The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  “We can come back in a while,” Dr. Trask said.

  Reluctantly Dr. Lash allowed himself to be drawn away in a trail of discourse. “During this initial adjustment period I think that slow progress is the ideal . . .” And mercifully they were gone.

  The books, the proper ones, were antiques. Everything about them proclaimed it, their smell of yellowy paper and dust, the alarming crack of their spines when Titus opened them, the flakes of brittle glue that sprinkled his pyjama lap. A film of fine greyish grime coated the top edges of the pages and came off on his fingers. How terrifying then, to see the photographs he remembered posing for only months ago! These men, that pony, those dogs: they weren’t old. How could they be, when the memory was so new? But the books belied him.

  And it was a jolt to glance at the text and realize that he was reading excerpts from Scott’s personal diary. The Owner was – had been – a meticulous diarist, but the volumes were of course private. Titus flushed with embarrassment, to thus pry into a comrade’s innermost thoughts. But here they were, all the juicy tidbits printed in a book, and an old one at that. Everything in them was common knowledge, public property for more than a century. Titus had kept journals himself, sent letters home, written to family and friends. He gulped, wondering now if they were printed here too. Figures of history have no privacy.

  But enough shilly-shallying! He paged rapidly through the book, skimming along the months and days. The journey to lay One-Ton Depot; daily life in the camp; the Polar trek; a photograph of Roald Amundsen and his team standing bareheaded before the Norwegian flag at the Pole. Titus glowered at it and turned the page. Towards the last he had lost track of the days, but Wilson or Scott would have kept good count.

  And here it was. Titus bent over the book, scarcely aware of the chilly floor or the crick in his neck. The end of the story at last: eleven miles short of the depot, Scott and Wilson and Bowers had frozen and starved to death. Titus exhaled a long silent breath. The unfairness of it, the waste! The print blurred as his eyes filled.

  This is history, he reminded himself. It’s over, long over, poor devils! But his heart refused to go along with it. Suddenly the coolness of the room seemed malevolent. He piled the pillows up at the head of the bed and sat against them, armoured in covers pulled up round his chest, to read – to dive into the books that held all that remained of his world.

  He devoured them, the different journals – the egotists, had every member of the expedition published his journal? – the scholarly analyses, the biography of Amundsen, the biographies of Scott. When he had read them all, he looked at them again and then yet again, chewing them over, extracting new meanings and significances.

  He noticed for instance that different meanings could be wrung out of the same set of events. Scott was praised as a hero and damned as an incompetent, his expedition the last flower of the golden Edwardian afternoon or the first tremor of a collapsing empire. And the theories of why the expedition failed! There were more candidates than he would have ever imagined: deteriorating washers in the fuel tins, crocked Manchurian ponies, Wilson’s poor medical supervision, Scott’s bad decisions, even – this made him wince – his own excessive endurance and bravery.

  But surely the eeriest experience of all was reading the account of his own death. Scott’s journal entry was quoted time and again. ‘Able and willing to discuss outside subjects’? Titus could recall nothing of it – perhaps he had muttered something about his yacht, in semi-delirium. Odd, but entirely characteristic of the Owner to find that admirable. And the paintings and memorial statuettes of himself! He turned past them, averting his eyes.

  Vaguely he was aware of Dr. Lash popping in and out, talking and asking questions, of the rattle of the food trolley as it came in and went out. Titus paid none of it any mind; focused with a ferocious concentration on the past. He only looked up when a slim pale hand laid itself flat on his page. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Titus, you’ve been slaving away for the entire day. Do you think you would care to quit for the night? Maybe have a meal? You have to take care of yourself – ”

  “Hell’s bells, man, must you hover? I’m perfectly fine!” Titus jumped to his feet and to his dismay fell head-foremost onto the food trolley. He didn’t quite faint, but the black buzzing in his eyes was curiously reminiscent of it. There was the hot oily splash of soup or gravy on his chest, a tremendous clatter of falling crockery, and over it Dr. Lash shouting for help.

  He came to himself in bed once more, clean and dry in fresh pyjamas, blue and white striped this time. The female doctors were there again, the plumper blonde holding his wrist while the tall dazzling brunette directed her mysterious tools at it. “Dr. – Gedeon, is it,” he murmured. “And Dr. – Dr. Trask.”

