The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  “They’re back there in the past with nobody to save them. They can’t see their hands in front of their faces and there are bombs falling down on them and you tell me they aren’t important? You call that being an historian?”

  The flunkies dragged me out the door and down the hall. “Langby saved St Paul’s. How much more important can a person get? You’re no historian! You’re nothing but a—” I wanted to call him a terrible name, but the only curses I could summon up were Langby’s. “You’re nothing but a dirty Nazi spy!” I bellowed. “You’re nothing but a lazy bourgeois tart!”

  They dumped me on my hands and knees outside the door and slammed it in my face. “I wouldn’t be an historian if you paid me!” I shouted, and went to see the fire watch stone.

  December 31 – I am having to write this in bits and pieces. My hands are in pretty bad shape, and Dunworthy’s boys didn’t help matters much. Kivrin comes in periodically, wearing her St Joan look, and smears so much salve on my hands that I can’t hold a pencil.

  St Paul’s Station is not there, of course, so I got out at Holborn and walked, thinking about my last meeting with Dean Matthews on the morning after the burning of the city. This morning.

  “I understand you saved Langby’s life,” he said. “I also understand that between you, you saved St Paul’s last night.”

  I showed him the letter from my uncle and he stared at it as if he could not think what it was. “Nothing stays saved forever,” he said, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to tell me Langby had died. “We shall have to keep on saving St Paul’s until Hitler decides to bomb something else.”

  The raids on London are almost over, I wanted to tell him. He’ll start bombing the countryside in a matter of weeks. Canterbury, Bath, aiming always at the cathedrals. You and St Paul’s will both outlast the war and live to dedicate the fire watch stone.

  “I am hopeful, though,” he said. “I think the worst is over.”

  “Yes, sir.” I thought of the stone, its letters still readable after all this time. No sir, the worst is not over.

  I managed to keep my bearings almost to the top of Ludgate Hill. Then I lost my way completely, wandering about like a man in a graveyard. I had not remembered that the rubble looked so much like the white plaster dust Langby had tried to dig me out of. I could not find the stone anywhere. In the end I nearly fell over it, jumping back as if I had stepped on a body.

  It is all that’s left. Hiroshima is supposed to have had a handful of untouched trees at ground zero. Denver the capitol steps. Neither of them says, “Remember men and women of St Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.” The grace of God.

  Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time,” but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. Which sounds to me like a course description for History Practicum 401. What a fine time to discover what historians are for when I have tossed my chance for being one out the windows as easily as they tossed the pinpoint bomb in! No, sir, the worst is not over.

  There are flash burns on the stone, where legend says the Dean of St Paul’s was kneeling when the bomb went off. Totally apocryphal, of course, since the front door is hardly an appropriate place for prayers. It is more likely the shadow of a tourist who wandered in to ask the whereabouts of the Windmill Theatre, or the imprint of a girl bringing a volunteer his muffler. Or a cat.

  Nothing is saved forever, Dean Matthews, and I knew that when I walked in the west doors that first day, blinking in the gloom, but it is pretty bad nevertheless. Standing here knee-deep in rubble out of which I will not be able to dig any folding chairs or friends, knowing that Langby died thinking I was a Nazi spy, knowing that Enola came one day and I wasn’t there. It’s pretty bad.

  But it is not as bad as it could be. They are both dead, and Dean Matthews too, but they died without knowing what I knew all along, what sent me to my knees in the Whispering Gallery, sick with grief and guilt: that in the end none of us saved St Paul’s. And Langby cannot turn to me, stunned and sick at heart, and say, “Who did this? Your friends the Nazis?” And I would have to say, “No, the communists.” That would be the worst.

  I have come back to the room and let Kivrin smear more salve on my hands. She wants me to get some sleep. I know I should pack and get gone. It will be humiliating to have them come and throw me out, but I do not have the strength to fight her. She looks so much like Enola.

  January 1 – I have apparently slept not only through the night, but through the morning mail drop as well. When I woke just now, I found Kivrin sitting on the end of the bed holding an envelope. “Your grades came,” she said.

  I put my arm over my eyes. “They can be marvelously efficient when they want to, can’t they?”

  “Yes,” Kivrin said.

  “Well, let’s see it,” I said, sitting up. “How long do I have before they come and throw me out?”

  She handed the flimsy computer envelope to me. I tore it along the perforation. “Wait,” she said. “Before you open it, I want to say something.” She put her hand gently on my burns. “You’re wrong about the history department. They’re very good.”

  It was not exactly what I expected her to say. “Good is not the word I’d use to describe Dunworthy,” I said and yanked the inside slip free.

  Kivrin’s look did not change, not even when I sat there with the printout on my knees where she could surely see it.

  “Well,” I said.

