The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  Kit leaned back on his bench, folding his hands in his lap. “Robin, I protest. Walsingham is as loyal to the crown as I.”

  “Ah.” Poley turned it into an accusing drawl: one long syllable, smelling of onions. He straightened, frowning. “And art thou loyal, Master Marley?”

  “Thy pardon?” As if a trapdoor had opened under his guts: he clutched the edge of the table to steady himself. “I’ve proven my loyalty well enough, I think.”

  “Thou hast grown soft,” Poley sneered. Frazier, on Kit’s right, stood, and Kit stood with him, toppling the bench in his haste. He found an ale-bottle with his right hand. There was a bed in the close little room in addition to the table, and Kit stepped against it, got his shoulder into the angle the headboard made with the wall.

  Ingram Frazier’s dagger rose in his hand. Kit looked past him, into Poley’s light blue eyes. “Robin,” Kit said. “Robin, old friend. What means this?”

  Professor Keats looked up as they knocked on his open door: a blatant abrogation of campus security, but Satyavati admitted the cross-breeze felt better than sealed-room climate control. Red curls greying to ginger, his sharp chin softened now by jowls, he leaned back in his chair before a bookshelf stuffed with old leatherbound books and printouts: the detritus of a man who had never abandoned paper. Satyavati’s eye picked out the multicolored spines of volumes and volumes of poetry; the successes of the Poet Emeritus project. As a personal and professional friend of the History Department’s Bernard Ling, Professor Keats had assumed the chairmanship of Poet Emeritus shortly after the death of its founder, Dr. Eve Rodale.

  Who would gainsay the project’s greatest success?

  The tuberculosis that would have been his death was a preresistant strain, easy prey to modern antibiotics; the lung damage was repairable with implants and grafts. He stood gracefully as Satyavati, Haverson, and Baldassare entered, a vigorous sixty-year-old who might have as many years before him as behind, and laid aside the fountain pen he still preferred. “It’s not often lovely ladies come to visit this old poet,” he said. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  “Soft,” Poley said again, and spit among the rushes on the floor. Bits of herbs colored his saliva green; Kit thought of venom and smiled. If I live, I’ll use that—

  The stink of fish and wine was dizzying. Poley kept talking. “Five years ago thou would’st have hanged Tom Walsingham for the gold in thy purse—”

  “Only if he proved guilty.”

  “Guilty as those idiot students thou did’st see hanged at Corpus Christi?”

  Kit winced. He wasn’t proud of that. The pottery bottle in his hand was rough-surfaced, cool; he shifted his grip. “Master Walsingham is loyal. Frazier, you’re in his service, man—”

  “So fierce in his defense.” Poley smiled, toxic and sweet. “Mayhap the rumors of thee dropping thy breeches for Master Walsingham aren’t so false, after all—”

  “Whoreson—” Kit stepped up, provoked into abandoning the wall. A mistake, and as his focus narrowed on Poley, Frazier grabbed his left wrist, twisting. Kit raised the bottle – up, down, smashed it hard across the top of Frazier’s head, ducking Frazier’s wild swing with the dagger. The weaselly Skeres, so far silent, lunged across the table as Frazier roared and blood covered his face.

  Satyavati had turned a student desk around; she sat on it now, her feet on the narrow plastic seat, and scrubbed both hands through her thick silver hair. Professor John Keats stood by the holodisplay that covered one long wall of the classroom, the twelve-by-fourteen card that Baldassare had pulled down off the wall in Satyavati’s office pressed against it, clinging by static charge. Pinholes haggled the yellowed corners of the card; at its center was printed a 2-D image of a painfully boyish, painfully fair young man. He was richly dressed, with huge dark eyes, soft features, and a taunting smile framed by a sparse down of beard.

  “He would have been eight years older when he died,” Keats said.

  Haverson chuckled from beside the door. “If that’s him.”

  “If he is a him,” Baldassare added. Haverson glared, and the grad student shrugged. “It’s what we’re here to prove, isn’t it? Either the software works, or—”

  “Or we have to figure out what this weird outlier means.”

  Keats glanced over his shoulder. “Explain how your program works, Professor?”

