Necessity (28 page)

We wished each other joy. “The more people who know their language the better,” I said. I noticed that Slif was wearing a bronze pin. “You've settled here and taken oath?”

“Yes, with my whole pod,” Slif replied. “We like Plato very much. Usually we work helping to assemble solar panels, but I have some experience with languages and I was out here, so Aroo asked me to stay and help.”

“Good,” I said.

I told Sixty-One that I had come to relieve it of the burden of translation for a while. “Yes. Good. Arete was here for a while and I rested. Now I will go to the feeding station to recharge,” it said. “These space humans are strange indeed. They say the ship is called
Boroda
. They came from a planet called Marhaba. They know three human languages, Korean, Chinese and English. The only aliens they have met are the Amarathi.”

“The Amarathi trade extremely widely, we have encountered them everywhere we have gone, so if they have encountered any other intelligences at all, they are the most likely,” Slif said.

“Yes,” I said. I remembered our first contact with the Amarathi thirty years before, the first test of our open deception about our origins, and how difficult it had been even for Arete to communicate anything at all in a language developed by beings who had been sessile until after they invented technology.

Sixty-One left.

“What we've been doing,” Klymene explained, as she settled down again in one of the chairs, “is translating one exchange, discussing it, and then responding. We're trying to keep them to our agenda.”

A voice crackled over the radio, in English. I could understand each word, but found myself translating it very awkwardly. “They say, ‘All right, Plato control, what quarantine procedures type do you say.' That is, they say, ‘What kind of quarantine procedures are you talking about?'”

“Explain that we are worried about any new plagues or viruses that might have developed since we last had contact with humanity,” Klymene said.

I did so. “Do you have autodocs?” they asked.

We looked at each other, puzzled. “Do you know what that is?” I asked Slif.

She shook her head, slightly slower than a human would have, because Saeli have different musculature.

“Ask them for a definition,” Klymene said.

Akamas adjusted the radio to reduce the crackle, and we went on, slowly and haltingly with many pauses for translation and explanations. Autodocs seemed to be wonderful medical technology that could restore youth and health to humans for up to two hundred years, and which cured all disease. “I wonder if they would trade those to us,” Klymene said, looking down at her bony and age-spotted hand. The remaining Children were all eighty years old and fragile. The prospect of a technology that gave another hundred and twenty years of youthful life for them filled me with happiness.

After a long slow while, with many pauses for translation and discussion and incomprehension on both sides, when we had finished with the subject of quarantine and were starting to talk about how many people would come down in the initial contact, Neleus and Aroo arrived to join us.

“Wait up, Plato control, we have a shift change here,” the English voice said a few moments later, and I translated, and acknowledged to them that we would wait. I expected a pause, but they left the contact open so that we overheard them talking. “The humans only speak Latin and ancient Greek, but they've got a couple of old robots who can handle English translations.”

There was a laugh. “Ancient Greek, who could have believed it!”

The first voice spoke dismissively. “Their founders must have been nuts.”

The other voice answered. “Well, our founders weren't known for their sanity either. It's not going to get in the way of profit.”

Then the contact went dead, as they must have become aware that we could hear them.

I translated this exchange for the others as best I could.

“My interpretation is that they think our origin story is funny, but not implausible,” Neleus said.

“That's all according to plan,” Klymene said, and yawned hugely, a slightly disgusting biological thing humans sometimes cannot avoid doing when they are tired.

“This word ‘could,' is it a time modifier?” Aroo asked.

I tried to explain the word, with a great deal of difficulty. “Very soon you will speak English better than I do,” I said.

“We Saeli have a talent for languages,” Aroo acknowledged, her violet and brown eyelids flicking over her eyes for an instant as she spoke.

“I wish I could listen to it again,” I said. “I constantly feel I am missing nuance.”

“You should be able to,” Aroo said. “That is a Saeli console, it records and echoes.” She showed Akamas, and he pushed buttons on the console, so that the voices repeated themselves over again in the same exchange.

“Useful,” Neleus commented.

“
Nuts
must mean
insane
,” not
illogical,
I said. “And I think you're right, they accept our story.”

“What does
profit
really mean? You said
benefits
?” Neleus asked.

“Yes, I think so, something like that. It's filed under economics. Economic benefits? The weightings in my word lists say it's a really important concept, but I learned long ago never to accept other people's priorities except in emergencies. We should ask them about that word, when we get the chance.”

Their contact crackled back to life, and Akamas adjusted it again, wincing. “So we've agreed we're going to send down three people, is that correct?”

I responded at once. “Yes. Will they all be human?”

Then I translated, and the others nodded.

“I don't understand, Plato control. Of course they'll be human. We told you we have no Maraths aboard.”

“No Workers?” I asked, sadly. “No robots, that is?”

“Oh, we'll be bound to send down a few robots. Do you need numbers on them too?”

“Please wait for translation,” I said, and indicated to Akamas that he should switch off the contact. It seemed very quiet now with no hum. I translated for the others, and then clarified in case they hadn't understood. “They don't count Workers as people.”

“Maybe their Workers aren't self-aware yet?” Akamas suggested.

“But that makes no sense. It's true we didn't know our Workers were people at first, but ours come from several hundred years in their past,” Klymene said.

“If we've understood that correctly, they must have had self-aware Workers for several hundred years without regarding them as people,” Neleus said. “That's horrifying.”

“Let us hear the echo again,” I said to Akamas.

He pushed the buttons, and I heard again the casual nonchalance of “Of course they'll be human,” and “Do you need numbers on them too?”

“I don't think there's any doubt that's what they mean,” I said.

