“I put my maternal instincts into being a teacher. The whole City is my baby—this city and the original. I don’t want my own baby to love more than all the others. I think Plato’s right that I would favor it.”

“I want children,” Lysias said. “I was prepared to do without to make the Republic, but what we’re doing here is all compromised anyway. I want to help everyone, you know I do, but I want my own children to grow up here too, now that it’s possible.”

“Would you want that if you had to be the mother rather than the father?” I asked. “If you were the one to stay home and sing them to sleep?”

“Yes,” he said, with no hesitation whatsoever. I was astonished. “Is that what you want?” He looked into my face.

“I was just being rhetorical. I never imagined you would agree. In the nineteenth century it would have been unthinkable for a man to do a woman’s work that way.” I put my hand on his.

He smiled. “In the twenty-first century it was unusual but not unheard of. And we assigned some iron boys as nursery attendants. I would do it if that’s how you wanted to arrange things.”

“I don’t want to shrink my horizons to a baby,” I said. “In my own time, that was the end of all independent thought.”

“It needn’t be that here,” Lysias said. “If we decided to have children, I’d certainly be willing to be the one to stay home with them. But we’ll also have crèches to provide flexibility. Nobody’s going to be forcing you to be a nineteenth-century mother.”

“I see that. But even so.”

“I truly want this. I want children. And I can’t do it without your help. You have a womb and can grow a new person. I can’t.”

I had never before thought of this as a form of female power that men lacked. No wonder they tried to control us in so many societies for so many years. (And no wonder Athene remained a virgin.) I still didn’t especially want to have babies. But I didn’t want to lose Lysias, and it seemed so important to him; and if he would take charge of the parts I didn’t want to, then I thought that perhaps it didn’t have to be something huge and life-changing for me.