Down in The Bottomlands (and Other Places)

by Harry Turtledove

  King Oswiu went out, avoiding the reproachful look that the Abbot sent after him. It was a dirty trick on Colman, who was a very decent chap. But after all, it wouldn’t do to antagonize the heavenly doorman. And maybe now Eanfled would stop nagging him…

  Allister Park rubbed his eyes and sat up in bed, as he usually did. He noticed nothing wrong until he looked at the sleeve of his pajamas.

  He could not recall ever having had a pair of pajamas of that singularly repulsive green. He couldn’t recall having changed to clean pajamas the night before. In short, he couldn’t account for these pajamas at all.

  Oh, well, probably, Eunice or Mary had given them to him, and he’d put them on without thinking. He yawned, brushing his mouth with the back of his hand.

  He jerked his hand away. Then he cautiously felt his upper lip.

  He got out of bed and made for the nearest mirror. There was no doubt about it. He had a mustache. He had not had a mustache when he went to bed the night before.

  ’Abd-ar-Rahman, Governor of Cordoba for the Khalifah Hisham ibn ’Abd-al-Malik, Lord of Damascus, Protector of the Faithful, etc., etc., paced his tent like a caged leopard with claustrophobia. He hated inactivity, and to him the last six days of tentative skirmishing had been just that.

  He glowered over his pepper-and-salt beard at his chiefs, sitting cross-legged in an ellipse on the rugs. “Well?” he barked.

  Yezid spoke up. “But a little longer, Commander-in-Chief, and the Franks will melt away. The infidels have little cavalry, save Gothic and Aquitanian refugees. Without cavalry, they cannot keep themselves fed. Our horse can range the country, supplying us and cutting off help from our enemies. There is no God but God.”

  Ya’qub snorted. “How long do you think our men will abide this fearful Frankish climate? The winter is almost upon us. I say strike now, while their spirits are still up. This rabble of Frankish farmers on foot will show some rare running. Have the armies of the Faithful come this far by sitting in front of their enemies and making grimaces at them?”

  Yezid delivered an impressive snort of his own. “Just the advice one would expect from a dog of a Ma’adite. This Karel, who commands the infidels, is no fool- ”

  “Who’s a dog?” yelped Ya’qub, jumping up. “Pig of a Yemenite- ”

  ’Abd-ar-Rahman yelled at them until they subsided. One major idea of this foray into Francia was to bury the animosity between members of the two parties. Yezid’s starting a quarrel on political grounds put the Governor in an embarrassing position, as he was a Yemenite himself. He was still undecided. An intelligent man, he could see the sense to Yezid’s Fabian advice. Emotionally, however, he burned to get to grips with the army of Charles, Mayor of Austrasia. And Yezid should be punished for his insulting remark.

  “I have decided,” said ’Abd-ar-Rahman, “that, while there is much to be said on both sides, Ya’qub’s advice is the sounder. Nothing hurts an army’s spirit like waiting. Besides, God has planned the outcome of the battle anyway. So why should we fear? If He decides that we shall win, we shall win.

  “Therefore tomorrow, Saturday, we shall strike the Franks with all our force. God is God, and Mohammed is His prophet…”

  But the next night ’Abd-ar-Rahman lay dead by the banks of the River Vienne, near Tours, with his handsome face waxy in the starlight and blood in his pepper-and-salt beard. The Austrasian line had held. Yezid, who had been right, was dead likewise, and so was Ya’qub, who had been wrong. And the surviving Arabs were fleeing back to Narbonne and Barcelona.

  Allister Park opened the door of his apartment and grabbed up his Times. Sure enough, the date was Monday April 11th, just as it ought to have been. The year was right, too. That ruled out the possibility of amnesia.

  He went back to the mirror. He was still a slightly stout man in his middle thirties, with pale-blue eyes and thinning sandy hair. But he wasn’t the same man. The nose was different. So were the eyebrows. The scar under the chin was gone…

  He gave up his self-inspection and got out his clothes. At that juncture he got another shock. The clothes weren’t his. Or rather, they were clothes for a man of his size, and of the quality that a self-indulgent bachelor with an income of $12,000 a year would buy. Park didn’t object to the clothes. It was just that they weren’t his clothes.

