“Have you asked what kind of government they have?”
“Yes, but we didn’t understand the answer very well,” he said.
“An oligarchy with some democratic features, but not much control,” Arete said, as she scraped her bowl.
I tried to imagine that and couldn’t.
“I wonder what kind of people they’d send out to explore?” Alkippe asked. “I think it would be a fun job.”
“Well, mostly Silvers, I’d think,” Klymene said. “Maybe with some Golds in charge, and some Bronzes to run the technical side of the spaceship.”
“We don’t use Platonic classes at home, but that’s approximately how we crew our spaceships,” Slif said. “It’s the logical way of organizing things.”
“But they may have other kinds of people entirely,” Dad said.
“What kind?” Akamas asked.
“Tyrants. Timarchs. Oligarchs. Slaves. Remember that word profits?” Arete frowned down at her empty bowl.
“Where’s Grandma?” Alkippe interrupted.
“Out on the Excellence, getting it ready for a trip to Amazonia,” Dad said.
Arete stood up. “Where are you going?” Alkippe asked.
“I’m going home to sleep now,” Arete said.
“Are you going to fly?” Alkippe asked.
“Yes, I am,” she said, smiling down at Alkippe. “I’ll be back this evening. I’ll see you in Thessaly after dinner.”
“Thank you for all your help with English,” Slif said.
Arete went off towards the kitchen, carrying her dishes.
“Is the space human language difficult?” I asked Slif.
“No, English is much like Greek in structure, but with odd tenses and conditionals and a very large vocabulary,” Slif replied. “It shows signs of being a creole originally, a merger of two or more different languages from the same family. Such often keep the vocabulary of both parent languages with different shades of meaning. Also, it has borrowed a great deal of technical vocabulary from Latin and Greek. The spelling is bizarre. It’s fascinating. But it’s not elegant.”
“It sounds like a kind of clicky buzz to me,” Akamas said. “I can see that it has borrowed some words from Greek, but I think they’d have done better to borrow the entire language and be clear. Or why didn’t they stick to Latin? English comes from Britannia, originally, apparently, and they spoke Latin there in Tacitus’s day. I don’t understand this desire people seem to have to be constantly changing things.”
They had both finished eating, so they bade us joy and left. They were going to catch up on sleep, and I envied them the opportunity.
“Where’s Pytheas?” Alkippe asked as soon as they had gone.
“We don’t know. He and Jathery went off together. They’ll be back tonight,” I said, praying that they would, that Jathery would go back and conceive her, that the world would be safe for her to grow up. “Now eat your porridge, don’t play with it.” I’m not Thetis. I don’t cry easily. But this conversation kept bringing a lump to my throat.
“Who’s Jathery?” Alkippe asked.
“He’s the one we thought was Hermes,” I said.
Dad looked at me sideways. “That wasn’t Hermes?”
“No, as it turns out that was Jathery, a Saeli trickster god,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. A night’s sleep had done me good, but it was still an uncomfortable thought, and I didn’t want Dad to worry about it. Klymene put her old hand on mine. I looked at her, and she smiled consolingly. I don’t know how she knew there was anything wrong.
“I thought he wasn’t like the way I thought Hermes would be,” Alkippe said, triumphantly.
“Well, that was extremely clever of you,” I said. I hadn’t guessed at all.
“Where’s Thetis?” Dad asked, clearly looking for a way to change the subject. “I was expecting her to come in with you.”
“Finally,” Alkippe said, bouncing on the bench. “She said if you asked to tell you that she’d gone down to the harbor to see Hilfa and collect the books for Ikaros before she goes to the nursery, and she’d see us all here at dinner like always.”
“Right,” Dad said, suddenly paying a lot of attention to scraping his bowl.
“Last night, Auntie Thee was with Jason and Her- and Jathery. I thought Jason was your friend?” Alkippe asked me.
“I work with Jason and Hilfa, but that’s no reason he can’t be Thetis’s friend too. They did their shake-up year and took their oaths together when they were ephebes,” I said. And even if Thetis didn’t exist, Jason would never have looked at me. I knew that. There was no sense in the way I kept wanting people who couldn’t see me that way. Plato was right as usuaclass="underline" keep sex for the Festival of Hera and stick to friendship the rest of the time. “People have lots of friends, not only one.”
“I have lots of friends,” Alkippe said. “But I like Camilla best.”
“That’s because she goes to a different palaestra so you don’t see her every day so she feels special,” Dad said.
The other children in the hall were all leaving, or getting ready to leave. “Eat up, you don’t want to be late,” I said. Alkippe took three huge bites of porridge, eating as much as she had in the rest of the meal put together. She leapt to her feet. “Are you sure you’ve had enough?”
“I’ll take a pear,” she said, and stuffed one inside her kiton before running off to spend the rest of her day with the other children, learning all the things Plato prescribes for excellence, the things I had recommended to Phila. I took the last pear myself and cleared the dishes. Then Dad and Klymene and I went to Chamber.
I love the way Chamber looks, black and white stripes. It was almost glowing in the morning sunlight.
Diotima was in the chair. I took my place on the bench at the front, next to Aroo and Dad. We wished Aroo joy, and she wished us the same. The room felt quieter than normal, the usual buzzing as people settled in and greeted each other was more muted.
There’s a lot of honor involved in being consul, not merely the Roman tradition of the thing, and naming the years, but the fact that it’s a planetwide office and directly elected. But what it really amounts to is a lot of chairing meetings. Diotima and I took it in turns to chair meetings of the Council of Worlds, and we were judged on our ability to do that. She was impeccably turned out in a neatly embroidered kiton. Like everyone I’d ever met from Athenia, she was very properly Platonic and utterly unprepared to compromise. But she certainly knew how to run a meeting smoothly.
We began with a report from Klymene, where she explained at more length what I’d heard at breakfast. Aroo followed with a short report.
Diotima recognized Androkles next. He bounded down to the front to face us all. “I call to schedule a debate with the gods, on why we need to lie to the space humans about our origins and our experience of divinity. I don’t want to have this argument here and now, I want to call the gods here to make their case.”
“Our gods, or all the gods?” Hermia asked. There was a laugh.
“Well, our gods might come,” Androkles said. “Though Pytheas too, if he wants to; I heard he was back here last night, and that people saw Hermes in Thessaly. I’d welcome any gods who want to come and explain themselves in Chamber. Look, Athene started all this seventy years ago, an experiment, a whim as Sokrates said at the Last Debate. We’re here because of the gods. Zeus moved us to Plato directly. I’m quite prepared to believe there are good arguments for keeping quiet about this to the space humans. In fact, I think there probably are, and I can think of some of them for myself. I’ve been thinking about this all night. I think this Chamber deserves to hear the arguments and decide for ourselves. I think we’ll decide responsibly. I’m only opposed to accepting the word of the gods as—well, as divine writ, without any examination. That’s not the spirit in which any of our cities were founded.”
“What if Athene came?” Diotima asked.