Chapter 44
Adrian goes tense beside me, and my stomach contracts into a ball. Helen seems unconcerned by the gun, and I wish I had her optimism.
I take a deep breath and try to ignore the gun in favor of focusing on Dr. Dane. “If you’re familiar with the Lettere Segrete, you know my name appears in it. I don’t know what the book says about me, but I can at least tell you why it’s in there.”
I’ve piqued her interest, judging by her expression. “Then please do so.”
I launch into my tale yet again, leaving out only the most personal details, which I doubt she’d be interested in anyway.
It sounds just as insane as the first time I told it, but Dr. Dane seems intrigued rather than baffled.
Does she know anything about what happened to me? She must if she’s read Giuliani’s book.
When I finish, she asks, “So you don’t know where the Key of Mithras is?”
Of all the things she could ask, why this? “I’m afraid not.”
“Blast. I’d kill to get my hands on a copy.” She considers. “Well, probably not literally.”
“So you believe us?” Adrian asks warily.
“I’d prefer not to, but your story makes too much sense.”
Not the way I’d have described anything that’s happened to me recently. “It does?”
“Oh yes.”
Adrian clears his throat. “Could you put the gun away, Dr. Dane?”
“Ah.” She seems to have forgotten she was holding it. “Of course. I’m glad not to have had to shoot you.”
“I’m glad not to have had to put a spark to the gunpowder and blown it up in your hand,” Helen replies coolly. No wonder she didn’t seem terribly worried about getting shot. “You were one of my favorite professors.”
“A sorceress? I should have guessed.” Dr. Dane tucks the gun back into the drawer. “You all might as well sit down.”
The chairs look hard, with unpadded wooden seats, and there are only two of them. I elect to stand, shaking my head when Adrian offers to let me sit instead of himself.
“Thank you,” Adrian says to Dr. Dane. “Can you tell us what Swarm-Sterling wanted from you? Was it the Lettere Segrete?”
“It was one of the things.” Her dark eyes fix briefly on my face.
“He tried the library first, posing as James Olden, bookseller. When he learned I had it, he wrote to me in a most demanding fashion, ordering me to let him borrow it. He also had a long list of questions about my work, apparently expecting me to waste my valuable time answering them. A pity I didn’t know what he really was; I would have given him an audience if I had. ”
I stare at her in shock. “You would have?”
“Of course! Can you imagine what I might have learned from a being that could project itself through time into a human body?” She shakes her head in frustration. “We could have made a satisfactory trade of knowledge.”
I’m taken aback by her eagerness to chat with a member of the Swarm, no matter what she might learn from it. The thing had taken my life and wrecked everything I’d worked for, erased my memories, made me doubt my very sanity.
Adrian cocks his head slightly to one side. “And what exactly does your work entail?”
“How familiar with metaphysics are you, young man?”
“Not at all, I’m afraid.”
She sighs, as though we’ve disappointed her.
“Very well, I shall speak simply. Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy dedicated to understanding reality. As its scope is so wide, many of us choose to narrow our studies to a particular field of inquiry. Mine is the study of space, time, the change associated with them, and the causality leading to the nature of said change.”
It all sounds very complicated to me, but Adrian seems to grasp it quickly. “Why things happen as they do, you mean?”
“To reduce it to the most basic level, yes.” She taps her fingers on the desk, studying us as if deciding how much we might comprehend. “What do you know of quantum mechanics?”
“Literally nothing,” Helen answers for all of us.
Dr. Dane sighs yet again, clearly frustrated by our ignorance.
“Let us do a thought experiment. Say you have an apple hanging from a string, a pair of scissors, and a coin. Through some mechanism, a flip of the coin determines whether the scissors cut the string. The apple either falls, or it doesn’t—both are equally probable. ”
“All right,” I say cautiously. “I think I’m following so far.”
“Good. Now, we perceive one outcome or the other, yes? Either the coin lands on heads and the string is cut and the apple falls, or it lands on tails and the string remains intact, the apple suspended. But since both were possible, both could occur. We observe one outcome; but the other also exists.”
I’m getting a headache trying to follow her logic. “Exists where?” Adrian asks.
“Presumably some other reality, where another version of you observed the second outcome. And since this other reality has a different causality, we can assume it will develop differently as well.” She smiles. “Just think—every choice you make creates new realities where you chose the opposite!”
No wonder she accepted my story with such ease—her theories sound far more insane than time-traveling body-snatchers. “But what does any of this have to do with time? Or the Key of Mithras, or Bianca Giuliani, or any of it?”
“We think of time as a straight line, progressing from past to future. But according to the theory I’ve just explained, it’s more like a river delta, with channels branching off, then splitting again, and yet again.
If you’re on a boat traveling from river to sea, you’ll only take one path through the delta. But those other channels still exist.”
Adrian’s eyes widen. “So someone traveling through time has more than one option of how to reach the future.”
Dr. Dane smiles approvingly. “Quite correct. You’re sharper than most of my students.”
Helen’s hands fidget with her purse, as if she can’t quite sit still when thinking. “Remember what Aunt Irene said? About the Key of Mithras allowing one to look across time? Maybe it lets you see those other channels. All the roads not taken.”
“Well, they were taken, just not by the you in your reality,” Dr. Dane corrects her. “But yes. Having the Key of Mithras would make my current project much easier.”
Something about the eager light in her eyes puts me on edge. It’s clear she’s not working with the Swarm or Timekeepers…but she told us herself she would have if she’d known the truth when Swarm-Me approached her.
“And what is your current project?” Adrian asks.
“A machine that would allow one to look across and through time, see these other realities.” She leans forward eagerly.
“Can you imagine how such a thing would change the world? Not sure who to vote for in an election? Look through time and the different possible outcomes and pick the one you want to experience! Wondering if you ought to get a divorce—now you can find out if you’ll be happier or worse off.
I suppose one could even use it when gambling on horse races and the like, though I would hope my work isn’t used for such crass matters. ”
“That does sound useful,” Helen says thoughtfully. “But is it really that simple?”
Dr. Dane deflates slightly. “Well, no. Maybe the bet on the horse race. It would only work well for simple systems—the more variables, the more possible outcomes, the more potential timelines you’d have to look through. But you could weight the dice toward whatever your ultimate goal is.”
My mind is reeling, so I focus on our immediate objective. “How does the Lettere Segrete fit into all this?”
“Bianca Giuliani became something of a mystic after her breakdown—after she was taken over by one of the Swarm, judging by what you’ve said.
Her letters are full of dire warnings to her correspondents—wild ravings about cyclical time and history repeating itself.
She refers to Aion often, as well as Cronus and Mithras, with whom the god became conflated.
” Dr. Dane takes a cigarette case out of her desk.
“She’s very focused on a specific date and time, in fact, though it was far in the future for her.
She claims to have calculated it based on the stars in a vision she had after using The Key of Mithras.
The same stars she painted in her masterwork, The Wheel of Aion. ”
The Key. She’d found a copy, maybe the original, and used it to look across time. A strange sensation fills me, but it takes me a moment to recognize it as pride.
Some part of me, the part that holds my locked-away memory, is proud of my friend. She did it; she’d managed to…what?
Adrian sits up, like a hound alerted for the hunt. “What was the date?”
“September 25, 1927. So a little less than two weeks ago. Whatever she wanted to warn you about, Mr. Caine, it’s already happened.”