She smiled, and I caught my breath, to see a smile like that from so close. “I love it,” she said. “Plato was right. It’s so good to have our work carefully chosen for us and to feel every day that in doing what I love I am helping make the City better.”

“Yes,” I said. “I feel exactly the same.” I hardly ever admitted it. Everyone complained, and so I did too, to fit in.

“And it is the same,” she said. “You work out at sea, hard work, dangerous, feeding us all. And I work with the tiny babies in the nursery, both the ones there full-time and the ones whose parents leave them with us for a few hours a day, or a few days now and then. I always have six or seven babies in my care, and I love them, and I love looking after them. And as they get older and need instruction they move up to teachers, but I still see them. There must be twenty children who call me Ma Thee, as well as my present little lovelies. They need me, and the City needs me there, and I am far far better suited to working with babies from birth to two than I should have been to anything else I could have done.”

“So you don’t resent Marsilia being consul?”

“I’m excited about it!” We were getting closer to Thessaly, but she stopped again, and I stopped too. The stones beneath our feet were incised with old debates. “All that was when I was younger. I don’t feel like that now. I’m happy with who I am. I was only talking about that because of Grandfather, trying to explain. He never made me feel stupid, or like I’m not achieving what I could, or any of that. When we were going to take our oaths and become ephebes, he talked to me about what the oath meant, and what the City meant, and I felt he loved me and he understood who I was. He could be strange sometimes, which is only to be expected. He was a god! But he saw that I was nervous and uncomfortable, and he explained it all to me, and he was right, and the Guardians were right.”