I took the citizenship course, which was full-time, so Jason had to find somebody else to work on the boat over the winter. Then I took my oath and was classified Silver, as I had hoped and expected.

We live in Thessaly. Camilla and Alkippe came to live with us, but little Dion opted to stay where he was in the sleeping house. He comes to visit us quite often though, and so does big Dion. Big Dion declined the rejuvenation treatments. He said he was used to being old and didn’t want to change. Marsilia says a surprising number of people made this choice, but it will be self-correcting over time, and also she thinks some people will change their minds as it gets closer to their last minute. Sokrates took the treatment almost at once.

I brought an egg out of the sea and woke it up. Marsilia and Thetis had babies too, so our pod has another generation. Jason and Marsilia and I go out fishing. Thetis brings up little children. Sokrates wanders about the City asking everyone questions and encouraging everyone else to do the same thing. Sometimes he wanders further, to other cities, or to space, but he always comes home to the pod and we are all delighted to see him when he does. We all try to learn and understand the universe and ourselves, and to help the gods. It is a good life.

V. Alkippe

I don’t have a metal yet because I’m only nine years old, but I’ll be Gold most likely, though Jason says I shouldn’t count on it and coast; philosophy takes hard work with mind and body as well as what’s in your soul. I do work hard in school, mostly, although I hate Pindar.

I live in a house in the Original City called Thessaly, and I’m one of the first humans to live in a pod. We used to live around the corner with my grandparents, and we still see them all the time. I have five pod-parents, and I love them all, and also Camilla, my pod-sister, she’s a year older than me. We also have new brothers and sisters, Leonidas and Perictione and Simmias. Simmias is Saeli, but the others are too little to be any fun yet. Humans take a long time to learn to talk, but it doesn’t make things any easier for Saeli, only different, Hilfa says.

I only met my real father once. It was on Mount Maia, last winter. I was skiing fast downhill. Skiing is a thing we learned from the space humans, and it’s amazing fun. People do it on Earth and other planets, but not in Greece because you need snow, which they didn’t have there. But we have it here, and so the space humans introduced us to skiing as part of art exchange, and it’s the best thing they offered in my opinion. In our pod, Sokrates and Camilla and I all love it.

It was one of those days when it’s really cold but the sun is shining. The air felt almost sharp in my lungs, and I felt full of life and energy and enthusiasm. Camilla was ahead, in her red hat and jacket that Thetis had made her, matching the purple ones she had made me. I could see her whipping her way down the trail, and I knew Sokrates was coming along behind. I was racing fast downhill, curving around the rocks that stuck up out of the snow. I thought I’d taken the curve too tight and was going to crash straight into a big greenish rock, which would have been bad. Even with autodocs to put you right again afterwards, you don’t want to get all smashed up in the mountains. As I leaned into the turn I prayed to Hermes, and I whizzed past the rock, almost close enough to smell it. Nothing marked the snow stretching clear downhill but Camilla’s tracks.

As I straightened up, there was Hermes skiing along right beside me, at precisely the same speed. He was grinning at me. I recognized him immediately. It wasn’t like the time when Jathery was imitating him and showed up in Thessaly. This really was Hermes. He skied along beside me for a little while. I didn’t know what to say. I knew he was my father, because Pytheas had explained it all to me, and to my mother, who seemed to find it all much more amazing than I did. But knowing somebody is your father is pretty meaningless when you have five parents already and he’s a god and a stranger. I smiled back at Hermes, tentatively. And then he was gone, without any conversation or anything.

Sokrates said he saw him, and also that there were three sets of parallel ski tracks when he came down to where Hermes had been. Camilla hadn’t seen anything, so she wanted to trudge back up and see the tracks, but we didn’t because the sun was going down and we needed to get to the station to catch the train home.

Camilla’s real parents died in a sailing accident a long time ago. Jason has told her about them, and so has Dion, who was also their friend and is kind of like a grandfather to Camilla now. We’ve spent a lot of time examining the question of parents, especially with Sokrates. I may write a dialogue about it when I’m older. There are lots of ways I don’t really know what it’s like to have a god for a father, or what it means. But I remember how Hermes looked when he grinned at me that day as we were skiing, and that’s good enough for now.

VI. Sokrates

My dear, I understand why you want me to write an account of my long and fascinating life, but I think you understand too why I am not going to.

Ikaros says excellence, perfection, and other Forms are dynamic. Plato believed they were unchanging and eternal. I think at the moment that it is only by constantly examining everything that we reach a state of knowing what we do not know, which is the beginning of understanding. When we ask questions, we open doors. When we write things down, we fix them in their form. And this is so even when it is the account of an enquiry, even when it is the story of a life. I have heard people quote Aristophanes’s jokes as if they were laws—worse, I have seen people take them as guidelines on how to live and love because they found them in Plato. So I will not write for you about my experiences in Athens or in the Just City, or my adventures at Potidaia or in space. I will happily tell you about them if you come to me and ask, but then of course I will have questions for you too. I always do. And since you are divine, you only sometimes want to give me answers.

I will keep on inquiring and examining everything, and I hope you will not be too angry that I refuse your request. You must have known it was likely that I would. I remain, as always, your gadfly.

23

CROCUS

I. On Long Life

The first space humans who found us proved to be obsessed with profit, equating it with self-worth and pursuing it even at the expense of excellence. The levels of our mutual incomprehensibility extended far beyond language.

Nevertheless, they sold us autodocs in exchange for star-fuel from the Saeli ship, lanthanides, and finely cut obsidian sheets which the Saeli and Amarathi also prize. These wonderful autodocs allowed aging humans to be restored to their functional peak of thirty-five. Further use allowed them to stay at that peak of physical health until reaching the age of around two hundred, when telomeres run out and death comes fast. Glaukon, one of the Children who was injured by a Worker when trying to escape in the first years of the Republic, was the first to use the autodoc, which enabled him to grow a new leg and walk for the first time in decades.

I do not know, do not remember, if I was the one who injured him. I decided long ago to act as if I were, because I bear the collective guilt even if not the individual guilt—I could have done it, whether or not I did. Such things may be forgiven by the victims, but never by the perpetrators. Nor was it undone even when Glaukon ran from the autodoc laughing and crying—seventy years of immobility is not so easily erased.

Interactions with other space humans later allowed us to buy first the chemicals the autodocs needed to run and later the technology necessary to produce them ourselves from placental tissue and other human waste.