Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  Limited med support. It was a century that had dosed people with leeches and powdered rubies, that had never heard of sterilization or germs or T-cells. They would have stuck filthy poultices on her and muttered prayers and opened her veins. “And the doctors bled them,” Colin’s book had said, “but many died in despite.”

  “Without antibiotics and T-cell enhancement,” Montoya said, the virus’s mortality rate is forty-nine per cent. Probability—”

  “Probability,” Dunworthy said bitterly. “Are these Gilchrist’s figures?”

  Montoya glanced at Colin and frowned. “There is a 75 per cent chance Kivrin contracted the virus, and a 68 per cent chance she was exposed to the plague. Morbidity for bubonic plague is 91 per cent, and the mortality rate is—”

  “She didn’t get the plague,” Dunworthy said. “She’d had her plague inoculation. Didn’t Dr. Ahrens or Gilchrist tell you that?”

  Montoya glanced at Colin again.

  “They said I wasn’t allowed to tell him,” Colin said, looking defiantly at her.

  “Tell me what? Is Gilchrist ill?” He remembered looking at the screens and then collapsing forward into Gilchrist’s arms. He wondered if he had infected him when he fell.

  Montoya said, “Mr. Gilchrist died of the flu three days ago.”

  Dunworthy looked at Colin. “What else did they instruct you to keep from me?” Dunworthy demanded. “Who else died while I was ill?”

  Montoya put up her thin hand as if to stop Colin, but it was too late.

  “Great-Aunt Mary,” Colin said.

  Transcript from the Doomsday Book

  (077076-078924)

  Maisry’s run away. Roche and I looked everywhere for her, afraid she’d fallen and crawled into some corner, but the steward said he saw her starting into the woods while he was digging Walthef’s grave. She was riding Agnes’s pony.

  She will only spread it, or make it as far as some village that already has it. It’s all around us now. The bells sound like vespers, only out of rhythm, as if the ringers had gone mad. It’s impossible to make out whether it is nine strokes or three. Courcy’s double bells tolled a single stroke this morning. I wonder if it is one of the chattering girls who played with Rosemund.

  She is still unconscious, and her pulse is very weak. Agnes screams and struggles in her delirium. She keeps shrieking for me to come, but she won’t let me near her. When I try to talk to her, she kicks and screams as if she were having a tantrum.

  Eliwys is wearing herself out trying to tend Agnes and Lady Imeyne, who screams, “Devil!” at me when I tend her and nearly gave me a black eye this morning. The only one who lets me near him is the clerk, who is beyond caring. He cannot possibly last the day. He smells so bad we’ve had to move him to the far end of the room. His bubo has started to suppurate again.

  (Break)

  Gunni, second son of the steward.

  The woman with the scrofula scars on her neck.

  Maisry’s brother.

  Roche’s altarboy, Cob.

  (Break)

  Lady Imeyne is very bad. Roche tried to give her the last rites, but she refused to make her confession.

  “You must make your peace with God ere you die,” Roche said, but she turned her face to the wall and said, “He is to blame for this.”

  (Break)

  Thirty-one cases. Over seventy-five per cent. Roche consecrated part of the green this morning because the churchyard is nearly full.

  Maisry hasn’t come back. She’s probably sleeping in the high seat of some manor house the inhabitants have fled, and when this is all over she’ll become the ancestor of some noble old family.

  Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with our time, Mr. Dunworthy, it was founded by Maisry and Sir Bloet. And all the people who stayed and tried to help, like Roche, caught the plague and died.

  (Break)

  Lady Imeyne is unconscious and Roche is giving her the last rites. I told him to.

  “It is the disease that speaks. Her soul has not turned against God,” I said, which isn’t true, and perhaps she does not deserve forgiveness, but she does not deserve this either, her body poisoned, rotting, and I can scarcely condemn her for blaming God when I blame her. And neither is responsible. It’s a disease.

  The consecrated wine has run out, and there is no more olive oil. Roche is using cooking oil from the kitchen. It smells rancid. Where he touches her temples and the palms of her hands, the skin turns black.

