“It’s an era far in the future, in the twenty-fifth century, when humanity has just discovered faster-than-light travel,” Porphyry said. “They’re just rediscovering all the civilizations on planets that were settled more slowly than light. There aren’t complete records of who went where. Some of them are very strange. We can be one of them. We won’t look much odder than the others. It’s long after the Republic was written, so why shouldn’t a group of people have tried it?”
“Nobody ever has,” muttered Zeus.
“We’d have a divine origin story, but nobody would have to pay any attention. And the ships will come, and they can discover us, and we can rejoin the human mainstream, with all our books and art and theories. It will be a mystery, but only a small one, nothing to prove anything.”
“Why do you keep so secret?” Neleus asked. “Why can’t we give them proof? People want so much to know and to understand.”
“It’s better for humanity to allow us to work out our own theories, our own destiny. If we know it changes everything,” Ikaros said.
Neleus nodded slowly, recognizing that in himself.
“And knowing would fix one truth, and close off many paths to enlightenment,” Athene said. “You’re going to love the Enlightenment,” she said aside, to Ikaros.
“Posterity,” I said, to Zeus and Porphyry. “But another planet? I suppose a new world would be a fresh beginning.”
“A new world won’t be an empty blank any more than ten-year-olds are,” Maia said.
Zeus smiled at her. “True, and well deduced.” He looked at my brothers. “New planets need their own pantheons, and it seems we have one all ready.” He turned to Ikaros. “It has to do with place. Place is much more important to deity than you’ve ever considered. You should get out more. Travel.”
“On another planet?” he asked.
Zeus looked at Athene. “Were you planning to keep him as a pet?”
“There are a lot of wonderful times and places he hasn’t seen on Earth,” she said. “And then perhaps later other planets.”
Zeus waved his hand, and thunder rumbled nearby. “Do what you want. You will anyway. You agree, Ikaros? You’ll work with Athene?”
“If the City doesn’t need me.”
“The City will get along without you, on its new planet. And as well as going sightseeing with Athene, which I’m sure you’ll enjoy, there are Mysteries here you can be working on.” He looked at Maia. “How about you? Do you want to stay here or go on?”
“Go on,” she said.
“Good. The Republic will need you. You’ll be directing it in a few years, you know, you and Crocus. And then you.” He indicated Neleus. Lightning danced around his head. “Philosopher kings. It won’t be easy.”
“It hasn’t been easy so far,” Maia said.
“I swore that same oath,” Neleus said. “Fight bravely, judge fairly, contribute to the best of my abilities. We all did. We all want to go.”
I was looking at Neleus, and so were my other brothers as he spoke for them, and for a moment it was the way it had been before the voyage, when we had seen that we were all one thing, and he was another. But now, on Olympos, we looked to him for leadership. We had our powers. But he was the most philosophical. And that made him the best of us.
“But another sun?” Father asked, sounding worried.
“You can have it,” Zeus said wearily. “Now, is there anything else before I send the pack of you back where you belong?”
32
APOLLO
Euripides puts it very welclass="underline" Zeus brings the unthought to be, as here we see.
Before we left Olympos I took Athene aside and took care of a few details. I scrawled “Goodness” on the parchment map they gave Maecenas in Lucia, and gave it to her to put into her arm-rest so that I could find it there. “Any time between the Last Debate and last autumn. And if you get the chance, could you possibly take the head of Victory and donate it to the Louvre so the poor thing can be back in one piece again? Oh, and for goodness’ sake, get us some more robots,” I said.
“Porphyry will get you robots,” she said. “Father’s going to be loading me down with work here.”
“But you’ll have Pico to help. He’s going to love your library. And learning all the new languages.” Behind us, he was hugging Maia, and Porphyry, and to my surprise, Arete.
“Thank you for speaking up for me,” Athene said, stiffly.
“It was nothing,” I said. I had felt sorry for her, exposed that way. “I know what it’s like to love a mortal.”
“It’s not the same,” she said, automatically. “Did you think of doing that with Simmea? Taking her outside time, where you could keep her young?”
“Sooner or later her soul would have wanted to go on,” I said, gently, because it would happen with Pico too, sooner or later, unless he became a god. Perhaps he would. He had the right kind of mind. Father had noticed that at once. We could do with a god with an excellence of fitting facts together into complex theories, especially if he could generalize it to things other than metaphysics. Now that I’d seen it, it seemed obvious. Athene didn’t have any children, so none of her areas of responsibility ever got passed along to anyone else. I really liked the idea of Pico as a god of synthesis.
“But did you want to?”
“I’m glad in a way that I didn’t have to make that choice. Simmea’s mortality was so much a part of who she was, and my incarnation so much a part of our relationship, that I don’t know what it would have been if I’d brought her here.” She’d have started to analyze everything. It would have been wonderful. I wished I had brought her, and Sokrates too. But mortal souls need to grow and go on, that’s part of the marvel of them, part of what we love about them. If Pico became a god, which I was now sure was Father’s plan all along, he would lose some of what made Athene love him, and lose the opportunities his soul would have had to transform. Who could tell what wonderful people Ikaros might become, given the opportunity? How much he might contribute to the excellence of the world? Still, there wasn’t any point saying that to her and risking spoiling what they had for now. He had to make his own choices.
“But you knelt in supplication to Father rather than let her life never have been.”
“Yes,” I said, simply. I hadn’t cared what it cost me.
She nodded. “Maybe it’s not so different. Agape.”
“Thank you for setting up the Republic, so I could learn what agape was,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m glad it was worth it. Have fun on the new planet. They’re bound to call it Plato. What else could they possibly agree on?”
I laughed. “Have fun with Pico. Keep learning everything, and let me know all about it when you have the chance.”
“When you come back, I’ll meet you in the Laurentian Library on the first day the orange tree blooms in 1564.”
“It’s a date,” I said, touched, and turned back to where Father and Maia and my Young Ones were waiting.
The sun isn’t literally a winged chariot with two fiery horses. It’s literally a big ball of fusing hydrogen. But metaphorically and spiritually, it’s a chariot. My chariot. My new sun, which had no name, only a catalog number, and which is literally a slightly bigger and redder ball of fusing hydrogen, is metaphorically and spiritually a racecar. My racecar. We called it Helios, “the sun,” either because we’re an unimaginative people, or because we instinctively recognized that it had metaphorically and spiritually the same driver as the old Helios we’d left shining on Earth. It zips across the sky. The day is only nineteen hours long.