One cube held several complete histories of Earth. Rhita had read these carefully, coming to know the other world’s story almost as well as the story of Gaia. She knew that on Earth, Megas Alexandros had tried to conquer Hindustan and had only partly succeeded, as he had on Gaia. But on Earth, Alexandros had not fallen from an overturned ferry into the swollen river Hydaspes, had not contracted pneumonia and been forced to lie sick for a month, to fully recover and live to a ripe old age. On Earth, the Great World-Master had been forced to turn back by his troops, had fallen sick in another location and died young in Babylōn…And there, Patrikia had told her, was the juncture where their two worlds had separated.

Rhita often thought of writing fantastic novels of that other Earth, what her grandmother would have called romances. Perhaps in time she would; she favored literature when she wasn’t deep in her studies of physics and math.

But who could imagine a world in which the Oikoumenē had fragmented among the loyal Successors? Wars between the Successors, the transformation of Alexandros’s empire into competing kingdoms; Egypt dominated by Ptolemaios’s dynasty, Syria by the Seleukids, and eventually, with the rise of Latine, all of the Middle Pontos coming under the control of Rhoma…

Rhoma, in Rhita’s world, was a small, troubled city in strife-torn Italia—hardly the successor of Hellas! Yet on Earth, Rhoma had risen to destroy Karkhēdōn—Carthago in the Latin language—ending that trading empire’s history a century and a half before the birth of the little-known Ioudaian Messiah Jeshua, or Jesus. Karkhēdōn would never have gone on to colonize the New World, and Nea Karkhēdōn would never have rebelled from its mother country and asserted itself on the Atlantian Ocean, to become, along with the Libyans and Nordic Rhus, one of the enemies of the Oikoumenē…

On Gaia, Ptolemaios Six Sōtēr the Third had defeated the tribes of Latinē, including the Rhomans, in Y.A. 84, thereby guaranteeing that the Ptolemies would be rewarded with perpetual stewardship of Aigyptos and Asia.

On Gaia, there were nuclear power plants, huge experimental things built in the Kyrēnaikē west of the Nilos. There were jet gullcraft and even rockets putting satellites but not men into orbit; but there were no atomic bombs, no continent-shattering missile barrages, no death-ray battle-stations in orbit around the world. Many of these wonders were part of the secret lore of the Akademeia; Patrikia had learned hard lessons in her encounters with Kleopatra’s grandfather.

Gaia, despite its troubles, seemed a more secure and livable place to Rhita. Why, then, go hunting Earth? Why ask for that kind of trouble?