The Philosopher Kings (40 page)

I had never before heard of the darkness of the oak. But as soon as I heard what Father said, I understood what it meant. Zeus had the power to undo time, to make things never have happened. He could do that with the city, unmake it. The Masters and Children would never have left their own times. The Young Ones would never have been born. The City would never have been more than Plato's dream. The darkness of the oak. I shuddered.

Fear is a strange thing. I had been afraid I wouldn't qualify as gold, but I had not been afraid when all-knowing Zeus had appeared before me and carried me off outside time. I had sat through the debate so far listening to Athene being chided and been calm and interested. But as soon as Father said “the darkness of the oak” I was terrified—and yet still a little detached from my fear, observing it rather than being swept off in it. Was this what it was like to be a god?

“But why, Phoebus?” Zeus grumbled. “You're outside time. You'd still remember what you've learned. Your children are here, even Neleus.” Neleus straightened Ficino's hat as Zeus glanced at him. “And however much agape you felt for her, your woman is already dead. The whole thing is ludicrous. Their souls are going back where they came from. It has only been a few years. The darkness of the oak would be a mercy—”

“No,” Father said. “Please.”

“Bring down the volcano,” I said, seeing it all at once as a solution. Zeus's eyes met mine over Father's prostrate form, and again I felt that I puzzled him. “If we can't go on, if you have to end it, bring down the lava and the fire and the death we have always known is coming, sweep it away, kill us all. But let it have happened! Wipe it out if you must, but don't make it never have been.”

“Why?” Behind him lightning flashed around the snowy peak of Olympos.

“We were trying to do Plato's Republic,” I said. “It may be ludicrous and impossible, it may seem foolish to you, but we were trying. We made compromises and adaptations, but we were all trying to increase our excellence, to increase the city's excellence, and the world's. You heard the vow I made, that's why you came, because I called on you to hold the oath. We all made that vow. We may have fallen short, we may have made mistakes, we may have done it all wrong, but our goal was great. Athene set us there under the volcano so that we would have no posterity, and we accepted that—difficult as it is to accept. But we were what we were, we existed. We tried. Kill us now if that's what's necessary to preserve history, but leave us the effort we made, at least.” I thought of Mother, Ficino, Erinna, Crocus, the everyday life of the Republic, Alkibiades showing me the vines and saying he didn't want divine power, the people of Psyche joining in raggedly on the last chorus of Father's ode to peace. “We might not have been philosopher kings as Plato intended, but at least we made the attempt.”

Maia was smiling through tears. Neleus nodded at me.

“And would you go back and die with the city you care for so much?” Zeus asked, his great dark eyes fixed on mine.

“You know I would. I know how temporary death is. My soul would go on with what it learned in the Just City, as we all would. Don't take that away from us.”

Ikaros was staring at me, his lips parted. “You said you weren't an angel,” he said.

“God is a better term,” Zeus said, absently. “She has free will, and limited knowledge. And there is no such thing as omnipotence, and omniscience is extremely overrated. As for omnibenevolence, I'm sure you realize by now that we're doing our best. And time is a Mystery, by which I mean you are welcome to make up your own theories and I'll be grateful if any of them come close to being a useful analogy.”

“I'll work on it,” Ikaros said. He looked at Athene. “I'll work on it with Sophia's help.” Athene was smiling at him, but he looked away from her, to me. “And I will always pursue excellence.”

Zeus's gaze ran over my brothers. He looked down at Father, who was still clutching his knees. “Get up, son. I won't do it. Though I can't see where, under Fate and Necessity, the place can go. She wants posterity, you know.”

“Mortals all want posterity,” Father said, getting up and settling back on the grass next to Zeus. “It's some compensation for forgetting when they go on to new lives. Mortality is so strange. You should try it sometime. It's so very different in practice.”

“I look forward to hearing you sing about it.” Zeus put his hand on Father's shoulder.

