Rhita returned to Patrikia’s house two years later, no longer a wild child made polite by the presence of an impossibly old grandmother, but a studious, well-groomed young girl intent on becoming a woman. Patrikia had not changed. To Rhita, she seemed like a preserved fruit or an Aigyptian mummy that might survive forever.

Their talk this time was more about history. Rhita knew quite a bit about Gaia’s history—and not precisely as the Oikoumenē wanted it taught. The Akademeia Hypateia used the distance between Rhodos and Alexandreia to some advantage. Decades before, the Imperial Hypsēlotēs Kleopatra the Twenty-first had given the sophē far more discretion as to curriculum than the royal advisors found pleasing.

At eleven, Rhita was already aware of politics. But she was proving even more adept at numbers and the sciences.

In the long evenings on the porch, watching the death of days along purple and gray and red horizons, Patrikia told Rhita about Earth, and how it had almost killed itself. And she told Rhita about the Stone that had come from the stars, hollow like a gourd or some exotic mineral, built by Earth’s children from a future time. Rhita puzzled over the subtle geometries that allowed such an enormous object to be whipped back through time into another closely similar universe. But her head seemed filled with sunlit bees when Patrikia described the corridor, the Way, that Earth’s children had attached to the Stone…

She slept restlessly and dreamed of this artificial place shaped like a never-ending water-pipe, with holes leaking onto an infinity of worlds…

As they gardened, weeding and killing insects, planting barricades of garlic around tender young flowers, Patrikia told Rhita the story of her arrival on Gaia. She had been young then, sixty years ago, when she been given the chance to seek a gate in the Way that might take her to an Earth free of nuclear war, where Patrikia’s family might still live.

Instead, she had miscalculated and come to Gaia.

“I became an inventor at first,” she said. “I invented things I knew from Earth. I gave them the bikyklos. Farm tools. Things I remembered.” She waved her hands as if to dismiss them. “That lasted only a few years. Soon, I was working for the Mouseion, and people began to believe my stories. Some treated me as if I were more than human, which,” she shook her head firmly, “I am not. I will die, my dear, probably very soon…”