To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  “Oh,” T.J. said. “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” and started for the door. Halfway there, he stopped and asked, “What happened to Ensign Klepperman?”

  “Killed in the line of duty,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  T.J. nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

  He went out and Finch came in, carrying a headrig.

  “Ring up Ernst Hasselmeyer in Berlin and ask him if he knows anything about parachronistic incongruities, and if he doesn’t, ask him who does,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “And then I want you to go over to the cathedral.”

  “The cathedral?” Finch said, alarmed. “What if Lady Schrapnell’s there?”

  “Hide in the Drapers’ Chapel,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “See if there’s anyone over there who works in Time Travel, anyone at all. There has to be someone around with more experience than an undergraduate.”

  Finch said, “Right away, sir,” and crossed over to me. He put the headrig in my ear. “The subliminal tapes, sir,” he said.

  I started to roll up my sleeve for the hypnotic.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to use drugs in your condition,” he said. “You’ll have to listen to them at normal speed.”

  “Finch,” Mr. Dunworthy said, coming over. “Where’s Kindle?”

  “You sent her to her rooms, sir,” Finch said.

  He touched the headrig. “Queen Victoria ruled England from 1837 to 1901,” the tape said in my ear.

  “Go and ask her how much slippage there was on the drop,” Mr. Dunworthy said to Finch. “The one where—”

  “—she brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to England.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “And find out how much slippage there’s been on the others—”

  “—remembered as a decorous, slow-paced society—”

  “—and telephone St. Thomas’s. Tell them under no circumstances to let Lady Schrapnell leave.”

  “Yes, sir,” Finch said and went out.

  “So Lizzie Bittner is still living in Coventry?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “She moved back from Salisbury after her husband died,” and then, because something more seemed to be expected, I said, “She told me all about the new cathedral and how Bishop Bittner had tried to save it. He reintroduced the Coventry morality plays in an attempt to shore up attendance and put up displays of the Blitz in the ruins. She took me on a tour of what had been the ruins and the new cathedral. It’s a shopping center now, you know.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I always thought it made a better shopping center than a cathedral. Mid-Twentieth-Century architecture was nearly as bad as Victorian. It was a nice gesture, though. And Bitty liked it. It was originally sold to the Church of the Hereafter or something, wasn’t it? I suppose you’ve checked with them to make certain they don’t have it?”

  I nodded, and then he must have left, though I don’t remember that part. A sound like the Ail-Clear after an air raid had started blasting in one ear, and the tapes were talking about the subservient role of women in the other.

  “Women held little or no power in Victorian society,” the headrig said. Except Queen Victoria, I thought, and saw that Warder was coming toward me with a wet cloth. She scrubbed roughly at my face and hands and then smeared a white lotion above my upper lip.

  “The role of the Victorian woman was that of nurse and helpmeet,” the headrig said, “of ‘the angel in the house.’”

  “Don’t touch your lip,” Warder said, pulling the measuring tape from around her neck. “Your hair will have to do. There’s not enough time for fenoxidils.” She encircled my head with the tape. “Part it in the middle. I said, don’t touch your lip.”

  “Women were thought to be too high-strung for formal education,” the subliminal said. “Their lessons were confined to drawing, music, and deportment.”

  “This whole thing’s ridiculous.” She wrapped the tape around my neck. “I should never have come to Oxford. Cambridge has a perfectly good degree in theatrical design. I could be costuming The Taming of the Shrew right now instead of doing three jobs at once.”

  I stuck a finger between the tape and my Adam’s apple to prevent strangulation.

  “Victorian women were sweet, softspoken, and submissive.”

  “You know whose fault this is, don’t you?” she said, snapping the tape as she pulled it free. “Lady Schrapnell’s. Why on earth does she want to rebuild Coventry Cathedral anyway? She’s not even English. She’s an American! Just because she married a peer doesn’t mean she has the right to come over here to our country and start rebuilding our churches. They weren’t even married that long.”

