What Ikaros did was to build a whole logical edifice reconciling everything—Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hedonism, Pythagoras, and sundry other ideas he’d picked up here and there. Bits of it were brilliant. For instance, he deduced from Athene saying that the City was just that justice must be a process, not a Form, and that reconciled contradictions between Plato and Aristotle’s views of justice as well as being a fascinating idea about dynamic ideals. In fact, all of it was brilliant, if you considered it as pure logic. The problem was his axioms.
He set about the whole thing properly, I have to admit. He wrote it all up, ordered his theses, and announced a great debate. He sent invitations to the other cities and arranged a festival. He debated everybody who came prepared to argue against his points, and when they won on any issue he accepted that and incorporated that into his argument. It’s just that the whole edifice was built on such terrible axioms. At first I had wanted it to be true, wanted the loving Father and Son I had grown up with to be real, as well as Athene. I wanted Jesus to be my savior, as I had believed as a child. But the more closely I looked at what Ikaros was doing, the less sense it made. His axioms were twisted. It was incredibly ingenious, and it all made perfect logical sense, each piece of the structure balanced on each other piece. But it was a castle of straws balanced on air. Athene just wasn’t an angel, and wasn’t perfect. Errors can be refuted, and as his errors were pointed out, by me and by others, he patched them. But his leaps of faith were not errors, and they were inarguable. I tried. Many of us tried. And it was all right as long as it was just a case of what Ikaros believed and tried to persuade people. It was when, after the festival, the Assembly of Amazons voted to make his New Concordance the official religion of the City of Amazons that I knew I had to leave. It would be practiced at festivals. I couldn’t believe it. And I couldn’t possibly teach it.
I’d told Klio and Axiothea that I was leaving, and they’d both tried to persuade me to stay. Axiothea was quite happy with the New Concordance. Klio had initially been even less in favor of it than I was, but once she began to study the logic she had been won over by the way Ikaros had integrated Platonic thought all through, and especially with his theory of dynamic ideals, which fit everything she believed. Klio had always disliked Ikaros, but now they began to work together on this project. They spent a lot of time together and became close. She told him about the religions and philosophies she knew about that were unfamiliar to him, and they worked together to reconcile them with everything else.
The New Concordance was generally very popular in the city, though I wasn’t sure how many people even among its adherents really understood it properly.
I announced generally that I was leaving, though it hurt me to go. I had put eight years of my life into this city, this second attempt to do what Plato suggested, and I had a new generation of students growing up. I packed up my few possessions in my cloak: my comb, the notebooks where I was writing this autobiography, and my Botticelli book. I opened it and looked at the angels clustered around the Madonna of the Pomegranates. They were beautiful, and perhaps they were real, but Athene wasn’t one of them. She was too much herself. She was real and imperfect and divine. She had rescued me from a life of unfulfilled emptiness and brought me to the City. I prayed to her now for guidance, and found myself thinking of my old house in the Remnant, and the rich colors of Botticelli’s Autumn on the wall in Florentia, and Ficino’s welcoming smile. I was right to leave. And I’d give this book to Simmea. That felt right too. I closed it and put it into my cloak, and went off to one last day’s teaching. Other people would be taking over my classes the next morning.
“I’ve done you an injustice and I want to apologize,” Ikaros said.
“What?” He had surprised me, coming up behind me after a gymnastics class. I had been teaching the littlest ones how to fall and roll and come up again, while the older ones were practicing with the discus. Then I had escorted the children through the wash-fountain, and handed them over to another teacher for their lute lesson. I was standing alone in the palaestra drying my hair on my kiton. It was autumn, almost olive season, so my damp bare skin was covered in goosebumps. I felt at a disadvantage, and quickly twisted my kiton back on, which left my damp hair dripping down my back. I never seemed to have any dignity around Ikaros. But when I looked at him, he wasn’t looking at me but down at the sand.
“I like you, Maia, and perhaps Providence meant us to be together, but I messed everything up between us at the beginning. I didn’t understand that you were truly saying no. I thought you were making a show of modest protest. Klio has explained to me that you were not. I’m really sorry.”
I glared at him until he looked up at me. He wasn’t laughing at me. He seemed sincere. “Klio had no right—why were you talking to her about me?”
“Because I want to understand why you oppose me so much.”
I was astonished that he was taking me so seriously. “And you’re finally acknowledging that you did something wrong?”
“Yes. I said so. I truly misunderstood all this time.” He sat down on the wall that separated the palaestra from the street.
“I was screaming and struggling!”
“But your body—I thought—Klio has explained to me how I was wrong. It was a long explanation, but I do finally understand now.” He smiled ruefully up at me. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have been talking to her about it, but I’d never in a hundred years have understood without all that. I was wrong. And I have been punished by being deprived of your friendship, and Klio’s friendship, all this time.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared at him.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Klio tells me that in her day, philosophy has discovered that people have two minds, a reasoning mind and an animal mind. Your reasoning mind believes that you have logical disagreements with me, but it is your animal mind driving what you feel. You have to get them into alignment to become godlike. That’s what Plato meant with the metaphor of the charioteer.”
“That is not what Plato meant!” I snapped, infuriated. At that moment, I’d have cheerfully turned him into a fly if I could. There’s nothing more irritating than having somebody misinterpret my intentions and Plato’s at the same time!
He went on. “Your animal mind wants to love me, the way your body wanted to love me that night under the trees. But your rational mind says no to love, because it’s afraid to love, maybe because of what I did. So I want to persuade your rational mind.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back against a pillar. “Go ahead. My rational mind only listens to rational arguments, not all this animal mind nonsense! And I think saying that part of me loves you is the most arrogant thing I’ve ever heard, even from you. And I am not afraid to love!”
“Who do you love?” he asked, rhetorically. “Lysias? No. He’s your friend, you sometimes used to share a bed, but that’s all. There’s no love, no real passion. He has told Lukretia, and she told me.”
I was furious with Lysias. “He had no right—”