It was a cold night and the stars were burning bright and clear, so distinct that I could see colors in some of them. “I can see all the stars in Orion’s belt,” I said.
“We’ll go there one day,” Father said.
I looked at him, startled. “You and me?”
“People,” he clarified. “They’ll settle planets out around those distant suns, one day, far ahead. I haven’t been there yet. I’m always reluctant to leave the sun. But eventually I will, and you will too. I promised your mother I’d see her out there one day.” He wiped his eyes.
“But what does it mean?” I asked. “She might be out there on another planet far in the future, but she won’t remember us, or her life here.”
“No,” he agreed, sadly.
“And the civilization that settles the stars won’t be our civilization. They won’t have learned anything from this experiment, they won’t know anything about the Just City except the legend of Atlantis in the Timaeus and Critias.”
“Time is so vast—they probably wouldn’t anyway,” he said. But as he stared up at the stars he began to weep again. We walked on in silence.
“I had not meant this grief to unman me so,” he said quietly, when we were getting close to Thessaly.
“It might be better on the ship. Here everything reminds us of her,” I said.
“The boys are right. They are men, and heroes, and they have to act as they think best. I can’t keep them children, or keep them safe.”
“I’m going,” I said, guessing where this conversation might be going. “The Chamber have approved me. I’m going!”
“Arete,” he said, then stopped and began again in a different tone. “And you have to decide for yourself too. Equal significance means letting people make their own choices. But it’s so difficult! Do you think she wanted me to learn this and that’s why she stopped me?”
“It’s possible,” I said. And then I dared to say what I’d been thinking for a long time now. “She would want you to command your grief with philosophy.”
“I know,” he said, bleakly. “Oh yes, I do know that. I shouldn’t be sad and I shouldn’t indulge my grief. She is gone on to a better life. I should remember her and love the world for her. I know all that. I really do know it. But knowing it doesn’t actually help at all when I want to talk to her so much my whole body aches.”
“I know,” I said. “I miss her every day.”
“I wish I understood why she wouldn’t let me heal her. It might all make more sense if I could understand that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I shivered.
“Come on, we should go in and tell the boys they can ask the Chamber if they can go on the voyage.” He was trying to sound cheerful. “And we can have more wine. Arete—do you think revenge will actually help me feel better?”
“No,” I said, surprised into honesty.
7
APOLLO
“How now shall I sing of you, though you are a worthy subject for song?” That’s from the Homeric hymn to me—the same line is in both Homeric hymns to me actually, the Delphian and the Delian. Mortals find it intimidating to write about me, sometimes. It’s as if they think I’ll be listening over their shoulder. I find myself thinking it writing this, about Simmea and Sokrates, about Ficino and Maia and Pico. How shall I sing of you? I promised Father there would be songs.
There are already songs on Olympos about the sorrows and miseries of humanity and how badly people deal with death, and certainly there are songs enough about those subjects sung by mortals. I had felt grief myself often before. But this grief resisted being transmuted to art. You have to understand that transmuting emotion into art is what I do. It’s one of the reasons I like emotions. But this emotion was bigger than I was. It’s not that I didn’t try to write songs for Simmea. I tried to write them, and for the first time my art failed me. I wrote songs, but they were pale thin things, they would not catch fire. They were true enough, but they left so much unsaid. I wanted vengeance, and yet at the same time as I struggled so desperately toward it I knew that revenge wasn’t really what I wanted. I knew that art would come. It always had. The depth of this grief was different and unusual, and so would be the songs that came of it. Her name would live forever, as would her soul. That was the only way I could comfort myself, and it was thin comfort. Meanwhile, I was making an even poorer job of being a human being than usual. I was developing more sympathy for Achilles than I ever had before.
About a month after she died I decided to open her chest and sort out her belongings. She didn’t have much—a winter cloak that doubled as a blanket, a pen and ink, some paints and brushes caught up in a scrappy paint-spattered rag, needles and thread, a scraper and a comb, another, finer comb with three broken teeth, a set of menstrual sponges. Underneath these things, all of which I had seen her use a million times and which seemed to miss the touch of her hands, was a pile of paper notebooks. I had seen her writing in them from time to time. “What are you doing?” I’d ask.
“Making notes,” she’d reply, shutting the book and putting it away. They were small, the standard little notebooks the Workers had produced and which we continued to produce now with rather more effort. They had buff covers and were sewn together. I had never realized how many of them she had. I counted—twelve. If they were full and each held five thousand words, which would be about right, that was sixty thousand words she had written. I expected them to be notes, perhaps dialogues. They had her name on the covers, and under that they were numbered with Roman numerals. I wasn’t sure how to read them—whether to glut myself on them all at once, or to save them. They represented something more of Simmea, which I had not expected. I was excited, and at the same time afraid of disappointment. I picked up the one labeled as number I and opened it and read.
“I was born in Amasta, a farming village near Alexandria, but I grew up in the Just City. My parents called me Lucia, after the saint, but Ficino renamed me Simmea, after the philosopher. Saint Lucy and Simmias of Thebes aid and defend me now!”
Whatever I had expected this was not it. I read the paragraph again. I had never known that her birth name was Lucia, nor guessed that she would have called on Saint Lucy. How little I had known her after all! But this was treasure, an autobiography. Many people in the city wrote one; there was a kind of fashion for them. Simmea had never told me she was writing one. I felt a little hurt, and yet still excited. She would be bound to talk about me. I could see our relationship from her perspective. It was the closest I could come now to talking to her. And yet I hesitated. Lucia, Saint Lucy—what if reading this proved I didn’t know her after all? What if she didn’t love me? But I knew she had. It was unquestionable. She had said once that she loved me like stones fall downward. I wanted to read her annals of our life together. I wouldn’t be able to show it to anyone except our Young Ones, because she was sure to have revealed that I was Apollo. How well I remembered her discovering it, that day in the Temple of Asklepius. How angry she had made Athene! What terrible consequences that had had! And it was all my fault. Yet even so, even in all its consequences that included the metamorphosis of Sokrates and the collapse of the First Republic, I still smiled to remember how well she had dealt with discovering who I was.
I read that first paragraph again, and this time I went on. I was brought up short again reading her pondering whether it might have been a better path to happiness for her to have lived out her life in the Egyptian Delta. “No,” I said aloud. I was astonished that she could even have considered that. Had I really known her? She had wanted, fiercely wanted, to be her best self, and surely her best self could only have been in this place and time?