“Deception is a crooked road to truth, but that’s where it’s leading you,” I said, standing up.
“What?” She looked up at me, confused.
“You’re confessing your deception because in feigning loving truth you’ve truly come to love it,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“And so you are worthy to be gold. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I made a mistake and was deceived, but Ficino saw into your soul. There are people whose souls are ideally suited from birth for them to be philosophers, but there are others whose souls have to be trained, like vines on a trellis. We built the trellis in the city, and though you started twisted you grew straight.”
“Like Simmea’s legs,” she said, utterly confounding me.
“Simmea’s legs?”
“When we came, Simmea’s legs were bandy. Now they’re straight and strong. You’re saying the same thing happened to my soul?”
“Yes,” I said, and I hugged her hard. “Your children will start clean, without any bad memories or twisted beginnings. They’ll prove everything Plato believed, become what he wanted. We masters are helping you and you will help them and they will make the Just City.”
She hugged me back. “I’m free,” she said, marvel in her voice.
22
SIMMEA
One morning Kebes and I went from breakfast to follow Sokrates around the city as we often did. We found him questioning a worker planting bulbs outside the temple of Demeter. “Do you like your work? Do you feel a sense of satisfaction doing it? Are there some jobs you enjoy more than others?”
“I don’t know why you keep doing that when you know they’re not going to answer,” Kebes said.
“I don’t know that,” Sokrates said. “Joy to you, Kebes, joy to you Simmea! I know they haven’t answered yet, but I don’t know whether they might answer in the future. I don’t even have an opinion on the subject.”
“Everyone knows they’re tools,” Kebes said.
“They’re not like tools,” Sokrates said. “They’re self-propelled, and to a certain extent self-willed. That one is making decisions about where to space the bulbs, precise and careful decisions. Those are going in a row, look, and then that one at an angle. It’s deliberate, not random. It may be a clever tool, but it may have self-will, and if it has self-will and desires, then it would be very interesting to talk to.”
“A tree would be interesting to talk to—” Kebes began, but Sokrates interrupted.
“Oh yes, wouldn’t it!” We laughed and followed him on.
A few months later, early in Gamelion, Kebes and I were walking along with Sokrates debating one morning when we happened to come back to the place outside the temple of Demeter where the worker had been planting bulbs when Sokrates asked it questions. A set of early crocuses had come up, deep purple with gold hearts. They were arranged in an odd pattern, two straight lines connected by a diagonal and then a circle. Sokrates glanced at them. “Spring after winter is always a joy to the heart,” he said, though he never seemed to feel the cold.
Kebes frowned at them. “It’s almost as if—no. I’m being silly.”
“What is it?” Sokrates asked.
“Well, you remember the worker was planting bulbs here when you asked it questions? The pattern the bulbs are planted in looks like N and then O in the Latin alphabet, which is like the beginning of non, the Latin for no.”
Sokrates stared at Kebes, and then back at the bulbs. “As if the worker were trying to answer me as best it could, with the materials it had? And as if it answered in Latin? Why would it do that, I wonder?”
“Latin was the language of civilization in the West for centuries,” I said.
“But it didn’t finish the word. Perhaps it ran out of bulbs. Or perhaps I’m imagining the whole thing,” Kebes said. “Seeing a pattern where there isn’t one.”
“It must have understood my questions, to answer no,” Sokrates said, ignoring this. “My questions were in Greek.”
“They were. It doesn’t make much sense,” I said. “But it does look deliberate. Let’s go on and see if it used this pattern in any of the other plazas.”
It hadn’t. Lots of the plazas had crocuses, but all of them were arranged in four neat vertical rows.
“What did I ask it?” Sokrates mused. “If it enjoyed its work?”
“I think so,” I said. “If there was anything it preferred doing. A whole pile of questions at once, typical of you!”
“So I can’t know which, if any, the no was intended to answer!” He ran his fingers through his hair, which was standing on end anyway. “Where’s Pytheas?”
“I think he’s in the palaestra this morning.”
“We must find him at once.” Sokrates set off rapidly in the wrong direction. Kebes and I got him turned around and walking just as fast towards the Florentine/Delphic palaestra.
“Why do you want Pytheas?” Kebes asked as we trailed him.
“The first time I asked about workers he said he had a belief that they were tools,” Sokrates said. “I want to know who told him that.”
“Ficino told us that, on the Goodness when we came,” Kebes said. “Probably it was the same for him.”
Sokrates stopped dead and stared at us as if he’d never seen us before. “I think it might be better if I spoke to Pytheas alone,” he said, and turned and walked off so fast that I’d have had to run to catch up with him.
Kebes and I stared at each other. “What was that about?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Do you think the worker really was trying to communicate?”
“Well, it seems unlikely on the face of it, but it also seems like a very unlikely coincidence that in only that one spot where Sokrates was trying to talk to the worker, the flowers should spell out something that could mean no. I’m almost more interested in why he acted like that about Pytheas. What would Pytheas know about workers that we don’t?”
“Pytheas knows some very odd things sometimes.”
“He reads a lot,” I said, defensively. “No, but what?”
Kebes frowned. “When we’re talking to Sokrates, sometimes Pytheas says odd things, or sometimes he says ordinary things and Sokrates reacts oddly. Like when he mentioned his parents that time, and Sokrates acted as if he’d said something completely bizarre.”
I remembered that. I shook my head. “That’s Sokrates behaving oddly, which … isn’t unusual for Sokrates. Do you think he’ll be in Thessaly this afternoon?”
“I’ll be there to see,” Kebes said.
“So will I. But first I have my math group. See you later!” I went off to join Axiothea and the others, puzzled.
Sokrates was at Thessaly when I got there at our usual time. Pytheas was there before me, and Kebes arrived a moment or two later. “I brought some nuts,” he said, pulling out a twist of paper.
“Raisins,” I said, pulling out a matching twist.
“Olives,” Pytheas said, smugly, bringing out a whole jar of olives stuffed with garlic.