The Just City (12 page)

“A good and thoughtful answer,” the old man said. “And a reasonable basis for trust, don't you agree, young man?”

“If I trusted Master Ficino it might be a good reason to trust you too,” Kebes said, stressing the word “master” ironically.

The old man nodded. “I see you have both been already studying logic and rhetoric.”

“No,” I said, my hand on the door. “We don't begin to study rhetoric until next spring, after the festival, when we will be sixteen. But I have been reading about it.”

“You are begining to study rhetoric tonight,” the old man said. “What are your names?”

“Simmea,” I said.

“Kebes,” said Kebes, reluctantly.

The old man looked sad for a moment. “I had friends with those names once,” he said. “Men of Thebes. Did they give you those names when you came to the city? Because I thought I heard you use another name just now in the street.”

“It is forbidden,” I whispered.

“Is it?” the old man asked. “Then I shall forget I heard them, and use my old friends' names when I address you. I had not been invited to join your conversation but invited myself along, so I should disregard anything I should not have overheard before you began to speak with me willingly. But now I shall recruit you to converse with me and be my friends, if you will. My name is Sokrates the son of Sophronikos.”

“Of course it is,” I said. I didn't know how I hadn't guessed it before. “I thought you were dead.” I had wept for him, reading the
Apology
.

“I should have been dead, but for my friend Krito, who thought it good to overrule my own wishes and the will of my daemon and drag me off here, for whatever good I might do. What would I do in Thessaly? I asked him, and yet here I am, will I or not. Now, Kebes, do you see yourself any closer to finding yourself trusting me?”

Kebes shook his head in astonishment. “Perhaps,” he said.

“And you, Simmea, are you further from it?”

“No. I trust you more than ever, now that I know you are Sokrates.”

“You can't trust everything that ass Plato wrote,” Sokrates said. It was astonishing to hear somebody refer to Plato as an ass, after five years of hearing him revered almost as a god. I gasped. Sokrates laughed. “It is late. You should go in to bed,” he said. “And you should meet me tomorrow. When are you free? Oh, I forgot, you are never free, are you? All of your time is accounted for. I shall request of our masters that they permit me the use of some of your time, so that you may begin to study rhetoric with me.”

Then he nodded gravely to me and went off down the street, taking Kebes with him. I stared after him. There was no reason Sokrates should not be here. And yet it seemed fantastical, dreamlike. I could see his profile as he turned to speak to Kebes. Sokrates! And here against his own will.

 

11

M
AIA

I hadn't intended to, but I took the gymnastic training so that I could teach in the palaestra. I didn't ever want to be helpless again. Once I got used to it, I liked it. My arms and legs developed muscles in unexpected places. I wrestled with the other women and learned how to break holds and how to use my body as a lever. Of course, Ikaros took the same training, and he was still stronger than I was.

Ikaros mostly left me alone. He acted hurt when he did talk to me and I was cold to him. He was conducting a spectacular public Platonic relationship with old Plotinus, the leader of the Neoplatonists. Plotinus was much older than Ikaros, but still handsome, very dignified with his white beard and flowing hair. They acted as if they were Sokrates and Alkibiades in the
Symposium
, at least in public, and Ikaros seemed happy. Atticus asked me whether I thought they were as Platonic in private as in public, and confided that Tullius had asked him his opinion on the matter. Ikaros seemed to revel in being the subject of everyone's gossip.

I had occasional invitations from other men, especially once we all had our own houses. I always turned them down politely, and that was always the end of it. I was still working hard, still happy, but it no longer had that same wonderful glow. I had thought it was perfect, or almost so. I had thought these people were all my friends, my Platonic brothers and sisters. I had trusted them unthinkingly. Now I had learned to be wary.

Eventually, everything was built and most of the initial decisions made, and we were ready to begin bringing in children and really getting started.

The Committee on Children reported to the Chamber. Plotinus made the presentation. “We have decided that the best method is to send out ships to purchase slave children. They will be freed, and be glad to be rescued and be here.”

Klio stood up, and was recognized. “Can't Sophia find ten-year-olds who wish to be here?”

Sophia, the goddess Athene, was sitting at the side of the hall. She had shrunk to normal human size, and generally went unarmed and wore a kiton like the rest of us. The owl was sometimes on her arm, and sometimes swooped about, alone and disconcerting, in the dusk. “Children don't generally read Plato,” she said.

“Nor do we want children who have read Plato. It would confuse them,” Plotinus said hastily. “We agreed that they wouldn't be allowed to read the
Republic
until they are fifty, though they can start reading some other Plato once they are fifteen.”

“How about slave children who wish to be free, and orphans who want homes?” Klio said.

“Certainly we can collect them. But I don't know if I could find ten thousand and eighty such praying to me for deliverance,” Athene said.

“They'd have to pray to you?” Ficino put in.

Her grey eyes flashed, literally flashed, like light glancing off metal. “The gods are bound by Necessity, as you know.”

“It's just that going to slave markets and paying slavers for children seems distasteful,” Klio said.

“We have, ah, decided that only men should go on these expeditions.” Plotinus stroked his beard. “As with the expeditions to rescue art, it's not safe for women. But we've decided that all the men will take turns going, to be fair. Oh, but not you, of course, Lysias.”

Lysias was an American whose family had come from China. He came from the mid–twenty-first century and was the only Asian in the Republic. I knew him quite well, as Klio had recently drafted him onto the Tech Committee. He nodded—it was obvious he'd be too conspicuous in a classical or medieval slave market.

“The point is not who's going, but whether we're empowering slavery by buying children,” Adeimantas said. He was an old man from my own century, an Oxford professor who had translated Plato into English. I hadn't spent much time with him; we weren't on any of the same committees.

