by Nancy Kress
Krenya said to the lawyer, “Is this in the visuals?”
“Yes.”
Krenya turned back to Anne. “But, Mistress Boleyn—these are things that, because of your time rescue, did not happen. Will not happen, in your time stream. How can they thus increase your anguish for relatives left behind?”
Anne stood. She took one step forward, then stopped. Her voice was low and passionate. “My good Lord—do you not understand? It is because you took me here that these things did not happen. Left to my own time, I would have been responsible for them all. For my brother’s death, for the other four brave men, for my daughter’s bastardization, for the torment in my own music . . . I have escaped them only because of you. To tell me them in such detail, not the mere provision of facts that I myself requested but agonizing detail of mind and heart—is to tell me that I alone, in my own character, am evil, giving pain to those I love most. And that in this time stream you have brought me to, I did these things, felt them, feel them still. You have made me guilty of them. My Lord Premier, have you ever been a Hostage yourself? Do you know, or can you imagine, the torment that comes from imagining the grief of those who love you? And to know you have caused this grief, not merely loss but death, blood, the pain of disinheritance—that you have caused it, and are now being told of the anguish you cause? Told over and over? In words, in song even—can you imagine what that feels like to one such as I, who cannot return at will and comfort those hurt by my actions?” The room was silent. Who, Lambert wondered, had told Anne Boleyn that Premier Krenya had once served as Holy Hostage?
“Forgive me, my Lords,” Anne said dully, “I forget myself.”
“Your testimony may take whatever form you choose,” Krenya said, and it seemed to Lambert that there were shades and depths in his voice.
The questioning continued. A Researcher, said Anne, had taunted her with being spied on even at her chamberpot—Lambert leaned slowly forward—which had made Anne cry out, “I had been better had you never told me!” Since then, modesty had made her reluctant to even answer nature, “so that there is every hour a most wretched twisting and churning in my bowels.”
Asked why she thought the Institute had chosen the wrong Hostage, Anne said she had been told so by my Lord Brill. The room exploded into sound, and Krenya rapped for quiet. “That visual now, please.” On a Square created in the center of the room, the visuals replayed on three sides:
“My Lord Brill . . . Was there no other person you could take but I to prevent this war you say is a hundred years off? This civil war in England?”
“The mathematics identified you as the best Hostage, Your Grace.”
“The best? Best for what, my Lord? If you had taken Henry himself, then he could not have issued the Act of Supremacy. His supposed death would have served the purpose as well as mine.”
“Yes. But for Henry VIII to disappear from history while his heir is but a month old . . . We did not know if that might not have started a civil war in itself. Between the factions supporting Elizabeth and those for Queen Catherine, who was still alive.”
“What did your mathematical learning tell you?”
“That it probably would not,” Brill said.
“And yet choosing me instead of Henry left him free to behead yet another wife, as you yourself have told me, my cousin Catherine Howard!”
Brill shifted on his chair. “That is true, Your Grace.”
“Then why not Henry instead of me?”
“Tm afraid Your Grace does not have sufficient grasp of the science of probabilities for me to explain, Your Grace.”
Anne was silent. Finally she said, “I think that the probability is that you would find it easier to deal with a deposed woman than with Henry of England, whom no man can withstand in either a passion or a temper.” Brill did not answer. The visual rolled—ten seconds, fifteen—and he did not answer.
“Mr. Premier,” Brill said in a choked voice, “Mr. Premier—”
“You will have time to address these issues soon, Mr. Director,” Krenya said. “Mistress Boleyn, this third charge—sexual abuse—”
The term had not existed in the sixteenth century, thought Lambert. Yet Anne understood it. She said, “I was frightened, my Lord, by the strangeness of this place. I was afraid for my life. I didn’t know then that a woman may refuse those in power, may—”
“That is why sexual contact with Hostages is universally forbidden,” Krenya said. “Tell us what you think happened.”
