“You’re not eating, Simmea,” Maia said after a time. I realised I was sitting there with ham in my mouth and not chewing.
“I’m sorry,” I said, closing my mouth and swallowing. “But the painting! Who did it? What is it?”
“Sandro Botticelli did it, in Florence. Florentia,” she corrected herself at once. “It’s Winter. It’s part of a set. Summer and Autumn are here too.”
“Not Spring?”
“Spring is in the original Florentia,” she said. “But I can show you a reproduction one day, if you like it.”
“Like it? Of all the wonders here it is the most wonderful,” I said. I had seen paintings before. There were two ikons in the church at home, one of the Virgin and one of Christ crucified. Botticelli left them in the dust.
After dinner we went off to bed. It turned out that there was a glowing beam in Hyssop House, which gave us enough light to use the latrine-fountains and then undress and get into bed. Maia showed Andromeda how to turn it off, using a switch near the door. I curled up under my two blankets and slept. The next morning Andromeda woke us, and we cleaned ourselves again in the wash-fountains before going back to the dining hall. There were even more children present, though the hall was not full. I saw Maia was sitting with a another group of girls who were staring around, amazed. We were served a porridge made of nuts and grains, and there was as much fruit as we wanted. I had seated myself where I could see Botticelli’s Autumn as I ate, and I kept looking up at the rich leaf-colors and half-hidden faces.
At the end of the meal Ficino stood up, and after considerable hushing we all fell silent. “You are all gathered now, my little Florentines, ten sleeping houses gathered into this dining hall. You came from many different places, many different families. But now you are here in the city, and you are all brothers and sisters. Let your old life be to you like a dream on waking. Shake it off, as if you had come here fresh from Lethe. Imagine you had been sleeping in the soil of this island and dreaming all you remember, and that your life begins here and now. When you were under the soil the metals of the Earth mixed in you, so that you are all a mixture of iron and bronze and silver and gold. Soon you will learn which metals are uppermost in you, and what you are good for. Here in the Just City you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent.”
He beamed around at us all. I saw that Kebes was looking down and frowning. Then Ficino spoke again. “We begin today. Those who can read to my left, those who cannot to my right.”
I went to his right, and indeed, that was when my life truly began.
5
MAIA
A young lady from Queen Victoria’s England does not expect to have her prayers answered, or at least not in such a direct and immediate way, and certainly not by Pallas Athene. My first thought as I looked at all the variously dressed people around me, united only in their expressions of complete bewilderment, was that throughout history everyone had wanted to know the truth about God, about the gods, and now there could be no question. There were gods, they did care about humanity, and one of them was Pallas Athene. She stood still, looking gravely out over the hall. She was half again the height of the tallest of the men, just as Homer describes her, with her helmet, spear, and an owl tucked under her arm. The owl was looking at me. I nodded my head to it. I should have wondered if this was a dream, but there was no doubt whatsoever that it was real. It was the most real thing that had ever happened.
Then Athene spoke. I had never before heard anyone speak Greek, though my father and I had sometimes read it aloud. I was so overwhelmed by the naturalness of the way the syllables sounded that it took me a moment to catch up to what she was actually saying.
“You have come from many times, but with a shared purpose. You all wished to work to set up Plato’s Republic, to build the Just City. Here we are. This is your plan, but you have all asked me for help. I suggest we discuss how to go about it and what we will need.”
A long-haired young man in the habit of a Dominican monk stepped forward. “Are we dead, Sophia?” he asked. “Is this place the afterlife?”
“You are not dead,” Athene said, smiling kindly at him. “You stand here in your mortal bodies. Some of you who were near death have been healed of your infirmities.” She nodded to the Dominican. “You will age naturally. When you die here, in the course of time, your body will be returned to the moment you left.”
How would that work? I couldn’t quite imagine it. Would Aunt Fanny and Anne look around for me and find instead the corpse of an old lady? An old lady who had grown old in Plato’s Republic? I found myself smiling as I realised I didn’t care.
“And our souls?” a man in a toga asked.
“Your souls will also go back to that moment and be reborn from that time, not from this time.”
There was a murmur across the room, as three hundred people said to themselves happily in their native languages: “We have immortal souls! I knew it!” I could only understand Latin and Greek and English, and I heard it in all three of those languages.
A white-bearded man in a Greek kiton, looking the very image of a philosopher, asked “Are they three-part souls as Plato described?”
“Would anyone prefer to return to their own time now?” Athene asked, either not hearing or ignoring the attempt to clarify the issue of our souls. “This would seem like a dream, soon forgotten.”
To my surprise three men raised their hands. Athene blinked, and they disappeared. I was looking at one of them, a shabby man with a donnish look, wondering how he could possibly not want to stay, when he just wasn’t there anymore.
“Now, we need to make plans,” she said.
“But where are we, Sophia? You spoke of our own times. When are we?” It was a man in Renaissance clothes and a red hat.
“We are in the time before the fall of Troy. And we are on the doomed island of Kallisti, called by some Atlante.” Even I had heard of Atlantis.
“Then what we make cannot last?” he asked.
The goddess inclined her head. “This is an experiment, and this is the best time and place for that experiment. Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages.”
After that, with the big questions out of the way, we began to discuss how we would go about the work.
It soon became clear that we were united on many issues and divided on others, and that there were practical problems none of us had thought through. Plato’s Republic was extremely specific on some issues and distressingly vague on others. It wasn’t really intended to be used as a blueprint.
There were almost three hundred of us, from twenty-five centuries. There were close to equal numbers of men and women, which astounded me at first. I had never before met another woman who cared about scholarship. Now I did, and it was wonderful. Before long I realised that most of the women were much like me, young, and fortunate enough to obtain enough education to make their possible lives unsatisfactory. I met young women from every century, including several from my own and the century after.
“It does get better,” one of them reassured me. Her name was Kylee, and she was wearing what seemed to me a man’s suit, but cut to her form. “In the eighteen-seventies they established colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge, and in America too. By the nineteen-twenties they began to grant degrees. By the nineteen-sixties they were actually nominally equal to the men’s colleges.”