  Park gave up speculation about his sanity for the nonce; he had to get dressed. Breakfast? He was sick of the more cardboard-like cereals. To hell with it; he’d make himself some French toast. If it put another inch on his middle, he’d sweat it off Sunday at the New York Athletic Club.

  The mail was thrust under his door. He finished knotting his necktie and picked it up. The letters were all addressed to a Mr. Arthur Vogel.

  Then Allister Park, really awake, did look around. The apartment was built on the same plan as his own, but it wasn’t the same. The furniture was different. Lots of little things were different, such as a nick in the wall that shouldn’t be there.

  Park sat down and smoked a cigarette while he thought. There was no evidence of kidnapping, which, considering his business, was not too unlikely a possibility. He’d gone to bed Sunday night sober, alone, and reasonably early. Why should he wake up in another man’s apartment? He forgot for the moment that he had also awakened with another man’s face. Before he had time to remember it, the sight of the clock jostled him into action. No time for French toast — it would have to be semi — edible cardboard after all.

  But the real shock awaited him when he looked for his briefcase. There was none. Neither was there any sign of the sheaf of notes he had so carefully drawn up on the conduct of the forthcoming Antonini case. That was more than important. On his convicting the Antonini gang depended his nomination for District Attorney for the County of New York next fall. The present DA was due to get the bipartisan nomination to the Court of General Sessions at the same time.

  He was planning, with thoroughly dishonorable motives, to invite Martha up for dinner. But he didn’t want to have dinner with her until he’d cleared this matter up. The only trouble with calling her up was that the address book didn’t have her name in it — or indeed the name of anybody Park had ever heard of. Neither was she listed in the phone book.

  He dialed CAnal 6-5700. Somebody said: “Department of Hospitals.”

  “Huh? Isn’t this CAnal 6-5700?”

  “Yes, this is the Department of Hospitals.”

  “Well what’s the District Attorney’s office then?” Hell, I ought to know my own office phone.

  “The District Attorney’s office is WOrth 2-2200.”

  Park groggily called WOrth 2-2200. “Mr. Park’s office, please.”

  “What office did you ask for, please?”

  “The office of Assistant District Attorney Park!” Park’s voice took on the metallic rasp. “Racket Bureau to you, sister.”

  “I’m sorry, we have no such person.”

  “Listen, young lady, have you got a Deputy Assistant DA named Frenczko? John Frenczko? You spell it with a z.”

  Silence. “No, I’m sorry, we have no such person.”

  Allister Park hung up.

  The old building at 137 Center was still there. The Racket Bureau was still there. But they had never heard of Allister Park. They already had an Assistant DA of their own, a man named Hutchison, with whom they seemed quite well satisfied. There was no sign of Park’s two deputies, Frenczko and Burt.

  As a last hope, Park went over to the Criminal Courts Building. If he wasn’t utterly mad, the case of People v. Cassidy, extortion, ought to come up as soon after ten as it would take Judge Segal to read his calendar. Frenczko and Burt would be in there, after Cassidy’s hide.

  But there was no Judge Segal, no Frenczko, no Burt, no Cassidy…

  * * *

  “Very interesting, Mr. Park,” soothed the psychiatrist. “Very interesting indeed. The most hopeful feature is that you quite realize your difficulty, and come to me now-”

  “What I want to know,” int
errupted Park, “is: was I sane up to yesterday, and crazy since then, or was I crazy up to then and sane now?”

  “It seems hard to believe that one could suffer from a coherent set of illusions for thirty-six years,” replied the psychiatrist. “Yet your present account of your perceptions seems rational enough. Perhaps your memory of what you saw and experienced today is at fault.”

  “But I want to get straightened out! My whole political future depends on it! At least-” he stopped. Was there such an Antonini gang? Was there a nomination awaiting an Allister Park if they were convicted?