  “Oh, so you’re talking again,” Dr. Trask said. “And you remember our names, that’s a good sign.”

  Dr. Gedeon scowled at the little machine in her hand. “He read all day yesterday? Wonderful. Very clever of you, Kev.”

  “That’s unfair, Shell,” Dr. Lash said, tightlipped. “And the vid record will bear me out.”

  “He said he felt perfectly fine,” Dr. Trask said.

  “And Kev believed him. Yeah, right.” Dr. Gedeon folded up one tool and took out another. “A man whose chief claim to fame is that he committed suicide to save his team. You wouldn’t keep a Pomeranian kenneled up this way, never mind a man used to an active lifestyle – ”

  “I’m giving him the dignity of a rational being. You, night and day training with the Fortie team, wouldn’t realize – ”

  Titus lay back and let the quarrel roll over him. He didn’t grasp what the difficulty was, and didn’t much care. In the Army he had learned to hole up when the brass had a row. Instead he assessed his surroundings again. Vaguely he remembered that while he was reading the sunshine had crept across the window and faded, an entire day’s passage. And then a period of oblivion, and now the light streamed in through the glass again, a new day. Perhaps midmorning, judging from the angle of the light. The trolley stood near the bed, laden anew with covered dishes. It would be a great pity to let the meal get cold. He slid the nearest plate off the shelf onto his knees and seized a fork, suddenly famished. Would he ever get enough food again?

  Dr. Lash thumped the hospital bed rail with both hands. “All right, a walk then! But let’s try to keep the chronal displacement shock at a minimum, all right? Through the park, not the streets.”

  “Shell will go along, won’t you, Shell?” Dr. Trask’s brilliant blue gaze shifted to her associate. “You can fit him into your exercise routine.”

  Dr. Gedeon turned to Titus, who hastily gulped down his mouthful. “Be dressed and ready at 12:30,” she said. “And make them give you a pair of decent shoes. You can’t walk in slippers in New York – there are always jerks who don’t scoop after their dogs.”

  On that gnomic statement she swept out of the room. “I’d hoped to postpone this, Titus old man,” Dr. Lash said, shaking his head. “But the ladies, God bless ’em . . . At any rate, while we fit you up with some walking shoes, we can go over a couple of routines that may ease the chronal displacement for you.”

  “Don’t concern yourself,” Titus said. “How difficult could a walk be?”

  Dr. Trask sighed at this, folding up her shining tools.

  Titus’s cocky self-confidence only began to shake when he and Dr. Lash met Dr. Gedeon in the hall. She wore the most outre clothing he had ever seen on a female. Even the street beggars in Calcutta didn’t go about bare to above the knees. It was indecent, shocking – wrong! The only possible conclusion to draw was that the woman was a whore. If they allowed women to become doctors, surely it was not a very much further descent to let in whores? One respected doctors, but light-skirts were owed only contempt. Nothing in Shell’s demeanor seemed to allow disrespect, however. The contradictions inherent in the situation made him giddy. Suddenly Dr. Lash’s words, repeated over and over, sank in: “Don’t let it get to you
. All that stuff, it’s unimportant, nothing to do with you. Let it roll off your back, like water off a duck. Accept, nod, and move on . . .”

  Titus nodded at Dr. Gedeon and moved on. Dash it, there were more important things to do now. He would worry about bare knees later. Dr. Lash held the door to the stair for them. Titus followed Dr. Gedeon down and down, dozens of flights of echoing steel stairs quite empty except for themselves. “Does nobody else use this building?” he asked.

  Dr. Gedeon glanced back, surprised. “Most Paticalars use the elevator – oops, sorry, Kev!”

  Water off a duck, Titus said to himself. Nothing to do with me really. But he was unable to resist adding the new words to the list. Paticalar, elevator, plastic – he ought to start a notebook like the Polar scientists, and illustrate them with water-colour. “And ought I have a hat?”

