“When you come back, I’ll meet you in the Laurentian Library on the first day the orange tree blooms in 1564.”

“It’s a date,” I said, touched, and turned back to where Father and Maia and my Young Ones were waiting.

The sun isn’t literally a winged chariot with two fiery horses. It’s literally a big ball of fusing hydrogen. But metaphorically and spiritually, it’s a chariot. My chariot. My new sun, which had no name, only a catalog number, and which is literally a slightly bigger and redder ball of fusing hydrogen, is metaphorically and spiritually a racecar. My racecar. We called it Helios, “the sun,” either because we’re an unimaginative people, or because we instinctively recognized that it had metaphorically and spiritually the same driver as the old Helios we’d left shining on Earth. It zips across the sky. The day is only nineteen hours long.

Father set the five Republics of Kallisti and the eight Lucian Republics down carefully on the new planet, without so much as bumping any of their art or architecture. He also took all the people who chose to go, which was everyone except for a scattering of stubborn idiots who stood alone to see their cities and civilization disappear around them. (And who do you think has to be their patron and look after them forever after? Well, did you think Athene was going to get stuck with it?) He set the cities down the same distance apart they had always been. It didn’t matter at all to Father that he put them on a rocky volcanic plain on the edge of a great ocean, or that many of them now had harbors that went nowhere. It looked exceedingly peculiar, but we coped.

Porphyry did indeed get us some new robots, and that helped a great deal.

Maia became the first leader of the City after the move, and she and Crocus were the first Consuls of the Senate of Plato, the council made up of representatives of all twelve cities. She helped lead us into the era of peace and exploration, and when the aliens came she was the first after Arete to learn their language. She was thrice Consul, and after she died we put that on her memorial stone, along with all her other achievements. As Father had predicted, Neleus led us after that. By then we were thoroughly involved with the alien confederation, and we’d persuaded a surprising number of aliens to strive for excellence and justice in a Platonic context before the human spaceships discovered all of us and things got complicated.

As for me, I kept writing songs, and learning things about myself, about mortal life, about my children and other people. I kept on striving toward excellence, for myself and for the world. All the worlds.