“Yes. I brought them here, now. This is the best place for them, this is where they can become their best selves. So I brought them.” The owl flew up and went to the doorway and led them in, and there they all were, my lost friends. I unplugged myself and went to greet them—they could not yet speak aloud, and so they carved their delight and greetings into the walls and floor as I tried to tell them all at once where they were and all that had happened since the Last Debate.

By the time I looked around again for Athene, she had gone.

IV. On Time and the Gods

I have myself been moved through in time on two occasions, once when Athene brought me to the Republic, and once when Zeus moved the cities to Plato during the Relocation. I am aware that moving in and out of time and taking others with them is an ability the gods have. Yet I have never really understood how it works, and I never expect it as something that can plausibly happen. It always seems to me contrary to logic, and un-Platonic.

The Workers who came direct from the Last Debate to the City of Workers told me that no experienced time passed for them in between. This leads me to believe that the same may be true for Athene, that she may have brought them to me directly, and that she conversed with me in the City of Workers in a time that was for her before both the Relocation and her sojourn outside in primal time. I could have told her about these things, and if I had she would then have been bound by Necessity, knowing about her own actions. As I did not, as we spoke only about Plato and the Republic, she was not.

I am not sure that this is what she did. It is very difficult for us to understand the way the gods relate to time. Porphyry says she could have spent hundreds of years of her own time calming down in between the Last Debate and when she spoke to me in the form of Septima. For me it was a century, and I lived every day of it. She may have come after the Relocation, and after the last time I saw her, on the day the first space humans landed, going back to the Last Debate to collect the Workers and bring them forward. It is a Mystery. Time, for the gods, is fundamentally different from the way it is for the rest of us, and hard to understand.