  The slip was hand-signed by the esteemed Dunworthy. I have taken a first. With honors.

  January 2 – Two things came in the mail today. One was Kivrin’s assignment. The history department thinks of everything – even to keeping her here long enough to nursemaid me, even to coming up with a prefabricated trial by fire to send their history majors through.

  I think I wanted to believe that was what they had done, Enola and Langby only hired actors, the cat a clever android with its clockwork innards taken out for the final effect, not so much because I wanted to believe Dunworthy was not good at all, but because then I would not have this nagging pain at not knowing what had happened to them.

  “You said your practicum was England in 1400?” I said, watching her as suspiciously as I had watched Langby.

  “1349,” she said, and her face went slack with memory. “The plague year.”

  “My God,” I said. “How could they do that? The plague’s a ten.”

  “I have a natural immunity,” she said, and looked at her hands.

  Because I could not think of anything to say, I opened the other piece of mail. It was a report on Enola. Computer-printed, facts and dates and statistics, all the numbers the history department so dearly loves, but it told me what I thought I would have to go without knowing: that she had gotten over her cold and survived the Blitz. Young Tom had been killed in the Baedaker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2006, the year before they blew up St Paul’s.

  I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of human kindness. They think of everything.

  Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in hospital next day, and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It seems to me that perhaps Langby is.

  January 3 – I went to see Dunworthy today. I don’t know what I intended to say – some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve
in the fire watch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.

  But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright image of St Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry I broke your glasses, sir.”

  “How did you like St Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.

  “I loved it, sir,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “So do I.”

  Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the bloom of that first afternoon, looking at the great west doors of St Paul’s at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

  NOBLE MOLD

  Kage Baker

  Kage Baker was an award-winning American writer of novels and stories. Her novels have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew, and German. Before she became a professional writer, Baker spent quite a bit of time in the theatre. Her beloved and popular Company series tells the story of time traveling agents who work for the mysterious Company. “Noble Mold” was the first short story written in that series. It is also the first story of hers that she read to her mother.

  This was the first Company story ever to appear in print, while In the Garden of Iden was still in search of a publisher. It is also the only story of mine my mother ever heard.

  She was a person of epic personality and style, rather like the late great Jennifer Patterson of Two Fat Ladies fame, outrageous, artistic, and endlessly nurturing. Naturally enough, I spent most of my life refusing to be anything she wanted me to be. I never let her read anything I wrote, although she loved science fiction.

  Then she was, abruptly, diagnosed with something awful and lasted only a month. Every day after work I would visit her in her hospital room, where of course the truth hit me like a grand piano dropped out a window: I desperately wanted her to read my stuff. And now she couldn’t hold a book or even focus her eyes. And the train was pulling out of the station so fast, and I was standing there like an idiot on the platform, with almost no time to say I was sorry.

  But, pacing by her bed, I explained the whole Company idea, and made up a short story to illustrate the way it worked, about Mendoza and Joseph trying to steal a rare plant. I acted it out, did all the voices, everything I could think of to hold her attention and get the idea across. She liked it, thank God. I wrote it down after she died.

  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

  This introduction first appeared in Black Projects, White Knights, by Golden Gryphon Press, 2002, introducing “Noble Mold,” the first story to be published of The Company Dossiers and, indeed, of Kage Baker’s.

  For a while I lived in this little town by the sea. Boy, it was a soft job. Santa Barbara had become civilized by then: no more Indian rebellions, no more pirates storming up the beach, nearly all the grizzly bears gone. Once in a while some bureaucrat from Mexico City would raise hell with us, but by and large the days of the old Missions were declining into forlorn shades, waiting for the Yankees to come.

  The Company operated a receiving, storage, and shipping terminal out of what looked like an oaken chest in my cell. I had a mortal identity as an alert little padre with an administrative career ahead of him, so the Church kept me pretty busy pushing a quill. My Company duties, though, were minor: I logged in consignments from agents in the field and forwarded communiqués.

  It was sort of a forty-year vacation. There were fiestas and fandangos down in the pueblo. There were horse races along the shore of the lagoon. My social standing with the De La Guerra family was high, so I got invited out to supper a lot. And at night, when the bishop had gone to bed and our few pathetic Indians were tucked in for the night, I would sneak a little glass of Communion wine and then relax out on the front steps of the church. There I’d sit, listening to the night sounds, looking down the long slope to the night sea. Sometimes I’d sit there until the sky pinked up in the east and the bells rang for Matins. We Old Ones don’t need much sleep.

  One August night I was sitting like that, watching the moon drop down toward the Pacific, when I picked up the signal of another immortal somewhere out there in the night. I tracked it coming along the shoreline, past the point at Goleta; then it crossed the Camino Real and came straight uphill at me. Company business. I sighed and broadcast, Quo Vadis?