  It’s a disease.

  (Break)

  Agnes is worse. It’s terrible to watch her, lying there panting like her poor puppy and screaming, “Tell Kivrin to come and get me. I do not like it here!”

  Even Roche can’t stand it. “Why does God punish us thus?” he asked me.

  “He doesn’t. It’s a disease,” I said, which is no answer, and he knows it.

  All of Europe knows it, and the Church knows it, too. It will hang on for a few more centuries, making excuses, but it can’t overcome the essential fact—that He let it happen. That He comes to no one’s rescue.

  (Break)

  The bells have stopped. Roche asked me if I thought it was a sign the plague had stopped. “Perhaps God has come to help us after all,” he said.

  I don’t think so. In Tournai church officials sent out an order stopping the bells because the sound frightened the people. Perhaps the Bishop of Bath has sent one out as well.

  The sound was frightening, but the silence is worse. It’s like the end of the world.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mary had been dead almost the entire time he had been ill. She had come down with it the day the analogue arrived. She had developed pneumonia almost immediately, and on the second day her heart had stopped. The sixth of January. Epiphany.

  “You should have told me,” Dunworthy had said.

  “I did tell you. Don’t you remember?”

  He had no memory of it at all, had had no warning even when Mrs. Gaddson was allowed free access to his room, when Colin had said, “They won’t tell you anything.” It had not even struck him as odd that she hadn’t come to see him.

  “I told you when she got ill,” Colin had said, “and I told you when she died, but you were too ill to care.”

  He thought of Colin waiting outside her room for news and then coming and standing by his bedside, trying to tell him. “I’m sorry, Colin.”

  “You couldn’t help it that you were ill,” Colin said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  He had told Ms. Taylor that, and she had not believed him any more than he believed Colin now. He did not think that Colin believed it either.

  “It was all right,” Colin said. “Everyone was very nice except Sister. She wouldn’t let me tell you even after you started getting better, but everyone else was nice except the Gallstone. She kept reading me Scriptures about how God strikes down the unrighteous. Mr. Finch rang my mother, but she couldn’t come, and so he made all the funeral arrangements. He was very nice. The Americans were nice, too. They kept giving me sweets.

  “I’m sorry,” Dunworthy had said then and after Colin had gone, expelled by the ancient sister. “I’m sorry.”

  He had not been back, and Dunworthy didn’t know whether the nurse had barred him from the infirmary or whether, in spite of what he said, Colin would not forgive him.

  He had abandoned Colin, gone off and left him at the mercy of Mrs. Gadsson and the sister and doctors who would not tell him anything. He had gone where he could not be reached, as incommunicado as Basingame, salmon fishing on some river in Scotland. And no matter what Colin said, he believed that if Dunworthy had truly wanted to, illness or no, he could have been there to help him.

  “You think Kivrin’s dead, too, don’t you?” Colin had asked him after Montoya left. “Like Ms. Montoya does?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But you said she couldn’t get the plague. What if she’s not dead? What if she’s at the rendezvous right now, waiting for you?”

 
; “She’d been infected with influenza, Colin.”

  “But so were you, and you didn’t die. Maybe she didn’t die either. I think you should go see Badri and see if he has any ideas. Maybe he could turn the machine on again or something.”

  “You don’t understand,” he’d said. “It’s not like a pocket torch. The fix can’t be switched on again.”

  “Well, but maybe he could do another one. A new fix. To the same time.”

  To the same time. A drop, even with the coordinates already known, took days to set up. And Badri didn’t have the coordinates. He only had the date. He could “make” a new set of coordinates based on the date, if the locationals had stayed the same, if Badri in his fever hadn’t scrambled them as well and if the paradoxes would allow a second drop at all.

  There was no way to explain it all to Colin, no way to tell him Kivrin could not possibly have survived influenza in a century where the standard treatment was blood-letting. “It won’t work, Colin,” he’d said, suddenly too tired to explain anything. “I’m sorry.”

