17

"Things have grown strange," Dr. Sabbatine says immediately. "I have been attempting to view the past, the way I did before I built the Specular, but things are distant and confused. Sometimes I see Stralchus, hard at work on his own machines. Sometimes I see things that are impossible.

"Perhaps more strangely," the doctor says, "unfamiliar objects have started to proliferate here. I have tried to categorize them with the help of my fellow scholars. Our tentative explanation is that objects from other…other pasts…are falling into the present."

You can't tell if she's frightened or astounded.