A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [609]
After a long time, her knees grew numb and her elbows hurt, and she spread the cloak over the nasty mattress, trying not to consider the various stains on it, nor the smell. Lying on her side, she watched the sky through the window, the infinitesimal changes of the light from one moment to the next, and considered in detail the specific pigments and the exact brushstrokes she would use to paint it. Then she got up and began pacing to and fro, counting her steps, estimating distance.
The room was about eight feet by ten; 5,280 feet in a mile. Five hundred and twenty-eight laps. She really hoped Bonnet’s office was underneath her.
Nothing, though, was enough, and as the room darkened and she reached two miles, she found Roger in her mind—where he had been all along, unacknowledged.
She sank down on the bed, hot from the exercise, and watched the last of the flaming color fade from the sky.
Had he been ordained, as he wanted so much? He had been worried about the question of predestination, not sure that he could take the Holy Orders he desired, if he were not able to subscribe wholeheartedly to that notion—well, she called it a notion; to Presbyterians, it was dogma. She smiled wryly, thinking of Hiram Crombie.
Ian had told her about Crombie earnestly attempting to explain the doctrine of predestination to the Cherokee. Most of them had listened politely, then ignored him. Bird’s wife, Penstemon, though, had been interested by the argument, and followed Crombie about during the day, playfully pushing him, then crying out, ‘Did your God know I would do that? How could he know that—I didn’t know I would do that!’, or in more thoughtful mood, trying to get him to explain how the idea of predestination might work in terms of gambling—like most of the Indians, Penstemon would bet on almost anything.
She thought Penstemon had probably had a lot to do with the shortness of Crombie’s initial visit to the Indians. She had to give him credit, though: he’d gone back. And back again. He believed in what he was doing.
As did Roger. Damn, she thought wearily, there he was again, those soft moss-green eyes of his dark with thought, running a finger slowly down the bridge of his nose.
“Does it really matter?” she’d said at last, tiring of the discussion of predestination, and privately pleased that Catholics weren’t required to believe any such thing and were content to let God work in mysterious ways. “Doesn’t it matter more that you can help people, that you can offer comfort?”
They’d been in bed, the candle extinguished, talking by the glow of the hearth. She could feel the shift of his body as he moved, his hand playing with a strand of her hair as he considered.
“I don’t know,” he’d said at last. He’d smiled a little then, looking up at her.
“Do ye not think any time-traveler must be a bit of a theologian, though?”
She’d taken a deep, martyred breath, and he’d laughed then, and let it go, kissing her instead and descending to far earthier matters.
He’d been right, though. No one who had traveled through the stones could help asking it: why me? And who would answer that question, if not God?
Why me? And the ones who didn’t make it—why them? She felt a small chill, thinking of those. The anonymous bodies, listed in Geillis Duncan’s notebook; Donner’s companions, dead on arrival. And speaking of Geillis Duncan . . . the thought came to her suddenly; the witch had died here, out of her own time.
Putting metaphysics aside and looking at the matter purely in terms of science—and it must have a scientific basis, she argued stubbornly, it wasn’t magic, no matter what Geilie Duncan had thought—the laws of thermodynamics held that neither mass nor energy could be created nor destroyed. Only changed.
Changed