The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  “Dr. Brahmaputra?” Her research assistant looked up, disconnecting his earplug. “Something wrong with the software?”

  She nodded, pushing a fistful of coarse silver hair out of her face as she bent closer to the holographic projection that hung over her desk. The rumble of a semiballistic leaving McCarran Aerospaceport rattled the windows. She rolled her eyes. “One of the undergrads must have goofed the coding on the text. Our genderbot just kicked back a truly freaky outcome. Come look at this, Baldassare.”

  He stood, a boy in his late twenties with an intimidatingly Italian name, already working on an academic’s well-upholstered body, and came around her desk to stand over her shoulder. “What am I looking at?”

  “Line one fifty-seven,” she said, pushing down a fragment of panic that she knew had nothing to do with the situation at hand and everything to do with old damage and ancient history. “See? Coming up as female. Have we a way to see who coded the texts?”

  He leaned close, reaching over her to put a hand on her desk. She edged away from the touch. “All the Renaissance stuff was double-checked by Sienna Haverson. She shouldn’t have let a mistake like that slip past; she did her dis on Nashe or Fletcher or somebody, and she’s just gotten into the Poet Emeritus project, for the love of Mike. And it’s not like there are a lot of female Elizabethan playwrights she could have confused—”

  “It’s not a transposition.” Satyavati fished out another cinnamon candy and offered one to Tony Baldassare, who smelled faintly of garlic. He had sense enough to suck on his instead of crunching it; she made a point of tucking hers up between her lip and gum where she’d be less likely to chew on it. “I checked that. This is the only one coming up wrong.”

  “Well,” Baldassare said on a thoughtful breath, “I suppose we can always consider the possibility that Dr. Haverson was drunk that evening—”

  Satyavati laughed, brushing Baldassare aside to stand up from her chair, uncomfortable with his closeness. “Or we can try to convince the establishment that the most notorious rakehell in the Elizabethan canon was a girl.”

  “I dunno,” Baldassare answered. “It’s a fine line between Marlowe and Jonson for scoundrelhood.”

  “Bah. You see what I mean. A nice claim. It would do wonders for my tenure hopes and your future employability. And I know you have your eye on Poet Emeritus, too.”

  “It’s a crazy dream.” He spread his arms wide and leaned far back, the picture of ecstatic madness.

  “Who wouldn’t want to work with Professor Keats?” She sighed, twisting her hair into a scrunchie. “Screw it: I’m going to lunch. See if you can figure out what broke.”

  The air warmed as the sun rose, spilling light like a promise down the road, across the grey moving water of the Thames, between the close-growing trees. Halfway to Deptford, Christofer Marley reined his gelding in to rest it; the sunlight matched his hair to the animal’s mane. The man was as beautiful as the horse – groomed until shining, long-necked and long-legged, slender as a girl and fashionably pallid of complexion. Lace cuffs fell across hands as white as the gelding’s forehoof.

  Their breath no longer steamed, nor did the river.

  Kit rubbed a hand across the back of his mouth. He closed his eyes for a moment before glancing back over his shoulder: the manor house – his lover and patron Thomas Walsingham’s manor house – was long out of sight. The gelding tossed his head, ready to canter, and Kit let him have the rein he wanted.

  All the rein he wants. A privilege Kit himself had rarely been allowed.

  Following the liver-colored gelding’s whim, they drove hard for Deptford and the house of a cousin of the Queen’s beloved secretary of state and closest confidant, Lord Burghley.

  The house of Mistress Eleanor Bull.

  Satyavati stepped out of the latest incarnation of a vegetarian barbecue joint that changed hands every six months, the heat of a Las Vegas August afternoon pressing her shoulders like angry hands. The University of Nevada campus spread green and artificial across a traffic-humming street; beyond the buildings monsoon clouds rimmed the mountains across the broad, shallow desert valley. A plastic bag tumbled in ecstatic circles near a stucco wall, caught in an eddy, but the wind was against them; there would be no baptism of lightning and rain. She crossed at the new pedestrian bridge, acknowledging Professors Keats and Ling as they wandered past, deep in conversation— “we were going after Plath, but the consensus was she’d just kill herself again” – and almost turned to ask Ling a question when her hip unit beeped.