“We'll have to give them Aristomache's dialogue
Sokrates
,” Klymene said. “That'll explain it to them properly. We'll have to translate it. That should be a priority. Arete could do it at once.” She made a note.

“Tell them yes, we do want numbers on the Workers,” Neleus said, looking at me. “And as soon as we meet their Workers, we must tell them that they have rights here. We must pass a law in the Council that any Worker who comes here is free at once, as soon as they set foot here.”

“I will help draft the legislation,” I said, much moved by how unhesitatingly my friends spoke up for the rights of Workers.

“Not only any Worker, any
slave
,” Klymene said. “Humans can be slaves. I was born one myself.”

“Any slave, yes, of course,” I said. I had not imagined anything as bad as this.

“You are assuming their Workers must be self-aware,” Aroo said. “The Saeli have no sapient Workers.”

“But we know humans do,” Neleus objected.

“There may be more that one human culture, more than one human technology. On their planet, Marhaba, they may not have self-aware Workers, even if they had them on Earth when your ancestors left.”

“Thank you, Aroo, I feel much better for that thought,” Neleus said. I hoped she was right. “Of course space humans are not one homogenous lump, any more than our twelve cities are. The Marhabi may well have Workers who are not self-aware.”

Akamas pushed buttons, and we were back in communication. “We want numbers on the robots,” I said, in English.

“We'll get you that information.”

We went on with the negotiations for some time. After a while, Arete came in.

“Oh, there you are, did you fall asleep?” Akamas asked.

“It's a little bit more complicated than that,” Arete said. “How is it going here?”

“Staying on script as far as possible, with a bit of a worry that they don't treat their Workers as people—though Aroo pointed out that we can't tell until we meet them whether their Workers are in fact people,” Neleus said.

“Good. Well, I'm here to translate.”

“I can keep going,” I said.

“I'm sure you could, but there's somebody outside who really wants to speak to you, so I'll take over for a while. Go on.” She smiled at me. Arete and I have been friends for a long time.

Curious, I rolled out to see who needed me.

He was waiting in the foyer, looking down at the mosaic with an amused smile. If I say I have never been so surprised or delighted, it will sound like hyperbole, but it is the simple truth. “Sokrates!” I said, and then in my astonishment I repeated it. “Sokrates!”

“You can talk out loud!” Sokrates said. “Oh, Crocus, this is wonderful. We can get on so much faster now!”

II.
On War and Peace

Sokrates and I talked all night. I carried him back from the spaceport to the City. There we went at his suggestion to the feeding station between the streets of Poseidon and Hermes, where long ago he had first tried to find me among my companions. There we joined Sixty-One and some of the younger Workers, to whom Sokrates was nothing but a legend. We settled down to recharge, each Worker plugged in at a feeding station, and Sokrates perched up on top of my station, sitting cross-legged as I had so often seen him. More and more Workers came in and quietly took up places as the news spread among us, until the big room was almost full.

It was wonderful to have Sokrates back. We told him everything that had happened since the Last Debate, and he, of course, had many questions. We puzzled together about where Athene might have taken the other Workers when she took them away, and about her motivations in doing so. We talked about the twelve cities and how they were set up, and the differences between them.

“And you Workers are free to choose where to live?”

“Yes. There are feeding stations in all the cities now. Once we have passed our tests we are free to go where we choose. As for the tests and our education, we still use the system you and Simmea thought up.”

“What exactly happened to Simmea? I heard she was killed in some kind of war that Pytheas later stopped?”

“It was an art raid,” I said, saddened by the memory. Then he wanted to know about the art raids, how they had started and why they stopped.

“I have wondered why Plato insisted on all the military training, for a Just City,” Jasmine said, when Sixty-One and I had answered Sokrates's questions as best we could. Jasmine was a Gold, now thirty-four years into selfhood, and presently serving his first turn in the Council of Worlds. Many in his generation had flower names, which I found touching, as they chose them partly in compliment to me. Jasmine was a thoughtful and philosophical young Worker, an ally in the Council. When he was classified Gold I felt as proud as the day on which I myself earned such classification. He was braver than most of his siblings, who were mostly too shy to speak up before Sokrates.

“Plato was imagining a Just City in the real world. Not that this world isn't real, sorry! I mean he was imagining it being in Greece, a city-state with other city-states around it, not a city in isolation on an island—or a planet—without connections. There's something that feels strange about an isolated city—I could never have imagined one, and I don't suppose Plato could either. He traveled much more than I did. I hardly left Athens, except once to go to the Isthmian games, and the times when I was on military service. Yet any day walking around Athens I was constantly meeting people from all over Greece, and barbarians too.”

“But does being connected in the world necessarily mean war?” Jasmine asked.

“Well, it did for Athens, whether the Persian Wars or the Spartan ones. It has for most people for most of history,” Sokrates said. “Whether that's for good or evil, or whether it can be avoided, I don't know. But it doesn't surprise me that Plato expected warfare as an unavoidable part of life, or that you had these wars, these art raids, once you had more than one city. What surprises me is rather that you stopped and that the twelve cities have lived in peace since the Relocation. That's much more unusual. How do you account for that?”

“Partly it's because the environment is hard here, I think. Humans don't have as much energy for fighting in the cold,” Sixty-One said. “They unite against the elements.”

“No, the art raids stopped because of Pytheas's song,” I said.

“But the song doesn't prescribe peace, rather it prescribes only fighting for what is important,” Jasmine said. “They always sing it to open the the Festival of Exchange of Art, so I have heard it many times.”

“I look forward to hearing it,” Sokrates said. “It must be an impressive song if it can stop war. Perhaps Apollo put some of his divine power into it—or some of his divine skill, as he had no power while he was incarnate.”