Rhita stood on the aft deck of the steam ferry Ioannes, plying the waters between Rhodos and Alexandreia. To keep away the winter sea chill, she wore an Akademeia brown cape and a butter-colored Rhodian wool gown. Her eyes soft-focused on the ocean and the ferry’s broad, churning wake. She was accompanied by a lone gull perched a few arms away on the dark oak railing, beak open, curiously turning its head back and forth. The somber gray sky brooded over a calm ocean the sullen color of iron. Behind her, large motor wagons from Rhodos, Kōs and Knidos hunkered in the shadow of the covered main deck.
At twenty-one years, she felt even more mature than she had at eighteeen, and that made her very mature indeed. At least her keen sense of fun had not yet deserted her; she had a healthy awareness of her own capacity for foolishness, and regretted finding little time to indulge it now.
Her hair had kept its luminous reddish-brown shade of childhood, but now she cut it shorter. Little changed were her large, quizzical green eyes, pale skin, and her stature. She had not grown beyond middle height, though her shoulders had broadened somewhat. She had inherited her father’s quiet physical strength, as well as long-fingered hands and long legs.
Rhita had visited Alexandreia only twice, both times before she was ten years old. Her mother, Berenikē, had thought it best to keep her only child close to the Hypateion and away from the cosmopolitan seductions of the Oikoumenē’s central city.
Berenikē had been an avid disciple of Patrikia, and had married Rhamōn, the sophē’s youngest son, more out of duty than love. She had loved her daughter fiercely, seeing in her a young image of Patrikia herself. In looks, however, Rhita resembled her mother more than her grandmother.
Now, with her mother dead a year, and Patrikia dead almost nine years, and her father still locked in a struggle for control of the Akademeia—in competition with theocratic elements her grandmother had openly despised—it had seemed best for her to take her talents and learning to the place where they might do the most good. If the Akademeia declined, at least she would be elsewhere, perhaps to establish a new Hypateion.
These worries were not foremost in her mind, however. They made her feel almost comfortable and secure when compared with her major concern.
For sixty years, Patrikia had searched for an elusive opening into a place she had called the Way. This gate had proven elusive, appearing at various times in various parts of the world only long enough to entice, never to be precisely located. Patrikia had died without finding it.
Rhita now knew precisely where the gateway was. It had stayed in one fixed position for at least three years. Such knowledge did not comfort her. She had become accustomed to her role, though hardly less resentful.
Knowing about the gateway had robbed her of her own life. Her grandmother, she thought, had imposed an almost impossible burden on a young girl by setting the instrument to recognize her touch, and hers alone.
Perhaps Patrikia had been a little crazy that year before she died. Crazy or not, she had given her granddaughter a terrible responsibility.
Everything else—her petition to study at the Mouseion, her personal life, everything—was subordinate to her knowledge.
She had not even told her father.
Rhita had hoped for a quiet life, but with a sigh, watching the seabird preen a wing, she knew that was not possible, not in this world. Even without the Objects, life at the Akademeia was going to be rough. All that she loved and was familiar with lay over the blue-black sea behind her.
She carried the clavicle and life-support machine in a large locked trunk; in a smaller suitcase, she also carried her grandmother’s “slate,” an electronic tablet for reading and writing upon. These were guarded by Lugotorix, her Keltic bodyguard, in her cabin. Lugotorix was unarmed, bowing to the sophē’s abhorrence of weapons and warfare, but hardly less lethal for all that. Rhamōn, for all the Hypateion’s pacifist philosophy, was a practical man, on occasion surprisingly resourceful and worldly. Lugotorix’s service was being paid for in goods more valuable than money; his two brothers now studied at the Akademeia. With such an education, they might overcome the prejudices that had handicapped those of Keltic descent since the uprising of century twenty-one.
Rhita felt a steady, unobtrusive connection with the clavicle; if anything happened to it, she would know, and she would probably be able to find it, wherever it was taken. With Lugotorix standing guard, few would try to take it; but not even the Kelt knew what he was protecting.
In good time, Rhita would petition Queen Kleopatra for an audience. She would present her evidence.
What happened after that, she did not care to dwell upon.
Having had enough sea air for the time—it was thick with cinders as the smoke shifted on the changing wind—Rhita returned to her small, stuffy cabin, sending the hulking, quiet black-haired Kelt to his own cabin for a rest. She removed her clothes and put on a simple Hindi cotton nightshirt. Crawling between the short bunk’s thin blankets, she switched on a feeble electric lamp and removed from her suitcase the smaller wooden teukhos, the book-box containing her grandmother’s slate and the cubes of music and literature, including her own diaries.
Nothing like the slate existed on this Earth, though in a few years the Oikoumenē mathematicians and mekhanikoi promised to create great electronic calculating machines. Patrikia had provided some of them with the theory of such machines, in meetings conducted just before her death.
