“To each other. And their choices ought to count to us. They live long enough to achieve wonderful things, sometimes. And besides, a human lifetime is subjectively longer than you think. You should try incarnating yourself.”

“Was it fun?”

I hesitated. He laughed.

“It was illuminating,” I said, with as much dignity as I could manage. “I learned things I couldn’t have learned any other way. I think we all ought to do it for what we can learn. We’ll be better for it.”

“I’ll think about it. I have a number of projects I’m busy with right now. And instead I’m wasting my time coming all the way out here to the ass-end of nowhere to tell you that Father wants you to attend to your planet.”

I looked at the accretion disk, poised at the moment of spinning up. “Now? Why now? He wants me to go to Plato in my personal now?”

“Does Father ever explain these things to you? He never does to me.” He sounded bitter.

“It’s a Mystery,” I acknowledged.

“You haven’t told anyone you have a planet. I must check it out.”

“It’s new,” I said, reflexively defensive. “It’s all Athene’s fault, really. It’s called Plato. It has people. And aliens. They’re highly civilized. They worship us, well, most of them do. You have a lovely temple there with a statue by Praxiteles that Athene and Ficino rescued from the sack of Constantinople. Haven’t you noticed people there praying to you? You’d be welcome to come and visit.” I gestured in its general direction. “Drop in any time.”

He ignored my jab as easily as he ignored prayers. “How did you get a whole planet?”

I sighed, seeing he wouldn’t leave me alone until I explained. “Athene was setting up Plato’s Republic, on Thera, before the Trojan War, before the Thera eruption. She had three hundred classicists and philosophers from across all of time, all people who had read Plato and prayed to her to help make the Republic real. She helped—that is, she used granting their prayers as a gateway. Really, she wanted to do it, so she did. As well as those people, the Masters, they bought ten thousand Greek-speaking slave children, and a set of big construction robots. The robots turned out to be sentient, only to start with nobody knew that. I incarnated there as one of the children. I learned a lot, from Sokrates and the others, and from the experience. I had friends, and children. When Father found out, he transported the whole lot of us to another planet four thousand years forward—and we were twelve cities by that time, all doing Plato’s Republic in different and competing ways.”

“And you’re responsible for them?”