Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  December 31 - Two of Dunworthy's flunkies met me in St John's Wood to tell me I was late for my exams. I did not even protest. I shuffled obediently after them without even considering how unfair it was to give an exam to one of the walking dead. I had not slept in -- how long? Since yesterday when I went to find Enola. I had not slept in a hundred years.

  Dunworthy was in the Examination Buildings, blinking at me. One of the flunkies handed me a test paper and the other one called time. I turned the paper over and left an oily smudge from the ointment on my burns. I stared uncomprehendingly at them. I had grabbed at the incendiary when I turned Langby over, but these burns were on the backs of my hands. The answer came to me suddenly in Langby's unyielding voice. "They're rope burns, you fool. Don't they teach you Nazi spies the proper way to come up a rope?"

  I looked down at the test. It read, "Number of incendiaries that fell on St Paul's_______ Number of land mines_______ Number of high explosive bombs_______ Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries_______ land mines_______ high explosive bombs_______ Number of volunteers on first watch_______ second watch_______ Casualties_______ Fatalities_______" The questions made no sense. There was only a short space, long enough for the writing of a number, after any of the questions. Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries. How would I ever fit what I knew into that narrow space? Where were the questions about Enola and Langby and the cat?

  I went up to Dunworthy's desk. "St Paul's almost burned down last night," I said. "What kind of questions are these?"

  "You should be answering questions, Mr Bartholomew, not asking them."

  "There aren't any questions about the people," I said. The outer casing of my anger began to melt.

  "Of course there," Dunworthy said, flipping to the second page of the test. "Number of casualties, 1940. Blast, shrapnel, other."

  "Other?" I said. At any moment the roof would collapse on me in a shower of plaster dust and fury. "Other? Langby put out a fire with his own body. Enola has a cold that keeps getting worse. The cat..." I snatched the paper back from him and scrawled "one cat" in the narrow space next to "blast". "Don't you care about them at all?"

  "They're important from a statistical point of view," he said, "but as individuals they are hardly relevant to the course of history."

  My reflexes were shot. It was amazing to me that Dunworthy's were almost as slow. I grazed the side of his jaw and knocked his glasses off. "Of course they're relevant!" I shouted. "They are the history, not all these bloody numbers!"

  The reflexes of the flunkies were very fast. They did not let me start another swing at him before they had me by both arms and were hauling me out of the room.

  "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.

  © Connie Willis 1982, 2003

  "Fire Watch" was first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Feb 1982, is reprinted in the collection Fire Watch (first published by St Martin's Press in 1985), and won the 1982 Nebula and 1983 Hugo awards for best novelette.

  Distress Call, by Connie Willis

  Caroline was not in the room. Amy could hear her crying somewhere down the hall. Her crying sounded louder, as though some other, all-pervading sound had suddenly ceased. “The engines have stopped,” Amy thought. “We are dead in the water. Something has happened,” she thought. “Something terrible.”

  She had gone to get Caroline, to get her out of this house, and Caroline had run from her, sobbing in terror. Had run from Amy, her own mother. She had found Caroline with the women, clinging onto their gray, drifting skirts. They had dressed her like themselves. “When did they do that?” Amy thought frightenedly. “I have let things go too far.”

  She had said firmly, so they wouldn’t know how frightened she was, “Get your things together, Caroline. We are going home.”

  “No!” Caroline had screamed, hiding behind their skirts. “I’m afraid. You’ll hurt me again.”

  “Hurt you?” Amy said, bewildered and then furious. “Hurt you? Who has been telling you that, that I would hurt you?” She reached angrily into the protective circle of the women for Caroline’s hand. “What have you been telling her?” she demanded.

  Debra stepped forward, graceful as a ghost in the drifting gray, and smiled at Amy. “She wanted to know why she got so sick at the picnic,” she had said.

  Amy had had to hold her hands stiffly against her body to keep from slapping Debra. “What did you tell her?” she had said, and Caroline had shot past her, out the door and down the hall to the parlor.

  Caroline had hidden under the big seance table in the parlor. Amy had gotten down on her knees and crawled toward her, but Caroline had backed away from her until she was almost hidden by the massive legs of the carved chair.

