The Philosopher Kings (37 page)

There was much debate, and eventually this proposal was accepted, as being the closest thing to fair. I set up a hasty committee to come up with numbers over the lunch break. I fortified myself with soup and grapes in Florentia, while claiming that talking to anyone about the conference would violate my neutrality. “Ficino never said that,” Arete complained.

“Ficino had more practice than I have. I need to clear my head.”

On my way back to the Chamber, Neleus caught up with me. “You're doing well so far,” he said. “I was terrified when Patroklus suggested me!”

“So was I when your father suggested me!” We smiled at each other. Neleus was one of the brightest of the Young Ones, and he had always been one of my favorite pupils, and one of Ficino's too. On impulse, I pulled Ficino's hat out of the fold of my kiton, where I'd been carrying it since Lucia. “I wonder if you'd like this. It's silly really, it's old and worn, and—”

“I'd really love it,” Neleus said, tears in his eyes. He reshaped the hat in his hands and jammed it on his head. “Thank you. I don't know what to say.” We walked along quietly together. Then to my surprise, Ikaros came bounding up through the crowd of people heading back into the chamber.

“Ficino! I'm so delighted—No. Sorry.”

Neleus turned to him in astonishment. He didn't look a thing like Ficino, even in the hat. He was even darker-skinned than Simmea, and much broader-shouldered than Ficino.

“I did know he was dead,” Ikaros said. “But there are others here I knew were dead. I saw the familiar red hat, on a street where I had seen him so often, and for a moment I thought it was him. Sorry, young man.”

“How are your eyes?” I asked, remembering his eyestrain from translating Aquinas the day he apologized to me.

“Maia! You're doing a wonderful job so far. Could I talk to you this evening after the session?”

He hadn't known me, and he had thought Neleus was Ficino. And he hadn't answered my question about his eyes. I realized he must be nearly blind. I felt profoundly sorry for him. “Of course,” I said. “I'll wait for you on the steps afterward.”

We reconvened. Axiothea came up to announce the results of the numbers. Psyche was given five votes, the Lucian cities six each, Athenia and Sokratea twelve each, the City of Amazons fifteen, and the Original City twenty-five. “If all of Kallisti voted together, that would be sixty-nine, to Lucia's forty-eight,” she said. Everyone laughed at the thought of all of Kallisti voting together.

“If the envoys from a city are divided, can the votes be split?” Aurelius asked.

“Certainly,” I ruled. “The envoys can divide the city's votes as they choose.”

“And who are the envoys who will vote for the Remnant?”

“The Foreign Negotiations Committee, with Pytheas representing Simmea,” I said. “But no doubt they will listen to opinions.”

The Chamber was less packed now. Some people were lingering over lunch, and others had realized that this would go on a long time and be boring. However, as soon as we started properly it began to move rapidly and became fascinating.

“The issue of the Lucians,” I said. I'd been thinking how to address this. “First Pytheas will explain succinctly what happened on the voyage, and then Aristomache will explain what they were doing and what they want. Questions afterward. I'll open up the debate to the whole room and we'll have plenty of time for everyone. But let's hear this quietly first.” I had caught both of them on my way to lunch and asked them to be ready.

Everyone in the room probably knew what Pytheas told them, but there were still some surprised gasps as he went through it. Then Aristomache came up and described the Lucian mission. “We have reading, plumbing, pottery, iron working, medicine, Yayzu, and Plato,” she said “How can we sit safely on an island while there are people out there who have none of these things? Join us, and help us spread civilization.”

Many agreed with her message, though some of us wanted to leave Jesus out of the lists of benefits. Kallikles spoke in support of Aristomache: “I was really shaken by what I saw on Naxos,” he said, describing the ignorance and poverty of the village he had visited. “People shouldn't be living like that when we can help them. The Lucians like Adrastos prove it can be done. We should be doing it.”

