To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  “Yes,” she said. “The fortuneteller said she saw a long journey in my future.”

  The sooner the better, I thought.

  “They have some lovely penwipers in the fancy goods stall,” I said shamelessly.

  “I don’t want a penwiper,” she said. “I want a Grand Prize.”

  She kept an eagle eye on me for another half hour, at which point Professor Peddick came over.

  “Looks exactly like the plain at Runnymede,” he said, gesturing to include the lawn with its stalls and tea tent. “The lords, with their marquees and their banners spread out across the plain, waiting for King John and his party to arrive.”

  “Speaking of Runnymede,” I said, “shouldn’t we be going on downriver and then back to Oxford to see your sister and your niece? No doubt they will be missing you.”

  “Pah!” he said. “There’s plenty of time. They’ll be staying all summer, and the Colonel’s ordered a red-spotted silver tancho that is to arrive tomorrow”

  “Terence and I could run you home tomorrow on the train, just to check on things at home, and then you could come back to see the red-spotted silver tancho.”

  “Not necessary,” he said. “Maudie’s a capable girl. I’m certain she has things well in hand. And I doubt Terence would be willing to go, now that he’s engaged to Miss Mering.” He shook his head. “I can’t say I entirely approve of these hasty engagements,” he said. “What’s your opinion of them, Henry?”

  “That little pitchers have big ears,” I said, looking at Eglantine, who was standing next to the Treasure Hunt, her hands behind her back, looking earnestly at the squares.

  “Pretty little thing, but knows scarcely any history,” Professor Peddick went on, not taking the hint. “Thought Nelson lost his arm fighting the Spanish Armada.”

  “Are you going to dig?” Eglantine said, coming over to him.

  “Dig?” Professor Peddick said.

  “For treasure,” she said.

  “As Professor Schliemann dug at ancient Troy,” he said, picking up the little shovel. “ ‘Fuimus Troes; fuit Ilium.’ ”

  “You must pay tuppence first,” Eglantine said. “And choose a number.”

  “Choose a number?” Professor Peddick said, bringing out two pennies. “Very well. Fifteen for the day and the year of the signing of the Magna Carta.” He plunked down the pennies. “The fifteenth of June, 1215.”

  “That’s tomorrow,” I said. “What an excellent occasion for us to go down to Runnymede, on the very anniversary of the signing. We could telegram your sister and your niece to meet us there, and we could go down by boat tomorrow morning.”

  “Too many sightseers,” Professor Peddick said. “They’d spoil the fishing”

  “Fifteen’s a very poor number,” Eglantine said. “I would have chosen Nine.”

  “Here,” Professor Peddick said, handing her the shovel. “You dig for me.”

  “May I keep anything I find?” she asked.

  “We shall share the spoils,” he said. “ ‘Fortuna belli semper anticipiti in loco est.’ ”

  “What do I get for digging if it isn’t in Fifteen?”

  “Lemonade and cakes in the tea tent,” he said.

  “It isn’t in Fifteen,” Eglantine said, but she began digging.

  “A fateful day, the fifteenth of June,” Professor Peddick said, watching her. “Napoleon marched his army into Belgium on the fifteenth of June in 1814. Had he pressed on to Ligny instead of stopping in Fleurus, he would have split Wellington’s and Blücher’s armies apart and won the battle of Waterloo. A day that changed history forever, the fifteenth of June.”

  “I told you it wasn’t in Fifteen,” Eglantine said. “I don’t think it’s in any of them. When do I get my lemonade and cakes?”

  “Now, if you like,” Professor Peddick said, taking her arm and leading her off toward the tea tent, and now I could go through and report in to Mr. Dunworthy.

  I started for the gazebo, and hadn’t made it three steps before I was stopped by Mrs. Chattisbourne. “Mr. Henry,” she said, “have you seen Eglantine?”

  I told her she was in the tea tent.

  “I suppose you have heard the delightful news of Miss Mering’s and Mr. St. Trewes’s engagement,” she said.

  I said I had.

