Phila laughed. “Thank you,” she said. She clapped her hands. The slaves came running. “Water and a towel,” she said to them, with no more acknowledgement of their humanity than before. She looked at me. “I will think about what you have said, and dream of your city.”

The slaves brought a bowl of water, and she used it to wash the sauce off her fingers. Then she dried her hands carefully. The slave brought the bowl to me, and I dipped my fingers, although I had no need to. I tried to smile at the slave, but he would not meet my eyes. Phila drew a flat box out of her kiton. She opened it with a key. Inside was a leather pouch, and from inside that she drew out a folded sheet of paper, much like the one Kebes had given us. I took this one as she offered it to us, and glanced at it. It was covered with the incomprehensible writing, like the other, as I had expected. “Go in,” she said to the slaves, and as they scurried off, “I will free these three, who have waited on the gods.”

“It is a small thing for you, and it’s a drop in the ocean, but it will make a huge difference to those three people to be free. Thank you,” I said. “And try to remember you share humanity with them, and as Aristotle was wrong about women so he was wrong about slaves. And don’t forget about the importance of education.”

I tucked the paper inside my kiton with the other, and then, with no warning or sense of transition, we were abruptly back in Hilfa’s sitting room.

17. Crocus

17

CROCUS

I. On First Contacts

I did not usually spend much time at the spaceport. It had been designed and built by Sixty-One, with the help of some of the other Workers, who were then only partway to self-awareness. Shuttles landed there from Amarathi and Saeli starships in orbit, and there were both automated and worker-operated facilities for loading and unloading. There were warehouses for storage, a station for the rail-link for passengers and supplies to the city, and a large observation and waiting space, with a curved glass window looking out over the field. There was also a communications, control, and administrative building. All these had been built on a suitable scale for Workers. It was a pleasant thing to have more buildings we could comfortably fit inside. The whole spaceport was set inside an old caldera, for sound deadening, and additional sound-deadening baffles had been erected around the rim. The rock of the mountains and the runways was black basalt, and Sixty-One had chosen to make the buildings out of the same material, except for the pillars and pediments and baffles, which were red scoria, fluted ionically. It gave the place a unified, distinctive feel. The frescoes in the admin building were all on space subjects—nebulas, galaxies, ringed planets; but the mosaic in the entrance hall was of Apollo in his sun-chariot.