I wondered who she had written the notebooks for. Not for me. I was fascinated to read them, but I wasn’t their intended audience. Equally they were not for publication in the City and inclusion in the library, certainly not, because not only did she reveal the truth of my identity, but she explained things neither I not anybody else in the City would need to have explained. What audience had she imagined? They were written in lucid classical Greek. Who could read them? Anyone in classical antiquity and truly educated people for another millenium. I considered for a moment that once I was back in my true form, I could take them to Athens and leave them on Plato’s doorstep. My mouth twisted. I wouldn’t do it, but I was so tempted.

Phaedrus and Neleus were in Thessaly when Arete and I got back. I took the last notebook out of Simmea’s chest and saw their interested glances. Before they could inquire, I removed all twelve notebooks and tucked them into the fold of my kiton. Our Young Ones were definitely not Simmea’s audience for these, and I didn’t want them reading them. Her thoughts and feelings and intimate experiences weren’t for them. Arete was looking at me curiously. “Did your mother ever tell you her childhood name?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Wasn’t she always called Simmea?”

“Her parents called her Lucia,” I said. “But she never used it after she came here.”

“Lucia?” Neleus asked. “I never knew that.”

“It isn’t important,” I said as I went out. I was glad I’d told them. I didn’t want Kebes to be the only other person who knew it. Though Ficino would know it too, if he remembered. He probably didn’t remember—not that his wits were wandering like poor old Adeimantus, but he couldn’t possibly remember the original name every child had given him.

I took the notebooks to the library and sat in the window seat where Athene used to sit. It was dark outside, though the library was lit with electricity, and warmed with it as well. The library stayed at a constant temperature. Crocus and Sixty-One kept the electricity working now as they always had. They needed it themselves, of course. I wondered why Athene had left them when she took all the other Workers. She took the others to punish us, of course, to make us do without them and realize how difficult it would be. To live a life of the mind you need slaves or technology, and technology is unquestionably better. Now we compromised, eking out the technology we had and working ourselves half the time. It didn’t leave us the leisure for philosophy we had before. A tired mind can’t think as well. But nobody who enslaves another can be truly free.