CHAPTER 30
Incredible as Kit’s unprecedented appearance seemed to everyone concerned, the tale he unfolded for them was more incredible still. Sitting in the tiny kitchen of the mountaintop observatory, Kit held his listeners rapt. Over big bowls of Brother Lazarus’ spaghetti puttanesca, Wilhelmina’s floury bread, and numerous glasses of the abbey’s hefty red wine, he described life in the Stone Age as he knew it: River City Clan and its organisation; the order and rhythm of daily existence; the flora and fauna; the various individuals and their orientation to the clan and to their world; their unstinting care, support, and respect for one another; and their extraordinary means of communication.
Wilhelmina, leaning on her elbows with chin in hand, her dark eyes wide, kept up a steady, murmuring stream of translation for the priest, who shook his head in continual amazement. Shorn of his matted, shaggy locks and shaved clean, Kit no longer looked like the Wild Man in a circus sideshow. In his clean black cassock he might have passed for one of the abbey’s resident monastics-except the things he was describing were things no monk had ever put into words. Story after story, each more astounding than the last, poured out in a flood of verbal astonishments. Every now and then Brother Lazarus would jot down a note for later reference, or a question. But neither he nor Mina wanted to interrupt for fear of missing something amazing.
They talked long into the night and the next morning. After broaching the subject of mounting a return expedition to explore the cave and retrieve the painted symbols from the walls, Brother Lazarus beetled off to consult his superiors. Meanwhile, Kit and Wilhelmina sat outside the observatory tower on a wooden bench, taking in the bright morning sun.
“I found that plaque in the church at Sant’Antimo in Italy and followed the trail,” Mina explained, “and it led me here to Brother Lazarus. His real name is Giambattista Beccaria, and he is a traveller- like us.” Her voice took on a no-nonsense tone. “That is a secret you will take to the grave-for his good as well as for ours, no one must know about any of us.” She lightened again. “You can trust him, Kit. He is one of us. Actually, he’s the one who’s responsible for finding you the first time.”
“I’ve always wondered how you managed to pull that off.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I figured.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he stretched his feet out in front of him, leaned his head against the back of the bench, closed his eyes, and tilted his face to the sun, enjoying the warmth. “Have a go.”
“Okay,” she agreed, turning her eyes to the valley, lost in a blue haze of morning mist. “I don’t know about you, but my life has ceased to have linear chronology. I seem to be here, there, and everywhere. Time gets a little fuzzy.”
“You got that right,” affirmed Kit, his voice hoarse from talking more in the last twelve hours than he had in the previous twelve months combined. “Go on.”
“I’ve been coming to Montserrat for a few years now. On one early visit I actually arrived and realised that I had returned before the last time I was here! From Brother Lazarus’ point of view, we had not yet had the previous visit.” She gave a little laugh. “That was a real mind bender. In the end, I had to go away again because it was all just too weird.”
Kit gave a passable imitation of an En-Ul grunt of agreement.
“Anyway, it has taught me not to make any assumptions, to keep quiet and observe what’s going on around me and try to blend in so I don’t alarm anyone. I’ve also learned how to calibrate my jumps better. I can leave right now, go back to Prague for a month or two, and then come back here and you won’t have arrived yet.”
“Yeah,” murmured Kit. “But you would know that I was going to arrive eventually, right?”
“Maybe. Sometimes.” She clasped her hands and unclasped them. “I don’t always know what I’m going to remember. You just said I found you in Egypt.”
“Right. You do remember that, don’t you?”
“Kit, I have no memory of that at all. For me-the Mina you are talking to right this moment-it hasn’t happened yet.”
He raised his head, opened his eyes, and stared at her. “Man, that is weird,” he said after a moment. “Mina, you showed up in Egypt just in the nick of time to break Giles and me out of the tomb. You were wearing something like army fatigues, and your hair was tied up in a scarf-it was light blue. You got us out of that terrible crypt where Burleigh had locked us and left us to die. Are you telling me you don’t remember any of that?”
“I have the scarf. But the rest of it?” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Sorry. I don’t have any memory of that.”
“Well, what is the last thing you recall?”
“I remember going to Egypt to meet Thomas Young and to collect you and Giles and the map,” she said slowly. “Then we all went back to Prague and ran into Burleigh. I sent you to the gorge, took Giles home, and came here. That’s all.”
“But before that-you don’t remember coming to Egypt the first time and breaking us out of the tomb?”
“Sorry.”
Kit sat up and put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples with his thumbs. Fearing she had caused an information overload, Mina put a comforting hand on his neck and massaged it gently.
“But it happened,” he said, his voice falling softly.
“Not to me,” she told him. “Not yet.”
Kit nodded, trying to penetrate this new mystery.
“Listen, when we’re together we occupy the same time frame, and the sequence of events is the same for both of us,” Mina suggested. “But when we are separated we go to different times, right? So if we meet up again in a third place, like we are right now, why assume that we’ll meet each other at the exact point where we left off? We might be catching one another before or after some arbitrary point in the sequence of events.” She offered a reassuring pat. “Does that help at all?”
“A little,” Kit allowed. “Maybe.”
The silence stretched between them for long moments that seemed like hours.
“Cosimo said it wasn’t time travel,” observed Kit at last. “He was always at pains to point that out, and I never understood why. He’d say, ‘Remember, Kit-this isn’t time travel.’ I remember thinking: when it so obviously is time travel, why make such a big deal of denying it?” He looked around at Wilhelmina and gave a half smile. “I think I’m finally beginning to understand why.”
“Well, it is time travel, and it isn’t. When we make a leap, we do travel in time, after all. But that isn’t all we do.”
“That’s right. We leave one reality and enter another that is on a different time stream-like stepping from one merry-go-round onto another. Maybe one merry-go-round has not made as many revolutions as the other, but everything else is more or less the same.” He considered this for a moment, then said, “I once asked Cosimo whether it was possible for you to meet yourself in another world. You know? Suppose you popped into London and went to your house, knocked on the door, and-Ta-da! There you are meeting yourself face-to-face. Could that ever happen?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t know if it could happen, but that it somehow never did,” Kit replied. “It must be that the same person cannot occupy the same reality in two different bodies-something like that.”
“I went back to London and visited the bakery and my flat. I even went around to your place, but you weren’t there. It was strange, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder if I would meet myself there.” She thought a moment. “So if I went to a place where there was another Wilhelmina, I would… what?” She looked at Kit.
“I don’t know. But this idea that once we start jumping around in space and time our lives no longer maintain a linear chronology must be tied up with it somehow.”