Necessity (15 page)

“Yes, of course we do. The other modes are bad for people's souls.” I looked up beyond the tree branches at the sky, which was an intense shade of blue I'd never seen before.

“And you don't find it monotonous?”

The answer to that one was very easy, as it's actually laid out in Plato so I could simply paraphrase. “Do you find a diet of healthy food monotonous so that you'd go out and eat unhealthy food and tasty poisons and make yourself sick? How much more so for the soul.”

Hermes laughed. “How pious you sound. Platonic piety.”

I looked back at him. For an instant he looked like a dappled animal with big eyes, and then he was himself again. “Well, it seems very strange to me to be saying these things, which are truths that everyone agrees about. Even in Lucia these days they accept limitations on the modes of music. I don't think even in Sokratea, where they question everything all the time, they question that. If anyone had ever doubted it, the example of what happened with the Lucians proved that Plato was right about this.”

Hermes sat up a little and arched a brow. “Proved it? How?”

“Well, it's obvious. They played music in the Mixolydian mode, and they tortured people to death and plagiarized. It led their souls away from justice.”

“It could be the other way around.”

I considered that for a moment, staring off at the trees again and the veins on the little yellow leaves. “I suppose it's possible. The torture and plagiarism could have led to harmful music arising. But that's no better.”

“There are a couple of good historical examples on Earth of changing the music and the whole culture changing. They're much later than Plato though. One is Southern Gaul in the chivalric era, and the other is the phenomenon they call the Sixties.” He smiled. “They were both a lot of fun.”

“So you agree Plato was right?” I asked, looking directly into his eyes, which for an instant had red and yellow Saeli lids, looking strange in his human face.

“Well, maybe. But I think I'd get bored. And you'd be surprised how many people intoxicate themselves immoderately and eat things that are bad for them. Lots of people in other cultures don't consider a party with quince paste and watered wine as exciting as you might.”

I thought about that, and wondered again about the humans on the ship. Would they be eating unhealthy food and drinking unmixed wine and listening to soul-destroying music? If so, how could we help them understand? What if they tried to introduce such things on Plato? Would there be people who would be tempted? Young people, feeling rebellious, who could find ammunition to do themselves real and lasting harm? I could hear a chirping music now, sounding like a small child learning to sing. I looked around for it and saw the bird, sitting on one of the branches, its beak open and its throat distended. I had of course read about birds singing. The music it made was safely in the Dorian mode. “I don't find the idea of food that's bad for me at all appealing.”

“That's because you've never had any.” He was smiling and watching me through half-lowered lids.

“Maybe. But I find the idea of music that's bad for my soul terrifying,” I said honestly.

“What if you hear some when we go to talk to Kebes?” Hermes asked teasingly.

“I hope I don't, but if I do, I'll listen to proper music to get my soul back into harmony when I get home,” I said. I was afraid, but my fear was held at arm's length. I was here for Alkippe, after all, and the thought of her made me strong. If she sang to me in her clear high voice it would drive out any dangerous music.

“Very wise,” he said. “So Kebes sang a song and we don't know where he learned it?”

“He didn't sing, he played it on a syrinx, a kind of multiple flute thing. We don't know where he got the syrinx from, either. Grandfather says Athene invented it. But Kebes always hated Athene.”

“Huh. So why did she choose him to have part of her puzzle?” Hermes asked.

I looked back at the bird. It had stopped singing but was sitting looking back at me, head cocked. I could see every feather. I wondered if they were hard or soft. “It's hard to imagine Kebes co-operating with Athene over anything. His religion teaches that she's a demon. And she's the one who set up the City in the first place, and Kebes hated the City and Plato. Or that's what I've always heard, from Pytheas and Arete and Dad, who were there. Dad helped Pytheas skin Kebes after the contest. He says it was disgusting but he learned a lot about anatomy.”

“Hmm. Where did this sanguinary musical contest happen? On Apollo's volcanic cinder, or back in Greece?”