  “I always think June is the perfect month for engagements, don’t you, Mr. Henry? And so many lovely young girls about. I shouldn’t be surprised if you were to become engaged, too.”

  I told her Eglantine was in the tea tent.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Oh, and if you see Mr. Finch, will you please tell him we are nearly out of parsnip wine at the baked goods stall?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Chattisbourne,” I said.

  “Finch is such a wonderful butler,” she said. “So thoughtful. Did you know he went all the way to Stowcester for seed cake for the stall? He spends every spare moment travelling the countryside, looking for delicacies for our table. Yesterday he walked to Farmer Bilton’s for strawberries. He’s quite simply amazing. The best butler we have ever had. I worry night and day that he will be stolen away from me.”

  A legitimate worry under the circumstances, I thought, and wondered what Finch was really up to at Stowcester and Farmer Bilton’s. And whether Mrs. Chattisbourne would ever leave.

  She did, but not before Pansy and Iris showed up, giggling, and spent tuppence apiece on Three and Thirteen (their lucky numbers). By the time I got rid of them, it had been nearly half an hour, and Eglantine was liable to be back at any moment.

  I sprinted over to the driveway and the Pony Ride and asked Terence if he could watch the Treasure Hunt for me for a few minutes.

  “What does it involve?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Handing people a shovel and taking their tuppences,” I said, skipping the part about Eglantine.

  “I’ll do it,” Terence said, tying the pony to a tree. “It sounds like a soft job compared to this. I’ve spent all morning being kicked.”

  “By the pony?” I said, eyeing it warily.

  “By the children.”

  I showed him the layout of the Treasure Hunt and gave him the shovel. “I’ll be back in a quarter of an hour,” I promised.

  “Take as long as you like,” he said.

  I thanked him and took off for the gazebo. And nearly made it. At the edge of the lilacs, the curate caught me and said, “Are you enjoying the fete, Mr. Henry?”

  “Tremendously,” I said. “I—”

  “Have you had your fortune told?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I—”

  “Then you must this very instant,” he said, grabbing me by the arm and propelling me back toward the fortunetelling tent. “It and the jumble sale are the high point of the fete.”

  He shoved me through a red-and-purple flap into a tiny enclosed tent in which sat Mrs. Mering and the crystal ball, which she had apparently bullied Felpham and Muncaster’s into delivering on time.

  “Sit down,” she said. “You must cross my palm with silver.”

  I handed her the lone gold coin she’d left me. She handed me back several silver coins in change and then passed her hands over the crystal ball.

  “I see . . .” she said in a sepulchral voice, “. . . you will live a very long life.”

  It only seems long, I thought.

  “I see . . . a long journey, very long . . . you are seeking something. Is it an object of great worth?” She closed her eyes and ran a hand across her forehead. “The glass is murky . . . I cannot see whether you will be successful in your search.”

  “You can’t see where it is, can you?” I said, leaning over to try to see into the ball. “The object?”

  “No,” she said, placing her hands over it, “. . . it . . . Things Are Not What They Seem. I see . . . trouble . . . the glass is becoming clouded . . . at the center I see . . . Princess Arjumand!”

  I jumped a good foot.

  “Princess Arjumand! Naughty puss!” she said, reaching un
der her robes. “You mustn’t come in here, you naughty bad kitty. Mr. Henry, do be so good as to take her back to my daughter. She quite spoils the atmosphere.”

  She handed over Princess Arjumand, who had to be detached claw by claw from her robes. “Always causing trouble,” she said.

  I carried Princess Arjumand over to the jumble sale stall and asked Verity to keep an eye on her.

  “What did you find out from Mr. Dunworthy?” she said.

  “I haven’t gone yet. I got waylaid by Mrs. Mering,” I said. “However, she saw a long journey in my future, so perhaps it means I’ll be able to go now”

  “She saw a wedding in my future,” Verity said. “Let’s hope it’s Tossie’s to Mr. C.”

  I came round behind the counter, handed Princess Arjumand to her, and then ducked out the back way, sprinted down to the towpath and along it to the gazebo, and hid in the lilac bushes, waiting for the net to open.

