Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  There were still no data on the screens. Badri was frowning. Montoya looked at her digital and said something to Gilchrist. Gilchrist nodded, and she scooped up a bag that had been lying half under the console, waved goodbye to Latimer, and went out through the side door.

  “Unlike Montoya, who obviously cannot wait to return to her dig, I would like to stay until I’m sure Kivrin got through without incident,” Dunworthy said.

  “I’m not suggesting you go back to Balliol,” Mary said, wrestling her way into her coat, “but the fix will take at least an hour, if not two, and in the meantime, your standing here won’t hurry it along. Watched pot and all that. The pub’s just across the way. It’s very small and quite nice, the sort of place that doesn’t put up Christmas decorations or play artificial bell music.” She held his overcoat out to him. “We’ll have a drink and something to eat, and then you can come back here and pace holes in the floor until the fix comes in.”

  “I want to wait here,” he said, still looking at the empty net. “Why didn’t Basingame have a locator implanted in his wrist? The head of a History Faculty has no business going off on holiday and not even a number where he can be reached.”

  Gilchrist straightened himself up from the still unchanging screen and clapped Badri on the shoulders. Latimer blinked as if he wasn’t sure where he was. Gilchrist shook his hand, smiling expansively. He started across the floor toward the wall panel partition, looking smug.

  “Let’s go,” Dunworthy said, snatching his overcoat from her and opening the door. A blast of “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night” hit them. Mary darted through the door as though she were escaping, and Dunworthy pulled it to behind them and followed Mary through the quad and out through Brasenose’s gate.

  It was bitter cold, but it wasn’t raining. It looked as though it might at any moment, though, and the crush of shoppers on the pavement in front of Brasenose had apparently decided it would. At least half of them had umbrellas already opened. A woman with a large red one and both arms full of parcels bumped into Dunworthy. “Watch where you’re going, can’t you?” she said, and hurried on.

  “The Christmas spirit,” Mary said, buttoning her coat with one hand and hanging onto her shopping bag with the other. “The pub’s just down there past the chemist’s,” she said, nodding her head at the opposite side of the street. “It’s these ghastly bells, I think. They’d ruin anyone’s mood.”

  She started off down the pavement through the maze of umbrellas. Dunworthy debated putting his coat on and then decided it wasn’t worth the struggle for so short a distance. He plunged after her, trying to keep clear of the deadly umbrellas and to determine what carol was being slaughtered now. It sounded like a cross between a call to arms and a dirge, but it was probably “Jingle Bells.”

  Mary was standing at the curb opposite the chemist’s, digging in her shopping bag again. “What is that ghastly din supposed to be?” she said, coming up with a collapsible umbrella. “O Little Town of Bethlehem?”

  “Jingle Bells,” Dunworthy said and stepped out into the street.

  “James!” Mary said and grabbed hold of his sleeve.

  The bicycle’s front tire missed him by centimeters, and the near pedal caught him on the leg. The rider swerved, shouting, “Don’t you know how to cross a bleeding street?”

  Dunworthy stepped backward and crashed into a six-year-old holding a plush Santa. The child’s mother glared.

  “Do be careful, James,” Mary said.

  They crossed the street, Mary leading the way. Halfway across it began to rain. Mary ducked under the chemist’s overhang and tried to get her umbrella open. The chemist’s window was draped in green and gold tinsel and had a sign posted in among the perfumes that said, “Save the Marston Parish Church Bells. Give to the Restoration Fund.”

  The carillon had finished obliterating “Jingle Bells” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and was now working on “We Three Kings.” Dunworthy recognized the minor key.

  Mary still couldn’t get her umbrella up. She shoved it back in the bag and took off down the pavement again. Dunworthy followed, trying to avoid collisions, past a stationer’s and a tobacconist’s hung with blinking red and green lights, through the door Mary was holding open for him.

  His spectacles steamed up immediately. He took them off to wipe at them with the collar of his overcoat. Mary shut the door and plunged them into a blur of brown and blissful silence.

  “Oh, dear,” Mary said. “I told you they were the sort that wouldn’t put up decorations.”

