The pen hovered over the page as she thought, but she couldn’t add anything else useful there, and so went on:
Hypothesis 2: That entering a time vortex with a gemstone (preferably faceted, vide remarks made by Geillis Duncan to this effect) offers some protection to the traveler in terms of physical effect.
Query: why facets? We used mostly unfaceted ones coming back through Ocracoke, and we know of other travelers using plain unfaceted ones.
Speculation: Joe Abernathy told me about one of his patients, an archaeologist who told him about some study done on standing stones up in Orkney, where they discovered that the stones have interesting tonal qualities; if you strike them with wooden sticks or other stones, you get a kind of musical note. Any kind of crystal—and all gems have a crystalline interior structure—has a characteristic vibration when struck; that’s how quartz watches work.
So what if the crystal you carry has vibrations that respond to—or stimulate, for that matter—vibrations in the standing stones nearby? And if they did . . . what might be the physical effect? D.B.K.*
She made a swift note at the bottom of the page: *D.B.K.—Don’t Bloody Know, and returned to her writing.
Evidence: There really isn’t any, other than the aforesaid remarks from Geillis Duncan (though she may have noted some anecdotal material in her journals, which you’ll find in the large safe-deposit box at the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh. Uncle Joe will have the key or will have made provisions for you to get it).
NB: Grannie Claire traveled the first two times without any stones (though note that she was wearing a gold wedding ring the first time, and a gold and a silver ring on the second journey).
Grannie said that going with a stone seemed slightly easier—but given the subjectivity of the experience, I don’t know how much weight to put on that. Doing it with a stone is the most horrible thing I . . .
Maybe better not to say that. She hesitated for some time, but, after all, her own experiences were data, and given how little there was of it . . . She finished the sentence, then went on.
Hypothesis 3: That traveling with a gemstone allows one better control in choosing where/when to emerge.
She stopped, frowning, and crossed out where. There wasn’t any indication of people traveling between sites. Be bloody handy if they could, though. . . . She sighed and went on.
Evidence: Pretty sketchy, owing to lack of data. We know of a few travelers other than ourselves, and of these, five Native Americans (part of a political group called the Montauk Five) traveled with the use of stones. One of these is known to have died in the attempt, one survived and traveled back about 200 years, and another, a man named Robert Springer (aka “Otter-Tooth”), traveled back more than the usual distance, arriving (approximately) 250–260 years prior to his year of departure. We don’t know what happened to the two other members of this group; they may have traveled to a different time and we haven’t found any mention of them (difficult to track down a time traveler, if you don’t know when they may have gone, what their real names are, or what they look like), may have been blown out of the time vortex for unknown reasons, or may have died inside it.
That little possibility unnerved her so much that she set down the pen and took several large swallows of wine before resuming.
By the evidence of Otter-Tooth’s journal, these men all did travel with gemstones, and he procured a large opal with which he intended to make the return trip. (This is the stone Jemmy made explode, in North Carolina, presumably because fire opals have a high water content.)
It hadn’t—and, thinking back, she couldn’t imagine how it hadn’t—occurred to her at the time to see whether Jemmy could make water boil by touching it. Well, she could see why it hadn’t occurred to her, in retrospect; the last thing she’d wanted was any more dangerous peculiarity near her children, much less dangerous peculiarities being inherent in them.
“I wonder how often it happens that two time travelers marry each other?” she said aloud. No telling what the frequency of the gene—if it was a gene, but that looked to be a decent bet—in the general population was, but it couldn’t be very common, or people would be walking into Stonehenge and Callanish and going poof! on a daily basis. . . . “Somebody would have noticed,” she concluded, and sat twiddling the pen for a bit in meditation.
Might she have met and married Roger if it weren’t for the time-traveling thing? No, because it was her mother’s need to find out what had happened to the men of Lallybroch that had led them to Scotland.
“Well, I’m not sorry,” she said aloud to Roger. “In spite of . . . everything.”
She flexed her fingers and picked up the pen, but didn’t write at once. She hadn’t thought further with her hypotheses and wanted them to be clear in her mind, at least. She had vague notions about how a time vortex might be explained in the context of a unified field theory, but if Einstein couldn’t do it, she didn’t think she was up to it right this minute.
“It has to be in there somewhere, though,” she said aloud, and reached for the wine. Einstein had been trying to form a theory that dealt both with relativity and electromagnetism, and plainly they were dealing with relativity here—but a sort in which it maybe wasn’t the speed of light that was limiting. What, then? The speed of time? The shape of time? Did electromagnetic fields crisscrossing in some places warp that shape?
What about the dates? Everything they thought they knew—precious little as it was—indicated that travel was easier, safer, on the sun feasts and fire feasts; the solstices and equinoxes. . . . A little ripple ran up her back. A few things were known about standing stone circles, and one of the common things was that many had been built with astronomical prediction in mind. Was the light striking a specific stone the signal that the earth had reached some planetary alignment that affected the geomagnetism of that area?