  “I know,” said the psychiatrist gently. “But this case isn’t like any I ever heard of. You go ahead and wire Denver for Allister Park’s birth certificate. We’ll see if there is such a person. Then come back tomorrow…”

  Park awoke, looked around, and groaned. The room had changed again. But he choked off his groan. He was occupying a twin bed. In its mate lay a fair-to-middling handsome woman of about his own age.

  His groan had roused her. She asked: “How are you feeling, Wally?”

  “I’m feeling fine,” he mumbled. The significance of his position was soaking in. He had some trouble suppressing another groan. About marriage, he was an adherent of the why-buy-a-cow philosophy, as he had had occasion to make clear to many women by way of fair warning.

  “I hope you are,” said the woman anxiously. “You acted so queer yesterday. Do you remember your appointment with Dr. Kerr?”

  “I certainly do,” said Park. Kerr was not the name of the psychiatrist with whom he had made the appointment. The woman prepared to dress. Park gulped a little. For years he’d managed to get along without being mixed up with other men’s wives, ever since…

  And he wished he knew her name. A well-mannered man, under those circumstances, wouldn’t refer to the woman as “Hey, you.”

  “What are we having for breakfast, sweetie-pie?” he asked with a sickly grin. She told him, adding: “You never called me that before, dear.” When she started toward him with an expectant smile, he jumped out of bed and dressed with frantic haste.

  He ate silently. When the woman inquired why, he pointed to his mouth and mumbled: “Canker sore. It hurts to talk.”

  He fled as soon as he decently could, without learning his “wife’s” name. His wallet told him his name was Wallace Heineman, but little else about himself. If he wanted to badly enough, he could no doubt find out whom he worked for, who his friends were, which if any bank he had money in, etc. But if these daily changes were going to continue, it hardly seemed worthwhile. The first thing was to get back to that psychiatrist.

  Although the numbers of the streets were different, the general layout was the same. Half an hour’s walking brought him to the block where the psychiatrist’s office had been. The building had been on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh and Eighth. Park could have sworn the building that now occupied that site was different.

  However, he went up anyway. He had made a careful note of the office number. His notebook had been missing that morning, like all the rest of his (or rather Arthur Vogel’s) things. Still, he remembered the number.

  The number turned out to be that of a suite of offices occupied by Williamson, Ostendorff, Cohen, Burke, and Williamson, Attorneys. No, they had never heard of Park’s brain-man. Yes, Williamson, Ostendorff, Cohen, Burke, and Williamson had occupied those offices for years.

  Park came out into the street and stood a long time, thinking. A phenomenon that he had hitherto noticed only vaguely now puzzled him: the extraordinary number of Union Jacks in sight.

  He asked the traffic cop about it. The cop looked at him. “King’s buithday,” he said.

  “What king?”

  “Why, our king of course. David the Fuist.” The cop touched his finger to the peak of his cap.

  Park settled himself on a park bench with a newspaper. The paper was full of things like references to the recent Anglo-Russian war, the launching of the Queen Victoria, His Majesty’s visit to a soap factory (“Where he displayed a keen interest in the technical problems involved in…”), the victory of Massachusetts over Quebec in the Inter-Colonial football matches (Massachusetts a colony? And football in April?), the trial of one Diedrichs for murdering a man with a cross-cut saw…

  All this was very interesting, especially the Diedrichs case. But Allister Park was more concerned with the whereabouts and probable fate of the Antonini gang. He also thought with gentle melancholy of Mary and Eunice and Dorothy and Martha and Joan and… But that was less important than the beautiful case he had dug up against such a slimy set of public enemies. Even Park, despite the cynical view of humanity that public prosecutors get, had felt a righteous glow when he tallied up the evidence and knew he had them.

  And the nomination was not to be sneezed at either. It just happened that he was available when it was a Protestant’s turn at that nomination. If he missed out, he’d have to wait while a Catholic and a Jew took theirs. Since you had to be one or the other to get nominated at all, Park had become perforce a church member and regular if slightly hypocritical goer.

  His plan was, after a few terms as DA, to follow the incumbent DA onto the bench. You would never have guessed it, but inside Allister Park lingered enough of the idealism that as a young lawyer he had brought from Colorado to give the bench an attractiveness not entirely comprised of salary and social position.

