The messenger was one of the older Young Ones, a girl of about ten. She brought a written message for Simmea, and it was Simmea they wanted; she was on the Foreign Negotiations Committee. “A mission from Psyche,” she said, looking up from the note. “I’m going to have to go, I’m afraid.”

“I’ll finish up here,” I said, with a sigh.

“No, come with me,” Simmea said, picking up her kiton from the heap where she had tossed it. “I want to talk to you. We can both come back and finish up afterward. Pytheas will watch Arete.” I had been back in the Remnant City for a couple of years. Arete was six. Simmea was just over thirty, all taut muscle and sinew. White stretch marks showed as fine seams on her flat brown belly and the sides of her breasts, the legacy of her two pregnancies. She had a very distinctive face, which many people found ugly but which I was so entirely used to that it just seemed to me Simmea’s face.

“I think we should go through the wash fountain before appearing to visitors,” I said.

Simmea laughed. “I got so used to the smell of the cheese that I’d stopped noticing it. But you’re right. You know, you taught me how to use the wash fountain on my very first day in the city.”

“I always did that with new Florentine girls,” I said. “Easing them in.”

I picked up my own kiton and we walked out together. It felt hotter out in the sun. “I don’t know how you coped with all of us,” she said. “I had a little taste of it when we brought the boys home, but they were so small. Ten thousand ten-year-olds doesn’t bear imagining.”

“It was terrible,” I agreed.

“And it’s not even what Plato suggests. He says take over an existing city and drive out everyone who is over ten—so you’d have had nine- and eight-year-olds, and so on down to babies.”

“It seemed more practical,” I said, defensive as always when Children criticized the decisions the Masters had made. “It was Plotinus’s idea.”

“If you’d got children of all ages from ten to newborn, that wouldn’t have been any easier,” she said, opening the door into Thessaly.

I followed her across the room, tightly packed with beds, empty now because Pytheas was busy somewhere else and the children were at lessons. We went into the spacious fountain room, tiled in black and white diagonals. She turned on the water and we both stepped under. The shock of the cold water on my hot sweaty skin was delicious.