The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  “Don’t tell me you’ve imported more Christmas bells,” Mary said.

  “I thought they were supposed to arrive on the twenty-second,” Dunworthy said to Finch.

  “This is the twenty-second,” Finch said. “They were to arrive this afternoon but their concert at Exeter was canceled, so they’re ahead of schedule. I called Mediaeval, and Mr. Gilchrist told me he thought you’d gone out to celebrate.” He looked at Dunworthy’s empty mug.

  “I’m not celebrating,” Dunworthy said. “I’m waiting for the fix on one of my undergraduates.” He looked at his watch. “It will take at least another hour.”

  “You promised you’d take them on a tour of the local bells, sir.”

  “There’s really no reason why you need to be here,” Mary said. “I can ring you at Balliol as soon as the fix is in.”

  “I’ll come when we have the fix,” Dunworthy said, glaring at Mary. “Show them round the college and then give them lunch. That should take an hour.”

  Finch looked unhappy. “They’re only here until four o’clock. They have a handbell concert tonight in Ely, and they’re extremely eager to see Christ Church’s bells.”

  “Then take them to Christ Church. Show them Great Tom. Take them up in St. Martin’s tower. Or take them round to New College. I will be there as soon as I can.”

  Finch looked like he was going to ask something else and then changed his mind. “I’ll tell them you’ll be there within the hour, sir,” he said and started for the door. Halfway there he stopped and came back. “I almost forgot, sir. The vicar called to ask if you’d be willing to read the Scripture for the Christmas Eve interchurch service. It’s to be at St. Mary the Virgin’s this year.”

  “Tell him yes,” Dunworthy said, thankful that he’d given up on the change ringers. “And tell him we’ll need to get into the belfry this afternoon so I can show these Americans the bells.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “What about Iffley? Do you think I should take them out to Iffley? They’ve a very nice eleventh century.”

  “By all means,” Dunworthy said. “Take them to Iffley. I will be back as soon as I can.”

  Finch opened his mouth and closed it again. “Yes, sir,” he said, and went out the door to the accompaniment of “The Holly and the Ivy.”

  “You were a bit hard on him, don’t you think?” Mary asked. “After all, Americans can be terrifying.”

  “He’ll be back in five minutes asking me whether he should take them to Christ Church first,” Dunworthy said. “The boy has absolutely no initiative.”

  “I thought you admired that in young people,” Mary said wryly. “At any rate, he won’t go running off to the Middle Ages.”

  The door opened, and “The Holly and the Ivy” started up again. “That’ll be him wanting to know what he should give them for lunch.”

  “Boiled beef and overcooked vegetables,” Mary said. “Americans love to tell stories about our dreadful cooking. Oh, dear.”

  Dunworthy looked toward the door. Gilchrist and Latimer stood there, haloed in the gray light from outside. Gilchrist was smiling broadly and saying something over the bells. Latimer struggled to collapse a large black umbrella.

  “I suppose we’ve got to be civil and invite them to join us,” Mary said.

  Dunworthy reached for his coat. “Be civil if you like. I have no intention of listening to those two congratulating each other for having sent an inexperienced young girl into danger.”

  “You’re sounding like you-know-who again,” Mary said. “They wouldn’t be here if anything had gone wrong. Perhaps Badri’s got the fix.”

  “It’s too soon for that,” he said, but he sat back down again. “More likely he threw them out so he could get on with it.”

  Gilchrist had apparently caught sight of him as he stood up. He half turned, as if to walk back out again, but Latimer was already nearly to the table. Gilchrist followed, no longer smiling.

  “Is the fix in?” Dunworthy asked.

  “The fix?” Gilchrist said vaguely.

  “The fix” Dunworthy said. “The determination of where and when Kivrin is that makes it possible to pull her out again.”

  “Your tech said it would take at least an hour to determine the coordinates,” Gilchrist said stuffily. “Does it always take him that long? He said he would come tell us when it was completed, but that the preliminary readings indicate that the drop went perfectly and that there was minimal slippage.”

