Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Nothingness again. To Alexis she said sadly in Russian, “He will never let us out. Never, never.”

  The child began to cry. Anne held him closer, looking reproachfully at Culhane, who was shifting toward anger. She caught him just before the shift was complete, befuddling him with un-looked-for wistfulness: “It is just that there is so little we can do here, in this time where we do not belong. You can understand that, can you not, Master Culhane? Would it not be the same for you, in my Court of England?”

  Emotions warred on his face. Anne put her free hand gently on his arm. He looked down: the long slim fingers with their delicate tendons, the tawny silk against his drab uniform. He choked out, “Anything in my power, anything within the rules, Your Grace . . .”

  She had not yet gotten him to blurt out “Anne,” as he had the day she’d thrown a candlestick after him at the door.

  She removed her hand, shifted the sobbing child against her neck, spoke so softly he could not hear her.

  He leaned forward, toward her. “What did you say, Your Grace?”

  “Would you come again tonight to accompany my lute on your guitar? For Alexis and me?

  Culhane stepped back. His eyes looked trapped.

  “Please, Master Culhane?”

  Culhane nodded.

  Lambert stared at the monitor. It showed the hospital suite, barred windows and low white pallets, where Helen of Troy was housed. The queen sat quiescent on the floor, as she usually did, except for the brief and terrifying periods when she erupted, shrieking and tearing at her incredible hair. There had never been a single coherent word in the eruptions, not since the first moment Helen had awoken as Hostage and had been told where she was, and why. Since that day Queen Helen had never responded in the slightest to anything said to her. Or maybe that fragile mind, already quivering under the strain of her affair with Paris, had snapped too completely to even hear them. Helen, Lambert thought, was no Anne Boleyn.

  Anne sat close to the mad Greek queen, her silk skirts overlapping Helen’s white tunic, her slender body leaning so far forward that her hair, too, mingled with Helen’s, straight black waterfall with masses of springing black curls. Before she could stop herself, Lambert had run her hand over her own shaved head.

  What was Mistress Anne trying to say to Helen? The words were too low for the microphones to pick up, and the double curtain of hair hid Anne’s lips. Yet Lambert was as certain as death that Anne was talking. And Helen, quiescent—was she nonetheless hearing? What could it matter if she were, words in a tongue that from her point of view would not exist for another two millennia?

  Yet the Boleyn woman visited her every day, right after she left the Tsarevich. How good was Anne, from a time almost as barbaric as Helen’s own, at non-verbal coercion of the crazed?

  Culhane entered, glanced at the monitor, and winced.

  Lambert said levelly, “You’re a fool, Culhane.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You go whenever she summons. You—”

  He suddenly strode across the room, two strides at a time. Grabbing Lambert, he pulled her from her chair and yanked her to her feet. For an astonished moment she thought he was actually going to hit her—two Researchers hitting each other. She tensed to slug him back. But abruptly he dropped her, giving a little shove so that she tumbled gracelessly back into her chair.

  “You feel like a fat stone.”

  Lambert stared at him. Indifferently, he activated his own console and began work. Something rose in her, so cold the vertebrae of her back felt fused in ice. Stiffly she rose from the chair, left the room, and walked along the corridor.

  A fat stone. Heavy, stolid yet doughy, the flesh yielding like a slug, or a maggot. Bulky, without grace, without beauty, almost without individuality, as stones were all alike. A fat stone.

  Anne Boleyn was just leaving Helen’s chamber. In the corridor, back to the monitor, Lambert faced her. Her voice was low, like a subterranean growl. “Leave him alone.”

  Anne looked at her coolly. She did not ask whom Lambert meant.

  “Don’t you know you are watched every minute? That you can’t so much as use your chamberpot without being taped? How do you ever expect to get him to your bed? Or to do anything with poor Helen?”

  Anne’s eyes widened. She said loudly, “Even when I use the chamberpot? Watched? Have I not even the privacy of the beasts in the field?”

