Chamber was filled with a babble of voices, human and Worker. Nobody was in the chair, and only a few people were sitting down. Everyone seemed to be waving their hands in the air and raising their voices. All the members of the Council of Worlds and half the Senate seemed to be here, crowding in together along with a few random concerned citizens—all Golds, of course. I looked at Crocus for help. Because he didn’t have a head I could never tell where his focus was, but he must have seen my glance. “You’re chair tonight, Marsilia,” he said.

“That’s right,” Dad said. “You’re consul, take charge.”

They had each been consul multiple times and knew much better than I did how to take charge of the Chamber. I’d have been vastly reassured with either one of them in the chair, and so would everyone else. But Dad was right. I’d be judged on how I acted in this emergency. I took a deep breath, wiped my suddenly sweaty palms on my thighs, and walked down towards the chair. Maia had sat there, and Dad, and before them legendary figures like Ficino and Tullius and Krito. I was thirty-five years old, and I was consul. And it wasn’t ambition, or anyway not in a bad way. I didn’t only want the glory. I wanted to serve Plato. I might wish in my cowardly liver that somebody else were in charge in this crisis, but it was my responsibility, so I swallowed hard and did my job.

“… any of Pytheas’s children!” Diotima was saying loudly, her voice cutting above the babble. She was my fellow consul. I had mixed feelings about her. Our names would be recorded together forever in the name of the year, though I didn’t know her well or like her much. She came from Athenia, and was polite and religious and conventionally Platonic. She was small and neatly made, with dark smooth hair, silvering now. She was fifty or so, since nobody can run for planetary office without having read The Republic, and Athenia, always stricter than everyone else, still did not allow their citizens to read it before they turned fifty. Here in the Remnant we read it as ephebes, as soon as we had taken our oaths of citizenship at sixteen, after our shake-up year at fifteen. Golds and Silvers have to read it, and the others can if they choose. It always surprises me how many people don’t bother, or give up part way through.

I sat down in the chair. “Quiet,” I said, much too quietly. Crocus echoed me loudly, and everyone fell silent and stared at me. “I call this emergency session of the Council of Worlds to order,” I said. “Members of the Council and senators may remain. Others should leave.”