Ficino looked at her, amazed. “What? Fluffy? Guarding your bed? However could your age have come to believe that? They are the operators of the universe, divine messengers, full of awe and light. Athene could fit within my beliefs about angels. And I remember very well what she was.”
“I shouldn’t have this, but look at it,” I said, reaching up to the high shelf and taking down the Botticelli book Ikaros had brought me. “Look at these angels. They’re not tame, and they have agency.”
Klio looked at the angels for a long moment. “Not that Botticelli was painting from life, but I do see what you mean,” she admitted.
“Where did that come from?” Ficino asked.
“Ikaros brought it back from one of his art expeditions,” I said.
“You shouldn’t have it. But I suppose it isn’t doing any harm. As long as you haven’t shown it to the children?”
“I showed Simmea the Primavera once, and the Birth of Venus.” She’d glimpsed the cover too, but she’d never mentioned it again. “And I showed it to Auge when she was just starting sculpting—and she’s getting really good now. But I’m very careful with it.”
“I’m sure Ikaros is saying Athene was just doing what God told her to,” Klio said.
“That’s nonsense,” I said. “She was unquestionably acting for herself. Goddess or angel, she wasn’t just a mouthpiece.”
“If God exists and gave us free will, then he wanted us to use it,” Ficino said. “So she could be doing as he wanted and also acting freely.”
“If Athene was an angel, what would it change?” Klio asked, putting her fingertip on one of Botticelli’s angels’ faces.
“Perhaps how we worship,” I said.
“How would it change that?” she asked.
“Sokrates said in the Apology that you should worship in the manner of the city in which you live. Plato said in the Laws that they should send to Delphi to ask how to worship,” Ficino answered.
“What does Sokrates say now?” Klio asked, looking up from the book.
“He says Providence is a very interesting idea,” Ficino said. “But he’s so obsessed with the workers at the moment that it’s hard to get him to focus on anything else.”
“I don’t know how we’d manage without the workers,” Klio said. “They do so much. They let us lead philosphical lives because they’re doing all the hard work—all the farming and building and everything. We’re comfortable because of them.”
“We’re rich because of them,” Ficino said. “We have no poverty here, because of them.”
“The idea was always that they were here to help us at the beginning, while the children were growing, and that in future generations the irons would replace them. Then we will have poverty, or at least some of us will live less comfortable lives.”
“Not poverty,” I said, remembering poverty in my own time. “Well, in some ways we are all poor. We live with very few possessions. But nobody will be in want. Nobody will feast while others starve.”
“That would be unjust indeed,” Ficino said. “Are we going to lose the workers?”
Klio stopped and sat down. “Eventually, we’ll lose them no matter what, unless Athene brings us more, and spare parts. They’ll wear out. And if the city can only keep going by constant divine intervention then we’re not doing very well, are we?”
“Having it to start us off—” Ficino said.
“Yes, but we had the workers to start us off too. After that, what? And it could be quite abrupt if we give them rights and then they stop working. At the moment it’s only some of them, and they are working voluntarily, but who knows what will happen? Aristomache made a powerfully moving speech about slavery, but when it comes to it they are machines and all our comfort rests on them.” She held up her wine cup. “Who planted these vines, and pruned them? Who trod the grapes and added the yeast and bottled the vintage?”
“The children of Ferrara made these cups,” I said. “We’re starting to replace what the workers do.”
“But we’re only starting. It will take a long time before we have everything smooth. If they suddenly refused to help it would be a disaster. And even with them slowly failing, it’s difficult. There are a lot of things they do that we can’t teach the children because we don’t know how to do them. Do you know how to make wine?”
“We have a number of skills between us,” Ficino said.
“Come and tell the Tech Committee that, and the Committee on Iron Work,” Klio said. “We have an odd number of skills between us, and we’re very lacking in practical physical skills. I’m not sure we have three people who know how to fix the plumbing.”
“I’ve got much better at midwifery than I ever imagined I would,” I said. “I wanted the life of the mind, but here I am delivering babies and teaching girls how to breast feed.”
“On the whole, the women are better on practical skills than the men,” Klio said. “Which makes sense, really, when you think about it. Most of the men come from eras where they had slaves or servants to do the physical work. Even though some of the women did as well, they were still expected to do more of the hands-on things.”
“To my mother, the word work meant sewing,” I said.
“And if you’d stayed in your time, you’d have had to make most of your clothes,” Klio said. “Not so for your brother.”
“I’d have made most of his clothes as well,” I said. “My aunt did have some dresses made for me, but I made all my own underthings. Underthings! How very little I miss them!”
“Do you miss anything?” Klio asked.
“About the nineteenth century?” She nodded. “I miss my father. I wish so much he could have been here. He’d have loved it so much. Apart from that—no. Nothing. Everything here is so much better. I have books and companionship and work that’s worth doing. Even when everything isn’t perfect and ideal and as one would wish Plato could have had it, even when I have to do terrible things,” and here I was thinking of the baby with the hare lip that I had exposed, “It’s still real work that’s worthy of me. Nothing in my own time could have offered me that.”
“I miss recorded music,” Klio said. “Being able to listen to it whenever I wanted. Apart from that, nothing. But sometimes I wonder if we should have stayed in our own times and fought for the Republic there. If we should have tried to make our own cities more just.”
“That’s what I did, for the first sixty-six years of my life,” Ficino said. “That gives me a different perspective. I did that, and I am remembered. We had a rebirth of the ancient world, and everyone acknowledges that my efforts made a contribution. But that was the most I could possibly do towards that, alone, in the company I had, without Athene. Without all of you. She brought us together here because we were so few, scattered throughout time.”
“We know we wouldn’t have achieved anything further in our lives, or else we wouldn’t have been brought here when we were,” I pointed out.
“I suppose you’re right,” Klio said. She drained her wine and set down the cup. “I should get back to the practical tasks at hand that help make the city work.”
“The philosophy of the quotidian,” Ficino said, smiling.
“I don’t know if what we have here is what Plato meant by The Good Life,” I said. “But it’s a good life.”
36
SIMMEA
Sokrates had once asked Kebes how he would fight a god. I had done it without even thinking about what I was doing, and I had used weapons Sokrates and Ficino had put into my hands, rhetoric and truth. I did not even understand what I had done in facing down Athene until the day before the festival of Hera when Pytheas met me, by arrangement, at the Garden of Archimedes. It was a fine night and I’d been looking through the telescope at the moons of Jupiter, and amusing myself by calculating their orbits. It was two months since I had been healed. For most of that time, Pytheas and Sokrates and I had been investigating mysteries and workers, without advancing very far on either front.