Rhita realized her responsibility in caring for these Objects. In a real sense, she carried the fate of the Rhodian Akademeia with her; the Objects were proof of Patrikia’s truth-telling. Without them—if, for example, the ferry were to sink in the sea and the Objects were lost—there would be no proof, and in time Patrikia’s story would be considered myth, or worse, a lie. But whatever the danger, wherever she went, Rhamōn had ordered that Rhita was to have these objects with her always.
Rhita had read her grandmother’s notes many times, comparing the history of her Earth with the history of Gaia. She took comfort in the notes on the slate, as she might have taken comfort from reading familiar fairy stories.
The modern Earth her grandmother described was such a fabulous, if horrifying place—a world that had burned itself alive with its own genius and madness.
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?
She wasn’t sure. In time, perhaps, she would understand her own compulsions, her own loyalties. Until then, she simply did what destiny had bid her do from childhood; what her grandmother had, without words, asked of her.
Rhita “scrolled” through the slate texts recorded by her grandmother, and came to the description of the Way, reading it through for perhaps the hundredth time. Here was a world even more fabulous and strange than Earth. Who in the Oikoumenē, or in all this world, could understand or believe such things? Had Patrikia dreamed at least these wonders, made them up out of her nightmares? Humans without human form, a man who had survived death several times, a cosmos shaped like a water-pipe and immensely long…
In time, she napped. Soon, the dinner bell rang, and she dressed again, leaving her cabin once more in Lugotorix’s charge. He ate alone from a pail provided by the ship’s galley.
Rhita ate with her fellow passengers, mostly Tyrians and Ioudaians, in the cramped dining hall above the main deck, ignoring the licentious stare of a richly-dressed Tyrian trader.
She would miss the Hypateion and its easy equality of the sexes, as well.
The skies over Alexandreia were clear, as they almost always were.
The ferry smoked past the four-hundred-arm-high Pharos Lighthouse at dawn the next morning. Rhita stood bundled against the cold at the stern. This Pharos was the fourth of its kind, the tallest of all, an iron, stone and concrete monster built a hundred and sixty years before. The crowded buildings on the low hills of Alexandreia glowed pink in the morning light, dusky green in the shadows. The marble and granite palace buildings on the Lokhias promontory were an orange blaze above the placid gray-blue Royal Harbor. The great caissons, sunk into the harbor floor northeast of the promontory to hold the harbor water back from subsided palace buildings, studded the shore like ivory game pieces, linked by lines of piled stone and masonry.
To Rhita, it hardly seemed real, this most famous of the world’s cities, the center of human culture and learning—Oikoumenē culture, at least.
The ferry docked in the Great Harbor and disgorged its motor wagons across a broad steel tongue. Greasy smoke and escaping steam wafted from the wagon deck to the passenger ramp where Rhita and the Kelt lugged their bags.
Crossing the ramp amid Aithiopian businessmen in their formal skins and feathers and Aigyptian hawkers, raucous and insistent in their black robes, the pair managed to cross the quay unmolested. Rhita kept her eye out for somebody to meet them, not knowing quite what to expect if indeed her grandmother’s influence still reached to Kleopatra. Off to one side of the pier, in a narrow corridor reserved for motor taxis and horse-drawn cargo trucks, a long, shabby black passenger wagon puffed steam while its driver smoked a foot-long black cigar redolent of cloves. A slate chalked with the message “VASKAYZA-MOUSEION” leaned against one open door.
“That’s ours, I think,” Rhita said. It wasn’t the most elegant of receptions. There were no security guards present—none she could see, anyway.
As they approached the passenger wagon, she felt bucolic in her innocence. The city, a palpable, odoriferous presence now—thick acrid fuel oil, sweet spattering clouds of steam, gassy horse dung, unwashed masses of travelers and merchants—could swallow her whole, chew her up, and not be held to any kind of account. For the first time, Rhita acutely felt her lack of power. Her grandmother had always seemed so self-assured; how could she possibly be emulated, in the face of such a huge, overpowering place?
Rhita and Lugotorix presented themselves to the driver, who stubbed out his smoke against an often-smudged door guard, stuffed the butt into a grimy pants pocket, and climbed into the elevated front seat. They boarded the wagon. With a hiss and a jerk, the wagon labored them down a broad boulevard lined with ancient marble colonnades. Turning left into a high marble archway, it took them onto the grounds of the Mouseion, the great Library and University of Alexandreia.
“She’s a very handsome young woman,” said the bibliophylax of the Mouseion, adjusting his floor-hugging stool before the queen. “She has more of her mother’s looks than her grandmother’s, but her former pedagogue assures me she is the equal of the sophē Patrikia. She’s arrived in the harbor with some great Northern brute, a servant, my scouts say, and will be in her temporary quarters within the hour.”
