“Why did you decide to call your city Lucia?” I asked. I knew I’d heard the name before, and I’d just remembered where. Father had said it had been Mother’s birth name. It seemed like a peculiar coincidence, but I couldn’t think of any possible connection.

“I think Matthias proposed it,” she said. “It means Light of course, and new light was what we all wanted. It was only afterward we thought of Saint Lucy and seeing everything with new eyes, which is what the name means to us now, our fresh start and our turning back to God. It was Providence, I suppose.”

“So how was it in the beginning?” Maia asked.

“We debated everything, like the philosophers we were, but sometimes the practical people we’d rescued had better ideas than any of us.” Aristomache smiled at one of the locals at the table, who looked down, clearly embarrassed. “They brought us back to Earth whenever we floated off too far. And it was that winter that we came back to God. That was Matthias’s proposal too.”

“Who’s Matthias, one of the people you rescued?” Maia asked.

Aristomache laughed and took another honey cake. “No, he’s the one who used to be called Kebes. He took his real name back. Some of us did that and some didn’t, according to what made us more comfortable. I didn’t want to be Ellen again.”

“We discussed that in the City of Amazons, too. I didn’t want to be Ethel,” Maia said, astonishing me. She seemed so very much a Maia that it didn’t seem possible she could ever have been called anything else. Ellen was clearly derived from Helen, but Ethel came from that strange language they had spoken together briefly. Maia was right, it emphatically didn’t suit her.

“We didn’t force anyone to worship God, but Matthias wanted to build a church and become a priest, and most of us had originally been Christian and many of those who hadn’t saw the light and wanted to be saved. I don’t think any of us had worshipped the Greek gods seriously back in the Just City, and if we had it was because of being taken in by Athene.”

“And your local recruits?” Erinna asked.

“They saw the sense in it, after the cruel things their gods had done to them. They understood the value of a god of forgiveness who understands us.”

Some of the locals around the table were nodding. “A god who accepts everyone, even slaves and women,” one of them said, shyly.

“So how did you go from one city to many cities?” Maia asked.

“We kept sending the ship out with a troop to rescue people, and eventually Lucia was running well and we had so many people that it seemed like a good idea to start a second city around the coast. Then we founded Marissa, here, when there was another war three years later, and we filled in the others. Usually the Goodness spends half the year sailing between the cities, trading, and the other half rescuing people and bringing them to whichever city needs people. We may found another city this year, on Ikaria. The Goodness tends to stay with a new city, and lots of experienced people stay to help things get going at first—people who know how to build and plant and everything like that. It takes quite a while for a city to get going properly. But Augustine is at that stage now, where it can grow naturally. We’re ready to found a new city.”

“And how many of you—the Goodness Group—stay in each city?” I asked.

Aristomache refilled her cup, considering. “It depends. There are lots in Lucia, of course, which is still our main base. Then there are lots wherever a city is new and needs help. Otherwise, well, the ideal is to have our cities working alone. Marissa doesn’t really need anyone from Goodness now. It could have local doctors and teachers.” There was a murmur from the locals at the table to the effect that they couldn’t manage without her. “Nonsense,” she said, but she looked pleased. “I stay because I’m getting old and my friends are here. Terentius stays because he’s married and his children are growing up here. But Marissa doesn’t need us. Hektor could do my job, he’s teaching most of the younger children as it is. And Ekate is as good a doctor as Terentius now, and she has an apprentice of her own. She may go to the new city on Ikaria if we do get it going this summer. Locals move around and share their expertise too.”

“So your ideal for your cities is self-sufficiency?” Erinna asked, swallowing another honey cake.

“It takes a while,” Aristomache admitted. “And they’re not big cities, compared to the Just City, never mind the Boston I remember. Most of our cities are about a thousand people. Marissa has eight hundred citizens, and almost that many children.”

“Do the children have to pass tests to become ephebes?” I asked. I was thinking about my own looming adulthood tests, to be taken on my return.

“Just swear their confirmation oath,” Aristomache said. “And we sort them into Platonic classes, of course. And they can vote in the Assembly then, the golds and silvers, and they’re eligible for election to the Council when they’re thirty. And nine of the Council are elected Kings every three years, and they make up the Committee of Kings. You have tests?”

“We have an oath too, but we also have to pass lots and lots of tests in all sorts of things. And then we swear, and do our military training, and read the Republic, and after two years we can vote in the Assembly, when we’re eighteen, all of us, not just the guardians. But only the guardians serve in Chamber. My brothers are all adults, and I’ll become an ephebe this year.”

Maia was looking about the hall. It had frescoed walls that showed pleasant farming scenes with nymphs and shepherds lolling in fields and under trees, feasting on food very like the food we were enjoying. “You know, Plato was right,” she said.

This was such a characteristic remark for Maia to make that I giggled, and so did Erinna beside me. We might have been drinking too much of the excellent wine.

“What was he right about?” Aristomache said. “A great many things, indeed, but what specifically are you thinking of?”

“He’s right that there was a golden age in his past when people in Greek cities governed themselves properly according to the precepts he described. Nobody has ever believed a word of it. But he was right. It happened. And this is it.” Maia laughed with an edge of hysteria. Ficino looked over to us, concerned. She took a sip of wine and went on. “It will deteriorate to timarchy, and then oligarchy, and so on, exactly as Plato wrote.”

“Well, maybe,” Aristomache said. “But for now it is the Good Life. For now it is definitely aristocracy. And besides, we’re sure we’ve changed the world, introducing Christianity here and now, introducing civilized ideas and sanitation and medicine in the time before the Trojan War. We’re not hiding away expecting everything we do to be destroyed by a volcano. Athene put us on Kallisti so we’d make no changes, cause no ripples, have no posterity. But we’re out here making a difference, keeping the peace, helping the poor and the hungry. This is a new world. Maybe everything will be different and the Age of Gold won’t vanish and there’ll never be a Plato.”

Maia hesitated, and I remembered that she had worried about breaking history if we intervened in the Kyklades. Father had reassured me that it wasn’t possible, but I couldn’t pass that reassurance on, at least not with proper citations. It might not be all that reassuring anyway, to think that Plato was right about everything degenerating. She closed her mouth as if she’d changed her mind about speaking, and when she did open it again what she said was: “You’re right to be rescuing people.”

Aristomache smiled at the rescued people around the table. “You know what you should do,” she said, looking back to us. “You should go to Lucia for Passion Week. In addition to the religious celebration we have a music festival. You’d love it. And that’s when the majority of the people who left the city are together, in Lucia at Easter. If you want to find out what we’ve been doing and see everyone, that’s where you ought to go.”