  Lambert clenched her fists. Anne was acting. Someone had already told her, or she had guessed, about the surveillance. Lambert could see that she was acting—but not why. A part of her mind noted coolly that she had never wanted to kill anyone before. So this, finally, was what it felt like, all those emotions she had researched throughout time: fury and jealousy and the desire to destroy. The emotions that started wars.

  Anne cried, even more loudly, “I had been better had you never told me!” and rushed toward her own apartments.

  Lambert walked slowly back to her work area, a fat stone.

  Anne lay on the grass between the two massive power generators. It was a poor excuse for grass; although green enough, it had no smell. No dew formed on it, not even at night. Culhane had explained that it was bred to withstand disease, and that no dew formed because the air had little moisture. He explained, too, that the night was as man-bred as the grass; there was no natural night here. Henry would have been highly interested in such things; she was not. But she listened carefully, as she listened to everything Michael said.

  She lay completely still, waiting. Eventually the head of a Researcher thrust around the corner of the towering machinery: a purposeful thrust. “Your Grace? What are you doing?”

  Anne did not answer. Getting to her feet, she walked back toward the castle. The place between the generators was no good: The woman had already known where Anne was.

  The three delegates from the All-World Forum arrived at the Time Research Institute looking apprehensive. Lambert could understand this; for those who had never left their own time-space continuum, it probably seemed significant to step through a force field to a place that did not exist in any accepted sense of the word. The delegates looked at the ground, and inspected the facilities, and asked the same kinds of questions visitors always asked, before they settled down to actually investigate anything.

  They were given an hour’s overview of the time rescue program, presented by the Director himself. Lambert, who had not helped write this, listened to the careful sentiments about the prevention of war, the nobility of Hostages, the deep understanding the Time Research Institute held of the All-World Accord of 2154, the altruistic extension of the Holy Mission of Peace into other time streams. Brill then moved on to discuss the four time Hostages, dwelling heavily on the first. In the four years since Herr Hitler had become a Hostage, the National Socialist Party had all but collapsed in Germany. President Paul von Hindenburg had died on schedule, and the new moderate Chancellors were slowly bringing order to Germany. The economy was still very bad and unrest was widespread, but no one was arresting Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals or Jehovah’s Witnesses or . . . Lambert stopped listening. The delegates knew all this. The entire solar system knew all this. Hitler had been a tremendous popular success as a Hostage, the reason the Institute had obtained permits for the next three. Herr Hitler was kept in his locked suite, where he spent his time reading power-fantasy novels whose authors had not been born when the bunker under Berlin was detonated.

  “Very impressive, Director,” Goro Soshiru said. He was small, thin, elongated, a typical free-fall Spacer, with a sharp mind and a reputation for incorruptibility. “May we now talk to the Hostages, one at a time?”

  “Without any monitors. That is our instruction,” said Anna Vlakhav. She was the senior member of the investigative team, a sleek, gray Chinese who refused all augments. Her left hand, Lambert noticed, trembled constantly. She belonged to the All-World Forum’s Inner Council and had once been a Hostage herself for three years.

  “Please,” Sor
en Tullio smiled. He was young, handsome, very wealthy. Disposable, added by the Forum to fill out the committee, with few recorded views of his own. Insomuch as they existed, however, they were not tinged with any bias toward the Church. Her Holiness had not succeeded in naming the members of the investigative committee—if indeed she had tried.

  “Certainly,” Brill said. “We’ve set aside the private conference room for your use. As specified by the Church, it is a sanctuary: There are no monitors of any kind. I would recommend, however, that you allow the bodyguard to remain with Herr Hitler, although of course you will make up your own minds.”

  Delegate Vlakhav said, “The bodyguard may stay. Herr Hitler is not our concern here.”

  Surprise, Lambert thought. Guess who is?

  The delegates kept Hitler only ten minutes, the catatonic Helen only three. They said the queen did not speak. They talked to the little Tsarevich a half hour. They kept Anne Boleyn in the sanctuary/conference room four hours and twenty-three minutes.

