The Divina in the Troupe — Thomas T. Thomas

Time is not a river: It's a choice …Returning from a rescue expedition to the Devonian period, 360 million years in Earth's past, Coel Rydin, Merola Tsverin, and their robot companions discover that their mission has failed, at least partially. The monster Glyph had concocted a virus to change the lobe-finned fishes from evolving into the familiar line of four-limbed animals known to Earth and instead sprout six-limbed chimera. And Rydin's antibody had not worked completely. So the modern world the travelers return to now contains a mix of familiar and exotic creatures …… including the mute but musically inclined strain of six-limbed hominids known as “Divina.” This gentle species, widely divergent from the human line, hides a great secret -- one that Rydin and Tsverin must discover if they are ever to unravel the mystery of their changed world. As if by accident, one of these creatures approaches Merola and apparently wants to join the Troupe des Jongleurs, the elite time-traveling organization of which she is a member. Against the Troupe's better judgment -- but finally permitted by their difficult and disagreeable supervisor, Captain Tavia -- she and Rydin accept the Divina as a Jongleur trainee. Almost inadvertently, they give him the ominous name “Ghost.”In their attempts to reverse the evolutionary process that Glyph had unleashed, the pair and their new-found pupil try to intercept Merola on her original mission to the early twenty-first century, where everything had gone so wrong. When that doesn't work, they attempt to track down -- ultimately to eliminate -- the mysterious Ramsay triplets, who had put the monster onto Merola's trail in the first place. And finally, they must learn the real nature of the time to which they have returned.This sequel to The Children of Possibility closely follows that story, picking it up from the moment of the pair's return to the eleventh millennium. In their desperate struggle to put the world right, they discover that time is not a river, nor some grand Möbius strip of repeated failure, and not even a tangle of loose strands and alternate possibilities. Time is ultimately a choice.