  She yanked my arm up and jammed the tape in my armpit. “And if she was going to rebuild something, why not something worthwhile, like Covent Garden Theatre? Or support the Royal Shakespeare or something? They were only able to mount two productions last season, and one of those was an old-fashioned nude production of Richard II from the 1990s. Of course, I suppose it would be asking too much of someone from Hollywood to appreciate art! Vids! Interactives!”

  She took rapid, careless measurements of my chest, sleeve, and inseam, and disappeared, and I went back to my chairs, leaned my head against the wall, and thought about how peaceful it would be to be drowned.

  This next part is a bit muddled. The headrig discussed Victorian table settings, the Ail-Clear mutated into an air-raid siren, and the seraphim brought me a stack of folded trousers to try on, but I don’t remember any of it very clearly.

  Finch lugged in a pile of Victorian luggage at one point—a portmanteau, a large carpetbag, a small satchel, a Gladstone bag, and two pasteboard boxes tied with string. I thought perhaps I was to choose from among them, like the trousers, but it developed that I was to take them all. Finch said, “I’ll fetch the rest,” and went out. The seraphim settled on a pair of white flannels and went off to look for suspenders.

  “The oyster fork is placed on the soup spoon, tines angled toward the plate,” the headrig said. “The oyster spear is placed to its left. The shell is held steady in the left hand, and the oyster lifted whole from the shell, detaching it, if necessary, with the spear.”

  I drowsed off several times and the seraphim shook me awake to try various articles of clothing on me and wipe off the white lotion.

  I touched the new mustache gingerly. “How does it look?” I said.

  “Lopsided,” the seraphim said, “but it can’t be helped. Did you pack a razor for him?”

  “Yes,” Finch said, coming in with a large wicker hamper, “a pair of hair-brushes from the Ashmolean and a brush and soap mug. Here’s the money,” he said, handing me a wallet nearly the size of the portmanteau. “It’s mostly coins, I’m afraid. Bank notes from that era have deteriorated badly. There’s a bedroll, and I’ve packed the hamper full of provisions, and there are tinned goods in the boxes.” He scurried out again.

  “The fish fork is placed to the left of the meat and salad forks,” the headrig droned. “It is recognizable by its pointed, slanted tines.”

  The seraphim handed me a shirt to try on. She was carrying a damp white dress over her arm. It had trailing sleeves. I thought about the water nymph, wringing it out on the carpet, the very picture of beauty. I wondered if water nymphs used fish forks and if they liked men with mustaches. Had Hylas had a mustache in the painting by Waterhouse? It was called Hylas and the . . . what? What were they called? It began with an “N.”

  More muddled parts. I remember Finch coming in with more luggage, a covered wicker basket, and the seraphim tucking something in my waistcoat pocket, and Finch shaking me on the shoulder, asking me where Mr. Dunworthy was.

  “He’s not here,” I said, but I was mistaken. He was standing next to the wicker basket, asking Finch what he’d found out.

  “How much slippage was there on the drop?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  “Nine minutes,” Finch said.

  “Nine minutes?” he said, frowning. “What about her other dr
ops?”

  “Minimal. Two minutes to a half hour. The drop is in an isolated part of the grounds, so there isn’t much chance of being seen.”

  “Except the one time it counted,” Mr. Dunworthy said, still frowning. “What about coming back?”

  “Coming back?” Finch said. “There’s no slippage on return drops.”

  “I am aware of that,” Mr. Dunworthy said, “but this is an unusual situation.”

  “Yes, sir,” Finch said, and went over, conferred with Warder for a few minutes, and came back. “No slippage on the return drop.”

  Mr. Dunworthy looked relieved.

  “What about Hasselmeyer?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  “I have a message through to him.”

  The door opened and T.J. Lewis hurried in with a thin stack of papers. “I’ve read the available research,” he said. “There’s not much. Setting up the necessary equipment to test for incongruities is extremely expensive. Time Travel was planning to build it with the money from the cathedral project. Most temporal physicists don’t believe incongruities are possible. Except for Fujisaki.”

  “Fujisaki thinks they’re possible? What’s his theory?”

