GREG BEAR

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 Soph 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 Pa-trikia?

What did she carry of the sopM?

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 Soph'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.

Page 43

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

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 Oikoumen jet gullcraft maneuvered, probably from desert aerodromoi in Kilikia or loudaia, leaving five nail-scratches of white against the soft blue sky.

Her father opened the vault doors with a ponderous key and nine