The Philosopher Kings Read Free

said.
    â€œHow are you going to manage without her?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t have the faintest idea,” I said.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œThey 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.
    â€œThe Young Ones will need you all the more without Simmea,” Klymene said.
    â€œThey’re nearly grown,” I said. It was almost true. The boys were nineteen or twenty, and Arete was fifteen.
    â€œThey’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.
    â€œYou won’t … you won’t do anything stupid?” Klymene asked.
    â€œNot after Simmea’s last request,” I said. “You heard her. She specifically asked me not to be an idiot.”
    â€œYes…” she said. She was frowning.
    â€œI won’t kill myself,” I specified. “At least, not immediately.”
    Klymene looked at me in incomprehension, and I’m sure I looked at her the same way. “You shouldn’t kill yourself because you don’t know that you’ve finished what you’re supposed to do in this life,” she said.
    Not even Necessity knows all ends.

 
    2
    ARETE
    You don’t exist, of course. It’s natural to write with an eye to posterity, to want to record what has happened for the edification not of one’s friends, but of later ages. But there will be no later ages. All this has happened and is, by design, to leave no trace but legend. The volcano will erupt and the Platonic Cities will be extinguished. The legend of Atlantis will survive to inspire Plato, which is especially ironic as it was Plato who inspired the Masters to set up the City in the first place.
    The more I think about this, the more I think that Sokrates was right in the Last Debate. It was fundamentally wrong of them to found the City at all. The story of humanity is one of growth and change and the accumulation of experience. We of the cities are a branch cut off to wither—not a lost branch, but a branch deliberately cut away. We are like figures sculpted of wax and cast into the fire to melt.