Not what did happen—what you think happened. Lambert took heart. Anne said, “Master Culhane bade me meet him at a place . . . it is a small alcove beside a short flight of stairs near the kitchens . . . He bade me meet him there at night. Frightened, I went.”
“Visuals,” Krenya said in a tight voice.
The virtual Square re-appeared. Anne, in the same white nightdress in which she had been taken Hostage, crept from her chamber, along the corridor, her body heat registering in infrared. Down the stairs, around to the kitchens, into the cubbyhole formed by the flight of steps, themselves oddly angled as if they had been added, or altered, after the main structure was built, after the monitoring system installed . . . Anne dropped to her knees and crept forward beside the isolated stairs. And disappeared.
Lambert gasped. A time Hostage was under constant surveillance, that was a basic condition of their permit, there was no way the Boleyn bitch could escape constant monitoring. But she had.
“Master Culhane was already there,” Anne said in a dull voice. “He . . . he used me ill there.”
The room was awash with sound. Krenya said over it, “Mistress Boleyn—there is no visual evidence that Master Culhane was there. He has sworn he was not. Can you offer any proof that he met you there? Anything at all?”
“Yes. Two arguments, my Lord. First: How would I know there were not spying devices in but this one hidden alcove? I did not design this castle; it is not mine.”
Krenya’s face showed nothing. “And the other argument?”
“I am pregnant with Master Culhane’s child.”
Pandemonium. Krenya rapped for order. When it was finally restored, he said to Brill, “Did you know of this?”
“No, I . . . it is a Hostage’s right by the Accord to refuse intrusive medical treatment. . . she has been healthy . . .”
“Mistress Boleyn, you will be examined by a doctor immediately.”
She nodded assent. Watching her, Lambert knew it was true. Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and had defeated herself thereby. But she did not know it yet.
Lambert fingered the knowledge, seeing it as a tangible thing, cold as steel.
“How do we know,” Krenya said, “that you were not pregnant before you were taken Hostage?”
“It was but a month after my daughter Elizabeth’s birth, and I had the white-leg. Ask one of your doctors if a woman would bed a man then. Ask a woman expert in the women of my time. Ask Lady Mary Lambert.”
Heads in the room turned; ask whom? Krenya said, “Ask whom?” An aide leaned toward him and whispered something. He said, “We will have her put on the witness list.”
Anne said, “I carry Michael Culhane’s child. I, who could not carry a prince for the king.”
Krenya said, almost powerlessly, “That last has nothing to do with this investigation, Mistress Boleyn.”
She only looked at him.
They called Brill to testify, and he threw up clouds of probability equations that did nothing to clarify the choice of Anne over Henry as Holy Hostage. Was the woman right? Had there been a staff meeting to choose between the candidates identified by the Rahvoli applications, and had someone said of two very close candidates, “We should think about the effect on the Institute as well as on history . . .” Had someone been developing a master theory based on a percentage of women influencing history? Had someone had an infatuation with the period, and chosen by that what should be altered? Lambert would never know. She was an intern.
Had been an i
ntern.
Culhane was called. He denied seducing Anne Boleyn. The songs on the lute, the descriptions of her brother’s death, the bastardization of Elizabeth—all done to convince her that what she had been saved from was worse than where she had been saved to. Culhane felt so much that he made a poor witness, stumbling over his words, protesting too much.
Lambert was called. As neutrally as possible she said, “Yes, Mr. Premier, historical accounts show that Queen Anne was taken with white- leg after Elizabeth’s birth. It is a childbed illness. The legs swell up and ache painfully. It can last from a few weeks to months. We don’t know how long it lasted—would have lasted—for Mistress Boleyn.”
“And would a woman with this disease be inclined to sexual activity?”
“ ‘Inclined’—no.”
“Thank you, Researcher Lambert.”