  Satyavati curled her tongue across her upper teeth and dug in her pocket for the tin of mints. She offered them around the room; only Keats accepted. “It’s an idea that’s been under development since the late 20th century,” she said, cinnamon burning her tongue. “It relies on frequency and patterns of word use – well, it originated in some of the metrics that Elizabethan scholars use to prove authorship of the controversial plays, and also the order in which they were written. We didn’t get Edward III firmly attributed to Marlowe, with a probable Shakespearean collaboration, until the beginning of the 21st century—”

  “And you have a computer program that can identify the biological gender of the writer of a given passage of text.”

  “It even works on newsfeed reports and textbooks, sir.”

  “Have you any transgendered authors entered, Satyavati?”

  John Keats just called me by my first name. She smiled and scooted forward half an inch on the desk, resting her elbows on her knees. “Several women who wrote as men, for whatever reason. Each of them confirmed female, although some were close to the midline. Two male authors who wrote as women. An assortment of lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals. Hemingway—”

  Haverson choked on a laugh, covering her mouth with her hand. Satyavati shrugged. “—as a baseline. Anaïs Nin. Ovid, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Tori Siikanen.”

  “I’ve read her,” Keats said. “Lovely.”

  Satyavati shrugged. “The genderbot found her unequivocally male, when her entire body of work was analyzed. Even that written after her gender reassignment. We haven’t been able to track down any well-known writers of indeterminate sex, unfortunately. I’d like to see how somebody born cryptomale and assigned female, for example, would score—”

  “What will your ’bot tell us then?”

  “Chromosomal gender, I suppose.”

  “Interesting. Is gender so very immutable, then?” He raised an eyebrow and smiled, returning his attention to Christopher Marlowe. “That’s quite the can of worms—”

  “Except for his,” Satyavati said, following the line of Keats’ gaze to the mocking smile and folded arms of the arrogant boy in the facsimile. “What makes him different?”

  “Her,” Baldassare said, in a feigned coughing fit. “That moustache is totally gummed on. Look at it.”

  Keats didn’t turn, but he shrugged. “What makes any of us different, my dear?” A long pause, as if he expected an attempt to answer what must have been a rhetorical question. He turned and looked Satyavati in the eye. His gingery eyebrows lifted and fell. “Do you understand the risks and costs of this endeavor?”

  Satyavati hunched forward on her chair and shook her head. “It was Sienna’s idea—”

  “Oh, so quick to cast away credit and blame,” the poet said, but his eyes twinkled.

  Haverson came to stand beside Satyavati’s desk. “Still. Is there any writer or critic who hasn’t wondered, a little, what that young man could have done?”

  “Were he more prone to temperance?”

  Keats was being charming. But he’s still John Keats.

  “Poets are not temperate by nature,” he said, and smiled. He folded his hands together in front of his belt buckle. His swing jacket, translucent chromatic velvet, caught the light through the window as he moved.

  “In another hundred years we’ll change our gender the way we change our clothes.” Haverson pressed her warmth against Satyavati’s arm, who endured it a moment before she leaned away.

  “I confess myself uncomfortable with the concept.” Keats’ long fingers fretted the cuff of his gorgeous jacket.

&nbs
p; Satyavati, watching him, felt a swell of kinship. “I think there is a biological factor to how gender is expressed. I think my genderbot proves that unequivocally: if we can detect birth gender to such a fine degree—”

  “And this is important?” Keats’ expression was gentle mockery; an emergent trace of archaic Cockney colored his voice, but something in the tilt of his head showed Satyavati that it was a serious question.

  “Our entire society is based on gender and sex and procreation. How can it not be as vital to understanding the literature as it is to understanding everything else?”

  Keats’ lips twitched; his pale eyes tightened at the corners. Satyavati shrank back, afraid she’d overstepped, but his voice was still level when he spoke again. “What does it matter where man comes from – or woman either – if the work is true?”

  A sore spot. She sucked her lip, searching for the explanation. “One would prefer to think such things no longer mattered.” With a sideways glance to Baldassare. He gave her a low thumbs-up. “This isn’t my first tenure-track position.”