  “What good news!” Mary said, sounding relieved. “Do come sit down. We’ve been waiting for the fix, too, and having a pint. Will you have something to drink?” she asked Latimer, who had got the umbrella down and was fastening the strap.

  “Why, I believe I shall,” Latimer said. “This is after all a great day. A drop of brandy, I think. Strong was the wyn, and wel to drinke us leste.” He fumbled with the strap, getting it tangled in the ribs of the umbrella. “At last we have the chance to observe the loss of adjectival inflection and the shift to the nominative singular at firsthand.”

  A great day, Dunworthy thought, but he felt relieved in spite of himself. The slippage had been his greatest worry. It was the most unpredictable part of a drop, even with parameter checks.

  The theory was that it was the net’s own safety and abort mechanism, Time’s way of protecting itself from continuum paradoxes. The shift forward in time was supposed to prevent collisions or meetings or actions that would affect history, sliding the historian neatly past the critical moment when he might shoot Hitler or rescue the drowning child.

  But net theory had never been able to determine what those critical moments were or how much slippage any given drop might produce. The parameter checks gave probabilities, but Gilchrist hadn’t done any. Kivrin’s drop might have been off by two weeks or a month. For all Gilchrist knew, she might have come through in April, in her fur-lined cloak and winter kirtle.

  But Badri had said minimal slippage. That meant Kivrin was off by no more than a few days, with plenty of time to find out the date and make the rendezvous.

  “Mr. Gilchrist?” Mary was saying. “Can I get you a brandy?”

  “No, thank you,” he said.

  Mary rummaged for another crumpled note and went over to the bar.

  “Your tech seems to have done a passable job,” Gilchrist said, turning to Dunworthy. “Mediaeval would like to arrange to borrow him for our next drop. We’ll be sending Ms. Engle to 1355 to observe the effects of the Black Death. Contemporary accounts are completely unreliable, particularly in the area of mortality rates. The accepted figure of fifty million deaths is clearly inaccurate, and estimates that it killed one third to one half of Europe are obvious exaggerations. I’m eager to have Ms. Engle make trained observations.”

  “Aren’t you being rather premature?” Dunworthy said. “Perhaps you should wait to see if Kivrin manages to survive this drop or at the very least gets through to 1320 safely.”

  Gilchrist’s face took on its pinched look. “It strikes me as somewhat unjust that you constantly assume Mediaeval is incapable of carrying out a successful drop,” he said. “I assure you we have carefully thought out its every aspect. The method of Kivrin’s arrival has been researched in every detail.

  “Probability puts the frequency of travelers on the Oxford-Bath road as one every 1.6 hours, and it indicates a 92 percent chance of her story of an assault being believed, due to the frequency of such assaults. A wayfarer in Oxfordshire had a 42.5 percent chance of being robbed in winter, 58.6 percent in summer. That’s an average, of course. The chances were greatly increased in parts of Otmoor and the Wychwood and on the smaller roads.”

  Dunworthy wondered how on earth Probability had arrived at those figures. The Domesday Book didn’t list thieves, with the possible exception of the king’s census takers, who sometimes took more than the census, and the cutthroats of the time surely hadn’t kept records of whom they had robbed and murdered, the locations marked neatly on a map. Proofs of deaths away fr
om home had been entirely de facto: the person had failed to come back. And how many bodies had lain in the woods, undiscovered and unmarked by anyone?

  “I assure you we have taken every precaution possible to protect Kivrin,” Gilchrist said.

  “Such as parameter checks?” Dunworthy said. “And unmanneds and symmetry tests?”

  Mary came back. “Here we are, Mr. Latimer,” she said, putting a glass of brandy down in front of him. She hooked Latimer’s wet umbrella over the back of the settle and sat down beside him.

  “I was just assuring Mr. Dunworthy that every aspect of this drop was exhaustively researched,” Gilchrist said. He picked up the plastic figurine of a wise man carrying a gilt box. “The brass-bound casket in her equipage is an exact reproduction of a jewel casket in the Ashmolean.” He set the wise man down. “Even her name was painstakingly researched. Isabel is the woman’s name listed most frequently in the Assize Rolls and the Regista Regum for 1295 through 1320.

