I sat on her bed beside her chest, leaning back against the wall, and read the whole first notebook. When I read that she had said my name to Ficino in the slave market, I had to put the book down because I was sobbing too hard to go on. The first book brought her up to her arrival in the Just City and learning to read. Kebes was all through it, but she did not yet mention me as Pytheas. Every time I saw his name I felt a pang of jealousy. Kebes had known her name was Lucia—it didn’t suit her at all. She was Simmea, the name was perfect for who she was. Lucia sounded soft and hesitant, while Simmea’s mind had been like a surgical instrument. I remembered her smiling at me. Kebes was nothing. Matthias, she said his original name was. Well, he was gone. I didn’t know whether or not to believe that he’d been responsible for the raid in which she had been killed. We hadn’t heard anything from him for such a long time. Nobody knew where he was, or cared anything about him.

I took up the second notebook. I touched the letters of her name where she had written them in both alphabets. Simmea, not Lucia. I knew, with my rational self, that if I’d ever asked her what her childhood name had been she would have told me. That she never had showed how trivial it was, not how important. I turned the second book over in my hands. There were twelve books. If I read one a month they could last me a year, and for that long I could have a little more of her. If I had been my proper self that was what I would have done, one a month, or even one a year. But in mortal form, with emotions that pounded in my veins and clutched at my stomach, I could not bear the suspense of not knowing what she had written. I opened the second notebook.

It began with her learning to read, and to love Botticelli. It was far on into it before she mentioned me, and the time she taught me to swim. I was hurt that she had disliked me before she knew me, and then charmed by her description of that swimming lesson, which I remembered very well. I was surprised she was attracted to me so soon. The second book ended with our agreeing to be friends. I picked up the third, hesitated only for an instant, then opened it.

By the time Arete came to find out why I hadn’t been in Florentia for dinner I had read all but the last volume, and was up to the conversation we had with the Workers outside Thessaly. I remembered that time so well; Sokrates, and the robots becoming entranced with philosophy, and Simmea discovering my true identity. It was so exciting. It had felt as if we could unravel all the Mysteries and remake the world. The words were still engraved in the paving stones outside, I walked on them every day. “Read. Write. Learn.” And she belonged to the city and wanted it. And yes, she loved me, she saw me clearly and loved me. But I had always known that. I hadn’t known she felt unworthy of me whether I was god or mortal. And I never doubted that what she wrote was the truth. She never said that she held the truth above me—she didn’t need to. It was axiomatic to Simmea. That was the thing about her that was so hard to put into a song.

I went with Arete to Florentia and sat with Ficino as I ate porridge and fruit. He talked to me but I barely listened. My mind was with Sokrates and Simmea and a time that was twenty years gone. I missed that sense of infinite possibility, like a bud coming to flower. Everything after the Last Debate had been compromised. I wanted to go back and read the last notebook, even though I knew now that it would end before our life together, that I would never know more than I knew now of what she had thought of our Young Ones, never read about our one long-anticipated mating. I looked at Arete, the product of that one sexual act, who was eating grapes and talking to Ficino. I felt my eyes mist with tears. I had read about Simmea’s matings with Aeschines and Phoenix and Nikias. I hoped the one time we had sex together had fulfilled her anticipations. I thought it had, and she said it had, but unless she had packed more into the last notebook than the others, I would never know for sure.

I wondered who she had written the notebooks for. Not for me. I was fascinated to read them, but I wasn’t their intended audience. Equally they were not for publication in the City and inclusion in the library, certainly not, because not only did she reveal the truth of my identity, but she explained things neither I not anybody else in the City would need to have explained. What audience had she imagined? They were written in lucid classical Greek. Who could read them? Anyone in classical antiquity and truly educated people for another millenium. I considered for a moment that once I was back in my true form, I could take them to Athens and leave them on Plato’s doorstep. My mouth twisted. I wouldn’t do it, but I was so tempted.

Phaedrus and Neleus were in Thessaly when Arete and I got back. I took the last notebook out of Simmea’s chest and saw their interested glances. Before they could inquire, I removed all twelve notebooks and tucked them into the fold of my kiton. Our Young Ones were definitely not Simmea’s audience for these, and I didn’t want them reading them. Her thoughts and feelings and intimate experiences weren’t for them. Arete was looking at me curiously. “Did your mother ever tell you her childhood name?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Wasn’t she always called Simmea?”

“Her parents called her Lucia,” I said. “But she never used it after she came here.”

“Lucia?” Neleus asked. “I never knew that.”

“It isn’t important,” I said as I went out. I was glad I’d told them. I didn’t want Kebes to be the only other person who knew it. Though Ficino would know it too, if he remembered. He probably didn’t remember—not that his wits were wandering like poor old Adeimantus, but he couldn’t possibly remember the original name every child had given him.

I took the notebooks to the library and sat in the window seat where Athene used to sit. It was dark outside, though the library was lit with electricity, and warmed with it as well. The library stayed at a constant temperature. Crocus and Sixty-One kept the electricity working now as they always had. They needed it themselves, of course. I wondered why Athene had left them when she took all the other Workers. She took the others to punish us, of course, to make us do without them and realize how difficult it would be. To live a life of the mind you need slaves or technology, and technology is unquestionably better. Now we compromised, eking out the technology we had and working ourselves half the time. It didn’t leave us the leisure for philosophy we had before. A tired mind can’t think as well. But nobody who enslaves another can be truly free.

But why had she left Crocus and Sixty-One? Was it because she felt they had betrayed her in becoming philosophers? But surely that was the purpose of the City? They were Sokrates’s friends, and my friends now. Perhaps it was because those two had spoken up at the Last Debate, choosing the City? I didn’t know what she was thinking. I wondered whether I ever had. Athene seemed very far away as I sat on her seat in the library. People constantly debated why she had set up the City. I thought I knew that—because it was interesting, and because she could. When it ceased to be interesting she had abandoned it. I had projects like that myself. My oracle at Delphi was one of them. It had seemed as if giving people good advice would help everyone get on better. I hadn’t kidnapped people from across time to do it, but I had dragged a shipload of Cretans across the Aegean.

I looked at the last notebook, XII. Had she stopped after the Last Debate? Why? Twelve seemed an extremely round number—and Simmea had distrusted numerology and suspiciously round numbers. It wouldn’t have been an accident. But it might be as far as she had reached. I’d seen her writing in notebooks fairly recently—it irked me that I couldn’t remember when exactly. The book might not be finished. I opened it and checked. It was full.