Tales from the Vatican Vaults: 28 extraordinary stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Garry Kilworth, Mary Gentle, KJ Parker, Storm Constantine and many more

by David V. Barrett

  ‘Don’t you recognise my voice?’

  ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve heard any voices.’ I laughed. ‘From outside my head, at least.’

  I heard a small splash as his oars dropped into the water, and a moment later he was alongside me. He was wearing a cowl, as if he were Death coming to call, but he threw it back, shook out his hair, and turned to look at me with a grin.

  ‘Benny!’ I cried. ‘How in the name of damnation did you get here? And how the devil did you find me? I thought I’d managed to lose myself completely.’

  I reached out across the gap between the two boats and we clumsily shook hands.

  ‘Is there somewhere we might go?’ said Benny. ‘You must have a home, surely? I’m freezing. And hungry. And I could do with a drink.’

  I pointed back over my shoulder with a thumb. ‘Follow me,’ I said.

  *

  One day all the buildings will surely come a-tumbling down, as the waters rot their foundations and the soil into which they were moored turns to clay and then mud and then not even that. But for now the upper storeys are often habitable. Mould is rampant, of course; there’s no electricity, and water has to be brought up from the street and distilled. But the city, even after all this time, is full of food and other essentials, ripe for the scavenging. If you don’t mind cooking on camping stoves and the fact that everything you eat comes out of a can or a jar that’s about a quarter of a century past its sell-by date, you can feast like a king. Well, sort of. At least you can wash the food down with a single-malt Scotch or a vintage Beaujolais. After spending so long in the bottle the wines are a bit hit-or-miss – you have to open a few before you find one that’s drinkable – but the Scotches usually taste just fine.

  Once I’d got the candles lit I put a stiff Glenlivet in Benny’s hand and sat him down in my best armchair, then sorted among my least-rusty cans. ‘A nice chicken casserole? Ravioli?’

  ‘Whatever you’re eating,’ he said drily, looking around him, the glass at his lips. ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing. Tell me why you ran away.’

  I opted for the ravioli. He’d said he was hungry and I had three cans of it. ‘Do you really want the answers or do you know them already?’

  ‘Some of them,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have guessed why I came here.’

  ‘To hide from people like me,’ he said. ‘Your old friends.’

  I nodded. ‘And I still don’t know how you found me.’

  ‘The Lord knows all . . .’ he began solemnly.

  We both laughed.

  ‘Seriously, Kenneth, New Vatican does know just about everything there is to know. It took me a lot of time and effort to track you down, but there was never really any doubt I’d be able to do so.’

  I’d known that, of course. ‘But why make the effort? Why bother?’

  ‘Because of Helen.’

  Suddenly I seemed to have very little breath. ‘So you do know why I fled.’

  ‘Yes and no.’ He got to his feet. ‘I could do with some more of this fine whisky, if you have any to spare.’ I passed him the bottle. ‘I know how the two of you felt about each other – it was obvious to everyone. But it’s a mystery even to the all-seeing eye of New Vatican – that’s me – what went wrong between you.’

  I chuckled, the way one does to keep pain at arm’s length. ‘I’m not sure I know, either. She was frightened of losing her identity, I think. We’d both been in too many different times, been too many different people. You’ve seen it yourself, how travellers can crack up from it: they’ve had so many personalities their psyches collapse and they’re left with no personality at all. You look for recruits who’re as self-sufficient as you can find them, but still your failure rate is high. Helen and I were among the lucky few. Yet . . . well, letting yourself love and be loved is an existential threat. She feared letting anyone have too much of her in case it’d be the final stress that shattered her inner self.’

  ‘So she made you back off.’

  ‘Yes. And that was more than I could bear. So I fled here to the early twenty-second. There’s no structure left, no records, hardly any communications. Who could find me here?’

  He smiled. ‘Well, we could. Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I agreed, putting plates out on the table. ‘Eat up. And tell me why you thought the search would be worth it.’

  *

  With the world having largely fallen apart by the middle of the twenty-first, and Fortusa,* among the worst afflicted nations of all, having hidden itself behind the Shield, the more liberal tatters of the Roman Catholic Church in Fortusa gravitated toward the small community of Vatican, Louisiana, and tried to establish a new structure there – not in rivalry to the Holy See but as a temporary adjunct. Although contact with the outside world was difficult, and fraught with danger for all concerned, news trickled through eventually that the Pope in Rome was not displeased. Even had he been, there wasn’t much he could have done about it. There were various centres around the world where civilisation had clung on, but southern Europe wasn’t one of them. The great Mediterranean Renaissance was still a couple of centuries away; by the time it dawned, the Roman Catholic Church, as originally constituted, would be no more. When the Fortusan Shield came down, at about the same time, the survivor of Catholicism in the world would be the Church centred on Vatican, Louisiana: New Vatican.