  She came out calm, blank-faced, and proceeded to her own apartments. Behind her the three delegates were tight-lipped and silent. Anna Vlakhav, the former Hostage, said to Toshio Brill, “We have no comment at this time. You will be informed.”

  Brill’s eyes narrowed. He said nothing.

  The next day, Director Toshio Brill was subpoenaed to appear before the All-World Forum on the gravest of all charges: mistreating Holy Hostages detained to keep Peace. The tribunal would consist of the full Inner Council of the All-World Forum. Since Director Brill had the right to confront those who accused him, the investigation would be held at the Time Research Institute.

  How, Lambert wondered? They would not take her unsupported word. How had the woman done it?

  She said to Culhane, “The Delegates evidently make no distinction between political Hostages on our own world and time Hostages snatched from shadowy parallel ones.”

  “Why should they?” coldly said Culhane. The idealist. And where had it brought him?

  Lambert was assigned that night to monitor the Tsarevich, who was asleep in his crib. She sat in her office, her screen turned to Anne Boleyn’s chambers, watching her play on the lute and sing softly to herself the songs written for her by Henry VIII when his passion was new and fresh, six hundred years before.

  Anne sat embroidering a sleeve cover of cinnamon velvet. In strands of black silk she worked intertwined H and A: Henry and Anne. Let their spying machines make of that what they would.

  The door opened and, without permission, Culhane entered. He stood by her chair and looked down into her face. “Why, Anne? Why?”

  She laughed. He had finally called her by her Christian name. Now, when it could not possibly matter.

  When he saw that she would not answer, his manner grew formal. “A lawyer has been assigned to you. He arrives tomorrow.”

  A lawyer. Thomas Cromwell had been a lawyer, and Sir Thomas More. Dead, both of them, at Henry’s hand. So had Master Culhane told her, and yet he still believed that protection was afforded by the law.

  “The lawyer will review all the monitor records. What you did, what you said, every minute.”

  She smiled at him mockingly. “Why tell me this now?”

  “It is your right to know.”

  “And you are concerned with rights. Almost as much as with death.” She knotted the end of her thread and cut it. “How is it that you command so many machines and yet do not command the knowledge that every man must die?”

  “We know that,” Culhane said evenly. His desire for her had at last been killed; she could feel its absence, like an empty well. The use of her name had been but the last drop of living water. “But we try to prevent death when we can.”

  “Ah, but you can’t. ‘Prevent death’—as if it were a fever! You can only postpone it, Master Culhane, and you never even ask if that is worth doing.”

  “I only came to tell you about the lawyer,” Culhane said stiffly. “Good night, Mistress Boleyn.”

  “Good night, Michael,” she said, and started to laugh. She was still laughing when the door closed behind him.

  The Hall of Time, designed to hold three hundred, was packed.

  Lambert remembered the day she had given the Orientation lecture to the history candidates, among them what’s-his-name of the violet eyes. Twenty young people huddled together against horror in the middle of Squares, virtual and simulated, but not really present. Today the Squares were absent and the middle of the floor was empty, while all four sides were lined ten-deep with All-World Inner Council members on high polished benches, archbishops and lamas and shamans of the Church of the Holy Hostage, and reporters from every major newsgrid in the solar system. Her Holiness the High Priest sat among her followers, pretending she wanted to be inconspicuous. Toshio Brill sat in a chair alone, facing the current Premier of the All-World Council, Dagar Krenya of Mars.

  Anne Boleyn was led to a seat. She walked with her head high, her long black skirts sweeping the floor.

  Lambert remembered that Anne had worn black to her trial for treason, in 1536.

  “This investigation will begin,” Premier Krenya said. He wore his hair to his shoulders; fashions must have changed again on Mars. Lambert looked at the shaved heads of her colleagues, at the long loose black hair of Anne Boleyn. To Culhane, seated beside her, she whispered, “We’ll be growing our hair again soon.” He looked at her as if she were crazy.

