Within five years of her arrival on Gaia, Patrikia had been called to the palace to meet with Ptolemaios Thirty-five Nikephoros. The old ruler of the Oikoumenē had questioned her closely, examined the devices she had brought with her and managed to keep safe, and proclaimed her a true prodigy. “He said I was obviously not a goddess, and not a demon, and attached me to the court. Those were hard times. I made the mistake of describing Earth’s weapons to them, and they wanted me to help them build bigger bombs. I refused. Nikephoros threatened to imprison me—he was feeling quite pressed by Libyan desert armies then. He wanted to wipe them all out with one blow. I told him again and again what the bombs had done to Earth, but he didn’t listen. I went to prison in Alexandreia for a month, and then he released me, sent me to Rhodos, and told me to start an akademeia there. He died five years later, but the Hypateion was well established. I dealt with his son well enough…a nice boy, rather weak. And then his granddaughter…first her mother, of course, a strong, willful woman, but brilliant, but then the Imperial Hypsēlotēs herself as she came of age…”

“Do you like it here?” Rhita asked, adjusting her broad straw sun-hat. Patrikia pushed her wizened lips out and shook her head ruefully, admitting and denying nothing.

“This is my world, and it is not my world,” she said. “I would still go home, given a chance.”

“Could you?”

Patrikia nodded at the bright sky. “Perhaps. But not likely. Once, another gate opened on Gaia, and with the queen’s support, I spent years searching for it. But it was like a marsh ghost. It vanished, reappeared somewhere else, vanished again. And now it has been gone for nineteen years.”

“Would it take you to Earth, if you found it?”

“No,” the sophē said. “It would probably take me back into the Way. From there, however, I might be able to go home.”

Rhita felt sad, hearing the old woman’s soft voice fade on the last word, her face deep in shadow under her hat, feline black eyes closing, opening halfway, infinitely tired. The sophē shuddered and looked appraisingly at her young granddaughter. “Would you like to learn some interesting geometries?”

Rhita brightened. “Yes!”

She lay half-asleep on her cot in the bare whitewashed room, listening to waves from a distant storm breaking just a few dozen arms away, great poundings of Poseidon’s fists on the rocks, coinciding in her dreams with the slow thump of the hooves of a huge horse. Moon filled a near corner with cold light. Rhita opened her eyes to slits, feeling a presence in the room with her. A shadow crossed the moonlight, carrying something. The girl stirred on her leather bed, still not fully awake, her body lost in comfort.