Others, especially the Athenians, were horrified at the very notion. “Athene put us here where the volcano would wipe out every trace of what we do. We can't go running around the Mediterranean interfering with everything! Who knows what harm it might do!”

I was sympathetic with that view myself. So was Klio. “We don't know how history works,” she said. “But consider that it might be a wax tablet like the ones we use every day. After it has been written, it can be erased and rewritten. If we step out of the margins where Athene has set us, we could wipe out everything that comes after. What Kallikles said about helping those poor people sounds entirely good. But we don't know enough. What if the Trojan War needs to come out of the poverty and dirt we saw in the Kyklades? If so we would be wrong to change it, however painful seeing it may be. What if people handed the secret of iron-making will be content to make iron forever and never move on to steel, as they would have if they'd discovered it for themselves? And we don't know, we can't know, what matters, or what is and isn't safe to change. We have seen too much here of what comes from good intentions and ignorance. We should leave them alone to find their own destiny and stay here on our island.”

Everyone had their own theory of history, and many aired them. Ikaros was absolutely sure that Athene wouldn't have put us here if there was any danger. He believed in Providence, and his argument was essentially that we could only do good by trying to increase excellence.

Finally Patroklus argued that the people of the Aegean had their own Fate and that we had no right at all to change that, or to judge them for living differently from the way we thought right. “You have described their art. What right have we to impose our ideas of art on them instead? Perhaps they have religions and philosophies that are equally valuable. I'm not arguing in support of Klio, that we don't know what it's safe to change. I agree with that, but my point is different. What right have we to judge and to say what is better or worse?”

I called an end to the day without calling for a vote. “Lots of people haven't had a chance to speak yet. We'll resume in the morning.”

“You're not setting up a committee on the nature of time?” Pytheas asked as I stepped down.

“Why, do you have any pertinent information for it?” He was always such a funny mixture. I remembered him as a boy, so intent on everything, so serious. They were all my children.

“Nothing that I want to talk about right now,” he said. “But it seems to me that the debate has been all about that, and only what Patroklus said was about whether we want to help.”

“I think there would be a clear majority for helping if not for the worry about time,” I said. “The suggestion that the Lucian cities are the cities Plato heard about was popular.”

“I suspect it's what Simmea would have wanted.” He sighed. “It's never easy, is it? But I think you're doing very well in the chair.”

Ikaros was waiting on the steps when I came out. The sun was setting, and in this light I had to touch his arm to get his attention.

“Where shall we go?” he asked.

“Let's go to my house,” I said.

“Oh marvelous!” he said.

“My house isn't so wonderful,” I said, taking his arm to lead the way.

“But if you'll invite me there it means you have forgiven me. Some things your pupils said led me to believe you might not have. That's really why I wanted to speak to you.”

I didn't want to say that he was old and almost blind and I felt sorry for him and not at all afraid any more. “Of course I forgive you. I forgave you years ago, before I left the City of Amazons. What pupils?”

“Pytheas said something very gnomic. And Arete said you were still upset about me saying you were afraid to love,” he said.

“I do think of that sometimes, wondering if it's true,” I admitted. We came to my house. I pushed the door open and turned on the light. “I think it made me uncomfortable because it was a little bit true. If it wasn't partly true it wouldn't have stung.”

He stood inside the dim room. I guided him to the bed, where he sat, cautiously. “And it was my fault you were afraid,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, as I mixed wine. “But it was a long time ago, and I have forgiven you. And I realized when Ficino died how much I loved him all this time.” I gave him a cup of wine, putting it into his hand.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“We can't undo the past. We go on from where we are.” I sat down on a cushion on the floor, against the wall. “And here you are back in the original city, and in my house. Tell me about your eyes. How much can you see?”

“I do all right in sunlight,” he said. “Though I mistake things even then, as you saw this afternoon. It's grown much worse this last year. But it's been three years now since I was able to read.”

“Oh Ikaros, how terrible for you! I'm so sorry.”

