“What?” Moskhion scratched his head. “What are they, then? Cabbages?” He laughed at his own wit.

Smiling, Sostratos said, “They’re no more cabbages than they are fish.”

The sailor started to laugh again, but the mirth faded from his face as he studied Sostratos’. Moskhion frowned. Some men, when they heard an opinion they’d never met before, wanted nothing more than to wipe it from the face of the earth. So the Athenians served Sokrates, Sostratos thought. Moskhion wasn’t of that school-not quite. But he wasn’t far removed from it, either. He said, “Why, what else can dolphins be but fish? They live in the sea, don’t they? They haven’t got any legs, do they? If that doesn’t make ‘em fish, what does?”

“Being like other fish would make them fish,” Sostratos said. “But as my teacher’s teacher, a lover of wisdom named Aristoteles, pointed out, they aren’t like other fish. That means they have to be some different kind of creature.”

“What do you mean, they aren’t?” Moskhion demanded. “I just showed you how they were, didn’t I?”

“Seaweed lives in the sea and hasn’t got any legs,” Sostratos said. “Does that make it a fish?”

“Seaweed?” As if humoring a madman, Moskhion said, “Seaweed doesn’t look like a fish, young sir. Dolphins do.”

“A statue may look like a man, but is a statue a man? If you ask a statue to lend you a drakhma, will it?”

“No, but half the men I know won’t, either,” Moskhion retorted, and Sostratos had to laugh. The sailor went on, “How is a dolphin different than a fish? Just tell me that, if you please.”

“I can think of two important ways,” Sostratos answered. “You must know that, if you keep a dolphin in the sea and don’t let it come up for air, it will drown. Any fisherman who’s caught one in a net will tell you that. And dolphins bring forth their young alive, the way goats and horses do. They don’t lay eggs like fish.”

Moskhion pursed his lips and scratched at the corner of his jaw. “They’re funny fish, then. You’re right about that much, I expect. But they’re still fish.” He went down from the foredeck into the waist of the ship.

Sostratos stared after him. The sailor had asked for reasons why dolphins weren’t like fish. He’d given them. What had it got him? Nothing-not a single, solitary thing. “Funny fish,” he muttered. Sokrates had crossed his mind a little while before. Now the Athenian sage did again; Sostratos thought, If he had to deal with people like that, no wonder he drank hemlock. It must have seemed a relief.

Moskhion hadn’t been rude or abusive. He’d even gone through the forms of reasoned argument. He’d gone through them… and then ignored them when they produced a result he didn’t like. As far as Sostratos was concerned, that was worse than refusing to argue at all.

From his station at the stern, Menedemos called, “If you’re going to be a lookout, my dear, kindly look ahead, not toward me.”

“Sorry,” Sostratos said, reddening. He gave his attention back to the sea.

He wondered whether, a moment later, he would have to scream out, Rock! and give his cousin just enough time to steer the merchant galley out of harm’s way. If he were telling the story in a tavern-and especially if Menedemos were telling it in a tavern-it would go that way. But he saw no rocks. He saw little of anything: only gray sky above and gray sea below. He wished he could see farther out to sea, but, unless Menedemos’ navigation was far worse than he feared, it mattered much less on this broad reach of the Aegean than it would, say, down in the Kyklades. In those crowded waters, you could spit over the side and hit an island no matter where you were.

Darkness fell with no special drama. Light oozed out of the sky. At Diokles’ command, the rowers shipped their oars. Men who weren’t rowing brailed up the sail. Anchors splashed into the sea. Menedemos ordered lamps lit and hung from the stempost and sternpost. He said, “If some idiot’s sailing on through the night, we ought to give him at least a chance to see us.”

“Did I argue?” Sostratos replied.

“Not about that.” Menedemos paused to dip up a cup of the rough red wine the crew drank aboard ship. “But Moskhion’s been going on about how you tried to tell him dolphins aren’t fish.”

“By Poseidon’s prick, they aren’t!” Sostratos yelped. “Ask any man who’s studied the issue, and he’ll tell you the same thing.”

“Maybe so, O best one, but any sailor, it seems, will tell you you’re out of your mind,” Menedemos replied.

“It’s the Apology of Sokrates all over again: men who know one thing well think they know all things well because of their little piece of knowledge.”

“More than a few of our sailors have been fishermen, too,” Menedemos said. “If they don’t know fish, what do they know?”

“Not much, in my opinion.” But Sostratos spoke in a voice not much above a whisper. He did remember he wouldn’t be wise to anger the men. With an odd mix of amusement and annoyance, he watched his cousin’s relief that he remembered.

He too drank wine, and ate an uninspiring shipboard supper. He almost thought of it as a Spartan supper. Then he remembered the horrid black broth served in the Lakedaimonians’ messes. Contemplating that nasty stuff made an opson of olives and cheese and an onion seem far more palatable.

The clouds and mist remained after full night came. “Too bad,” Sostratos said, wrapping himself in his himation. “I always like looking at the stars before I go to sleep.”

“Not tonight.” Menedemos was also making himself as comfortable as he could on the poop deck.

“I wonder what they really are, and why a few of them wander while the rest stand still,” Sostratos said.

“Those are questions for gods, not men,” his cousin replied.

“Why shouldn’t I ask them?” Sostratos said. “Men should ask questions, and look for answers to them.”

“Go ahead and ask all you like,” Menedemos said. “Getting answers to those questions is a different story, though.”

Sostratos wished he could have quarreled with that. Instead, he sighed and dipped his head, saying, “I’m afraid you’re right. Until we find some way to reach out and touch the stars, we’ll never be able to find out what they are or why they shine.”

“Well, my dear, you don’t think small-I will say that,” Menedemos replied with a laugh. “How do you propose to touch the stars?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I wish I did.” Sostratos yawned. “I haven’t the faintest idea how I’m going to stay awake any more, either.” The next thing he knew, he wasn’t.

When he woke, the sky was getting light. It wasn’t the rosy-fingered dawn of which the poets wrote, though: no pink and gold eastern sky, no sunbeams darting up from the sea. Only a sullen gray like that of the day before made night withdraw.

Menedemos was already up. “Good day, my dear,” he said. “Here you’ve gone and taken away the fun of giving you a good kick, the way I was about to.”

“So sorry to deprive you of your simple pleasures.” Sostratos got to his feet and stretched to work the kinks out of his back. Rubbing his eyes, he added, “I’m feeling pretty simple myself right now.”

Up and down the length of the Aphrodite, sailors were rousing. Diokles had already got up from the rower’s bench where he’d spent the night. He seemed as well rested as if he’d slept in the bedchamber of the Great King of Persia. “Good day, young sirs,” he called to Sostratos and Menedemos.

“Good day,” Sostratos said. “We should pass through the strait between Euboia and Andros before sunset, shouldn’t we?”

“I hope so,” the oarmaster said. “If we’re anywhere near where we ought to be, and if our navigation today’s halfway decent, we ought to manage that.”

“And if we don’t, everyone will blame me.” Menedemos made a joke of it, where a lot of captains would have been deadly serious. Pointing up toward the clue-obscuring sky, he said, “I do have an excuse for not guiding us to within a digit’s breadth of our perfect path.”