Rhita walked through the grove where Berenikē had told her she would find her father. She saw Rhamōn sitting discouraged among the olive trees, back against a gnarled trunk, head in hands, face twisted with troubles. Having fought some petty battle against the Akademeia’s increasingly rebellious board of masters. Needing encouragement.
“Father,” she said, and then stepped back as if slapped. Something fell on her, into her; something at once familiar and very alien. She saw herself, strange and exhausted, tumbling from nowhere, as if into a cup…Memories of invasion, destruction and something like death filled her. She closed her eyes and held her hands to her head, wanting to scream. She gasped like a fish with the shock of assimilating so much, feeling for an instant that she must have lost her mind…
Stumbled on a root and almost lost her balance.
When she recovered, the memories were cached in deep background, safely isolated for the moment.
“Rhita?” Rhamōn looked up from his reverie. “Are you all right?”
She made up an excuse to cover her confusion. “Some illness, I think…from Alexandreia.”
She was home for a vacation. Truly home, not in a dream or a nightmare. She grasped her upper arms with both hands. Real flesh, real trees, her real father. All the other memories, visions, hallucinations…faces. Nightmares.
“I felt faint. I’m all right now,” she said. “Perhaps it was Grandmother touching me.”
“We could use her touch,” Rhamōn said, shaking his head.
“Tell me what’s happened,” Rhita said. And sat before her father, digging her hand into the dry, caky soil, clenching the dirt between her fingers.
I will sort this out, in time. I promise myself that I will. Visions and dreams and nightmares enough for a dozen lifetimes.
The legacy of the sophē. Who was, even now…Where? Doing what?
The Way was coming apart. The flaw station had moved out of sight, retreating in the face of the Engineer’s accelerating destruction. Ry Oyu gave up his human form then, hovering as a twist of light and pattern over the double gate, searching across a different Earth, an Earth without the Death, reaching through the geometry stack some decades back in time, finding a specific moment.
Even in his immaterial form, the stresses on the Way began to dissolve him. He shifted character again, hid himself within the geometry of the gate, found the gate itself dissolving, struggled to keep integral long enough to complete this last but not least important of his duties—
Patricia Luisa Vasquez stepped from the car of her fiancé, Paul, clutching a bag of groceries. The air was chill with California’s mild brand of winter, and the last light of day spread gray and yellow fingers along the scattered clouds high overhead. She started up the flagstone path to her parents’ house—
And dropped the bag onto the lawn, arms thrown wide, neck jerked back, eyes seeming to vibrate in their sockets.
“Patricia!” Paul shouted from the car.
She rolled onto the ground, then straightened again, bucking against the grass, grunting and whining incoherently.
Then she lay back limp, spent.
“Jesus, Jesus,” Paul said, bending over her, hand on her forehead, other hand waving, not knowing what to do.
“Don’t let Mother hear you say that,” Patricia whispered, her throat raw.
“I didn’t know you were epileptic.”
“I’m not. Help me up.” She tried to gather up the spilled groceries. “Oh, what a mess…”
“What happened?”
She smiled fiercely, sweetly, triumphantly, and then the smile faded and was replaced by puzzlement. “Don’t ask,” she said. “I’ll tell you no lies.”
If I know where I am, she thought, I know who I am. Nothing was very clear; she had only vague, scattered recollections of a group of people trying valiantly to help her, and succeeding. But she was home, on the walkway just outside the little bungalow in Long Beach, and that meant she was Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the worried young man kneeling on the grass beside her was Paul, whom she had mourned for some reason, just as she had mourned…
Looking around at the streets, the houses, unburnt, solid, skies clear of smoke and flame. No Apocalypse.
“Mother will be so pleased,” she said in a hoarse croak. “I think I’ve just had an epiphany.” She reached up and wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him so hard he grimaced.
Around his head, she peered up with sharp, cat-like eyes at the stars just beginning to shine overhead.
No Stone in the heavens, she told herself. Whatever that means.