“I’m seven and a half. Next I’ll be seven and three-quarters, then eight, then eight and a quarter, then eight and a half, then—”

I stood and stretched as Alkippe demonstrated her grasp of counting by fractions, which was her favorite game this month. I prayed to Zeus, father of gods and men, that she would reach all those ages, and beyond them, ninety-nine and a half, ninety-nine and three-quarters … Her empty bed was a crumpled mess. Thetis’s bed against the far wall was neatly made. I couldn’t hear Ma and Dad moving around on the other side of the partition either. “We must be really late. Come on, quick!”

We ran into the fountain room. “What are you doing today? Fishing or meetings? Or fishing and meetings?” Alkippe called.

“Meeting this morning, if I haven’t missed it, and then fishing this afternoon.”

“Granddad would have woken you in time so you wouldn’t miss the meeting,” Alkippe pointed out.

“True.” She was so smart, she lapped up learning, and she had that kind of common sense too, like Ma, because she was absolutely right, Dad wouldn’t have let me miss the meeting.

*   *   *

My life was good and full of daily pleasures. In addition to the satisfactions of my political work, I had valuable and healthy work fishing, where I could see Jason every day and keep an eye on Hilfa. I enjoyed my food. I loved Alkippe more and more each day as she came to the age of reason. I had Dad’s full approval, and now that I had been elected I felt worthy of it. I made a real effort to get on with Ma and Thetis, and even though they sometimes seemed more alien to me than the Saeli, I had been doing better at this recently. So things were going along smoothly and my life was good. I’d hug Alkippe, or put my back into hauling nets with Jason and Hilfa, or get some groups to agree to a compromise in Chamber, and realize all at once that I was happy. I also felt I was doing what Plato wanted, though I suppose strictly speaking he wouldn’t have had me doing it until I was fifty.

The morning was all meetings, and there was an important debate scheduled for the evening. But in between, I went out on Phaenarete on the tide and had a delightfully busy afternoon hauling in fish. After a day out on the ocean, I had expected a couple of hours to get ready for the evening’s Council session. At the very least, I’d have appreciated a hot drink to warm myself up, and time to change into a formal kiton. As it was, Crocus collected me on the quayside and I had to take the chair in my fishy work clothes, on no notice, and deal with the most difficult and controversial of all topics—human recontact, and what the gods really want us to do. Oh, and Grandfather was dead, and I hadn’t had any time yet to think through what that meant.

Chamber was filled with a babble of voices, human and Worker. Nobody was in the chair, and only a few people were sitting down. Everyone seemed to be waving their hands in the air and raising their voices. All the members of the Council of Worlds and half the Senate seemed to be here, crowding in together along with a few random concerned citizens—all Golds, of course. I looked at Crocus for help. Because he didn’t have a head I could never tell where his focus was, but he must have seen my glance. “You’re chair tonight, Marsilia,” he said.

“That’s right,” Dad said. “You’re consul, take charge.”

They had each been consul multiple times and knew much better than I did how to take charge of the Chamber. I’d have been vastly reassured with either one of them in the chair, and so would everyone else. But Dad was right. I’d be judged on how I acted in this emergency. I took a deep breath, wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my thighs, and walked down towards the chair. Maia had sat there, and Dad, and before them legendary figures like Ficino and Tullius and Krito. I was thirty-five years old, and I was consul. And it wasn’t ambition, or anyway not in a bad way. I didn’t only want the glory. I wanted to serve Plato. I might wish in my cowardly liver that somebody else were in charge in this crisis, but it was my responsibility, so I swallowed hard and did my job.

“… any of Pytheas’s children!” Diotima was saying loudly, her voice cutting above the babble. She was my fellow consul. I had mixed feelings about her. Our names would be recorded together forever in the name of the year, though I didn’t know her well or like her much. She came from Athenia, and was polite and religious and conventionally Platonic. She was small and neatly made, with dark smooth hair, silvering now. She was fifty or so, since nobody can run for planetary office without having read The Republic, and Athenia, always stricter than everyone else, still did not allow their citizens to read it before they turned fifty. Here in the Remnant we read it as ephebes, as soon as we had taken our oaths of citizenship at sixteen, after our shake-up year at fifteen. Golds and Silvers have to read it, and the others can if they choose. It always surprises me how many people don’t bother, or give up part way through.

I sat down in the chair. “Quiet,” I said, much too quietly. Crocus echoed me loudly, and everyone fell silent and stared at me. “I call this emergency session of the Council of Worlds to order,” I said. “Members of the Council and senators may remain. Others should leave.”

A handful of people left. Everyone else sat down, higgledy-piggledy where they were, like stories of the earliest days of the Council eighty years ago when Sokrates had been here and regularly violated procedure. Some of the benches had been replaced since then, but many of them were the same. I found that both comforting and intimidating. Crocus rolled over and settled himself in the section where benches had been removed to make a space for Workers, and humans in wheelchairs.

“Who has the details of what has happened?” I asked.

Klymene, one of the Children, and the oldest person still serving on the Council, stood up. She was bony and wrinkled, and looked as if she were made of old tanned leather. Her hair was no more than a straggle of thin white strands stretched over her scalp. She had the log of our communication with the ship, and summarized it for us in her thin elderly voice. “They don’t speak Greek or Latin. We started off using Amarathi, and were at the point of asking Arete to help when Sixty-One worked out that they were speaking a variant of English, which it could mostly understand. So after a brief delay we were able to communicate with them that way. They are humans, not from Earth but from a planet called—” she squinted at the printout, holding it farther away from her eyes, “Marhaba, but they have been to Earth. They asked permission to land and wanted to know who we were. According to the plan, we told them the name of the planet and that our cities were founded seventy years ago. They have also been in communication with the Saeli ship in orbit.”

“Where’s Aroo?” I asked, realizing for the first time as I looked for her that none of our Saeli senators or councillors were present.

“Not here. But the meeting isn’t due to begin for an hour and a half. We all came here now because we heard the news. The Saeli don’t think that way,” Dad said.

“It would be good to make some decisions quickly, and we need information. Can somebody find Aroo and bring her back here?” I asked. I looked around for people who Aroo was likely to pay attention to, and noticed Parmenion sitting near Crocus. “Parmenion?” He had been consul three years ago, a quiet man in his forties, an excellent lyre-player and composer.

He nodded, accepting the errand, and rolled his chair out.

“Meanwhile,” I said, looking out over the room, at my friends and allies and political rivals, “we have a plan for this situation. It’s been in place since Maia and Klio were consuls. Unless there’s some really good reason not to follow it, that’s what we ought to be doing, not running around in circles trying to make new decisions in advance of information.”