  “So you’re just going to leave her there? Whether she’s dead or not? You’re not even going to talk to Badri?”

  “Colin—”

  “Aunt Mary did everything for you. She didn’t give up!”

  “What is going on in here?” the sister had demanded, creaking in. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave if you persist in upsetting the patient.”

  “I was leaving anyway,” Colin had said and flung himself out.

  He hadn’t come back that afternoon or all evening or the next morning.

  “Am I being allowed visitors?” Dunworthy asked William’s nurse when she came on duty.

  “Yes,” she said, looking at the screens. “There’s someone waiting to see you now.”

  It was Mrs. Gaddson. She already had her Bible open.

  “Luke Chapter 23:23,” she said, glaring pestilentially at him. “Since you’re so interested in the Crucifixion. ‘And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, there they crucified him.’”

  If God had known where His Son was, He would never have let them do that to him, Dunworthy thought. He would have pulled him out, He would have come and rescued him.

  During the Black Death, the contemps believed God had abandoned them. “Why do you turn your face from us?” they had written. “Why do you ignore our cries?” But perhaps He hadn’t heard them. Perhaps He had been unconscious, lying ill in heaven, helpless Himself and unable to come.

  “‘And there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour,’” Mrs. Gaddson read, “‘and the sun was darkened…’”

  The contemps had believed it was the end of the world, that Armageddon had come, that Satan had triumphed at last. He had, Dunworthy thought. He had closed the net. He had lost the fix.

  He thought about Gilchrist. He wondered if he had realized what he had done before he died or if he had lain unconscious and oblivious, unaware that he had murdered Kivrin.

  “‘And Jesus led them out as far as to Bethany,’” Mrs. Gaddson read, “‘and he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and was carried up into heaven.’”

  He was parted from them, and was carried up into heaven. God did come to get him, Dunworthy thought. But too late. Too late.

  She went on reading until William’s nurse came on duty. “Naptime,” she said briskly, shoving Mrs. Gaddson out. She came over to the bed, snatched his pillow from under his head, and gave it several sharp whacks.

  “Has Colin come?” he asked.

  “I haven’t seen him since yesterday,” she said, pushing the pillow back under his head. “I want you to try to go to sleep now.”

  “Ms. Montoya hasn’t been here?”

  “Not since yesterday.” She handed him a capsule and a paper cup.

  “Have there been any messages?”

  “No messages,” she said. She took the empty cup from him. “Try to sleep.”

  No messages. “I’ll try to be buried in the churchyard,” Kivrin had told Montoya, but they’d run out of room in the churchyards. They had buried the plague victims in trenches, in ditches. They had thrown them in the river. Towards the end they hadn’t buried them at all. They had piled them in heaps and set fire to them.

  Montoya would never find the corder. And if she did, what would the message be? “I went to the drop, but it didn’t open. What happened?” Kivrin’s voice rising in panic, in reproach, crying, “Eloi, eloi, why hast thou forsaken me?”

  William’s nurse made him sit up in a chair to eat his lunch. While he was finishing his stewed prunes, Finch came in.

  “We’re nearly out of tinned fruit,” he said, pointing at Dunworthy’s tray. “And lavatory paper. I have no idea how they expect us to start term.” He sat down on the end of the bed. “The university’s set the start of term for the twenty-fifth, but we simply can’t be ready by them. We still have fifteen patients in Salvin, the mass immunizations have scarcely started, and I’m not at all convinced we’ve seen the last of the flu cases.”

  “What about Colin?” Dunworthy said. “Is he all right.”

  “Yes, sir. He was a bit melancholy after Dr. Ahrens passed away, but he’s cheered up a good deal since you’ve been on the mend.”

  “I want to thank you for helping him,” Dunworthy said. “Colin told me you’d arranged for the funeral.”

