Read Online The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton - Free Book Online

it helped at the time. So I dealt with my grief by writing autobiography, working hard at the palaestra, and reading history.
    The other person who really helped was Crocus. Crocus is a Worker, a robot, and he had been a close friend of Mother’s. We had long ago worked out a way for the Workers to write in wax so there wasn’t a permanent engraved record of every time they wished somebody joy, but he always carved what he wrote about Mother into the paving stones. He wanted to talk about debates they had shared, and he took me to the places where they’d had them. His responses were engraved into the marble, and it comforted us both when he engraved what Mother had said beside them, making them into full dialogues. He knew all about death and what happened to human souls—at least as much as anyone else. But he worried about his own soul, and Sixty-One’s, and the souls of the Workers Athene had taken with her after the Last Debate. We had enough spare parts for Crocus and Sixty-One to last indefinitely, but he wondered whether he should want his soul to move on. He wondered if he would become a human or an animal or another Worker. He mused about why Plato never mentioned Workers. Crocus could always distract me from my own thoughts. Sometimes he would come into Florentia and join me and Ficino when we were debating.
    He had built a number of statues—we called them colossi, because they were so immense. They combined hyperrealism—you could see all the hairs up Sokrates’s nose in his Last Debate —with strange outbreaks of fantasy—in that same statue, one of Sokrates’s eyes is already a fly’s multifaceted eye. Parts of them were painted and parts of them were plain marble or other stone. He had decided to make a sculpture of Mother, but he hadn’t decided where. We went together to look at various places in the city he thought might be appropriate. I know he tried to talk to Father about this too. But Father was too sunk in grief to give an opinion—though he did sensibly agree with me that having a colossus of Mother in the garden at Thessaly would be a bad idea.
    One day when it was my turn to help cook dinner in Florentia, I came out to eat late and saw Maia and Aeschines sitting with Father and Phaedrus. I took my plate over to join them. Father wasn’t crying at that moment, but his face still had that devastated look. Maia looked firm. Aeschines was looking troubled. He was one of the Children, and father of my friend Baukis. He had been a good friend of Mother’s, though not especially of Father’s. Father found him slow. He was a member of the Chamber, and on a number of important committees.
    â€œNobody is going to agree to a voyage of vengeance,” Maia was saying as I put my plate down.
    Father looked up. “Arete. Joy to you.”
    â€œJoy,” I echoed, though joy was the furthest thing from either of our voices.
    â€œJoy to you, Arete,” Aeschines said. “I haven’t seen you in a long time. You must come and eat with me and Baukis in Ithaka one of these days.”
    â€œJoy, and thank you,” I said. There was a fresco at Ithaka that Mother had painted when she’d been young. When Aeschines invited me, I was suddenly filled with a need to see it. She had painted it so long ago, and she had done better work since, as she always said. But I liked it, especially the way she had shown Odysseus in the harbor that was our own harbor. “I’ll come one day soon,” I promised.
    â€œBaukis will be glad.” He smiled at me in a friendly way, as if he genuinely liked me.
    Meanwhile Father had turned back to Maia. “Maybe nobody wants a voyage of vengeance. But how about a voyage of exploration? It’s ridiculous when you think about it, nonsensical for us to be here and know so little about what’s out there right now. Finding Kebes would be an advantage, if we could, whether or not