I’d heard about heaven from Ficino, so I knew it was a place like Hades that some people thought was an interlude between incarnations and others thought was the end-point of all incarnations, for souls that had purified themselves. It’s mentioned in the Phaedo, though not with that name. My eyes went to Father, still deeply engaged in conversation on the other side of the agora. He had come down to earth and become mortal, and was learning about understanding human life. So there was no reason not to believe that Yayzu had done the same. And his mother, especially as Botticelli had painted her and Auge carved her, seemed like a perfectly nice goddess. The statue had a book in one hand. And I could certainly understand anyone who had been at the Last Debate being angry at Athene. I nodded and smiled at Aristomache.

15. Arete

15

ARETE

We were feasted by Marissa, and I believe in the process Maecenas came to some trade agreement, but I don’t know the details. I know there are too many things that only the Workers can make, and everyone wants those things. But in Marissa they were making some of them and getting others from the Goodness, like glass. We trade Worker-made glass to all the other cities. But they didn’t have any Workers and they were making their own. I saw it in some of their windows, and while it was thick and streaky, it was still pretty impressive that they were making it themselves. They were also making iron. And they had plumbing—they didn’t have wash-fountains in every house the way we did, but they had public baths, and public drinking fountains, like Rome. I thought they were doing pretty well.

I also admired their outreach to the refugees. It was what I’d wanted to do the moment I’d seen the villages of the Kyklades, and the Goodness Group were doing what we’d talked about—rescuing people and teaching them hygiene and technology and how to read and think independently. They didn’t have printing presses, but they had literacy and fairly advanced math. Aristomache was a good teacher. I was impressed by how much they had achieved, especially when we got Aristomache off the subject of Yayzu and his mother and onto the subject of how they’d done it.