I recognized them instantly, even faster than I’d recognized Hermes. Hermes bore a resemblance to his pictures and statues, so that you’d immediately think of them when you saw him. Sokrates looked exactly like his. It was the oddest thing. All Crocus’s statues of Sokrates had something a little bit weird about them, and I had always thought that was to do with the nature of the artist, that Crocus had grown up surrounded by human art without being human and therefore saw things in a different way. Now that Sokrates was in front of me, I saw that Crocus had captured him very well. Although he was only a balding old man with a big bulbous nose, there was indeed a difficult-to-define strangeness about him. As for Ikaros, there are frescoes of him debating Athene or being carried off to Olympos outside every Ikarian temple. Besides, Dion and Aelia and I had taken the boat into Amazonia in a storm once, years ago, and I saw a beautiful lifesize Auge bust of Ikaros in one of the palaestras. When he appeared abruptly in Hilfa’s room, I knew him at once, even though he was wearing a heavy black robe, belted with a piece of rope. He looked around curiously, beaming.

Sokrates stumped around in a slow circle, taking everything in, his eyes resting longest on Hilfa. Hilfa stared back at him. “Joy to you. What are you?” Sokrates asked, gently.

“This is Hilfa. He’s a Sael. This is his house,” Pytheas said. “And that’s my granddaughter Thetis and her friend Jason,” he added, with a wave of his hand towards where we sat on the bed. “And of course, everyone, meet Sokrates and Ikaros.”

“What are Saeli?” Ikaros asked. “The aliens you mentioned? Folk who live beyond the stars?” He gestured questioningly towards Hilfa, who was standing completely still staring at the newcomers. I was used to Saeli, and especially to Hilfa, but seeing their stunned reaction reminded me of how strange they had seemed when I first saw them, with their patterned green skin and their strange eyes. I had stood behind the glass of the landing field in a whispering line with the other Samian children, full of anticipation. When they had come out of their shuttle and we had seen them out there we had all fallen silent, and although we were ten years old and not babies, we found ourselves clutching each other’s hands for comfort against the strangeness. I had slid slowly from that awe into comfortable familiarity. In this last couple of years working with Hilfa and seeing him every day I had almost forgotten that first astonishment, until I saw it now reflected in Sokrates and Ikaros’s faces.

“Yes, precisely that,” Pytheas said, sitting down again in the chair where he had been before.