In geological terms, I learned later, an aeon is indeed a billion years. But the Greeks who coined the word were not so specific. They used it as a pointer to eternity, the lifetime of a universe, far more than a billion years. It was also the personification of a god's cycle of time.

I have survived the Worker's Paradise. I have survived the end of my universe, and may survive countless others.

Dear stepfather, it looks as if I will outlive the gods themselves. . . . 

A true eon.

So much to learn, and so much change to look forward to. Each day I breathe deeply, count my choices and realize how lucky we are. (If only I can convince Rimskaya! Sad man.)

I am free.

Four - Aigyptos, 

Year of Alexandros 2323

Young queen Kleopatra the 21st had just spent a long and drowsy four hours listening to the complicated testimony of five ostracized congressmen from the Oxyrrhynkhos Nome's Boulē. Their complaints, her most trusted counselor decided, were without merit, so she dismissed them with a stern smile and warned them not to take their complaints outside Aigyptos, to any other polity, or they would be exiled from the Alexandrian Oikoumenē and forced to wander east or west in the lands of the barbarians, or even worse, in Latium.

Three times a week, Kleopatra received such complaints, selected from thousands of cases by her counselors, well aware they were mostly for show and had been predecided. She was not entirely happy with the limitations of royal power imposed by the Oikoumenical Boulē in the time of her fathers, but it was that or exile, and an exiled eighteen-year-old queen had few places to go outside the Oikoumenē. How things had changed in the past five hundred years!

Kleopatra looked forward to her next visitor, however. She had heard many stories about the head priestess and sophē of the Hypateion in Rrodos; the woman was legendary not only for the tale of how she had come to the Oikoumenē, but for her accomplishments in the last half-century. Yet queen and priestess had never met.

The sophē Patrikia had flown in from Rhodos two days before, landing at the Rakhotis airport just west of Alexandria and then taking up privileged residence in the Mouseion until an audience could be arranged. In those two days, the sophē had been taken on the virtually mandatory tours of the pyramidons of Alexandros and the Diadokhoi to observe (how tiresome, Kleopatra thought) the gold-wrapped mummies of the founders of the Alexandrian Oikoumenē, and then through the surrounding pyramids and tombs of the Later Successors. It was said that the sophē had borne the tours well, and some of her observations had been recorded for broadcast to the eighty-five nomes of the Oikoumenē.