The Divina in the Troupe

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. The monster Glyph concocted a virus to change the lobe-finned fishes to evolve into six-limbed chimera. Rydin's antibody had not worked completely. So the modern world now contains a mix of familiar and exotic creatures...... including the mute strain of six-limbed hominids known as "Divina." This...
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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. The monster Glyph concocted a virus to change the lobe-finned fishes to evolve into six-limbed chimera. Rydin's antibody had not worked completely. So the modern world now contains a mix of familiar and exotic creatures...... including the mute strain of six-limbed hominids known as "Divina." This gentle species hides a great secret-one 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 wants to join the Troupe des Jongleurs, the elite time-traveling organization of which she is a member. Against the Troupe's better judgment, she and Rydin accept the Divina as a Jongleur trainee.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 track down-ultimately to eliminate-the mysterious Ramsay triplets, who 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.