Ikaros says excellence, perfection, and other Forms are dynamic. Plato believed they were unchanging and eternal. I think at the moment that it is only by constantly examining everything that we reach a state of knowing what we do not know, which is the beginning of understanding. When we ask questions, we open doors. When we write things down, we fix them in their form. And this is so even when it is the account of an enquiry, even when it is the story of a life. I have heard people quote Aristophanes’s jokes as if they were laws—worse, I have seen people take them as guidelines on how to live and love because they found them in Plato. So I will not write for you about my experiences in Athens or in the Just City, or my adventures at Potidaia or in space. I will happily tell you about them if you come to me and ask, but then of course I will have questions for you too. I always do. And since you are divine, you only sometimes want to give me answers.

I will keep on inquiring and examining everything, and I hope you will not be too angry that I refuse your request. You must have known it was likely that I would. I remain, as always, your gadfly.

23. Crocus

23

CROCUS

I. On Long Life

The first space humans who found us proved to be obsessed with profit, equating it with self-worth and pursuing it even at the expense of excellence. The levels of our mutual incomprehensibility extended far beyond language.

Nevertheless, they sold us autodocs in exchange for star-fuel from the Saeli ship, lanthanides, and finely cut obsidian sheets which the Saeli and Amarathi also prize. These wonderful autodocs allowed aging humans to be restored to their functional peak of thirty-five. Further use allowed them to stay at that peak of physical health until reaching the age of around two hundred, when telomeres run out and death comes fast. Glaukon, one of the Children who was injured by a Worker when trying to escape in the first years of the Republic, was the first to use the autodoc, which enabled him to grow a new leg and walk for the first time in decades.

I do not know, do not remember, if I was the one who injured him. I decided long ago to act as if I were, because I bear the collective guilt even if not the individual guilt—I could have done it, whether or not I did. Such things may be forgiven by the victims, but never by the perpetrators. Nor was it undone even when Glaukon ran from the autodoc laughing and crying—seventy years of immobility is not so easily erased.

Interactions with other space humans later allowed us to buy first the chemicals the autodocs needed to run and later the technology necessary to produce them ourselves from placental tissue and other human waste.