  “He has two theories. One is that they’re not incongruities, that there are objects and events in the continuum that are nonsignificant.”

  “How is that possible? In a chaotic system, every event is linked to every other.”

  “Yes, but the system’s nonlinear,” T.J. said, looking at the papers, “with feedback and feedforward loops, redundancies and interference, so the effect of some objects and events is multiplied enormously, and in others it’s cancelled out.”

  “And a parachronistic incongruity is an object whose removal has no effect?”

  T.J. grinned. “Right. Like the air historians bring back in their lungs or,” he looked at me, “the soot. Its removal doesn’t cause any repercussions in the system.”

  “In which case the object shouldn’t be returned to its temporal location?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

  “In which case it probably can’t be returned,” T.J. said. “The continuum wouldn’t allow it. Unless it was nonsignificant in its returned state, too. Unfortunately, this sort of incongruity’s pretty much limited to air and soot. Anything larger has a significant effect.”

  Even penwipers, I thought, leaning my head against the wall. I had bought an orange one shaped like a pumpkin at the Autumn Choir Festival and Salvage Drive and then forgotten it, and when I tried to come back, the net wouldn’t open. I wondered drowsily how it had come to open for the fan.

  “What about living things?” Mr. Dunworthy asked.

  “Harmless bacteria, possibly, but nothing else. The effect of life-forms on the continuum is exponentially greater than for inanimate objects, and exponentially greater again for intelligent life-forms because of the complexity of interactions they’re capable of. And of course nothing that could have an effect on the present or future. No viruses or microbes.”

  Mr. Dunworthy cut him off. “What’s Fujisaki’s other theory?”

  “His second theory is that there are incongruities, but that the continuum has built-in defenses that counteract them.”

  “Slippage,” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  T.J. nodded. “The mechanism of slippage prevents nearly all potential incongruities by removing the time traveller from the area of potential danger. Fujisaki’s theory is that the amount of slippage is limited, and that an incongruity occurs when the slippage can’t increase radically enough to prevent the parachronism.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Theoretically it could alter the course of history, or, if it were severe enough, destroy the universe, but there are safeguards in the modern net to prevent that. As soon as the danger of incongruities was realized, the net was modified to automatically shut down whenever the slippage reaches dangerous levels.And Fujisaki says that if an incongruity did occur, which it can’t, there are other lines of defense that would correct the incongruity and would manifest themselves as,” he read from the paper, “radically increased slippage in an area surrounding the incongruity, an increase in coincidental events—”

  Mr. Dunworthy turned to me. “Did you experience any coincidences in Coventry?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What about your jumble sales?”

  “No,” I said, thinking how nice it would have been if I had experienced one, if, strolling between the coconut shy and the plum-cake raffle, I had run bang into the bishop’s bird stump.

  Mr. Dunworthy turned back to T.J. “What else?”

  “Increased slippage in the peripheral temporal areas.”

  “How large an area?”

  He bit his lip. “Fujisaki says most incongruities are corrected within fifty years, but this is all theoretical.”

  “What else?”

  “If it were really serious, a breakdown in the net,” T.J. said.

  “What sort of breakdown?”

  He frowned. “Failure of the net to open. Malfunction in destination. But Fujisaki says those are all statistically unlikely,” T.J.said, “and that the continuum is essentially stable or it would have been destroyed by now.”

  “What if there was no radical increase in slippage, but it was definitely an incongruity?” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Would that mean it had been corrected before it could have any effect on the continuum?”

  “Yes,” T.J. said. “Otherwise there’d have to be slippage.”

  “Good. Excellent job, Ensign Klepperman,” Mr. Dunworthy said. He went over to the seraphim, who was violently banging keys at the console. “Warden, I want a list of all the drops we’ve done to the 1880s and ‘90s with the recorded amount of slippage and the normal parameters.”

  “It’s Warder,” the seraphim said. “And I can’t do it now. I’ve got a rendezvous.”