“It was Crocus's fault really, not yours,” he said. I'd only meant to convey sympathy, not admit fault, but if it was translating Aquinas that had made him lose his vision it was indeed partly my fault. “I've wondered sometimes if it's Providence, if it's punishment for what I did to you and destroying your joy.”

“No,” I said at once, then wondered. Could it be? “I have had plenty of joy, even though I was afraid. And I still do.” And I can read, I thought, looking at my bookshelves.

“I think it would have happened more quickly and more directly,” he said. “If this is a punishment for anything it's probably for buying those books.”

“Forbidden books,” I said. “How did Crocus know you had them?”

“And he was there. I told Sokrates about them. Sokrates couldn't read Aquinas, because it was in Latin, of course.” He hesitated, and sipped his wine. “Speaking of Latin and forbidden books, could I ask you to read something to me?”

“Of course,” I said, with no hesitation.

He pulled a book out of his kiton. It was black and had a cross on the cover. I recognized it immediately as a Bible. “It's Jerome's Latin Bible,” he said.

Written on the cover was
Versio Sacra Vulgata
. It was the Vulgate, the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church. I had heard about it but never seen it before. We didn't allow it in the Republic, of course, and I had only read the King James Version when I was young.

“I thought you allowed Bibles in Amazonia?”

“We have Bibles compiled from memory. It's surprising how much people knew, and of course I had this and could fill in some pieces nobody remembered.” I took it from him and leafed through it. It was printed on the same Bible paper I remembered from my childhood, with the initials of verses printed in red.

“So what do you want me to read?”

“Jerome's prefaces. Of course nobody had memorized those.” He smiled. “Nobody else. But ever since I heard about Ficino's death, I've been longing to re-read Jerome's preface to Job, where he talks about the difficulties of translation.”

I turned the pages until I came to it. I had never read it, and reading it aloud now I laughed when I reached Jerome's comparison of translating to wrestling an eel, which gets more slippery the harder you try to hold on. When I came to the end of the preface, I kept on reading. I had not read Job since I was a girl, and I was surprised how much it still meant to me. We both had tears in our eyes when I stopped reading.

“Come to Florentia and have dinner,” I said, handing him back the book.

“Keep it,” he said. “It's no use to me now. Even if you don't want to read it, you can enjoy all of Jerome's snarky prefaces, where he calls people who prefer other translations barking dogs.”

“Do you still think Athene's perfect?” I asked. “Because I find a great deal of comfort in thinking that she isn't, and that the gods have limited natures and limited reach. Believing that allows for things going wrong and not being part of anybody's plan.”

“I keep trying to understand,” he said, getting up. “If we became like angels, we would see how perfect she is. Don't you remember how wonderful she was when she was here?”

“Wonderful, yes, absolutely. But wonderful is not at all the same thing as perfect. Come on, let's go and eat before the food is all gone. I'll read to you some more tomorrow if you want. I assume you have plenty of people to take dictation.”

By lunchtime the next day we had a consensus—a two-thirds majority—for helping the Lucians. We weren't prepared to give them the
Excellence
, though obviously we'd have to use it. Details remained to be agreed on, especially on religious issues. I set up a number of committees. I pushed Aristomache, Ikaros, Aurelius, Manlius and Pytheas onto the committee on religion, and swore privately never to go near it myself. There was also consensus that any individual Lucians who wanted to return to the Remnant City would be welcome, and any who met the immigration criteria for the other cities would be welcome to apply there. The Lucians offered reciprocal agreements, but I didn't think many of us would want to emigrate there.

After lunch came the choral ode. Pytheas had written it, and his son Phaedrus was conducting it. It took place out of doors, in the agora, so that as many people as possible could hear it. It was Pytheas's best work, powerful and moving, especially with the massed voices echoing around the space. The song was about peace. I'd never really considered that peace isn't just the absence of war but an active positive force. It must be one of Plato's Forms, I thought.