“It’s a Mystery,” I said.

“By which you mean you don’t understand it?” Sokrates asked.

“By which I mean it’s an actual Mystery that maybe Father understands and the rest of us just live with. There are lots of things the gods don’t understand.” I smiled. “And we can work on that. The three of us. This is so wonderful.”

“Is this what you came here for?” Sokrates asked.

“What? To have a dialogue with you about things the gods don’t understand? Wouldn’t that have been a marvellous reason? But no, I never thought of it. I told you. I wanted to be a mortal to learn about volition and equal significance.”

“But you could have done that anywhere,” he said. “Athens would have taught you that, or Troy for that matter. Why here?”

“It seemed like such an interesting idea,” I said. “And Athene did tell me you would be here, and I have always been your friend.” I looked at Simmea. “I wanted to grow in excellence.”

“But you’re already a god,” Simmea said.

“There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”

She nodded, attuned to that idea with every fiber. It was so good to have her back. The weeks she’d been sunk in postpartum depression had been horribly difficult for me. I kept wanting to tell her things, to hear her ideas about them. It reminded me too much of death. Mortal death is such a hard thing. Yes, there’s rebirth of the soul, but the soul isn’t the personality. It doesn’t share memories. I try to visit my mortal friends sparingly so that I can keep having times when I can visit them. Bach’s sixty years of continuous inspired music happened over thousands of years of my own life, and there are still some few days I’m saving where I could drop in and chat. (It’s a calumny about those the gods love dying young. Fate and Necessity are real constraints, but apart from them we do our best for our friends.)

“And you thought you could become your best self here in the city?” Sokrates asked.

Simmea was nodding.

“I thought I could increase excellence, and it would be interesting,” I said. “I wanted to see what happened here.”

“And you are truly here,” Sokrates said.

“Assuredly, Sokrates, that is the case,” I said, mockingly. “I can’t resume my powers except by dying and taking them up again.”

“But Athene has all her powers,” Simmea said. “She was using them to intimidate me.”

“To intimidate you!” It was rare to see Sokrates lose his temper, but he came close now.

“I told her if she didn’t trust me as a gold of this city to keep my word, then what had she been doing? And she accepted that.”

“Why was she there?” Sokrates asked, still angry.

“I needed divine intervention to heal Simmea, and as I was just saying, I didn’t have any.” I shrugged.

“We can all call on the gods,” Sokrates said.

“But it’s a question of whether they’re listening. Having some power helps it get through.”

Simmea looked at me with eyes full of worship, just like always, but still with that edge that meant she was absolutely ready all the same to beat me in debate or in the palaestra. “I’m so glad to be healed. It was so horrible not caring about anything.”

“If I’d had my powers and you’d asked me, I could have healed you with a touch, without asking anyone anything. It was unbearable to see you suffering and not to be able to do that.”

“But an essential part of human experience,” Sokrates said.

“I stuck it out for two months,” I said. “And it’s not an essential part of human experience to know you could do something to help and choose not to do it. Athene didn’t want to help, I had to beg her. That isn’t easy for me.”

“Would she talk to me?” Sokrates asked.

“I’m sure she would. Hasn’t she already? She brought you here. You’re her votary as well as mine.”

“I mean would she talk to me the way you are talking to me?”

“I’d be very surprised if she would,” I said. “She’s here, but she’s not incarnate. She’s still detached.”

“Would she debate me? In front of everyone?”

“On what?” I asked. He seemed very focused on the idea.

“On the good life. The Just City.”

Simmea laughed. “I’d love to see that.”

“Everyone would,” Sokrates said. “Will you ask her? I’d really like to initiate a series of debates with her.”

“When she has calmed down a bit,” I said. “And when we’ve sorted out the issue of the workers a bit more.”

“What’s going on with them?” Simmea asked. “They’re really thinking and wanting things?”

“They can choose the better over the worse, thus clearly demonstrating that they have souls,” Sokrates said. “The whole city is in turmoil over it.”

“If they have souls, I don’t know whether they’re like human souls,” I said.

“It would be logical for them to come from the same pool of souls,” Sokrates said. “Man and woman, animal and worker. You said there’s no shortage. And Pythagoras believed that every soul had a unique number, and that when those numbers added up again the soul would be reborn.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If they each have a unique number then we’re certainly not going to run out soon. But as far as I know, the souls are reborn when they find their way through the underworld, not when numbers add up. But numbers might be adding up without my being aware of it. There certainly do seem to be patterns in the world.”

“The workers each have a unique number,” Simmea pointed out.

“That’s true, and it’s inscribed over their livers,” Sokrates said. He looked at me.

“Minds are in the brain, truly,” I said. “Souls are harder to locate.”

“Ikaros has some interesting beliefs,” Sokrates said, carefully.

I laughed. “He does.”

“He thinks man is the greatest of all things, being between animals and gods and partaking of both natures.”

I nodded. “Yes. I didn’t really understand that until I was incarnate, but he does have a point. There are some wonderful things about being human.”

“He thinks there are greater gods, and the Olympians are a circle of lesser divinities serving the greater ones. He thinks there are many such circles.” Sokrates raised an eyebrow.

I hesitated. “Many circles is right; all human cultures have their own appropriate gods. But the only thing on top is Father. It isn’t a set of concentric rings the way Ikaros wrote—unless he’s changed his mind. I haven’t talked to him about it recently. He thought of it as a hierarchy with divinities subordinated to others. It isn’t like that at all. It’s a set of circles of gods pretty much equal to each other but with different responsibilities, and linked by Father.” I sketched circles in the dust, overlapping in the centre and a tiny bit at the edges.

“And his thoughts about the divine son Jesus and his mother the Queen of Heaven, and sin and forgiveness and reconciling all religions with all other religions?”

“Christianity is one of those circles.” I put my finger down in one. “Jesus is just as real and just as much Father’s son as I am. He’s one of the Elohim who incarnated. The eras when that was the dominant ideology in Europe tend to be a little inimical to me, but I do have friends there. And they made some wonderful art, especially in the Renaissance, which is where Ikaros comes from.”

Sokrates rocked back on his heels. “You should explain these things to him.”

“Tell Ikaros? The last thing he wants is certainty. About anything. That’s why he chose that name. And he’s a favorite of Athene’s. She wouldn’t like me interfering with him.” For that matter, I wondered how she liked his newest theories on religion.

Simmea had eaten a whole cheese and two lemons and was absentmindedly licking the chestnut leaves the cheese had been wrapped in. “What’s in the overlap between the circles?” she asked, pointing at where they touched at the edges.

“Well, say there’s a man out on the edges of Alexander’s empire, in Bactria. And when he’s sick he prays to Kuan Yin, the Mother of Mercy, not to me. But when he’s composing poetry in Greek, it’s me he looks to. That’s the kind of case where the circles overlap, when cultures come together like that.”