ET E R N I TY 19

she brought them luck. In the village, her world seemed full of welcoming smiles from familiar faces.

On her seventh birthday, Berenik~, her mother, took her from Lindos to Rhodos. She did not remember much about the island's biggest city besides the imposing bronze Neos Kolossos, re-cast and erected four centuries ago, and now missing all of one arm and half of another.

Her mother, with red-brown haft, as wide-eyed as her daughter, led her through the town to the whitewashed brick and stone and plaster home of the first-level Akademeia didaskalos--the master of children's Page 34

education. Rhita stood alone before the didaskalos in the warm sunny examination chamber, barefoot in a plain white shift, and answered his simple but telling questions. This was little more than formality, considering that her grandmother had founded the Akademeia Hypateia, but it was an important formality.

Later that day, her mother told her she had been accepted into the first school, her lessons to begin at age nine. Then Berenik~ took Rhita back to Lindos, and life went on much as before but with more books and

more lessons to prepare her and less time to run with wind and water.

They did not visit the Soph on that journey; she had been ill. Some said she was dying, but she recovered two months later. This all meant very little to young Rhita, who knew almost nothing about her grandmother, having met her only twice, in infancy and at age five.

The summer before she began her formal schooling, her grandmother called upon her to return to Rhodos, and to spend some time with her.

The Soph was reclusive. Many Rhodians thought she was a goddess.

Her origins and the stories that had grown up around her supported theft beliefs. Rhita had no fixed opinions. What the Lindians said and what her father and mother told her were confusingly far apart on some points and close on others.

Rhita's mother was almost frantically thrilled by this privilege, which Patrikia had accorded to none of her other grandchildren. Her father, Rham6n, accepted it with the calm, self-assured aft he had in those days, before the sophC~'s death and the factional fighting at the Akademeia.

Together, they took her to Rhodos by horse cart, driving along the same cobbled and oiled road they had followed two summers before.

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Patrikia's house stood on a rocky promontory overlooking the Great Naval Harbor. It was a small gypsum-plaster and stone dwelling, in late Persian style, with four rooms and a separate study on the low cliff above the beach. As they walked up the path through the vegetable garden, Rhita looked over a brick wall at the ancient Fortress of KamybsC~s across the harbor, rising like a huge stone cup from the end of a broad

20 GREG BEAR

mole. The fortress had been abandoned for seventy years, but was now being refurbished by the Oikoumen. Workmen clambered along its thick crumbling walls, tiny as mice. The Neos Kolossos guarded the harbor entrance a hundred arms beyond the fortress, still armless, standing with more dignity withal on its own massive block of brick and stone, surrounded by water.

"Is she a witch?" Rhita asked RhamOn softly at the front door.

"Hsss," Berenik~ warned, crossing Rhita's lips with her finger.

"She's not a witch," RhamOn said, smiling. "She's my mother."

Rhita thought it would be nice for a servant to open the door, but the Soph had no servants. Patrikia askayza herself stood smiling in the

doorway, a white-haired brown-skinned dried stick of a woman with shrewd, deep-seeing eyes wreathed in leathery wrinkles. Even in the heat of summer, the wind blew cool on the hill, and Patrikia wore a floor-length black robe.

She touched Rhita's cheek with a dry finger tip, and Rhita thought, She's made of wood. But the Soph's palm was soft and warmly sweet-scented.

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From behind her back, she brought out a garland of flowers and looped them around Rhita's neck. "An old tradition from Hawaii," she explained.

Berenik~ stood with head bowed, hands pressed firmly to her sides.

Rhita saw her mother's awe and vaguely disapproved; the Soph was very old and very skinny, to be sure, but not frightening. At least not yet.

Rhita tugged at the flowers around her neck and glanced at RhamOn, who gave her a reassuring smile.

"We'll have lunch," Patrikia said, her voice husky and almost as deep as a man's.

She walked slowly ahead of them into the kitchen, measuring each step precisely, slipper-shod feet scuffing the rough black the floor. Her hands touched a chair back, as if she were greeting a friend, then tapped the rim of an old black iron basin, and finally smoothed along the edge of a bleached wooden table laden with fruit and cheese. "After my son and daughter-in-law--sweet people that they are, but they intrude~-after

they go home, we can really talk." The Soph glanced sharply at Rhita, and despite herself, the girl nodded agreement, conspiring.

They spent much of the next few weeks together, Patrikia telling her tales, many of which Rhita had already heard from her father. Patrikia's Earth was not the Gaia Rhita had grown up on; history had gone differently there.

On a warm hazy day when the wind was still and the sea seemed lost