“Not like that, no.”

“Does that mean he was right and I did want it? I felt that my body was a traitor. Does it make me a hetaira?”

“No.” She sounded really fierce. “If you didn’t agree, then you didn’t agree and it was rape, whatever your body thought about it.”

“Can I use your wash fountain?”

“Of course. Clean him off you. Wait—when did you have your period?”

“Last week,” I said.

“That’s good.” I looked at her blankly. “You’re probably not pregnant,” she expanded. “I’m assuming you didn’t chew silphium beforehand, as you weren’t planning on it.”

“No,” I said.

Klio frowned. “Do you think Ikaros would do it again? To someone else? Because if so then we should tell people, to protect them.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t expect anyone is as naive as I was, to go off with him like that, without realizing.”

“I can put the word around that women should be careful of him, without mentioning your name or the word rape,” she said. “Go on, shower.”

I didn’t tell anyone else. I resigned from the Art Committee. I did not speak much to Ikaros on the Tech Committee. He kept saying things and giving me looks, clearly confused. Once I was sure I wasn’t pregnant, I tried to forget about it. I made sure not to be alone with men, any men, ever. We were busy. It wasn’t difficult.

A few days after my house was ready and I had moved into it, delighted to have a bed and privacy again, Ikaros waited for me after a meeting of the Tech Committee. Klio stayed with me, glaring at him. His confidence withered a little before the concerted force of our glares

“I’ve just come back from an art expedition,” Ikaros said. “I have something for you.” He gave me a big book wrapped in muslin. “Don’t open it here.” He left.

Klio and I went back to my house, where I unwrapped it. It was a book of reproductions of Botticelli paintings, in English, printed on glossy paper and with a publication date of 1983. On the cover was the Madonna of the Magnificat.

10

SIMMEA

In Year Five of the city, when we were all nominally fifteen, it was finally Florentia’s turn to learn astronomy. I’d been looking forward to it ever since Axiothea told us that it would involve more geometry. We began one crisp autumn afternoon in the Garden of Archimedes on the western edge of the city, where the big orrery and telescopes were. There were only nineteen of us. Astronomy wasn’t considered essential, and as always we were short of masters. Only those selected could pursue it.

I enjoyed the orrery, and calculating the motions of the planets. Archimedes’s own orrery was there, with his gearing, and another, not as beautiful, which Axiothea said was Keplerian and which showed the motion of the planets as ellipses. When darkness fell I enjoyed seeing the planets exactly where we had predicted they would be. I loved looking through the telescope and learning how to adjust it. Kebes was there, and my close friend Laodike, but not Pytheas. Delphi had studied astronomy the season before.

That first night they showed us all the spectacular things—the moons of Jupiter and the extra sisters in the Pleiades and the great galaxy of Andromeda. Walking back through the dimly lit city, I bade joy of the night to Laodike when we came to her house, which was Thyme, on the street of Demeter. Kebes came up beside me as we walked on. Our ways lay together almost all the way back. His sleeping house was Violet, which lay just beyond Hyssop, on the street of Hera. “You really enjoyed that.”

“I did.” I was still bouncing with excitement. “Just think. We can tell where Mars will be in a thousand years. In ten thousand years.”

“Who cares?”

I looked at him blankly. I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “I care.”

“Lucia,” he said, very softly. I started guiltily at the name. He stepped closer as we came to a sconce on the wall of the temple of Hestia. I could see his eyes glint. “Don’t you see it doesn’t matter? We’re never going to Mars. Humanity may, one day. It may already have gone there, in the far future that they won’t tell us about. But we’ve been deliberately brought into a sterile backwater of history where nothing we do can achieve anything.”

“We’ve been lucky enough to be brought to the Just City to have the one opportunity of growing up to be our best selves, Matthias,” I said, saying his old name as deliberately as he said mine.

“Oh, you’re hopeless,” he said, walking on into the darkness. “They brought us here against our will, all of us. But you’ve swallowed it all whole. They’ve made you over into one of them.”

“And you aren’t prepared to trust that anyone has good intentions, or anything at all!”

Just then a voice came from what I had taken for a statue of an old man next to a pillar on the steps of the temple. “What aren’t you prepared to trust?” he asked Kebes.

“You,” Kebes blurted.

“Me?” the old man asked, coming out into the street and falling into step with us. “Well, you don’t know me, you’ve never seen me before, I am a stranger who has only just come to this place, you have no reason to trust me. But you have no reason to distrust me either, so it seems that the maiden is correct in her assessment that you trust nothing. How did you come to such a position?”

“From meeting a great deal of deception,” Kebes said.

“Then you are judging a stranger by your past experience of humanity, that they are untrustworthy, and assuming that I am the same?”

“Yes,” Kebes said.

“Well, and you believe that the maiden is the opposite, that she is overly trusting?”

Kebes looked at him sideways and said nothing. The old man turned his bright gaze on me. There was something about the way his bright dark eyes met mine that reminded me of Ficino. But he really was a stranger, which was astonishing. I had never seen strangers come to the city since we had all come here at the beginning, over the course of a few days, five years before. There were masters I knew more or less well, and many of the children in other halls I barely knew at all, but after this time in which we had all been in the city they were all generally familiar to me by sight. This old man was entirely new to me. “So, do you trust everything as the youth says?”

“No,” I said. “I trust what I have found trustworthy.”

“And do you trust me?”

“I do,” I said. It was true, up to a point. I did instinctively feel that I could trust him. But this was a dangerous conversation. Although he was a stranger, he was an old man and must therefore be a master, and the real subject that Kebes and I had been discussing was about trusting the masters. Kebes could get into serious trouble if they knew what he had said. When he had run away before he had been a boy, now he was a youth on the edge of manhood. He’d be showing them that he hadn’t changed, that they couldn’t trust him. He could be punished.

“On what basis do you judge me trustworthy? Because I am a stranger to you just as much as to the youth here, who does not trust me enough even to enter deeply into dialogue with me.”

I thought hard about what I wanted to say, and spoke the truth but phrased it carefully. “I trust you because you wish to have a dialogue to discover the truth. And I trust you because you remind me of Master Ficino.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Ficino would like that!” he said. “So you judge me by your previous experience of humanity and it has been good, so you are in all ways the opposite of your companion.”

“No, wait. I don’t have a good opinion of all humanity, but of Ficino, whom you resemble. And from what you say it seems you know him well, which gives me an even better opinion of you.”

“I have met him. I would not say I know him well. In what particulars do I seem to you to resemble him?”