  Dunworthy put his spectacles back on. The shelves behind the bar were strung with blinking lights in pale green, pink and an anemic blue. On the corner of the bar was a large fiber-op Christmas tree on a revolving stand.

  There was no one else in the narrow pub except a beefy– looking man behind the bar. Mary squeezed between two empty tables and into the corner.

  “At least we can’t hear those wretched bells in here,” she said, putting her bag down on the settle. “No, I’ll get the drinks. You sit down. That cyclist nearly put you out.”

  She excavated some mangled pound notes out of the shopping bag and went up to the bar. “Two pints of bitter,” she told the barman. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked Dunworthy. “They’ve sandwiches and cheese rolls.”

  “Did you see Gilchrist staring at the console and grinning like the Cheshire cat? He didn’t even look to see whether Kivrin had gone or whether she was still lying there, half-dead.”

  “Make that two pints and a good stiff whiskey,” Mary said.

  Dunworthy sat down. There was a creche on the table complete with tiny plastic sheep and a half-naked baby in a manger. “Gilchrist should have sent her from the dig,” he said. “The calculations for a remote are exponentially more complicated than for an on-site. I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t send her lapse-time as well. The first-year apprentice couldn’t do the calculations. I was afraid when I loaned him Badri, Gilchrist would decide he wanted a lapse-time drop instead of a real-time.”

  He moved one of the plastic sheep closer to the shepherd. “If he’s aware there’s a difference,” he said. “Do you know what he said when I told him he should run at least one unmanned? He said, ‘If something unfortunate does happen, we can go back in time and pull Ms. Engle out before it happens, can’t we?’ The man has no notion of how the net works, no notion of the paradoxes, no notion that Kivrin is there, and what happens to her is real and irrevocable.”

  Mary maneuvered her way between the tables, carrying the whiskey in one hand and the two pints awkwardly in the other. She set the whiskey down in front of him. “It’s my standard prescription for cycling victims and overprotective fathers. Did it catch you in the leg?”

  “No,” Dunworthy said.

  “I had a bicycle accident in last week. One of your Twentieth Centuries. Just back from a World War I drop. Two weeks unscathed at Belleau Wood and then walked into a high– wheeler on the Broad.” She went back to the bar to fetch her cheese roll.

  “I hate parables,” Dunworthy said. He picked up the plastic Virgin. She was dressed in blue with a white cloak. “If he had sent her lapse-time, at least she wouldn’t have been in danger of freezing to death. She should have had something warmer than a rabbit-fur lining, or didn’t it occur to Gilchrist that 1320 was the beginning of the Little Ice Age?”

  “I’ve just thought who you remind me of,” Mary said, setting down her plate and a napkin. “William Gaddson’s mother.”

  That was a truly unfair remark. William Gaddson was one of his first-year students. His mother had been up six times this term, the first time to bring William a pair of earmuffs.

  “He catches a chill if he doesn’t wear them,” she had told Dunworthy. “Willy’s always been susceptible to chill, and now he’s so far away from home and all. His tutor isn’t taking proper care of him, even though I’ve spoken to him repeatedly.”

  Willy was the size of an oak tree and
looked as susceptible to chill as one. “I’m certain he can take care of himself,” he had told Mrs. Gaddson, which was a mistake. She had promptly added Dunworthy to the list of people who refused to take proper care of Willy, but it hadn’t stopped her coming up every two weeks to deliver vitamins to Dunworthy and insist that Willy be taken off the rowing team because he was over-exerting himself.

  “I would hardly put my concern for Kivrin in the same category as Mrs. Gaddson’s overprotectiveness,” Dunworthy said. “The 1300’s are full of cutthroats and thieves. And worse.”

  “That’s what Mrs. Gaddson said about Oxford,” Mary said placidly, sipping her pint of ale. “I told her she couldn’t protect Willy from life. And you can’t protect Kivrin. You didn’t become an historian by staying safely at home. You’ve got to let her go, even if it is dangerous. Every century’s a ten, James.”

  “This century doesn’t have the Black Death.”