  “The rendezvous can wait.” He went back over to T.J. “Lewis, I want you to look for unusual slippers;”

  Or at least that’s what I thought he said. The Ail-Clear had started up again, and now it was accompanied by a steady, thumping throb, like ack-ack guns.

  “And chicken drops.”

  “Yes, sir,” T.J. said and left.

  “Finch, where’s the hat?” Mr. Dunworthy said.

  “Right here,” Finch said, and that couldn’t be right either. I had white flannels and a waistcoat, but no hat. And Victorians always wore hats, didn’t they? Top hats and those hard round affairs, what were they called? It began with an “N.”

  The seraphim was leaning over me, which meant I must have sat down again. She stood me up to try on blazers.

  “Put your arm in this one,” she said, thrusting a maroon-striped one at me. “No, your right arm.”

  “The sleeves are too short,” I said, looking at my bare wrists.

  “What’s your name?”

  “My name?” I said, wondering what that had to do with the sleeves being too short.

  “Your name!” she said, yanking off the maroon-striped blazer and shoving a red one at me.

  “Ned Henry,” I said. The sleeves of this one came down over my hands.

  “Good,” she said, stripping it off and handing me a dark-blue-and-white one. “At least I won’t have to come up with a contemp name for you.” She tugged on the sleeves. “That’ll have to do. And don’t go diving into the Thames. I haven’t time to do any more costumes.” She clapped a straw boater on my head.

  “The hat was here. You were right, Mr. Dunworthy,” I said, but he wasn’t there. Finch wasn’t either, and the seraphim was back at the console, banging away at the keys.

  “I can’t believe Badri isn’t back yet,” she said. “Leaving me with this lot. Set the coordinates. Come up with a costume. And meanwhile, I’ve got an historian waiting three-quarters of an hour to come through. Well, your priority jump can jolly well wait for unmarried girls were constantly accompanied by chaperones, usually an older maiden aunt or cousin, and were never allowed to be alone with a man until a
fter their engagement, Ned, pay attention.”

  “I am,” I said. “Unmarried girls were always accompanied by chaperones.”

  “I told you I didn’t think this was a good idea,” Finch, who was there, too, said.

  “There’s nobody else to send,” Mr. Dunworthy said. “Ned, listen carefully. Here’s what I want you to do. You’ll come through on June the seventh, 1888, at ten A.M. The river is to the left of the dessert fork, which is used for gateaux and puddings. For such desserts as Muchings End, the dessert knife is used with the . . .”

  Knife. Nice. Naiads. That was what they were called.Hylas and the Naiads. He went to fill his water jug, and they pulled him into the water with them, down and down, their hair and their wet sleeves twining about him.

  “As soon as it’s returned, you can do whatever you like. The rest of the two weeks is yours. You can spend it boating on the river or to the right of the dessert plate, with the blade pointing inward.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Have you got that?”

  “What?” I said, but Mr. Dunworthy wasn’t listening. He was looking at the net. There was a loud hum that threatened to drown out the ack-ack guns, and the veils on the net began to lower.

  “What’s that?” Mr. Dunworthy said to the seraphim.

  “The rendezvous,” she said, pounding keys. “I couldn’t very well leave him there forever. I’ll do your drop as soon as I bring him through.”

  “Good,” Mr. Dunworthy said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “I’m counting on you, Ned,” he said through the hum.

  The veils touched the floor, draping gently. The hum rose in pitch till it sounded like the Ail-Clear, the air shimmered with condensation, and Carruthers appeared inside the net. He began fighting with the veils to get out.

  “Stand still and wait till the veils have raised,” the seraphim ordered, pounding keys. The veils rose a foot and a half and stopped.

  “Wait?” Carruthers said, ducking under them. “Wait? I’ve been waiting for two bloody hours!” He flailed at the fabric of the veils. “Where the bloody hell were you?”

  He worked himself free and limped toward the console. He was covered in mud. He had lost one of his boots, and the front of his non-AFS uniform had a long, flapping tear in the back of one leg. “Why the hell didn’t you come get me as soon as you got the fix and saw where I’d landed?”