  It took forever to open, during which I worried about Eglantine or the curate catching me, and then, when the net finally began to shimmer, about Lady Schrapnell catching me.

  I came through in a crouch, ready to bolt if Lady Schrapnell was in the lab. She wasn’t, at least in the parts that I could see. The lab looked like it had been turned into a war room. All across the wall where I had sat—how many days ago?—there was a comp setup so big it dwarfed the net console. A tall bank of monitors and three-dimensional stack screens filled the entire part of the lab that wasn’t taken up by the net.

  Warder was at the console, interrogating the new recruit.

  “All I know is,” the new recruit said, “he said, ‘I’m not risking you being left behind again. Get in the net,’ and I did.”

  “And Carruthers didn’t say anything about doing anything before he followed you?” Warder asked. “Checking on something?”

  He shook his head. “He said, ‘I’m right behind you.’”

  “Was there anyone about?”

  He shook his head again. “The sirens had gone. And there’s nobody living in that part of the city. It’s all burnt down.”

  “The sirens had gone?” Warder said. “Were you under attack? Could a bomb have hit—” She looked up suddenly and saw me. “What are you doing here?” she said. “What happened to Kindle?”

  “Advanced time-lag, thanks to you people,” I said, flailing my way out of the veils. “Where’s Mr. Dunworthy?”

  “Over at Corpus Christi with the forensics expert,” she said.

  “Go tell him I’m here and need to talk to him now,” I said to the new recruit.

  “I’m trying to find out what happened to Carruthers,” Warder said, flushing angrily. “You can’t just come in here and—”

  “This is important,” I said.

  “So is Carruthers!” she snapped. She turned to the new recruit. “Were there any delayed-action bombs in the area?”

  The recruit looked uncertainly from her to me. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Warder said angrily. “What about the buildings and ruins in the area, were they unstable? And don’t tell me you don’t know!”

  “I’d best go fetch Mr. Dunworthy,” the recruit said.

  “All right,” Warder snapped. “Come straight back. I’ve some more questions to ask you.”

  The recruit made his escape, brushing past T.J., who was on his way in with a stack of books, vids, and disks. “Oh, good,” he said when he saw me. “I want to show you both—” He stopped, looking round. “Where’s Verity?”

  “In 1888,” I said. “She got time-lagged doing all those drops for you.”

  “They didn’t turn up anything,” he said, trying to set the stack down without it falling over, “which doesn’t make any sense. There’s got to be increased slippage around the site. Here, let me show you.”

  He started to lead me over to the comp setup and then stopped and went over to the console and asked Warder, “Was there slippage on Ned’s drop?”

  “I haven’t had time to calculate it,” Warder said. “I’ve been trying to get Carruthers out!”

  “Okay, okay,” T.J. said, holding up his hands defensively. “Could you please calculate it?”

  He turned to me. “Ned, I want to show you—”

  “What’s this about slippage on my drop?” I said. “There isn’t any slippage on return drops.”

  “There was on Verity’s last drop,” he said.

  “What’s causing it?”

  “We don’t know yet,” he said. “We’re working on it. Come here. Let me show you what we’re doing.” He led me over to the comp setup. “Did Verity tell you about the Waterloo sims?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Okay, it’s very hard to make an accurate comp model of an historical event because so many factors are unknown, but Waterloo’s an exception. The battle’s been analyzed and every incident’s been described down to a microscopic level. Also,” he said, his black fingers typing rapidly, “it has several crisis points and a number of factors which could have made the battle go either way: the violent rainstorms on the sixteenth and seventeenth, General Grouchy’s failure to come up—”

  “Napoleon’s bad penmanship,” I said.

  “Exactly. Napoleon’s message to D’Erlon and the failure to take Hougoumont, among others.”

  He hit more keys, leaning round to see the bank of stack screens behind him.

  “All right, here’s what we’ve been looking at,” he said, picking up a lightpen and walking over to the center screen. “This is a sim of Waterloo as it actually happened.”