There was a vigorous debate, ending in a vote, in which we narrowly decided to buy children, making sure they knew that they were free as soon as they came aboard our ships. The committee then explained which slave markets they would go to in which years. Athene would have to accompany each expedition, to which she agreed. Each expedition would bring in two hundred children, which meant it would take fifty to fill our quota. “You'll never find two hundred ten-year-olds in any slave market,” Tullius said.

“What we propose to do is to go to one market and buy all the available children of the right age, then move through time so that it seems as if we return every year, until the ship is full. Then we'll bring the children home, and make another expedition to another market,” Plotinus said.

Tullius sat down, satisfied. I looked at Klio and Axiothea. “Won't that really be creating a demand?” I asked.

“That question has been decided and gains nothing by being reopened,” Plotinus said, huffily.

So we prepared to receive the children. Every dining hall was ready, named and furnished, with two masters assigned to it. Every sleeping house had a name and an associated flower. Every bed had a chest and every chest had two blankets, a comb, a belt, and an iron pin, the very minimum we felt they needed. We had food ready, and workers reprogrammed to make food for everyone. We had so many plans. Of course, they collapsed on contact with reality.

The first children ran away the first night, ran off into the woods and had to be recaptured. After that we guarded the sleeping houses until the children were settled. We also instituted the watcher system, where one child in each house was responsible for the others and reported on them to a master. We kept them busy, which helped. Still some of them ran away from time to time. We brought them back and told them they would not be punished the first time. The Committee on Punishment was still in deliberations. Plato talks about punishments in some detail in the
Laws
, but he was thinking of adults, not frightened children. We tried to make them less frightened. Then another ship came, and we had four hundred children to three hundred of us.

I had never imagined the chaos ten-year-olds could cause. I could never have thought of children setting their chests alight or trying to sail off the island in them. “It will settle down,” Lysias said when I was in despair. “They'll police themselves once it's working properly. We just need to get it started right.”

“I think Plato was thinking of ten-year-olds as blank slates who know nothing,” I said. “These are anything but.”

“He must have been a ten-year-old himself,” Lysias said.

“Yes, but never a parent, was he?”

The first months were total chaos. We had new batches of children coming every few days. I often felt close to despair. One boy ran away and got his leg crushed beneath a robot who was trying to round them up again. That was the absolute low point, when we hurt a child and made his life worse instead of better.

After a while we got better at managing them. It became almost routine. We'd divide up the arriving children by fourteens into cities that still had room. When there were girls for Florentia I'd show them their sleeping room, teach them how to shower and use the toilets, choose a watcher, and take them to Florentia for dinner. Then I'd spend the night sleeping outside the door to make sure they didn't escape.

Lysias was right that it did get easier. Keeping them busy all the time and too tired to keep awake and plot mischief helped. He himself was driven to exhaustion working in the palaestra—we really didn't have enough young men. I was constantly exhausted myself, from being teacher and parent and continuing to sit on the organization committees. I didn't have time to worry about anything except whether we were giving the children the right foundation, doing as Plato described. I worried about that all the time. “Ideally,” I kept saying, every time we had to compromise.

“In the next generation we will have enough people,” Klio said. “These children will have children, and they'll help us with them. In that generation, the generation who come along when we are old, we'll see our Philosopher Kings, the native speakers of the language of the Republic.”

“I have hopes for these children. Some of them are wonderful.”

“The longer it's established, the closer we'll get to Plato's design and the better it will work,” Klio said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She never let it grow long enough to braid neatly, and so except when she had just cut it, it was always falling into her face. “But I am worried about the workers. We're overloading them. We don't really have enough of them for everything we expect them to do. We're going to have to find another way of doing some of those things before they break down. It's ridiculous for them to rake the palaestras. Anyone could do that.”

“When the children are sixteen we'll assign some of them to farming and weaving and raking the sand too,” I said.

“They could rake the sand now. Lysias and I are almost out of spare parts for the workers. We're going to have to conserve them and use them for the essential things.”

“Can't we ask Athene for more?” I asked.

“I suppose we could, but I don't know where she got these from and whether it was difficult. Besides, I feel we ought to be self-reliant and go on with what we've got.”

“I'm sorry I can't help, but I don't understand how they work.”

“Nobody does, really. Not even Lysias. We're just patching them up. But they shouldn't be doing things we can do, like cooking and farming, when there are things we really need them for that we can't do, like making roads and maintaining the ships and building things.”

“I'll support you on that when we next have a Tech Committee meeting,” I said.

“The Tech Committee isn't the problem. It's when it comes to Chamber everybody has plans they want the workers for and nobody understands or is prepared to wait.” She sighed. “Well, some of them will just have to wait.”

It was hard work, but things did settle down. We couldn't keep as close an eye on the children as we would have liked. I tried to know all seventy little Florentines as well as I could, so I could help them to become their best selves. Often I envied them, especially the girls, seeing them grow up with their bodies and brains exercised and thinking it entirely natural that they were as good as the boys.

I saw Ikaros at committee meetings. The Tech Committee was always busy. Ikaros did not pester me for eros, but he was always friendly and occasionally let me know that if I changed my mind he hadn't changed his. I always said that I was happy to remain celibate. He really didn't believe, even now, that he had done anything wrong. Ikaros had been assigned to Ferrara with Lukretia, a beautiful woman a little older than he was. There were soon rumors that he was having a less than Platonic relationship with her, in addition to whatever he was doing with Plotinus. She was from his own period, so perhaps they shared the same ideas of seduction. I hoped so. We never discussed the personal sexual morality of the masters in Chamber, though the children's was a constant topic of debate.