To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  “‘Thank you for your kind offer to send Princess Arjumand to me in the care of Dawson, but my beloved husband and I agree that, given her dislike of water, it is best that she remain in your care. I know that you and your bride Maud will love and cherish her as I have. Mama wrote me of your marriage. Though it seems to me to have been a bit hasty, and I sincerely hope that it was not done on the rebound, I am gladder than I can say that you have been able to forget me, and it is my fervent hope that you will be as happy as I and my beloved husband are! Kiss Princess Arjumand and stroke her dear sweet fur for me, and tell her that her muvver finks of her dearum dearums darling evewy day. Gratefully, Toots Callahan.’”

  “Poor Cyril,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” Verity said. “They were made for each other.”

  “So are we,” I said.

  She ducked her head.

  “So, how’s about it, Harriet?” I said. “We make a jolly good detectin’ team, eh what? What say we make the partnership permanent?”

  “No!” Warder shouted. “I told you not to sit down. Look at those wrinkles! Those surplices are linen!”

  “Well, Watson?” I said to Verity. “What do you say?”

  “I don’t know,” she said miserably. “What if it’s just time-lag? Look at Carruthers. He thinks he’s in love with Warder—”

  “That is absolutely out of the question!” Warder snapped at a small boy. “You should have thought of that before you put your surplice on!”

  “Look at her! What if, now that this is all over,” Verity said, looking earnestly up at me, “you’re able to get some rest, you recover from your time-lag, and decide the entire thing was a dreadful mistake?”

  “Nonsense,” I said, backing her against the wall. “Also balderdash, pish-tosh, stuff-and-nonsense, humbug, and pshaw! To say nothing of poppycock! In the first place, you know perfectly well that the first time I saw you, wringing out your sleeve on Mr. Dunworthy’s carpet, it was ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to the life—webs flying, mirrors splintering, threads and glass all over the place.”

  I put my hand on the wall above her head and leaned toward her. “In the second place,” I said, “it’s your patriotic duty.”

  “My patriotic duty?”

  “Yes. We’re part of a self-correction, remember? If we don’t get married, something dire’s likely to happen: the Nazis will realize we have Ultra, or Lady Schrapnell will give her money to Cambridge, or the continuum will collapse.”

  “There you are,” Finch said, hurrying in with a handheld and a large pasteboard box. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Mr. Dunworthy said you and Miss Kindle were to have one, but I didn’t know if that meant one or two.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but after a week in the Victorian era I was no longer bothered by the fact. “One,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “One,” he said into the handheld and set it down on a monument. “Mr. Dunworthy said that in light of your valuable contributions, you were to have first pick. Did you have a preference in color?” he said, opening the box.

  “Yes,” Verity said. “Black. With white paws.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I told you he was bringing back nonsignificant objects,” Verity said.

  “I should hardly call them nonsignificant,” Finch said, and lifted out a kitten.

  It was the exact image of Princess Arjumand, down to the white pantaloons on her back feet, only in miniature.

  “Where?” I said. “How? Cats are an extinct species.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, handing the kitten to Verity, “but there was an overabundance of them in Victorian times, with the result that farmers frequently drowned litters of kittens in an attempt to keep the population down.”

  “And when I brought Princess Arjumand through,” Verity said, holding the kitten in her hand and petting it, “T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy decided to see if the kittens, once they had been put in a bag and thrown in the pond, would be nonsignificant.”

  “So you were wandering all over the countryside looking for pregnant cats,” I said, looking in the box. There were two dozen kittens inside, most with their eyes still closed. “Are any of these Mrs. Marmalade’s?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, pointing at several little balls of fur. “These three tabbies and this calico. They are of course all too young to be weaned, but Mr. Dunworthy said to tell you you could have yours in five weeks. Princess Arjumand’s are slightly older since they were not found for nearly three weeks.”

  He took the kitten away from Verity. “The cat will not actually belong to you,” Finch said, “and you will need to return it to the lab for cloning and regular breeding. There are not enough yet for a viable gene pool, but we have contacted the Sorbonne, Caltech, and the University of Thailand, and I will be returning to Victorian England for additional specimens.” He put the kitten back in the box.

  “Can we come and see it?” Verity said.

  “Certainly,” Finch said. “And you will need to be trained in its care and feeding. I recommend a diet of milk and—”

  “Globe-eyed nacreous ryunkins,” I said.

  Finch’s handheld bleeped. He looked at it and scooped up the pasteboard box. “The archbishop’s here, and the usher guarding the west door says it’s starting to rain. We’re going to have to let the crowd in. I must find Lady Schrapnell. Have you seen her?”

  We both shook our heads.

  “I’d best go find her,” he said, scooping up the pasteboard box. He bustled off.

  “In the third place,” I said to Verity, picking up where I had left off, “I happen to know from that day in the boat that you feel exactly the same way I do, and if you’re waiting for me to propose in Latin—”

  “There you are, Ned,” T.J. said. He was carrying a small screen and a portable comp hookup. “I need to show you something.”