  The screen showed a three-dimensional gray blur with lighter and darker areas. “This is the battle,” he said, switching on the pen and pointing it into the center of the three-dimensional blur. “And here,” he pointed at the edges, “are the surrounding temporal and locational areas the battle affected.”

  The light darted back to the center and rapidly pointed to several places. “Here you can see the battle at Quatre Bras, the fight for Wavre, the charge of the Old Guard, the retreat.”

  I couldn’t see anything but assorted gray blurs. I felt the way I always do when a doctor shows me a scan. “Here you see the lungs, the heart—” I never see anything of the sort.

  “What I’ve done is introduce simulated incongruities into the model and see how the sim changes,” he said.

  He moved to the screen on the left. As near as I could tell, it looked identical to the one in the center. “In this one, for example, Napoleon sent an illegible order to D’Erlon to turn toward Ligny, with the result that he brought his men up behind Napoleon’s left flank instead of ahead of it and was mistaken for the enemy. I introduced a simulated historian here,” he said, pointing at gray, “who substituted a legible order for Napoleon’s note, and as you can see, it changed the picture radically.”

  I would have to take his word for it.

  “When the incongruity’s introduced, you get a pattern of radically increased slippage at the site,” he pointed with the light-pen, “and then slightly lower levels here and here surrounding the site, and then smaller peripheral patches as the system corrects itself.”

  I squinted at the screen, trying to look intelligent.

  “In this case, the system was able to self-correct almost immediately. D’Erlon issued the orders to his second-in-command, who gave them to a lieutenant, who couldn’t hear him for the artillery fire, and sent the troops up on the left flank after all, and the situation reverted to its original pattern.”

  He pointed the lightpen at the top row of screens. “I tried a number of variables of varying severity. In this one, the historian breaks the lock on the gate at Hougoumont. In this one, he spoils an infantryman’s shot so Letort isn’t killed. In this one here, the historian intercepts a message between Blücher and Wellington,” he said, pointing at one screen after another. “They vary greatly in their impact on the situation and in how long it takes the continuum to self-correct.”

&nb
sp; He pointed at more screens. “This one took a few minutes, this one took two days, and there doesn’t seem to be a direct correlation between the seriousness of the incongruity and its consequences. In this one,” he pointed at the far left bottom screen, “we shot Uxbridge to prevent his suicidal charge, and his second-in-command immediately took up the charge with the same result.

  “On the other hand, in this one,” he indicated a screen in the second row, “we had an historian dressed as a Prussian soldier stumble and fall during the fight for Ligny, and the self-correction was enormous, involving four regiments and Blücher himself.”

  He moved to a screen in the center. “In this one, we changed the circumstances at La Sainte Haye. The thatched roofs caught fire from the artillery shells, and a chain of men with soup kettles full of water managed to put the fires out.”

  He pointed at a spot near the center. “I introduced an historian here to steal one of the soup kettles. It created a major incongruity, and the interesting thing is that the self-correction didn’t just involve increased slippage here and here,” the light pointed at the top of the screen, “but here, before 1814.”

  “It went back in the past and corrected itself?”

  “Yes,” he said. “In the winter of 1812, there was a bad snow-storm, which caused a deep rut in the road in front of La Sainte Have, which caused an oxcart passing over it to lose part of its load, including a small wooden keg full of beer, which a servant found and carried home to La Sainte Haye. The keg, with the top hacked off, was substituted for the missing soup kettle in the bucket brigade, the fires were put out, and the incongruity was repaired.”

  He went back to the comp, hit more keys, and brought up a new set of screens. “This one, where Gneisenau retreats to Liege, and this one, in which the historian helps push a cannon out of the mud, show self-corrections in the past, too.”

  “That’s why you had Verity do drops in May?” I said. “Because you think the incongruity may have attempted to adjust itself before it happened?”

  “But we haven’t found any slippage anywhere except for your drop,” he said, sounding frustrated. “Every one of these,” he waved at the screen, “no matter how large or how small the self-correction, has the same basic pattern: radically increased slippage at the site, moderately increased slippage in the immediate area, and then isolated pockets of slippage farther from the site.”