  He looked in his pockets. There was enough there for one good bender.

  Of the rest of the day, he never could remember much afterwards. He did remember giving a pound note to an old woman selling shoelaces, leading a group of drunks in a song about one Columbo who knew the world was round-o (unexpurgated), and trying to take a fireman’s hose away from him on the ground that the city was having a water shortage.

  He awoke in another strange room, without a trace of a hangover. A quick look around assured him that he was alone.

  It was time, he thought, that he worked out a system for the investigation of his identity on each successive morning. He learned that his name was Wadsworth Noe. The pants of all the suits in his closet were baggy knee — pants, plus fours.

  Something was going ping, ping, ping, like one of those tactful alarm clocks. Park located the source of the noise in a goose-necked gadget on the table, which he finally identified as a telephone. As the transmitter and receiver were built into a single unit on the end of the gooseneck, there was nothing to lift off the hook. He pressed a button in the base. A voice spoke: “Waddy?”

  “Oh-yeah. Who’s this?”

  “This is your little bunnykins.”

  Park swore under his breath. The voice sounded female and young; and had a slight indefinable accent. He stalled:

  “How are you this morning?”

  “Oh, I’m fine. How’s my little butterball?”

  Park winced. Wadsworth Noe had a figure even more portly than Allister Park’s. Park, with effort, infused syrup into his voice: “Oh, I’m fine too, sweetie-pie. Only I’m lonesome as all hell.”

  “Oh, isn’t that too bad! Oo poor little thing! Shall I come up and cook dinner for my precious?”

  “I’d love it.” A plan was forming in Park’s mind. Hitherto all these changes had taken place while he was asleep. If he could get somebody to sit around and watch him while he stayed up…

  The date was made. Park found he’d have to market.

  On the street, aside from the fact that all the men wore plus fours and wide-brimmed hats, the first thing that struck him was the sight of two dark men in uniform. They walked in step down the middle of the sidewalk. Their walk implied that they expected people to get out of their way. People got. As the soldiers passed him, Park caught a sentence in a foreign language, sounding like Spanish.

  At the market everyone spoke with that accent Park had heard over the phone. They fell silent when another pair of soldiers entered. These loudly demanded certain articles of food. A clerk scurried around and got the order. The soldiers
took the things and departed without paying.

  Park thought of going to a library to learn about the world he was in. But if he were going to shift again, it would hardly be worthwhile. He bought a New York Record, noticing that the stand also carried a lot of papers in French and Spanish.

  Back in his apartment he read of His Majesty Napoleon V, apparently emperor of New York City and God knew what else!

  His little bunnykins turned out to be a smallish dark girl, not bad-looking, who kissed him soundly. She said:

  “Where have you been the last few days, Waddy? I haven’t heard from you for simply ages! I was beginning to think you’d forgotten me. Oo hasn’t forgotten, has oo?”

  “Me forget? Why, sweetie-pie, I couldn’t any more forget you than I could forget my own name.” (And what the hell’s that? he asked himself. Wordsworth — no, Wadsworth Noe. Thank God.) “Give us another kiss.”

  … She looked at him. “What makes you talk so funny, Waddy?”

  “Canker sore,” said Allister Park.

  “O-o-o, you poor angel. Let me see it.”

  “It’s all right. How about that famous dinner?”

  At least Wadsworth Noe kept a good cellar. After dinner Park applied himself cautiously to this. It gave an excuse for just sitting. Park asked the girl about herself. She chattered on happily for some hours.

  Then her conversation began to run dry. There were long silences.

  She looked at him quizzically. “Are you worrying about something, Waddy? Somehow you seem like a different man.”

  “No,” he lied. “I’m not worrying.”

  She looked at the clock. “I suppose I ought to go,” she said hesitantly. Park sat up. “Oh, please don’t!”

  She relaxed and smiled. “I didn’t think you’d let me. Just wait.” She disappeared into the bedroom and presently emerged in a filmy nightgown.