  Amy had crawled out from under the table so she would not frighten her, and squatted back on her heels, her arms extended to the six-year-old. Caroline stayed huddled behind the chair. “Come here, Caroline,” she had whispered, horrified that she should be reduced to having to say such a thing, “I won’t hurt you, honey.”

  Caroline shook her head, the tears still wet on her face. “You’ll poison me again,” she whispered. Amy could hardly hear her.

  “Poison?” Amy whispered. Caroline in her arms and dying, and then Jim, carrying her across the park to the house, she running after him, her heart pounding, running here because the police station was on the other side of the park and she was afraid Caroline would die before Jim got her there. Jim carrying her here, to this house, which was so much closer. To these people. Thinking hysterically as Ismay took Caroline’s limp body from Jim’s arms, “We should not have brought her here.”

  “Somebody poisoned you,” Amy said, and knew it was true. She was so shocked that for a long minute she was not able to say anything. She crossed her hands on her breast as if she had been wounded there and whispered, so quietly someone standing behind her could not have heard her, her lips moving in almost silent prayer, “I would never hurt you, Caroline. I love you.”

  * * * *

  The sound of Caroline’s crying was louder again, as though someone had opened a door. “I must go find Caroline,” she said aloud, and tried to keep that brave thought in her mind as she went out the open door toward the sound of the crying. But before she had come to the room where they had Caroline, she was saying over and over, like a prayer, “Something terrible has happened, something terrible has happened.”

  She stopped, standing in the open door, and looked back toward the parlor. The lamps in the hall wavered like candles and then steadied, dimmer than before. The hall was icy. “I should go back for my coat,” Amy thought. “It will be cold on deck.” And then the other thought, even colder, “I mustn’t go in there. Something terrible has happened in the parlor.”

  * * * *

  Ismay had taken her into the parlor to wait while the doctor saw Caroline. Amy had been standing at the foot of the wide stairs, clutching the newel post, trying not to think, “She’s going to die,” for fear she would know it was true.

  “Don’t give up hope,” one of the gray-haired women had said, patting Amy’s clenched hands as she went up the stairs with a blanket. She was d
ressed in the floating gray all the women, even the young one, wore. They had clustered like specters around Caroline’s limp body, and Amy had thought, “It’s some kind of cult. I shouldn’t have brought her here.” But the young one—Debra, Jim had called her—had gone immediately for the doctor. Debra had led the doctor up the stairs past Amy, saying, “The little girl collapsed in the park. They were having a picnic. Her father brought her here,” and she had sounded so normal, in spite of the drifting ghost’s dress, that Amy had begun to hope again.

  “Hope persists, doesn’t it?” someone said behind her. “Even with the most blatant evidence to the contrary.”

  “What do you mean?” Amy stammered. This was the man Jim had called Ismay. Debra and Ismay. How had he known their names?

  “Did you know,” he said, “it was nearly an hour before the passengers on the Titanic knew that she was sinking? Then they looked down at the lights still shining underneath the water on the lower decks and said, ‘How pretty! Do you think perhaps we should get into a lifeboat?’”

  Amy was very frightened at what this talk of sinking ships might mean, and she half-started up the stairs, but his hand closed over hers on the banister, and he said, “They won’t let you up there. The doctor’s still with her. And your husband.” He moved his hand to her arm and led her into the parlor.

  “Caroline’s dead,” she thought numbly, and looked unseeingly at the parlor.

  “The body is like a ship. It does not die all at once. It is struck by death, the fatal iceberg brushing past, but it does not sink for several hours. And all that time, the passengers wander the decks, sending out S.O.S.’s to rescue ships that never come. Have you ever seen a ghost?”

  “There were survivors on the Titanic,” Amy said, her heart pounding so hard it hurt. “Help came.”

  “Ah, yes,” Ismay said. “The Carpathia steamed boldly up at four in the morning. Captain Rostron stumbled about among the icebergs for nearly an hour, thinking he was in the wrong place. He was too late. She was already gone.”