“They have equal significance, you know,” Father said. “All of them. They all matter to themselves, to each other.”

“I know. I wondered how long it would take you to figure that one out.”

Father leaned back on his hands. “There will be songs. A lot of songs.”

“Good. These are things the gods need to understand. If I am to send the lava—”

“Yes. Send me back to die with the city.” Father didn't hesitate.

“And I,” Maia said, instantly.

“And I,” my brothers chorused.

“And I,” Ikaros said, only a heartbeat later.

“It's not even your city anymore, you've just been given a research project by ever-living Zeus, you're on Olympos with the gods, and you're asking to go back to die?” Athene asked, incredulous.

“If it's going to perish that way, I should go with it. And all of Kallisti is the Republic, all the different cities are our own visions of the Just City, and choices we have opened up in our interpretations.” Ikaros nodded to Porphyry, who grinned at him.

“Don't worry, he won't do that either,” Porphyry said.

Deep-browed Zeus turned his gaze on Porphyry. “Won't I, grandson? How do you know?”

“You're trying to find a way, by Fate and Necessity, to give us posterity. And I see one!”

“Oh Porphyry, you have your powers! Are they prophetic?” I asked.

“I'd much rather be able to fly,” Porphyry said. “And I don't know whether it's prophetic power, or just being outside time, but I can see time from the outside, and I see the threads and patterns of it, so I see where we could go.”

“What useful skills your children have,” Zeus said, to Father. “Did you think at all what you were doing with a whole clutch of them? Setting up your own pantheon? Will you go back with them even if it's not to fiery destruction?”

“I'll live out this life until this body dies, and then come home to Olympos,” Father said. “When this body dies, whether that's in ten minutes from the volcano or in fifty years from old age.”

“You'll be cleaning up this mess for a lot longer than fifty years,” Zeus said. “And you too,” he added, to Athene. “You'll be out there getting your hands dirty, not tucked away in your library.”

“If that is your judgment,” Athene said.

“Show me what you have found, Porphyry,” Zeus said.

Porphyry stood up and walked over to Zeus. He put his hands together, then pulled them apart, as if doing a cat's cradle, but without string. Something glimmered between his fingers. I thought for a moment it was one of the blue and gold bell-headed flowers, but there was nothing there. “Here,” Porphyry said, indicating the emptiness between his fingers. “And a little while before the ships arrive from Earth, do you see?” Zeus peered into the nothingness, then laughed. Thunder rolled around the mountain.

“That'll do,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It's an era far in the future, in the twenty-fifth century, when humanity has just discovered faster-than-light travel,” Porphyry said. “They're just rediscovering all the civilizations on planets that were settled more slowly than light. There aren't complete records of who went where. Some of them are very strange. We can be one of them. We won't look much odder than the others. It's long after the
Republic
was written, so why shouldn't a group of people have tried it?”

“Nobody ever has,” muttered Zeus.

“We'd have a divine origin story, but nobody would have to pay any attention. And the ships will come, and they can discover us, and we can rejoin the human mainstream, with all our books and art and theories. It will be a mystery, but only a small one, nothing to prove anything.”

“Why do you keep so secret?” Neleus asked. “Why can't we give them proof? People want so much to know and to understand.”

“It's better for humanity to allow us to work out our own theories, our own destiny. If we
know
it changes everything,” Ikaros said.

Neleus nodded slowly, recognizing that in himself.

“And knowing would fix one truth, and close off many paths to enlightenment,” Athene said. “You're going to love the Enlightenment,” she said aside, to Ikaros.

“Posterity,” I said, to Zeus and Porphyry. “But another planet? I suppose a new world would be a fresh beginning.”

“A new world won't be an empty blank any more than ten-year-olds are,” Maia said.

Zeus smiled at her. “True, and well deduced.” He looked at my brothers. “New planets need their own pantheons, and it seems we have one all ready.” He turned to Ikaros. “It has to do with place. Place is much more important to deity than you've ever considered. You should get out more. Travel.”

