“It hasn’t been kept from you at all. It’s that crazy religion Ikaros has in the City of Amazons,” I said, dismissively.

Dion was a sensible lad. He nodded politely at Aristomache. “Oh, that,” he said.

“God sent his son, his only son, down into the world to save everyone,” she said.

“Right, and Athene’s one of his angels,” Dion said. “I remember now. It’s popular in the City of Amazons. Here too, I see.”

Although we had thought a lot about what Kebes and the Goodness Group might have been doing, collecting refugees from Greece and settling them in colonies on uninhabited islands had never crossed our minds. And of course they were doing just exactly what everyone else I knew was doing, trying to live the Good Life in Plato’s Republic. It also hadn’t occurred to anyone that Kebes would try to do this in a Christian context, more than a thousand years before Christ. Ficino and Ikaros had managed to reconcile Christianity and Plato, and also in Ikaros’s case Christianity and the inarguable presence of Pallas Athene. I wondered how Kebes had done it. He wasn’t stupid, and he’d been trained by Sokrates, but didn’t have most of the structure they were starting from. He couldn’t have. He’d been ten.

“No, actually Athene’s a demon,” Aristomache said.

Dion shrugged as if he didn’t care either way. I hoped this would be the general reaction aboard, at least among the Young Ones.

I don’t have anything against Christianity. It’s a wonderful story. Indeed it’s a wonderful story that has been mostly wasted by Christians. It produced some incredible architecture and music, and some splendid visual art, especially in the Renaissance. But they have made surprisingly little art about what it’s like to be an incarnate god, suddenly subject to the pains of humanity, and then being tortured to death, before returning to sort things out in divine form. It’s the heart of the story, and I’d been thinking the whole time I’d been incarnate myself that they could have done so much more with it. Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Bach, yes, but who else had truly entered into the Mystery of it? For every Supper at Emmaeus there are thousands of Annunciations and Nativities, as if the interesting thing is that Jesus was born. Everyone is born. There’s a lot of focus on the Crucifixion, again mostly in the visual arts, but surprisingly little about how he experienced his life, before or after death. Fra Angelico came closest, I think. But you’d think in that whole era where Christianity was dominant, they’d have thought about the whole thing more, instead of getting obsessed with sin and punishment.