He looked out over the island. “It’s such a long time since I’ve seen it,” he said. “No lions yet.”
“It looks deserted. Or is everyone still asleep?”
“It’s only used for the festival at this date. There’ll probably be a few priests, I should think.”
“The temples look like proper buildings.”
He smiled his kouros smile. “They may have had inspiration.”
“But not those poor villagers on Naxos and Paros?”
He looked impatient. “I can’t be everywhere taking care of everything all at once. Yes, I could spend all my time curing people of boils and teaching them to read, but instead I set up centers of healing and learning, to teach doctors and scholars. I gave Greece an oracle where they could come and ask their questions. I sent Sokrates a daimon to watch out for him, but I can’t do that for everyone. I’m constantly inspiring people, but only people who can do something with the inspiration. I do the best I can within what Fate allows. Don’t confuse me with Ficino’s ideas of God, Arete!”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Besides, I didn’t know anything about them. They didn’t pray to me,” he said, still staring out over Delos, toward the mountain in the center of the little island where he had been born long before. “Those people in the Kyklades. I didn’t know they were there. There weren’t any statues of me, did you notice?”
“But this is so close,” I said, gesturing at Delos, the first and oldest center of the worship of Apollo in the world.
“How often do you think they leave their petty islands?” Father asked, shaking his head. “Probably they haven’t ever been any further out to sea than they need to catch fish. I’ll do what I can to help them, now. I’ll argue in Chamber in favor of Kallikles’s idea of sending out missions to them. You’re absolutely right that it’s what Simmea would have wanted to do.”
“And it won’t change anything?”
“It might get the Naxians to build that pleasant temple I remember on the little island,” he said. “But it won’t change the future. There’s only one world. We’re in prehistory here. We hardly know the names of kings. Nobody knows for sure what happened on any given day, or when people learned about sanitation or philosophy, or even metal smelting. This isn’t the generation before the Trojan War, it’s more like four or five generations before. And even Troy—ask Ficino exactly where it was. He doesn’t know. They forgot where it was until it was rediscovered late in the nineteenth century.”
“Really?” I was astonished. “How could they lose Troy?”
“There’s a lot of history. When it isn’t recorded, things drop out. There are entire civilizations that are forgotten. Troy’s lucky. It had Homer.”
“Why do you suddenly seem so sure about when we are? I thought you didn’t know either?”
“I didn’t until now. But look at Delos,” he said, gesturing. “I pay attention to Delos. It’s mine. I know when things were built here. This is early Minoan. I should have guessed Athene wouldn’t have put us immediately before the eruption.”
I looked at the island. “I really want to go ashore,” I said. “It’s so beautiful. I want to explore it. I feel connected to it, even from up here, as if it’s calling to me.”
“You’re my daughter. The island knows you.” He sighed. “It knows me too. But I probably shouldn’t go ashore, just in case. People don’t usually recognize me, incarnate. They’re not expecting to see me. But Sokrates did. And priests of mine, on Delos—they probably are expecting me at any moment. And if the island knew me—no. It’s a little unkind to the priests, being so close and not letting them see me, but better not to risk it.”
“Why do you keep your real nature secret in the City?” I asked.
He kept on gazing out over the island as he answered. “Because I want to live an incarnate life that’s as normal as possible. It makes people uncomfortable if they know who I am, normal people. Your mother—Simmea was different. And I didn’t tell her. She worked it out for herself.” He wiped away tears, unselfconsciously as ever. “If I tell people, they’ll treat me differently. As it is, they think I’m a credit to Plato, and to them. They treat me as one of them. If they knew, they would expect me to be able to do things, and to know things. I don’t have my powers, so there’s not much I can do. And I do know some things, but I’m here hoping to learn, not to teach. And there are a lot of things I don’t know, and they’d find it hard to believe that I don’t. Some of the things I do know it’s better for people not to know, to guess and work out for themselves.”
“But you tell me?”
“That’s different. I couldn’t have kept it from you Young Ones. You have a right to know. I’m your father. And being a parent, up close and every day, is one of the things that has taught me the most.”
“But you’re also a god.”
“You were asking about becoming a god.” The sun was up now, blazing a gold path on the azure sea. He gestured to it. “That’s mine. And Delos is mine. And inspiration and healing and poetry and all those things. Those are responsibilities. But they’re not what’s important. Being a god means being myself forever, and that means knowing myself as well as I can. Seeing the sun rise over Delos makes me feel all kinds of things, and they are different now because of what I have experienced since the last time I saw it. So I feel at home, and yet not at home, and the contradiction there is fascinating, and I can explore that feeling and make it into something.”
“But not all the gods do that. And humans can,” I said. “Humans can make art.”
His eyes were precisely as blue as the sky, and his expression wasn’t human at all. “They can. But they have such a brief span to do it. And a lot of their life is misery, and while that’s a productive subject for art, it’s a limited one. And then they die and lay down their memories in Lethe and go on to become a new person. They come to the end of themselves and change and start again. Gods may or may not make art, but they can’t come to the end of themselves. Not ever. And we are art. Our lives are subjects for art. Everything we are, everything we do, it all comes to art, our own or other people’s. Mortals can forget and be forgotten. We can’t. Everything we do has to be seen in that light. There’s no anonymity. If you’re a god, your deeds will be sung. Even the ones you would prefer to forget about.”
“And I can choose, whether to be a mortal or a god?” I felt as if the whole world was holding its breath before he answered.
“Going ashore on Delos might help you. But time is the best gift.” He stared out over Delos again. “I don’t understand why she wanted to die. How she could have been ready. She told me not to be an idiot, but I don’t understand how I was wrong.”
We’d had this conversation a hundred times already, but this time I thought of something new. “Why are you assuming she was right?”
“What?”
“You’re assuming she was right. Mightn’t she have been wrong? Mistaken?”
He looked stricken. “But that would make everything worse! If she’d been wrong then I should have done it, and now it’s too late.”
“Somebody’s coming up,” I said, as I felt it through the mast.
It was Klymene. “Good to see something that looks halfway like civilization,” she said, after she had greeted us. “I’m leading the shore party today. I thought I’d come up and see if I could spot any signs of life.”
“There’s smoke rising from the altar over there,” Father said, gesturing. It was a thin thread of gray smoke, almost invisible. I hadn’t seen it until he pointed it out. “I expect you’ll find a priest or two.”