I know Ficino felt the same way about me leaving the Remnant as I felt about Andromeda and the others who chose Psyche. He was almost in tears, arguing with me at one point. But in the end he respected my decision, as I respected his to stay.
The other, less worthy reason I made the choice to go is that all of my close friends except Ficino were going: Axiothea, and Klio, and Lysias, and Kreusa. I went despite Ikaros, not because of him.
I have written already about how Ikaros raped me when I was young and naive. I had been sheltered and protected all my life until I came to the city, and I had no instinct for self-preservation. I went off alone with Ikaros, seeking answers to questions, with no idea that he imagined this was a sexual tryst. (It’s hard to believe I was ever so stupid.) I saw him as a man from the romantic and wonderful Renaissance, and I did not consider what that really meant. He had read Plato and loved the idea of the Republic, and he was prepared to concede that women had the philosophic nature. That didn’t mean he had entirely put away the appetites and expectations of his own era. He thought my protests were conventional. He thought I was saying no because society allowed me to enjoy sex only if it was forced on me in circumstances beyond my control. He believed I wanted it, even when I screamed and fought. He was confused, afterward. He tried to make amends. He gave me a book. I remained furious with him—for raping me, and for continuing to act as though he had done nothing. Others adored him, but I kept away from him as much as I could. I didn’t trust him, and I found it harder to trust any men because of him.
I spent eight years in the City of Amazons.
At first it was two thousand people camped out in the fields on the north side of the island. Building the physical city was a challenge. Klio persuaded Crocus to help us. Crocus was one of the two remaining worker-robots. In the debates that followed the Last Debate, both Workers had considered Sokratea, but decided to stay in the Remnant. They had good solid philosophical reasons, but also practical ones—they needed electricity as we needed food, and designing and installing electrical generators elsewhere would be a challenge.
Crocus quarried marble for us and delivered it to the site of the new city, and then we humans wrestled the slabs into roads and assembled the blocks into buildings. Crocus helped—what was difficult for even the strongest of us was trivially easy for him. We built one wall while he built the other three and put on the roof. He cut marble pipes and installed plumbing. We assembled ourselves into teams and tried to learn skills from him and from each other. We did as much as we could. As there were two thousand of us and one of him, in the end more of Amazonia was built by humans than by Crocus, but I don’t know how we could have possibly managed without him. We voted him full privileges of citizenship including voting rights, although he never became a resident. We inscribed his name among the list of founders. There is also a bas-relief of him above the main gate, carved by Ardeia.
He returned to the Remnant every night to rest and recharge, while the rest of us planned the city and the work for the next day. We did our planning in the dark. We had all grown used to electric lights in the time we had been in the City, and we missed them. Our old Tech Committee was almost all there, and we assembled to try to deal with problems.
“We need to find a way of having light,” Lysias said. “They have refused to let us have any of the solar lights, so we need a proper alternative. What did people use?” Lysias came from the twenty-first century and so, like the Children, he had grown up with electricity.
“Gas lights,” I said. “Gas was made from coal in some way. I’ve no idea how.”
“Nobody will know, and there won’t be any books on it,” Lysias said, savagely. “I don’t think there’s any coal on the island anyway. What else?”
“Oil lamps,” Axiothea said, a calm voice in the darkness. “We have olive oil. We can make glass, or if we can’t we can make clay lamps like the Romans had. I wonder what wicks are made out of?”
“If the Romans had them, somebody might know, or it might be written down somewhere,” Lysias said, sounding a little more cheerful. “Did they give enough light?”
“Enough to read and work by,” I said. “And there are also candles, made from beeswax or tallow. Wicks were made from cotton in my time, which we don’t have, but I expect linen would do just as well.”
“Candles, of course,” Klio said.
“They’re just decorative,” Lysias protested. “Not that I wouldn’t appreciate having one right now.”
“Lamps are more effective,” I said. I had lived with electricity long enough that it was easy for me to understand how in future ages, candles could have come to be thought of as nothing but decoration.
“Yes, I’ve heard of things smelling of the lamp, meaning people were up late working on them,” Klio said. “And burning midnight oil. So it must give enough light for people to work. We can’t make glass, but Crocus can. Except I don’t want to impose on his good nature to ask him to do even more for us. There’s not much we can do for him in return—only discuss philosophy and read to him, and there are plenty of people in all the cities happy to do that.”
“Books,” Lysias said. “That’s another tech issue we should discuss. We can use the libraries in the Remnant, they’ve agreed we can. But can we use their printing presses? We should have our own library here. The City Planning Committee have assigned it a place. But should we be building a printing press? Do we have anyone who can set type?”
“And should we be duplicating everything so we have it to hand and don’t have to walk ten miles every time we want to look something up?” I asked.
“And if we have only one press, should it be Greek or Latin?” Klio asked.
“It doesn’t matter, we melt all the type regularly and recast it—it’s only lead.” I said. “We’d have to have both sets of molds, but we could print in either language, switching when the type got worn.” I had always enjoyed working with the presses.
“Good!” Lysias said, relieved.
When we had set up the original city, most of the tech questions had been philosophical—we had to decide what we wanted to do and what was the best way to achieve it. We had the practical means, unlimited Worker resources, and the presence of Athene to give us divine intervention as needed. We didn’t realize what a luxury these things had been until we had to manage without them. Now the problems were almost all practical, and the answers were almost all things we didn’t like.
We made the most urgent decisions, and had drinking-fountains and latrine-fountains and wash-fountains enough for everyone, and fields prepared for animals and crops, and shelter from the elements before the first winter came. During that winter we began to manufacture lamps. We had a skilled potter, one of the Children from Ferrara, a girl called Iris. She made the bases, and Kreusa, of all people, knew how to make wicks from flax and instructed others. Crocus was still helping us finish off the city, and it fell to me to ask him if he would make us some clear glass bowls for the lamps.
It was raining. Crocus was putting a roof onto the hall in the southwest corner that was destined for our library. Some of us had, through practice, become quite skilled at masonry, but roofing was still a real challenge. “Joy to you, Crocus,” I said.