Dooms Day Book

by Connie Willis

  Dunworthy managed to say goodbye civilly, but as soon as the screen went blank he slammed the receiver down, yanked it up again, and began stabbing numbers. He would find Basingame if it took all afternoon.

  But the computer came on and informed him all lines were engaged again. He laid the receiver down and stared at the blank screen.

  “Are you waiting for another call?” Colin asked.

  “No.”

  “Then can we walk over to the infirmary? I’ve a present for Great-Aunt Mary.”

  And I can see about getting Andrews into the quarantine area, he thought. “Excellent idea. You can wear your new muffler.”

  Colin stuffed it in his jacket pocket. “I’ll put it on when we get there,” he said, grinning. “I don’t want anyone to see me on the way.”

  There was no one to see them. The streets were completely deserted, not even any bicycles or taxis. Dunworthy thought of the vicar’s remark that when the epidemic took hold people would hole up in their houses. Either that, or they had been driven inside by the sound of the Carfax carillon, which was not only still banging away at “The Carol of the Bells” but seemed louder, echoing through the empty streets. Or they were napping after too much Christmas dinner. Or they knew enough to keep in out of the rain.

  They saw no one at all until they got to Infirmary. A woman in a Burberry stood in front of the casualties ward holding a picket sign that said, “Ban Foreign Diseases.” A man wearing a regulation face mask opened the door for them and handed Dunworthy a very damp flyer.

  Dunworthy asked at the admissions desk for Mary and then read the flyer. In boldface type it said, “FIGHT INFLUENZA. VOTE TO SECEDE FROM THE EC.” Underneath was a paragraph: “Why will you be separated from your loved ones this Christmas? Why are you forced to stay in Oxford? Why are you in danger of getting ill and DYING? Because the EC allows infected foreigners to enter England, and England doesn’t have a thing to say about it. An Indian immigrant carrying a deadly virus—”

  Dunworthy didn’t read the rest. He turned it over. It read, “A Vote for Secession is a Vote for Health. Committee for an Independent Great Britain.”

  Mary came in, and Colin grabbed his muffler out of his pocket and wrapped it hastily around his neck. “Happy Christmas,” he said. “Thank you for the muffler. Shall I open your cracker for you?”

  “Yes, please,” Mary said. She looked tired. She was wearing the same lab coat she had been two days ago. Someone had pinned a cluster of holly to the lapel.

  Colin snapped the cracker.

  “Put your hat on,” he said, unfolding a blue paper crown.

  “Have you managed to get any rest at all?” Dunworthy asked.

  “A bit,” she said, putting the crown on over her untidy gray hair. “We’ve had thirty new cases since noon, and I’ve spent most of the day trying to get the sequencing from the WIC, but the lines are jammed.”

  “I know,” Dunworthy said. “Can I see Badri?”

  “Only for a minute or two.” She frowned. “He’s not responding at all to the synthamycin, and neither are the two students from the dance in Headington. Ms. Breen is a bit improved.” She frowned. “It worries me. Have you had your inoculation?”

  “Not yet. Colin’s had his.”

  “And it hurt like blood,” Colin said, unfolding the slip of paper inside the cracker. “Shall I read your motto for you?”

  She nodded.

  “I need to bring a tech into the quarantine area tomorrow to read Kivrin’s fix,” Dunworthy said. “What must I do to arrange it?”

  “Nothing, so far as I know. They’re trying to keep people in, not out.”

  The registrar took Mary aside, and spoke softly and urgently to her.

  “I must go,” she said. “I don’t want you to leave till you’ve had your enhancement. Come back down here when you’ve seen Badri. Colin, you wait here for Mr. Dunworthy.”

  Dunworthy went up to Isolation. There was no one at the desk, so he wrestled his way into a set of SPG’s, remembering to put the gloves on last, and went inside.

  The pretty nurse who had been so interested in William was taking Badri’s pulse, her eyes on the screens. Dunworthy stopped at the foot of the bed.

