“But they can’t live out there, away from the cities?”
“No.” I took another gulp of my soup, finishing it. I put the empty bowl down. “I’d never thought of anyone wanting to try.”
“The Saeli have not tried it either,” Hilfa said.
Talking to Sokrates made me feel as if I should have been paying more attention to everything all along instead of only really thinking about my own life.
“So, Jason, tell me about your revolutionaries.”
“What revolutionaries?” I had no idea what he meant.
“The malcontents, the people who don’t like the system and agitate against it,” Sokrates explained.
I was still confused. “You mean Sokratea?”
“You don’t have people like that here?”
“We have people who disagree about things, but they’re not revolutionaries,” I said. “They debate a lot. People who really disapprove fundamentally of how things work here tend to go off to Sokratea, the same as people who want to be really rigid and Platonic go off to Athenia. The twelve cities are all different, so people who are discontent with the way things are usually move around until they find one where they’re happier and things suit them better. People sort themselves out by temperament and what they like. People from the other cities come to the big festivals and tell you what it’s like there, sometimes trying to persuade people to move. I’ve never been tempted. I like it here.”
“But you’re free to move around?”
“Oh yes. That’s one point you made in the Last Debate that really bit hard.” I smiled at him.
“So you know what I said about that to Athene?”
“Are you joking? There are hundreds of books about the Last Debate.”
“I have read some of them,” Hilfa said. “Everyone knows what you said at the Last Debate. And at your trial in Athens.”
“I seem doomed to keep catching up to my own fame,” Sokrates said. “But I’m glad they didn’t try to conceal how it went. There was a lot of censorship here sixty years ago, and I was afraid the Masters might have kept that up. Twelve cities that are different and allow free movement sounds ever so much better than what I knew when I was here before.”
“Oh yes. Even in Psyche these days they allow immigration and emigration,” I said.
“What’s Psyche?” he asked, cautiously.
“It’s a Neoplatonist city that’s obsessed with redefining the soul, and that doesn’t give women or Workers full citizenship. But they still have some women and Workers living there, amazingly enough. For a while they forced people to stay, but they ran away anyway when they wanted to, and eventually they agreed to let them go as part of the settlement when the Council of Worlds was set up. They’re the only city that ever tried to force people to stay, after the Last Debate.” I was amazed I could remember this. I’d had to study it for my citizenship exams, but I’d hardly thought about it since. “There used to be wars between the cities, back on Earth, but they stopped when we came here, after Pytheas pointed out there were only some things worth fighting for.”
“So people have to choose one of the cities?” Sokrates asked.
“Yes. Well, no. Most people do—it’s like you said in the Apology, or was it the Crito, about agreeing to be bound by the laws of a city? But there are metics, people who live in one city while having citizenship somewhere else. And a few people don’t like things anywhere and keep moving around without ever taking citizenship. There’s a joke about somebody who decided to live for ten years in each city before deciding where to settle down.”
“But humans only live eighty or ninety years,” Hilfa objected.
“That’s why it’s a joke,” I explained. “Seriously, there are people who don’t ever pick a city. There’s s theater troupe I know who do a circuit. They spend a couple of months at a time in each city and keep moving on, going everywhere in the course of a year or two.”
“If the gods save reality and time goes on, perhaps I will try that,” Sokrates said. “Certainly I’d like to see all the cities. And perhaps other planets too.”
“Some people have left with the Saeli on ships, though Marsilia was saying nothing like as many as Saeli have settled here,” I said.
“Perhaps I will do that. Or perhaps on human ships, now they have contacted us, to visit human planets. But there’s certainly a lot on this planet to learn about, and I am seventy-five years old, so we’ll have to see.” He grinned. “I’m very interested to learn more about the Saeli. Tell me about your gods. You have more, not only Jathery?”
The kelp-gatherers all looked up as Sokrates spoke gla name.
“Yes,” Hilfa said. “We—”
One of the kelp-pickers got up and came over to our table. “You shouldn’t talk about the gods,” he said to Hilfa. And to Sokrates, “And you shouldn’t ask, it’s not polite.”
“I had no idea, I’m sorry to violate your custom,” Sokrates said. “Why is it impolite to inquire about your religion?”
“Saeli religion is private,” the Saeli said. “Young Hilfa here was wrong to tell you the name of a god, and you shouldn’t go around saying it.”
“Hilfa didn’t tell me about Jathery. Gla was here this evening, and I met gla,” Sokrates said.
The kelp-gatherer said something in Saeli. “He says, see what harm it does speaking their names,” Hilfa translated. The other kelp-gatherers got up and came over to our table. They were all wearing silver pins.
“Plato says, worship in the manner of the city,” one of the other kelp-gatherers said, in Greek. “We do that, those of us who have taken oath. We worship the Olympians, at the proper times, like all the other citizens. You can see us there in the temples with everyone else. We want to leave our old gods behind on our planet-of-origin.”
“But you have a temple of your own, I’ve seen it,” I objected. The five of them were crowding round the three of us now. As I spoke and they all looked at me, I felt a definite sense of menace. Although I hadn’t felt anything like it since I was a kid in the palaestra, it was very familiar. They used to say in my sleeping house that it was Kebes who had taught big boys to pick on smaller boys and intimidate them physically, turning wrestling matches into serious fighting when the masters weren’t looking. Whether or not that was true, we certainly all learned the difference between sport and menace when we were young. I found myself calculating. Sokrates was old and would try to keep talking too long. The other three humans in the room would probably help if I called out to them. It would be quite a scrap, and we were in a temple. We’d all be brought up for brawling, and sentenced to spend all our evenings for months moving hives around and getting stung. I braced myself against the table, ready to push it back and be on my feet in an instant.
“It’s a private temple,” the first one said.
“Was gla really here?” another asked.
“Gla was really here, and spoke to us, and may well be back tomorrow,” Sokrates said. “I think it would be better for us to deal with gla from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance. That’s why I was asking Hilfa.”
The pod exchanged looks. I couldn’t read their faces at all. I kept myself ready for a sudden move. “We’re only Silvers. You should talk to Afial,” a greenish-grey one said.
“And who are you to be asking?” the first one asked, glancing visibly from Sokrates’s pinless kiton to my own silver pin. I wished Marsilia were still with us to lend us some visible authority.
“Surely anyone can make an enquiry?” Sokrates asked. “I’m a philosopher, but not a gold or even a citizen. My name is Sokrates.”
Hilfa said something in Saeli, and the kelp-gatherers took a step back. The menace evaporated as if it had never been. I let go of the table and breathed freely again. The first one to approach us stepped forward again and sat down beside Hilfa, opposite me and Sokrates. “All right then, yes, since you are Plato’s Sokrates I’ll tell you. It is a Temple of Jathery that allows us to change our names and allegiances and be free to worship better gods.”