“On another planet?” he asked.

Zeus looked at Athene. “Were you planning to keep him as a pet?”

“There are a lot of wonderful times and places he hasn't seen on Earth,” she said. “And then perhaps later other planets.”

Zeus waved his hand, and thunder rumbled nearby. “Do what you want. You will anyway. You agree, Ikaros? You'll work with Athene?”

“If the City doesn't need me.”

“The City will get along without you, on its new planet. And as well as going sightseeing with Athene, which I'm sure you'll enjoy, there are Mysteries here you can be working on.” He looked at Maia. “How about you? Do you want to stay here or go on?”

“Go on,” she said.

“Good. The Republic will need you. You'll be directing it in a few years, you know, you and Crocus. And then you.” He indicated Neleus. Lightning danced around his head. “Philosopher kings. It won't be easy.”

“It hasn't been easy so far,” Maia said.

“I swore that same oath,” Neleus said. “Fight bravely, judge fairly, contribute to the best of my abilities. We all did. We all want to go.”

I was looking at Neleus, and so were my other brothers as he spoke for them, and for a moment it was the way it had been before the voyage, when we had seen that we were all one thing, and he was another. But now, on Olympos, we looked to him for leadership. We had our powers. But he was the most philosophical. And that made him the best of us.

“But another sun?” Father asked, sounding worried.

“You can have it,” Zeus said wearily. “Now, is there anything else before I send the pack of you back where you belong?”

 

32

APOLLO

Euripides puts it very well: Zeus brings the unthought to be, as here we see.

Before we left Olympos I took Athene aside and took care of a few details. I scrawled “
Goodness
” on the parchment map they gave Maecenas in Lucia, and gave it to her to put into her arm-rest so that I could find it there. “Any time between the Last Debate and last autumn. And if you get the chance, could you possibly take the head of Victory and donate it to the Louvre so the poor thing can be back in one piece again? Oh, and for goodness' sake, get us some more robots,” I said.

“Porphyry will get you robots,” she said. “Father's going to be loading me down with work here.”

“But you'll have Pico to help. He's going to love your library. And learning all the new languages.” Behind us, he was hugging Maia, and Porphyry, and to my surprise, Arete.

“Thank you for speaking up for me,” Athene said, stiffly.

“It was nothing,” I said. I had felt sorry for her, exposed that way. “I know what it's like to love a mortal.”

“It's not the same,” she said, automatically. “Did you think of doing that with Simmea? Taking her outside time, where you could keep her young?”

“Sooner or later her soul would have wanted to go on,” I said, gently, because it would happen with Pico too, sooner or later, unless he became a god. Perhaps he would. He had the right kind of mind. Father had noticed that at once. We could do with a god with an excellence of fitting facts together into complex theories, especially if he could generalize it to things other than metaphysics. Now that I'd seen it, it seemed obvious. Athene didn't have any children, so none of her areas of responsibility ever got passed along to anyone else. I really liked the idea of Pico as a god of synthesis.

“But did you want to?”

“I'm glad in a way that I didn't have to make that choice. Simmea's mortality was so much a part of who she was, and my incarnation so much a part of our relationship, that I don't know what it would have been if I'd brought her here.” She'd have started to
analyze
everything. It would have been wonderful. I wished I had brought her, and Sokrates too. But mortal souls need to grow and go on, that's part of the marvel of them, part of what we love about them. If Pico became a god, which I was now sure was Father's plan all along, he would lose some of what made Athene love him, and lose the opportunities his soul would have had to transform. Who could tell what wonderful people Ikaros might become, given the opportunity? How much he might contribute to the excellence of the world? Still, there wasn't any point saying that to her and risking spoiling what they had for now. He had to make his own choices.

“But you knelt in supplication to Father rather than let her life never have been.”

“Yes,” I said, simply. I hadn't cared what it cost me.

She nodded. “Maybe it's not so different. Agape.”