The shadow came closer. It was Patrikia.

Rhita’s eyes closed and then opened slightly again. She was certainly not afraid of the sophē, but why was she in her room at this late hour of the night? Patrikia grasped her granddaughter’s hand in her own dry, strong fingers and placed it on something metallic, hard and smooth, unfamiliar yet pleasant to touch. Rhita murmured an incoherent question.

“This will know you, recognize you,” Patrikia whispered. “By your touch, you make it yours, years from now when you mature. My child, listen to its messages. It tells you where, and when. I am too old now. Find the way home for me.”

The shadow passed from her room, and the moonlight faded. The room filled with darkness. Rhita closed her eyes and soon it was morning.

On this new morning, Patrikia began teaching Rhita two languages that did not exist on Gaia, English and Spanish.

The sophē died, attended only by her three surviving sons, in the bare room where five years before her granddaughter had slept and dreamed of horses. Now a young woman, beginning her third-level studies at the Hypateion, Rhita hardly knew what emotions she felt. She was of middle height but gawky, her face bluntly, boyishly attractive, her figure slight; her hair was reddish brown, and her brows arched quizzically over green eyes, her father’s eyes in her mother’s face. What part of her was Patrikia? What did she carry of the sophē?

Her father was a slow, careful man, but his grief and worry were evident as he led the stade-long funeral procession across the sun-beaten carved stone roadway to the Merchant’s Harbor, taking the sophē’s frail body to the boat that would carry it out to sea. His two brothers followed, Rhita’s uncles, teachers of language in the Hypateion; after them came the entire faculty of the four schools, dressed in gray and white. Rhita walked a step to one side and behind her father, saying to herself, I do what she wanted me to.

Rhita studied physics and mathematics. That was what she carried of the sophē.

Her talents.

One year after the funeral, as spring greened the orchards and the vineyards and olive groves came into flower, Rhita’s father took her to a secret cave a dozen stadia northwest of Lindos, not far from where she had been born. He refused to answer her questions. She was a grown woman now, or thought she was. She had already taken a lover, and she objected to being ordered about, being led mysteriously to places she knew and cared nothing about. But her father insisted, and she did not enjoy defying him.

The caves were blocked by thick, narrow steel vault doors, ancient with rust but with hinges well-oiled. Overhead, a flight of Oikoumenē jet gullcraft maneuvered, probably from desert aerodromoi in Kilikia or Ioudaia, leaving five nail-scratches of white against the soft blue sky.