“I do agree. But I can see that nobody who doesn’t know Kebes well will believe that.”

“Kebes doesn’t speak English,” Pytheas said. “Greek and Latin and Italian, he said.”

“You’re supposed to forget any other languages you had before you came here,” Klio clucked.

“Well, you can forget that I said that,” Pytheas said. “Forgetting a language isn’t easy.”

I nodded. “I’d like to believe that I came out of the soil on the day I started to learn to read, but I can’t really forget ten years of memories. They’re dim, and I don’t often think of them, but they’re not gone.”

“Your children will have no such memories,” Klio said. “It’ll be easier for them.”

“To return to the point,” Pytheas said, though we were drawing near the Spartan hall now. “Kebes doesn’t speak English. If he had replanted the bulbs he could have made them say no in Greek or Latin, but not English. And doing it in Greek would have been simplest, and Sokrates would have understood it.”

Klio nodded. “And by the same logic, it can’t have been any of the other children either.”

“None of the children speak English?” I asked.

Pytheas raised his head as if he were waiting to hear how she would answer. “You’re all from the Mediterranean, and there are no English-speaking countries there.”

“Besides,” I said, “Kebes wasn’t ready to believe the worker had really communicated. If it had been a hoax he’d have been trying to get Sokrates to believe it, not arguing against it.”

“Not necessarily, depending on how well he knows Sokrates,” Klio said. We were at the door of the Spartan hall, which Klio held open for us. We went inside. The room was full now.

“We fetch our own soup from the urn,” Klio explained. I took a bowl and filled it. I also took a little roll of barley bread and a piece of smoked fish from the trays laid out. The soup was lovely, warming and filling, full of onions and beans.

“If Kebes didn’t do it, then I have another thought,” Klio said, when I was nearly done eating. “There are workers that go to the feeding station and won’t leave again. Lysias tries to give them new orders, but nothing works except taking out the piece of them that makes decisions and replacing it. We’re running extremely low on spares. If they really are developing volition and that’s a symptom of it, then what have we been doing?”

“Cutting out their minds?” Pytheas asked. “How gruesome. Could you put them back?”

“Yes … I think so. But we need the workers. We’ve been saying for years that we have to reduce our dependence on them, but nobody’s ever willing to do it. They do so much, and some of it we can’t do. We can’t manage if they just sit in their feeding stations and feed and don’t work.”

“Maybe those are the ones Sokrates should be talking to,” Pytheas said. “Have you finished? Shall we go back and suggest this?”

“Lysias is going to resist hearing this argument,” Klio said. “It would make him feel he has done bad things—without intending to, but done them nonetheless. He doesn’t know Kebes.”

“It’s worse than that, he does know Kebes, and he knows bad things about him,” I said.

“What bad things?” Klio asked.

“What Pytheas said. That he doesn’t pursue excellence. And I think he might have mocked Lysias when he was trying to be his friend. He’s never going to believe that he has honor and wouldn’t trick Sokrates.”

“Lysias knows Kebes mocked him?” Pytheas asked.

I nodded. “I believe he does.”

“He’s really not going to want to hear it,” Klio repeated. “Let’s not go back there now. Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Sokrates.”

23

MAIA

We had more than a thousand babies born in the month of Anthesterion, and it strained our resources to the utmost.

Plato wrote in the Republic that defective babies, and babies of defective parents, should be exposed. It was the standard practice of the classical world to expose unwanted babies—just to leave them out in a waste place where they might be rescued or, more often, just die. There was no blood guilt on the parents, they just left the child, they didn’t kill it. The children froze to death or were eaten by animals … or occasionally rescued. Stories like Oedipus, and Theseus, and Romulus and Remus are of exposed babies who came back to find the family that had abandoned them. There were other stories too, which I hadn’t heard before I came to the city, ghost stories.

I know that in my own century it was the practice for midwives to kill badly deformed babies—or just allow them to die instead of helping them to survive. It did seem the kind option. But the thought of exposing even deformed infants made my heart ache.

We had kept careful records of all the “marriages,” so carefully planned out with an eye to eugenics. (Klio and Lysias shrank from that term, but would never tell me why.) We took the babies into the nurseries as they were born. There was a nursery shared between Florentia and Delphi, so Axiothea and I worked together there—Ficino and Atticus left it to us. We called in Charmides when we really needed to. He was exhausted too, as our only real doctor. We defined all the babies we saw as excellent and passed them over to the nurses—men and women of iron status. One was Andromeda, whom I’d always liked.

Then in the middle of the night in the third week of the baby-rush, when we were already exhausted, there was one with a harelip. Axiothea had been with the mother while I was with another girl just starting her labor. She called me and I joined her in the private room, where she showed it to me.

Axiothea and I looked at each other in mute horror. The child had a cleft palate too. “It’s fixable,” Axiothea said.

“Not here,” I said. “And Plato says…”

“I know,” she said. “Are you going to do it?” There was a mute appeal in her eyes.

“Yes,” I said, refusing to shrink from the duty. I wrapped the baby in a cloth and held it against my shoulder. It was a girl, which made things somehow worse. I was here to make the lot of women better, after all. “You look after things here.”

I went out of the nursery and walked through the city to the north gate, the one near the temple of Zeus and Hera. I walked quickly and held the baby tenderly, but she started to wail. She was such a little scrap of a thing. I walked on up the mountain, with some thought of taking her up to the top and throwing her into the crater. There was no hope of rescue here. No shepherd in want of a child was going to come along. There was nobody on Kallisti but us. There were wolves, but wolves wouldn’t be able to feed her, even if they really did feed babies. With that lip she wouldn’t be able to suck, and with the hole in her mouth she’d choke if she could.

She wasn’t heavy, but she was awkward to carry. I was exhausted before I made it halfway up the mountain. I left her by the roots of a rowan tree, near a spring. I commended her soul to Athene and prayed that she might be reborn whole. She had been quiet for the last part of my walk, but when I put her down she started to wail loudly. I could hear it halfway back to the city. It cut off abruptly. I wondered if she had fallen asleep, or whether she was lying there still and terrified in the darkness, or whether a wild animal had taken her—a wild boar? A wolf? I took two steps back up the hill before I forced myself to stop. This was ridiculous. I was a disgrace to philosophy. I had done what I had come to do, what Plato told me to do, the standard practice of the ancient world. It was to protect the city, to make us better. All the same, I was still weeping when I came back into the city.

It was dawn. The wind came chill from the sea. The sky was paling and the birds waking. It was the point where late winter becomes early spring—the first of the flowers were coming up. Everything said beginnings, but for that poor harelipped baby there was nothing but an ending.