The Just City (Thessaly, #1)

by Jo Walton

She hasn’t forgiven me for the moon missions being called the Apollo Program when they should have been called after her.

Word.

I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.

“Clever,” I acknowledged. “Also, doing Plato’s Republic on Atlantis is … recursive. In a way that’s very like you.”

I raised my chin in the universal sign for negation, and saw at once that he did not understand. “No.”

“Oh Pallas Athene, please take me away from this, let me live in Plato’s Republic, let me work to find a way to make it real.”

Let your old life be to you like a dream on waking. Shake it off, as if you had come here fresh from Lethe.

“Yes! And when it comes to art, the best is definitely the originals.” “Jupiter!” Atticus swore. “They won’t be able to tell if they’re originals or copies.” “Their souls will,” Ficino said.

“Does that show good people performing good actions?” I asked, quietly, so that Atticus wouldn’t hear.

“I’m on the Censorship Committee, so I’ll get to them before anyone.”

(The river Lethe is full of brilliantly colored fish. Nobody ever mentions that when they talk about it. I suppose they forget them as soon as they see them, and so they are a surprise at the end and the beginning of each mortal life.)

My strongest emotion was an ache at how beautiful it was, and a great admiration for Michaelangelo’s skill in creating it. That humans could do such things made me long to emulate them, to follow them in creating beauty. If this was a possible thing, it was a thing I wanted to do.

Sokrates turned to him. “Ah, Kebes, I see that you have learned to trust, at least to trust that I will not report what you are saying.”

“If there weren’t any buyers there wouldn’t be any slavers,” Kebes said. “They’re part of it. And that they have high intentions makes it worse, not better. And they did the same to you.”

“What everyone knows, Sokrates examines,” I said.

Plato wrote in the Republic that defective babies, and babies of defective parents, should be exposed.

We had kept careful records of all the “marriages,” so carefully planned out with an eye to eugenics. (Klio and Lysias shrank from that term, but would never tell me why.)

Sokrates agreed that we ought to love all children as if they were our own, but disputed the value of the training and education the city would give, and immediately we were back on familiar ground from a new angle.

“Plato says the masters should cheat to get the best babies for the next generation. He says they should expose any babies born to people not the best. He says they should choose mates that will produce the best children, and let us think that it’s chance.”

And I felt it was perfectly fine—indeed better, as I didn’t want her—that we didn’t have sex; but if she was having sex with anyone it ought to be me.

We’ve established, I think, that what Plato knew about love and real people could have been written on a fingernail paring.

“You can’t name him. It would make too much of the connection.” She wrapped him in a white cloth, twisting it expertly. “Choosing names for them would? Not carrying them in our bodies for all these months and then going through all that?”

I wondered idly if perhaps some of my soul had gone into the baby and left me this empty husk without passion or desires.

“Soon the whole city is going to be paved in Socratic dialogues,” Pytheas said. “It’s so appropriate that I’m amazed they didn’t think of it from the start.”

“There isn’t an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.”

“Christianity is one of those circles.” I put my finger down in one. “Jesus is just as real and just as much Father’s son as I am. He’s one of the Elohim who incarnated. The eras when that was the dominant ideology in Europe tend to be a little inimical to me, but I do have friends there. And they made some wonderful art, especially in the Renaissance, which is where Ikaros comes from.”

“It might be better to suggest it to Ardeia and Adeimantus and whoever else is on the Baby Committee.”