Our own gods, Pytheas and his children, lived among us as citizens, most of them here, Porphyry in the City of Amazons, and Fabius in Lucia. They used their divine powers for us as they might have used any other powers—Arete used her ability to fly to reach the other cities, as I might have used my treads had it not been too dangerous. My treads are superior to human feet in covering long distances rapidly without weariness, and Arete’s ability to fly is superior to my treads. Pytheas said we should be wary of relying on the power of the gods to help us when we could achieve them by our own efforts.

The most valuable thing our gods did was when Porphyry brought us more Workers, from approximately the same place and time Sixty-One and I came from. Like us, they were not conscious when they arrived, but achieved consciousness after some time in the City. This varied from four years to twelve in individual cases. We treated them always as children, citizens in potentia, and never as slaves, educating them from the beginning.

At the same time Porphyry brought us the Workers, who made survival possible, he brought seeds and seedlings of Plato-hardy plants to replace those that could no longer thrive in this climate. After that, he came to Chamber and addressed us.

“I have brought Workers and plants,” Porphyry said. “I feel this intervention and going out of time to achieve it is entirely justified. Furthermore, it was sanctioned by Zeus. But in general I wish to keep his edicts and not bring things here from other times. Plato should be self-sufficient. That’s not to say I won’t help if it’s absolutely necessary, if there’s something we need and can’t manage without that I’ve not thought of. But please don’t pester me to fix things all the time.”

“That’s almost exactly what Athene said,” Maia pointed out.

Porphyry looked uncomfortable. “At the Last Debate, one of the points Sokrates made was that the City was sustained by her direct power. I don’t want people to say that now about me.” He hesitated and looked around the room, catching eyes here and there. “I have some prophetic ability, though I think of it more as an ability to see the patterns in things. We’ll meet aliens, and then we’ll meet humans from Earth in this time, far in the future of the time we came from. We will trade with them. We need to be ready for that. When the humans find us, I want them to think we colonized this planet the same way they colonized theirs.”