Lambert returned to her seat. The committee next looked at visuals, hours of visuals—Culhane, flushed and tender, making a fool of himself with Anne. Anne with the little Tsarevich, an exile trying to comfort a child torn from his mother. Helen of Troy, mad and pathetic. Brill, telling newsgrids around the solar system that the time rescue program, savior of countless lives, was run strictly in conformance with the All-World Accord of 2154. And all the time, through all the visuals, Lambert waited for what was known to everyone in that room except Anne Boleyn: That she could not pull off in this century what she might have in Henry’s. That the paternity of a child could be genotyped in the womb.
Who? Mark Smeaton, after all? Another miscarriage from Henry, precipitately gotten and unrecorded by history? Thomas Wyatt, her most faithful cousin and cavalier?
After the committee had satisfied itself that it had heard enough, everyone but Forum delegates was dismissed. Anne, Lambert saw, was led away by a doctor. Lambert smiled to herself. It was already over. The Boleyn was defeated.
The All-World Forum investigative committee deliberated for less than a day. Then it issued a statement: The child carried by Holy Hostage Anne Boleyn had not been sired by Researcher Michael Culhane. Its genotypes matched no one’s at the Institute for Time Research. The Institute, however, was guilty of two counts of Hostage mistreatment. The Institute charter as an independent, tax-exempt organization was revoked. Toshio Brill was released from his position, as were Project Head Michael Culhane and intern Mary Lambert. The Institute stewardship was re-assigned to the Church of the Holy Hostage under the direct care of Her Holiness the High Priest.
Lambert slipped through the outside door to the walled garden. It was dusk. On a seat at the far end a figure sat, skirts spread wide, a darker shape against the dark wall. As Lambert approached, Anne looked up without surprise.
“Culhane’s gone. I leave tomorrow. Neither of us will ever work in time research again.”
Anne went on gazing upward. Those great dark eyes, that slim neck, so vulnerable. . . Lambert clasped her hands together hard.
“Why?” Lambert said. “Why do it all again? Last time use a King to bring down the power of the Church, this time use a Church to—before, at least you gained a crown. Why do it here, when you gain nothing?”
“You could have taken Henry. He deserved it; I did not.”
“But we didn’t take Henry!” Lambert shouted. “So why?”
Anne did not answer. She put out one hand to point behind her. Her sleeve fell away, and Lambert saw clearly the small sixth finger that had marked her as a witch. A tech came running across the half-lit garden. “Researcher Lambert—”
“What is it?”
“They want you inside. Everybody. The queen—the other one, Helen—she’s killed herself.”
The garden blurred, straightened. “How?”
“Stabbed with a silver sewing scissors hidden in her tunic. It was so quick, the researchers saw it on the monitor but couldn’t get there in time.”
“Tell them I’m coming.”
Lambert looked at Anne Boleyn. “You did this.”
Anne laughed. This lady, wrote the Tower Constable, hath much joy in death. Anne said, “Lady Mary—every birth is a sentence of death. Your age has forgotten that.”
“Helen didn’t need to die yet. And the Time Research Institute didn’t need to be dismantled—it will be dismantled. Completely. But somewhere, sometime, you will be punished for this. I’ll see to that!”
“Punished, Lady Mary? And mayhap beheaded?”
Lambert looked at Anne: the magnificent black eyes, the sixth finger, the slim neck. Lambert said slowly, “You want your own death. As you had it before.”
“What else did you leave me?” Anne Boleyn said. “Except the power to live the life that is mine?”
“You will never get it. We don’t kill, here!”
Anne smiled. “Then how will you ‘punish’ me—‘sometime, somehow’ ?” Lambert didn’t answer. She walked back across the walled garden, toward the looming walls gray in the dusk, towards the chamber where lay the other dead queen.
1992
THE MOUNTAIN TO MOHAMMED
Our last stories from Nancy Kress were a powerful pair of novellas, Jr “Beggars in Spain” (April 1991) and “And Wild for to Hold” (July 1991). She returns to our pages with an equally compelling short story about a terrifying future not impossibly removed from today.
“A person gives money to the physician.
Maybe he will be healed.
Maybe he will not be healed.”
