So anyway, Erinna and Neleus got married, way back, even though she’s Silver and he’s Gold. And they did mix up the metals, and Marsilia is Gold, as I said, and she works on my boat what time she’s not too busy with Chamber affairs. But her sister Thetis is Iron, and she works with little children.

Looking at it that way, even though she’s from a family with a god in it, I should feel Thetis is below me. I always felt the opposite, though, that she’s infinitely above me. It’s not that she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet. But she’s extremely beautiful, and—she’s Thee. Every time I see her my blood pounds in my veins, and that has been the case since we were both fifteen and I first met her in Arete’s communication class. I thought she didn’t care about me at all. I figured she knew who I was—Jason who took his oath the same time she did and worked on the same boat her sister works on. I doubted she thought about me once a month. I didn’t see her all that often. But when I did, even if I only caught sight of her in the agora, I was happy for days afterwards. I didn’t want anything from her, simply for her to exist and for me to see her sometimes. Maybe this is the kind of love Plato talks about in the Phaedrus, I don’t know. No, because I always knew I’d be only too delighted to make it carnal, if that could be an option. But I thought it couldn’t, and there it was. What I thought is that it didn’t do her any harm for me to feel this way about her, and it did me a lot of good, because it gave me something in my life that was special, that lifted it above the everyday.

Marsilia pulled one of the gloaters out of the tub as Hilfa and I set our tack. Once that was done there was nothing to do for the moment but glide smoothly into the harbor. “It’s so big, and it looks so delicious. I could almost eat it right now, raw!” She mimed taking a bite.

I laughed. “I hope some of these get to the tables while they’re still fresh and they don’t decide to salt them all down. How about you? Do you fancy it, Hilfa?”

Hilfa laughed his slightly forced laugh. He’d learned it the way he’d learned Greek. A laugh was a word to him, a part of human communication. I didn’t know whether the Saeli really laughed or not. I’d learned to read Hilfa’s expressions, a little, working with him for so long, and I thought one of them meant amusement, but I wasn’t sure. He knew I was joking about him eating a fish, but I didn’t know if he really understood what a joke was, or why I might think it was funny to make one. “I don’t eat fish,” he said, seriously.

“Silly Hilfa. Why do you work on a fishing boat if you don’t eat fish?” I teased.

“I like the waves and the wind,” Hilfa said, seriously. I wondered whether he would stay and take oath or leave for another planet on some Saeli ship. I hoped he’d stay. I liked him. And he might. He liked the waves and the wind, after all.

“We’re glad to have you working with us,” Marsilia said, as the jib came around a final time.

“Also I can study the Platonic fish,” Hilfa said, entirely serious, as usual. “The radial symmetry of fish on this planet is fascinating. Everything in this ocean is symmetrical. I keep hoping we will one day pull something out that isn’t, but we never do.”

“We’re never going to,” I said, thinking of mosaics of Greek fish and their strange stretched shapes. Then I saw Marsilia stiffen, staring at the quay.

“Trouble,” she said, then shook her head at me as she saw me twitch. “Only for me. Probably some kind of political disruption. We’re signing a new foreign relations treaty, and maybe some of our negotiations came unstuck.” She let the gloater slide back into the tub. “It looks as if I’m going to have to rush off. Can you two manage unloading without me?”

“Of course,” I said, without even a sigh. Knowing that she’d have to dash off to a crisis, or have one prevent her from showing up now and then, was all part of having Marsilia working for me. I wondered sometimes whether part of the attraction of working on the boat for her was the fact she couldn’t be interrupted while we were out at sea. But I knew a lot of it was that the sea was in her blood, from her mother—she too liked the waves and the wind.

I was easing Phaenarete into dock, so I didn’t see who had come to interrupt Marsilia this time until we were ready to tie up. I got ready to toss the line, and saw to my astonishment Crocus standing ready to catch it. And behind him, wrapped in a silvery-grey cloak that rippled in the wind, stood Thetis. My breath caught, as always. I wished somebody would paint her like that, in that cloak, on a cloudy day, standing on the little grey triangular cobblestones of the quay, with the black stone warehouses with their slit windows all along behind her. If they did, I’d want them to put the painting in Samos, my eating hall, where I could stare at it whenever I ate. Thetis had a grace and poise like the nymphs in Botticelli’s Summer, but a far lovelier face.

Crocus caught the rope with the attachments at the end of one of his great arms. I saw the golden bee painted on it flash as it caught the light. I said Marsilia was an aristocrat, and she is, but compared to Crocus she was little better than me. Crocus was a Worker, a machine, huge and metallic, one of our two original Workers. He had huge arms, no head, and great treads instead of legs. He and Sixty-One were the only people who had been here for the entire history of the City. He had been a friend of Sokrates. He was a Gold, one of our philosopher kings. He was probably the most famous person on the planet who wasn’t a god. I had friends among the younger Workers, but I had never even spoken to Crocus.

He tied the line rapidly and deftly around the bollard. “I can’t imagine what use he could ever have had for that skill,” Marsilia said in my ear.

I was staring past him at Thetis, who was crying. It made her look lovelier than ever, beautiful and vulnerable and sad, in need of protection. “Do you know what’s wrong with her?” I asked.

“Thee? It could be anything. She cries really easily.” She sounded much more irritated than sympathetic.

“Why are you so unkind to her?” I asked.

“Is that unkind?” Marsilia asked. “I try not to be. I love her. She’s my sister. But she’s all emotion and no thought, and I’m the opposite. It’s hard to be sisters. Everything seems to come so easily to her. Do you think if I looked like that, people would look at me the way you’re looking at her? Do you think I’d want them to?”

“It’s hard to imagine you wanting them to,” I said.

Marsilia snorted. The quay was near enough for her to spring ashore, and she did.

“We can manage if you have a family emergency,” Hilfa said. I don’t know where he got expressions like that from.

“Trouble?” she asked Crocus, ignoring Thetis.

“News, and a complication,” he replied, in his slightly odd mechanical voice. Before either of them could say anything more, Thetis ran towards Marsilia, who braced herself and clutched her barely in time to prevent both of them falling over the edge of the quay into the icy water. “Grandfather’s dead,” Thetis said.

That was news. Old Pytheas, Apollo himself. He was one of the Children, and so he must have been eighty or thereabouts, but he’d seemed well enough when I’d seen him singing at the Festival of Artemis a few days before. What did it mean for an incarnate god to die?

Marsilia patted Thee’s back and made soothing noises. Hilfa went to fetch the cart to get the fish into the warehouse. I began to swing the heavy tubs of fish onto the hoist, to be ready when he came back with it.

“Is this the news or the complication?” Marsilia asked Crocus. She sounded taken off balance. It must be strange to have a grandfather who’s a god. I wondered what she felt about him.

“Neither,” he responded. “Though I should give you my condolences. The news and the complication are the same thing.” Because he didn’t have eyes, I had no way to tell where he was looking. I couldn’t tell whether he was paying any attention to me at all. I looked away from Marsilia and poor Thetis and saw Hilfa coming back with the cart. Dion was helping him push it over the cobblestones, and little Camilla came skipping along beside them. I was looking at them, and moving the tubs on their swivel along the sloping deck, and I almost didn’t take it in when Crocus said: “A human spaceship is in orbit.”