“I’ve been thinking that for ages,” she said. “Do you think he still wants to tear it all down?”
“Sokrates? The city? Yes. Why do you ask that now?”
I could see her face clearly in the light of a sconce above a sleeping house we were passing. She looked abstracted, and then as we moved and the shadows danced she looked maniacal. “I think the workers could be a lever for that,” she said. “I do wish one of them had answered though!”
But it was months before they communicated with us again.
26
SIMMEA
For the first four months I was queasy in the mornings. In the next four I grew huge, which made sleeping uncomfortable and walking a misery. I also suffered horribly from heartburn, which could be relieved only by a tisane of elderflowers. It was the hottest part of the year, the part where Demeter threatens to burn up the world unless Persephone is returned to her. Klymene showed me how to adjust my kiton, and Maia gave me a harness to stop my newly swollen breasts from chafing. I sweated more than I ever had, and was happy only in the sea. I couldn’t eat in the mornings and was ravenous by mid-afternoon. I craved cheese and fruit.
By the ninth month I was more than ready to give birth and get it over with. One afternoon I was sitting in the shade at Thessaly, drinking elderflower tisane and sucking a lemon. Aristomache was there—she had brought the basket of lemons. Sokrates and Pytheas were also sucking lemons while debating what it meant to make choices, and what constrained choices. Aristomache and I put in a word now and then, but largely it was a debate between the two of them.
“Apollo! What hyperbole!” Sokrates said. It always made Pytheas choke with laughter when Sokrates swore.
“But seriously, correct information,” Aristomache began, when Kebes came dashing in, looking as if he’d been chased by the Kindly Ones.
“What’s the matter?” Sokrates asked, getting up at once and putting his arm around Kebes.
Kebes had been running so hard that he could hardly catch his breath for a moment. He leaned against Sokrates, and I could see that Sokrates, for all that he was old, had no trouble supporting him. “Workers. Message. Come and see!”
“A message?” Sokrates jumped, but to his credit he did not immediately drop Kebes.
“I can’t read it. It’s in that language.”
That proved that Kebes hadn’t written it himself, I thought, except that it would be possible to argue that he was lying about not knowing English. Though if none of us knew English, that did change that. It could certainly be seen as suspicious that he was again the one to find the message.
Pytheas helped me to my feet. He had become quite expert at bracing himself so I could haul myself up, and did it automatically now. Since we had had the conversation about agape, nothing had changed and everything had changed. It was as if acknowledging it had made a difference, as if naming transmuted. I was sometimes a little shy with him now.
Aristomache folded a cloth over the lemons and set the basket in the shade. “I know English,” she said, getting up.
Kebes led the way. He didn’t run, perhaps because he was winded or perhaps because he was aware that I could only waddle. Even so, his pace was too much for me and I trailed behind the others. Of course what Kebes had found was on the opposite side of the city—I could have guessed that. Even so, he must have sprinted all the way in the heat to have got so out of breath.
“My friend Herakles lives in Mulberry,” Kebes said as we walked. “The mulberries have been ripe, and the birds have been all over the tree, and the house. It happens every year. The workers clean the guano off afterwards, because it looks so awful. This year when it was clean there was also an inscription, but he couldn’t read it. I came straight back here with him after he told me. I couldn’t read it either, not even no.”
Mulberry was a perfectly ordinary seven-person sleeping house, down on the street of Artemis. The mulberry tree was splendid, one of the big ones with twisted branches. And indeed there was writing, in the Latin alphabet, inscribed neatly all around the eaves, where nobody except a worker could have reached without a ladder. I looked at it, assessing. Kebes could have done it on a ladder with a chisel, he’d had basic stone carving lessons at the same time I had. But it would have been a long job, and somebody would have been bound to notice.
Meanwhile, Aristomache was frowning. “I can’t read it either,” she said. “It certainly isn’t English.”
It wasn’t Latin either. “What other language could it be?” I asked. “Klio said something about the workers speaking English or Chinese. Does anyone know Chinese? Does it use the Latin alphabet?”
“No, I don’t know it, and it doesn’t,” Aristomache said. “And I don’t think anyone here knows it, not even Lysias. China’s such a very different civilization.”
“But they use the Greek alphabet?” I asked.
“No, they have their own and I don’t know it,” Aristomache said, astonishing me. I knew there were a multiplicity of languages, but two alphabets seemed more than enough! “It doesn’t look like our letters at all. I suppose they might have transliterated it—” and then she laughed. “It’s Greek!”
I looked at her in astonishment. “It’s certainly not!”
“No, it is,” Pytheas said. “It’s Greek spelled out in Latin letters.”
“What does it say?” Sokrates asked.
Kebes began to read it aloud, hesitating now and then when the worker had made some odd sound choice in using the wrong alphabet. “No, no, no, do not like work, do not like some work more, do not like feeding station, do not like, no, no, want to talk, want to make, do not want to work, do not want to animals, do not want to farms, do not want to build, not, not, do not want, no, no, no.” I could read it too, once I realized what I was looking at.
“Which worker wrote this?” Sokrates asked, looking wildly around as if he thought the worker would be waiting.
“No way to tell,” Aristomache said.
“There may be a record,” Kebes said. “Somebody may know which one they assigned to clean this house.” He didn’t sound hopeful.
“If they can do this they can hold a dialogue,” Sokrates said, beaming. “I can speak and they can inscribe their answers! Want to talk! Wonderful!”
“Why did this one answer in this way now?” Pytheas asked. “And why up there?”
“It’s where writing could be,” I suggested. “Lots of buildings have writing up there. They don’t say this kind of thing; they have uplifting mottoes or the names of the buildings, but that’s where inscriptions go. Perhaps it felt it could only write inside the lines?”
“Just like the bulbs,” Sokrates said. “I should have asked every one different questions so I’d know which one answered me.”
“Even you might have had trouble thinking of that many different questions,” Aristomache teased.
“I think that settles the question of whether the workers have free will and intelligence,” Pytheas said.
“Yes,” Kebes flashed at once. “Now you can stop thinking I did it.”
“Pytheas never thought you did it,” I said. “He argued persuasively that you wouldn’t.”
Kebes stopped with his mouth open. “Really?” he asked, after a moment.