“The two of us, and Marsilia, that’s three, and Thetis, four,” he said, waving his free hand. “We need one more to be five. A pod. A family. Maybe Dion? Though he’s so much older.”
“Marsilia and Thetis—look, Hilfa, this isn’t how it works. And humans don’t make pods of five. You should make a pod with Saeli, surely. Don’t you want children?”
“There are children already,” Hilfa said. “Camilla, and little Di. And Alkippe. You could make more. And I could have children.”
“Not with humans,” I said, sure of myself on that. “You’d need a Saeli pod for that, like I said.”
“No. I would need an egg, that’s all. Pods are about childraising, not genetics.”
“But where would you get an egg?” I asked. “Athene isn’t going to give you one in a box.”
He laughed his learned laugh and started walking again, out of the temple and into the chill of the street. “No. I would fertilize one in my body, or find one in the sea.”
“The sea’s not full of Saeli eggs, is it?” I looked out towards the peaceful starlit water as if expecting to see it suddenly swarming with young Saeli.
“Yes, it is. Most Saeli don’t want babies most of the time, and so they discharge eggs swimming. Fish eat many of them, but many survive. But don’t worry, none will hatch unless brought out and touched with the right … I don’t know the word. The right touch. By one of my gender.”
I thought of all the times I’d seen Saeli swimming, and shuddered at no more than the thought of how cold the water was. “Do people know this? Do the consuls know that the sea is full of Saeli eggs?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I expect so. You should ask Aroo, or the Saeli who first settled here. I do not know what they explained.” Hilfa shook his head. “But while it would be nice to have a Saeli child, it is not necessary for the pod. If you don’t want one, I can help with the human children.” He already did.
“I can see you’ve been thinking about this a lot, but it isn’t a human kind of thing,” I said.
“Pod formation is difficult, and we have come so far on the road together. I want to form a pod with you. You are my friends. The other Saeli don’t like me. You saw that earlier with that pod of kelp-gatherers. They think I am an orphan, that I was an egg somebody of my gender brought out and raised without a pod and then abandoned. It happens occasionally. It is disapproved of, in our culture, though they say there are other Saeli cultures where only those of my gender raise children and there are no pods.”
“Well, maybe the crew is something like a pod,” I said. This hadn’t been what I expected when he’d started to work with me, but I did care about him and I didn’t want to trample over hopes he’d clearly been holding close for some time. “I do think of you as being almost like a brother. And if you were to raise an egg, I’d certainly help.” I thought of all the times he’d helped get the kids to eat in the mornings, and helped Dion limp along to Samos, our eating hall, even carrying him a few times on icy days. “But that doesn’t mean that Thetis and Marsilia are involved. This isn’t how it works with humans.”
“But you want Thetis and Marsilia wants you.” He sounded entirely matter of fact. “I don’t understand.”
No, he certainly didn’t understand! “Marsilia works with us, but this isn’t how we organize things,” I said. “I do feel as if you’re family, Hilfa, and I think from what she said earlier that Marsilia does too, and likely Thee does as well, but even so that doesn’t mean we’re going to arrange a pod.” I suspected that, far from wanting me, Marsilia had come to work on my boat to keep an eye on Hilfa.
“They have marriages with multiple adults in the City of Amazons,” Hilfa said. “And they have fishing there too. Thetis could work in a nursery there, but I think Marsilia needs to be here for politics.”
“Marsilia definitely needs to be here.” We had reached my sleeping house and stopped outside it. “This isn’t going to work. Plato’s right. Friendship is best.”
“But a pod is friendship.”
“And Marsilia and Thee are sisters,” I said.
“Plato says brothers and sisters can marry if the gods allow it,” Hilfa said, looking up. “We could ask Arete. Or Pytheas.”
“No,” I said, as firmly as I could.
“Pod formation is always difficult,” Hilfa said, undeterred. “But we’re a good team. We’ll work it out.”
He walked off down the street towards his own house. It had been a long evening full of strange conversations, but that might have been the strangest of all.
19
MARSILIA
The next morning, Alkippe and I went to Florentia for breakfast, the way we did every day. I put on my best kiton, because there was a Council meeting. The meeting of the previous evening seemed to have happened long ago, because so much had happened since and my priorities had shifted so much. Even counting the extra time I had spent with Hermes collecting Athene’s messages, it couldn’t be more than a day and a half’s worth of hours, but it felt like years. Time was a strange thing even when it didn’t have gods messing about with it.
It was a beautiful day, with warm sunlight, though a chilly edge to the wind whispered that summer was over. Dad was sitting at our usual table, eating nut porridge with Arete, Klymene and a couple of Bronzes I didn’t know. We made our way across the room, greeting friends and the morning’s servers as we helped ourselves to porridge and fruit. Alkippe slid in next to Dad, and I sat opposite them, next to Klymene. Dad introduced the strangers as Akamas, the human, and Slif, the Sael. “We’ve been up all night at the spaceport,” Dad said. “Akamas works the communications there, and Slif has been starting to learn the space-human language.”
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Pretty much on track,” Klymene said. “I think they believe us, and I think their initial delegation will come down tomorrow morning. They’ll be three humans and six Workers. They have much better medical technology than we have—that’s something we haven’t been able to trade for with the Saeli or the Amarathi.”
“Sixty-One is back on duty translating now, and the new shift have taken over,” Dad said. “I’m going to go to the meeting and then sleep all afternoon.”
“I’ll be very very quiet if you’re sleeping in the afternoon,” Alkippe said. She was holding a spoonful of honey above her porridge bowl and turning it so that it fell in a slow spiral.
“You’ll be in the palaestra, so you can be as loud as you like,” Dad said.
Alkippe laughed and stirred her porridge. “I’d have to be very loud in the palaestra to wake you at home!”
Dad grinned back at her. “Maybe if you were wrestling and you brought somebody down with a big thud and a loud grunt!”
“Maybe if I was running in armor and ran very fast and really rattled!”
I felt so fond of them both as I listened to them burbling nonsense. This was how meals were supposed to be. A sufficiency of healthy food, and comfortable conversation. “How’s the other thing?” I looked at Arete.
“Everything’s fine so far. No news expected until tonight,” she said. She didn’t look worried, and I couldn’t ask more in front of the others, but I assumed that meant Grandfather and Jathery had set off all right.
“Well, that seems like good progress with the ship,” I said. “It’s wonderful to think we’re going to meet the space humans. So exciting!”
“I want to meet them too,” Alkippe said.
“It seems the space humans may be stranger than we thought,” Dad said.
I nodded, thinking of Phila. “I expect they will be different.”
“Will they look different, like the Saeli?” Alkippe asked.
“No, they’ll look like ordinary humans, probably, but they’ll have all kinds of axioms about what’s important that are different,” I said.
“Yes, that’s it,” Dad said.