“She’s great. I’m sorry I missed that. Did I miss anything else?”

“You’d have missed that anyway, it took place in closed Chamber. Sokrates told me about it afterwards.”

Just then we saw Sokrates, up the street a way past Thessaly. He was talking to a worker, who was carving replies into the marble. “Soon the whole city is going to be paved in Socratic dialogues,” Pytheas said. “It’s so appropriate that I’m amazed they didn’t think of it from the start.”

“It’s wonderful,” I said, starting to read some of it. Just then Sokrates saw us, said something to the worker he was talking to and bounded towards us.

“Simmea!” he said. “Joy to you! How wonderful to see you restored to yourself.”

“It’s wonderful to see you too. As for my restoration, it’s divine intervention,” I said.

His keen eyes went from Pytheas to me. “I see. Perhaps we should go into the garden and sit down and talk about this?”

“That would be excellent, but do you have anything to eat? I feel as if I haven’t eaten anything in half a year.”

Sokrates looked bemused as he opened the door. “I don’t think I do. Maybe I have some lemons?”

Pytheas reached into the fold of his kiton and produced a goat cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves. Sokrates led the way through to the garden. I sat on the ground by the tree, getting down easily, in a way that I’d taken for granted until recently. Pytheas leaned on the tree and I leaned back against him as I often did here. Sokrates came out with three slightly wizened lemons and handed us one each. I broke off chunks of the cheese and started to eat it.

“Do you want to hear about my success with the workers, or should we discuss the nature of the gods?” Sokrates asked.

“He says he’s Apollo and he always does his best for his friends, under the constraints of Necessity and Fate and other gods,” I said.

“I can still talk, you know,” Pytheas protested.

I stopped. “Go ahead then.”

“Is there anything new from the workers?” he asked.

Sokrates threw his head back and laughed, and I laughed too. Sokrates mopped his eyes with a corner of his kiton. “Why did you come here?” he asked.

“To talk to you,” Pytheas said.

“I didn’t mean this afternoon, double-tongued one, though it’s interesting that you want to talk to me about this now when you’ve been avoiding it for so long. Why did you come to the city? Unless you did that to talk to me?”

“That was part of the attraction,” Pytheas admitted. “But seriously, I wanted to experience being a mortal. I wanted to learn about volition and equal significance.”

“And have you been learning about them?” Sokrates asked.

“You know he has,” I said.

“Volition and equal significance,” Sokrates said. “What interesting subjects for a god to need to study!”

“You know we don’t know everything. Well, except for Father.”

“It’s just exactly what I’ve been thinking about with the workers,” Sokrates went on, as if Pytheas hadn’t spoken. His eyes were very sharp. “Both of those things. The masters were not prepared to see them in the workers, as the gods were perhaps not prepared to see them in us?”

“I don’t know what the other gods know about it. Athene knew.”

“Did she now? And still she chose to do this to us?”

Sitting as we were, I could feel Pytheas draw breath and then let it go before drawing breath again to speak. “Is this really the conversation you want to have with me?”

Sokrates laughed again, a short bark of a laugh. “Should I ask you instead what happens to souls before birth and after death?”

“I could tell you,” Pytheas said.

I sat up and moved to where I could see his face. “It’s what Plato wrote in the Phaedo, isn’t it?”

“That piece of misrepresentation,” Sokrates said, automatically, as he always did whenever that dialogue was mentioned.

“Close enough,” Pytheas said.

“Then we did choose,” I said.

“I certainly didn’t,” Sokrates said.

“You don’t know it, but you did. When your eyes were open, in the underworld, you chose a life that would lead you closer to excellence, and it led you here. And me. And Kebes, and I can’t wait to tell him.”

“You can’t tell Kebes,” Pytheas said, alarmed.

Sokrates was blinking. “No, I might have chosen my life to lead me to excellence despite the diversion here at the last minute,” he said.

“That doesn’t hold for Kebes,” I said.

“Simmea, really, you can’t tell him!”

“I know. I promised. But I’m right, aren’t I? We chose, knowing, and then drank from Lethe and forgot. So, volition. How about the workers? Do they have souls?”

Pytheas started to answer, then stopped. “I don’t know. I don’t even have a belief on the subject. I thought not.”

“How could a being have desires, and plans, and think, and not have a soul?” Sokrates asked.

“How could a being made by men out of glass and metal have a soul?” Pytheas asked.

“How could a being made by women out of blood and sperm?” I countered. “Where did souls come from? How many are there?”

“Athene probably knows,” Pytheas said. “But I don’t want to ask her while she’s still angry. There were already people and they already had souls by the time I was born. As for how many, lots. Lots and lots. The underworld is practically solid with them.”

I looked at Sokrates, who was twisting his beard in his fingers and staring at Pytheas. “If you are present in the world, why do you keep so secret?” he asked.

Pytheas laughed. “Sokrates, I sent a keeper—a daemon to whisper in your ear every time you were going to do something dangerous for your whole life, and you call that keeping secret?”

“Why don’t you do that for everyone?”

“I only have so many daemons, and not everyone can hear them, or wants to. I do it for my friends.” His eyes met mine for a second.

“And you can change time?”

“Only time that nobody cares about. Some bits of time are stiff with divine attention. Here, before the Trojan War, and on Kallisti, nobody was looking until Athene started this.”

“And the volcano will destroy the evidence,” I said. I had just put this together in my mind.

“Klio tells me that this island isn’t round but a semi-circle by my own era,” Sokrates confirmed.

“I hope we’ll have warning to leave in time,” I said. I looked at Pytheas.

He spread his hands. “I hope so too,” he said.

31

APOLLO

I had always thought that if she knew she would be intimidated, but I should have known better. Almost everyone is intimidated, it’s normal, it’s why we go about in disguise so much. Being capable of intimidating people is useful. Being surrounded by people who are intimidated all the time is miserable and tiresome. I’ve always hated people grovelling too. I thought she’d change to me. But instead she immediately started to analyze the whole thing. It was wonderful. It was what I should have expected. It was then that I came to truly love her.

“So you don’t know the future?” Sokrates asked.

“All of us here know a lot about the future,” I said. “I don’t know my personal future. None of us do. Except maybe Father. Usually I live outside time, and I can go into time when I want to. So I know a lot about time, and it doesn’t have future and past, it’s just there, spooling out and I can step into it where I want to. Think of it like a scroll that I can open up anywhere. It lets me give oracles, though half the purpose of oracles is to be mysterious, not to give information. Sometimes it’s a way of helping people, or just getting some information across. But usually it’s a useless way of warning people, no matter how much I might want to. Anyway, right now I’m living in time, just the same as you are.”

“How does that work?” Simmea asked. “Being outside time, but having your own personal time?”