  It was a kind of crazy, to live everything twice: once in research, once in the flesh. Did it seem so to Anne Boleyn? Lambert knew her frivolity was misplaced, and she thought of the frivolity of Anne in the Tower, awaiting execution: “They will have no trouble finding a name for me. I shall be Queen Anne Lackhead.” At the memory, Lambert’s hatred burst out fresh. She had the memory, and now Anne never would. But in bequeathing it forward in time to Lambert, the memory had become second-hand. That was Anne Boleyn’s real crime, for which she would never be tried: She had made this whole proceeding, so important to Lambert and Brill and Culhane, a mere re-enactment. Pre-scripted. Second-hand. She had robbed them of their own, unused time.

  Krenya said, “The charges are as follows: That the Time Research Institute has mistreated the Holy Hostage Anne Boleyn, held Hostage against war. Three counts of mistreatment are under consideration this day: First, that researchers willfully increased a Hostage’s mental anguish by dwelling on the pain of those left behind by the Hostage’s confinement, and on those aspects of confinement that cause emotional unease. Second, that researchers failed to choose a hostage that would truly prevent war. Third, that researchers willfully used a hostage for sexual gratification.”

  Lambert felt herself go very still. Beside her, Culhane rose to his feet, then sat down again slowly, his face rigid. Was it possible he had . . . no. He had been infatuated, but not to the extent of throwing away his career. He was not Henry, any more than she had been over him.

  The spectators buzzed, an uneven sound like malfunctioning equipment. Krenya rapped for order. “Director Brill—how do you answer these charges?”

  “False, Premier. Every one.”

  “Then let us hear the evidence against the Institute.”

  Anne Boleyn was called. She took the chair in which Brill had been sitting. “She made an entry as though she were going to a great triumph and sat down with elegance,” . . . but that was the other time, the first time. Lambert groped for Culhane’s hand. It felt limp.

  “Mistress Boleyn,” Krenya said—he had evidently not been told that she insisted on being addressed as a queen, and the omission gave Lambert a mean pleasure—“In what ways was your anguish willfully increased by researchers at this Institute?”

  Anne held out her hand. To Lambert’s astonishment, her lawyer put into it a lute. At an official All-World Forum investigation—a lute. Anne began to play, the tune high and plaintive. Her unbound black hair fell forward; her slight body made a poignant contrast to the torment in the words:

  Defiled is my
name, full sore,

  Through cruel spite and false report,

  That I may say forever more,

  Farewell to joy, adieu comfort.

  “Oh, death, rock me asleep,

  Bring on my quiet rest,

  Let pass my very guiltless ghost

  Out of my careful breast.

  Ring out the doleful knell,

  Let its sound my death tell,

  For I must die, There is no remedy,

  For now I die!

  The last notes faded. Anne looked directly at Krenya. “I wrote that, my Lords, in my other life. Master Culhane of this place played it for me, along with death songs written by my . . . my brother . . .”

  “Mistress Boleyn . . .”

  “No, I recover myself. George’s death tune was hard for me to hear, my Lords. Accused and condemned because of me, who always loved him well.”

  Krenya said to the lawyer whose staff had spent a month reviewing every moment of monitor records, “Culhane made her listen to these?”

  “Yes,” the lawyer said. Beside Lambert, Culhane sat unmoving.

  “Go on,” Krenya said to Anne.

  “He told me that I was made to suffer watching the men accused with me die. How I was led to a window overlooking the block, how my brother George knelt, putting his head on the block, how the axe was raised—” She stopped, shuddering. A murmur ran over the room. It sounded like cruelty, Lambert thought—but whose?

  “Worst of all, my Lords,” Anne said, “was that I was told I had bastardized my own child. I chose to sign a paper declaring no valid marriage had ever existed because I had been pre-contracted to Sir Henry Percy, so my daughter Elizabeth was illegitimate and thus barred from her throne. I was taunted with the fact that I had done this, ruining the prospects of my own child. He said it over and over, Master Culhane did . . .”