  Mary had said Badri wasn’t responding, but Dunworthy was still shocked by the sight of him. His face was dark with fever again, and his eyes looked bruised, as if someone had hit him. His right arm was hooked to an elaborate shunt. It was bruised a purple-blue on the inside of the elbow. The other arm was worse, black all along the forearm.

  “Badri?” he said, and the nurse shook her head.

  “You can only stay a moment,” she said.

  Dunworthy nodded.

  She laid Badri’s unresisting hand down at his side, typed something on the console, and went out.

  Dunworthy sat down beside the bed and looked up at the screens. They looked the same, still indecipherable, the graphs and jags and generating numbers telling him nothing. He looked at Badri, who lay there looking battered, beaten. He patted his hand gently and stood up to go.

  “It was the rats,” Badri murmured.

  “Badri?” Dunworthy said gently. “It’s Mr. Dunworthy.”

  “Mr. Dunworthy…” Badri said, but he didn’t open his eyes. “I’m dying, aren’t I?”

  He felt a twinge of fear. “No, of course not,” he said heartily. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “It’s always fatal,” Badri said.

  “What is?”

  Badri didn’t answer. Dunworthy sat with him until the nurse came in, but he didn’t say anything else.

  “Mr. Dunworthy?” she said. “He needs to rest.”

  “I know.” He walked to the door and then looked back at Badri, lying in the bed. He opened the door.

  “It killed them all,” Badri said. “Half of Europe.”

  Colin was standing at the registrar’s desk when he came back down, telling her about his Christmas gifts. “My mother’s gifts didn’t arrive because of the quarantine. The postman wouldn’t let them through.”

  Dunworthy told the registrar about the T-cell enhancement and she nodded and said, “It will just be a moment.”

  They sat down to wait. It killed them all, Dunworthy thought. Half of Europe.

  “I didn’t get to read her her motto,” Colin said. “Would you like to hear it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Where was Father Christmas when the lights went out?” He waited expectantly.

  Dunworthy shook his head.

  “In the dark.”

  He took his gobstopper out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. “You’re worried about your girl, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He folded up the gobstopper wrapper into a tiny packet. “What I don’t understand is, why can’t you go get her?”

  “She isn’t there. We must wait for the rendezvous.”

  “No, I mean why can’t you go back to the same time you sent her through and get her while she was still there? Before anything happened? I mean you can go to any time you want, can’t you?”

  “No,” he said. “You can send an historian to any time, but once she’s there, the net can only operate in real time. Did you study the paradoxes at school?”

  “Yes,” Colin said, but he sounded uncertain. “They’re like time-travel rules?”

  “The space-time continuum doesn’t allow paradoxes,” Dunworthy said. “It would be a paradox if Kivrin made something happen that hadn’t happened, or if she caused an anachronism.”

  Colin was still looking uncertain.

  “One of the paradoxes is that no one can be in two places at the same time. She’s already been in the past for four days. There’s nothing we can do to change that. It’s already happened.”

  “Then how does she get back?”

  “When she went through, the tech took what’s called a fix. It tells the tech exactly where she is, and it acts as a… um…” he groped for an understandable word. “A tether. It ties the two
times together so the net can be reopened at a certain time, and she can be picked up.”

  “Like, ‘I’ll meet you at the church at half-past six?’”

  “Exactly. It’s called a rendezvous. Kivrin’s is in two weeks. The twenty-eighth of December. On that day the tech will open the net, and Kivrin will come back through.”

  “I thought you said it was the same time there. How can the twenty-eighth be two weeks from now?”

  “They used a different calendar in the Middle Ages. It’s December the seventeenth there. Our rendezvous date is the sixth of January.” If she’s there. If I can find a tech to open the net.

  Colin pulled out his gobstopper and looked at it thoughtfully. It was a mottled bluish-white and looked rather like a map of the moon. He stuck it back in his mouth.

  “So, if I went to 1320 on the twenty-sixth of December, I could have Christmas twice.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Apocalyptic,” he said. He unfolded the gobstopper wrapper and folded it into an even tinier packet. “I think they’ve forgotten about you, don’t you?”