Kleopatra the Twenty-first shifted her short, stout body on the informal throne. The scar that sucked a line across her face from left temple to right cheek, marring the bridge of her nose and half-closing one eye, was a pale shell pink against her fair, otherwise smooth skin. She had little of the beauty of her youth; the Libyan hasisins had seen to that twenty years before, during her state visit to Ophiristan. Having no further interest in lovers—she had lost her three favorite consorts on that one hateful day—she did not mind her appearance any more. Kleopatra was simply thankful she still had her health and a sound, agile mind.
The famous dry Alexandreian sunshine crossed the foot-worn white marble of the royal dwelling’s inner porch in a golden stripe and touched the queen’s left slipper, highlighting an unpainted but finely manicured toe. “You know I indulged that sophē beyond reason,” she said. Her grandfather had decreed that Patrikia Luisa Vaskayza set up an akademeia on Rhodos. The Rhodian Akademeia, named the Hypateion after a woman mathematician none in Alexandreia had ever heard of, had for the last fifty years competed with Kallimakhos’s Mouseion for research funding, more often than not receiving substantial royal awards. Useful and even startling work had come out of the Rhodian Akademeia, but everyone in the palace—and in much of the popular press—knew that the sophē’s highest priority had been finding a way to return to her home. Most had thought her more than a little mad.
“You are stating a royal opinion, my Queen.”
“Be straight with me now, Kallimakhos.”
The bibliophylax’s syrupy expression acidified. “Yes, my Queen. You overindulged her at the expense of far more worthwhile scholars, with more formal backgrounds and useful proposals.”
She smiled. Hearing this from the bibliophylax made it seem less true. “No one in the Mouseion has done so much for mathematics and calculation. For cybernetics,” she added, pronouncing the word as the sophē would have. She dabbled her toe in the sunshine as if it were a stream of water. For a moment, the simple color of the sunlight—warm and full of God—and the dry, cool breeze from the sea took her away from reality. She closed her eyes. “Even a queen needs a hobby,” she murmured.
Kallimakhos kept a respectful silence, though he had much more to say. The Oikoumenē Mechanikoi League had made its weapons procurement proposals to the palace two weeks ago. The rebel government of Nea Karkhēdōn, across the Atlantian sea, had twenty times in the past year raided the Oikoumenē’s southern hemisphere supply routes. The rebels had, a decade before, repudiated all contracts made by Karkhēdōn and were forming an alliance with the island fortresses of Hiberneia-Pridden and Angleia. The bibliophylax hoped that all the necessary defense work could mean fine rich contracts for his Mouseion. Instead, he sat discussing the sophē Patrikia’s granddaughter. The sophē and her family had dogged his footsteps for all the thirty years he had been in office, and the footsteps of his predecessor more decades before that.
Kleopatra smiled at Kallimakhos, a sympathetic, motherly smile despite the scar, and shook her head. “You must take her into the Mouseion. She must be accorded the rank of her father—”
“No match for his mother, that man,” Kallimakhos said.
“And she must be allowed to continue her search.”
“Pardon my insolence, dear Queen, but why does she not stay at the Hypateion in Rhodos? Surely she could better carry on her grandmother’s tradition there.”
“Her petition states she wishes the assistance of your mekhanikos Zeus Ammōn Demetrios. Demetrios has agreed, in a private conference with me. I hope this does not tread on your toes, beloved Kallimakhos.”
She knew it did, and she gambled he would ignore the slight. He benefited too much from his relationship with her highness to let small, if constant irritations like the Vaskayza family irritate him unduly. “Your will be done,” the bibliophylax said, bowing and touching the collar of his black scholar’s robes to the floor.
Overhead came a shrill hawklike scream, followed by a shudder in the palace foundations and a distant, innocuous crump. Kallimakhos got to his feet as the queen rose and followed her deferentially, hands folded, onto the outer porch. She leaned on the railing and saw a pillar of smoke in the Brukheion, right in the middle of the Jewish quarter. “Libyans again,” she said. He could see deeper red in her scar, but her voice was smooth and calm. “Have we any news from Karkhēdōn?”
“I do not know, my Queen. I am not privileged in such communications.” The Jewish militia would be even more irritated by this, and already it was common knowledge they did not favor Kleopatra; he wondered how he could use this new outrage to his benefit.
Kleopatra turned around slowly and returned to the inner porch, where she picked up the mouthpiece of an ornate golden telephone. With a nod, she dismissed the bibliophylax.
Within the hour, after a conference with her generals and the head of the Oikoumenē Security Staff, she dispatched a squadron of jet fighter gullcraft from Kanopos to bomb the Libyan rebel city of Tunis.
She then returned to her simply decorated private quarters and sat cross-legged on a Berber wool rug. Eyes closed, she tried to still her deep rage.
She had very little time indeed for her hobbies, but her word was still law in the Mouseion, if not always in the contentious Boulē. Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza…
Kleopatra no longer believed a doorway to another world would ever be found. But even in a time of horrible civil strife, and the worst threat to the Oikoumenē in her lifetime, she believed in allowing herself a just foolish obsession.