“I work with Jason and Hilfa, but that’s no reason he can’t be Thetis’s friend too. They did their shake-up year and took their oaths together when they were ephebes,” I said. And even if Thetis didn’t exist, Jason would never have looked at me. I knew that. There was no sense in the way I kept wanting people who couldn’t see me that way. Plato was right as usual: keep sex for the Festival of Hera and stick to friendship the rest of the time. “People have lots of friends, not only one.”

“I have lots of friends,” Alkippe said. “But I like Camilla best.”

“That’s because she goes to a different palaestra so you don’t see her every day so she feels special,” Dad said.

The other children in the hall were all leaving, or getting ready to leave. “Eat up, you don’t want to be late,” I said. Alkippe took three huge bites of porridge, eating as much as she had in the rest of the meal put together. She leapt to her feet. “Are you sure you’ve had enough?”

“I’ll take a pear,” she said, and stuffed one inside her kiton before running off to spend the rest of her day with the other children, learning all the things Plato prescribes for excellence, the things I had recommended to Phila. I took the last pear myself and cleared the dishes. Then Dad and Klymene and I went to Chamber.

I love the way Chamber looks, black and white stripes. It was almost glowing in the morning sunlight.

Diotima was in the chair. I took my place on the bench at the front, next to Aroo and Dad. We wished Aroo joy, and she wished us the same. The room felt quieter than normal, the usual buzzing as people settled in and greeted each other was more muted.

There’s a lot of honor involved in being consul, not merely the Roman tradition of the thing, and naming the years, but the fact that it’s a planetwide office and directly elected. But what it really amounts to is a lot of chairing meetings. Diotima and I took it in turns to chair meetings of the Council of Worlds, and we were judged on our ability to do that. She was impeccably turned out in a neatly embroidered kiton. Like everyone I’d ever met from Athenia, she was very properly Platonic and utterly unprepared to compromise. But she certainly knew how to run a meeting smoothly.

We began with a report from Klymene, where she explained at more length what I’d heard at breakfast. Aroo followed with a short report.