'You haven't!' she replied. 'You're as much a mess as ever!' Sosibia and Sosibia's two children hovered grinning and exclaiming in the background. But there was an absence. 'Where's Papa?' asked Archimedes, and the noise died.
'He's too ill to stand,' Philyra said, into the sudden quiet. 'He hasn't been able to get out of bed for months.' Her voice was heavy with reproach. For months she had tended their father and watched him waste away, while Archimedes, the darling and only son, lingered in Alexandria.
Archimedes stared at her, stricken. He had known that his father was ill. For a couple of months that awareness had lurked in the back of his mind, putting a wash of anxiety over all his preparations for coming home. But despite that, he had expected to find his father much as he had left him. He would have reckoned illness to be a persistent cough, a bad back, chronic indigestion. He had not expected a deforming monster to have moved into the house and pinned his father to his bed.
'I'm sorry, my darling,' said his mother gently. She had always been the family peacemaker, the voice of calm practicality. She was shorter than her children, wide-hipped, broad-browed; there was more gray in her brown hair than her son remembered. 'I'm afraid it will be a great shock for you to see him. You can't have realized how ill he is. But I thank the gods you're safely home at last.'
'Where is he?' asked Archimedes in a hoarse whisper.
Phidias's sickbed had been placed in the room Archimedes remembered as his mother's workroom. It was at the opposite end of the small courtyard which opened onto the street and formed the center of the house. The stairways to the bedrooms on the upper floors were steep and narrow, and a ground-floor room was much more convenient for an invalid. When Archimedes crossed to the old workroom, he found a lamp lit and his father sitting up and looking eagerly toward the door: he had heard the commotion, and was impatiently awaiting his son's appearance. Archimedes faltered on the threshold. Phidias had always been tall and thin; now he was skeletal. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow, and they stared out of deep hollows; his skin, too, was yellowish, and crumpled and dry. Most of his hair had fallen out, and what remained was white. When he stretched out his arms toward his son, his hands trembled.
Archimedes went through the door in a rush, dropped to his knees beside the bed, and threw his arms about his father's emaciated frame. 'I'm sorry!' he choked. 'I didn't… if I'd known…'
'Archimedion mine!' exclaimed Phidias, and folded his stick-like arms about his son. 'Thank the gods you're home!'
'Oh, Papa!' cried Archimedes, and burst into tears.
In the courtyard, Marcus dragged the luggage in out of the street and shut the door. When he turned back to the house, Sosibia caught his shoulders and kissed him lightly on the cheek. 'You're welcome back, too!' she said softly. 'I wish it were to a happier house.'
He looked at her in surprise, touched despite himself. He and Sosibia had never been friends. When they first met, her chief concern had been to make it clear that though he might have been purchased to replace the household's previous manservant, she had no intention of allowing him to take the dead man's place in her bed. Marcus had not at first understood her (he had been eighteen at the time, fresh from Italy and almost Greekless), but when at last he did, he in turn had made it clear that the very idea of sleeping with a plain, fortyish household slave disgusted him. This unanimity about sleeping arrangements had not, obviously, led to any feelings of goodwill, and for years they feuded, Sosibia sneering at Marcus as a crude barbarian, and Marcus disdaining Sosibia as a servile old woman. Now she was welcoming him back. 'Well,' he said gruffly, 'it's good to be here.'
There was a silence, and then he nodded to the two children, who stood behind their mother, watching- Chrestos, a boy of fifteen, and thirteen-year-old Agatha. 'You two have grown,' he commented. Another reason not to be welcome, he thought privately. Four adult slaves was too many for one middle-class household: now that Marcus was back, it was quite likely that Chrestos would be sold. But Sosibia had not acknowledged this uncomfortable prospect, so he ignored it as well. 'When we came up to the house, I thought to myself that there'd be a lot of work waiting for me,' he said instead. 'I'd forgotten we have another man about the place now.'
Chrestos grinned. 'Welcome home, Marcus,' he said. 'You're welcome to do my work if you want to!'