  “Oh, I was glad to help, sir. He’d no one else, you know. I was certain his mother would come now that the danger’s past, but she said it was too difficult to make arrangements on such short notice. She did send lovely flowers. Lilies and laser blossoms. We held the service in Balliol’s chapel.” He shifted on the bed. “Oh, and speaking of the chapel, I do hope you don’t mind, but I’ve given permission to Holy Re-Formed to use it for a handbell concert on the fifteenth. The American bellringers are going to perform Rimbaud’s “When At Last My Savior Cometh,” and Holy Re-Formed’s been requisitioned by the NHS as an immunization center. I do hope that’s all right.”

  “Yes,” Dunworthy said, thinking about Mary. He wondered when they had had the funeral, and if they had rung the bell afterwards.

  “I can tell them you’d rather they used St. Mary’s,” Finch said anxiously.

  “No, of course not,” Dunworthy said. “The chapel’s perfectly all right. You’ve obviously been doing a fine job in my absence.”

  “Well, I try, sir. It’s difficult, with Mrs. Gaddson.” He stood up. “I don’t want to keep you from your rest. If there’s anything I can bring you, anything I can do?”

  “No,” Dunworthy said, “there’s nothing you can do.”

  He started for the door and then stopped. “I hope you’ll accept my condolences, Mr. Dunworthy,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “I know how close you and Dr. Ahrens were.”

  Close, he thought after Finch was gone. I wasn’t close at all. He tried to remember Mary leaning over him, giving him his temp, looking up anxiously at the screens, to remember Colin standing by his bed in his new jacket and his muffler, saying, “Aunt Mary’s dead. Dead. Can’t you hear me?” but there was no memory there at all. Nothing.

  The sister came in and hooked up another drip that put him out, and when he woke he felt abruptly better.

  “It’s your T-cell enhancement taking hold,” William’s nurse told him. “We’ve been seeing it in a good number of cases. Some of them make miraculous recoveries.”

  She made him walk to the toilet, and, after lunch, down the corridor. “The farther you can go, the better,” she said, kneeling to put his slippers on.

  I’m not going anywhere, he thought. Gilchrist shut down the net.

  She strapped his drip bag to his shoulder, hooked the portable motor to it, and helped him on with his robe. “You mustn’t worry about the depression,” she said, helping him out of bed. “It’s a common symptom after influenza. It will fade as soon as your chemical balance is restored.”

  Sh
e walked him out into the corridor. “You might want to visit some of your friends,” she said. “There are two patients from Balliol in the ward at the end of the corridor. Ms. Piantini’s the fourth bed. She could do with a bit of cheering.”

  “Did Mr. Latimer—” he said, and stopped. “Is Mr. Latimer still a patient?”

  “Yes,” she said, and he could tell from her voice that Latimer hadn’t recovered from his stroke. “He’s two doors down.”

  He shuffled down the corridor to Latimer’s room. He hadn’t gone to see Latimer after he fell ill, first because of having to wait for Andrews’ call and then because the infirmary had run out of SPG’s. Mary had said he had suffered complete paralysis and loss of function.

  He pushed open the door to Latimer’s room. Latimer lay with his arms at his sides, the left one crooked slightly to accommodate the hookups and the drip. There were tubes in his nose and down his throat, and opfibers leading from his head and chest to the screens above the bed. His face was half-obscured by them, but he gave no sign that they bothered him.

  “Latimer?” he said, going to stand beside the bed.

  There was no indication he’d heard. His eyes were open, but they didn’t shift at the sound, and his face under the tangle of tubes didn’t change. He looked vague, distant, as if he were trying to remember a line from Chaucer.

  “Mr. Latimer,” he said more loudly, and looked up at the screens. They didn’t change either.

  He’s not aware of anything, Dunworthy thought. He put his hand on the back of the chair. “You don’t know anything that’s happened, do you?” he said. “Mary’s dead. Kivrin’s in 1348,” he said, watching the screens, “and you don’t even know. Gilchrist shut down the net.”

  The screens didn’t change. The lines continued to move steadily, unconcernedly across the displays.

  “You and Gilchrist sent her into the Black Death,” he shouted, “and you lie there—” He stopped and sank down in the chair.