I wondered who she had written the notebooks for. Not for me. I was fascinated to read them, but I wasn’t their intended audience. Equally they were not for publication in the City and inclusion in the library, certainly not, because not only did she reveal the truth of my identity, but she explained things neither I not anybody else in the City would need to have explained. What audience had she imagined? They were written in lucid classical Greek. Who could read them? Anyone in classical antiquity and truly educated people for another millenium. I considered for a moment that once I was back in my true form, I could take them to Athens and leave them on Plato’s doorstep. My mouth twisted. I wouldn’t do it, but I was so tempted.
Phaedrus and Neleus were in Thessaly when Arete and I got back. I took the last notebook out of Simmea’s chest and saw their interested glances. Before they could inquire, I removed all twelve notebooks and tucked them into the fold of my kiton. Our Young Ones were definitely not Simmea’s audience for these, and I didn’t want them reading them. Her thoughts and feelings and intimate experiences weren’t for them. Arete was looking at me curiously. “Did your mother ever tell you her childhood name?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Wasn’t she always called Simmea?”
“Her parents called her Lucia,” I said. “But she never used it after she came here.”
“Lucia?” Neleus asked. “I never knew that.”
“It isn’t important,” I said as I went out. I was glad I’d told them. I didn’t want Kebes to be the only other person who knew it. Though Ficino would know it too, if he remembered. He probably didn’t remember—not that his wits were wandering like poor old Adeimantus, but he couldn’t possibly remember the original name every child had given him.
I took the notebooks to the library and sat in the window seat where Athene used to sit. It was dark outside, though the library was lit with electricity, and warmed with it as well. The library stayed at a constant temperature. Crocus and Sixty-One kept the electricity working now as they always had. They needed it themselves, of course. I wondered why Athene had left them when she took all the other Workers. She took the others to punish us, of course, to make us do without them and realize how difficult it would be. To live a life of the mind you need slaves or technology, and technology is unquestionably better. Now we compromised, eking out the technology we had and working ourselves half the time. It didn’t leave us the leisure for philosophy we had before. A tired mind can’t think as well. But nobody who enslaves another can be truly free.
But why had she left Crocus and Sixty-One? Was it because she felt they had betrayed her in becoming philosophers? But surely that was the purpose of the City? They were Sokrates’s friends, and my friends now. Perhaps it was because those two had spoken up at the Last Debate, choosing the City? I didn’t know what she was thinking. I wondered whether I ever had. Athene seemed very far away as I sat on her seat in the library. People constantly debated why she had set up the City. I thought I knew that—because it was interesting, and because she could. When it ceased to be interesting she had abandoned it. I had projects like that myself. My oracle at Delphi was one of them. It had seemed as if giving people good advice would help everyone get on better. I hadn’t kidnapped people from across time to do it, but I had dragged a shipload of Cretans across the Aegean.
I looked at the last notebook, XII. Had she stopped after the Last Debate? Why? Twelve seemed an extremely round number—and Simmea had distrusted numerology and suspiciously round numbers. It wouldn’t have been an accident. But it might be as far as she had reached. I’d seen her writing in notebooks fairly recently—it irked me that I couldn’t remember when exactly. The book might not be finished. I opened it and checked. It was full.
I read everything she had written in the last notebook. Then I sat staring unseeingly at the bookshelves. She hadn’t written about the Last Debate. She had written about the conversation we had in the Garden of Archimedes, which I remembered very well, and then about the last Festival of Hera, the one in which she’d been paired with Kebes. My fingers clenched into fists reading it. She had told me it hadn’t been so bad. She said she didn’t want to discuss it, and I hadn’t pushed her about it. She had never told me that he had raped her, or I’d have killed him. I really would. I was ready to kill him now. She wrote that it wasn’t rape, that she had consented, but I knew better. She had said no, and asked him to stop, and he had gone on. He had bruised her. She had gone there willingly, for the City, like the philosopher she was, and he had tried to take her into his fantasy.
I got up and paced the library furiously. I wanted to kill Kebes, now, immediately, with my bare hands, but I didn’t know where he was. Simmea had written that I’d have been upset, but she had no idea how upset I would have been. I had learned what rape was, what it meant. I was also furious with Athene for pairing her with Kebes. It had been aimed at me, and I knew it, and Simmea knew it too. I would have killed him and left his body for the dogs and kites. He had tried to own her, and he had hurt her, my Simmea, my friend, my votary. She had told him I didn’t try to own her, and she had told Sokrates that she and I wanted each other to be our best selves. It was true. Worship was easy, commonplace. Beautiful women were everywhere. People who understood what I was talking about and could argue with me as equals were incredibly rare. How could he have done that? And why didn’t she tell me? Was it connected to the reason she had stopped me saving her life?
I was also furious that he had called her a scrawny, flat-faced, bucktoothed Copt. It was true, and she cared so little that she had laughed, but it galled me that he had dared to say it to her, to try to hurt her that way, through her looks. I always put up with Kebes because he was Simmea’s friend, and all that time he had imagined he owned her, owned some imaginary person called Lucia. She was Simmea, Plato’s Simmea, as Sokrates had said to her, as close to Plato’s ideal Philosopher King as anyone was likely to get. She had never told me about that conversation either. She had told me about Sokrates’s plan for what turned into the Last Debate, but not about the rest of what she had written, and how they had talked about the way they both loved me.
I missed Sokrates. Not the way I missed Simmea, as if half of myself had been amputated so that I was constantly reaching out with a missing limb. I hadn’t entirely lost him, either; there were days of his life before he came to the City when I could still visit him, in Athens, once I was back to myself. But I missed being able to just talk openly with him. He would have had wise advice for this situation, and nobody else would. Nobody else could even understand it. There was nobody I could remotely imagine talking to about it, except Simmea and Sokrates, and I couldn’t have either one of them. Sokrates had flown to me, after Athene had transformed him into a gadfly, and perched on my chest for a moment, then he had stung me and flown away, and nobody had seen him since.
I went back to Athene’s window seat. Nobody was in sight. A few people had been in the stacks, but they had fled when they saw my face. (Even without far-shooting arrows rattling on my shoulder, my wrath can have that effect on people.) I sat down and opened Athene’s secret compartment under the arm-rest. All I was thinking was of hiding Simmea’s notebooks. I wasn’t expecting anything to be there. Athene had been gone for almost twenty years. She’d had plenty of time to cover any traces she wanted to cover. But as I slid the notebooks in I felt that there was something there, stiff parchment, not paper. I pulled it out, curious.