32

APOLLO

Euripides puts it very well: Zeus brings the unthought to be, as here we see.

Before we left Olympos I took Athene aside and took care of a few details. I scrawled “Goodness” on the parchment map they gave Maecenas in Lucia, and gave it to her to put into her arm-rest so that I could find it there. “Any time between the Last Debate and last autumn. And if you get the chance, could you possibly take the head of Victory and donate it to the Louvre so the poor thing can be back in one piece again? Oh, and for goodness’ sake, get us some more robots,” I said.

“Porphyry will get you robots,” she said. “Father’s going to be loading me down with work here.”

“But you’ll have Pico to help. He’s going to love your library. And learning all the new languages.” Behind us, he was hugging Maia, and Porphyry, and to my surprise, Arete.

“Thank you for speaking up for me,” Athene said, stiffly.

“It was nothing,” I said. I had felt sorry for her, exposed that way. “I know what it’s like to love a mortal.”

“It’s not the same,” she said, automatically. “Did you think of doing that with Simmea? Taking her outside time, where you could keep her young?”

“Sooner or later her soul would have wanted to go on,” I said, gently, because it would happen with Pico too, sooner or later, unless he became a god. Perhaps he would. He had the right kind of mind. Father had noticed that at once. We could do with a god with an excellence of fitting facts together into complex theories, especially if he could generalize it to things other than metaphysics. Now that I’d seen it, it seemed obvious. Athene didn’t have any children, so none of her areas of responsibility ever got passed along to anyone else. I really liked the idea of Pico as a god of synthesis.

“But did you want to?”

“I’m glad in a way that I didn’t have to make that choice. Simmea’s mortality was so much a part of who she was, and my incarnation so much a part of our relationship, that I don’t know what it would have been if I’d brought her here.” She’d have started to analyze everything. It would have been wonderful. I wished I had brought her, and Sokrates too. But mortal souls need to grow and go on, that’s part of the marvel of them, part of what we love about them. If Pico became a god, which I was now sure was Father’s plan all along, he would lose some of what made Athene love him, and lose the opportunities his soul would have had to transform. Who could tell what wonderful people Ikaros might become, given the opportunity? How much he might contribute to the excellence of the world? Still, there wasn’t any point saying that to her and risking spoiling what they had for now. He had to make his own choices.

“But you knelt in supplication to Father rather than let her life never have been.”

“Yes,” I said, simply. I hadn’t cared what it cost me.

She nodded. “Maybe it’s not so different. Agape.”

“Thank you for setting up the Republic, so I could learn what agape was,” I said.

She smiled. “I’m glad it was worth it. Have fun on the new planet. They’re bound to call it Plato. What else could they possibly agree on?”

I laughed. “Have fun with Pico. Keep learning everything, and let me know all about it when you have the chance.”

“When you come back, I’ll meet you in the Laurentian Library on the first day the orange tree blooms in 1564.”

“It’s a date,” I said, touched, and turned back to where Father and Maia and my Young Ones were waiting.

The sun isn’t literally a winged chariot with two fiery horses. It’s literally a big ball of fusing hydrogen. But metaphorically and spiritually, it’s a chariot. My chariot. My new sun, which had no name, only a catalog number, and which is literally a slightly bigger and redder ball of fusing hydrogen, is metaphorically and spiritually a racecar. My racecar. We called it Helios, “the sun,” either because we’re an unimaginative people, or because we instinctively recognized that it had metaphorically and spiritually the same driver as the old Helios we’d left shining on Earth. It zips across the sky. The day is only nineteen hours long.

Father set the five Republics of Kallisti and the eight Lucian Republics down carefully on the new planet, without so much as bumping any of their art or architecture. He also took all the people who chose to go, which was everyone except for a scattering of stubborn idiots who stood alone to see their cities and civilization disappear around them. (And who do you think has to be their patron and look after them forever after? Well, did you think Athene was going to get stuck with it?) He set the cities down the same distance apart they had always been. It didn’t matter at all to Father that he put them on a rocky volcanic plain on the edge of a great ocean, or that many of them now had harbors that went nowhere. It looked exceedingly peculiar, but we coped.

Porphyry did indeed get us some new robots, and that helped a great deal.

Maia became the first leader of the City after the move, and she and Crocus were the first Consuls of the Senate of Plato, the council made up of representatives of all twelve cities. She helped lead us into the era of peace and exploration, and when the aliens came she was the first after Arete to learn their language. She was thrice Consul, and after she died we put that on her memorial stone, along with all her other achievements. As Father had predicted, Neleus led us after that. By then we were thoroughly involved with the alien confederation, and we’d persuaded a surprising number of aliens to strive for excellence and justice in a Platonic context before the human spaceships discovered all of us and things got complicated.

As for me, I kept writing songs, and learning things about myself, about mortal life, about my children and other people. I kept on striving toward excellence, for myself and for the world. All the worlds.

I could still see my chariot at night from our new home, a distant glimmer, shining to me across space and time, which are Mysteries, and in strange ways almost the same thing. I was glad I could see it. I would have been very sad without it. But I’d have managed. I managed without Simmea, after all.

Not even Necessity knows all ends.

THANKS

Ada Palmer gave the right answers to all my questions, lent me books, sent me useful links, and talked to me about Pico when she was supposed to be grading. Then, after all that, she read it and made brilliant suggestions. This book wouldn’t exist without her. Buy her books and listen to her music. You’ll be glad you did.

I’m very grateful to my husband, Emmet O’Brien, for putting up with me when I’m writing. Elise Matthesen spent much longer than she imagined we would in the Bronze Age Greece section of the National Museet in Copenhagen, not to mention snarky Apollo comments in Antwerp cathedral. Gillian Spragg and Lauren Schiller were a great help with references.

This book was read by Mary Lace and Patrick Nielsen Hayden while it was being written, and after it was finished by Bo Balder, Biersma, Maya Chhabra, Pamela Dean, Ruthanna and Sarah Emrys, Magenta Griffith, Steven Halter, Sumana Harihareswara, Madeleine Kelly, Nancy Kremi, Marissa Lingen, Elise Matthesen, Clark E. Myers, Kate Nepveu, Lydia Nickerson, Emmet O’Brien, Ada Palmer, Doug Palmer, Susan Palwick, Eliana Rus, Drew Shiel, Sherwood Smith, and Nicholas Whyte.

I’d like to thank Patrick for editing, his assistant Miriam Weinberg for wrangling, Teresa Nielsen Hayden for her sensitive and thoughtful copyedits, and everyone in Tor Production and Publicity and Sales who work so hard at the unglamorous part of publishing, without which we wouldn’t have any books.

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