  Hola, came the reply. I scanned, but I knew who it was anyway. Hi, Mendoza, I signaled back, and leaned up on my elbows to await her arrival. Pretty soon I picked her up on visual, too, climbing up out of the mists that flowed along the little stream; first the wide-brimmed hat, then the shoulders bent forward under the weight of the pack, the long walking skirt, the determined lope of the field operative without transportation.

  Mendoza is a botanist, and has been out in the field too long. At this point she’d been tramping around Alta California for the better part of twelve decades. God only knew what the Company had found for her to do out in the back of beyond; I’d have known, if I’d been nosy enough to read the Company directives I relayed to her from time to time. I wasn’t her case officer anymore, though, so I didn’t.

  She raised burning eyes to me and my heart sank. She was on a Mission, and I don’t mean the kind with stuccoed arches and tile roofs. Mendoza takes her work way too seriously. “How’s it going, kid?” I greeted her in a loud whisper when she was close enough.

  “Okay.” She slung down her pack on the step beside me, picked up my wine and drank it, handed me back the empty glass and sat down.

  “I thought you were back up in Monterey these days,” I ventured.

  “No. The Ventana,” she replied. There was a silence while the sky got a little brighter. Far off, a rooster started to crow and then thought better of it.

  “Well, well. To what do I owe the pleasure, et cetera?” I prompted.

  She gave me a sharp look. “Company Directive 080444-C,” she said, as though it were really obvious.

  I’d developed this terrible habit of storing incoming Green Directives in my tertiary consciousness without scanning them first. The soft life, I guess. I accessed hastily. “They’re sending you after grapes?” I cried a second later.

  “Not just grapes.” She leaned forward and stared into my eyes. “Mission grapes. All the cultivars around here that will be replaced by the varieties the Yankees introduce. I’m to collect genetic material from every remaining vine within a twenty-five-mile radius of this building.” She looked around disdainfully. “Not that I expect to find all that many. This place is a wreck. The Church has really let its agricultural program go to hell, hasn’t it?”

  “Hard to get slave labor nowadays.” I shrugged. “Can’t keep ’em down on the farm without leg irons. We get a little help from the ones who really bought into the religion, but that’s about it.”

  “And the Holy Office can’t touch them.” Mendoza shook her head. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “Hey, things change.” I stretched out and crossed my sandaled feet one over the other. “Anyway. The Mexicans hate my poor little bishop and are doing their level best to drive him crazy. In all the confusion with the Missions being closed down, a lot of stuff has been looted. Plants get dug up and moved to people’s gardens in the dark of night. There are still a few Indian families back in some of the canyons, too, and a lot of them have tiny little farms. Probably a lot of specimens out there, but you’ll really have to hunt around for them.”

  She nodded, all brisk. “I’ll need a processing credenza. Bed and board, too, and a cover identity. That’s your job. Can you arrange
them by 0600 hours?”

  “Gosh, this is just like old times,” I said without enthusiasm. She gave me that look again.

  “I have work to do,” she explained with exaggerated patience. “It is very important work. I’m a good little machine and I love my work. Nothing is more important than My Work. You taught me that, remember?”

  Which I had, so I just smiled my most sincere smile as I clapped her on the shoulder. “And a damned good machine you are, too, I know you’ll do a great job, Mendoza. And I feel that your efficiency will be increased if you don’t rush this job. Take the time to do it right, you know? Mix a little rest and rec into your schedule. After all, you really deserve a holiday, a hard-working operative like you. This is a great place for fun. You could come to one of our local cascaron balls. Dance the night away. You used to like to dance.”

  Boy, was that the wrong thing to say. She stood up slowly, like a cobra rearing back.

  “I haven’t owned a ballgown since 1703. I haven’t attended a mortal party since 1555. If you’ve chosen to forget that miserable Christmas, I can assure you I haven’t. You play with the damned monkeys, if you’re so fond of them.” She drew a deep breath. “I, myself, have better things to do.” She stalked away up the steps, but I called after her:

  “You’re still sore about the Englishman, huh?”

  She didn’t deign to respond but shoved her way between the church doors, presumably to get some sleep behind the altar screen where she wouldn’t be disturbed.

  She was still sore about the Englishman.

  I may have a more relaxed attitude toward my job than some people I could mention, but I’m still the best at it. By the time Mendoza wandered squinting into morning light I had her station set up, complete with hardware, in one of the Mission’s guest cells. For the benefit of my fellow friars she was my cousin from Guadalajara, visiting me while she awaited the arrival of her husband from Mexico City. As befitted the daughter of an old Christian family, the señora was of a sober and studious nature, and derived much innocent pleasure from painting flowers and other subjects of natural history.