  “It is actually a corrupted form of Elizabeth,” Latimer said, as if it were one of his lectures. “Its widespread use in England from the twelfth century is thought to trace its origin to Isavel of Angoulême, wife of King John.”

  “Kivrin told me she’d been given an actual identity, that Isabel de Beauvrier was one of the daughters of a Yorkshire nobleman,” Dunworthy said.

  “She was,” Gilchrist said. “Gilbert de Beauvrier had four daughters in the appropriate age range, but their Christian names were not listed in the rolls. That was a common practice. Women were frequently listed only by surname and relationship, even in parish registers and on tombstones.”

  Mary put a restraining hand on Dunworthy’s arm. “Why did you choose Yorkshire?” she asked quickly. “Won’t that put her a long way from home?”

  She’s seven hundred years from home, Dunworthy thought, in a century that didn’t value women enough to even list their names when they died.

  “Ms. Engle was the one who suggested that,” Gilchrist said. “She felt having the estate so distant would ensure that no attempt would be made to contact the family.”

  Or to cart her back to them, miles from the drop. Kivrin had suggested it. She had probably suggested the whole thing, searching through exchequer rolls and church registers for a family with a daughter the right age and no court connections, a family far enough up into the East Riding that the snow and the impassable roads would make it impossible for a messenger to ride and tell the family a missing daughter had been found.

  “Mediaeval has given the same careful attention to every detail of this drop,” Gilchrist said, “even to the pretext for her journey, her brother’s illness. We were careful to ascertain that there had been an outbreak of influenza in that section of Gloucestershire in 1319, even though illness was abundant during the Middle Ages, and he could just as easily have contracted cholera or blood poisoning.”

  “James,” Mary said warningly.

  “Ms. Engle’s costume was hand-sewn. The blue cloth for her dress was hand-dyed with woad using a mediaeval recipe. And Ms. Montoya has exhaustively researched the village of Skendgate where Kivrin will spend the two weeks.”

  “If she makes it there,” Dunworthy said.

  “James,” Mary said.

  “What precautions have you taken to ensure that the friendly traveler who happens along every 1.6 hours doesn’t decide to cart her off to the convent at Godstow or a brothel in London, or see her come through and decide she’s a witch? What precautions have you taken to ensure that the friendly traveler is in fact friendly and not one of the cutthroats who waylay 42.5 percent of all passersby?”

  “Probability indicated there was no more than a 0.04 percent chance of someone being at the location at the time of the drop.”

  “Oh, look, here’s Badri already,” Mary said, standing up and putting herself between Dunworthy and Gilchrist. “That was quick work, Badri. Did you get the fix all right?”

  Badri had come away without his coat. His lab uniform was wet and his face was pinched with cold. “You look half-frozen,” Mary said. “Come and sit down.” She motioned to the empty place on the settle next to Latimer. “I’ll fetch you a brandy.”

  “Did you get the fix?” Dunworthy said.

  Badri was not only wet, he was drenched. “Yes,” he said, and his teeth started to chatter.

  “Good man,” Gilchrist said, standing up and clapping him on the shoulder. “I thought you said it would take an hour. This calls for a toast. Have you any champagne?” he called out to the barman, clapped Badri on the shoulder again, and went over to the bar.

  Badri stood looking after him, rubbing his arms and shivering. He seemed inattentive, almost dazed.

  “You definitely got the fix?” Dunworthy asked.

  “Yes,” he said, still looking after Gilchrist.

  Mary came back to the table, carrying the brandy. “This should warm you up a bit,” she said, handing it to him. “There. Drink it down. Doctor’s orders.”

  He frowned at the glass as if he didn’t know what it was. His teeth were still chattering.

  “What is it?” Dunworthy said. “Kivrin’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “Kivrin,” he said, still staring at the glass, and then seemed suddenly to come to himself. He set the glass down. “I need you to come,” he said, and started to push his way back through the tables to the door.

  “What’s happened?” Dunworthy said, standing up. The crèche figures fell over, and one of the sheep rolled across the table and fell off.

