Now, fishing is essential, everyone knows that, and it’s also reasonably dangerous—even if you know what you’re doing you can get caught out by a squall or an underwater eruption—or the usual kind of eruption, come to that. That’s what happened to Aelia and Leonidas five years back. Their luck ran out.

It’s not really all that dangerous. Most days most of us come back. And we need the catch, we rely on it. There are no land animals on Plato, only what we brought with us, and the sheep and goats don’t thrive here the way they did in Greece, where they could graze on plants growing wild everywhere. Dion remembers Greece and talks about it sometimes, but it sounds strange to me, the idea of plants sprawling all over, plants nobody planted and nobody tends to. There’s none of that on Plato. Our plants take a lot of attention. We have to nurse them along. Keeping them alive is hard work for a lot of people, human and Workers. And we like eating them! But we want protein too, so we encourage the sheep and goats to give lots of milk and we don’t often eat them, only at special festivals. And so fish are very important, and fishing is important, and worth the risk.

It’s not only our City, the Remnant, that relies on the fish. We salt and smoke and freeze them and send them to the inland cities. Back in Greece, before Zeus brought them here, all the cities had been on islands in a warm sea, a deep blue sea with coasts close all around. (It’s hard to imagine a warm sea, though I’ve seen enough pictures of it to have a good idea of the color.) Now we and the Amazons are on the coast of a cold ocean, which has islands and other continents that we’ve only partly explored. The other cities, still in the same positions relative to us and to each other, are scattered about inland on a volcanic plain. Fortunately the Workers have built the electric rail, so we can move goods and people relatively easily. And fish are an important part of that, and only we and the Amazons can fish, so we do. And because fishing is both important and somewhat dangerous, naturally it’s classified as Silver.

Now, being properly Platonic, which we do try to be most of the time here in the Original City, that ought to mean everyone who works on a fishing boat is Silver. And most of the time that’s true. But for fishing, you need a minimum of two people, and three or four is better. And at that time I had two crazy crew members who weren’t Silvers at all. Hilfa is Saeli, which wouldn’t stop him being a citizen and having a metal; plenty of Saeli have taken their oaths. But Hilfa was young, not that I had any idea what that meant for a Saeli. And at that time, he wasn’t yet part of a pod the way most grown Saeli are. He had only been here for two years. He told me he was still studying—though whether he was studying us or fish or what, I didn’t know. And I say “he” but that’s not clear at all either. The Saeli need three genders to reproduce, but most of the time they don’t take any notice of gender at all, and while they have a bunch of pronouns for different things, gender isn’t one of them. Hilfa said “he” feels most comfortable for him in Greek, so that’s what I used. What he has between his legs seemed to be a sort of scrunched-up green walnut shell. I saw it often enough, because on the boat he mostly wore a red webbing vest and nothing else, being as Saeli are pretty much comfortable naked in temperatures that make humans want to huddle up. Dion says in Greece we were comfortable naked, and what that says to me is that we should have stayed there and let the Saeli have Plato. Not that they’re native here either; far from it. They showed up in a spaceship about twenty years ago, meaning twenty years after our Relocation. They first came here when I was ten. And weren’t we pleased to see them after trying to deal with the weird Amarathi! Before we met the Saeli, dealing with the Amarathi was almost a full-time job for Arete, being as their language is so odd that she was the only one who could speak to them at all and have any hope of getting through.

So I had Hilfa on the boat every day, and he’s maybe not as strong as a human, and sometimes he does things that make no sense, but he’s better adapted to the temperatures, and he’s keen, always at work on time and ready to stay on late if needed. It was Dion’s decision to take him on, a year and a half ago, when Dion was still going out most of the time, before he broke his leg slipping on the icy deck last winter. (I told you it was dangerous.) Dion’s lucky it was his leg and not his neck, and lucky Hilfa caught him before he slid off the side and into the water. I’d not been sure about Hilfa at first, but I’d come to appreciate him even before that. After that, of course, green hide or not, he might as well have been my brother.

My other crew member was even stranger, in her way. Marsilia’s not an alien, but she’s aristocracy. Not only that she’s a Gold, which ought to mean she spends her time on politics and philosophy, not fishing; but her father’s Neleus, and his stepfather is Pytheas. I wasn’t going to refuse her when she came asking, was I? But truthfully, it wasn’t so much because her dad had been consul umpty-ump times or her step-grandfather was a god in mortal form, or that she’d recently been elected consul herself. It was because I’d been in love with her sister Thetis since we were both fifteen and in the same shake-up class coming up to qualifications. Not that Thee had ever looked at me. I’d always been too shy to say anything to her about how I felt.

I used to wonder sometimes how it was that Thetis and Marsilia were sisters. Thetis looks like a goddess—tall, but slight of frame, so her breasts look like every boy’s dream of breasts, or maybe only mine, I don’t know. She has a broad brow, hair the color of obsidian flowing down her back, soft brown eyes—well, I suppose to be fair Marsilia has the same eyes. But you don’t notice them as much because Marsilia’s face is flat, and she has jutting teeth. Their skin is the same velvety brown. But Marsilia’s squat, with broad hips, which is good for the boat. She keeps her hair short, like most people. Thee looks fragile, but Marsilia can pull a full net out of the water. Marsilia definitely takes after Neleus, and so I’d think Thetis takes after their mother, but Erinna is the Captain of the Excellence, and anyone less fragile you have never seen. Even now, when she must be sixty, Erinna has muscles on her muscles, as they say.

It’s funny when you think about it.

The way we interpret Plato’s intentions here now, we have regular Festivals of Hera, where people get paired up and married for the day, and hopefully babies are born as a result. We also allow long-term marriage, and participation in our Festivals of Hera is voluntary, which it isn’t in Athenia and Psyche. It wasn’t here to start with. There was a while when we didn’t have any Festivals of Hera, because of that, but we voted to reintroduce them on a voluntary basis years ago, I’m not quite sure when. It was after the Relocation, but before I was born. If you volunteer, you get matched up with a partner by lot, and you spend a day in bed together. All the children born from that festival are considered to be your children. When a woman has a baby, she can either choose to bring it up herself or give it to the nurseries to be brought up there, whatever she prefers. It’s her choice, some do one and some do the other. Probably about half of us grow up in nurseries and sleeping houses, and the rest in families. I was festival-born myself. I don’t have any idea who my parents were, and not much curiosity about it either. When I took my oath at sixteen, along with all the other sixteen-year-olds, everyone who had participated in that festival seventeen years before and was still alive came along to the procession and the feast afterwards.

So with the marriages at the Festivals of Hera, all the pairings are arranged within the same metal, always, because they say that’s what leads to the best children. When it comes to other kinds of marriage, people are supposed to choose people of their own kind too, to keep the metals from mixing more than they’re mixed already. But we’re human, and the metals in our souls are already mixed up, the way metals are under the ground, and so although everyone tries to discourage you, it’s not forbidden to marry someone of a different class. (Here, anyway. It is forbidden in some of the Lucian cities. In Athenia and Psyche they don’t have marriage except for the Festivals of Hera, in Sokratea they don’t have classes, and in Amazonia they have lots of orgies and hope for the best, or that’s what I’ve heard, though I didn’t see anything like that the one time I was there.) Even if you do have parents of the same metal, you can’t tell how the kids will come out.