“Greece,” I said, ignoring his rudeness about my home. “Lesbos, the northeast corner. A city called Lucia.” The bird was still looking at me. The tilt of its head reminded me of the Saeli bow. “Hermes, what kind of bird is that? It's not an owl, is it?”

He spun around quickly. The bird took alarm at his rapid movement, or perhaps his attention, and flew off, whirring through the branches. “No, it wasn't an owl. It was a jay.”

“Was it spying on us? Who do jays belong to?”

“Probably not,” he said, leaning back. “And it's gone now anyway. Go on. When did this contest happen?”

I brought my attention back to the conversation. “Oh, before I was born. It was immediately before the Relocation. Forty years ago.”

Hermes laughed. “We're outside time, so there's no ‘ago' about it. But if it's before Thera exploded then it's more like four thousand years before the moment we stepped out of Hilfa's sitting room.” He spread his hands demonstratively. I saw them as olive-skinned, and then black, and then green. I looked away at the trees, which stayed so reassuringly the same from moment to moment.

“It makes me feel dizzy to think about it,” I admitted. “I don't understand how this works at all.”

“Time is like a place we can step in and out of. And we can be in time in many different times and places, though never twice in the same time. We're outside time now. We could go back in to an instant after we left, either right now or after spending months or years of our personal experienced time here. Or we can go back in somewhere else, which is what we're going to do, and later we can go back to your home time an instant after we left.” I kept my eyes on the vibrant green of the leaves as he spoke.

“So what you call time is the material world, the sensible world?” I asked.

“You could say that. And where we are now is another world, if you like, the next layer out.”

The World of Forms, I thought. “And where is Athene?” I asked.

“Where she really shouldn't be. She should be either somewhere in time or here, and instead she's gone around it. Underneath it. There was a time—well, not a time, and not a place either. But maybe it's easier to imagine if you think of time as a place, a location. It's hard to talk about. Long ago, Father … built both time, and Olympos like a shell around it. I don't know how. Before that there was only him and Chaos. And they say that time will one day end, and after it there will be Chaos again. And that's where Athene is, out in the primal Chaos that surrounds both time and Olympos.”

“And she's been there for two years, since she gave us Hilfa?”

“No.” I glanced at Hermes. He seemed to be stable again. He smiled at me in a kinder way. “It is hard to follow, I know. We have no idea how long she has been there. She could have gone into time this afternoon, stepped into your life of two years ago and given you Hilfa then, and then directly after that she could have gone to Lucia four thousand years before and given his part of the puzzle to Kebes. Or it could have been centuries for her. We don't know when she did this, in her own time frame, only that she's there now.”

“And we're outside time and there's no hurry?” The very idea of hurrying seemed alien to the air we were breathing.

“Well—normally that would be true. But I don't want to stay bound by Necessity any longer than I have to—it's exceedingly unpleasant. And we don't know if there's time where Athene is, or if so how it works, or what's happening to her there, and whether duration there has any connection to how things work here, or in time. So actually we should collect our puzzle pieces as rapidly as we can.”

“And do you have any idea why she did it this way—giving different people the pieces instead of leaving it all with Hilfa?”

“It does seem most peculiar, doesn't it? Even using Hilfa. I sincerely hope it was explained in that letter my big brother wouldn't let me see, and that it was a good explanation too. The Enlightenment, ugh.”

“I've never heard of the Enlightenment. What's so awful about it?” I asked, curious.

“The wigs.” He shuddered and gestured with both hands an armspan from his head, and for an instant I saw a huge elaborately curled monstrosity, with a Saeli face peeking out beneath. My stomach lurched. I quickly looked back up into the peacefully waving branches. “They all wore the most appalling powdered wigs, all the time, huge ones, men and women.”

He was much too frivolous for me. He was right to think he was better suited to Thee. “Well, we're not going there,” I said, briskly. “But I don't know the exact year the City was founded, I'm afraid. Athene never told us.”

“We'll go to the Thera eruption and work back,” he said. “I think you'd better try negotiating with Kebes in the first instance. You have more of an idea of their culture. Normally I'd take the personal time to learn, especially as it's so interesting. As it is, it might be better if you make the first approach.”