  She dabbed her lips in case of leftover barbecue sauce and flipped the minicomputer open. Clouds covered the sun, but cloying heat radiated from the pavement under her feet. Westward, toward the thunderheads and the mountains, the grey mist of verga – evaporating rain – greased the sky like a thumbsmear across a charcoal sketch by God. “Mr. Baldassare?”

  “Dr. Brahmaputra.” Worry charged his voice; his image above her holistic communications and computational device showed a thin dark line between the brows. “I have some bad news...”

  She sighed and closed her eyes, listening to distant thunder echo from the mountains. “Tell me the whole database is corrupt.”

  “No.” He rubbed his forehead with his knuckles; a staccato little image, but she could see the gesture and expression as if he stood before her. “I corrected the Marlowe data.”

  “And?”

  “The genderbot still thinks Kit Marlowe was a girl. I re-entered everything.”

  “That’s—”

  “Impossible?” Baldassare grinned. “I know. Come to the lab; we’ll lock the door and figure this out. I called Dr. Haverson.”

  “Dr. Haverson? Sienna Haverson?”

  “She was doing Renaissance before she landed in Brit Lit. Can it hurt?”

  “What the hell.”

  Eleanor Bull’s house was whitewashed and warm-looking. The scent of its gardens didn’t quite cover the slaughterhouse reek, but the house peered through narrow windows and seemed to smile. Kit gave the gelding’s reins to a lad from the stable, along with coins to see the beast curried and fed. He scratched under the animal’s mane with guilty fingers; his mother would have his hide for not seeing to the chestnut himself. But the Queen’s business took precedence, and Kit was – and had been for seven years – a Queen’s man.

  Bull’s establishment was no common tavern, but the house of a respectable widow, where respectable men met to dine in private circumstances and discuss the sort of business not for common ears to hear. Kit squared his shoulders under the expensive suit, clothes bought with an intelligencer’s money, and presented himself at the front door of the house. His stomach knotted; he wrapped his inkstained fingers together after he tapped, and waited for the Widow Bull to offer him admittance.

  The blond, round-cheeked image of Sienna Haverson beside Satyavati’s desk frowned around the thumbnail she was chewing. “It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Christopher Marlowe, a woman? It isn’t possible to reconcile his biography with – what, crypto-femininity? He was a seminary student, for Christ’s sake. People lived in each other’s pockets during the Renaissance. Slept two or three to a bed, and not in a sexual sense—”

  Baldassare was present in the flesh; like Satyavati, he preferred the mental break of actually going home from the office at the end of the day. It also didn’t hurt to be close enough to keep a weather eye on university politics.

  As she watched, he swung his Chinese-slippered feet onto the desk, his fashionably shabby cryosilk smoking jacket falling open as he leaned back. Satyavati leaned on her elbows, avoiding the interface plate on her desktop and hiding a smile; Baldassare’s breadth of gesture amused her.

  He said, “Women soldiers managed it during the American Civil War.”

  “Hundreds of years later—”

  “Yes, but there’s no reason to think Marlowe had to be a woman. He could have been providing a cover for a woman poet or playwright – Mary Herbert, maybe. Sidney’s sister—
”

  “Or he could have been Shakespeare in disguise,” Haverson said with an airy wave of her hand. “It’s one anomaly out of a database of two hundred and fifty authors, Satyavati. I don’t think it invalidates the work. That’s an unprecedented precision of result.”

  “That’s the problem,” Satyavati answered, slowly. “If it were a pattern of errors, or if he were coming up as one of the borderline cases – we can get Alice Sheldon to come back just barely as a male author if we use a sufficiently small sample – but it’s the entire body of Marlowe’s work. And it’s strongly female. We can’t publish until we address this. Somehow.”

  Baldassare’s conservative black braid fell forward over his shoulder. “What do we know about Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Haverson? You’ve had Early Modern English and Middle English RNA-therapy, haven’t you? Does that include history?”