  “A hat?” Both moderns looked so blank, Titus immediately saw that hats were dead out of fashion. In his day a gentleman rarely stepped out of doors without some sort of head covering, summer or winter. In fact he noticed now that the entire party was free of the impedimentia an Edwardian outing would entail – no gloves or walking sticks, muffs or card-cases, hats or topees, purses or parasols. For a moment it was almost discomposing, to have nothing to fill one’s hands. But then he thought of his walks as a child, when the grown-ups had to do all the carrying, and it was deliciously freeing instead.

  The stair ended at another door. Through, past a lobby beyond, and . . .

  Titus felt his mouth go dry. He had stepped into a street as strange as the far side of the moon. And so damn busy! Machines he couldn’t name whizzed past, big and small, making noises he had no word for. People surged round him, hatless indeed, dressed in colourful grotesque garb and doing or eating or saying things that he could not name. Were those little machines on their heads, or merely elaborate hairdos? Were those scars on the bare legs and arms, or paint, or some attenuated garment? Strange smells assailed his nose, tempting appetite, revolting, attracting in turn. Colour and light poured over him too quickly for comprehension. And the noise! Worse than the beggars in Cairo, worse than Covent Garden market. The wail and clatter and roar of the 21st century slapped him in the face and drove all rational thought from his head.

  He found he was clutching his companions, Dr. Lash on his left and Dr. Gedeon on his right, flank to flank as if they were breasting a mighty river in full flood. Somehow they passed together through the howling chaos to a haven, a refuge of calmness and green, and Titus became aware of Dr. Lash’s steady lecturing again. Apparently he had been talking all this while: “Don’t think about it. Ignore her. It’s all rolling off you. Has no effect, eh? Someday when you’re up to it you can easily figure it out. But now, today, you don’t have to . . .”

  “You know,” Titus mumbled.

  “Yes?”

  “You know, Lash, you can be bloody damn tiresome,” Titus said, all in a breath. His vision cleared. The object in front of him was blessedly familiar. “A tree! First one I’ve seen in – ” He halted, confused. Was it a year and a half, or a hundred and thirty?

  “You’re feeling better,” Dr. Lash noted.

  Titus nodded. The vertiginous sense of unreality seeped away fast as it had come. The vista before him now would have been familiar to a man of any era: rolling grassland studded with handsome clumps of trees. If one didn’t look beyond, at the clifflike buildings towering above the treeline, it was an environment Titus knew down in his bones. Carefully, he didn’t look. He drew a deep happy breath, eased from a constraint he had not recognized until now.

  Dr. Gedeon lifted what he realized was a small rucksack from her back – he had assumed her jacket was merely cut strangely. She took out two dumbbells, saying, “You want to set the pace, Kev?”

  “I’m not going far,” Dr. Lash said. “My asthma will start up if I push it.”

  “Let’s take the reservoir path then.” Dr. Gedeon clenched a weight in each small fist and began to walk briskly down the path. Titus and Dr. Lash followed.

  An almost frightening sense of wellbeing possessed Titus. He had not felt so fit, so confident, so brimful of vigour, in ages. The dear old sun shone behind leaves as cleanly cut as paper, and birds sang with enthusiasm. A breeze blew cool and damp from the reservoir below, freighted with a slight scummy smell. Titus inhaled it like incense. He stretched his legs, striding out with long steps. Surely it would be possible to live in just the familiar bits of this new era, comforting and safe areas like this park?

  Dr. Gedeon grinned at him when he caught her up, her teeth very white in her tanned face. “Great, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” Carefully he did not look down past her face. She had accurately pinpointed the medicine he needed. Perhaps she wasn’t a bogus sawbones after all.

  “Hold up, you two,” Dr. Lash called. He had fallen far behind, wheezing.

  Dr. Gedeon reversed course immediately. “Did you bring your inhaler?”

  “Of course.” Dr. Lash appeared to be sniffing medicine from a large white tube. Concerned, Titus watched him closely. The dose did seem to help.

  Dr. Gedeon said, “You’d better go straight back to the office and take an antihistamine. Shall we come back with you?”

  “No, don’t bother,” Dr. Lash said. “I’ll be fine. This happens all the time,” he added to Titus.

