GREG BEAR

ject. Even before her finger brushed the surface, she understood that this was the key that opened gates from within the Way. It was warm and friendly, not unfamiliar; she knew it, and it knew her.

Rhita closed her eyes and saw Gaia, the entire world, as if marked on an incredibly detailed globe. The globe spun before her and expanded, drawing her down to the steppes of Nordic Rhus, Mongoleia and Chin Ch'ing, lands beyond the power of the Alexandreian Oikoumen. There, in a shallow swale, above a trickling, muddy stream, glowed a brilliant red three-dimensional cross.

She opened her eyes, terrified and pale, and stared down at the clavicle.

It was three times its former size now, filling the molded velvet cushion.

"What's happening?" her father asked.

She shook her head. "I don't want these things." She ran to the cave opening and into the sunshine. Her father trailed after, slightly hunched, almost obsequious, calling out, "They are yours, my daughter. No one Page 46

else can use them."

She outran him and hid in a cleft between two weathered boulders, wiping tears from her eyes. She suddenly hated her grandmother. "How could you do this to me?" Rhita asked. "You were crazy." She pulled her knees up to her chin, bracing her sandaled feet against the rough dry rock. "Crazy old woman."

She remembered the shadow in the darkness when she was a girl and kicked out against the stone until her heel was bruised. The months Rhita had spent almost alone with her, listening to her stories, thinking of that fabulous world . . . she had never imagined that it actually existed, as real as Rhodos or the sea. Patrikia's world had always been as far away as dreams, and as unlikely.

But Grandmother had never lied, never even stretched the truth, about anything else they had discussed. She had always been perfectly straightforward, treating her as an adult, explaining carefully, answering her questions with none of the dissembling adults often hid behind.

Why should she have lied about the Way?

As dusk softened the outlines of the tree branches overhead, visible through the cleft, Rhita emerged from the rocks and walked slowly down the slope to the cave. There, her father waited, sitting beside the vault door, a long green stick held in both hands across his knees. She didn't even consider the possibility he might hit her; Rham0n had never physically punished her. The stick was just something to fiddle with and contemplate.

Gentle, careful Father, she thought. Life was complicated for him. The