Neleus looked down at him and shook his head. “What are you two doing sitting in the garden? We need to find the others, and we need to get drunk.”

“Is that what people do?” Father asked.

“Yes,” Neleus said firmly. “That’s what people do, and it’s what we shall do. Come on, let’s go to Florentia. Ficino will be there, and they always have wine and won’t grudge it to us. I asked Sophoniba to find the others and send them there, and all of Mother’s especial friends. We’ll gather there and drink and talk about her. Come on.”

Father got up slowly. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what people do.”

So that’s what we did.

4. Maia

4

MAIA

I am a teacher. I have also worked as a midwife to babies and cities, but it is on teaching that I have spent most of my life. I have the temperament of a scholar. I always have had.

In the years after the Last Debate I had cause to regret a lot of things I had done in the name of Plato, but I never regretted that we had made the attempt to create the Just City. I agree with a lot of the criticisms that have been made of us, of the Masters. Buying slave children was wrong. I always thought so. I should have been more forceful in my opposition. In those days I was young, and too easily cowed by male authority. I grew up in England in the 1850s. It wasn’t until I saw the girls who grew up in the Just City that I really understood what free women could be like. That in itself justifies us in what we did, in my eyes—how marvelous they are, their natural assumption of equality. What was a hypothesis to me is an axiom to them. Only Plato in all the thousands of years between his time and my own saw that women could have philosophical souls, only Plato allowed that we were people. Only in the City were women truly liberated, for the first time in history.

All the same, we Masters did and allowed things that were wrong, and I am as guilty as any of us. These days I defer to those whose authority I respect, but I try not to automatically defer to anyone. I accept my share of the guilt for what we did, but I still say that what we tried to achieve was a noble goal, and what we did achieve was wonderful, even if it fell short of perfection. There is no perfection in human things, only in the world of Forms. We tried our best. Our intentions were good.