  Badri opened the door on the carillon’s clanging of “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.”

  “Badri, wait, we’re to have a toast,” Gilchrist said, coming back to the table with a bottle and a tangle of glasses.

  Dunworthy reached for his coat.

  “What is it?” Mary said, reaching for her shopping bag. “Didn’t he get the fix?”

  Dunworthy didn’t answer. He grabbed up his overcoat and took off after Badri. The tech was already halfway down the street, pushing his way through the Christmas shoppers as if they weren’t even there. It was raining hard, but Badri seemed oblivious to that, too. Dunworthy pulled his overcoat more or less on and shoved into the crowd.

  Something had gone wrong. There had been slippage after all, or the first-year apprentice had made an error in the calculations. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the net itself. But it had safeties and layereds and aborts. If anything had gone wrong with the net, Kivrin simply couldn’t have gone through. And Badri had said he’d got the fix.

  It had to be the slippage. It was the only thing that could have gone wrong and the drop still take place.

  Ahead Badri crossed the street, narrowly avoiding a bicycle. Dunworthy barged between two women carrying shopping bags even larger than Mary’s, and over a white terrier on a leash, and caught sight of him again two doors up.

  “Badri!” he called. The tech half turned and crashed straight into a middle-aged woman with a large flowered umbrella.

  The woman was bent against the rain, holding the umbrella nearly in front of her, and she obviously didn’t see Badri either. The umbrella, which was covered with lavender violets, seemed to explode upward, and then fell top down onto the pavement. Badri, still plunging blindly ahead, nearly fell over it.

  “Watch where you’re going, won’t you?” the woman said angrily, grabbing at the edge of the umbrella. “This is hardly the place to run, then, is it?”

  Badri looked at her and then at the umbrella with the same dazed look he had had in the pub. “Sorry,” Dunworthy could see him say and bend to pick it up. The two of them seemed to wrestle over the expanse of violets for a moment before Badri got hold of the handle and righted the umbrella. He handed it to the woman, whose heavy face was red with rage or the cold rain or both.

  “Sorry?!” she said, raising the handle over her head as if she were going to strike him with it. “Is that all you’ve got to say?”

  He put his hand uncertainly up to his forehead
and then, as he had in the pub, seemed to remember where he was and took off again, practically running. He turned in at Brasenose’s gate, and Dunworthy followed, across the quad, in a side door to the laboratory, down a passage, and into the net area. Badri was already at the console, bending over it and frowning at the screen.

  Dunworthy had been afraid it would be awash with garbage, or, worse, blank, but it showed the orderly columns of figures and matrices of a fix.

  “You got the fix?” Dunworthy said, panting.

  “Yes,” Badri said. He turned and looked at Dunworthy. He had stopped frowning, but there was an odd, abstracted look on his face, as if he were trying hard to concentrate.

  “When was …”he said and began to shiver. His voice trailed off as if he had forgotten what he was going to say.

  The thin-glass door banged, and Gilchrist and Mary came in, with Latimer at their heels, fumbling with his umbrella. “What is it? What’s happened?” Mary said.

  “When was what, Badri?” Dunworthy demanded.

  “I got the fix,” Badri said. He turned and looked at the screen.

  “Is this it?” Gilchrist said, leaning over his shoulder. “What do all these symbols mean? You’ll need to translate for us laymen.”

  “When was what?” Dunworthy repeated.

  Badri put his hand up to his forehead. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

  “What?” Dunworthy shouted. “Slippage? Is it the slippage?”

  “Slippage?” Badri said, shivering so hard he could hardly get the word out.

  “Badri,” Mary said. “Are you all right?”

  Badri got the odd, abstracted look again, as if he were considering the answer.

  “No,” he said, and pitched forward across the console.

  3

  She heard the bell as she came through. It sounded thin and tinny, like the piped-in bell music they were playing in the High for Christmas. The control room was supposed to be soundproof, but every time someone opened the anteroom door from outside, she had been able to hear the faint, ghostly sound of Christmas carols.