The way we interpret Plato’s intentions here now, we have regular Festivals of Hera, where people get paired up and married for the day, and hopefully babies are born as a result. We also allow long-term marriage, and participation in our Festivals of Hera is voluntary, which it isn’t in Athenia and Psyche. It wasn’t here to start with. There was a while when we didn’t have any Festivals of Hera, because of that, but we voted to reintroduce them on a voluntary basis years ago, I’m not quite sure when. It was after the Relocation, but before I was born. If you volunteer, you get matched up with a partner by lot, and you spend a day in bed together. All the children born from that festival are considered to be your children. When a woman has a baby, she can either choose to bring it up herself or give it to the nurseries to be brought up there, whatever she prefers. It’s her choice, some do one and some do the other. Probably about half of us grow up in nurseries and sleeping houses, and the rest in families. I was festival-born myself. I don’t have any idea who my parents were, and not much curiosity about it either. When I took my oath at sixteen, along with all the other sixteen-year-olds, everyone who had participated in that festival seventeen years before and was still alive came along to the procession and the feast afterwards.

So with the marriages at the Festivals of Hera, all the pairings are arranged within the same metal, always, because they say that’s what leads to the best children. When it comes to other kinds of marriage, people are supposed to choose people of their own kind too, to keep the metals from mixing more than they’re mixed already. But we’re human, and the metals in our souls are already mixed up, the way metals are under the ground, and so although everyone tries to discourage you, it’s not forbidden to marry someone of a different class. (Here, anyway. It is forbidden in some of the Lucian cities. In Athenia and Psyche they don’t have marriage except for the Festivals of Hera, in Sokratea they don’t have classes, and in Amazonia they have lots of orgies and hope for the best, or that’s what I’ve heard, though I didn’t see anything like that the one time I was there.) Even if you do have parents of the same metal, you can’t tell how the kids will come out.