“And Jason,” Sokrates said, reproachfully, waving a hand at Jason, who was standing next to me looking embarrassed. I took his hand defiantly. “The number five seems to have some significance to Saeli. I don’t know if this is empty numerology, or if it truly has a kind of Pythagorean significance.”
“There have been human-Worker marriages,” Crocus said, as he and Grandfather came closer to join the group, no doubt attracted by the volume of Dad’s expostulation. It was still strange to see Grandfather looking not much older than me. I wasn’t used to it.
Dad turned to look at Crocus, took a deep breath and calmed himself. I wish I could do that. I almost never lose my temper, but I’m always bursting out crying whenever I feel something strongly. “This is all very unexpected,” he said mildly, then turned back to me. “I don’t know what your mother will say.”
“Unexpected for us too,” I said, which was an understatement. Ma would be fine with it if I were the one to explain it to her. We always understood each other. And she often said we should get married.
“More importantly,” Sokrates said, turning to Athene. “Jathery told Hilfa that Zeus wants us to learn, experience and comprehend. Is that something he wants of everyone, or only the Saeli?”
Athene exchanged a glance with Ikaros. “All of us,” Athene said. “Saeli, humans, gods, everyone.”
“You told us you didn’t know what he wanted,” Sokrates said to Grandfather, with a tiny hint of accusation in his tone.
“I didn’t know when I told you that, long ago, here in this garden. This is something we learned when we spoke to him now, after we came back from being out there.”
“Out in Chaos?” I asked.
“It isn’t Chaos. Well, it isn’t only Chaos,” he said.
“That’s what Athene has been telling me,” Ikaros said. “How marvelous and unexpected. I have to rethink everything. I can’t wait to see it.”
“You’re there,” Athene said.
“Everyone is there. Everything,” Grandfather said. “I have a song about it. I’ll sing it tomorrow in Chamber.”
“Do you want to sing before the session?” Marsilia asked. “The way you legendarily did to stop the art wars?”
“Are you chair tomorrow?”
“I am,” she said, apprehensively.
“Who’s supposed to go first?” Pytheas asked.
“Androkles. Then Porphyry and the others. Then Sokrates,” she said.
“I’ll sing after Sokrates,” Pytheas said.
“All right,” she said, biting her lip as if she wasn’t at all sure.
“And Athene and I can debate, like at the Last Debate,” Sokrates said cheerfully, grinning at Athene, who smiled unrepentantly back. “For now, I only have one more question about what Zeus wants from us. What should we learn, experience, and comprehend?”
“Everything,” Athene said.
“Yourself,” Pytheas contradicted her at once. She glared at him. “Well, you should know yourself first, and then once you do, you can move on out to everything else,” he said.
“Do I take it Zeus didn’t specify?” Sokrates asked.
Ikaros laughed, and the owl flew off Athene’s arm at the sound and circled silently around the garden before perching back on her shoulder.
“He didn’t specify, but he seemed to approve of what Athene has been doing,” Pytheas said.
“So should we put knowledge ahead of excellence?” I asked.
“No,” both of them said together, and the owl twisted its head around to stare arrogantly into my eyes.
“Excellence must always be our priority,” Crocus said.
“Pursuing excellence will lead to everything else,” Dad said.
The gods, the owl, and Sokrates nodded in unison.
“I’ll sing the song for you tomorrow, and then you’ll understand,” Grandfather said.
“But that way Jason and Hilfa and I won’t hear it,” I said. “Or is it a song that only philosophers should hear?”
Grandfather looked at me. “Do you want to know?” he asked.
“Of course I do! How could anyone not want to know what the gods want of us?” I asked.
“She is a philosopher too,” Sokrates said, and exactly as it had when he had made this claim the night before, it simultaneously filled me with happiness and confusion. I knew I wasn’t really a philosopher, not the way Marsilia was, but I did love wisdom, and I did want to know the answers to questions.
“Everyone in the cities is more of a philosopher than even philosophers are elsewhere,” Athene said.
“That’s one of the fascinating results of your experiment,” Ikaros said. “Did you intend it?”
“Did Plato intend it?” she asked.
“Plato divided people by class because he believed souls really divide up that way,” Ikaros said.
“There are some people who are completely incurious, even here,” Athene said. “So to that extent he was right.”
“But the education here encourages inquiry.” Ikaros was grinning.
“I wondered about that, and about Plato’s intentions, and I let the Masters decide from the beginning where Plato was ambiguous, about how the Irons and Bronzes should live,” Athene said.
“Montaigne suggests—”
“Yes, but nobody had ever really—”
“Abelard, but I suppose that doesn’t count. Heloise herself—” Ikaros was completely intent on Athene.
“Kellogg says—” she interrupted.
“Ah yes, but even when there’s a wide liberal arts education it’s limited, so—”
“Boethius really managed to preserve so much of what was really valuable—”
“And the Dominicans, except that they got—”
“Yes, politics is always the problem. Marcus Aurelius couldn’t make Commodus—”
“And Poliziano couldn’t make Piero, some people—”
“Well, but Tocqueville—”
The two of them went on, in half-sentences, following each other’s thought, interrupting each other, citing authorities, and the rest of us stood there listening. Even Sokrates stayed quiet. It wasn’t like a debate, because they finished each other’s thoughts so much that they grasped each other’s points before they were even made, and the rest of us couldn’t do that. I hadn’t heard of half the people they mentioned. It was like listening to a truly brilliant person thinking, except that they were thinking too fast for us to follow and that it was both of them, their minds meshing. You could tell they’d been working together for a long time. It was like warp and weft when a shuttle is flying across the loom as fast as a Worker can send it, the colors dancing through each other and the pattern emerging into clear sight as it changes from threads of color to a length of cloth.
“Like Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Athene said.
“And that gets us back to Plato—”
Sokrates laughed at that, and they stopped and became aware that the rest of us were still there. Grandfather was smiling. The rest of us were staring at Athene and Ikaros.
“We were wondering whether it would be possible to have a city where everyone was a philosopher,” Ikaros explained.
“But who would fix the latrine fountains?” Crocus asked.
“Maybe the philosophers would do it as their recreation, the way Marsi fishes,” Jason suggested.
Marsilia really grinned at him when he used her childhood name. It was lovely to see. I was coming to like this pod idea. If I was going to be married, I was glad it was going to be with a group of people, all of them kind, and that Marsilia would be there.
“Things aren’t as divided up as Plato would have them,” Sokrates said. “I have learned much wisdom from craftspeople, and heard much windy bombast from supposedly wise men.”
“I don’t want to be a philosopher king and have to make political decisions I don’t know anything about,” I said, quickly. “I know I’m an Iron. I love my work. But anyone would want to know what the gods want of us. I might not understand. But I would like to hear it.”