  The hologram rolled her eyes. “There’s also old-fashioned reading and research,” she said, scratching the side of her nose with the gnawed thumbnail. Satyavati grinned at her, and Haverson grinned back, a generational acknowledgment. Oh, these kids.

  “Christopher Marlowe. Alleged around the time of his death to be an atheist and a sodomite – which are terms with different connotations in the Elizabethan sense than the modern: it borders on an accusation of witchcraft, frankly – author of seven plays, a short lyric poem, and an incomplete long poem that remain to us, as well as a couple of Latin translations and the odd eulogy. And a dedication to Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, which is doubtless where Baldassare got that idea. The only thing we know about him – really know – is that he was the son of a cobbler, a divinity student who attended Corpus Christi under scholarship and seemed to have more money than you would expect and the favor of the Privy Council, and he was arrested several times on capital charges that were then more or less summarily dismissed. All very suggestive that he was an agent – a spy – for Queen Elizabeth. There’s a portrait that’s supposed to be him—”

  Baldassare jerked his head up at the wall; above the bookcases, near the ceiling, a double row of 2-D images were pinned: the poets, playwrights, and authors whose work had been entered into the genderbot. “The redhead.”

  “The original painting shows him as a dark mousy blond; the reproductions usually make him prettier. If it is him. It’s an educated guess, frankly: we don’t know who that portrait is of.” Haverson grinned, warming to her subject; the academic’s delight in a display of useless information. Satyavati knew it well.

  Satyavati’s field of study was the late 21st century; Renaissance poets hadn’t touched her life in more than passing since her undergraduate days. “Did he ever marry? Any kids?” And why are you wondering that?

  “No, and none that we know of. It’s conventionally accepted that he was homosexual, but again, no proof. Men often didn’t marry until they were in their late twenties in Elizabethan England, so it’s not a deciding factor. He’s never been convincingly linked to anyone; for all we know, he might have died a virgin at twenty-nine—” Baldassare snorted heavily, and Haverson angled her head to the side, her steepled hands opening like wings. “There’s some other irregularities in his biography: he refused holy orders after completing his degree, and he was baptized some twenty days after his birth rather than the usual three. And the circumstances of his death are very odd indeed. But it doesn’t add up to a pattern, I don’t think.”

  Baldassare shook his head in awe. “Dare I ask what you know about Nashe?”

  Haverson chuckled. “More than you ever want to find out. I could give you another hour on Marlowe easy: he’s a ninety-minute lecture in my Brit Lit class.”

  The Freshman Intro to British Literature that Haverson taught as wergild for her access to Professor Keats and Ling, and the temporal device. The inside of Satyavati’s lip tasted like rubber; she chewed gently. “So you’re saying we don’t know. And we can prove nothing. There’s no period source that can help us?”

  “There’s some odd stuff in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that seems to indicate that the protagonist is intended to be a fictionalized reflection of Marlowe, or at least raise questions about his death. We know the two men collaborated on at least two plays, the first part of Henry VI and Edward III—” Haverson stopped and disentangled her fingers from her wavy yellow hair, where they had become idly entwined. Something wicked danced in her eyes. “And—”

  “What?” Satyavati and Baldassare, in unison. Satyavati leaned forward over her desk, closing her hands on the edges.

  “The protagonist of As You Like It – the one who quotes Marlowe and details the circumstances of his death?”

  “Rosalind,” Baldassare said. “What about her?”

  “Is a young woman quite successfully impersonating a man.”

  *

  Kit ate sparingly, as always. His image, his patronage, his sexuality, his very livelihood were predicated on the contours of his face, the boyish angles of his body, and every year that illusion of youth became harder to maintain. Also, he didn’t dare drop his eyes from the face of Robin Poley, his fair-haired controller and – in Kit’s educated opinion – one of the most dangerous men in London.

  “Thou shalt not be permitted to abandon the Queen’s service so easily, sweet Kit,” Poley said between bites of fish. Kit nodded, dry-mouthed; he had not expected Poley would arrive with a guard. Two others, Skeres and Frazier, dined heartily and without apparent regard for Kit’s lack of appetite.

