“But how does it work? Haven’t these things we’ve done always been in time, so that even before we left Plato, even before I was born these things happened? We always spoke to Kebes earlier, and took Athene’s message from him before that? If time can’t change except in extreme circumstances when Zeus intervenes, isn’t everything we do in time determined? Why are you uncomfortable about Alkippe, when it’s all like that?”

“Well, things can change because of our actions. And once we know about them, we are bound to do them. It’s uncomfortable because I know about Alkippe.” He hesitated, frowning a little. “It’s like an itch I can’t reach, until I set it straight, a painful spreading itch. Or maybe it’s more like the feeling that I am constantly doing the wrong thing. I should be attending to that, so everything else I do feels bad and wrong. But it’s only because I know. If I didn’t know?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know until I saw her, and it didn’t bother me at all.”

“So it has to do with awareness, with consciousness?” I asked. “Divine consciousness, or any consciousness?”

“Only gods can go outside time, so mortal consciousness isn’t usually a problem this way. Your lives unfold in time, you do what you want to do, you can’t get tangled up in it unless we take you outside it, which Father wisely forbids.” He grinned.

Yet here I was, in a time that was both forty years and four thousand years before the time when I was born. “Can you change things on purpose?”

“Yes. But it gets harder the farther from our central concerns it is.”

“And how about getting tangled up in Necessity? Can that be deliberate?”

He looked uncomfortable. “No, not normally. Because it’s the consequences of actions. Well, there are ways one can, but nobody would. It feels horrible enough when it isn’t.”

“And what if you never went back to conceive Alkippe?” I asked, my deepest fear. “Would she cease to exist?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody could withstand Necessity for long enough to find out. But maybe. We’re banking on her being protection for us, being a shield. But if I should be stuck out there, or killed, then I don’t really know what would happen to her.”

“Well, that’s honest, thank you.” I blinked back tears. “You take it so lightly.”

“I don’t know her as you do.”

I tried to put it more clearly. “I didn’t mean that. I mean you seem to find everything funny, you keep laughing at things, and yet you say everything feels wrong.”

“That’s my nature,” he said.

That didn’t explain anything. “Let’s get on with it. When are we now, exactly?”