We had to work hard, without Workers, just to have enough to eat. All the same, we spent more time in debate than anything else. We debated everything in committees and then before the whole Assembly—and the Assembly here consisted of all those over eighteen, though they were not all equal within the Assembly. Irons and bronzes were given one vote each, silvers three, and golds four. The age of eighteen was chosen because it was the traditional age of adulthood in Plato’s Athens. We would have gone with Plato’s thirty, but nobody was thirty yet except for Masters. I was only a little over thirty myself. To start with we had practically nobody who was not an adult in our newly defined terms. A few of the Children had brought their Young Ones, and a few of them were pregnant. The first baby born in the City of Amazons was Euridike’s Porphyry, born the first winter. I delivered him myself, the first baby I ever helped deliver who was not immediately taken away from their mother to grow up in anonymity.

Porphyry encapsulated in his tiny person our first two great debates—over names, and over families. Klio and some others wanted us all to take back our original names and allow eclectic naming of new babies. This divided everyone. Lysias and I were against it. “It’s not that different, and I’ve been Lysias so long it feels like my real name now,” Lysias said, and I nodded.

“Why would I want to be Ethel? Ethel feels like another person, a person from another world. It has been more than ten years. I’m not Ethel anymore. I’ve grown up as Maia.”

“I can’t think of you as Ethel,” Lysias agreed.

“And I don’t think I even knew you were Li Xi,” I said. “It’s a name from another culture. It would make you seem different from everyone.”

“I think Klio thinks that’s a good thing, to point up the differences.”

For once Ikaros and I were on the same side. “Naming ourselves and our children from the classical world unites us; using naming customs from other times and places would divide us,” he said in debate. The vote was close, but we won. Porphyry was named after the philosopher, who had been one of us and had recently died. He was also named for the purple stone that had symbolized Roman technical prowess in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and thirdly for the idea of being porphyrogenitos, born to the purple, being the first baby born in the new city and the heir to our traditions. It was a lot of weight for a name to carry.