  “The consecration’s about to start,” I said. “Can’t it wait?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” Verity said, “I’ll be right back,” and slipped out of the chapel.

  “What is it?” I said to T.J.

  “It probably isn’t anything,” T.J. said. “It’s very likely a mathematical error. Or a glitch in the system.”

  “What is it?” I repeated.

  “All right, do you remember how you asked me to shift the focus of the incongruity to Coventry 1940, and I did, and I told you it matched the Waterloo soup-kettle sim nearly perfectly?”

  “Yes,” I said warily.

  “Yes, well, ‘nearly’ is the operative word.” He brought one of his blurry gray models up on the screen. “It matched very well in the peripheral slippage, and along the main areas here, and here,” he said, pointing at indistinguishable areas. “But not in the slippage surrounding the site. And although there was slippage at the site of Mrs. Bittner’s bringing the bishop’s bird stump through, it wasn’t radically increased.”

  “There wouldn’t have been room for radically increased slippage, would there?” I said. “Lizzie Bittner had to go in within a very narrow window of time—between the time the treasures were last seen and their destruction by the fire. She only had a few minutes. Increased slippage would have put her right in the middle of the fire.”

  “Yes, well, even taking that into consideration, there is still the problem of the surrounding slippage,” he said, pointing at nothing. “So,” he said, flicking some more keys, “I tried moving the focus forward.” A nondescript gray picture came up.

  “Forward?”

  “Yes. Of course, I didn’t have enough data to pick a space-time location like you did, so what I did was to consider the surrounding slippage to be peripheral and to extrapolate new surrounding slippage, and then extrapolate a new focus from that.”

  He called up another gray picture. “Okay, this is the model of Waterloo. I’m going to superimpose it over the model with the new focus.” He did. “You can see it matches.”


  I could. “Where does that put the focus?” I said. “What year?”

  “2678,” he said.

  2678. Over six hundred years in the future.

  “The fifteenth of June, 2678,” he said. “As I said, it’s probably nothing. An error in the calculations.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “Then Mrs. Bittner’s bringing the bishop’s bird stump through isn’t the incongruity.”

  “But if it isn’t the incongruity . . . ?”

  “It’s part of the self-correction as well,” T.J. said.

  “The self-correction of what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something that hasn’t happened yet. Something that’s going to happen in—”

  “—in 2678,” I said. “What’s the focus’s location?” I asked, wondering if it would be as far-flung as the date. Addis Ababa? Mars? The Lesser Magellanic Cloud?

  “Oxford,” he said. “Coventry Cathedral.”

  Coventry Cathedral. On the fifteenth of June. Verity had been right. We were intended to find the bishop’s bird stump and return it to the cathedral. And all of it, the selling of the new cathedral and Lady Schrapnell’s rebuilding of the old one and our discovery that nonsignificant treasures could be brought forward through the net were all part of the same huge self-correction, some Grand—

  “I’m going to double-check all the calculations and run some logic tests on the model,” T.J. said. “Don’t worry. It’ll probably turn out to be nothing more than a flaw in the Waterloo sim. It’s only a rough model.”

  He touched some keys, and the gray disappeared. He began folding up the screen.

  “T.J.,” I said. “What do you think determined the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo? Napoleon’s handwriting or his hemorrhoids?”

  “Neither,” he said. “And I don’t think it was any of the things we did sims on—Gneisenau’s retreat to Wavre or the lost messenger or the fire at La Sainte Have.”

  “What do you think it was?” I asked curiously.

  “A cat,” he said.

  “A cat?”

  “Or a cart or a rat or—”

  “—the head of a church committee,” I murmured.

  “Exactly,” he said. “Something so insignificant no one even noticed it. That’s the problem with models—they only include the details people think are relevant, and Waterloo was a chaotic system.Everything was relevant.”

  “And we’re all Ensign Kleppermans,” I said, “suddenly finding ourselves in positions of critical importance.”

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning, “and we all know what happened to Ensign Klepperman. And what’s going to happen to me if I don’t get over to the vestry. Lady Schrapnell wants me to light the candles in the chapels.” He hastily grabbed up the screen and the comp setup. “I’d better get busy lighting. It looks like they’re about to begin.”

  It did. The choirboys and dons were more or less lined up, the woman in the green apron was gathering up scissors and buckets and flower-wrappings, the boy had come out from under the choir stall. “Is the trumpet stop working now?” a voice called down from the clerestory, and the organist shouted back, “Yes.” Carruthers and Warder were standing by the south door, their arms full of orders of service and each other. I went out into the nave, looking for Verity.

  “ Where have you been?” Lady Schrapnell said, bearing down on me. “I have been looking all over for you.” She put her hands on her hips. “Well,” she demanded. “I thought you said you’d found the bishop’s bird stump. Where is it? You haven’t lost it again, have you?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s in front of the parclose screen of the Smiths’ Chapel where it’s supposed to be.”

  “I want to see it,” she said and started for the nave.

