Porphyry grimaced sympathetically. “Even I didn’t realize he was Jathery for a little while, yesterday.”

“Would being outside time be enough to make Ikaros young again?” Sokrates asked.

“It would make him his essential self. If that requires being young, then yes,” Porphyry said.

“I’ve wondered if it made me the age I was when I died,” Ikaros said. “The age I was when I came to the Republic, that is. As if only the time before counted.”

“But you didn’t really die,” Porphyry said. “If you did, you really are unquestionably a god. But you can’t have, you wouldn’t have aged or strained your eyes and gone blind. I remember you very well that way, and so it’s strange for me when I knew you as almost a father, and when I know you’re a grandfather, to see you looking younger than I am.”

“No, I didn’t really die,” Ikaros agreed. “Athene snatched me away an instant before death, and removed the arsenic that was killing me.”

“But it didn’t take you to your essential age, because then you’d be back to being old again when you came back into time, wouldn’t you?” I asked. Was Jathery’s essential self that perpetual flicker? He had seemed human more often than Saeli.

“I think Athene fixed it,” he said.

“Are you her votary?” Porphyry asked.

“Of course I am,” Ikaros said.

“Then she could do that, I think,” Porphyry said. “I said I’m not really an expert.”

“I can’t go outside time on my own,” Ikaros said. “That means I’m not a god, or an angel. Gods live in the hypostasis of soul, in what you call ‘outside time,’ and step in and out of time, or the hypostasis of body, freely.”

“My brothers and Arete can’t go outside time on their own either. They’ll have to die and take up immortal bodies before they can. And I know nothing more about that. Father mentioned it, and he said it happens in the Underworld, and that’s all I know about it. I think gods who have two divine parents are born with divine bodies, but they can take up a mortal body later, the way Father did.”

“Are the hypostases real, then?” Sokrates asked.

Porphyry shrugged. “What do you mean, real? They’re a way of thinking about things that are very hard to put into words.”

“Aroo said spaceships go into the second hypostasis and come out again somewhere else and that’s how they travel in space. If they do that, could they travel in time too?” I asked.

“Yes,” Porphyry said. “They do. Stars are in different times.”

“But why don’t they return before they left?”

“Necessity prevents it,” Porphyry said.