“If the workers do have intelligence and free will, then there’s a real issue here,” Klio said. She patted the worker. It did not respond.
“Slavery,” said Sokrates. “Plato allowed slavery, did he?”
“Free will and intelligence are different things,” Pytheas pointed out.
“Different things?” Sokrates repeated. “We’ve been discussing them together, but is it possible to have one without the other?”
“Very possible. There are logic-machines in my time that can play games of logic so well that they beat a human master of the game,” Klio said. “That can be considered intelligence. But they don’t have volition or anything like it. They are machines that simulate intelligence. The way these prioritize their tasks, and come here to recharge, simulates intelligence.”
“And it’s very easy to see volition without intelligence in animals and small children,” Lysias said.
Klio nodded. “Developing one seems almost possible, but both at once? Surely not. But choosing to plant the bulbs so they would answer your question would take both.”
“Explain to me about the bulbs,” Lysias said.
“I was attempting to have a dialogue with a worker, asking if it liked its work and if there was any work it preferred and that kind of thing, while it was planting bulbs last autumn,” Sokrates said. “Today the crocuses it planted came up, and they spell no in Latin.”
“In English,” Klio corrected, pushing her hair back behind her ears. “Which seems more plausible, except for understanding the questions in Greek.”
“Did anyone else witness this?” Lysias asked.
“I did,” I said. “Both parts of it.”
“And so did I,” Kebes said.
“Kebes was the first to recognize the word this morning. And we investigated the other patches of bulbs in other places in the city, and they are all arranged in rows, not in anything resembling letters.”
“From which direction did they read as letters?” Lysias asked.
“North to south,” I said, after it seemed that Kebes and Sokrates were having trouble remembering. “And that was the direction the worker was facing as it planted them.”
“It does sound as if it would take both,” Pytheas said. He looked hopefully at the worker sitting so stoically plugged into the socket.
“Unless Simmea or Kebes went back and rearranged the bulbs to play a trick,” Lysias said.
“I would never do such a thing!” I said, hotly indignant.
“Neither would I!” Kebes said, but I could see that Lysias didn’t believe him.
“It’s certainly the most logical explanation,” Klio said. She sounded relieved.
“I shall consider that explanation and continue to explore the question,” Sokrates said. “Will you permit me to continue recording the numbers of the workers here, so that I can tell if I’ve talked to one before?”
Lysias and Klio looked at each other. “I suppose it can’t do any harm,” Klio said.
“But you must promise not to keep coming back in here through the worker doors,” Lysias said. “It could be dangerous. You can talk to them in the city.”
“How is it dangerous?” Sokrates asked. “Do you think I’m going to plug myself into the sockets?” He laughed when he saw our faces. “I promise I won’t plug myself into the sockets, or slip under a worker’s treads, or any such thing. Is that good enough?”
“I’ll stay and help,” Lysias said. “The rest of you can get to your dinners.”
I was about to offer to help, but Sokrates nodded. “If you’ll talk to me while we work,” he said. “I’m exceedingly interested in what you know about intelligence and volition. Do the workers actually want things?”
“Come on,” Klio said, gathering the rest of us up. “Do you want to eat in Sparta?”
“Sure,” I said.
“It’s bean soup.”
“Delicious! We haven’t had bean soup in Florentia since last month.” Pytheas came with us. Kebes grunted and went off alone.
“He really didn’t like it when Lysias said that,” I said after he had left.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Pytheas said.
“I thought you’d think he would. You’re usually ready to say anything bad about him.”
“He’s an unmannerly lout and he doesn’t pursue excellence, and I don’t like the way he talks to you, and I don’t like what he says in our debates on trust.” Pytheas glanced at Klio. “But he has honor. And he really cares about Sokrates. He wouldn’t play a trick on him.”
“Do you agree, Simmea?” Klio asked.
“I do agree. But I can see that nobody who doesn’t know Kebes well will believe that.”
“Kebes doesn’t speak English,” Pytheas said. “Greek and Latin and Italian, he said.”
“You’re supposed to forget any other languages you had before you came here,” Klio clucked.
“Well, you can forget that I said that,” Pytheas said. “Forgetting a language isn’t easy.”
I nodded. “I’d like to believe that I came out of the soil on the day I started to learn to read, but I can’t really forget ten years of memories. They’re dim, and I don’t often think of them, but they’re not gone.”
“Your children will have no such memories,” Klio said. “It’ll be easier for them.”
“To return to the point,” Pytheas said, though we were drawing near the Spartan hall now. “Kebes doesn’t speak English. If he had replanted the bulbs he could have made them say no in Greek or Latin, but not English. And doing it in Greek would have been simplest, and Sokrates would have understood it.”
Klio nodded. “And by the same logic, it can’t have been any of the other children either.”
“None of the children speak English?” I asked.
Pytheas raised his head as if he were waiting to hear how she would answer. “You’re all from the Mediterranean, and there are no English-speaking countries there.”
“Besides,” I said, “Kebes wasn’t ready to believe the worker had really communicated. If it had been a hoax he’d have been trying to get Sokrates to believe it, not arguing against it.”
“Not necessarily, depending on how well he knows Sokrates,” Klio said. We were at the door of the Spartan hall, which Klio held open for us. We went inside. The room was full now.
“We fetch our own soup from the urn,” Klio explained. I took a bowl and filled it. I also took a little roll of barley bread and a piece of smoked fish from the trays laid out. The soup was lovely, warming and filling, full of onions and beans.
“If Kebes didn’t do it, then I have another thought,” Klio said, when I was nearly done eating. “There are workers that go to the feeding station and won’t leave again. Lysias tries to give them new orders, but nothing works except taking out the piece of them that makes decisions and replacing it. We’re running extremely low on spares. If they really are developing volition and that’s a symptom of it, then what have we been doing?”
“Cutting out their minds?” Pytheas asked. “How gruesome. Could you put them back?”
“Yes … I think so. But we need the workers. We’ve been saying for years that we have to reduce our dependence on them, but nobody’s ever willing to do it. They do so much, and some of it we can’t do. We can’t manage if they just sit in their feeding stations and feed and don’t work.”
“Maybe those are the ones Sokrates should be talking to,” Pytheas said. “Have you finished? Shall we go back and suggest this?”