“I’ll live out this life until this body dies, and then come home to Olympos,” Father said. “When this body dies, whether that’s in ten minutes from the volcano or in fifty years from old age.”

“You’ll be cleaning up this mess for a lot longer than fifty years,” Zeus said. “And you too,” he added, to Athene. “You’ll be out there getting your hands dirty, not tucked away in your library.”

“If that is your judgment,” Athene said.

“Show me what you have found, Porphyry,” Zeus said.

Porphyry stood up and walked over to Zeus. He put his hands together, then pulled them apart, as if doing a cat’s cradle, but without string. Something glimmered between his fingers. I thought for a moment it was one of the blue and gold bell-headed flowers, but there was nothing there. “Here,” Porphyry said, indicating the emptiness between his fingers. “And a little while before the ships arrive from Earth, do you see?” Zeus peered into the nothingness, then laughed. Thunder rolled around the mountain.

“That’ll do,” he said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s an era far in the future, in the twenty-fifth century, when humanity has just discovered faster-than-light travel,” Porphyry said. “They’re just rediscovering all the civilizations on planets that were settled more slowly than light. There aren’t complete records of who went where. Some of them are very strange. We can be one of them. We won’t look much odder than the others. It’s long after the Republic was written, so why shouldn’t a group of people have tried it?”

“Nobody ever has,” muttered Zeus.

“We’d have a divine origin story, but nobody would have to pay any attention. And the ships will come, and they can discover us, and we can rejoin the human mainstream, with all our books and art and theories. It will be a mystery, but only a small one, nothing to prove anything.”

“Why do you keep so secret?” Neleus asked. “Why can’t we give them proof? People want so much to know and to understand.”

“It’s better for humanity to allow us to work out our own theories, our own destiny. If we know it changes everything,” Ikaros said.

Neleus nodded slowly, recognizing that in himself.

“And knowing would fix one truth, and close off many paths to enlightenment,” Athene said. “You’re going to love the Enlightenment,” she said aside, to Ikaros.

“Posterity,” I said, to Zeus and Porphyry. “But another planet? I suppose a new world would be a fresh beginning.”

“A new world won’t be an empty blank any more than ten-year-olds are,” Maia said.