and see everyone, that's where you ought to go.”

“When's Easter?” I asked.

“It's—” Aristomache and Maia began together, then caught each other's eyes and giggled, exactly as if they were both ephebes. “It's the first Lord's Day after the first full moon after the spring equinox,” Aristomache finished alone. “So it's soon.”

“What's the Lord's Day?” Erinna asked.

The locals clucked, but Aristomache explained quickly and easily. “Instead of having Ides and Nones, we call each seven-day period a week, and the days of the week have names, and the seventh day of each week is the Lord's Day, and a day of rest and religious worship.”

“How can you celebrate Easter before Yayzu is even born?” Maia asked.

“He is our
eternal
savior,” Aristomache said, serenely confident.

 

16

MAIA

People say I left the City of Amazons because I wanted comfort, but I have never loved comfort, only learning. I left for reasons of conscience—religious reasons.

I suppose the whole New Concordance was partly my fault, or rather Crocus's, making Ikaros translate Thomas Aquinas. The
Summa Theologica
is really long, and of course because Ikaros shouldn't have had the book he could only work on it in private, and when he had free time. It took him years. He still hadn't finished it by the time I left. Ikaros was the ultimate synthesist, but he had a fast mind that was always racing ahead to the next thing. Needing to translate Aquinas for Crocus, slowly, over a long time, and then reading his translation aloud, and answering Crocus's questions, forced him to keep coming back to it and thinking about it, instead of leaping on to something new.

Ikaros had found a way, in about 1500
A.D.
from what I gather, to reconcile all the religions and philosophies in the world. He got into some considerable amount of trouble over this with the Pope and the Inquisition, and was saved, bizarrely enough, by Savonarola. I only know most of this secondhand through Lysias, who had heard of him before we came to the City. I barely know anything about Savonarola, or about the controversies of the Renaissance, and I can't look it up because it falls into the area we decided to exclude from our library. We have plenty of Renaissance art, and Renaissance people, but not religion and politics, because we wanted the Renaissance re-imagining of the classical world, not what Lysias described as the “medieval remnants” of Christianity. So Ikaros's
Oration on the Awesomeness of Humanity
, as Lysias calls it, saying that I could substitute “Pico della Mirandola” and “Dignity of Man” if I preferred, is not in the library, and neither are his nine hundred theses. His work was too Christian for the Library Committee. But excluding them didn't keep them out. They were still in Ikaros's head, and Ikaros's brain was in Ikaros's head, and what Ikaros's brain did when it was idle was make up perfectly logical but utterly insane theories of religious reconciliation.

He had been thinking about this on and off the whole time, from the moment when he saw that Pallas Athene was real. He had told me before the Last Debate that he had found a way to make it all make sense. But it wasn't until the first years in the City of Amazons, when he had to go through Aquinas line by line to translate it, that he came up with the rigorous and philosophically defensible thesis he called his New Concordance.

In the original city, where Sokrates and Tullius and Manlius and Ficino and all the other older Masters were there to sit on him, Ikaros couldn't do much about his religious theories except have occasional debates. His debates were always very popular with everyone, but he had to find people who wanted to debate with him, and his metaphysical theories were never a particularly popular topic. Athene never showed up for them, though she almost always came to his debates on other topics. Most Platonists are quite happy with Plato's metaphysics. Tullius was a Stoic. Even so, Ikaros is such a powerful orator, impassioned and fast-thinking and funny, that he could sometimes find people prepared to take on the more esoteric subjects. Even here, where everyone is trained in rhetoric, he stands out as surpassingly excellent. He's good at coming up with memorable images and working them all the way through an argument. He has always been a joy to listen to, in either language.

Once we were in the City of Amazons there was nobody better—nobody even as good. Klio was very good, and so were Myrto and Kreusa. Myrto was his most effective opponent. It wasn't until after she died, in the sixth year, that he gained complete sway over the city.

I could live in a city that has Ikaros in it, even though I disagreed with him a great deal. But I couldn't live in a city that required me to follow his crazy religion. I could be a Christian—I had been for the first eighteen years of my life. Or I could be a Platonic pagan, as I had been for the next eighteen. I had met Pallas Athene, talked to her. I had no doubt that the Olympians were real. I knew the way we worshipped them in the City was acceptable to Athene, who existed, who had set up the City and brought us the Workers, and then lost her temper and turned Sokrates into a gadfly and took the Workers away again. In Athenia they think she was right. I don't go as far as that, but I think what she did was understandable in the circumstances.

Athene thought we should be grateful to her for the opportunity to be in the City—and I was. I can't imagine any life that could have been better for me personally that led on from the nineteen years of my life I lived in the nineteenth century. I would never stop being grateful for the rescue that allowed me to be myself, to be respected as a scholar and a teacher. My feelings about Christianity were conflicted, while my gratitude to Athene was unfailing. On the other hand, Sokrates made some valid points in the Last Debate. I continued to question whether she had the right to do what she had done. But I still prayed to her nightly, and to the other Olympians on appropriate occasions.

What Ikaros did was to build a whole logical edifice reconciling everything—Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hedonism, Pythagoras, and sundry other ideas he'd picked up here and there. Bits of it were brilliant. For instance, he deduced from Athene saying that the City was just that justice must be a process, not a Form, and that reconciled contradictions between Plato and Aristotle's views of justice as well as being a fascinating idea about dynamic ideals. In fact, all of it was brilliant, if you considered it as pure logic. The problem was his axioms.

He set about the whole thing properly, I have to admit. He wrote it all up, ordered his theses, and announced a great debate. He sent invitations to the other cities and arranged a festival. He debated everybody who came prepared to argue against his points, and when they won on any issue he accepted that and incorporated that into his argument. It's just that the whole edifice was built on such terrible axioms. At first I had wanted it to be true, wanted the loving Father and Son I had grown up with to be real, as well as Athene. I wanted Jesus to be my savior, as I had believed as a child. But the more closely I looked at what Ikaros was doing, the less sense it made. His axioms were twisted. It was incredibly ingenious, and it all made perfect logical sense, each piece of the structure balanced on each other piece. But it was a castle of straws balanced on air. Athene just wasn't an angel, and wasn't perfect. Errors can be refuted, and as his errors were pointed out, by me and by others, he patched them. But his leaps of faith were not errors, and they were inarguable. I tried. Many of us tried. And it was all right as long as it was just a case of what Ikaros believed and tried to persuade people. It was when, after the festival, the Assembly of Amazons voted to make his New Concordance the official religion of the City of Amazons that I knew I had to leave. It would be practiced at festivals. I couldn't believe it. And I couldn't possibly teach it.

I'd told Klio and Axiothea that I was leaving, and they'd both tried to persuade me to stay. Axiothea was quite happy with the New Concordance. Klio had initially been even less in favor of it than I was, but once she began to study the logic she had been won over by the way Ikaros had integrated Platonic thought all through, and especially with his theory of dynamic ideals, which fit everything she believed. Klio had always disliked Ikaros, but now they began to work together on this project. They spent a lot of time together and became close. She told him about the religions and philosophies she knew about that were unfamiliar to him, and they worked together to reconcile them with everything else.