The Philosopher Kings (41 page)
Read The Philosopher Kings Online
Authors: Jo Walton
“Thank you for setting up the Republic, so I could learn what agape was,” I said.
She smiled. “I'm glad it was worth it. Have fun on the new planet. They're bound to call it Plato. What else could they possibly agree on?”
I laughed. “Have fun with Pico. Keep learning everything, and let me know all about it when you have the chance.”
“When you come back, I'll meet you in the Laurentian Library on the first day the orange tree blooms in 1564.”
“It's a date,” I said, touched, and turned back to where Father and Maia and my Young Ones were waiting.
The sun isn't literally a winged chariot with two fiery horses. It's literally a big ball of fusing hydrogen. But metaphorically and spiritually, it's a chariot.
My
chariot. My new sun, which had no name, only a catalog number, and which is literally a slightly bigger and redder ball of fusing hydrogen, is metaphorically and spiritually a racecar.
My
racecar. We called it Helios, “the sun,” either because we're an unimaginative people, or because we instinctively recognized that it had metaphorically and spiritually the same driver as the old Helios we'd left shining on Earth. It zips across the sky. The day is only nineteen hours long.
Father set the five Republics of Kallisti and the eight Lucian Republics down carefully on the new planet, without so much as bumping any of their art or architecture. He also took all the people who chose to go, which was everyone except for a scattering of stubborn idiots who stood alone to see their cities and civilization disappear around them. (And who do you think has to be their patron and look after them forever after? Well, did you think Athene was going to get stuck with it?) He set the cities down the same distance apart they had always been. It didn't matter at all to Father that he put them on a rocky volcanic plain on the edge of a great ocean, or that many of them now had harbors that went nowhere. It looked exceedingly peculiar, but we coped.
Porphyry did indeed get us some new robots, and that helped a great deal.
Maia became the first leader of the City after the move, and she and Crocus were the first Consuls of the Senate of Plato, the council made up of representatives of all twelve cities. She helped lead us into the era of peace and exploration, and when the aliens came she was the first after Arete to learn their language. She was thrice Consul, and after she died we put that on her memorial stone, along with all her other achievements. As Father had predicted, Neleus led us after that. By then we were thoroughly involved with the alien confederation, and we'd persuaded a surprising number of aliens to strive for excellence and justice in a Platonic context before the human spaceships discovered all of us and things got complicated.
As for me, I kept writing songs, and learning things about myself, about mortal life, about my children and other people. I kept on striving toward excellence, for myself and for the world. All the worlds.
I could still see my chariot at night from our new home, a distant glimmer, shining to me across space and time, which are Mysteries, and in strange ways almost the same thing. I was glad I could see it. I would have been very sad without it. But I'd have managed. I managed without Simmea, after all.
Not even Necessity knows all ends.
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Ada Palmer gave the right answers to all my questions, lent me books, sent me useful links, and talked to me about Pico when she was supposed to be grading. Then, after all that, she read it and made brilliant suggestions. This book wouldn't exist without her. Buy her books and listen to her music. You'll be glad you did.
I'm very grateful to my husband, Emmet O'Brien, for putting up with me when I'm writing. Elise Matthesen spent much longer than she imagined we would in the Bronze Age Greece section of the National Museet in Copenhagen, not to mention snarky Apollo comments in Antwerp cathedral. Gillian Spragg and Lauren Schiller were a great help with references.
This book was read by Mary Lace and Patrick Nielsen Hayden while it was being written, and after it was finished by Bo Balder, Biersma, Maya Chhabra, Pamela Dean, Ruthanna and Sarah Emrys, Magenta Griffith, Steven Halter, Sumana Harihareswara, Madeleine Kelly, Nancy Kremi, Marissa Lingen, Elise Matthesen, Clark E. Myers, Kate Nepveu, Lydia Nickerson, Emmet O'Brien, Ada Palmer, Doug Palmer, Susan Palwick, Eliana Rus, Drew Shiel, Sherwood Smith, and Nicholas Whyte.
I'd like to thank Patrick for editing, his assistant Miriam Weinberg for wrangling, Teresa Nielsen Hayden for her sensitive and thoughtful copyedits, and everyone in Tor Production and Publicity and Sales who work so hard at the unglamorous part of publishing, without which we wouldn't have any books.
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JO WALTON
won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012 for her novel
Among Others
. Before that, she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel
Tooth and Claw
won the World Fantasy Award in 2004. The novels of her Small Change sequenceâ
Farthing, Ha'penny,
and
Half a Crown
âhave won widespread acclaim. More recently, her novel
My Real Children
won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. A native of Wales, Walton lives in Montreal. You can sign up for email updates
here
.
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B
OOKS BY
J
O
W
ALTON
The King's Name
Lifelode
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CONTENTS
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS
Copyright © 2015 by Jo Walton
All rights reserved.
Cover art:
The School of Athens
(detail) by Raphael / Vatican Museums and Galleries / Bridgeman Images
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor
®
is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-3267-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-0083-0 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466800830
First Edition: June 2015