“Good,” Sokrates said. “I’ll be glad to see him.” Then he turned back to Pytheas expectantly. “Well?”
“I told you. Athene’s lost. Also, I can’t be in the same time twice, so we couldn’t come here until after my mortal body died, which happened this afternoon.”
“Right.” Sokrates’s mobile face contorted as he assimilated that.
“And Hilfa is part of her message, so I needed to come here where he was,” Pytheas went on.
“I have given my part of the message,” Hilfa said. “I don’t know about anything more the gods need me to do.” He took a step backwards, towards me.
“I hope you can lead a happy and fulfilling life from now on, free from what she has done to you,” Pytheas said. “But I fear you may still be needed.”
“Did Athene … create Hilfa?” Ikaros asked.
“She and Jathery caused him to come into being in some way, yes,” Pytheas said. “She put him in a box and gave the box to Neleus’s daughters, to open in case she was lost. I’m not clear on the details of why this seemed like the best plan. I’m expecting an explanation when we decode her notes. Unless you know more about it?”
“I don’t know anything about her message, beyond the paper she left with me, which I can’t read either,” Ikaros said. “I don’t know why she didn’t tell you herself, or leave all her notes with me, or with some one person. That riddle … She and I and Jathery did talk about going into Chaos a great deal, about ways and means. She was excited about going. The only thing I know about any explanation is that she talked about needing to take proper precautions.”
“Who’s Jathery?” Sokrates asked.
“One of the Saeli gods,” Pytheas said. “He—”
“She,” Ikaros interrupted, and at the same moment, much more quietly, Hilfa said, “Gla.”
“Gla,” Pytheas corrected himself, “is a trickster god who has gone with Athene into the Chaos before and after time.”
“Why do we need to rescue her?” Sokrates asked.
“Are you still that angry with her?” Ikaros asked, sadly.
“How long did she leave you as a fly anyway?” Thetis asked, which was what I was also wondering.
“I didn’t mean to imply that we should abandon her out there, but rather to inquire why she is in need of our rescue, how can she be beyond her own resources,” Sokrates explained calmly. “And if she should be in such need, then what resources do we have that she does not, that we can help her if she has gone beyond them?”
As if on cue, Hermes and Marsilia reappeared at that moment. Hermes was grinning, and Marsilia was frowning. Marsilia seemed to have been frowning a lot since all this started, and it wasn’t characteristic. She’s a serious person, yes, but on a normal day on the boat her brows might not draw down at all. Now she looked as if she might never relax then again. She moved away from Hermes. I saw her eyes widen as she recognized Sokrates and Ikaros.
“Do you have Athene’s notes?” Pytheas asked Hermes.
“Marsilia has them,” Hermes said. He looked at her expectantly. She pulled three pieces of paper out of her inside pocket, put one of them back and held the others up.
“Here,” she said.
Hermes leaned against the wall, staring over at Pytheas. “Do you have yours?”
“Yes. But I can’t read them.”
“No more can I,” Hermes said. “They’re in some kind of code. Maybe with time I could figure it out.”
“It will be much faster if I get Arete,” Pytheas said, and vanished.
“This is my sister Marsilia,” Thetis said, moving around refilling winecups again. “Marsilia, Hermes, Ikaros and Sokrates.”
“You’re not a fly anymore,” Hermes said.
“Apollo was kind enough to turn me back,” Sokrates said, frowning at him. “Who’s Arete?”
“Pytheas and Simmea’s daughter,” Ikaros said. “She can fly. And detect falsehood. She’s wonderful. I expect she’s grown up by now. It’s hard to take in. Forty years.”
“Sixty years,” Sokrates said. “But it was thousands of years last time. At least it’s never boring being a plaything of the gods.”
“Why is Apollo taking so long?” Hermes asked.
“I expect he has to explain to Arete,” Thetis said. “What’s the hurry anyway?”
Marsilia, Ikaros and Hermes looked at her in astonishment.
“Thetis is right. Athene’s not even in the same time as us. Why does it matter how long it takes?” Sokrates asked.
“We don’t know whether there’s time where Athene is, or how time works there, so there may be time pressure on our need to find her,” Ikaros said.
“And I am bound by Necessity, which is becoming increasingly difficult as more time passes for me,” Hermes said.
“Also there’s a human spaceship up in orbit waiting for permission to land,” Marsilia said.
“A human spaceship?” Sokrates asked. “From where?”
“From Earth,” Marsilia said.
“We’re not on Earth?” Sokrates asked.
Everyone fell over themselves explaining the Relocation to him. “I wouldn’t have imagined I could be on a world circling another sun without knowing it, even inside, at night, with only little slit windows,” Sokrates said at last when he’d assimilated it. “And you called your new world Plato?”
“Yes,” Marsilia said.
“Of course they did,” Ikaros said.
“And why exactly did Athene bring you here from Greece?” Sokrates asked.
“Zeus brought them here, as I understand it,” Hermes said.
“Why did he do that?”
“So we could have posterity, they say,” Marsilia said. “And this human spaceship that’s up there now is our first recontact with wider humanity, and it will give us that posterity.”
Pytheas reappeared with Arete. She immediately hugged Ikaros, who had leapt out of his chair as soon as he saw her.
“It’s so good to see you!”
“You look so young!” Arete said.
“Fascinating as this reunion is, can we get on and read Athene’s message?” Hermes asked.
Arete turned to Hermes, then stopped. She became completely expressionless for a moment, staring at him stone-faced, looking for that moment decidedly like her father. “Who in all the worlds of thinking souls are you?”
“Nobody asked,” he said. “I’m Jathery, of course. Not outside time with Athene, as you can see, but left behind as part of her precautionary system, like the rest of you.”
“Gla ordered me not to tell,” Hilfa said. He took another step back and sat beside me on the bed. I put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly.
Hermes bent forward from the waist with one hand extended and the other behind his back, and when gla straightened up again gla was a huge greenish-gold Saeli, dressed in a gold webbing vest like the red one Hilfa wore on the boat. The patterns on gla skin were a deep black and seemed to writhe and change as gla moved.
Nobody moved or spoke for a long moment. Then Marsilia made a retching sound and made a dash for the fountain room, looking seasick. The papers she had been holding scattered to the ground as she ran.
12
MARSILIA
Hermes turned to me a second later, on the same quayside on a blazing hot summer afternoon, hotter than it ever was at home. “He recognized you. So we had already successfully got Athene’s note from him.”
“So am I caught up in Necessity’s toils now as well?” I asked. I rubbed my eyes against the sun’s glare reflecting off the harbor water.
Hermes looked intrigued. “Yes. But we can’t use that as a shield the way Apollo wants me to use Alkippe, because we need Athene’s explanation first, so don’t worry, we can clear it up quickly.”
“But how does it work? Haven’t these things we’ve done always been in time, so that even before we left Plato, even before I was born these things happened? We always spoke to Kebes earlier, and took Athene’s message from him before that? If time can’t change except in extreme circumstances when Zeus intervenes, isn’t everything we do in time determined? Why are you uncomfortable about Alkippe, when it’s all like that?”