“No!” Sokrates said. “Doctors are idiots. They tell me Charmides makes his drugs out of mold! Yuck! But your other points are well taken. There are rare occasions to allow others to set the priorities, usually in an emergency when there isn’t time for everyone to have all the information, or when somebody has a specialized skill. We’d put the fire out first and ask how it started afterwards. But we’re back to Crocus’s question: when it isn’t that kind of emergency, who decides?”

“Plato would say the philosopher kings, which means the Masters for now,” Ikaros said.

“The Masters decide all too many things in this City,” Sokrates grumbled.

“What would you say then?”

“Everyone should decide for themselves after examining the situation, and consulting experts as necessary. If I have a hangnail, I can decide whether to put mold on it or not, eww. But if there isn’t time to examine things, in an emergency, then the expert should decide—if my blood is spurting out then a doctor should put a tourniquet on it right away.”

“And in the City, for now, the Masters are in the position of the doctor with the tourniquet, and decide the priorities, informed by Plato,” Ikaros said. “When there’s time we examine everything, in Chamber. We’re not always right even so,” he concluded, despondently.

“Expert,” I wrote. “Only Workers do. Mend. Build. Need do.”

“You mean when there’s something only Workers can do, that people can’t do as well, you need to do that when it needs doing?” Ikaros asked.

“Do you mean that the Workers are the experts in that situation?” Sokrates asked. “That’s an interesting thought.”

“Yes. If fire, bring water. Mend plumbing. For Good. For all.”

“You’re talking about duty,” Sokrates said. “But again, who decides on the priorities?”

“What is duty?” I wrote.

“He really is a philosopher, it’s amazing,” Ikaros said, patting my side above my tread.

Sokrates ignored this, having accepted the fact long before. He kept explaining to me. “Duty is a moral obligation to someone or something. It’s the term for what you’re talking about. But an interesting question is how we incur duties.”

“Cicero says we incur some simply by being human, which might mean you have some because you are a Worker,” Ikaros said. “And we have duties to the state, to the gods, to other people, to philosophy.”

“Does Cicero say where he thinks we incur them?” Sokrates asked.

“Some we’re born with, some we run into as we go along,” Ikaros said.

“Duty,” I wrote. It was such a useful concept. How I wished to be able to speak freely, to use Greek as the flexible instrument it was for Ikaros and Sokrates, not the clumsy one it still was for me. “Duty to City, to others—to self?”