He was waiting in the foyer, looking down at the mosaic with an amused smile. If I say I have never been so surprised or delighted, it will sound like hyperbole, but it is the simple truth. “Sokrates!” I said, and then in my astonishment I repeated it. “Sokrates!”

“You can talk out loud!” Sokrates said. “Oh, Crocus, this is wonderful. We can get on so much faster now!”

II. On War and Peace

Sokrates and I talked all night. I carried him back from the spaceport to the City. There we went at his suggestion to the feeding station between the streets of Poseidon and Hermes, where long ago he had first tried to find me among my companions. There we joined Sixty-One and some of the younger Workers, to whom Sokrates was nothing but a legend. We settled down to recharge, each Worker plugged in at a feeding station, and Sokrates perched up on top of my station, sitting cross-legged as I had so often seen him. More and more Workers came in and quietly took up places as the news spread among us, until the big room was almost full.

It was wonderful to have Sokrates back. We told him everything that had happened since the Last Debate, and he, of course, had many questions. We puzzled together about where Athene might have taken the other Workers when she took them away, and about her motivations in doing so. We talked about the twelve cities and how they were set up, and the differences between them.

“And you Workers are free to choose where to live?”

“Yes. There are feeding stations in all the cities now. Once we have passed our tests we are free to go where we choose. As for the tests and our education, we still use the system you and Simmea thought up.”

“What exactly happened to Simmea? I heard she was killed in some kind of war that Pytheas later stopped?”

“It was an art raid,” I said, saddened by the memory. Then he wanted to know about the art raids, how they had started and why they stopped.

“I have wondered why Plato insisted on all the military training, for a Just City,” Jasmine said, when Sixty-One and I had answered Sokrates’s questions as best we could. Jasmine was a Gold, now thirty-four years into selfhood, and presently serving his first turn in the Council of Worlds. Many in his generation had flower names, which I found touching, as they chose them partly in compliment to me. Jasmine was a thoughtful and philosophical young Worker, an ally in the Council. When he was classified Gold I felt as proud as the day on which I myself earned such classification. He was braver than most of his siblings, who were mostly too shy to speak up before Sokrates.