“No,” Father said. “Please.”

“Bring down the volcano,” I said, seeing it all at once as a solution. Zeus’s eyes met mine over Father’s prostrate form, and again I felt that I puzzled him. “If we can’t go on, if you have to end it, bring down the lava and the fire and the death we have always known is coming, sweep it away, kill us all. But let it have happened! Wipe it out if you must, but don’t make it never have been.”

“Why?” Behind him lightning flashed around the snowy peak of Olympos.

“We were trying to do Plato’s Republic,” I said. “It may be ludicrous and impossible, it may seem foolish to you, but we were trying. We made compromises and adaptations, but we were all trying to increase our excellence, to increase the city’s excellence, and the world’s. You heard the vow I made, that’s why you came, because I called on you to hold the oath. We all made that vow. We may have fallen short, we may have made mistakes, we may have done it all wrong, but our goal was great. Athene set us there under the volcano so that we would have no posterity, and we accepted that—difficult as it is to accept. But we were what we were, we existed. We tried. Kill us now if that’s what’s necessary to preserve history, but leave us the effort we made, at least.” I thought of Mother, Ficino, Erinna, Crocus, the everyday life of the Republic, Alkibiades showing me the vines and saying he didn’t want divine power, the people of Psyche joining in raggedly on the last chorus of Father’s ode to peace. “We might not have been philosopher kings as Plato intended, but at least we made the attempt.”

Maia was smiling through tears. Neleus nodded at me.

“And would you go back and die with the city you care for so much?” Zeus asked, his great dark eyes fixed on mine.

“You know I would. I know how temporary death is. My soul would go on with what it learned in the Just City, as we all would. Don’t take that away from us.”

Ikaros was staring at me, his lips parted. “You said you weren’t an angel,” he said.

“God is a better term,” Zeus said, absently. “She has free will, and limited knowledge. And there is no such thing as omnipotence, and omniscience is extremely overrated. As for omnibenevolence, I’m sure you realize by now that we’re doing our best. And time is a Mystery, by which I mean you are welcome to make up your own theories and I’ll be grateful if any of them come close to being a useful analogy.”