  But it was no longer really a Church, not in any sense of the word that would have been understood in previous eras. In a backlash against the savage Christian fundamentalism that had ravaged Fortusa during the Shield years, New Vatican had become less and less engaged with religion – even, indeed, with God. Instead it had come to devote most of its energies to the study and preservation of knowledge. It had been the Church, after all, that was credited with keeping the flame of scholarship alive during the long Dark Age between the fifth and tenth centuries. Surely its divine mission during this even more barbaric repetition of history was to do the same. And it could feed people, try to defend the persecuted, save lives. Indisputably, this was God’s will. God could do without His Church for a time while it rescued people’s bodies and minds rather than necessarily their souls. He preferred to do without His Church for a time.

  In the end, it seemed, He forfeited it entirely.

  The Shield came down. Civilisation began to rebuild, even in Fortusa. Humankind’s world would likely never be the same again, but at least it was becoming livable.

  Among the pieces of knowledge preserved at New Vatican was the technology of time travel to the past. This had been developed during the Fortusan period, but was so abused by the Empire that eventually the people of a distant future had intervened. The priests were able to use the inherited technology to study the past. They couldn’t do so very often, because the procedure required extraordinary use of energy and was phenomenally expensive; the Fortusan economy was, after all, still stumbling towards a recovery. Besides, the combination of characteristics required for someone to have much chance of survival was rare: the toughness of mind, the lack of impressionability, the linguistic flair, the ability to function in environments whose entire structure could collapse at any moment. Another important trait was shortness. Go back a couple of centuries and you’ll find just about everyone’s a lot smaller than you are, unless you yourself happen to be quite small by modern standards.

  New Vatican’s historical researches were difficult, yes.

  But not impossible.

  And it was only natural that the Dark Age – the original – should eventually become a focus of the priests’ attention. With sufficient knowledge of what had given rise to it and sustained it, perhaps another repetition of complete societal collapse could be avoided . . .

  *

  ‘But then the problems arose,’ said Benny. ‘You must have known something of them before your . . . disappearance.’

  I nodded. There’s always a certain casualty rate among travell
ers. It’s not high enough to lose sleep over, but it’s definitely non-negligible. The Dark Age expeditions, however, seemed to represent a new hazard. They were the farthest anyone had ever tried to go into the past, but in theory that shouldn’t have been a problem. Even so, by the time my pain over Helen’s rejection had become too great to bear and I deserted the twenty-fifth for the twenty-second, four travellers had been sent to the period and none had returned. Either there was a threat there that we didn’t know about, or the era was far more dangerous than any historian had ever guessed, or . . .

  ‘Or Heaven came to Earth for six hundred years or so,’ Benny said, topping up his glass, ‘and then we suffered a second fall from grace.’

  ‘You don’t really believe that, do you?’

  ‘No.’ He sighed.

  For some minutes we were both silent, watching the flicker of the candles. Who was it who said that knowledge and science and culture are just a solitary flame in the night, vulnerable to any barbarian who wants to blow it out?

  ‘You didn’t come here just to bring me up to date on the project?’ I said eventually.

  He started in his chair, as if I’d woken him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

  I waited.

  He let out a long sigh. ‘You were one of the best, Kenneth, maybe the best of all the travellers. When I can’t get to sleep and my insecurities start trying to come home to roost, I drive them away by remembering that I was the one who found you, who taught you, who groomed you, who made you what you are.’ He smiled grimly. ‘Were. That’s the trouble. Then I remember how you packed it all in, and my self-doubts come flocking back to torment me.’

  ‘Insomnia’s a terrible thing,’ I said blandly.

  ‘So are nightmares. You travellers usually have plenty of them, having seen what you’ve seen.’

  ‘One hardens,’ I said, shrugging. I still sometimes wake in a sweat over the Elizabethan execution I witnessed, or what I saw during my time on an antebellum Southern plantation. Auschwitz. Other things. But it was none of Benny’s business that I did.

  ‘You’re not just one of the best,’ he continued. ‘You’ve made yourself expendable. We’ve already lost you. Training a traveller is a huge investment. Like all investments, they sometimes go bad. You’re one of the investments that went bad, for us. We’ve marked you off on the books. So if we lose you again it won’t make any difference. You’re an asset of no value any longer, so far as the bean counters are concerned. They won’t let me risk another of my current travellers – another of their investments. But’ – he spread his hands expressively – ‘they wouldn’t give a damn if I risked you.’

  ‘What makes you think I’m willing to be risked?’ I looked around the cozy room. The wind was building up now, as it always does at nights here, preparing for the howl it sustains from midnight ’til dawn. But I had warmth, food, drink – even, for once, human company. The sanitary arrangements were a bit primitive, true, but that was a small detraction. ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Helen,’ said Benny.

  ‘Helen’s my past. Well, my future, I suppose. But for me she’s the past. I’ve moved on.’

  ‘You say.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘We don’t know where she is. When she is.’

  ‘Neither do I. I can live with that.’ But I was beginning to guess where he was heading. ‘Which century?’ I added before he had a chance to speak.

  ‘Why do you think I’m here?’ He stared at me. ‘She’s at the end of the eighth, beginning of the ninth.’

