The Just City by Jo Walton Read Free Book Online

How I wished my father could have been here—but he would never have prayed to a pagan goddess. When Atticus introduced me to Cicero, whom he called Tullius, I found he was less delighted to meet me. He was not among those who believed Plato on the equality of women. He was flattered when he found how much of his work I had read, and how high his reputation stood in my century, but he could never really consider me, or any of us women, as people to be taken seriously.
    The difficulties and complications of actually putting Plato’s ideas into practice were immense. But we had Athene, whom we all addressed as Sophia, meaning “wisdom.” She had brought the workers—automata that could follow orders and build and plant crops and perform even more wonders. “They come from the future. They are here to labor for you,” she said.
    Very few of us had seen anything like them before. Kylee said they were robots, and “workers” was a good translation of that. She said they were more advanced than any such things in her own day.
    We formed into committees to work on different aspects of the Republic. We came together to report on progress in formal sessions, which we came to call Chamber. At first we had just that one hall, where we all slept in drafts on the cold marble floor. It was lucky it was summer. We drank water from a spring, and had the workers dig trenches for latrines. Then we had them build a fountain, and bathrooms, and kitchens. Few of us knew how to cook, but fortunately the workers had some limited abilities in that area.
    As we had, as yet, no philospher kings, and as we could acknowledge no leader but Athene, we decided that for the time being, when we did not agree, we would vote on an issue. Athene smiled at this. The first divisive issue that came to a vote was names. We voted that those of us with inappropriate names would adopt new names, and that we would do the same with the children who came to us, naming them from the Dialogues and from Greek mythology. Kylee and some others felt strongly against this, but in the vote after the debate, the majority carried the day. I adopted the name Maia, for my birth month, and for the mother of Hermes. Kylee took the name Klio, as being the closest she could come to her original name. We also agreed that we would have one unique name each. The Romans and others who had multiple appropriate names would limit themselves to just one.
    For the first time ever I was fully engaged in life. I cared about everything. I read the Republic over and over, I took part in debates in Chamber, I served on committees, I had opinions and was listened to. It was marvellous. I woke up every morning on the cold floor of the hall, happy simply to be alive. I daily thanked God, the gods, Athene, for allowing me to be there and part of all of it. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be infuriating.
    I served on the Technology Committee. We had long debates about how much technology to allow. Some of us felt that we should do it with the technology of the day, or that which Plato would have understood. But we already had the workers, and without workers we should have needed slaves. The workers needed electricity, which was produced from the sun. Sufficient electricity to feed the workers would also provide good lighting, and a certain amount of heating and cooling. “The advantage of that,” Klio said, when she presented our recommendations to the whole Chamber, “will be to keep the library at a constant temperature to better protect the books.”
    Most of the older people and all of the famous ones were men, but most of the people who understood technology in any way were young women. Though we had nominal equality, there were always those like Tullius who would not accept us as equals. In addition I saw in other women and detected in myself a tendency to defer to older men—as I had always deferred to my father. We had grown up in