  “You left Yale.” Just a statement, as if he would not press.

  “I filed an allegation of sexual harassment against my department chair. She denied it, and claimed I was attempting to conceal a lack of scholarship—”

  “She?”

  Satyavati folded her arms tight across her chest, half sick with the admission. “She didn’t approve of my research, I think. It contradicted her own theories of gender identity.”

  “You think she knew attention would make you uncomfortable, and harried you from the department.”

  “I... have never been inclined to be close to people. Forgive me if I am not trusting.”

  He studied her expression silently. She found herself lifting her chin to meet his regard, in answer to his unspoken challenge. He smiled thoughtfully and said, “I was told a stableman’s son would be better to content himself away from poetry, you know. I imagine your Master Marlowe, a cobbler’s boy, heard something similar once or twice – and God forbid either one of us had been a girl. It’s potent stuff you’re meddling in.”

  Rebellion flared in her belly. She sat up straight on the ridiculous desk, her fingers fluttering as she unfolded her hands and embraced her argument. “If anything, then, my work proves that biology is not destiny. I’d like to force a continuing expansion of the canon, frankly: ‘women’s books’ are still – still – excluded. As if war were somehow a more valid exercise than raising a family—” Shit. Too much, by his stunned expression. She held his gaze, though, and wouldn’t look down.

  And then Keats smiled, and she knew she’d won him. “There are dangers involved, beyond the cost.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” He wore spectacles, a quaint affectation that Satyavati found charming. But as he glanced at her over the silver wire frames, a chill crept up her neck.

  “Professor Keats—”

  “John.”

  “John.” And that was worth a deeper chill, for the unexpected intimacy. “Then make me understand.”

  Keats stared at her, pale eyes soft, frown souring the corners of his mouth. “A young man of the Elizabethan period. A duelist, a spy, a playmaker: a violent man, and one who lives by his wits in a society so xenophobic it’s difficult for us to properly imagine. Someone to whom the carriage – the horse-drawn carriage, madam doctor – is a tolerably modern invention, the heliocentric model of the solar system still heresy. Someone to whom your United States is the newborn land of Virginia, a colony founded by his acquaintance Sir Walter Ralegh. Pipe tobacco is a novelty, coffee does not exist, and the dulcet speech of our everyday converse is the yammering of a barbarian dialect that he will find barely comprehensible, at best.”

  Satyavati opened her mouth to make some answer. Keats held up one angular hand. As if to punctuate his words, the rumble of a rising semiballistic rattled the windows. “A young man, I might add” – as if this settled it—”who must be plucked alive from the midst of a deadly brawl with three armed opponents. A brawl history tells us he instigated with malice, in a drunken rage.”

  “History is written by the victors,” Satyavati said, at the same moment that Baldassare said “Dr. Keats. The man who wrote Faustus, sir.”

  “If a man he is,” Keats answered, smiling. “There is that, after all. And there would be international repercussions. UK cultural heritage is pitching a fit over ‘the theft of their literary traditions.’”

  “Because the world would be a better place without John Keats?” Satyavati grinned, pressing her tongue against her teeth. “Hell, they sold London Bridge to Arizona. I don’t see what they have to complain about: if they’re so hot to trot, let them build their own time device and steal some of our dead poets.”

  Keats laughed, a wholehearted guffaw that knocked him back on his heels. He gasped, collected himself, and turned to Haverson, who nodded. “John, how can you possibly resist?”

  “I can’t,” he admitted, and looked back at Haverson.

  “How much will it cost?”

  Satyavati braced for the answer and winced anyway. Twice the budget for her project, easily.

  “I’ll write a grant,” Baldassare said.

  Keats laughed. “Write two. This project, I rather imagine there’s money for. It will also take a personal favor from Bernard. Which I will call in. Although I doubt very much we can schedule a retrieval until next fiscal. Which makes no difference to Marlowe, of course, but does mean, Satyavati, that you will have to push your publication back.”

  “I’ll consider it an opportunity to broaden the database,” she said, and Keats and Haverson laughed like true academics at the resignation in her voice.

  “And—”

  She flinched. “And?”

