Ikaros shrugged. “He feels passion for Lukretia, and she asked him about you.”
I still didn’t understand what was going on with Lysias and Lukretia. I missed him.
There were more women than men in the City of Amazons, but not by a huge degree—the city was about sixty percent female. I’ve heard ridiculous stories in other cities about harems and men being waited on by women in return for sexual favors. This seems to me to say rather more about men’s fantasies than about anything real in Amazonia. There was a slight surplus of single women, but when you consider women who prefer other women, and families that have more than two adult partners, and men who maintained relationships with each other or with several women—Ikaros among them—it didn’t amount to much. Heterosexual men were not a scarce resource. I’d had one or two discreet offers myself since Lysias moved out. It wasn’t sex I was feeling deprived of.
“He shouldn’t have said anything to her about me, and even if he did, she shouldn’t have said anything to you,” I said, as evenly as I could, braiding my damp hair and twisting it up on top of my head. “Is there any point to this scurrilous gossip?”
Ikaros ignored this. “So who do you love? Klio and Axiothea? Friends only, although they love each other. The children? You like them, you care about them, but you don’t really love them. There’s no love in your life, because you have closed off your soul, and that closes out the possibility of God’s love. And that’s why you won’t consider the New Concordance.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I love all those people. And the kind of love you’re talking about is specifically what Plato tells us to avoid.”
“No it’s not. It’s what he thinks you can use to bring yourself closer to God.” He was leaning forward now, passionate. “It is by loving each other that our souls rise up and grow wings to approach heaven. It’s in the Phaedrus.” He pushed back his hair, which was starting to silver now, making him better-looking than ever. “For a while, before I read Aquinas again and realized I was mistaken, I thought that love was enough. Now I see it isn’t, that we need reason even more. But we do need love.”
“I don’t oppose you because I don’t have enough love. I oppose you because I disagree with you. Because you’re wrong. I started off half-wanting to believe Athene was an angel, and that God was still there. The more I hear your proofs and arguments, the less I’m prepared to consider it.”
He rubbed his eyes again, and I noticed that they were red-rimmed from too much rubbing. “Maia, you’re one of the few people here who really can follow my thought, who’s really capable of being an equal. So it’s very frustrating when you disagree without a logical reason behind it. Won’t you forgive me and let us start again?”
I considered that. “I don’t know whether I can trust you,” I said. Perhaps it was true that before Klio explained he just wasn’t capable of understanding. His world had shaped him as badly as mine had shaped me. In a better world, in the City we both wanted to build, we could both have been philosopher kings. Perhaps then we could have loved each other as Plato wanted.
“Are you afraid of me? I don’t want you to be afraid.”
The children were mangling their scales behind us. Crocus went past carrying the window glass for the new crèche. “I’m not afraid that you’re about to ravage me here and now. But you make me very uneasy. Today is the first time you’ve ever acknowledged what you did. You always laughed about it and dismissed it.”
“I didn’t understand. In my time women had no way to say yes to anything except marriage and keep their self-respect, so they had to make formal protests without really meaning them. That’s what I thought you were doing. Klio had to explain to me that if people can’t say yes, they can’t say no either. It was a new idea.”
“I understand that,” I acknowledged. “But I’m afraid you’re apologizing now because you want something, that you’re trying to manipulate me. And you’re making up all these theories about why I disagree, just like you make up all these theories about the gods, and none of it has any basis in reality. What do you want from me?”
“I want you to be my friend,” he said, with no hesitation at all. “And I would like you to forgive me, if you can. And I don’t want you to leave this city.”
I stopped and thought for a moment, trying to examine my own feelings with philosophical rigor. It wasn’t easy. I asked myself whether I could forgive him. I found that I could—I did understand what he had been thinking, and also I appreciated the effort he had made now to understand what he had done and accept that it was wrong. “I don’t know whether it’s possible for me to trust you enough to be your friend,” I said, after a moment. “But I do understand what you did, what you were thinking. And I suppose I forgive you.” He closed his eyes for a moment when I said that and his face went slack. I realized that my forgiveness really did matter to him. He was so naturally playful, even at his most serious. It was rare to see him this unguarded.
He opened his eyes again and looked at me. “So if I’m wrong about my theories about why you disagree, and you disagree logically, what’s wrong with my logic?” he asked.
I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, and sat down tailor-fashion on the wall, leaning back against the pillar. “It’s not your logic-structures, it’s your axioms. I’ve said this before. Examine your assumptions. You say Athene is an angel, and you say angels are perfect. I can’t see how you can believe that after the way Athene behaved in the Last Debate.”
“She’s an angel, and she’s perfect. What she did may seem imperfect to us, but that’s because our perceptions are imperfect. If we had complete knowledge, we’d be able to understand what she did.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. We know she exists. We know we can trust what she told us directly. And she said in the Last Debate that the gods don’t know everything, and that part of her motivation in setting up the City was to see what happened. That’s not something we don’t understand because we’re not perfect.”
“She’s of a lesser order of perfection than the Persons of the Trinity,” he said. “But she’s still perfect.”
“She turned Sokrates into a gadfly!” I said.
“If we understood more, we’d understand why.”
“I have no difficulty understanding why. How can you possibly argue that she was justified in what she did to him? She lost her temper. I have lost my own temper with students often enough to recognize that. It isn’t the slow ones that make me do it, it’s the insolent ones. Sokrates had some good arguments, but he was behaving like an insolent ephebe pushing the limits. He wanted to make her angry, and he did. But anger and power go badly together, and she is a goddess. Power comes with responsibility. She killed him, or the next thing to it. She was wrong to do what she did and walk away.”
Ikaros rubbed his eyes again. “She is wisdom. She had reasons we don’t understand. She must have.”
“Why is it hard to understand that she lost her temper?” I asked. Kreusa went by with two of her apprentices, all carrying baskets of herbs. She nodded to me, and I waved.
“You’re trying to understand her as if she were human. But she’s an angel,” Ikaros said.
“It seems to me that she’s a Homeric god, acting exactly the way Homer described the gods acting. We know that gods exist, gods like Athene, who have incredible powers that nevertheless have limits. We know they can make mistakes, and lose their tempers. We might think they should be more responsible, but we can’t affect that. We also know they can be open to persuasion. For instance, Athene agreed to take us to rescue art treasures for the city, though she hadn’t wanted to at first. She changed her mind. We know they can be kind to their worshippers. Athene brought all of the Masters here because we prayed for it. For me it was a rescue, and for most of the others too.”