“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.”
Roger felt a distinct lurch in his insides at the memory of what it felt like. Being dead wasn’t putting it too strongly, but …