  “’Tis not that I wish any disservice to her Majesty,” Kit said. “But I swear on my honor Thomas Walsingham is her loyal servant, good Robin, and she need fear him not. His love for her is as great as any man’s, and his family has ever been loyal—”

  Poley dismissed Kit’s protestations with a gesture. Ingrim Frazier reached the breadth of the linen-laid table with the long blade of his knife and speared a piece of fruit from the board in front of Kit. Kit leaned out of the way.

  “You realize of course that textual evidence isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. And if you assume Marlowe was a woman, and Shakespeare knew it—”

  “You rapidly enter the realm of the crackpots. Indeed.”

  “We have a serious problem.”

  “We could just quietly drop him from the data—” He grinned in response to her stare. “No, no. I’m not serious.”

  “You’d better not be,” Satyavati answered. She quelled the rush of fury that Baldassare’s innocent teasing pricked out of always-shallow sleep. What happened a decade ago is not his fault. “This is my career – my scholarship – in question.”

  A low tap on the office door. Satyavati checked the heads-up display, recognized Haverson, and tapped the key on her desk to disengage the lock. The Rubenesque blonde hesitated in the doorway. “Good afternoon, Satya. Baldassare. Private?”

  “Same conversation as before,” Satyavati said. “Still trying to figure out how to salvage our research—”

  Haverson grinned and entered the room in a sweep of crinkled skirts and tunic. She shut the door behind herself and made very certain it latched. “I have your answer.”

  Satyavati stood and came around her desk, dragging with her a chair, which she offered to Haverson. Haverson waved it aside, and Satyavati sank into it herself. “It assumes of course that Christopher Marlowe did die violently at Eleanor Bull’s house in May of 1593 and did not run off to Italy and write the plays of Shakespeare—” Haverson’s shrug seemed to indicate that that was a fairly safe assumption.

  “The Poet Emeritus project?” Baldassare crowed, swinging his arms wide before clapping his hands. “Dr. Haverson, you’re brilliant. And what if Marlowe did survive 1593?”

  “We’ll send back an observer team to make sure he dies. They’ll have to exhume the body anyway; we’ll need to be able to make that swap for the living Marlowe, assuming the recovery team can get to him before Frazier and company stab him in the eye.”

  Baldassare shuddered. “I swear that makes my skin crawl—”r />
  “Paradox is an odd thing, isn’t it? You start thinking about where the body comes from, and you start wondering if there are other changes happening.”

  “If there were,” Baldassare said, “we’d never know.”

  Satyavati’s dropped jaw closed as she finally forced herself to understand what they were talking about. “No one who died by violence. No one from before 1800. There are rules. Culture shock, language barriers. Professor Ling would never permit it.”

  Haverson grinned wider, obviously excited. “You know why those rules were developed, don’t you?”

  “I know it’s a History Department and Temporal Studies protocol, and English is only allowed to use the device under their auspices, and competition for its time is extreme—”

  “The rule developed after Richard I rose from what should have been his deathbed to run through a pair of History undergrads on the retrieval team. We never did get their bodies back. Or the Lionheart, for that matter—” Baldassare stopped, aware of Haverson’s considering stare. “What? I’m gunning for a spot on the Poet Emeritus team. I’ve been reading up.”

  “Ah.”

  “We’d never get the paperwork through to pull Christopher Marlowe, though.” He sighed. “Although it would be worth it for the looks on the Marlovians’ faces.”

  “You’re awfully certain of yourself, son.”

  “Dr. Haverson—”

  Haverson brushed him off with a turn of her wrist. She kept her light blue eyes on Satyavati. “What if I thought there was a chance that Professor Keats could become interested?”

  “Oh,” Satyavati said. “That’s why you came to campus.”

  Haverson’s grin kept growing; as Satyavati watched, it widened another notch. “He doesn’t do business by holoconference,” she said. “How could Percy Shelley’s best friend resist a chance to meet Christopher Marlowe?”