“Did you know people have equal significance?” I asked, suddenly reminded by what he had been saying. I’d promised Simmea I’d tell the gods. Putting together the chronicle was only the first part of that.

“To us? How could they have?” A frown briefly creased his golden brow. “They’re mayflies.”

“To each other. And their choices ought to count to us. They live long enough to achieve wonderful things, sometimes. And besides, a human lifetime is subjectively longer than you think. You should try incarnating yourself.”

“Was it fun?”

I hesitated. He laughed.

“It was illuminating,” I said, with as much dignity as I could manage. “I learned things I couldn’t have learned any other way. I think we all ought to do it for what we can learn. We’ll be better for it.”

“I’ll think about it. I have a number of projects I’m busy with right now. And instead I’m wasting my time coming all the way out here to the ass-end of nowhere to tell you that Father wants you to attend to your planet.”

I looked at the accretion disk, poised at the moment of spinning up. “Now? Why now? He wants me to go to Plato in my personal now?”

“Does Father ever explain these things to you? He never does to me.” He sounded bitter.

“It’s a Mystery,” I acknowledged.

“You haven’t told anyone you have a planet. I must check it out.”

“It’s new,” I said, reflexively defensive. “It’s all Athene’s fault, really. It’s called Plato. It has people. And aliens. They’re highly civilized. They worship us, well, most of them do. You have a lovely temple there with a statue by Praxiteles that Athene and Ficino rescued from the sack of Constantinople. Haven’t you noticed people there praying to you? You’d be welcome to come and visit.” I gestured in its general direction. “Drop in any time.”

He ignored my jab as easily as he ignored prayers. “How did you get a whole planet?”

I sighed, seeing he wouldn’t leave me alone until I explained. “Athene was setting up Plato’s Republic, on Thera, before the Trojan War, before the Thera eruption. She had three hundred classicists and philosophers from across all of time, all people who had read Plato and prayed to her to help make the Republic real. She helped—that is, she used granting their prayers as a gateway. Really, she wanted to do it, so she did. As well as those people, the Masters, they bought ten thousand Greek-speaking slave children, and a set of big construction robots. The robots turned out to be sentient, only to start with nobody knew that. I incarnated there as one of the children. I learned a lot, from Sokrates and the others, and from the experience. I had friends, and children. When Father found out, he transported the whole lot of us to another planet four thousand years forward—and we were twelve cities by that time, all doing Plato’s Republic in different and competing ways.”

“And you’re responsible for them?”

“Until my children are ready to be their pantheon, which shouldn’t be long now. Why? Did you think Athene would end up getting stuck with it, after she tired of the project and moved on?”

He grinned. “It’s hard to imagine. She always squeaks out of things. Well, you’d better get on and take care of them for her.”

“For Father,” I said. I was puzzled. I wondered why Father had sent this message. He must have known that I wouldn’t neglect Plato. I didn’t understand why there was any urgency about it. But I’d do it, of course. Nobody understood how Father knew anything, or how he prioritizes. Nor, for that matter, did we have any idea how he experiences time. He was there before it, after all. Mortals find it difficult to understand how we understand time, living outside it, but that’s simple, compared to how it is for Father.

We’re bound by our own actions, and, naturally, whether we’re in or out of time, by Fate and Necessity. There’s no getting around them. They make changing time extremely hard, and harder when we get away from our core concerns. And we’re limited by Father’s edicts, but only in so far as we respect them. They don’t have the same inevitable force. If I got caught up with Fate or Necessity it wouldn’t really be a matter of choice—resisting a force like that is almost impossible, even for me. But I could simply ignore Father’s message if I wanted to. It was usually a terrible idea to ignore such things, because Father does know more than the rest of us and generally means well, and also because he could have made my life a misery if I went against him. There was this one time at Troy—but that’s a different story. But it’s not like being caught up with Necessity, which is a compulsion on the soul.

“What’s this I hear about you playing my gift upside-down to beat somebody playing Athene’s syrinx?” Hermes asked.

Hermes had invented the lyre when he was three days old, as a way to win my friendship after stealing some of my cows. He’d given it to me. He’d also promised never again to steal anything else of mine, a promise I didn’t quite trust him to keep. He was much too fond of playing tricks.

“Yes, I played the lyre upside-down,” I acknowledged. “Won the contest that way, too.” The whole messy business seemed long ago and almost unimportant. I do enjoy being an Olympian and having a proper perspective.

“It sounds like something I’d do.”

“Feel free to teach yourself to play it that way,” I said, and grinned at him.

“Well, joy to you with all of it,” wing-footed Hermes said, smiling as he departed.

So, with no foresight or warnings, and with one last longing look at the glowing disk (which would after all still be there and about to form into a sun whenever I wanted to come back into time at this moment to watch), I left too.

I was going to Plato, of course I was. I accepted Father’s message that playtime was over, whether I liked it or not. But I wasn’t quite ready. Another little while—another long subjective time—watching suns would have been exactly what I needed, but I wasn’t going to disobey Father to that extent. I didn’t want to mess up whatever mysterious plan he had, which presumably needed me to be still a little off balance. But I did have something to do first, something that would hardly take any personal time and couldn’t possibly make any difference, and which would make a good transition. I had a date with Athene.

The date in question was 1564, the day in the spring of that year when the orange tree in the courtyard of the Medici Laurentian Library bloomed. Athene had arranged it herself, the last time I had seen her, on Olympos, at the time of the Relocation, when Zeus moved the Cities from Bronze Age Greece to Plato. It had been a peace offering, after everything that had happened. “When you get back,” she had said. This would mark me being back. We could meet on neutral territory, in an extraordinary year, and after we’d talked I might feel better equipped for taking care of Plato. I wanted to see her. There were several things I wanted her to explain, and other things I wanted to explain to her. Parts of it I knew she’d never understand, but other parts of it she was the only person who ever could understand.

I hadn’t talked to her in decades, and while decades might often pass without our talking, these years had been full of things I wanted to share with her. Her experiment in setting up Plato’s Republic had had unexpected results, and had produced something genuinely new and of interest to both of us. The culture on Plato wasn’t the ideal Republic Plato had described. As I’d said to Maia long ago, we all live on somebody’s dunghill. But it was a completely different kind of human culture, one steeped in Platonism and philosophy and the dream of the classical world. And it was out there in the twenty-sixth century, vibrating with philosophical passion and full of people at least trying to lead the Good Life. I wanted to know what she thought about that, and share my thoughts. Creating Plato’s Republic had been Athene’s idea, after all, and lately I’d been wondering if there had been more to it than simply to see what happened and have somewhere to take Ikaros. Pico. I wanted to see him again too. I wanted to see his face when I told him what the Ikarians had made of his New Concordance since his apotheosis.