It was amazing, really. A count by birth, a Humanist by inclination, befriended by Ficino, imprisoned by the Inquisition, saved by Lorenzo and Savonarola, taken to the City an instant before death, snatched to Olympos by Zeus, set to work with Athene, abandoned by her in Bologna mere months before it was due to be sacked, and still his optimism was undimmed. There aren’t many like him. “Do you know where Athene is?”

He looked wary again. “She was going somewhere she thought was too dangerous for me. And since you’re here, it seems she was right. Do you know where she was going, or should I explain?” He glanced at the oblivious guzzling stonemasons as if worried that they might be able to speak Greek after all.

“Give me whatever she gave you to give to me.” I put out my hand.

“It’s in my cell.”

“You left it in your cell among a lot of thieving Augustinians?” Optimism is not always a virtue.

He shrugged. “It’s inside my copy of Ficino’s Plato, which they think is magic and won’t touch. Besides, I’ve given a copy of it to Raffaele Maffei, in case.”

“Why don’t you simply keep it in your pocket?” I growled. “And Maffei? The Volterran encyclopaedist? Why Maffei?”

“When you’re not a count in Renaissance Italy, you’re always getting your pocket picked. And Raffaele is an old acquaintance. He thinks I’m my own illegitimate son.”

“Let’s hope for the copy in your Plato,” I said. I put my full winecup down on the table and stood. We wouldn’t be driven to Maffei’s copy in any event. If the original copy was missing, I could go back to a time when Pico had it and recover it—ten seconds after he had left it alone in his cell, if that’s what it took.

“It’s incredibly frustrating. Wherever I am, I never have access to all the books I need,” he said, swallowing his wine and putting the cup down. “Here I have all the Christian books, even those that will be destroyed when Julius gets here in November, but not the ones we rescued from Alexandria. My memory’s good, but it’s so useful to be able to check things.”

“Are you done with the ones here?” I asked.

He nodded. “But I wish there were somewhere we could have everything.”

We walked together through the streets. Bologna is a remarkably medieval city. It was a provincial nowhere as Roman Bononia, and thrived in the Middle Ages; but in my opinion, while the food is usually good, it was never really beautiful until the renewal of the periphique in the twenty-second century. True, it had pillars and colonnades, but as we walked in their shade I couldn’t help noticing that all the pillars were different. There was no harmony, no true proportion. Nothing matched. It was all a medieval jumble. Occasionally I noticed a lovely classical pillar, and felt an urge to rescue it and put it somewhere it could be comfortable.

“You’re not so angry now?” Pico asked.

“I’m not unjustly taking out my anger on the wrong person,” I said. “When I find Athene will be soon enough to indulge my wrath.”

“You really did look like an avenging angel, with your cloak flaring around you like that,” he said.

In Pico’s New Concordance, Olympian gods are classed as angels. I think of it as a metaphor. I had changed the appearance of my clothes to be locally inconspicuous. Everyone’s cloak flared in 1506. But there was no point in arguing.

*   *   *

There’s nothing wrong with brick, brick can be beautiful, but it can easily be overdone. The church and monastery of St. Stephen was a mess. It contained different sections built at different times. It had been owned by a number of different orders, and they had all built onto it, none of them completing the designs of their predecessors. It was like a chambered nautilus where each chamber had been designed by a different committee. “It’s as if the Renaissance had never happened,” I murmured to Pico as we passed through a room containing an enormous pulpit in the shape of the Holy Sepulchre, with scarcely room for two people to pass by around it. It would have done well enough in a correspondingly huge and Gothic nave, here it was ridiculous and unserviceable, almost intimidating in its size and impracticality.

“The Renaissance is thriving right now in Florence and Rome,” he said with a sideways smile. “It’ll make it here eventually. I hope.”

We came out into an enclosed courtyard. I was glad to see the sky and the sun again. There was a piece of sad mosaic on the wall—abstract, only a pattern, but what made it sad was the presence of two tiny fragments of porphyry given pride of place. Porphyry is a speckled purple rock which, over time, had in Medieval Europe come to stand for the lost wonders of Rome. The Egyptian quarry it came from was lost after Rome fell, and so were the skills of making steel tough enough to work it. It’s a volcanic rock, and it’s therefore present in quantity on Plato. The Workers can work with it easily, so there’s lots of it everywhere and we have all kinds of things made out of it. But here and now, porphyry symbolized the lost heritage of Rome, and here set in the wall were these two minute pieces, all poor Bologna had left of the ancient world. They had not entirely forgotten what it meant, but they couldn’t come any closer than this to regaining or re-creating it. I wished somebody in Bologna would pray for my help so that I could give them something better than this. And they were about to be sacked, too. It really wasn’t fair.

Pico led me into a cloister. The shadows of the pillars were falling across the open central space. A heavily bearded monk was sitting on the wall reading Latin poetry, a cat curled on his lap. Pico frowned. “We should wait here,” he said, quietly. “We’re not supposed to have guests in our cells, and I’m not supposed to be in my cell at this time of day. He’ll go to Vespers soon.”

He nodded to the monk and took a seat against a pillar on the other side of the cloister. “Won’t they expect you to go?” I asked, sitting beside him and looking over at the well in the center of the courtyard.

“I’m only visiting. They know I’m a scholar.”

“He won’t speak Greek?” I asked, smiling at the monk, who smiled back uncertainly.

“Here?” Pico asked. He was right. It was even less likely we’d find someone who understood Greek here than among the stonemasons.

It was too much. “If she had to leave you somewhere in 1506 with Christian books and a university, why aren’t you in Florence?”

“There was a book here I needed. And there are people there who know me too well not to recognize me, even if I tell them I’m my own son. They poisoned me the first time, after all. And Soderini’s in power, and the Medici will be back soon and feeling vengeful—I could hardly bear to see it. It’s the last days of the Republic.” He stopped. “The Florentine Republic, that is, not Plato’s Republic.”

“They probably don’t spare a thought for Plato’s Republic.”

“I do,” he said. “As well as working on my new theory of the universe.”

“Newer than the New Concordance?” I wondered whether to tell him now what had been going on among the Ikarians on Plato.

“The New Concordance arose out of realizing that the Republic wasn’t working, couldn’t work, because Plato was wrong about the nature of the soul. The philosophical soul can feel love, in addition to desiring the Good. Love isn’t simply a way towards opening the soul to God. So I had to rethink everything. They were doing the same in Psyche, coming to different conclusions but working on the same basis. If Plato had been right about that, it would all have worked properly. The problem on Kallisti was that we got overfocused on tweaking practical reality.”

“Do you still think all the authorities agree with each other?”

“They do if you look at them the right way. They were all trying to reach the truth, and it’s amazing how much congruence there is. But I have lots of new information. My new theory is an attempt at integrating that.”