“We talked about how important it was to help you increase your excellence only a few days ago—that is, only a few days before the Last Debate,” he said.

“I know. She wrote about that, and I read it after she was dead.”

The first blaze of light that was the shuttle appeared high up, and people started pointing to it in excitement. “But what you said last night was true. Other people shouldn’t have to die so I can learn things. They also matter.”

“It was her choice,” Sokrates said.

“I stayed incarnate for forty more years to honor that choice.”

He nodded, understanding the significance of that. “But now are you glad to be a god again?”

“Oh yes. Very much. It’s wonderful. No aches and pains, a lyre that stays tuned, the ability to go anywhere I want to, detachment, power—everything I’ve been missing.” I could hear the roar of the shuttle now, through the special glass of the window.

“Yet you keep wearing your Gold pin?”

I touched it for an instant as he mentioned it. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Athene is wearing one right now, in her Septima form as she came to the debate, but she wasn’t before. You’ve had yours on the entire time, even when we were wearing those absurd costumes in Cirey. It was pinning the fall of lace at your throat.”

I’d had it on on Olympos, and out there, and in the Underworld, and when I’d been watching sun formation. “I like it,” I said. “Simmea designed it. And it stands for excellence and philosophy.”

“So you don’t miss being a mortal?” he asked. The shuttle touched down in a thunderous roar that seemed to shake the building, a designed pattern of sound that was almost music. Lots of the spectators cheered.

“No,” I said, when it was quiet enough to speak again. The last time I’d had to wait for silence to speak it had been the bells in Bologna. A shuttle landing was better. “It was a wonderful experience, and a terrible one. It was a significant event. It changed me. I did it for very mixed reasons, some of them much better than others. I’m really glad I experienced it. I learned all kinds of things from it I could have learned in no other way. But I don’t miss it.”

The shuttle, on the ground now, was rolling slowly towards us. Marsilia, Diotima, Klymene and Arete climbed up onto Crocus’s back, holding on to the webbing, and he rolled out.

“What do you think the space humans will be like?” Sokrates asked.