“Lysias is going to resist hearing this argument,” Klio said. “It would make him feel he has done bad things—without intending to, but done them nonetheless. He doesn’t know Kebes.”
“It’s worse than that, he does know Kebes, and he knows bad things about him,” I said.
“What bad things?” Klio asked.
“What Pytheas said. That he doesn’t pursue excellence. And I think he might have mocked Lysias when he was trying to be his friend. He’s never going to believe that he has honor and wouldn’t trick Sokrates.”
“Lysias knows Kebes mocked him?” Pytheas asked.
I nodded. “I believe he does.”
“He’s really not going to want to hear it,” Klio repeated. “Let’s not go back there now. Don’t worry. I’ll talk to Sokrates.”
23
MAIA
We had more than a thousand babies born in the month of Anthesterion, and it strained our resources to the utmost.
Plato wrote in the Republic that defective babies, and babies of defective parents, should be exposed. It was the standard practice of the classical world to expose unwanted babies—just to leave them out in a waste place where they might be rescued or, more often, just die. There was no blood guilt on the parents, they just left the child, they didn’t kill it. The children froze to death or were eaten by animals … or occasionally rescued. Stories like Oedipus, and Theseus, and Romulus and Remus are of exposed babies who came back to find the family that had abandoned them. There were other stories too, which I hadn’t heard before I came to the city, ghost stories.
I know that in my own century it was the practice for midwives to kill badly deformed babies—or just allow them to die instead of helping them to survive. It did seem the kind option. But the thought of exposing even deformed infants made my heart ache.
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.) We took the babies into the nurseries as they were born. There was a nursery shared between Florentia and Delphi, so Axiothea and I worked together there—Ficino and Atticus left it to us. We called in Charmides when we really needed to. He was exhausted too, as our only real doctor. We defined all the babies we saw as excellent and passed them over to the nurses—men and women of iron status. One was Andromeda, whom I’d always liked.
Then in the middle of the night in the third week of the baby-rush, when we were already exhausted, there was one with a harelip. Axiothea had been with the mother while I was with another girl just starting her labor. She called me and I joined her in the private room, where she showed it to me.
Axiothea and I looked at each other in mute horror. The child had a cleft palate too. “It’s fixable,” Axiothea said.
“Not here,” I said. “And Plato says…”
“I know,” she said. “Are you going to do it?” There was a mute appeal in her eyes.
“Yes,” I said, refusing to shrink from the duty. I wrapped the baby in a cloth and held it against my shoulder. It was a girl, which made things somehow worse. I was here to make the lot of women better, after all. “You look after things here.”
I went out of the nursery and walked through the city to the north gate, the one near the temple of Zeus and Hera. I walked quickly and held the baby tenderly, but she started to wail. She was such a little scrap of a thing. I walked on up the mountain, with some thought of taking her up to the top and throwing her into the crater. There was no hope of rescue here. No shepherd in want of a child was going to come along. There was nobody on Kallisti but us. There were wolves, but wolves wouldn’t be able to feed her, even if they really did feed babies. With that lip she wouldn’t be able to suck, and with the hole in her mouth she’d choke if she could.
She wasn’t heavy, but she was awkward to carry. I was exhausted before I made it halfway up the mountain. I left her by the roots of a rowan tree, near a spring. I commended her soul to Athene and prayed that she might be reborn whole. She had been quiet for the last part of my walk, but when I put her down she started to wail loudly. I could hear it halfway back to the city. It cut off abruptly. I wondered if she had fallen asleep, or whether she was lying there still and terrified in the darkness, or whether a wild animal had taken her—a wild boar? A wolf? I took two steps back up the hill before I forced myself to stop. This was ridiculous. I was a disgrace to philosophy. I had done what I had come to do, what Plato told me to do, the standard practice of the ancient world. It was to protect the city, to make us better. All the same, I was still weeping when I came back into the city.
It was dawn. The wind came chill from the sea. The sky was paling and the birds waking. It was the point where late winter becomes early spring—the first of the flowers were coming up. Everything said beginnings, but for that poor harelipped baby there was nothing but an ending.
Of course, this was when I saw Ikaros. I hardly ever saw him now. He had dropped out of the Tech Committee in favour of something more exciting. “Maia, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing, really,” I said. “Just a deformed baby that had to be exposed, and my soft heart.”
“The poor little mother,” he said at once.
I had not thought about the mother, going through all that for nothing. “At least she won’t know,” I said. “She’ll think they’re all hers.”
“How could she not know? She’ll look for the one with the deformity.”
“We’ll tell her it was cured,” I said. “If she saw it. I don’t know whether she did. I’ll find out.”
He nodded. Then he turned and walked along with me. “You’re siding with Lysias about trying to use the workers less.”
“He and Klio say they’re being overburdened and they’ll break down. There are things they’re essential for, that we’ll need them for for a long time.”
“The question is what’s essential. Well, isn’t that always the question?” He smiled brilliantly at me. “We should set up a committee especially for that.”
I was exhausted and wrung out. “Talk to Lysias,” I said. “I don’t really know enough of the details. None of us understand the workers properly; they come from a time ahead of everyone here.”
“We could just ask Athene for more,” he suggested.
“We don’t know how far her patience runs. Besides, I haven’t seen her for ages, have you? She probably has a lot more to do than collect workers for us.”
“I haven’t seen her. Sokrates really wants to talk to her,” he said. “Speaking of her, do you remember that conversation we had about Providence?”
I couldn’t believe that he was mentioning it casually like that. “You mean the night you raped me?”
He patted my arm and smiled at me. “Call it that if you want. But do you remember the conversation? About not being able to reconcile Christianity with the presence of Athene?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped.
“Well, I was naive, I think. Since then I’ve been working on it, and I have found a way to make it all fit together.”
I stared at him. “Really?”
He looked smug. “Well, if Athene—if the Greek gods are actually angels in one of the lower heavens, and if those angels have a considerable amount of autonomy, then it all works, that she should have brought us here and that the persons of the Trinity should still be there at the apex.”
“But she’s Athene!”
“Why shouldn’t she be? Wasn’t God there before the birth of Christ, and mightn’t he have used appropriate angels? It makes more sense that he would. I always thought the classical gods must have been some kind of angels.”