His little sister laughed, slipped forward suddenly, and gave Marcus a shy kiss on the cheek. 'Welcome home!' she whispered.
Not home, Marcus reminded himself, but some part of him was still glad. The first year of his slavery had been a nightmare he still sweated to remember, but that nightmare had ended in this house, and he had waked again to a world governed by sane rules. 'It's good to be back,' he repeated gruffly.
There was another silence, and then Marcus jerked his head at the doorway on the other side of the small courtyard and asked, 'Is the old man dying?'
Sosibia hesitated, then made a gesture against evil and nodded. 'Jaundice,' she said resignedly. 'He can't eat now, poor man: he lives on barley broth and a little honeyed wine. It won't be much longer.'
Marcus reflected on Phidias. A kind man; an honest, hardworking citizen; a loving husband and father. A good master. He might resent the man for that last, but it was not Phidias' fault that he himself was a slave. 'I'm sorry,' he said sincerely; then added, in a harsh voice, 'The gods made us mortal. It will come to us all.'
'He has lived well,' said Sosibia. 'I pray the earth receives him kindly.'
Archimedes stayed with his father for half an hour, retreating when the dying man fell asleep. He himself had no interest in anything more that night. Sosibia and his mother made up the bed in his old room, and he lay down and sought oblivion in sleep.
He woke early next morning, and lay for a while looking at the patterns the rising sun made upon the wall beside his bed. The window shutter was of wickerwork woven in a crisscross pattern and covered the whitewashed plaster with bars and triangles of orange light. As the sun rose higher, the light grew paler and the triangles shifted and widened. They slid from the wall onto his bed, where they lay in bright profusion over the sheet, like tiles of fresh ivory.
His eyes stung. In Alexandria he had purchased a game for his father, a set of ivory tiles cut into squares and triangles. They could be fitted together to form a square, or arranged to make a ship, a sword, a tree, or any of a hundred other figures. The puzzle was a geometer's delight. He'd liked it, so he'd been sure his father would too. Gifts given to his father now were destined for the grave. That fact was an enormity so devastating that it left him feeling as if half his soul had been removed.
When Archimedes was growing up, Phidias had been the one person who really understood. It had often seemed to Archimedes that everyone else had a blind spot in the middle of the head. They could look at a triangle, a circle, a cube- but they couldn't see it. Explain it to them, and they couldn't understand. Explain the explanation, and they stared and wondered aloud why you thought that was so wonderful. Yet it was, unspeakably wonderful. There was a world there, a world without material existence but luminous with pure reason, and they couldn't see it! Only Phidias had seen it. He had shown it to Archimedes, taught him its ways and its rules, and joined in with all his exclamations of amazement. As Archimedes grew older, they had gone on to explore the other world together. They had been co-conspirators, laughing together over an abacus, arguing together about axioms and proofs. They had walked together into the hills on clear nights, to observe the rising and setting of the stars and take sightings of the altitude of the moon. Only the two of them, out of all Syracuse, were at home in the invisible world. Others- even the closest and best loved of others- were forever outsiders.
It had been Phidias who suggested that Archimedes go to Alexandria. 'I went when I was your age,' he said, 'and I heard Euclid himself lecture. You must go.' He had sold a vineyard he could not afford the loss of, parted with a slave he could not easily do without, so that his son could study mathematics at the world's greatest center of learning. And Alexandria had been everything Phidias had promised- but it had been more, as well. For the first time, Archimedes had found others who understood, and some of them were young men of about his own age. It was the first time in his life he hadn't felt like a freak; the first time he'd been free to open up his mind outside his own house. So he had tossed it open to embrace the sky, and the ideas came in- thronging, pushing for attention, scattering, battling, seething, dancing together. He had felt like a fish raised in a garden pond, suddenly discovering the vastness of the sea. It was a liberation more intoxicating than anything he had ever imagined.
At the end of the first year, Phidias had started to write letters asking, 'When are you coming home?' and Archimedes had not known how to answer them. Instead he had written to tell his father about Aristarchos' hypothesis that the earth went around the sun, about Conon's work on eclipses, about the Delian problem, and the