I nodded without looking away from the fascination of the branches weaving across the sky. “All right. But what should I offer him?”

“Tell him you've come to collect whatever Athene gave him, that ought to be enough. And if not, try the gold in your new purse.”

“I suppose that might work,” I said. Everything I'd heard about Kebes made him seem likely to be sufficiently corrupt to accept a bribe.

“Failing that, we can offer to teach him some inappropriate songs,” Hermes said. I could hear the amusement in his voice. “What do they wear?”

“Kitons,” I said. I looked down at my cold-weather fishing gear. The Amarathi-made waterproof jacket seemed terribly out of place in the beautiful golden sunlight of this grove. “I should have changed before we left.”

“Appearances are easy,” Hermes said, and as fast as that we were both wearing kitons, his pale gold and mine red, both with embroidered borders in a blue and gold book-and-scroll pattern exactly like the one Pytheas had been wearing, and both pinned with identical gold pins. Mine had been on my jacket collar before. Hermes seemed solidly and completely himself now, as much himself as the trees were themselves. “Red is a good color for you. You should wear more red.”

I didn't say it didn't matter what I wore because I'd never be Thetis so I might as well not make any effort. I didn't say that I had dreamed about him for the last eight years, and I hadn't even known he was a god. I did not in fact say anything. I looked down and saw the kiton and the loam I was sitting on. Then I rubbed the kiton between my fingers. It felt combed almost smooth, like good Worker-woven wool. “Isn't this supposed to be the World of Forms?” I said. “The true reality outside the cave we live in that only feels like reality? So how can you change things here?”

“That's only a Platonic thought experiment, an analogy.”

“Are we in the third hypostasis? The hypostasis of soul?” The Ikarians and the Neoplatonists of Psyche believed that there were five layers of reality, and that things could change in the lower three.

“It's a bit more complicated than that,” Hermes said. “Things don't age and die here, but they can change and grow. And I haven't truly changed your clothes, only the appearance of them. It's still your rain suit really.” He stood up. “Come on.”

“But I can feel it,” I objected.

“It's simply sensation,” he said. “That's as easy to change as any other sense.” He held out a hand, and I took it. It felt real, he felt real, but so did the wool of the red kiton which I knew was an illusion.

He pulled me to my feet, and once again there was no sense of transition. We were standing in the glade on Olympos and I was enjoying the touch of Hermes's hand, and then we were floating in the air above an immense volcanic eruption. It was night. A great plume of flame was billowing up through the air below us in red and gold and orange and all the colors of fire. I had seen plenty of eruptions, but never from this close, and never below me. The fire flickered and changed shape against the darkness. We weren't falling, or moving at all, but the fire seemed to be reaching up great greedy arms toward us. I hate to confess such a loss of control, but I screamed.

Then we were back in the glade. I was still gasping and shuddering. I bent over, taking deep breaths as my stomach lurched, afraid I might throw up. Hermes took no notice. “Northeast Lesbos, you said? Let's try fifty years.”

We were standing at the foot of a hill, by a sea so blue it almost hurt my eyes. The gentle slopes of the hills were covered with olive trees, but there were no buildings or any other signs of civilization. “Is this the place?” Hermes asked. Two grey and white birds startled into flight as he spoke. They were much bigger than the jay I had seen on Olympus. I watched them fly off, circling over the water and calling to each other raucously. I couldn't tell whether this was the right spot. “Zeus moved the cities to Plato, not the locations. So I don't know. If I see buildings I ought to recognize them.”

“Could be earlier, could be later. Let's try earlier.” The shadows shifted a little, and the birds vanished, but nothing else changed. Then the shadows shifted again and we were standing by a busy harbor, full of little fishing boats with colored sails. More of the grey and white birds were flying around them, squawking indignantly. A woman with a basket of fish almost bumped into me, and when I apologized she told me to look where I was going. Two naked children pulled themselves out of the water right in front of me, dripping. “How about this?” Hermes asked. “Those buildings are really anachronistic. It's a good thing they got taken off to your planet.”