“Women?” I asked. “Did women choose?”
“Their parents tended to arrange marriages,” Sokrates said. “But they knew their own children.”
“The masters know us. And the marriages are to be only for one day, not stuck forever, the way they usually were in other cultures. Were you happy in your marriage?” I knew he had not been.
“It’s very difficult when people are married and don’t like each other,” Sokrates admitted.
“Did your parents like each other?” Kebes asked me.
I thought about it. “Yes. But they led very separate lives.”
“My parents loved each other, and they loved me,” Pytheas said. It was the first time I had ever heard him mention his parents. Sokrates too looked at him in astonishment. “They’re still alive as far as I know, in the time I came from. They had a farm up above Delphi.” He caught Sokrates’s expression and laughed. “Not so far above Delphi! That’s where I was born, sixteen years ago. In the hills, half a day’s walk from the Pythian shrine.”
“Would you like to have a marriage like they had?” Sokrates asked.
It was Pytheas’s turn to look surprised. “I’d never thought about it.” He looked away. “It’s too hard to imagine.”
“How about you, Simmea? Are you looking forward to the one-day marriages, or would you want a life partnership?”
Involuntarily I looked back at Pytheas, who was still staring into space. Kebes was glaring as I met his eye as I turned to look back at Sokrates. “We can have friendships for life,” I said. “And friendships don’t have to be exclusive.” I smiled at Kebes, but he kept on frowning.
“Plato didn’t have as much experience of humanity as he needed to write a book like the Republic,” Sokrates said. “Perhaps nobody does.”
“What sort of experience would it take?” Pytheas asked, smiling, and we were off down another dialectical avenue exploring that.
I thought about Sokrates’s question when I was alone that night. Klymene and the others were sleeping and the light was off. If I could choose—well, it would be Pytheas, of course, but would he choose me? I was better off as I was. I knew he liked me and valued me, but would he want that kind of marriage if it were an option? I didn’t think he would. Kebes definitely would, but I wouldn’t want it with Kebes. I didn’t know enough about it. I thought of my parents. It seemed so long ago. I wondered if my mother could still be alive. Then I realised that “still” meant nothing, she wasn’t even born yet, and in another sense she was certainly dead. Then I sat up in bed. If we could move through time, could we change things? Could we go back to before the slavers came with an armed troop of Silvers and prevent them from killing my father and brothers? If I prayed to Athene?
I prayed, and felt as an answer to my prayer a strong urge to go to the library. I got up and dressed and found my way through the dark streets. There was no moon, and it was very late and the sconces were dimmed. I went to the big library in the southwest corner. It was not so grand as the one by the Agora, but it had a charming bronze Athene by the door which always seemed to be welcoming me. It was here that I had learned to read.
The doors were open, and inside the lights were on. I looked about for direction. Would the goddess send me to a book? I waited for guidance but none came. After a while I walked up to the seat where I usually worked and took out Newton’s Principia. I knew there was nothing in it about time travel.
When I had been reading for a few minutes, I saw Septima. She was shelving. I watched her, then stood and went over to her. “What are you doing here in the middle of the night?” she whispered.
“I couldn’t sleep, and thought I might as well read. How about you?”
“I couldn’t sleep, and thought I might as well work. Why couldn’t you sleep?” She looked inquiringly at me.
“I suddenly thought of something.”
“Let’s go and sit on the steps where we can talk out loud,” she said.
“But … there’s nobody else here!”
“I don’t think I could raise my voice in here, even in the middle of the night,” she admitted. We went outside and sat on the steps by the feet of the bronze Athene. “What did you think of?” she asked, and her normal voice sounded loud after the quiet.
“Moving through time. We all did it. The goddess brought us here that way. If she can do that, she could use it to change things that have happened. We could raise a bodyguard and go back and save my family from the slavers.”
“We could raise an army and save Constantinople from the Turks,” Septima said.
“Yes, exactly!” I said, glad she had understood so quickly.
“I’ve thought about this a lot, and no, we couldn’t. The gods are bound by Fate and Necessity, and Necessity only allows the kind of changes in time that nobody notices. We can’t change what’s fated to happen. One vanished sculpture,” she patted the shiny bronze toe of the goddess, “is neither here nor there. Two slave children?” She gestured at us. “Thousands of people like us lived and died and made no difference. When Fate is involved, especially when the gods know what happened and try to change it? That just makes everything worse.”
“How could it make it worse if—” I decided to use her example rather than my own. “—if we saved Constantinople?”
“Without the fall of Constantinople bringing manuscripts to Italy, there might have been no Renaissance. Constantinople hadn’t done much for civilization throughout the Middle Ages. It had held on, that’s all. It hadn’t built anything new, produced any new and truly wonderful books or art or scientific discoveries. The flowering of the Renaissance, on the other hand…” She spread out her hands.
“Is it like the bit in the Iliad when Zeus is deciding whether to let Patroklus die or live for a bit longer, and Patroklus kills all those other people, who clearly don’t matter to Zeus even though Patroklus and Achilles do?” I’d recently been allowed to read the unexpurgated Homer.
“Just like that.”
“Then my family didn’t matter?” I hated that thought.
“They mattered. Everyone matters. But not everything is bound by fate. Everyone has their own fate, that they chose before they were born. But they’re just choosing a chance of filling out as much as they can of the shape of it. What actually happens is up to the choices they make—well, until they come right up to the edges, where they run into Necessity. Necessity is the line drawn around what anyone can do. Life is full of randomness and chance and choices, and only some things matter to fate. The difficulty is knowing which things.” She sighed. “I talked to Krito once about why most of the male masters here were old when most of the women were young. It seems it’s because men achieve so much more in their lives, and they couldn’t be missed from them until they were near to death, whereas most women might as well not exist for all the individual contribution most of us get to make to history.”
I thought about that. “Some of the women are older. Lukretia of Ferrara is. And Aristomache of Olympia must be at least fifty.”
“Aristomache translated Plato into the vernacular in Boston in eighteen eighty-three,” Septima said. “She published it anonymously. Nobody in her time would have trusted a woman as a scholar. But her translation helped a lot of young people discover philosophy. She couldn’t come until she’d finished it, and until after a friend of hers had written a poem to her.” Septima shook her head. “I really like Aristomache. She really deserves to be here.”
“And some of the men are younger,” I said. “Like Lysias, and Ikaros.”
“Oh, Ikaros,” she said, her eyes softening at the thought of him. “He deserves to be here too. He died before he had the chance to do what he could have done. But he’s spending so much time with Sokrates now. He hardly ever has time to talk to me.”