“Arete isn’t there. She’s at the spaceport,” I said.

Pytheas hesitated. “Then—”

“No, come on. It’ll be fun to see their faces,” Hermes said.

7

JASON

Now, if you were an incarnate god and you died and then resurrected and came back, the way Christians and Ikarians say Yayzu did, what would be the first thing you’d say the first time you saw your children?

Pytheas came in from the garden looking about my age, with all the silver gone from his hair. He was wearing a white kiton trimmed with a conventional blue-and-gold book and scroll pattern, and pinned with the pin that meant he was a Gold of the City. He went straight up to Neleus, and what he said absolutely flummoxed me. It was the last thing I’d have expected to hear in the circumstances. And I was right there. I can report his exact words, and they were: “Why didn’t you tell me about Hilfa?”

Neleus blushed at that, which meant that, given the color his skin was to start off, he turned almost purple.

“You were always telling us to sort things out for ourselves,” Neleus said. “You never wanted to hear anything about negotiations with the aliens.”

“You don’t think the name of Athene would have got my attention?”

“Too much of it,” Neleus said.

Hermes laughed aloud.

“And she had asked the girls specifically not to tell you,” Neleus went on. “Hilfa didn’t seem dangerous. We could have told you any time there was need. We didn’t tell my brothers or Arete either.”

“What’s this about Hilfa?” I asked. It wasn’t really my place to speak in that kind of company, and they’d been ignoring me so far, but I wanted to know what kind of trouble Hilfa had managed to find, so that I could help the dear dunderhead out of it. How could anyone imagine he might be dangerous?

And that’s why I found myself with Marsilia and Thetis and the two gods an hour later, after a lot of talking and a walk in the cold, on the green basalt street outside Hilfa’s house down by the harbor, three streets over from my own sleeping house. Neleus had gone off to take Alkippe to bed and then go himself to the spaceport, but all the rest of us were there. They had shared an unlikely story about Athene giving Hilfa to Marsilia and Thetis in a box, and beyond that a lot of questions and not enough answers. The only way to get the answers was to talk to Hilfa, seemingly. I insisted on coming along to look out for Hilfa, and Thetis backed me up until Pytheas gave in and let us come along, trusting her social judgement.

Down in the harbor, instead of sconces there’s a strip of light running along the sills of all the buildings, lighting everyone’s faces from underneath. On Hilfa’s street, where a lot of Saeli lived, the lighting ran a little green, which made Thetis and Marsilia look as if they were made out of gold, while Pytheas and Hermes seemed as if they were made out of marble. I could see this really well, because they all turned to look at me. I’d insisted on coming along; now they wanted me to announce that we were there.

It was easier to do it than say anything, so I scratched on the door.

Hilfa appeared, wearing loose-woven dark-purple pants, with his chest and back bare. I had thought he would be disconcerted seeing a bunch of important people wanting to talk to him in the middle of the night—not that it was so late really, but I’d had a long day. Hilfa didn’t even blink. He invited us all in and apologized for not having enough chairs. He knew everyone except Hermes. Marsilia introduced them. To my surprise, Hermes said something to Hilfa in Saeli, which I took to be a greeting. Who would have thought he’d know it? He hadn’t used it to greet Aroo. Travel and trade, I thought; he’d probably run into Saeli on other planets where humans had contacted them.

We sat where we could. Hilfa scurried around putting all the lights on, which made the room very bright. Thetis and I sat on the bed, against the wall. Pytheas took one chair, and Marsilia the other, while Hermes leaned against the table. Then Hilfa made a dash into the little back room, which wasn’t much more than a big closet really. He brought out wine, and Marsilia got up to help him mix it and hand the cups around. He brought four matching red-pattern winecups, and two Saeli-style beakers. He gave one of those to me, with a smile, and kept the other himself. Mine was incised with geometric patterns in the porphyry inlay, so I couldn’t quite figure how he meant it. It might have been treating me as family, to have the other cup that didn’t match, or it might have been meant as an honor. There was no telling, and it wasn’t the time to ask. I decided it came out positive either way, and smiled at him over the brim. Other times when I’d had a drink at Hilfa’s place we’d used winecups, but there had never been more than three or four of us. It was a biggish room, with one small red-and-blue geometric rug, and the walls were painted white, with no frescos or other art. It had always seemed quite empty to me, until now, when I’d have thought it full if I hadn’t come straight from the press at Thessaly.

“Athene is missing,” Pytheas said as soon as we had all settled down and sipped our wine.

“Missing? Lost?” Hilfa asked, turning to him from where he had been putting down the wine bowl on the table. The swirls on his skin faded a little. Up to that moment I thought there had been some mistake, that Hilfa couldn’t be anything but what he seemed: a slightly puzzled Sael who had somehow wandered into all this by mistake. “Is she—” He hesitated. “Do I say she? Are there no special pronouns for divinity?”

“No, you simply say she,” Marsilia said. “Ikarians capitalize it when they write, but we use the same word.”

“Do you mean to say that She is lost?” Hilfa asked. I could all but hear the capital.

“Yes. What do you know about it?” Pytheas leaned forward, winecup forgotten in his hand and nearly spilling. Thetis gently took it from him and set it down on the tiles by her feet.

“I don’t remember anything before I hatched here, you understand?” Hilfa said. He seemed more confident and relaxed than normal. I thought I had been wrong to come; he didn’t need my help.

“That’s what you said at the time, but you could talk,” Marsilia said.

“I knew some things,” Hilfa said. “I don’t know how much is normal for newly hatched Saeli. I have not wanted to ask, because sometimes questions reveal too much about what you do not know, when you should.” He looked at Marsilia, with a twitch of expression that I thought meant apology. “I know that’s not the Socratic way.”

“The Socratic way regards deception very badly,” Marsilia said.

Hilfa inclined his head. “You told me not to reveal my origins.”

Marsilia sighed. “It’s true, we did.”

“Plato’s censorship and deception wars with Sokrates’s desire to question everything all the time,” Hermes said.

“We in the Cities have noticed this contradiction,” Pytheas said wearily. “Go on, Hilfa.”

Hilfa turned to Thetis, who was sitting next to me on the bed. “I remember you looking after me, and that is the first thing I remember. Before that there was no me. Let me fetch paper.”

“Paper?” Hermes asked.

“Quicker to do than to explain,” he said, and darted back into the little storeroom.

“I think he’s telling the truth,” Thetis said. The instinctive twitches of my own liver said the same thing. Saeli are hard to read, but I was used to Hilfa, and he didn’t seem to be prevaricating at all, even as he talked about dodging revelation.

Pytheas nodded. “I think so too. Hermes?”

Hermes was staring intently at the door through which Hilfa had vanished, and shook himself when he was addressed, the way Hilfa often did on the boat when I called him back from one of his reveries. “I sense no deception either,” he said.

Hilfa came back with paper, a standard sheaf of Worker-made letter paper. He set it down on the table. Hermes moved to give him room, and took up position leaning casually against the wall. Hilfa took a pen and wrote for perhaps a second. I don’t think I could have written my name in the time he spent writing. It didn’t look like he was writing, either; more like he was doodling. The pen danced over the paper, and then he was done. He walked over to hand it to Pytheas, and I could see it was covered all over in neat script, where I’d have counted on a sketch.