  “It’s beginning to look that way,” Dunworthy said. The next time a house officer came through, Dunworthy stopped him and told him he was waiting for T-cell enhancement.

  “Oh?” he said, looking surprised. “I’ll try to find out about it.” He disappeared into Casualties.

  They waited some more. “It was the rats,” Badri had said. And that first night he had asked Dunworthy, “What year is it?” But he had said there was minimal slippage. He had said the apprentice’s calculations were correct.

  Colin took his gobstopper out and examined it several times for change in color. “If something terrible happened, couldn’t you break the rules?” he said, squinting at it. “If she got her arm cut off or she died or a bomb blew her up or something?”

  “They’re not rules, Colin. They’re scientific laws. We couldn’t break them if we tried. If we attempted to reverse events that had already happened, the net wouldn’t open.”

  Colin spit his gobstopper into the wrapper and folded the wrinkled paper carefully around it. “I’m sure your girl’s all right,” he said.

  He jammed the wrapped gobstopper in his jacket pocket and pulled out a lumpy parcel. “I forgot to give Great-Aunt Mary her Christmas present,” he said.

  He jumped up and started into Casualties before Dunworthy could caution him to wait, got opposite the door, and came tearing back.

  “Blood! The Gallstone’s here!” he said. “She’s coming this way.”

  Dunworthy stood up. “That’s all that’s needed.”

  “This way,” Colin said. “I came in the back door the night I got here.” He sprinted off in the other direction. “Come on!”

  Dunworthy could not manage a sprint, but he walked quickly down the labyrinth of corridors Colin indicated and out a service entrance into a side street. A man in a sandwich board was standing outside the door in the rain. The sandwich board said, “The doom we feared is upon us,” which seemed oddly fitting.

  “I’ll make certain she didn’t see us,” Colin said, and dashed around to the front.

  The man handed Dunworthy a flyer. “THE END OF TIME IS NEAR!” it said in fiery capital letters. “‘Fear God, for the hour of his judgment is come.’ Rev. 14:7.”

  Colin waved to Dunworthy from the corner. “It’s all right,” Colin said, slightly out of breath. “She’s inside shouting at the registrar.”

  Dunworthy handed the flyer back to the man and followed Colin. He led the way along the side street to Woodstock Road. Dunworthy looked anxiously toward the door of Casualties, but he couldn’t see anyone, not even the anti-EC picketers.

  Colin sprinted another block, and then slowed to a walk. He pulled the packet of soap tablets out of his pocket and offered Dunworthy one.

  He declined.

  Colin popped a pink one in his mouth and said, none too clearly, “This is the best Christmas I’ve ever had.”

  Dunworthy pondered that sentiment for several blocks. The carillon was massacring, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which also seemed fitting, and the streets were still deserted, but as they turned down the Broad, a familiar figure hurried toward them, hunched against the rain.

  “It’s Mr. Finch,” Colin said.

  “Good Lord,” Dunworthy said. “What do you suppose we’ve run out of now?”

  “I hope it’s Brussels sprouts.”

  Finch had looked up at the sound of their voices. “There you are, Mr. Dunworthy. Thank goodness. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “What is it?” Dunworthy said. “I told Ms. Taylor I’d see about a practice room.”

  “It isn’t that, sir. It’s the detainees. Two of them are down with the virus.”

  Transcript from the Doomsday Book

  (082631-084122)

  21 December 1320 (Old Style.) Father Roche doesn’t know where the drop is. I made him take me to the place where Gawyn met him, but even standing in the clearing didn’t jog my memory. It’s obvious Gawyn didn’t happen upon him until he was a long way from the drop, and by that time I was completely delirious.

  And I realized today I’ll never be able to find the drop on my own. The woods are too big, and they’re full of clearings and oak trees and willow thickets that all look alike now that it’s snowed. I should have marked the drop with something besides the casket.

  Gawyn will have to show me where the drop is, and he’s not back yet. Rosemund told me it’s only a half day’s ride to Courcy, but that he will probably spend the night there because of the rain.

