“We’ll get it back,” I said, choking out the words.
“Yes.” Klymene hesitated. “I know I’m the worst person to be with you now, and I would leave you in peace, but I don’t think you ought to be alone.”
I sat up and looked at her. She was the same physical age as all of us Children, almost forty now. She had been pretty once, lithe and graceful, with shining hair. She was still trim from working with the auxiliaries, but her face had sagged, and her hair been cut off at the jaw to fit under a helmet. She looked weary. I had known her for a long time. We’d both been brought to the Republic when we were ten. When we were fourteen she’d been a coward and I’d said it was all right because she was a girl, and she’d never forgiven me. When we were sixteen we’d shared the single worst sexual experience of my life, then had a son together. When we were nineteen and Athene had turned Sokrates into a fly and everything had subsequently fallen apart, we’d both stayed and tried to make the revised original Republic work, instead of going off to start fresh somewhere else.
“You’re not any worse to be with right now than anyone else who isn’t Simmea,” I said.
“How are you going to manage without her?” she asked.
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have tried to kill yourself,” she said, tentatively. “It isn’t what Simmea would have wanted. Your Young Ones will need you.”
“They need both of us,” I said, which was entirely true. The difference was that they could have had both of us. If I’d killed myself it would have been temporary. Oh, it would have been different being here as a god with all my abilities. Being incarnate made everything so vivid and immediate and inexorable. But I’d have been here and so would Simmea, and she knew that. Why would it have been being an idiot to kill myself to save her? She understood how temporary death would have been for me, how easy resurrection. If she’d let me do it we could have been having a conversation about it right now. There would even be advantages to being here as a god—there were all kinds of things I could use my powers for. For a start I could get us some more robots, unintelligent ones this time, and make everyone’s life easier.
Naturally, I couldn’t share these thoughts with Klymene. She didn’t know I was Apollo. Nobody did except Simmea and our Young Ones, and Sokrates and Athene. Sokrates had flown off after the Last Debate and never been seen again. We assumed he was dead—flies don’t live very long. Simmea was definitely dead. And deathless Athene was back on Olympos, and after twenty years probably still furious with me. If I’d killed myself and saved Simmea in front of her, Klymene would have been bound to notice. As things were, there was no need to tell her. Even without that she had no reason to like me.
“The Young Ones will need you all the more without Simmea,” Klymene said.
“They’re nearly grown,” I said. It was almost true. The boys were nineteen or twenty, and Arete was fifteen.
“They’ll still need you,” Klymene said.
Before I could answer, she saw somebody coming and stiffened, reaching for her bow. I leaped to my feet and spun around. Then I relaxed. It was the Delphi troop coming out. I bent down and picked up the arrow, which I’d dropped. It wasn’t much of a memento, but it was all I had. “I’ll go home,” I said.
“You won’t … you won’t do anything stupid?” Klymene asked.
“Not after Simmea’s last request,” I said. “You heard her. She specifically asked me not to be an idiot.”
“Yes…” she said. She was frowning.
“I won’t kill myself,” I specified. “At least, not immediately.”
Klymene looked at me in incomprehension, and I’m sure I looked at her the same way. “You shouldn’t kill yourself because you don’t know that you’ve finished what you’re supposed to do in this life,” she said.
Not even Necessity knows all ends.
2
ARETE
You don’t exist, of course. It’s natural to write with an eye to posterity, to want to record what has happened for the edification not of one’s friends, but of later ages. But there will be no later ages. All this has happened and is, by design, to leave no trace but legend. The volcano will erupt and the Platonic Cities will be extinguished. The legend of Atlantis will survive to inspire Plato, which is especially ironic as it was Plato who inspired the Masters to set up the City in the first place.
The more I think about this, the more I think that Sokrates was right in the Last Debate. It was fundamentally wrong of them to found the City at all. The story of humanity is one of growth and change and the accumulation of experience. We of the cities are a branch cut off to wither—not a lost branch, but a branch deliberately cut away. We are like figures sculpted of wax and cast into the fire to melt. When I asked Father why Athene had done this he said that he had never asked her, but he supposed that it seemed interesting, and she had wanted to see what would happen. In my opinion that’s an irresponsible way for a god to behave. I intend to do better if I ever have the opportunity.
It may seem like hubris, but it really is possible that I might. Others of Father’s children have become heroes, and Asklepius is a god. I am the daughter of Apollo, and Father says I have the soul of a hero. Sometimes I really feel as if I do, as if I could do anything. Other times I feel all too human and vulnerable and useless. It doesn’t help that I have seven brothers. That’s too many. They try to squash me, naturally, and naturally I hate being squashed and resist it as much as possible.
People talk all the time about pursuing excellence, and when I was younger my brothers made a game of this where they chased me. My mother was a philosopher and my father is an extremely philosophical god, and so of course they named me Arete, which means excellence. Maia, who comes from the nineteenth century, says that in her day it used to be translated as virtue, and Ficino worries that this is his fault for translating it into Latin as virtus. Maia and Ficino are my teachers. Ficino comes from Renaissance Florence, where it was considered the duty of everyone to write an autobiography, and since Renaissance Florence is almost as popular here as Socratic Athens, many people do. I, as you can see, am no exception.
I’m starting this all wrong, with my thoughts all over the place. Ficino would say it lacks discipline, and make me write a plan and then write it again to the plan, but I’m not going to. This isn’t for Ficino, it isn’t for anyone but myself and you, dear nonexistent Posterity, and I intend to set down my thoughts as they come to me. My brothers chased me and called it pursuing excellence, but I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught—though my brothers caught me often enough, and turned me upside-down when they did.
I call them brothers, but they’re all half-brothers, really. Kallikles is the oldest. He’s Father’s son by Klymene, conceived at the first Festival of Hera. Father and Klymene don’t like each other much. But Klymene doesn’t have any other children, and she and Kallikles have this odd relationship where they’re not quite mother and son, but they’re not quite not either. Maia says I should think of her like an aunt, and I suppose I do, insofar as I know what aunts are. We don’t have any proper ones yet. When my brothers start to have children I’ll be an aunt, and my little nieces and nephews will be overwhelmed by how many uncles they have.