  “It had the Pandemic, which killed thirty-five million people. And the Black Death wasn’t in England in 1320,” she said. “It didn’t reach there till 1348.” She put her mug down on the table, and the figurine of Mary fell over. “But even if it had, Kivrin couldn’t get it. I immunized her against bubonic plague.” She smiled ruefully at Dunworthy. “I have my own moments of Mrs. Gaddsonitis. Besides, she would never get the plague because we’re both worrying over it. None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one’s never thought of does.”

  “Very comforting.” He placed the blue-and-white Mary next to the figure of Joseph. It fell over. He set it carefully back up.

  “It should be comforting, James,” she said briskly. “Because it’s obvious you’ve thought of every possible dreadful thing that could happen to Kivrin. Which means she’s perfectly all right. She’s probably already sitting in a castle having peacock pie for lunch, although I suppose it isn’t the same time of day there.”

  He shook his head. “There will have been slippage—God only knows how much, since Gilchrist didn’t do parameter checks. Badri thought it would be several days.”

  Or several weeks, he thought, and if it were the middle of January, there wouldn’t be any holy days for Kivrin to determine the date by. Even a discrepancy of several hours could put her on the Oxford-Bath road in the middle of the night.

  “I do hope the slippage won’t mean she’ll miss Christmas,” Mary said. “She was terribly keen to observe a mediaeval Christmas mass.”

  “It’s two weeks till Christmas there,” he said. “They’re still using the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar wasn’t adopted till 1752.”

  “I know. Mr. Gilchrist orated on the subject of the Julian calendar in his speech. He went on at considerable length about the history of calendar reform and the discrepancy in dates between the Old Style and Gregorian calendars. At one point I thought he was going to draw a diagram. What day is it there?”

  “The thirteenth of December.”

  “Perhaps it’s just as well we don’t know the exact time. Dierdre and Colin were in the States for a year, and I was worried sick about them, but out of synch. I was always imagining Colin being run over on the way to school when it was actually the middle of the night. Fretting doesn’t work properly unless one can visualize disasters in all their particulars, including the weather and the time of day. For a time I worried about not knowing what to worry about, and then I didn’t worry at all. Perhaps it will be the same with Kivrin.”

  It was true. He had been visualizing Kivrin as he last saw her, lying amid the wreckage with her temple bloody, but that was probably all wrong. She had gone through nearly an hour ago. Even if no traveller had come along yet, the road would get cold, and he couldn’t imagine Kivrin lying there docilely in the Middle Ages with her eyes closed.

  The first time he had gone through to the past he had been doing there-and-backs while they calibrated the fix. They had sent him through in the middle of the quad in the middle of the night, and he was supposed to stand there while they did the calculations on the fix and picked him up again. But he was in Oxford in 1956, and the check was bound to take at least ten minutes. He had sprinted four blocks down the Broad to see the old Bodleian and nearly given the tech heart failure when she opened the net and couldn’t find him.

  Kivrin would not still be lying there with her eyes shut, not with the mediaeval world spread out before her. He could see her suddenly, standing there in that ridiculous white cloak, scanning the Oxford-Bath road for unwary travellers, ready to fling herself back on the ground at a moment’s notice, and in the meantime taking it all in, her implanted hands clasped together in a prayer of impatience and delight, and he felt suddenly reassured.

  She would be perfectly all right. She would step back through the net in two weeks’ time, her white cloak grubby beyond belief, full of stories about harrowing adventures and hair’s– breadth escapes, tales to curdle the blood, no doubt, things that would give him nightmares for weeks after her telling him about them.

  “She’ll be all right, you know, James,” Mary said, frowning at him.

  “I know,” he said. He went and got them another half pint apiece. “When did you say your great-nephew was getting in?”

  “At three. He’s staying a week, and I’ve no idea what to do with him. Except worry, of course. I suppose I could take him to the Ashmolean. Children always like museums, don’t they? Pocahontas’s robe and all that?”

  Dunworthy remembered Pocahontas’s robe as being a completely uninteresting scrap of stiff grayish material much like Colin’s intended muffler. “I’d suggest the Natural History Museum.”

