The surface of the Way grew dark with the approach of the accelerating kink. That would make opening gates even more difficult. There was little time left, perhaps only hours, and he had much work to do, much searching even after the gate was open.

He finished with, “Behold…I open a new world.”

He had never before, in all his career as gate-opener, made a double gate. Yet this gate would open onto two precisely chosen worlds.

A circular depression began to form beneath his feet, its edges sparkling. The first world spun beneath him, as seen through the clavicle; here was an alternate to Rhita’s Gaia, a spreading branch from the Gaia where Patricia had arrived and made her changes, yet where no Jarts had ever invaded.

The gate-opener could not stretch this gate far back in time. He made a brief attempt, then pulled back and concentrated on locating Rhita Vaskayza. A Rhita who had never known the Jarts, who had never traveled to find the Jart gate…

The Way shimmered violently, and he wondered if there would be time.

81

Home

Rhita walked through the grove where Berenikē had told her she would find her father. She saw Rhamōn sitting discouraged among the olive trees, back against a gnarled trunk, head in hands, face twisted with troubles. Having fought some petty battle against the Akademeia’s increasingly rebellious board of masters. Needing encouragement.

“Father,” she said, and then stepped back as if slapped. Something fell on her, into her; something at once familiar and very alien. She saw herself, strange and exhausted, tumbling from nowhere, as if into a cup…Memories of invasion, destruction and something like death filled her. She closed her eyes and held her hands to her head, wanting to scream. She gasped like a fish with the shock of assimilating so much, feeling for an instant that she must have lost her mind…

Stumbled on a root and almost lost her balance.

When she recovered, the memories were cached in deep background, safely isolated for the moment.

“Rhita?” Rhamōn looked up from his reverie. “Are you all right?”

She made up an excuse to cover her confusion. “Some illness, I think…from Alexandreia.”

She was home for a vacation. Truly home, not in a dream or a nightmare. She grasped her upper arms with both hands. Real flesh, real trees, her real father. All the other memories, visions, hallucinations…faces. Nightmares.

“I felt faint. I’m all right now,” she said. “Perhaps it was Grandmother touching me.”

“We could use her touch,” Rhamōn said, shaking his head.

“Tell me what’s happened,” Rhita said. And sat before her father, digging her hand into the dry, caky soil, clenching the dirt between her fingers.

I will sort this out, in time. I promise myself that I will. Visions and dreams and nightmares enough for a dozen lifetimes.

The legacy of the sophē. Who was, even now…Where? Doing what?