  There was a fanfare, and the organist launched into “O God Who Doeth Great Things and Unsearchable.” The choirboys opened their hymnals. Carruthers and Warder pulled apart and took up their positions by the south door.

  “I don’t think there’s time,” I said. “The consecration’s about to start.”

  “Nonsense,” she said, barging through the choirboys. “There’s plenty of time. The sun isn’t out yet.”

  She pushed through the dons, parting them like the Red Sea, and started down the north aisle to the Smiths’ Chapel.

  I followed her, hoping the bishop’s bird stump hadn’t mysteriously disappeared again. It hadn’t. It was still there, on its wrought-iron flower stand. The woman in the green apron had filled it with a lovely arrangement of white Easter lilies.

  “There it is,” I said, presenting it proudly. “After untold trials and tribulations. The bishop’s bird stump. What do you think?”

  “Oh, my,” she said, and pressed her hand to her bosom. “It really is hideous, isn’t it?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I know my great-great-great-great-grandmother is supposed to have liked it, but my God! What is that supposed to be?” she said, pointing at the base. “Some kind of dinosaur?”

  “The Signing of the Magna Carta,” I said.

  “I’m almost sorry I had you waste so much time looking for it,” she said. She looked thoughtfully at it. “I don’t suppose it’s breakable?” she said hopefully.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, I suppose we have to have it for authenticity’s sake. I certainly hope the other churches don’t have anything this hideous in them.”

  “Other churches?” I said.

  “Yes, haven’t you heard?” she said. “Now that we’re able to bring objects forward through the net, I have all sorts of projects planned. The San Francisco earthquake, the MGM back lot, Rome before the fire Julius Caesar set—”

  “Nero,” I said.

  “Yes, of course. You will have to bring back the fiddle Nero played.”

  “But it didn’t burn in the fire,” I said. “Only objects that have been reduced to their component parts—”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Laws are made to be broken. We’ll start with the fourteen Christopher Wren churches that were burned in the Blitz, and then—”

  “We?” I said weakly.

  “Yes, of course. I’ve already specifically requested you.” She stopped and glared at the bishop’s bird stump. “Why are those lilies? They are supposed to be yellow chrysanthemums.”

  “I think lilies are extremely appropriate,” I said. “After all, the cathedral and all its treasures have been raised from the dead. The symbolism—”

  She wasn’t impressed with the symbolism. “The order of service says yellow chrysanthemums,” she said. “‘God is in the details.’” She stormed off to find the poor defenseless woman in the green apron.

  I stood there, looking at the bishop’s bird stump. Fourteen Christopher Wren churches. And the MGM back lot. To say nothing of what she might come up with when she Realized What It Meant.

  Verity came up. “What’s wrong, Ned?” she said.

  “I am fated to spend my entire life working for Lady Schrapnell and attending jumble sales,” I said.

  “Pish-tosh!” she said. “You are fated to spend your life with me.” She handed me the kitten. “And Penwiper.”

  The kitten didn’t weigh anything. “Penwiper,” I said, and it looked up at me with gray-green eyes.

  “Mere,” it said, and began to purr, a very small purr. A purrlet.

  “Where did you get this kitten?” I said to Verity.

  “I stole it,” she said. “Don’t look like that. I intend to take it back. And Finch will never miss it.”

  “I love you,” I said, shaking my head. “If I’m fated to spend my life with you, does that mean you’ve decided to marry me?”

  “I have to,” she said. “I just ran into Lady Schrapnell. She’s decided what this cathedral needs is—”

  “A wedding?” I said.

  “No, a christening. So they can use the Purbeck marble baptismal font.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want t
o,” I said. “I could sic Lady Schrapnell on Carruthers and Warder, and you could make a run for it to someplace safe. Like the Battle of Waterloo:”

  There was a fanfare, the organ launched into “The Heavens Are Declaring the Glory of God,” and the sun came out. The east windows burst into blue and red and purple flame. I looked up. The clerestory was one long unbroken band of gold, like the net at the moment of opening. It filled the cathedral with light, illuminating the silver candlesticks and the children’s cross and the underside of the choir stalls, the choirboys and workmen and eccentric dons, the statue of St. Michael and the Dance of Death and the orders of service. Illuminating the cathedral itself—a Grand Design made of a thousand thousand details.

  I looked at the bishop’s bird stump, cradling the kitten in the crook of my arm. The stained-glass window behind outlined the bishop’s bird stump in glorious colors, and the window of the Dyers’ Chapel opposite tinted the camels and the cherubs and the Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots emerald and ruby and sapphire.

  “It is hideous, isn’t it?” I said.

  Verity took my hand. “Placet,” she said.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CONNIE WILLIS has won six Nebula Awards (more than any other science fiction writer), six Hugo Awards, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for her first novel, Lincoln’s Dreams. Her novel Doomsday Book won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her first short-story collection, Fire Watch, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other works include Bellwether, Impossible Things, Remake, and Uncharted Territory. Ms. Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family.

  This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG

  A Bantam Spectra Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover published January 1998

  Bantam paperback edition/December 1998

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc.