The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [190]
However, if Jeremiah’s father is not a time traveler (Stephen Bonnet, for instance), then the assortment is as follows:
Which in turn means that Jeremiah may still be able to travel, but the odds are only one-in-two, or fifty/fifty.
On the other hand, we only know Brianna’s genotype for sure; Roger could have received a traveling gene from both parents. If he did, then his genotype is TT, and all the children born to him and Brianna will be able to travel.
On the third hand, we don’t know for sure that Stephen Bonnet isn’t a traveler. After all, a person wouldn’t find that out until he or she happened to walk through a circle of standing stones—and only at the right time of the year. We can assume from Geilie Duncan’s research that this doesn’t happen all that often—though it does happen.
Geillis Duncan seems to have done a lot of research, and probably knew more than anyone about the ways and means of time travel. Unfortunately, she’s dead,2 so unless she wrote down more of her findings somewhere else along the way, we’re just going to have to try to work things out by deduction and experiment.
We must also bear in mind that Geillis Duncan may not always have been right in her own deductions, either; for instance, she was originally convinced that a blood sacrifice was required in order to open the time-passage. We know this is not correct, since Claire passed through without any such assistance.
Geillis also thought—presumably on the basis of ancient writings she later discovered3—that gemstones offered a means both of controlling the process of time travel (opening passages at times other than the sun feasts and fire feasts, for example) and protecting the traveler. She appears to have been closer the mark in this assumption, since Roger was in fact protected in his journey—first by the garnets on his mother’s locket, and then by the diamond given to him by Fiona Graham.
The grimoire that Fiona found and gave to Roger contained Geilie’s hypothesis that the time-passages were located at spots where the “ley lines” (lines of magnetic force that pass through the earth’s crust) come close enough together that they are drawn into vortices, forming passages that join the layers of time. Evidently the time-passages may indeed be subject to some influence of magnetic force, since they stand widest open on the sun feasts and fire feasts—the times of year when the gravitational pull of the sun is most pronounced with respect to the earth’s lines of magnetic force.
Still, these are only hypotheses; the true effect of gemstones remains to be seen.
This is as much as we presently know, concerning the mechanism of time travel. Beyond the simple fact of the phenomenon, though, we can observe and deduce various things concerning its effects. In other words, how, when, and why one time-travels is one thing; but what happens to the time-traveler—and to time—on the other side?
Presentism
LACK OF PERSPECTIVE in literature (or in readers) often causes a contemporary condition I’ve heard referred to as “presentism”; that is, a disposition to judge all literature by the narrow standards of present time and present culture. This leads to peculiar phenomena such as the denunciation of classic novels such as Huckleberry Finn, on grounds that they deal with issues such as slavery, women’s civil rights, etc., in a way not consistent with the present-day notion of political correctness. In essence, this attitude is based on a failure to acknowledge that any time other than the present has actually existed; since that underlying assumption is clearly mistaken, the resultant attitude—that it is reasonable to judge historical times and characters by modern standards—can’t possibly be taken seriously. At least by me.
PARADOX, PREDESTINATION, AND FREE CHOICE
There are always two choices facing a writer who deals with time travel, whether these are addressed specifically or not: one, the time travel paradox (that is, can the past be changed, and if so, how is the future affected?), and