Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “How goes the war, Mistress?”

  Footsteps hurry toward us.

  I can’t look away from the soldier’s eyes. He doesn’t know, can’t know, what he’s asking, or of whom. My mouth forms the words softly, so that only he hears.

  “You won. England surrendered in October of 1781.”

  Something moves behind those black eyes, something so strong I draw back a little. Then they’re on us, General Robinson first and behind him chief of medical staff, Colonel Dr. William Bechtel. My father, who has denied me truth for thirty-five years.

  I have never stood by the mess tent with a young soldier. If you join the Army at 20, right out of nursing school, and you stay in it for nineteen years, and you never wear a skirt or makeup, there is only one question your fellow soldiers come to ask. I know the answer: I am not homosexual. Neither, as far as I can tell, am I heterosexual. I have never wanted to feel anyone’s touch on my hair in the moonlight.

  Dr. Bechtel was assigned to duty at the Hole the day it appeared. If I’d known this, I never would have requested a transfer. I was en route to the U.S. European Command in Stuttgart; I would have continued on my way there I use my dead mother’s surname, and I don’t think General Robinson knows that Bechtel is my father. Or maybe he does The Army knows everything; often it just doesn’t make connections among the things it knows. But that doesn’t matter. I run the best nursing unit under fire in the entire Army. I’d match my nurses with any others, anywhere. I myself have performed operations alongside the doctors, in Bogota, when there were five doctors for three hundred mangled and screaming soldiers. I never see my father outside the OR.

  The new Arrival’s name is Sergeant Edward Strickland, of the Connecticut Third Regiment. No modems are permitted in the Hole compound, which used to be Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but officers are issued dumb terminals. The Army has allowed us access to its unclassified history databanks. By this time we all know a lot about the Battle of Long Island, which a year ago most of us had never heard of.

  Strickland rates two mentions in the d-banks. In a 1776 letter to his wife, General Israel Putnam praised Strickland’s “bravery and fearlessness” in defending the Brooklyn Heights entrenchments. A year later, Strickland turns up on the “Killed in Action” list for the fighting around Peekskill. A son, Putnam Strickland, became a member of the Pennsylvania Legislature in 1794.

  My father never had a son. The criminal charges against him resulted in a hung jury, and the prosecutor chose not to refile but to refer the case to the Family Court of Orange County. After he was barred by the judge from ever seeing me again, he lived alone.

  In the afternoon, a Special Forces team shows up to make a fourth assault on the Hole. During the first two, medical staff had all been bundled into concrete bunkers; maybe the Pentagon was afraid of an explosion from antimatter or negative tachyons or whatever the current theory is. By the third attempt, when it seemed clear nothing was going to happen anyway, we were allowed to stay within a few yards of the Hole, which is as far as most Arrivals get.

  And farther than the assault team gets. The four soldiers in their clumsy suits lumber toward the faint shimmer that is all you can see of the Hole. I pause halfway between OR and Supply, a box of registered painkillers in my hand, and watch. Sun glints off metal helmets. If the team actually gets through, will they be bulletproof on the other side? Will the battle for Brooklyn Heights and the Jamaica Road stop, in sheer astonishment at the monsters bursting in air? If the battle does stop, will the assault team turn around and lumber back, having satisfied the Pentagon that this really is some sort of time hole and not some sort of enemy illusion? (Which enemy?) Or will the team stay to give General Israel Putnam and his aide-de-camp, Aaron Burr, a strategy for defeating twenty thousand British veterans with five thousand half-trained recruits?

  Head nurses are not considered to have a need to know these decisions.

  When the assault team reaches the shimmer—I have to squint to see it in the sunlight—they stop. Each of the four suited figures bends forward, straining, but nothing gives. Boxlike items—I assume they’re classified weapons-are brought out and aimed at the shimmer. Nothing. After ten minutes, three soldiers lumber back to the command bunker.

