“We’re all going,” Kallikles said. “It won’t be all of your sons, Father. Alkibiades and Porphyry and Euklides would still be on the island even if the ship sinks. And how can we live as heroes if we don’t get the chance to join the one heroic venture in our lifetimes so far?”

Father looked from one to the other of them, then he slowly set down his cup, got up, and went out of the street door.

“Where are you going?” Kallikles asked, but Father kept on walking and didn’t answer.

“Where is he going?” Phaedrus asked.

Since nobody else was going to, I got up and followed Father. He was walking aimlessly south down the middle of the street. “Where are you going?” I asked.

“To visit the lion,” he said.

I put my hand through his arm. “I’ll come too.” I knew the lion he meant. It was a bronze statue of a lion on a street corner near Florentia. Mother had been especially fond of it. One of my first memories was walking to visit the lion, one of my little hands held in each of my parents’ big ones. We walked down briskly through the night’s chill that made me wish for my cloak. Father felt warm, but then he always does. I don’t know if it was his divine fire burning even in his mortal incarnation or just a natural warmth. We reached the lion, and he patted it the way Mother used to. I patted it too. The lion’s face was very expressive, but it was hard to say just what it expressed. It seemed to change from time to time. Tonight the shadows made it seem worried. We turned around and walked back toward home.

It was a cold night and the stars were burning bright and clear, so distinct that I could see colors in some of them. “I can see all the stars in Orion’s belt,” I said.

“We’ll go there one day,” Father said.

I looked at him, startled. “You and me?”

“People,” he clarified. “They’ll settle planets out around those distant suns, one day, far ahead. I haven’t been there yet. I’m always reluctant to leave the sun. But eventually I will, and you will too. I promised your mother I’d see her out there one day.” He wiped his eyes.

“But what does it mean?” I asked. “She might be out there on another planet far in the future, but she won’t remember us, or her life here.”

“No,” he agreed, sadly.

“And the civilization that settles the stars won’t be our civilization. They won’t have learned anything from this experiment, they won’t know anything about the Just City except the legend of Atlantis in the Timaeus and Critias.”