“Jathery—” I was speechless. “You know he’s an alien god? And that he and Athene have gone out into Chaos and are trapped there?”
“What was that word? Alien?”
“Intelligent people who evolved on other planets. We’ve only started to use it to mean that since we’ve been on the planet Plato and had to deal with them all the time. But I’d assumed you’d know it.”
He shook his head. “So there are people on other worlds? And Jathery is one of their gods? Wondrous! I want to go there.”
He’d want to reconcile all their theories with Platonism and Christianity and make one huge synthesis. “Athene knows. You couldn’t tell?”
“Jathery didn’t seem as if she’s from another planet. Are you sure Athene knows?”
I sighed, and my anger rose up again. “Athene certainly knew. She messed about making a half-alien demigod to give me a message, creating a living being with a perplexed soul, when she could have simply given the message to me directly and explained what was going on. She could have trusted me. She should have!” I sat there on the wall and waited, calm on the surface but still utterly livid. This was all so completely unnecessary.
Pico looked extremely uncomfortable at that. “She used you.”
“Yes! She used me as if I’d been of no account. And not only me.” I glared at the stone coping of the well. I wasn’t used to being treated that way. Granting equal significance to others was something I had only learned, slowly and painfully, over the course of my mortal life. Being granted it was something I was so accustomed to that I felt affronted when I was not. That was interesting to consider. I stepped out of time and considered it for a while, staring out from Olympos over the distant blue isles of Greece, until I was calm and fully understood my anger and affronted pride. Then I slipped back to the moment in the cloister beside Pico. He hadn’t noticed my absence.
“She might have thought you’d try to stop her,” Pico said.
“I would have, of course. But she could have trusted me. There was no need for any of this.” I was calm now, but I hadn’t forgiven her.
“Yes. Well. About the other thing,” he said.
The church bells rang for Vespers, deafeningly close. The monk let go of the cat, set down his book, and straightened himself up. I spoke as soon as the bells were quiet enough for me to be heard. “I’d have taken you with me anyway. I wouldn’t leave anyone stranded, waiting indefinitely in Bologna. She needn’t have done it like this.”
“I told her as much,” Pico said, with his open smile. “And even without your promise to take me with you, I’d have told you where Sokrates is.”
9
MARSILIA
Being outside time wasn’t at all the way I had imagined it. We were in Hilfa’s little house down near the harbor, and then the next moment without any sense of transition we were standing in a leafy glade. We were surrounded by unfamiliar kinds of trees, with leaves of the most intense green and red and gold I had ever seen. My focus seemed strange, as if whatever I was looking at was much closer than it should have been. Across the clearing, I saw a tiny purple flower growing at the foot of a tree, and I could see the shading of each petal, and the cracks in the bark of the tree behind. It seemed as if it were close enough that my breath would make the flower tremble, and yet I could also plainly see that it was several strides away from me. It was disconcerting. At the same time I could see the trees towering up around us, and although I could not name any of them I was sure, without knowing how I knew, that they were each a different species.
“Where are we?” I asked. My voice came out as a cracked whisper.
“We’re outside time,” Hermes said. “Sit down.”
I obeyed, and sat down on the leaf-mould, which smelled rich and complex and almost overwhelming. “Are we on Olympos?” I asked.
“Somewhere like that, yes,” Hermes said. “This is one of my places, outside time.”
Something gold and blue darted across the clearing at head height. A bird! I had seen them represented, and I recognized it at once by the wings and beak. It felt so strange to be here, and yet perfectly natural. The air was pleasantly warm. I unsnicked my jacket.
Hermes sat down beside me. I couldn’t quite look at him. He seemed to change under my gaze, now naked, now clothed, now a man, now a woman, for a disconcerting moment a Sael, now an old man, now a young girl. I looked back at the trees, which stayed the same from moment to moment, which seemed eternally solid and unchangeable, as well as incredibly beautiful. “Marsilia,” Hermes said. I nodded, staring up at the leaves. “Before we go to seek him, tell me about Kebes. Everyone seemed so uncomfortable at the mention of his name, even Apollo.”
I focused on a five-pointed bright red leaf on a tree behind Hermes, took a breath, and organized my knowledge. It seemed easier than it usually was. Perhaps it was the air of the place. “Kebes was one of the original Children brought to the Republic. He hated it and was rebellious. After the Last Debate he ran away, stealing one of the ships.”
“Wait, the Last Debate?”
It seemed extraordinary that he could be unaware of something so fundamental to history. It was like hearing someone say “Wait, who’s Alexander? What’s Thermopylae? Who won at Zama anyway?” It would be like this, I realized, with the space humans, only ten times harder because they wouldn’t believe us and we didn’t want them to. And they’d have huge history-shaping events of their own in the centuries that we’d missed and know nothing about, and they’d be as surprised as this that we didn’t know them, and would look at us in amazement when we asked about them. As Hilfa had said, asking questions could be more revealing than we might want. Dealing with Hermes might be good practice for dealing with the space humans. “It was a debate between Athene and Sokrates. She turned him into a gadfly.”
Hermes laughed delightedly. I was taken aback and glanced at him. He seemed fixed again in the form I thought of as Poimandros. I admired the interplay of dappled sunlight on his muscles. He really was the loveliest-looking man I’d ever seen, as well as the best in bed. Of course it was Thetis he wanted. Oh well. The trees were more beautiful anyway. And they stayed fixed in their forms. “Serves him right. Nobody has ever read Plato without wishing to do the same. And you didn’t have any debates after that? Did you stop wanting to?”
“I wasn’t born yet, but from what I hear they had twice as many debates as before. But Athene wasn’t there for them.”
“And Kebes left too? With her?”
It was my turn to laugh. “No, he hated her. He hated everything. He was no more than a big ball of hate from what I’ve heard.”
Hermes twisted his lips in distaste, and then his face changed and seemed to be that of a broad-cheeked woman.
I looked down and focused on the trefoil leaves of the tiny purple flowers. “He took a bunch of people and stole a boat. They founded the Lucian cities, all eight of them, helped out with people they rescued from wars in Greece. They imposed a kind of Christianity, and practiced torture.”
Hermes laughed again, but I didn’t look up. I could see tiny hairs on the leaves. “Christianity more than a thousand years before Christ? I suppose this is an example of why Father forbids taking mortals out of time. I mean, Athene couldn’t have tried harder, she stuck you on an island that was going to be destroyed, and still all this happened.”
“He forbids it? Then we’re breaking his edicts right now?” I did look up then. I’d never before realized the magnitude of what Athene had done.
Hermes was looking like himself again. He nodded. “Well, technically. And we shouldn’t be using Necessity as a shield. I’m amazed Apollo even thought of that, he’s usually so law-abiding.”
“You said it’s like a stone in your shoe?”
“Like a sharp painful stone that half cuts off my foot at every step that isn’t in the direction Necessity wants me to go, back to conceive Alkippe and set time straight.” He shrugged. “But don’t worry. None of this was my idea, or yours either. It shouldn’t come to that and it should be all right, even if he’s angry. We can blame it all on Apollo and Athene. Now, tell me about Kebes.”