  The fourth stays. I wouldn’t have seen what he did except that I turn around as three British soldiers fall through the Hole from the other side. An infantryman first, blood streaming from his mouth and nose, screaming, screaming. By the time I reach him, he’s dead. The other two come through twenty feet east, and as I straighten up from bending over the infantryman, his blood-smearing my uniform, I see the Hole guards leap forward. A musket discharges, a sound more like an explosion than like the rat-a-tat-tat of our pieces. I hit the dirt. The guards jump the other two redcoats.

  Beside me, just beyond the dead Brit, I see the assault-team lieutenant finish his task. He’s undogged the front of his suit, and now he reaches inside and pulls out something that catches the sunlight. I recognize it: Edward Strickland’s hunting knife. He lobs it gently toward the Hole. It cuts through the shimmer as easily as into butter and disappears.

  “Major! Major!” One of my young nurses runs toward me. For the second time I crawl up from the English soldier’s body.

  Another musket discharges. A fourth British soldier, an officer, has stumbled through the Hole and fired. The ball hits the young nurse in the chest, and she staggers backward and falls in a spray of blood just as the rat-a-tat-tat of assault rifles barks in the hot air.

  We’re in OR all afternoon. I think that’s the only reason they don’t get to me until evening. My nurse, Lt. Mary Inghram, dies. The British major who killed her dies. One of the other British soldiers dies. The infantryman was already dead. The last Brit, a Captain John Percy Healy of His Majesty’s Twenty-Third Foot under the command of Lord William Howe, is conscious. He has arterial bleeding, contusions, and a complex femoral fracture. We put him under. To treat him and to autopsy the other three English soldiers, we have to remove heavy winter uniforms, including watch coats and gloves. The cockade on Healy’s tricorne is still wet with snow.

  I am just finishing at the dumb terminal when the aide comes for me. I haven’t even showered after OR, just removed my scrubs. The terminal screen says: JOHN PERCY HEALY, THIRD SON OF VISCOUNT SHERINGHAM, 1747-1809. (1) ARRIVAL IN VIRGINIA WITH TWENTY-THIRD FOOT, 1781, JUST PRIOR TO CORNWALLIS SURRENDER ATYORKTOWN. see Burke’s Peerage.

  “Major Peters? The General wants to see you in his quarters, ma’am.”

  1781. Five years after the Battle of Long Island.

  “Ma’am? He said right away, ma’am.”

  What battle had Captain Healy been fighting on his side of the Hole?

  “Ma’am . . .”

  “Yes, soldier.” The screen goes blank. After a moment, red letters appear: ACCESS DENIED ALL PERSONNEL UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  General Robinson’s quarters are as bleak as the rest of the compound: a foamcast “tent” that is actually a rigid, gray-green dome, furnished with standard-issue cot, desk, locker, and terminal. He’s made no effort at interior decoration, but on the desk stand pictures of his wife and three daughters. They’re all pretty, smiling, dressed up for somebody’s wedding. Bechtel is there.

  As I stand at attention in front of the two men, I have a sudden memory of a doll I owned when I was a child. By the time the doll came to me from some other, forgotten child, its hair was worn to a fragile halo through which you could see the cracked plastic scalp. One eye had fallen back into its head. It wore a stained red dress with a raveling hem where one sleeve should have been. My mother told me much later that whenever I saw the doll around our house, I picked it up and carried it everywhere for a few days, but when I lost it, I didn’t hunt for it. When it appeared again at my father’s trial, it must have-seemed natural to me to once more take hold of its battered, indifferent familiarity. I think now that I didn’t understand to what use it was being put. I don’t remember what I thought then. I
was four years old.

  Nor do I remember anything about the actual trial, only what I was told much later. But I know why I remember the doll. I even know why I think of it now, in the General’s bunker. After the trial, my mother took the doll away and substituted another with the same Shape, the same dress, the same yellow hair. Only this doll was new and unused, its red satin dress shiny and double-sleeved. I remember staring at it, puzzled, knowing something had changed but not how, nor why, It was the same doll—my mother told me it was the same doll—and yet it was not. I looked at my mother’s face, and for the first time in what must have been the whole long mess of the trial, I felt the floor ripple and shake under my feet. My mother’s smiling face looked suddenly far away, and blurred, as if she might be somebody else’s mother. I remember I started screaming.