  ‘Charlemagne,’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  It all made sense. New Vatican would want to probe the Dark Age. Helen had always been fascinated by Charlemagne, the Frankish king and conqueror who created the greatest empire in Europe since Roman times. As with the petty British king called Arthur, it was hard to distinguish truth from legend – or so I thought. Helen had read all the histories and the legends too. Her eyes lit up at the mention of her hero’s name. I used to tease her that she was more in love with this man she hadn’t even seen than ever she was with me, and sometimes my teasing didn’t seem entirely a joke. If Benny had offered her the chance to go to Charlemagne’s era she’d have jumped at the opportunity, whatever the dangers and uncertainties.

  ‘And you’ve lost her?’ I said.

  ‘She hasn’t come back.’

  ‘And you think I’m the useful idiot who’ll volunteer to go after her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I let out a long, slow breath. ‘You’re right, of course.’

  ‘I know,’ said Benny, as if the issue had never been in doubt. ‘Shall we go now?’

  ‘No better time,’ I said. ‘I’ve nothing here that I need to take with me. Except maybe a couple of bottles of the Glenlivet.’

  ‘A couple for each of us, I think.’ Then his grin faded. ‘What about your portal?’

  ‘I destroyed it as soon as I got here.’

  He gave a low whistle. ‘My, you really did want to make sure you stayed lost, didn’t you?’

  His question wasn’t trivial. Portals can be finicky and sometimes they just crash, but physically they’re virtually indestructible.

  A portal may be small enough to stick in a pocket, but making one is inordinately difficult, involving physics that’s not entirely based in our universe. (I don’t understand this, but it’s what the techies have told me.) And, though portals are astonishing in their capabilities – the Emperor used to send whole armies through them to ransack the past – they don’t last forever. Add in the problems of calibrating the devices for both temporal and spatial location: not much use arriving in the right year if you’re floating between the stars because the solar system has moved in the interim.

  ‘I raided a chemistry lab,’ I said. A couple of months in a vat of concentrated nitric acid did the trick. I assume there’s nothing at all left of it by now. It’s been a while since I went back to check.’

  ‘Why make so much effort?’

  ‘Helen, of course.’

  ‘You doubted your own resolve?’

  ‘Yes. I thought that one day I might wake up and think it was worth going back to the twenty-fifth to try to change her mind. Rather than get myself hurt even worse, I decided to forestall my own stupidity.’

  Benny dismissed the issue with a movement of his hand. ‘It’s no matter. We can use mine.’

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the portal. I’d almost forgotten how small portals are. There’s a whole lot of the cleverest technology in human history packed into a device that’s barely larger than a man’s palm and only a few millimetres thick.

  ‘Don’t forget the whisky,’ he told me.

  *

  Love isn’t easy between two travellers. You spend long periods separated not just by distance but by centuries. And if you’re spending a year or three in the field, living among the people of the past, you naturally tend to form attachments there. In some cases you have no choice: some societies look askance at single people. I’ve had four wives in wildly different eras, and each of them I’ve loved – if not with my whole heart then at least with much of it. There are still nights when I find myself dreaming of one or other of them. There’s guilt in me, too – guilt over the pain I must have caused them when I vanished inexplicably from their lives. Those acts of desertion likewise can trouble my dreams.

  So liaisons between travellers tend to be short-term, matters of convenience rather than anything more. The first time I hooked up with Helen – it was in a New Vatican bar, so very romantic – I thought of her as just a pretty woman who might, if I were lucky, be looking for a fling. By the time the evening ended, though, after we’d talked for hours about how the skies are so much clearer in the past, about how birdsong in the twenty-fifth is so much more subdued than in the seventeenth, about a whole host of other subjects . . . as we came out of that bar into night air that’s never cold any longer, never crisp, I knew I was smitten. There’s an old my
th that each of us is only half of a complete person; one of our tasks in life is to find our counterpart and thereby make ourselves whole. That’s what I felt I’d achieved as we walked hand in hand down the quiet streets to my house.

  We both knew the difficulties facing us. We were going to have to solve those difficulties somehow, make our love work.

  Except, in the end, we didn’t.

  *

  Benny and I arrived in a sterilised room and immediately stripped, putting our clothes into a chute that led directly to a furnace. Carrying the whisky bottles, we went through a decontamination procedure with chemical sprays and radiation that left us feeling nauseous; we both knew we’d be sick as dogs for a few hours. It was the routine as usual – but a routine I’d never thought I’d experience again. Decontam’s essential, of course, because who knew how many twenty-second-century bugs we might be carrying that could prove devastating to the people of the twenty-fifth? The same goes the other way round. Immediately prior to departure to the past, travellers go through this same decontam ritual for fear of causing plagues. If ever you witness someone pop into existence out of nowhere and they’re green in the face and puking, that’s likely someone arriving from the future.

  Under the Empire, the rules weren’t as stringent. Where do you think the Black Death came from?

  After Benny and I had the worst of the retching under control, we dressed in white smocks and headed for his office. Once there, he threw himself down behind his desk. A holo display flashed all the colours of urgent, but he batted an angry hand through it and it disappeared.

  He spoke without preamble. ‘We sent Helen to the year 800, more or less in the middle of the Dark Age.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘She suggested Rome.’

  ‘Yes.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘The Pope crowned Charlemagne there that year.’

  ‘Of course. I’m surprised you knew.’