“You bring a feast! And I as always can offer crystal clear water and the shade of my garden,” Sokrates said, leading the way out. It was a little chilly to sit outside, and I kept my cloak around me. Once we were seated and passing round the food, he began. “I believe I have discovered evidence of conversational thought among the workers.”
“I’m not convinced,” Kebes said.
“It’s not necessary to be convinced by one piece of evidence,” Sokrates said. “But it’s indicative that it might be worth further investigation.”
Sokrates unveiled his plan, in which the three of us were to do nothing but go around talking to every worker we saw, in Latin, while he did the same in Greek. “Do any of you know any other languages?”
“A little Coptic, if I still remember any,” I said.
“Italian,” Kebes said. “It’s like simple Latin without the word endings.”
Pytheas spread his hands. “I was born in the hills above Delphi. How would I have encountered anything but Greek?”
“How indeed?” Sokrates muttered. “I believe I can recruit Aristomache into this project,” he said. “She speaks two other languages of Europe. I forget their names now, but she told me so. With all those languages it may be easier to get them to answer.”
“Or they may not,” I said. “And we’re going to look awfully silly trying to have dialogue with workers.”
“As cracked as me,” Sokrates agreed cheerfully. “Report any results, positive or negative. But results might be slow—like the bulbs.”
“If they can speak, why don’t they?” Kebes asked.
“I don’t think they can speak. This is just a theory, but I suspect they can hear and move and think without being able to speak. They have no organs of speech, no mouths, no heads. But they have things like hands, and they may be able to write. That one found a way.”
“They have nothing like ears either, how do you know they can hear?” I asked.
“I conjecture that they have the ability to hear because the response to my questions suggests that it heard them. I conjecture they have understanding for the same reason.” Sokrates shook his head. “I think it would be wrong to consider them people, but we don’t have a term for anything like them. Thinking beings that aren’t human! How wonderful if they are able to reason and communicate!”
“Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?” Kebes put in.
“In their livers, obviously,” Sokrates said. “What makes you think minds are in the head?”
“Closest to the eyes,” Kebes said.
“And people with head injuries are often damaged in their minds, while people with liver injuries continue to think perfectly well,” Pytheas added.
“Huh.” Sokrates touched his head. “But they have no heads, and you’ve all been assuming that the head is the seat of intelligence and therefore that’s why you’re all so reluctant to consider that they might be intelligent. Well, now. Perhaps you’re right, and perhaps I am. They might help sort it out.”
“They’re made of metal and glass,” Pytheas said.
“So?” Sokrates looked puzzled.
Pytheas shook his head, defeated.
“The next problem is that there’s no way to tell them apart! Have you ever found one?”
I shook my head. “They sometimes have different hands. But I don’t know if they change them or if it’s always the same hands on the same ones. And of course some are bronze-colored and some are iron-colored.”
Pytheas nodded. “What Simmea said. I’ve never tried to distinguish them.” Whatever it was Sokrates had imagined he knew about them clearly didn’t amount to much.
Kebes smiled. “Actually, they are easy to tell apart. They’re numbered. Lysias showed me once, when I was helping him.” When he was going through his period of making Lysias think that Kebes would begin to strive for excellence through his encouragement, I thought. “The numbers are very small, down on their side, above the tread. They’re long. But they’re all different. So we can tell them apart, by checking the numbers.”
“Are they numbered in Latin or Greek?” Sokrates asked, leaning forward, urgently interested.
“Neither,” Kebes said. “They’re numbered in numbers.”
Sokrates looked blank.
“You know, zeroic. Like page numbers in books,” I said. I pulled a book out of the fold of my kiton and showed him. It happened to a bound copy of Aeschylus’s Telemachus.
“Those are numbers?” he asked. “How do they work?”
I wrote them down in the dust, from one to ten, and showed him. “That’s all there is to it. For twenty, or for a hundred—”
He understood it at once. “And you have all known this all this time and never mentioned it to me?” he said.
“It never occurred to me that you didn’t know,” I said.
“Pah. My ignorance is vast and profound. I like to know at least what I do not know.” He traced the numbers again. “Zero. What a concept. What a timesaver. What vast realms of arithmetic and geometry it must reveal. I wish Pythagoras could have known it, and the Pythagoreans of Athens.” Then, like a hound who had started after the wrong hare, he got immediately back on track. “So the workers are labelled with this?”
“That’s right,” Kebes said. “All of them.”
“Who did this?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is the purpose?”
“Telling them apart. That’s how Lysias uses it, anyway.”
“Did you note the number of the one planting bulbs?”
“Sorry, no, it didn’t occur to me.”
Sokrates sighed, sat back and absently ate a handful of olives.
“So the numbers are like names?” I suggested. “That seems to argue against them being people. Why not give them names?”
“Maybe there are too many to name?” Pytheas suggested.
“How many of them are there?” Sokrates asked, licking olive oil off his fingers.
We all shrugged. “Lots,” Kebes said. “I was surprised how many when I saw them at their feeding station.”
“They eat?” Sokrates asked.
“They eat electricity, Lysias said.”
Sokrates bounced to his feet. “Come on, show me this feeding station!”
I swallowed an olive hastily. We set off, with Kebes leading the way and Sokrates close behind.
Pytheas walked beside me. “This is crazy,” he said.
“Sure. Kind of fun, though. And what if they actually were thinking beings with plans?”
“They’re not. They’re tools. Everyone knows that.” Pytheas looked a little unsettled.
“What everyone knows, Sokrates examines,” I said.
Kebes led us to a block on the east side of the city, between the streets of Poseidon and Hermes, not far from the temple of Ares. The whole block was one square building, relatively unexciting. I’d never particularly noticed it. There was a lot in the city that was empty, awaiting a later purpose, or used by the masters for unknown purposes. I wasn’t especially curious about most of it. This building had decorative recessed squares set all around it at ground level. There were no windows. A key-pattern frieze ran around the top. There was another key pattern over the door.
“What now?” Sokrates asked.
“Now we wait for a worker, because Lysias has a key but I don’t. But you’ll see when a worker comes.” Kebes leaned back on his heels. I squatted down and ate more raisins. Pytheas and Sokrates began to debate volition, and whether workers could be considered to have it.
“Ah, here we go,” Kebes said, when the sun was beginning to slide towards dinner time.
A bronze-colored worker came down the street. “Joy to you,” Sokrates said. “I am Sokrates. Do you have a name?” It ignored him utterly and approached the building, not by the door but directly at one of the recessed squares. The square slid open in front of it and it vanished inside.