  The General says, “Major Peters, Sergeant Strickland says you were the first person to talk to him after he gained consciousness. He says you told him the American colonists won the Revolution and that England surrendered in 1781. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir.” My shoulders are braced hard. I look directly at the General, and no one else.

  The General’s face is very grave, “Were you aware of explicit orders that no medical personnel shall supply information concerning these men’s future, under any circumstances?”

  “Yes, sir. I was.”

  “Then why did you disobey the order, Major?”

  “I have no good reason, sir.”

  “Then let’s hear an ungood one, Major.”

  He’s giving me every chance to explain. I wonder if General Israel Putnam was like this with his men, all of whom followed him with a fanatic devotion, even when his military decisions were wrong. Even when a movement started to have him court-martialed for poor military judgment after the disaster of Long Island. Robinson watches me with grave, observant eyes. I might even have tried to answer him if Bech-tel hadn’t been there. Bechtel is responsible for the conduct of his entire medical staff, of course, and for a sudden, horrified moment, I wonder if that’s really why I disobeyed orders. To get back at my father.

  But I can’t say all that out loud, not even if Bechtel were still posted halfway around the world.

  “No reason at all, sir,” I say, and wait for my reprimand, or transfer, or court-martial. I’m not sure how seriously the Army takes this gag order with Arrivals. I’ve never heard of anybody else disobeying it.

  The General shuffles some papers on his desk. “There is a complication, Major.” He looks up at me, and now I see something else in his eyes besides fairness. He is furious. “Sergeant Strickland refuses to talk to anyone but you. He says he trusts you and no one else, and unless you’re present, he won’t cooperate with Military Intelligence.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “This is obviously an undesirable situation, Major. And one for which you may eventually be held responsible. In the meantime, however, you’re needed to assist in the debriefing of Sergeant Strickland, and so you will report immediately to Colonel Orr and arrange a schedule for that. If that represents a conflict with your other duties, I will arrange to relieve you of those.”

  Relief fills me like sunlight. No court-martial. If I cooperate, the whole thing will be overlooked—that’s what the offer to keep my nursing duties means. Robinson doesn’t want an issue made of this one slip any more than I do. Slavering beyond the. perimeter of the high-security compound, along with the Brooklyn Zoo, are hundreds of journalists from around the world. The less we have to say to them, and they about us, the better. No duty goes on forever.

  “Yes, sir. There will be no conflict of duties. Thank you, sir.”

  “You logged onto the library system last night.”

  “Yes, sir.” Of course log-ons would be monitored. The Army knows what I discovered about the Brit captain. The Army knows that I know they know. I like that. I joined the service for just these reasons: Actions are measurable, and privacy is suspect.

  “What did you learn about Captain Healy?”

  I answer immediately. “That he must come from a different past on the other side of the Hole. A past in which events in the Revolution were somehow different from ours.”

  Robinson nods. The carefully controlled anger fades from his eyes. I have passed some test. “You will say nothing of that speculation to Sergeant Strickland, Major. Anything you tell him will concern only history as it exists for us.”

  He’s asking me to not do something I would never have done anyway. I am the last person to offer Strickland a doubtful past. “Certainly, sir.”

  “You will answer only such questions as Colonel Orr thinks appropriate.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There will be no more anomalies in any communication in which you are involved.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Fine,” Robinson says. He rises. “I’m going for a walk.”

  Without dismissing me. The General knows, then. He has cross-filed the personnel records. Or Bechtel told him. Bechtel requested this “walk” to leave us alone for a moment. The skin over my belly crawls—Robinson knows—I stare straight ahead, still at attention.

  A long silent moment passes.

  Bechtel makes a noise, unclassifiable. His voice is soft as smoke. “Susan—I didn’t do it.”

