“Well, things can change because of our actions. And once we know about them, we are bound to do them. It’s uncomfortable because I know about Alkippe.” He hesitated, frowning a little. “It’s like an itch I can’t reach, until I set it straight, a painful spreading itch. Or maybe it’s more like the feeling that I am constantly doing the wrong thing. I should be attending to that, so everything else I do feels bad and wrong. But it’s only because I know. If I didn’t know?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know until I saw her, and it didn’t bother me at all.”
“So it has to do with awareness, with consciousness?” I asked. “Divine consciousness, or any consciousness?”
“Only gods can go outside time, so mortal consciousness isn’t usually a problem this way. Your lives unfold in time, you do what you want to do, you can’t get tangled up in it unless we take you outside it, which Father wisely forbids.” He grinned.
Yet here I was, in a time that was both forty years and four thousand years before the time when I was born. “Can you change things on purpose?”
“Yes. But it gets harder the farther from our central concerns it is.”
“And how about getting tangled up in Necessity? Can that be deliberate?”
He looked uncomfortable. “No, not normally. Because it’s the consequences of actions. Well, there are ways one can, but nobody would. It feels horrible enough when it isn’t.”
“And what if you never went back to conceive Alkippe?” I asked, my deepest fear. “Would she cease to exist?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody could withstand Necessity for long enough to find out. But maybe. We’re banking on her being protection for us, being a shield. But if I should be stuck out there, or killed, then I don’t really know what would happen to her.”
“Well, that’s honest, thank you.” I blinked back tears. “You take it so lightly.”
“I don’t know her as you do.”
I tried to put it more clearly. “I didn’t mean that. I mean you seem to find everything funny, you keep laughing at things, and yet you say everything feels wrong.”
“That’s my nature,” he said.
That didn’t explain anything. “Let’s get on with it. When are we now, exactly?”
“Five years earlier than when we spoke to Kebes before. The boat’s there.” He gestured towards it. “Goodness. What a name!”
“What?” I was so used to it as a name that I’d never really considered it before. “It’s a great name!”
“Very Platonic,” Hermes agreed, so I didn’t understand his previous objection.
“Let’s try again,” I said. We walked over to the Goodness, which was tied up at the same spot. The same sailor was standing in a slightly different place on the deck, coiling a rope. One of the grey and white sea birds was perched on the rail in almost the same place. “Is Matthias aboard?” I asked. It reminded me of rehearsing a play, but of course the sailor didn’t recognize me, and didn’t know his lines.
“Nope,” he said. “Went ashore.”
“Do you know where I could find him?”
The sailor looked from my face to my gold pin, and frowned. His pin was silver, I noticed. “Might be in the church,” he said, after a noticeable hesitation.
I thanked him, then Hermes and I turned and walked away, up the steep hill in the blazing sunshine. I led the way towards the agora where I remembered the church standing in my own world. “Churches are a kind of Christian temple, and Kebes is some kind of permanent priest,” I remembered. “It’s going to be really hard to talk to him, to be friendly I mean.” I wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When I’d been in Lucia before, the streets had been bustling. Now there was nobody in sight but an old man leading a laden donkey down the hill, and two little girls playing on a doorstep. The sea below was so still that birds were sitting floating on the water.
“You said he believes Athene is a demon. Will he think I am a demon too?” Hermes looked quite pleased at the thought.
“I expect so. The Ikarians say the Olympians are angels, and the Lucian church these days—I mean, in my own time, on Plato, has moved a lot closer to the Ikarians. I’ve never really paid that much attention—with Pytheas right there and his children being my uncles and aunt, and all of them saying Yayzu isn’t anything different, it’s hard to take contradictory beliefs seriously. Though the Ikarians claim it doesn’t contradict at all.” We came to a beautiful, slightly old-fashioned sculpture of Marissa, which I remembered from when I was in Lucia in my past and its future. I gestured to it. “But why have only one goddess, instead of all of them?”
“It’ll probably be best if we don’t debate religion with him,” Hermes said.
“Should we tell him who we are?” I asked.
“If we don’t, how will he know to give us Athene’s message?”
“How will he anyway? She can’t have known we’d be the ones to come. I mean she must have known Grandfather couldn’t come, because of being in two times at once. So he’d have to send someone, but Athene wouldn’t know who. She might have expected it would be Porphyry. He’s the only one of my uncles who goes in and out of time.” Or I suppose he could have asked another of the Olympians. Hermes was only helping because he happened to be there, wasn’t he? For the first time I wondered why he had come to Plato when he did.
“I wonder why Athene chose a time she knew Apollo couldn’t reach? It can’t have been accidental. She must have had a reason. I think we should say we come from Athene, to collect what she left with him,” Hermes said. “If he asks who we are, we should simply tell him the truth.”
“But we already know it didn’t go well,” I said. “The way he reacted when he saw us.”
“If it’s not going to go well, then nothing we can think of will change that,” Hermes said.
We walked on in silence as I pondered the ramifications of that. We soon came into the main part of the city and passed the sleeping house where I had stayed when I had spent my year in Lucia. It looked exactly the same, except that there was a pea vine covered in orange flowers growing up the white-painted wall which was new—or no, of course, old. The vine had probably died of cold before I was born.
“It’s really quiet,” I said. “Where do you think everyone is?”
“Napping in the heat of the day,” he said, gesturing towards the latched shutters. “It’s a normal thing in Greece. In summer everything gets done in the morning and the evening.”
“That makes sense, because it is really hot,” I admitted. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been this hot.”
“I might be able to help make you more comfortable.” My red kiton didn’t change, but it immediately felt lighter. I wondered if the weight and warmth of my fishing clothes had been in it until then. After a moment, a little breeze sprang up, ruffling the water, now far below us, and evaporating the sweat from my face. Hermes smiled.
We came to the agora. A man and woman were sitting debating something at one of the tables outside the cafe, bending together over some papers. An old woman walked across the plaza carrying a whimpering toddler. Hermes wrinkled his nose at the freestanding wooden crucifix outside the church. I’d seen it before, so I pushed the door open and went inside.
It was cool and dark and smelled of something heavy and sweet. I stood still for a moment while my eyes adjusted. There were high windows with no glass, which had contained lovely stained glass scenes of the life of Yayzu when I’d seen them before. The inside of the church had been lit with electricity then, too, and there had been paintings and statues. Now it was mostly bare. There was a shadowed altar, with a cloth and a gold cross on it, and four rows of benches. I thought for a moment that the sailor was wrong, or that Kebes must have left, because I couldn’t see anybody, then I realized that there was someone prostrate on the tiles in front of the altar. It seemed an uncomfortably intimate way to catch somebody unawares. I wished he had been on the boat. He must have heard the door creak as we came in, but he hadn’t moved. I looked at Hermes for advice. He spread his hands theatrically. My job, of course.