“No. I mean bodies. Physically.”
He changed metaphysical gears, not without a small sense of clashing and grinding.
“You mean something other than just … er … decay?”
“Well, no, that is what I mean—but kind of … beyond rotting.”
He rolled onto his side and she followed, nestling under his chin, much like Adso, but with better-smelling hair.
“Beyond rotting … this is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night? God, what kind of dreams do you have? You’re the scientist here, but so far as I know, the process just goes on … what, dissolving?”
“Dissolution. Yes, exactly.”
“You know, normal people talk about sex in bed, don’t they?”
“Most of them probably talk about what horrible thing their child did during the day, the price of tobacco, or what to do about the sick cow. If they can stay awake. Anyway—I only had the required physics classes in college, so this is pretty basic and it may be completely wrong, and—”
“And nobody will ever be able to prove it one way or the other, so let’s not trouble about that part,” he suggested.
“Good thought. And speaking of smelling …” She turned her head and snuffled gently at his neck. “You smell like gunpowder. You haven’t been hunting, have you?” Her voice held a certain amount of incredulity. Not without reason, but he was slightly nettled.
“I have not. Your da asked me to show a’ chraobh àrd how to load his new musket and fire it without knocking his teeth out.”
“Cyrus Crombie?” she said. “Why? Da isn’t conscripting him into his gang, is he?”
“I believe ‘partisan band’ is the proper term,” Roger said primly. “And no. Hiram asked Jamie to take the boy on and teach him to fight—with a gun and dirk, that is. He said if it was a matter of fists, any fisherman could lay a landsman out like a flatfish without half trying—and he’s probably right—but none of the Thurso folk had ever even held a gun before coming here, and most of them still haven’t. They fish, and snare, and trade for meat.”
“Mm. Do you think Hiram made him, or was it Cyrus’s own idea?”
“The latter. He’s courting Frances—in his own inimitable way—but he knows he hasn’t a chance unless your da thinks he’ll make her a good husband. So he means to prove his mettle.”
“How old is he?” Brianna asked, a note of concern in her voice.
“Sixteen, I think,” Roger said. “Old enough to fight, so far as that goes.”
“So far as that goes,” she muttered, huffing a little under her breath, and he knew why.
“Jemmy won’t be old enough to ride with them before the war’s over,” he assured her. “No matter how good he is with a gun.”
“Great. So he can stay and guard the ramparts here with me, Rachel, and Aunt Jenny and the Sachem, while the partisan band—and Mama, because she won’t let Da go alone—and probably you—go roaming the countryside, getting their asses shot off.”
“As you were saying about your physics class …?”
“Oh.” She paused to regather her thoughts, a small soft frown between her brows. “Well. You know all about atoms and electrons and that sort of thing?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, there are smaller things than that—subatomic particles—but nobody knows how many or exactly how they work. But while we were hearing about that in class, the instructor said something about how everything—everything in the universe and probably even if there’s more than one universe—everything is made of stardust. People, plants, planets … and stars, I suppose.
“‘Stardust’ not being a scientific term,” she added, just in case he’d thought it was. “Just that everything is composed of the same infinitesimal bits of matter.”
“Yes?”
“So what I’m thinking is … maybe that’s what happens when someone steps through a time place. I’m almost sure that it’s an electromagnetic phenomenon of some kind, because of the ley lines.”
“Ley lines?” He was surprised. “I wouldn’t think you’d be running into those in a physics class.”
She rolled a little, in order to look up at him. Her breath tickled the hairs on his chest and warmed his neck as she talked. She’d grown warm with talking; he could feel the vibration of words through her back as she spoke. It was curiously arousing.
“‘Ley line’ is kind of an informal term, but … you know that the earth’s crust is magnetic, right?”
“I can’t say I did, but I’m willing to take your word for it.”
“You may. And you do know that magnets are directional? Did you play with them as a kid?”
“You mean, positive end, negative end, and if you put the positive ends of two magnets together, they bounce apart? Yes, but what’s that got to do with ley lines?”
“That’s what a ley line is,” she said patiently. “The electromagnetism in the earth runs in parallel bands, and the bands alternate in the direction of their magnetic current. Though it’s not totally neat and tidy, of course. They diverge and overlap and like that. Haven’t I told you this stuff before?”
“Possibly.” He abandoned his half-formed amorous intentions, with a sense of regret. “But the ley lines I know about are … I don’t know what you’d call them, in terms of classification. Folklore, ancient builder stuff? At least in the British Isles, if you go looking at ancient hill forts and churches that are probably built on much older sites of worship and … well, things like standing stones, you often find that you can draw a straight—very straight, in most cases, as though it had been surveyed—line through two or three or four such sites. Archaeologists call those ley lines—though some folk call them spirit walks, because the dead are thought to … Oh, my God.”
A brief, uncontrollable shudder ran through him.
“Goose walking on your grave?” she asked, sympathy slightly marred by a look of satisfaction.
“Not everybody makes it,” he said, ignoring both sympathy and smugness. He pushed back the covers and sat up. “Through the stones. That’s what you mean? That the people who don’t go through, or don’t go through properly, turn up dead on these ley lines, leading to the not-unreasonable supposition that there’s something supernatural going on.”
“I hadn’t heard of spirit walks,” she admitted. “So I can’t say that’s what I mean—but it makes sense, doesn’t it?” She didn’t wait for him to admit it, but went on with her own line of thought.
“So … I’m thinking that the … time places … are maybe spots where different ley lines converge. If so, what happens to the electromagnetism in that spot would be really interesting, and it might be what … makes time be accessible? I mean, Einstein’s Unified Field Theory—”
“Let’s leave Albert out of it,” he said hastily. “At least for now.”
“All right,” she said agreeably. “Einstein never got it to work, anyway. All I’m saying is, maybe when you walk into one of those places—if you have the right genetics for it—you, um, die. Physically. You dissolve into stardust, if you want to call it that—and your particles can pass through stone, because they’re smaller than the atoms that make up the stones.”