We had to work hard, without Workers, just to have enough to eat. All the same, we spent more time in debate than anything else. We debated everything in committees and then before the whole Assembly—and the Assembly here consisted of all those over eighteen, though they were not all equal within the Assembly. Irons and bronzes were given one vote each, silvers three, and golds four. The age of eighteen was chosen because it was the traditional age of adulthood in Plato’s Athens. We would have gone with Plato’s thirty, but nobody was thirty yet except for Masters. I was only a little over thirty myself. To start with we had practically nobody who was not an adult in our newly defined terms. A few of the Children had brought their Young Ones, and a few of them were pregnant. The first baby born in the City of Amazons was Euridike’s Porphyry, born the first winter. I delivered him myself, the first baby I ever helped deliver who was not immediately taken away from their mother to grow up in anonymity.
Porphyry encapsulated in his tiny person our first two great debates—over names, and over families. Klio and some others wanted us all to take back our original names and allow eclectic naming of new babies. This divided everyone. Lysias and I were against it. “It’s not that different, and I’ve been Lysias so long it feels like my real name now,” Lysias said, and I nodded.
“Why would I want to be Ethel? Ethel feels like another person, a person from another world. It has been more than ten years. I’m not Ethel anymore. I’ve grown up as Maia.”
“I can’t think of you as Ethel,” Lysias agreed.
“And I don’t think I even knew you were Li Xi,” I said. “It’s a name from another culture. It would make you seem different from everyone.”
“I think Klio thinks that’s a good thing, to point up the differences.”
For once Ikaros and I were on the same side. “Naming ourselves and our children from the classical world unites us; using naming customs from other times and places would divide us,” he said in debate. The vote was close, but we won. Porphyry was named after the philosopher, who had been one of us and had recently died. He was also named for the purple stone that had symbolized Roman technical prowess in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and thirdly for the idea of being porphyrogenitos, born to the purple, being the first baby born in the new city and the heir to our traditions. It was a lot of weight for a name to carry.
The other great early debate was over marriage and families. None of us wanted to carry on Plato’s idea of arranged matings at festivals. We had all seen the misery and complications it caused. But some of us wanted traditional marriage and families, while others wanted to try other varieties of Plato’s idea of having wives and children in common. I was torn on this subject. We Masters had been very loose about this. Klio and Axiothea might as well have been married, except that they were both women. Lysias and I had a friendship that included some sex. Ficino had been strictly celibate while openly admiring all the beautiful youths. Ikaros, in addition to his spectacular public Platonic relationship with Plotinus, had an ongoing private arrangement with Lukretia, and sex with anyone he could charm into lying down with him. We masters were not a good example. I felt that this was an area where Plato should perhaps have stayed with tradition.
This time Ikaros was firmly on the other side. He wanted to keep everything fluid and flexible, where people could live together if they chose but everyone should be available to everyone else with no exclusivity. Ikaros read Plato’s passage on this aloud, very movingly. Many Children spoke about their love for each other and their desire to form families and bring up their own children. Lukretia expanded on Athene’s point in the Last Debate about the damage done to cities and states by families and factions, with chilling examples from her own experience. Eventually we came to a kind of compromise where families would be permitted but not marriages or inheritance, and those families could be of any number and any gender, and could form and reform at will. Thus Porphyry was born into the family Euridike had formed with Castor, Hesiod, and Iris, although his father was Pytheas, who had stayed behind in the Remnant City.
I was sharing a house with Lysias, and if the vote had gone the other way we had agreed to marry. When I came home exhausted after Porphyry’s birth, he brought me apple porridge and rubbed my feet.
“We could have children now,” he said, looking up at me. “You’re not too old. If you stopped taking the silphium.”
I shook my head. “It’s not what I want.”
He looked disappointed and got up from the floor to sit beside me on the bed. “Why not?”
I had seen a great deal of childbirth, enough to put anyone off, but that wasn’t it. “I want a life of the mind, not to be mired in domesticity. All that milk and washing.”
“But you have maternal instincts. You’re such a good teacher.”
“I put my maternal instincts into being a teacher. The whole City is my baby—this city and the original. I don’t want my own baby to love more than all the others. I think Plato’s right that I would favor it.”
“I want children,” Lysias said. “I was prepared to do without to make the Republic, but what we’re doing here is all compromised anyway. I want to help everyone, you know I do, but I want my own children to grow up here too, now that it’s possible.”
“Would you want that if you had to be the mother rather than the father?” I asked. “If you were the one to stay home and sing them to sleep?”
“Yes,” he said, with no hesitation whatsoever. I was astonished. “Is that what you want?” He looked into my face.
“I was just being rhetorical. I never imagined you would agree. In the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable for a man to do a woman’s work that way.” I put my hand on his.
He smiled. “In the twenty-first century it was unusual but not unheard of. And we assigned some iron boys as nursery attendants. I would do it if that’s how you wanted to arrange things.”
“I don’t want to shrink my horizons to a baby,” I said. “In my own time, that was the end of all independent thought.”
“It needn’t be that here,” Lysias said. “If we decided to have children, I’d certainly be willing to be the one to stay home with them. But we’ll also have crèches to provide flexibility. Nobody’s going to be forcing you to be a nineteenth-century mother.”
“I see that. But even so.”
“I truly want this. I want children. And I can’t do it without your help. You have a womb and can grow a new person. I can’t.”
I had never before thought of this as a form of female power that men lacked. No wonder they tried to control us in so many societies for so many years. (And no wonder Athene remained a virgin.) I still didn’t especially want to have babies. But I didn’t want to lose Lysias, and it seemed so important to him; and if he would take charge of the parts I didn’t want to, then I thought that perhaps it didn’t have to be something huge and life-changing for me.
So I agreed to stop chewing silphium, and I did stop. The next month when my blood came on time I was astonished, and the same the month after and the month after that. I knew that even at the festivals not every girl became pregnant every time, but I had expected Lysias’s fervor to have had results. He had never wanted me so much or so enthusiastically. I saw now that he had seen sterile coupling as hardly worth doing. I wasn’t comfortable about this change, but I didn’t feel I could talk to him about it.