The Philosopher Kings (5 page)

“Death is a terrible thing,” he said.

“What do I have to do to not die?” I blurted. I'd often wondered about this, but never asked directly.

“Not die?”

“To become a god. I'm your daughter. I could.” I hoped I didn't sound childish or hubristic. Fortunately, he took me seriously.

“You could. Several of my sons have.” It sounded so strange to hear him mention sons and know he didn't mean my brothers. “You'd have to decide to do it, and you'd have to find your power, and you'd have to find a new and original way of being Arete. Being excellent, that is!” He was still weeping, but his eyes were focused on me now. “You'd still have to die. If you became a god it would happen afterward.”

“But you have a body when you're a god?”

“Yes, but it's not the same as a mortal body. Nothing's the same. I'll have to die to get back to being a god. It's the only way. What you should do, if you want to be a god, is to find something to be responsible for, something you can take charge of. That's what my sons who are gods did. It could be something that no god cares about now, or it could be something of mine that I'd devolve onto you. It would have to be something that needed a patron, something you cared about. And then after you died, instead of going on to Hades your soul would go to Olympos and you'd become a god. But you might prefer to stay mortal and go on to have new lives. You get to start again and forget. And there are things humans can do that gods can't—humans can do whatever they can, but we're bound by Father's edicts—or, if we break them, we are subject to punishment. There's a lot to be said for being mortal … but it is also awful, I'll admit.” He wiped his hand over his eyes and tried to smile. “I would still grieve if I were my proper self, but it wouldn't swallow me up this way.”

“If it's awful for you when you know what happens after death, think how awful it is for everyone who doesn't know!”

“I have thought about that a lot, since I talked to Sokrates and Simmea about it, and of course since Athene admitted it to everyone at the Last Debate.” He looked at different spots in the garden, as if he could see where they had sat for that conversation. “But while it might be better for individual people to know, it's better for the world for people not to be sure.”

“If people knew for sure that they had immortal souls, and that they needed to pursue—” I stopped, because I heard a sound from inside. I thought it was probably the other students come for the calculus class, and I'd have to tell them that Mother wasn't here and the calculus class was canceled not just for today but for always. There wasn't anyone who could take it over, either, not that I could think of.

But it wasn't a student who came out, it was my brother Neleus. He looked almost as bad as Father. His face seemed entirely bloodless. I was delighted to see him—anything to relieve the burden of being alone with Father in this state. I got up and hugged him tightly. “You know?”

“Sophoniba told me,” he said. “An art raid.”

“Nobody knows who,” Father said, without moving from where he sat, staring at the space by the tree where I had been.

Neleus looked down at him and shook his head. “What are you two doing sitting in the garden? We need to find the others, and we need to get drunk.”

“Is that what people do?” Father asked.

“Yes,” Neleus said firmly. “That's what people do, and it's what we shall do. Come on, let's go to Florentia. Ficino will be there, and they always have wine and won't grudge it to us. I asked Sophoniba to find the others and send them there, and all of Mother's especial friends. We'll gather there and drink and talk about her. Come on.”

Father got up slowly. “All right,” he said. “If that's what people do.”

So that's what we did.

 

4

MAIA

I am a teacher. I have also worked as a midwife to babies and cities, but it is on teaching that I have spent most of my life. I have the temperament of a scholar. I always have had.

In the years after the Last Debate I had cause to regret a lot of things I had done in the name of Plato, but I never regretted that we had made the attempt to create the Just City. I agree with a lot of the criticisms that have been made of us, of the Masters. Buying slave children was wrong. I always thought so. I should have been more forceful in my opposition. In those days I was young, and too easily cowed by male authority. I grew up in England in the 1850s. It wasn't until I saw the girls who grew up in the Just City that I really understood what free women could be like. That in itself justifies us in what we did, in my eyes—how marvelous they are, their natural assumption of equality. What was a hypothesis to me is an axiom to them. Only Plato in all the thousands of years between his time and my own saw that women could have philosophical souls, only Plato allowed that we were people. Only in the City were women truly liberated, for the first time in history.

All the same, we Masters did and allowed things that were wrong, and I am as guilty as any of us. These days I defer to those whose authority I respect, but I try not to automatically defer to anyone. I accept my share of the guilt for what we did, but I still say that what we tried to achieve was a noble goal, and what we did achieve was wonderful, even if it fell short of perfection. There is no perfection in human things, only in the world of Forms. We tried our best. Our intentions were good.

They don't allow Masters in Sokratea. I suppose they're justified, but I am hurt whenever I think of it. We, and Plato, meant nothing but the best for them! And when I say the best I mean it literally; what we wanted for them was nothing but excellence, virtue, arete. They say you can't want that for somebody else, they have to want it for themselves. Well, perhaps they have a point. But Plato wrote that seeking to increase someone else's excellence is the best form of love. We loved them and we sought their excellence; and if the means were not always ideal, then I contend that we were limited by the constraints of reality. Though Athene, of course, was not.

She turned Sokrates into a fly and vanished, and Sokrates too flew off and vanished, so we had to manage as best we could without either of them.

In the many debates that followed the Last Debate there were more voices crying for going than staying. Trying to fix the City we had seemed less appealing to many than trying to start again, this time with like-minded volunteers. Athenia wanted to do everything exactly the same, only more strictly. Having seen some of the pain caused by being strict, this had very little appeal for me. Sokratea, as I said, excluded Masters from the beginning, when it was only a group of hot-headed children headed by Patroklus. Kebes, with what we came to call the Goodness Group, left immediately that first afternoon, without participating in any of the subsequent debates. That left the Remnant City, which felt at first like a patched-up compromise, and Psyche, and the City of Amazons.

