Everyone fell over themselves explaining the Relocation to him. “I wouldn’t have imagined I could be on a world circling another sun without knowing it, even inside, at night, with only little slit windows,” Sokrates said at last when he’d assimilated it. “And you called your new world Plato?”

“Yes,” Marsilia said.

“Of course they did,” Ikaros said.

“And why exactly did Athene bring you here from Greece?” Sokrates asked.

“Zeus brought them here, as I understand it,” Hermes said.

“Why did he do that?”

“So we could have posterity, they say,” Marsilia said. “And this human spaceship that’s up there now is our first recontact with wider humanity, and it will give us that posterity.”

Pytheas reappeared with Arete. She immediately hugged Ikaros, who had leapt out of his chair as soon as he saw her.

“It’s so good to see you!”

“You look so young!” Arete said.

“Fascinating as this reunion is, can we get on and read Athene’s message?” Hermes asked.

Arete turned to Hermes, then stopped. She became completely expressionless for a moment, staring at him stone-faced, looking for that moment decidedly like her father. “Who in all the worlds of thinking souls are you?”

“Nobody asked,” he said. “I’m Jathery, of course. Not outside time with Athene, as you can see, but left behind as part of her precautionary system, like the rest of you.”

“Gla ordered me not to tell,” Hilfa said. He took another step back and sat beside me on the bed. I put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly.

Hermes bent forward from the waist with one hand extended and the other behind his back, and when gla straightened up again gla was a huge greenish-gold Saeli, dressed in a gold webbing vest like the red one Hilfa wore on the boat. The patterns on gla skin were a deep black and seemed to writhe and change as gla moved.

Nobody moved or spoke for a long moment. Then Marsilia made a retching sound and made a dash for the fountain room, looking seasick. The papers she had been holding scattered to the ground as she ran.

12. Marsilia

12

MARSILIA

Hermes turned to me a second later, on the same quayside on a blazing hot summer afternoon, hotter than it ever was at home. “He recognized you. So we had already successfully got Athene’s note from him.”

“So am I caught up in Necessity’s toils now as well?” I asked. I rubbed my eyes against the sun’s glare reflecting off the harbor water.

Hermes looked intrigued. “Yes. But we can’t use that as a shield the way Apollo wants me to use Alkippe, because we need Athene’s explanation first, so don’t worry, we can clear it up quickly.”