“It isn’t Chaos. Well, it isn’t only Chaos,” he said.

“That’s what Athene has been telling me,” Ikaros said. “How marvelous and unexpected. I have to rethink everything. I can’t wait to see it.”

“You’re there,” Athene said.

“Everyone is there. Everything,” Grandfather said. “I have a song about it. I’ll sing it tomorrow in Chamber.”

“Do you want to sing before the session?” Marsilia asked. “The way you legendarily did to stop the art wars?”

“Are you chair tomorrow?”

“I am,” she said, apprehensively.

“Who’s supposed to go first?” Pytheas asked.

“Androkles. Then Porphyry and the others. Then Sokrates,” she said.

“I’ll sing after Sokrates,” Pytheas said.

“All right,” she said, biting her lip as if she wasn’t at all sure.

“And Athene and I can debate, like at the Last Debate,” Sokrates said cheerfully, grinning at Athene, who smiled unrepentantly back. “For now, I only have one more question about what Zeus wants from us. What should we learn, experience, and comprehend?”

“Everything,” Athene said.

“Yourself,” Pytheas contradicted her at once. She glared at him. “Well, you should know yourself first, and then once you do, you can move on out to everything else,” he said.

“Do I take it Zeus didn’t specify?” Sokrates asked.

Ikaros laughed, and the owl flew off Athene’s arm at the sound and circled silently around the garden before perching back on her shoulder.

“He didn’t specify, but he seemed to approve of what Athene has been doing,” Pytheas said.

“So should we put knowledge ahead of excellence?” I asked.

“No,” both of them said together, and the owl twisted its head around to stare arrogantly into my eyes.

“Excellence must always be our priority,” Crocus said.

“Pursuing excellence will lead to everything else,” Dad said.

The gods, the owl, and Sokrates nodded in unison.

“I’ll sing the song for you tomorrow, and then you’ll understand,” Grandfather said.

“But that way Jason and Hilfa and I won’t hear it,” I said. “Or is it a song that only philosophers should hear?”

Grandfather looked at me. “Do you want to know?” he asked.

“Of course I do! How could anyone not want to know what the gods want of us?” I asked.

“She is a philosopher too,” Sokrates said, and exactly as it had when he had made this claim the night before, it simultaneously filled me with happiness and confusion. I knew I wasn’t really a philosopher, not the way Marsilia was, but I did love wisdom, and I did want to know the answers to questions.

“Everyone in the cities is more of a philosopher than even philosophers are elsewhere,” Athene said.

“That’s one of the fascinating results of your experiment,” Ikaros said. “Did you intend it?”

“Did Plato intend it?” she asked.

“Plato divided people by class because he believed souls really divide up that way,” Ikaros said.

“There are some people who are completely incurious, even here,” Athene said. “So to that extent he was right.”

“But the education here encourages inquiry.” Ikaros was grinning.

“I wondered about that, and about Plato’s intentions, and I let the Masters decide from the beginning where Plato was ambiguous, about how the Irons and Bronzes should live,” Athene said.

“Montaigne suggests—”

“Yes, but nobody had ever really—”

“Abelard, but I suppose that doesn’t count. Heloise herself—” Ikaros was completely intent on Athene.

“Kellogg says—” she interrupted.

“Ah yes, but even when there’s a wide liberal arts education it’s limited, so—”

“Boethius really managed to preserve so much of what was really valuable—”

“And the Dominicans, except that they got—”

“Yes, politics is always the problem. Marcus Aurelius couldn’t make Commodus—”

“And Poliziano couldn’t make Piero, some people—”

“Well, but Tocqueville—”

The two of them went on, in half-sentences, following each other’s thought, interrupting each other, citing authorities, and the rest of us stood there listening. Even Sokrates stayed quiet. It wasn’t like a debate, because they finished each other’s thoughts so much that they grasped each other’s points before they were even made, and the rest of us couldn’t do that. I hadn’t heard of half the people they mentioned. It was like listening to a truly brilliant person thinking, except that they were thinking too fast for us to follow and that it was both of them, their minds meshing. You could tell they’d been working together for a long time. It was like warp and weft when a shuttle is flying across the loom as fast as a Worker can send it, the colors dancing through each other and the pattern emerging into clear sight as it changes from threads of color to a length of cloth.

“Like Love’s Labour’s Lost,” Athene said.

“And that gets us back to Plato—”

Sokrates laughed at that, and they stopped and became aware that the rest of us were still there. Grandfather was smiling. The rest of us were staring at Athene and Ikaros.

“We were wondering whether it would be possible to have a city where everyone was a philosopher,” Ikaros explained.

“But who would fix the latrine fountains?” Crocus asked.

“Maybe the philosophers would do it as their recreation, the way Marsi fishes,” Jason suggested.

Marsilia really grinned at him when he used her childhood name. It was lovely to see. I was coming to like this pod idea. If I was going to be married, I was glad it was going to be with a group of people, all of them kind, and that Marsilia would be there.

“Things aren’t as divided up as Plato would have them,” Sokrates said. “I have learned much wisdom from craftspeople, and heard much windy bombast from supposedly wise men.”

“I don’t want to be a philosopher king and have to make political decisions I don’t know anything about,” I said, quickly. “I know I’m an Iron. I love my work. But anyone would want to know what the gods want of us. I might not understand. But I would like to hear it.”

Beside me Jason was nodding.

“In Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, he puts words into my mouth, as usual,” Sokrates said. “And they are more interesting than most such words, though I never said them. I am talking with this man, famous for his piety, and Plato depicts him quite as I remember him, as a bit of an ass. ‘Tell me then, oh tell me,’ Plato has me say, ‘What is the great and splendid work which the gods achieve with the help of our devotions?’ What is it, Pytheas, Athene? You say you care, about us, about the world. What are you doing? How can we help you? What is the great and splendid work?”

“We have projects,” Grandfather said. “This city was one of Athene’s. I’m going to be working on more of them. You can definitely help, all of you. You can learn new things.”

“But what is the great work?” Sokrates asked. “What is it for?”

“I’ll have to sing it.”

“Sing, Far-Shooter,” Athene said.

And Grandfather sang, there in the garden of Thessaly, and we listened, and I did understand, as much as anyone human can. And although I wept, I was not the only one.

III. Jason

We were out in the garden of Thessaly, where so much of the history of the Republic has been made. A little while after Pytheas had sung. I realized that Marsilia and Thetis were both not-looking at me in the same way. They’d be talking, and looking somewhere, and then one of them would catch sight of me, or glance at me, perfectly normally, and then immediately look away as fast as they could. I’d probably have noticed either one of them doing it, but when it was both of them it wasn’t a thing I could overlook. And that got me thinking, as we were out in the garden talking to Neleus and Crocus and the gods. I kept thinking about what Hilfa had said, that I wanted Thetis but Marsilia wanted me. I’d never thought about Marsilia wanting me, or wanting anyone, really, she seemed so self-contained. She had her life in order. She didn’t behave as if she wanted me. We were friends, comrades. And she knew how I felt about Thetis; she teased me about it. But the way she wasn’t looking at me now, maybe she did want me, maybe like I wanted Thetis, and maybe we should have talked about this before. Well, we weren’t gods, we couldn’t go back and talk about it any earlier than now, but we could talk about it now. We go on from where we are.