—The Talmud
When the security buzzer sounded, Dr. Jesse Randall was playing go against his computer. Haruo Kaneko, his roommate at Downstate Medical, had taught him the game. So far nineteen shiny black and white stones lay on the grid under the scanner field. Jesse frowned; the computer had a clear shot at surrounding an empty space in two moves, and he couldn’t see how to stop it. The buzzer made him jump.
Anne? But she was on duty at the hospital until one. Or maybe he remembered her rotation wrong . . .
Eagerly he crossed the small living room to the security screen. It wasn’t Anne. Three stories below a man stood on the street, staring into the monitor. He was slight and fair, dressed in jeans and frayed jacket with a knit cap pulled low on his head. The bottoms of his ears were red with cold.
“Yes?” Jesse said.
“Dr. Randall?” The voice was low and rough.
“Yes.”
“Could you come down here a minute to talk to me?”
“About what?”
“Something that needs talkin’ about. It’s personal. Mike sent me.”
A thrill ran through Jesse. This was it, then. He kept his voice neutral. “I’ll be right down.”
He turned off the monitor system, removed the memory disk, and carried it into the bedroom, where he passed it several times over a magnet. In a gym bag he packed his medical equipment: antiseptics, antibiotics, sutures, clamps, syringes, electromed scanner, as much equipment as would fit. Once, shoving it all in, he laughed. He dressed in a warm pea coat bought second-hand at the Army-Navy store and put the gun, also bought second-hand, in the coat pocket. Although of course the other man would be carrying. But Jesse liked the feel of it, a slightly heavy drag on his right side. He replaced the disk in the security system and locked the door. The computer was still pretending to consider its move for go, although of course it had near-instantaneous decision capacity.
“Where to?”
The slight man didn’t answer. He strode purposefully away from the building, and Jesse realized he shouldn’t have said anything. He followed the man down the street, carrying the gym bag in his left hand.
Fog had drifted in from the harbor. Boston smelled wet and grey, of rotting piers and dead fish and garbage. Even here, in the Morningside Security Enclave, where that part of the apartment maintenance fees left over from security went to keep the streets clean. Yellow lights gleamed through the gloom, stacked twelve stories high but crammed close together; even insurables couldn’t afford to heat much space.
Where they were going the
re wouldn’t be any heat at all.
Jesse followed the slight man down the subway steps. The guy paid for both of them, a piece of quixotic dignity that made Jesse smile. Under the lights he got a better look: The man was older than he’d thought, with webbed lines around the eyes and long, thin lips over very bad teeth. Probably hadn’t ever had dental coverage in his life. What had been in his genescan? God, what a system.
“What do I call you?” he said as they waited on the platform. He kept his voice low, just in case.
“Kenny.”
“All right, Kenny,” Jesse said, and smiled. Kenny didn’t smile back. Jesse told himself it was ridiculous to feel hurt; this wasn’t a social visit. He stared at the tracks until the subway came.
At this hour the only other riders were three hard-looking men, two black and one white, and an even harder-looking Hispanic girl in a low-cut red dress. After a minute Jesse realized she was under the control of one of the black men sitting at the other end of the car. Jesse was careful not to look at her again. He couldn’t help being curious, though. She looked healthy. All four of them looked healthy, as did Kenny, except for his teeth. Maybe none of them were uninsurable; maybe they just couldn’t find a job. Or didn’t want one. It wasn’t his place to judge.
That was the whole point of doing this, wasn’t it?
The other two times had gone as easy as Mike said they would. A deltoid suture on a young girl wounded in a knife fight, and burn treatment for a baby scalded by a pot of boiling water knocked off a stove. Both times the families had been so grateful, so respectful. They knew the risk Jesse was taking. After he’d treated the baby and left antibiotics and analgesics on the pathetic excuse for a kitchen counter, a board laid across the non-functional radiator, the young Hispanic mother had grabbed his hand and covered it with kisses. Embarrassed, he’d turned to smile at her husband, wanting to say something, wanting to make clear he wasn’t just another sporadic do-gooder who happened to have a medical degree.
