“Maecenas is right, hard as it is,” Maia said. “There’s nothing we can do for them this year.”

I erased what I had written without showing it. I wanted to help Aristomache, and I sympathized with the plight of the people in the Lucian cities, but Maecenas was indeed right. There was no way we could do it immediately. Aristomache nodded. She had tears falling down her cheeks, but she ignored them. Maia hugged her, and she embraced her back fiercely.

“Sorry,” I wrote.

“It’s not your fault, Crocus,” Maia said, looking down at the wax. “We’ll do it as soon as we can.”

“I hate feeling so helpless,” Aristomache said, breathing harshly.

I hated it too.

IV. On the Railroad

“What you should do is build a railroad from here to our cities,” Aristomache proposed in Chamber one day that first winter. “Then we could travel between them rapidly and safely whenever we wanted, and all the cities could be linked together.”

“What is a railroad?” Lamprokleia asked. She was in the chair that day. She was a Master, a women of Athens who had studied at the Academy under Plato’s nephew Speusippos.

Aristomache explained, the rails, the rooms drawn along on them by an engine, which would be powered by electricity, though she said that in her day they used a different, dirtier method. She had prepared drawings, which I examined carefully as they were passed around. They were sketches, and not technical diagrams, but the system seemed simple enough to extrapolate from what she had drawn. They could operate on rechargable solar batteries, much bigger ones than the ones we Workers used. We were already planning to build more stations to convert sunlight into electricity.

“That sounds like an excellent system,” Maecenas said. “Though a lot of work to build.”

“Workers can do much. Grading tracks, surveying beforehand,” I wrote, and Maia read it aloud for me.

“Is it properly Platonic?” Lamprokleia asked.

“Plato knew of no such thing, but he did not know of Workers either, or electricity for heating and light, or printing. In our original Tech Committee we considered that there are technologies Plato would have embraced for the City had he known about them, and others that were contrary to the spirit of what he wrote,” Maia said. “We did not consider railroads then because we had no need for them. How could we, with one city on an island? Now it is a different matter, and ending the isolation of the Lucians seems to me like an excellent idea.”

Lamprokleia set up a committee to plan a railroad, and made me a member. The system took longer to survey than to build once it was surveyed, for as always practice illuminates difficulties theory elides. Once it was in place it allowed us to move goods and people easily between the cities, as Aristomache had said. The free movement of people led to the establishment of metics, citizens of one city who lived in another, and to people more easily changing their citizenship. This has generally been perceived as a benefit to everyone.

V. On Divine Intervention

Later on the day Aristomache wept for the ignorance of her city, Maia spoke to Arete about this and asked her to fly to the Lucian cities and deliver messages from their delegates and an explanation from our Council. She was reluctant to do this at first, as she had never flown so far, but she saw that it was her duty and so she did it. Thus the citizens of the lost cities did not have to survive in ignorance for a long time, even though we could not send an expedition to them until spring, and although they did not achieve electricity or railroads for more than a year.

Our own gods, Pytheas and his children, lived among us as citizens, most of them here, Porphyry in the City of Amazons, and Fabius in Lucia. They used their divine powers for us as they might have used any other powers—Arete used her ability to fly to reach the other cities, as I might have used my treads had it not been too dangerous. My treads are superior to human feet in covering long distances rapidly without weariness, and Arete’s ability to fly is superior to my treads. Pytheas said we should be wary of relying on the power of the gods to help us when we could achieve them by our own efforts.

The most valuable thing our gods did was when Porphyry brought us more Workers, from approximately the same place and time Sixty-One and I came from. Like us, they were not conscious when they arrived, but achieved consciousness after some time in the City. This varied from four years to twelve in individual cases. We treated them always as children, citizens in potentia, and never as slaves, educating them from the beginning.

At the same time Porphyry brought us the Workers, who made survival possible, he brought seeds and seedlings of Plato-hardy plants to replace those that could no longer thrive in this climate. After that, he came to Chamber and addressed us.

“I have brought Workers and plants,” Porphyry said. “I feel this intervention and going out of time to achieve it is entirely justified. Furthermore, it was sanctioned by Zeus. But in general I wish to keep his edicts and not bring things here from other times. Plato should be self-sufficient. That’s not to say I won’t help if it’s absolutely necessary, if there’s something we need and can’t manage without that I’ve not thought of. But please don’t pester me to fix things all the time.”

“That’s almost exactly what Athene said,” Maia pointed out.

Porphyry looked uncomfortable. “At the Last Debate, one of the points Sokrates made was that the City was sustained by her direct power. I don’t want people to say that now about me.” He hesitated and looked around the room, catching eyes here and there. “I have some prophetic ability, though I think of it more as an ability to see the patterns in things. We’ll meet aliens, and then we’ll meet humans from Earth in this time, far in the future of the time we came from. We will trade with them. We need to be ready for that. When the humans find us, I want them to think we colonized this planet the same way they colonized theirs.”

“My children will settle down into this world,” Pytheas said to me afterwards. “One day you’ll worship them. They and their children will be your pantheon, appropriate to this place. But for now, let them grow up. Let them be human while they can. They’ll be gods long enough.”

Eight years afterwards I thought of this conversation while I was working with Arete, educating a class in preparation for their oath-taking. This was the first class to contain Workers as well as human ephebes, and so I had been invited to help. I was enjoying the stimulation of all the questions they came up with.

“Plato thought of his system for humans, but it works very well for Workers,” Arete said as we watched the class go off debating noisily with each other, making necessary but not unnecessary distinctions between human and Worker.

“Yes. He could imagine humans who grew up in a Just City, but he could not imagine what it would be like for either Workers or gods,” I said. “But we all have souls that yearn for excellence and justice.”

Arete laughed with surprise. “We all do,” she said.

A little while after that, I was talking to Klio on a train ride where we happened to find ourselves together. Klio was another Master, younger than Aristomache and Lamprokleia but older than Maia. She came from the twentieth or twenty-first century, and had been a classical scholar there. We found ourselves talking about religion. Klio was an Ikarian, and she was still in the process of adjusting her ideas after the apotheosis of Ikaros. She was not disturbed by the direct intervention of Zeus in our affairs—she said she had always considered that he and Ikaros’s primal God the Father were identical. “You don’t need to come to the New Concordance from Christianity,” she insisted.