  “Your young man may prove thoroughly uncooperative. Or mentally unstable once the transfer is done.”

  “Is the transition really so bad?” Baldassare, with the question that had been on the tip of Satyavati’s tongue.

  “Is there a risk he will reject reality, you mean? Lose his mind, to put it quaintly?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t say what it will be like for him,” he said. “But I, at least, came to you knowing the language and knowing I had been about to die.” Keats rubbed his palms together as if clapping nonexistent chalk dust from his palms. “I rather suspect, madam doctors, Mr. Baldassare” – Satyavati blinked as he pronounced Baldassare’s name correctly and without hesitation; she hadn’t realized Keats even knew it— “we must prepare ourselves for failure.”

  Kit twisted away from the knife again, but Skeres had a grip on his doublet now, and the breath went out of him as two men slammed him against the wall. Cloth shredded; the broken bottle slipped out of Kit’s bloodied fingers as Frazier wrenched his arm behind his back.

  Poley blasphemed. “Christ on the cross—”

  Frazier swore too, shoving Kit’s torn shirt aside to keep a grip on his flesh. “God’s wounds, it’s a wench.”

  A lax moment, and Kit got an elbow into Frazier’s ribs and a heel down hard on Poley’s instep and his back into the corner one more time, panting like a beaten dog. No route to the window. No route to the door. Kit swallowed bile and terror, tugged the rags of his doublet closed across his slender chest. “Unhand me.”

  “Where’s Marley?” Poley said stupidly as Kit pressed himself against the boards.

  “I am Marley, you fool.”

  “No wench could have written that poetry—”

  “I’m no wench,” he said, and as Frazier raised his knife, Christofer Marley made himself ready to die as he had lived, kicking and shouting at something much bigger than he.

  *

  Seventeen months later, Satyavati steepled her fingers before her mouth and blew out across them, warm moist breath sliding between her palms in a contrast to the crisping desert atmosphere. One-way shatterproof bellied out below her; leaning forward, she saw into a retrieval room swarming with techn
icians and medical crew, bulwarked by masses of silently blinking instrumentation – and the broad space in the middle of the room, walled away from operations with shatterproof ten centimeters thick. Where the retrieval team would reappear.

  With or without their quarry.

  “Worried?”

  She turned her head and looked up at Professor Keats, stylishly rumpled as ever. “Terrified.”

  “Minstrels in the gallery,” he observed. “There’s Sienna...” Pointing to her blond head, bent over her station on the floor.

  The shatterproof walls of the retrieval box were holoed to conceal the mass of technology outside them from whoever might be inside; theoretically, the retrievant should arrive sedated. But it wasn’t wise to be too complacent about such things.

  The lights over the retrieval floor dimmed by half. Keats leaned forward in his chair. “Here we go.”

  “Five.” A feminine voice over loudspeakers. “Four. Three—”

  I hadn’t thought he’d look so fragile. Or so young.

  Is this then Hell? Curious that death should hurt so much less than living—

  “Female,” a broad-shouldered doctor said into his throat microphone. He leaned over the sedated form on his examining table, gloved hands deft and quick.

  Marlowe lay within an environmentally shielded bubble; the doctor examined her with built-in gloves. She would stay sedated and in isolation until her immunizations were effective and it was certain she hadn’t brought forward any dangerous bugs from the 16th century. Satyavati was grateful for the half-height privacy screens hiding the poet’s form. I hadn’t thought it would seem like such an invasion.

  “Aged about thirty,” the doctor continued. “Overall in fair health although underweight and suffering the malnutrition typical of Elizabethan diet. Probably parasitic infestation of some sort, dental caries, bruising sustained recently – damn, look at that wrist. That must have been one hell of a fight.”

  “It was,” Tony Baldassare said, drying his hands on a towel as he came up on Satyavati’s right. His hair was still wet from the showers, slicked back from his classically Roman features. She stepped away, reclaiming her space. “I hope this is the worst retrieval I ever have to go on – although Haverson assures me that I made the grade, and there will be more. Damn, but you sweat in those moonsuits.” He frowned over at the white-coated doctor. “When do they start the RNA therapy?”