  I stare straight ahead.

  “No matter what the judge decided. I never touched you. Your mother wanted the divorce so bad she was willing to say anything. She did say anything. She—”

  “Will that be all, sir?”

  This time there is no soft noise. “Susan—she lied. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

  “She said you lied,” I say, and immediately am furious with myself for saying anything at all. I clench my jaw.

  My fury must somehow communicate itself to my father. In the stiffness of my already stiff body, in the air itself. He says tiredly, “Dismissed,” and I hear in the single word things I don’t want to examine. I walk stiff-legged from the tent.

  After the trial, I never touched the doll in the red dress again.

  My first interview with Sergeant Edward Strickland, Connecticut Third Regiment, First Continental Army, takes place the next morning. He’s been moved from Recovery Lo a secure bunker at the far end of the compound, although he still has an elevated temperature and the remains of dysentery. Even in a standard-issue hospital gown he doesn’t look like a man from our time. It’s more than just the broken teeth. It’s something unbroken in his face. He looks as if ass-covering is as foreign to him as polyester.

  “Sergeant Strickland,” commands the Military Intelligence expert, Colonel Or p. Unseen recording equipment whirs quietly. “Tell us all your movements for the last few days, starting with General Putnam’s fortification of the Brooklyn Heights works.”

  Strickland has apparently decided he is not enlisted in this Army. He ignores the colonel and says directly to me, “Where am I, Mistress Nurse?”

  Orr nods, almost imperceptibly. We’ve rehearsed this much. I say, “You’re in an Army hospital on Long Island.”

  “What date be today?”

  “July 15, 2001.”

  I can’t tell if he believes me or not. The fierce black eyes bore steadily, without blinking. I say, “What work did you do before you joined the Army, Sergeant?”

  “I was a smith.”

  “Where?”

  “Pomfret, Connecticut. Mistress . . . if this be the future, how come I to be here?”

  “We don’t know. Three months ago soldiers from the Battle of Long Island began to stumble into a city park out of thin air. Most of them died. You didn’t.”

  He considers this. His gaze travels around the foamcast bunker, to my glasses, to the M-18 held by the guard. Abruptly, he laughs. I see the moment he refuses the idea of the future without actually rejecting it, like a man who accepts a leaflet on a street corner but puts it in his pocket, unread, sure it has nothing to do with his real life.

  He says, “What losse
s did we suffer at Long Island?”

  “A thousand dead, seven hundred taken prisoner,” I answer, and he flinches.

  “And the enemy?”

  “Howe reported sixty-one dead, twenty-nine missing.”

  “How did the enemy best us?”

  “Surprised you with a flanking march down the Jamaica Road, with a force you couldn’t possibly match.”

  “How did Put retreat?”

  “By water, across the river to New York.”

  It goes on like that, reliving military history 225 years dead. Six months ago, I knew none of it. Orr doesn’t interrupt me. Probably he thinks that Strickland is learning to trust us. I know that Strickland is learning to trust his own past, checking the details until he knows they’re sound, constructing around himself the solid world that must hold this mutable one.

  From the direction of the Hole comes the muffled sound of musket fire.

  This time it’s a Hessian, one of the mercenary forces serving the British under De Heister in front of the Flatbush pass. He’s the first Hessian to come through the Hole. Screaming in German, he fights valiantly as the OR personnel put him under. By the time I see him, swaddled in a hospital gown in Recovery, his face is subdued in the unnatural sleep of anesthesia, and I see that although as big as Strickland, the Hessian mercenary is no more than 16. By our standards, a child.

  Strickland walks in, accompanied by the M1 colonel and a very attentive MP. Are they trying to build his trust by giving him the illusion of free movement within the compound? He’s the first Arrival who’s ambulatory and still here. I think about how easily the Special Forces lieutenant slid Strickland’s hunting knife back through the Hole, which not even our tanks had been able to penetrate, and I bet myself that Old Put’s Sergeant’s free movement has no more latitude than Put himself did on the Jamaica Road.