“Asleep down below, I think. But he’ll be up soon.” Neleus nodded to the east where the sky was starting to pale. Father inevitably woke at sunrise. Naxos was a dark bulk immediately to the north of us. The rain was chilling me. I walked over to the rail. Neleus walked beside me. “They’re out there somewhere,” he said.

My mind was full of Erinna and the Naxians, and I frowned at him, puzzled. “Who?”

“The Goodness Group,” he said, his hands clenching into fists. “We’ll find them. We’ll avenge Mother. I know you want that as much as I do.”

I put my hand on his arm. “I grieve for Mother, but I don’t know whether vengeance will help.”

“It’ll help me,” he said. “I feel I let her down.”

“Oh Neleus, you didn’t,” I said.

“She was always so exacting, and I didn’t meet her standards.” He was staring out over the dark water, not looking at me.

“It’s true what Father said. She loved you. I often felt I didn’t meet her standards either.”

“You and I are all that’s left of her now,” he said, turning toward me.

“Well, genetically,” I agreed. “But all the people she taught, all the pictures and sculptures she made, that lives on.” For as long as the City lives, I thought. Not into posterity, because there is none. Unless we can change history. If we can change history, then her legacy could really last.

Father came up from below, yawning. I waved to him and he came over to us. “Joy to you both,” he said, and we repeated the wish.

“I need to know something about how the universe works,” I said.

He looked over to the little island he had been looking at the day before. “There’ll be a temple there one day,” he said, quietly. “A temple to me. It’ll be there by Homer’s day. We’re here early. But I don’t know exactly when.”

“Can we change history?” I asked.

He and Neleus both stared at me. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“Can things we do, here and now, change what will happen in the future?”

“Yes. Of course. But not things that the gods know about, not things that are already fixed.”

“So there’s only one time?” I asked.

“Right. It’s as if time’s a scroll, and we haven’t read all of it but it’s all there, and once we’ve read it, that’s fixed. But it all scrolls along in order when you’re inside it. From outside, it’s different.” His chin wavered. “I remember explaining it like that to Simmea and Sokrates.”

“So for instance we could teach the people on Naxos medicine and iron working and navigation and philosophy, and it wouldn’t change the outcome of the Trojan War?” I asked.

“No.”