It was Psyche that drove me to the Amazons. Psyche, the city the Neoplatonists set up, decided to manage without the difficult requirement of allowing women to be full participants in their city and in the life of the mind. They made women second-class citizens, as they usually have been, historically. It's amazing to me that any women at all agreed to move there. Psyche is the smallest of the cities even now, and disproportionately male. But some women went willingly—and I know it was willingly, because I argued with them, personally and at length. Some of my girls from Florentia chose Psyche of their own will. It was those debates that drove me to the other extreme and the choice of the City of Amazons—those debates, and the necessity for them. There were women trained in logic who were prepared to argue that they didn't deserve citizenship, and that they were inferior to men.

I know Ficino felt the same way about me leaving the Remnant as I felt about Andromeda and the others who chose Psyche. He was almost in tears, arguing with me at one point. But in the end he respected my decision, as I respected his to stay.

The other, less worthy reason I made the choice to go is that all of my close friends except Ficino were going: Axiothea, and Klio, and Lysias, and Kreusa. I went despite Ikaros, not because of him.

I have written already about how Ikaros raped me when I was young and naive. I had been sheltered and protected all my life until I came to the city, and I had no instinct for self-preservation. I went off alone with Ikaros, seeking answers to questions, with no idea that he imagined this was a sexual tryst. (It's hard to believe I was ever so stupid.) I saw him as a man from the romantic and wonderful Renaissance, and I did not consider what that really meant. He had read Plato and loved the idea of the
Republic,
and he was prepared to concede that women had the philosophic nature. That didn't mean he had entirely put away the appetites and expectations of his own era. He thought my protests were conventional. He thought I was saying no because society allowed me to enjoy sex only if it was forced on me in circumstances beyond my control. He believed I wanted it, even when I screamed and fought. He was confused, afterward. He tried to make amends. He gave me a book. I remained furious with him—for raping me, and for continuing to act as though he had done nothing. Others adored him, but I kept away from him as much as I could. I didn't trust him, and I found it harder to trust any men because of him.

I spent eight years in the City of Amazons.

At first it was two thousand people camped out in the fields on the north side of the island. Building the physical city was a challenge. Klio persuaded Crocus to help us. Crocus was one of the two remaining worker-robots. In the debates that followed the Last Debate, both Workers had considered Sokratea, but decided to stay in the Remnant. They had good solid philosophical reasons, but also practical ones—they needed electricity as we needed food, and designing and installing electrical generators elsewhere would be a challenge.

Crocus quarried marble for us and delivered it to the site of the new city, and then we humans wrestled the slabs into roads and assembled the blocks into buildings. Crocus helped—what was difficult for even the strongest of us was trivially easy for him. We built one wall while he built the other three and put on the roof. He cut marble pipes and installed plumbing. We assembled ourselves into teams and tried to learn skills from him and from each other. We did as much as we could. As there were two thousand of us and one of him, in the end more of Amazonia was built by humans than by Crocus, but I don't know how we could have possibly managed without him. We voted him full privileges of citizenship including voting rights, although he never became a resident. We inscribed his name among the list of founders. There is also a bas-relief of him above the main gate, carved by Ardeia.

He returned to the Remnant every night to rest and recharge, while the rest of us planned the city and the work for the next day. We did our planning in the dark. We had all grown used to electric lights in the time we had been in the City, and we missed them. Our old Tech Committee was almost all there, and we assembled to try to deal with problems.

“We need to find a way of having light,” Lysias said. “They have refused to let us have any of the solar lights, so we need a proper alternative. What did people use?” Lysias came from the twenty-first century and so, like the Children, he had grown up with electricity.

“Gas lights,” I said. “Gas was made from coal in some way. I've no idea how.”

“Nobody will know, and there won't be any books on it,” Lysias said, savagely. “I don't think there's any coal on the island anyway. What else?”

“Oil lamps,” Axiothea said, a calm voice in the darkness. “We have olive oil. We can make glass, or if we can't we can make clay lamps like the Romans had. I wonder what wicks are made out of?”

“If the Romans had them, somebody might know, or it might be written down somewhere,” Lysias said, sounding a little more cheerful. “Did they give enough light?”

“Enough to read and work by,” I said. “And there are also candles, made from beeswax or tallow. Wicks were made from cotton in my time, which we don't have, but I expect linen would do just as well.”

“Candles, of course,” Klio said.

“They're just decorative,” Lysias protested. “Not that I wouldn't appreciate having one right now.”

“Lamps are more effective,” I said. I had lived with electricity long enough that it was easy for me to understand how in future ages, candles could have come to be thought of as nothing but decoration.

“Yes, I've heard of things smelling of the lamp, meaning people were up late working on them,” Klio said. “And burning midnight oil. So it must give enough light for people to work. We can't make glass, but Crocus can. Except I don't want to impose on his good nature to ask him to do even more for us. There's not much we can do for him in return—only discuss philosophy and read to him, and there are plenty of people in all the cities happy to do that.”

“Books,” Lysias said. “That's another tech issue we should discuss. We can use the libraries in the Remnant, they've agreed we can. But can we use their printing presses? We should have our own library here. The City Planning Committee have assigned it a place. But should we be building a printing press? Do we have anyone who can set type?”

“And should we be duplicating everything so we have it to hand and don't have to walk ten miles every time we want to look something up?” I asked.

“And if we have only one press, should it be Greek or Latin?” Klio asked.

“It doesn't matter, we melt all the type regularly and recast it—it's only lead.” I said. “We'd have to have both sets of molds, but we could print in either language, switching when the type got worn.” I had always enjoyed working with the presses.