“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d have tried to kill yourself,” she said, tentatively. “It isn’t what Simmea would have wanted. Your Young Ones will need you.”

“They need both of us,” I said, which was entirely true. The difference was that they could have had both of us. If I’d killed myself it would have been temporary. Oh, it would have been different being here as a god with all my abilities. Being incarnate made everything so vivid and immediate and inexorable. But I’d have been here and so would Simmea, and she knew that. Why would it have been being an idiot to kill myself to save her? She understood how temporary death would have been for me, how easy resurrection. If she’d let me do it we could have been having a conversation about it right now. There would even be advantages to being here as a god—there were all kinds of things I could use my powers for. For a start I could get us some more robots, unintelligent ones this time, and make everyone’s life easier.

Naturally, I couldn’t share these thoughts with Klymene. She didn’t know I was Apollo. Nobody did except Simmea and our Young Ones, and Sokrates and Athene. Sokrates had flown off after the Last Debate and never been seen again. We assumed he was dead—flies don’t live very long. Simmea was definitely dead. And deathless Athene was back on Olympos, and after twenty years probably still furious with me. If I’d killed myself and saved Simmea in front of her, Klymene would have been bound to notice. As things were, there was no need to tell her. Even without that she had no reason to like me.

“The Young Ones will need you all the more without Simmea,” Klymene said.

“They’re nearly grown,” I said. It was almost true. The boys were nineteen or twenty, and Arete was fifteen.

“They’ll still need you,” Klymene said.

Before I could answer, she saw somebody coming and stiffened, reaching for her bow. I leaped to my feet and spun around. Then I relaxed. It was the Delphi troop coming out. I bent down and picked up the arrow, which I’d dropped. It wasn’t much of a memento, but it was all I had. “I’ll go home,” I said.

“You won’t … you won’t do anything stupid?” Klymene asked.

“Not after Simmea’s last request,” I said. “You heard her. She specifically asked me not to be an idiot.”

“Yes…” she said. She was frowning.

“I won’t kill myself,” I specified. “At least, not immediately.”