“Athene most of all,” Androkles said. “There’s nothing we want more in Sokratea than for Athene to show up and finish arguing the Last Debate.”
But he was wrong. His mouth fell open, and everyone turned to see what there was behind us that he could be staring at. Crocus had come late to the meeting. And riding on his back, beaming at everyone, was Sokrates.
An hour later, after the meeting, Sokrates and I walked over to Thessaly to see Ikaros. I hadn’t yet learned that when you do anything with Sokrates you have to budget twice as much time as you expect it to take. He kept stopping and reading bits of inscribed debate on paving stones. “Weren’t you there for all that?” I asked.
“There are new bits,” he said. “I mean look at all this about classification. That must have been after the Last Debate. I wonder who they were talking to—Patroklus, maybe? Glaukon? It’s interesting that the Workers approve of classes, here anyway. Hmm. That’s not what I’d have said.”
“You mean we’ve been having debates and you missed it?” I teased.
He grinned up at me. “I’ve skipped over so much! Well, it was two thousand years the first time. This time, only sixty. And then we’ll all be catching up with the next thousand years or so once the space humans get down here.” He rubbed his hands together eagerly.
“You like it?” I asked.
“I hate missing it, but I love catching up. Think how many new arguments they’ll have come up with, how many new thoughts in a thousand years! I can hardly wait. Ikaros will try to synthesize them all into one system, but I want to hear what they are and point out all the holes.”
As we got nearer Thessaly, he speeded up a little, then stopped entirely. “Somebody came back and filled it all in,” he said. “What I said, what Simmea said. It reads like a proper dialogue.”
“Hasn’t it always been like that?” It had been like that as long as I could remember.
“No, the only thing written down was what Crocus said, and the other Workers. We humans spoke out loud. Though whoever did it remembers what we said accurately, not like Plato who was making most of it up even when he wasn’t making up the whole thing.” He tutted.
My uncle Porphyry opened the door of Thessaly. Porphyry lived in the City of Amazons so I didn’t see him very often. He was the most mysterious and divine of my uncles, and at the same time the most playful and childlike. When I was a child he had been my favorite uncle. He lived with his mother, and had no children of his own, but he loved to play with his nieces and nephews, and now with the new generation. At family gatherings he was often romping outside with the children, or telling stories to groups of them. As I’d grown up I’d grown shy of him, knowing how powerful he was, and sometimes seeing him do strange things that made me uneasy. In the last few years, seeing Alkippe’s delight in him had rekindled my old memories.
He stepped forward and took Sokrates’s hands. “Joy to you. I’m Porphyry.”
“Pytheas’s son by Euridike, and you live in the City of Amazons and Ikaros was your teacher,” Sokrates said. I had no idea how he could know all that. “And you’re a god and you fetched the new Workers.” Which told me that of course Crocus must have told him.
“That’s right.” Porphyry let go of Sokrates’s hands and nodded to me. “Good to see you again, Marsi.” Nobody had called me by that short name since I was a child, so it made me feel happy and young to hear it from Porphyry now.
“What happened to the tree?” Sokrates asked accusingly as soon as we’d followed Porphyry through the house and into the garden, where Ikaros was sitting by the herm. It was the kind of day when you wanted to sit outside, knowing winter was close and there wouldn’t be many more days when you could.
“Couldn’t take the winters,” Porphyry said. “It gets cold here. If it wasn’t for the vulcanism we wouldn’t be able to have vines and olive trees. Citrus can survive, but it takes a lot of looking after. We grow a lot more stone fruit, and apples and pears.”
I sat down in the grass. “We’ve voted to schedule a debate tomorrow morning in which the gods come to Chamber to explain the reasoning behind the plan for lying to the space humans,” I said. “Will you come, Porphyry? Dad says it was your plan originally.”
Porphyry did the creepy thing he does where he moves his fingers and his eyes go out of focus. I don’t know why it should be so creepy, because that’s really all it is. Anyone else could twiddle their fingers and stare vacantly at them and it wouldn’t bother me at all, but when Porphyry does it I always shiver. I did now, and I noticed Ikaros looking at me. Sokrates was staring at Porphyry’s fingers. “Yes, I’ll be there,” Porphyry said. He sat down beside Ikaros, and Sokrates sat down too, crossing his legs comfortably like a much younger man.
“Will you come too, Ikaros?” I asked.
He looked startled. “I’m not sure I’m qualified.”
I sighed and looked him in the eye. “You’re a Master, and therefore a member of Chamber and qualified to attend. There aren’t any other Masters still alive, but we didn’t feel it necessary to change the rules. And whether or not you’re a god is a matter of definition—and one that doesn’t matter because a substantial minority of our population worships you as one.”
“I saw the temple,” Ikaros said. He shook his head.
“What did you expect when you found a religion and then get bodily taken up into heaven in front of half the city?” Porphyry asked, teasingly.
“I’m surprised it became so popular,” Sokrates said. “I’d have thought it was too complicated.”
“I worked on it a lot more after the Last Debate, with Klio and other people. We had a great festival in the City of Amazons where everyone came and tried to refute my logic. You’d have loved it. It’s what I originally wanted to do in Rome. It was wonderful. But I’ve been working on the theory again since I’ve been with Athene and I’ve changed some things now I know more.” Ikaros stopped. “I suppose I should tell them.”
“What, walk in with a New Testament?” Porphyry asked.
“I’m not sure how the Ikarians would take that,” I said.
“They weren’t ever supposed to be Ikarians, or add me to the pantheon,” he said. “Things do get complicated.”
“Are you a god, then?” Sokrates asked.
“What is a god?” Ikaros threw back instantly. They both sat up and leaned forward eagerly. Sokrates looked like, well, a philosopher. Ikaros was, frankly, gorgeous, more gorgeous than even Jathery pretending to be Hermes, because he was more mature. But there was no question he was a philosopher too, with that avidity in his face, twin to Sokrates’s own.
“None of my old definitions will work, unless we allow that you and Porphyry and Athene are some other kind of being, and that there are unchanging unseeking perfect gods that are different,” Sokrates said.
“The One,” Ikaros said. “And I used the word angels in the New Concordance, for those other kinds of being. But perfection is a dynamic attribute.”
“How can it be? The nature of perfection—”
“Perfect things can become more perfect, endlessly.”
“Excellence, yes, but perfection implies completeness.”
Porphyry and I looked past them and smiled at each other. There was something satisfying to the soul in the way they so immediately became utterly absorbed in the argument. Sokrates caught the smile as Ikaros began to explain the nature of dynamic perfection, which was exactly the kind of abstraction Ikarians and Psycheans love. “Wait,” he said. “We’re arguing with each other when we have an expert here.”
“I’m not an expert,” Porphyry said, throwing up his hands.
“But you admit you are a god?”
“Yes…” Porphyry admitted, tentatively.
“Then you must know what a god is,” Sokrates said, with a brisk nod. “Please enlighten us.”
Porphyry shook his head ruefully. “Do you know what a human is because you are one? Or how souls work because you have one? There are many kinds of god, and I don’t know everything about it. It makes a huge difference who your parents were, and I’m not sure how. Gods are born with a heroic soul. Some have one or two parents who are divine, others do not.”