“We’ll have lunch,” Patrikia said, her voice husky and almost as deep as a man’s.

She walked slowly ahead of them into the kitchen, measuring each step precisely, slipper-shod feet scuffing the rough black tile floor. Her hands touched a chair back, as if she were greeting a friend, then tapped the rim of an old black iron basin, and finally smoothed along the edge of a bleached wooden table laden with fruit and cheese. “After my son and daughter-in-law—sweet people that they are, but they intrude—after they go home, we can really talk.” The sophē glanced sharply at Rhita, and despite herself, the girl nodded agreement, conspiring.

They spent much of the next few weeks together, Patrikia telling her tales, many of which Rhita had already heard from her father. Patrikia’s Earth was not the Gaia Rhita had grown up on; history had gone differently there.

On a warm hazy day when the wind was still and the sea seemed lost in glazed sleep, her grandmother walked slowly ahead of her in a nearby orange grove, a basket of fruit slung over one arm. “In California, there used to be orange groves all over, beautiful big oranges, much bigger than these.” Patrikia lifted a reddish, plum-sized fruit in her thin, strong fingers. “The groves had almost disappeared by the time I was your age. Too many people wanted to live there. Not enough room for the groves.”

“Is California here, or there, Grandmother?” Rhita asked.

“There. On Earth,” Patrikia said. “There’s no such name here.” She paused, staring up at the sky reflectively. “I don’t know what’s happening where California would be in this world…I suppose it’s part of Nea Karkhēdōn’s western desert.”

“Full of red men with bows and arrows,” Rhita suggested.

“Maybe so. Maybe so.”

After eating alone together in the kitchen, Rhita listened quietly to the sophē in the welcome cool of the summer’s evening, an old oil lamp glowing and smoking sweetly on a wicker table between them, supplementing the twilight as they shared glasses of warm tea. “Your great-grandmother, my mother, comes to visit me now and then…”

“Isn’t she in the other world, Grandmother?”

Patrikia smiled and nodded, her face a mass of wrinkles in the golden-orange light. “That doesn’t stop her. She comes when I sleep, and she says you’re a very bright girl, a wonderful child, and she’s proud to share her name with you.” Patrikia leaned forward. “Your great-grandfather’s proud of you, too. But don’t let us get you down, dear. You’ve time enough to play and dream and grow up before your day comes.”

“What day, Grandmother?”

Patrikia smiled enigmatically and nodded at the horizon. Aphrodite dazzled and shimmered over the sea like a hole in a dark silk lamp shade.