  There was a rattle of tinsel and some “Ding Dong, Merrily on High” and Dunworthy looked anxiously over at the door. His secretary was standing on the threshold, squinting blindly into the pub.

  “Perhaps I should send Colin up Carfax Tower to vandalize the carillon,” Mary said.

  “It’s Finch,” Dunworthy said, and put his hand up so he could see them, but he had already started for their table. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, sir,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

  “With the fix?”

  His secretary looked blank. “The fix? No, sir. It’s the Americans. They’ve arrived early.”

  “What Americans?”

  “The bellringers. From Colorado. The Western States’ Women’s Guild of Change and Handbell Ringers.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve imported more Christmas bells,” Mary said.

  “I thought they were supposed to arrive on the twenty– second,” Dunworthy said to Finch.

  “This is the twenty-second,” Finch said. “They were to arrive this afternoon but their concert at Exeter was cancelled, so they’re ahead of schedule. I called Mediaeval, and Mr. Gilchrist told me he thought you’d gone out to celebrate.” He looked at Dunworthy’s empty mug.

  “I’m not celebrating,” Dunworthy said. “I’m waiting for the fix on one of my students.” He looked at his watch. “It will take at least another hour.”

  “You promised you’d take them on a tour of the local bells, sir.”

  “There’s really no reason why you need to be here,” Mary said. “I can ring you at Balliol as soon as the fix is in.”

  “I’ll come when we have the fix,” Dunworthy said, glaring at Mary. “Show them round the college and then give them lunch. That should take an hour.”

  Finch looked unhappy. “They’re only here until four o’clock. They have a handbells concert tonight in Ely, and they’re extremely eager to see Christ Church’s bells.”

  “Then take them to Christ Church. Show them Great Tom. Take them up in St. Martin’s tower. Or take them round to New College. I will be there as soon as I can.”

  Finch looked like he was going to ask something else and then changed his mind. “I’ll tell them you’ll be there within the hour, sir,” he said and started for the door. Halfway there he stopped and came back. “I almost forgot, sir. The vicar called to ask if you’d be willing to r
ead the Scripture for the Christmas Eve interchurch service. It’s to be at St. Mary the Virgin’s this year.”

  “Tell him yes,” Dunworthy said, thankful that he’d given up on the change ringers. “And tell him we’ll need to get into the belfry this afternoon so I can show these Americans the bells.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “What about Iffley? Do you think I should take them out to Iffley? They’ve a very nice eleventh century.”

  “By all means,” Dunworthy said. “Take them to Iffley. I will be back as soon as I can.”

  Finch opened his mouth and closed it again. “Yes, sir,” he said, and went out the door to the accompaniment of “The Holly and the Ivy.”

  “You were a bit hard on him, don’t you think?” Mary asked. “After all, Americans can be terrifying.”

  “He’ll be back in five minutes asking me whether he should take them to Christ Church first,” Dunworthy said. “The boy has absolutely no initiative.”

  “I thought you admired that in young people,” Mary said wryly. “At any rate, he won’t go running off to the Middle Ages.”

  The door opened, and “The Holly and the Ivy” started up again. “That’ll be him wanting to know what he should give them for lunch.”

  “Boiled beef and overcooked vegetables,” Mary said. “Americans love to tell stories about our dreadful cooking. Oh, dear.”

  Dunworthy looked toward the door. Gilchrist and Latimer stood there, haloed in the gray light from outside. Gilchrist was smiling broadly and saying something over the bells. Latimer struggled to collapse a large black umbrella.

  “I suppose we’ve got to be civil and invite them to join us,” Mary said.

  Dunworthy reached for his coat. “Be civil if you like. I have no intention of listening to those two congratulating each other for having sent an inexperienced young girl into danger.”

  “You’re sounding like you-know-who again,” Mary said. “They wouldn’t be here if anything had gone wrong. Perhaps Badri’s got the fix.”

  “It’s too soon for that,” he said, but he sat back down again. “More likely he threw them out so he could get on with it.”