  It’s been raining hard since we got back, and I suppose I should be happy since it may melt the snow, but it makes it impossible for me to go out and look for the drop, and it’s freezing in the manor house. Everyone’s wearing their cloaks and huddling next to the fire.

  What do the villagers do? Their huts can’t even keep the wind out, and the one I was in had no sign of a blanket. They must be literally freezing, and Rosemund said the steward said it was going to rain till Christmas Eve.

  Rosemund apologized for her ill-tempered behavior in the woods and told me, “I was wroth with my sister.”

  Agnes had nothing to do with it—what upset her was obviously the news that her fiance had been invited for Christmas, and when I had a chance with Rosemund alone, I asked her if she was worried over her marriage.

  “My father has arranged it,” she said, threading her needle. “We were betrothed at Martinmas. We are to be wed at Easter.”

  “And is it with your consent?” I asked.

  “It is a good match,” she said. “Sir Bloet is highly placed, and he has holdings that adjoin my father’s.”

  “Do you like him?”

  She stabbed the needle into the linen in the wooden frame. “My father would never let me come to harm,” she said, and pulled the long thread through.

  She didn’t volunteer anything else, and all I could get out of Agnes was that Sir Bloet was nice and had brought her a silver penny, no doubt as part of the betrothal gifts.

  Agnes was too concerned about her knee to tell me anything else. She stopped complaining about it halfway home, and then limped exaggeratedly when she got down off the sorrel. I thought she was just trying to get attention, but when I looked at it, the scab had come off completely. The area around it is red and swollen.

  I washed it off, wrapped it in as clean a cloth as I could find, (I’m afraid it may have been one of Imeyne’s coifs—I found it in the chest at the foot of the bed) and made her sit quietly by the fire and play with her knight, but I’m worried. If it gets infected, it could be serious. There weren’t any antimicrobials in the 1300’s.

  Eliwys is worried, too. She clearly expected Gawyn back tonight, and has been going to stand by the screens all day, looking out the door. I have not been able to figure out how she feels about Gawyn. Sometimes, like today, I think she loves him, and is afraid of what that means for both of them. Adultery was a mor
tal sin in the eyes of the church, and often a dangerous one. But most of the time I am convinced that his amour is completely unrequited, that she is so worried about her husband that she doesn’t know he exists.

  The pure, unattainable lady was the ideal of courtly romances, but it’s clear he doesn’t know whether or not she loves him either. His rescuing me in the wood and his story of the renegades was only an attempt to impress her (which would have been much more impressive if there had been twenty renegades, all armed with swords and maces and battle axes). He would obviously do anything to win her, and Lady Imeyne knows it. Which is why, I think, he’s been sent off to Courcy.

  Chapter Eighteen

  By the time they got back to Balliol, two more of the detainees were down with the virus. Dunworthy sent Colin to bed and helped Finch get the detainees to bed and phone the infirmary.

  “All our ambulances are out,” the registrar told him. “We’ll send one as soon as possible.”

  As soon as possible was midnight. He didn’t get back and to bed till past one.

  Colin was asleep on the cot Finch had set up for him, The Age of Chivalry next to his head. Dunworthy debated pulling the book away but he didn’t want to risk waking him. He went in to bed.

  Kivrin could not be in the plague. Badri had said there was minimal slippage, and the plague had not hit England until 1348. Kivrin had been sent to 1320.

  He turned over and closed his eyes determinedly. She could not be in the plague. Badri was delirious. He had said all sorts of things, talked about lids and breaking china as well as rats. None of it made any sense. It was the fever speaking. He had told Dunworthy to back up. He had given him imaginary notes. None of it meant anything.

  “It was the rats,” Badri had said. The contemps hadn’t known it was spread by fleas on the rats. They had had no idea what caused it. They had accused everyone—Jews and witches and the insane. They had murdered halfwits and hanged old women. They had burned strangers at the stake.

  He got out of bed and padded into the sitting room. He tiptoed around Colin’s cot and slid The Age of Chivalry out from under Colin’s head. Colin stirred but didn’t wake.