I must have been about four years old when Maia came back, so it was probably in the eighteenth year of the City, eight years or so after the Last Debate. My parents lived in the house called Thessaly that had once belonged to Sokrates. It was an extremely inconvenient house for a family, as are all the houses of the Remnant. There are enormous eating halls and public buildings, and little sleeping houses designed for seven people to sleep in. There were eight of us, but that wasn’t the problem; the problem was that there wasn’t room for anything but sleeping and washing and sitting in the garden debating philosophy. Mother had built a partition down the middle so that she and Father and I slept on one side and the boys slept on the other. I remember our three little beds all in a row, mine under the window.

One night, long after I had fallen asleep, I was wakened by a scratch at the door. Father went and opened it, and there was Maia, carrying a big book. I didn’t know Maia then, of course. Mother was awake, and she went at once to Maia and hugged her, so I knew it was all right. The three of them went out into the garden, so as not to wake the boys, and as I was awake and curious I followed after. We all sat on the grass. I don’t really remember the conversation, though I do remember Mother looking at the Botticelli book Maia had brought, and which I later came to know and love. I probably couldn’t understand all the words they used, but I knew that Maia had left some other city and come back to ours, and she had just arrived that night. It shows how peaceful everything was then that she could do that. She was probably about forty at the time, and she had come alone, unarmed and unchallenged, halfway across the island, arriving after dark. The gates were guarded, but she had come in simply by saying she wanted to. The guards knew her, of course, because pretty much everyone knew everyone. That was before the art raids started, and it was the art raids that spoiled everything and led to the present lamentable state of affairs.

I remember sitting on the rough grass in the moonlight, looking at Maia as she talked to my parents. They knew her well, but I found her fascinating because she was a complete stranger. There were very few complete strangers in my world in those days. I remember noticing how white her skin was in the moonlight, whiter even than Father’s. Her pale hair was braided and the braid was pinned up around her head.

“I thought you were all for women’s rights,” Mother said.