Then we were back in the glade. I was still gasping and shuddering. I bent over, taking deep breaths as my stomach lurched, afraid I might throw up. Hermes took no notice. “Northeast Lesbos, you said? Let’s try fifty years.”

We were standing at the foot of a hill, by a sea so blue it almost hurt my eyes. The gentle slopes of the hills were covered with olive trees, but there were no buildings or any other signs of civilization. “Is this the place?” Hermes asked. Two grey and white birds startled into flight as he spoke. They were much bigger than the jay I had seen on Olympus. I watched them fly off, circling over the water and calling to each other raucously. I couldn’t tell whether this was the right spot. “Zeus moved the cities to Plato, not the locations. So I don’t know. If I see buildings I ought to recognize them.”

“Could be earlier, could be later. Let’s try earlier.” The shadows shifted a little, and the birds vanished, but nothing else changed. Then the shadows shifted again and we were standing by a busy harbor, full of little fishing boats with colored sails. More of the grey and white birds were flying around them, squawking indignantly. A woman with a basket of fish almost bumped into me, and when I apologized she told me to look where I was going. Two naked children pulled themselves out of the water right in front of me, dripping. “How about this?” Hermes asked. “Those buildings are really anachronistic. It’s a good thing they got taken off to your planet.”

“Yes, I think this is it,” I said. I looked around me, trying to picture the colors as they would be lit by our redder sun, and the spaces between the pillars filled in. “If I’m right, I think we should go up that way to come to the agora.” I pointed. “But the Goodness isn’t here, the ship. From what Dad said, I think Kebes usually stayed near the ship. We could ask somebody.”

“There’s a mouthwatering smell of cooking fish coming from over there,” Hermes said. “We could buy some and ask.”

They used money in Lucia, of course. Money is un-Platonic and leads to injustice and inequality and immoderate behavior—nobody doubts this. Whenever we’re having trade negotiations with the Lucians they admit this and agree, and then keep talking in terms of money. It’s the same with the Amarathi. It’s supposed to be only a medium of exchange and accounting, but I think it must be a way of viewing economics that’s very hard to shift.