  “It shouldn’t,” Dr. Gedeon said. “You should have your condition assessed by a qualified allergist. Asthma can be a killer.”

  Asthma, Titus mused – another new word. Dr. Lash brushed her concerns aside. “Keep a close eye on Titus,” he said. “Once only around the park, and then come straight back. This is his first experience, remember.”

  “A walk round the park?” Titus snorted. “Don’t make me laugh, Lash.”

  “I’ll take good care of him,” Dr. Gedeon said. “Now off you go.”

  Only when Lash was out of sight did Titus realize how confining his fuss and mother-hen admonitions had been. Dr. Gedeon, a real medico and female to boot, had a more robust outlook, more to Titus’s taste. “I think we should run,” he said. “Fast.”

  “All right. Race you to that bench!”

  And she was off, surprisingly speedy in spite of a womanish rocking-horse gait that would have made a pony blush. How delightful it was to use the limbs like this! Titus made his best effort, trying to use his greater length of leg to advantage, but she beat him handily. Carrying a weight handicap, too! He felt only a moment of obscure outrage before laughter overtook him. “Bravo!”

  She laughed too. “Not a real contest, against a disabled vet.”

  “Ludicrous. The leg wound hasn’t bothered me in years.”

  “Not till recently.”

  He stared in astonishment – how could anyone know that? He had hidden the disintegrating scar even from Scott and Wilson until the very end. And he knew from the books that Scott, the last expedition member to keep records, had not mentioned it. She went on, “I watched Sabrina glue you back together again, remember? One of the symptoms of scurvy is old wounds breaking out again.”

  “Whatever she did patched it up fine. I couldn’t even find the scar.”

  “She’s a whiz. It was worth all the cloning work, to see you trying out your leg, and feeling your toes for the first time.”

  “You saw me? But, but I was alone in my room.”

  She grimaced. “Titus, you’re unique and valuable – the first and possibly last man to travel through time. And not only that – you are a patient. We’ve been monitoring you all during your recovery. You have never been alone or unobserved since you arrived.”

  He remembered the shiny metal tools, the gleaming examination table cleaner than anything he had ever seen. “How long have I been here?”

  “You traveled to the modern era a year and a half ago.”

  He stared at the trees, trying to take her words in. For eighteen months he had been clay on the wheel, dough under the rolling pin – a chunk of inert material upon whi
ch skilled hands worked. It was a sodding liberty! And surely he could not have spent all that time flat on his back in a hospital bed. He had done that in 1901, and knew well how one’s legs became weak as string and the muscles wasted away for want of use. Now his legs were a little shaky and his skin unusually pale, but otherwise he was himself, in good working order. They must have been exercising his limbs, working and testing and using his body in ways he couldn’t conceive of, with all the conscious consent one would get from the clockwork goatherd in a Swiss cuckoo clock. Returning him to consciousness the day before yesterday was only the capstone of a major project – it was obvious in retrospect that his first short encounter with the 21st century, swearing on the shiny-clean table, had been unplanned. He wondered how many people were employed on the task. The thought of unseen eyes spying on him day and night made his spine crawl. “Are they watching us now?”

  “Here in the park? Well, I’m in charge, watching you, but that’s all. C’-mon, Titus, don’t let it worry you. There’s a lot for you to get used to. Here.” She took water bottles from her rucksack and, opening one, passed it over.

  He drank, hefting the weird feather-weight container. “Plastic?”

  She smiled. “You’re a sharp one.” He felt absurdly chuffed at this praise from a modern.

  They walked on at a slower pace. The path was narrow here, crowded closer to the tall wrought-iron palings of the park fence by trees and brush. Beyond the palings was a city street. It was a quieter one, without the surging crowds and thundering vehicular traffic near the first building, but still Titus felt like a lion safe behind the zoo bars. “Are those commercial buildings?”

  “Those tall ones over there, you mean? Oh, no – co-ops, I think. Damn! What I mean is, they’re residences. People live there.” He knew his face was blank with ignorance, because she waved her hands in rhythm with her stride, trying to explain. “I mean separately, not all together. Condos. Cells. Divisions.” She groped for more synonyms.

  The penny dropped. “You mean, it’s a block of flats.”