I noted a quick glance from Gregory and Teskhamen responding in a subtle way as well. They weren’t as sure as Marius about all this. But I was.

Gremt looked quietly and unobtrusively stricken as if he were lost. I wished I could say something to him to comfort him—to tell him that he was as much a part of us here as anyone else was—but I wanted to hear Kapetria’s story now as well.

“Let’s get to it,” I said. “You talk, Kapetria. We listen. We won’t interrupt unless we feel strongly that we should.”

“Excellent,” said Kapetria. She removed her small digital recorder and set it on the table. I could see a tiny light pulsing from the device. “You have your cameras,” she said. “We have these.”

Marius nodded with an open-handed gesture of acceptance.

“Trust us,” Marius said, “to understand.”

“I do,” Kapetria said.

She was still holding Derek’s hand and she reached up and stroked his hair now, comfortingly. Then she looked at me again. And then she looked at David.

Perhaps she hadn’t noticed David before. But she did now. Did she sense that David hadn’t been the original occupant of his body? It seemed almost certain that she did sense this. Finally she smiled and nodded to him and he returned her smile with his usual graciousness.

Kapetria went on. “We’ve been sharing what we remember with one another. And I believe I have put the entire story together as best I can.”

Nods from one and all.

“Now I will be speaking to you in English,” she said, “because that is the one language we all share. I’ll be using innumerable words and phrases and expressions in English which have no equivalent in our ancient tongue, but which are superbly effective—after thousands of years of linguistic development—for describing everything we experienced and everything we saw. I refer now to words like ‘skyscraper’ or ‘polymer’ or ‘metropolis’ or ‘plastic.’ Words like ‘transmit’ and ‘magnificence’ and ‘empathy’ and ‘programmed.’ Do you follow me?”

“I think we understand very well,” said Seth. “There was no language in my home country of Kemet at the time of my birth thousands of years ago to describe automobiles, or airplanes, or parachutes, or the subconscious, or psychopathology, or force fields, or binary systems.”

“Yes, exactly,” she said with a delighted laugh. “That is what I am saying. And I will use the full power of the English language now to communicate rather than relive what happened. But there is another aspect of this too. I didn’t always understand what I was seeing twelve thousand years ago. The world today has helped me to interpret much of what I saw, but whether those interpretations are accurate I don’t know.”

We were nodding, expressing in soft murmurs that we understood.