I suppose the whole New Concordance was partly my fault, or rather Crocus’s, making Ikaros translate Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica is really long, and of course because Ikaros shouldn’t have had the book he could only work on it in private, and when he had free time. It took him years. He still hadn’t finished it by the time I left. Ikaros was the ultimate synthesist, but he had a fast mind that was always racing ahead to the next thing. Needing to translate Aquinas for Crocus, slowly, over a long time, and then reading his translation aloud, and answering Crocus’s questions, forced him to keep coming back to it and thinking about it, instead of leaping on to something new.

Ikaros had found a way, in about 1500 A.D. from what I gather, to reconcile all the religions and philosophies in the world. He got into some considerable amount of trouble over this with the Pope and the Inquisition, and was saved, bizarrely enough, by Savonarola. I only know most of this secondhand through Lysias, who had heard of him before we came to the City. I barely know anything about Savonarola, or about the controversies of the Renaissance, and I can’t look it up because it falls into the area we decided to exclude from our library. We have plenty of Renaissance art, and Renaissance people, but not religion and politics, because we wanted the Renaissance re-imagining of the classical world, not what Lysias described as the “medieval remnants” of Christianity. So Ikaros’s Oration on the Awesomeness of Humanity, as Lysias calls it, saying that I could substitute “Pico della Mirandola” and “Dignity of Man” if I preferred, is not in the library, and neither are his nine hundred theses. His work was too Christian for the Library Committee. But excluding them didn’t keep them out. They were still in Ikaros’s head, and Ikaros’s brain was in Ikaros’s head, and what Ikaros’s brain did when it was idle was make up perfectly logical but utterly insane theories of religious reconciliation.

He had been thinking about this on and off the whole time, from the moment when he saw that Pallas Athene was real. He had told me before the Last Debate that he had found a way to make it all make sense. But it wasn’t until the first years in the City of Amazons, when he had to go through Aquinas line by line to translate it, that he came up with the rigorous and philosophically defensible thesis he called his New Concordance.