The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

“Well, I try, sir. It’s difficult, with Mrs. Gaddson.” He stood up. “I don’t want to keep you from your rest. If there’s anything I can bring you, anything I can do?”

  “No,” Dunworthy said, “there’s nothing you can do.”

  He started for the door and then stopped. “I hope you’ll accept my condolences, Mr. Dunworthy,” he said, looking uncomfortable. “I know how close you and Dr. Ahrens were.”

  Close, he thought after Finch was gone. I wasn’t close at all. He tried to remember Mary leaning over him, giving him his temp, looking up anxiously at the screens, to remember Colin standing by his bed in his new jacket and his muffler, saying, “Great-aunt Mary’s dead. Dead. Can’t you hear me?” but there was no memory there at all. Nothing.

  The sister came in and hooked up another drip that put him out, and when he woke he felt abruptly better.

  “It’s your T-cell enhancement taking hold,” William’s nurse told him. “We’ve been seeing it in a good number of cases. Some of them make miraculous recoveries.”

  She made him walk to the toilet, and, after lunch, down the corridor. “The farther you can go, the better,” she said, kneeling to put his slippers on.

  I’m not going anywhere, he thought. Gilchrist shut down the net.

  She strapped his drip bag to his shoulder, hooked the portable motor to it, and helped him on with his robe. “You mustn’t worry about the depression,” she said, helping him out of bed. “It’s a common symptom after influenza. It will fade as soon as your chemical balance is restored.”

  She walked him out into the corridor. “You might want to visit some of your friends,” she said. “There are two patients from Balliol in the ward at the end of the corridor. Ms. Piantini’s the fourth bed. She could do with a bit of cheering.”

  “Did Mr. Latimer—” he said, and stopped. “Is Mr. Latimer still a patient?”

  “Yes,” she said, and he could tell from her voice that Latimer hadn’t recovered from his stroke. “He’s two doors down.”

  He shuffled down the corridor to Latimer’s room. He hadn’t gone to see Latimer after he fell ill, first because of having to wait for Andrews’s call and then because the Infirmary had run out of SPG’s. Mary had said he had suffered complete paralysis and loss of function.

  He pushed open the door to Latimer’s room. Latimer lay with his arms at his sides, the left one crooked slightly to accommodate the hookups and the drip. There were tubes in his nose and down his throat, and op-fibers leading from his head and chest to the screens above the bed. His face was half-obscured by them, but he gave no sign that they bothered him.

  “Latimer?” he said, going to stand beside the bed.

  There was no indication he’d heard. His eyes were open, but they didn’t shift at the sound, and his face under the tangle of tubes didn’t change. He looked vague, distant, as if he were trying to remember a line from Chaucer.

  “Mr. Latimer,” he said more loudly, and looked up at the screens. They didn’t change either.

  He’s not aware of anything, Dunworthy thought. He put his hand on the back of the chair. “You don’t know anything that’s happened, do you?” he said. “Mary’s dead. Kivrin’s in 1348,” he said, watching the screens, “and you don’t even know. Gilchrist shut down the net.”

  The screens didn’t change. The lines continued to move steadily, unconcernedly across the displays.

  “You and Gilchrist sent her into the Black Death,” he shouted, “and you lie there—” He stopped and sank down in the chair.

  “I tried to tell you Great-aunt Mary was dead,” Colin had said, “but you were too ill.” Colin had tried to tell him, but he had lain there, like Latimer, unconcerned, oblivious.

  Colin will never forgive me, he thought. Any more than he’ll forgive his mother for not coming to the funeral. What had Finch said, that it was too difficult to make arrangements on such short notice? He thought of Colin alone at the funeral, looking at the lilies and laser blossoms his mother had sent, at the mercy of Mrs. Gaddson and the bell ringers.

  “My mother couldn’t come,” Colin had said, but he didn’t believe that. Of course she could have come, if she had truly wanted to.

  He will never forgive me, he thought. And neither will Kivrin. She’s older than Colin, she’ll imagine all sorts of extenuating circumstances, perhaps even the true one. But in her heart, left to the mercy of who knows what cutthroats and thieves and pestilences, she will not believe I could not have come to get her. If I had truly wanted to.

  Dunworthy stood up with difficulty, holding on to the seat and the back of the chair and not looking at Latimer or the displays, and went back out into the corridor. There was an empty stretcher trolley against the wall, and he leaned against it for a moment.

  Mrs. Gaddson came out of the ward. “There you are, Mr. Dunworthy,” she said. “I was just coming to read to you.” She opened her Bible. “Should you be up?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, I must say, I’m glad you’re recovering at last. Things have simply fallen apart while you’ve been ill.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You really must do something about Mr. Finch, you know. He allows the Americans to practice their bells at all hours of the day and night, and when I complained to him about it he was quite rude. And he assigned my Willy nursing duties. Nursing duties! When Willy’s always been susceptible to illness. It’s been a miracle that he didn’t come down with the virus before this.”

  It very definitely has been, thought Dunworthy, considering the number of very probably infectious young women he had had contact with during the epidemic. He wondered what odds Probability would give on his having remained unscathed.

  “And then for Mr. Finch to assign him nursing duties!” Mrs. Gaddson was saying. “I didn’t allow it, of course. ‘I refuse to let you endanger Willy’s health in this irresponsible manner,’ I told him. ‘I cannot stand idly by when my child is in mortal danger,’ I said.”

  Mortal danger. “I must go see Ms. Piantini,” Dunworthy said.

  “You should go back to bed. You look quite dreadful.” She shook the Bible at him. “It’s scandalous the way they run this Infirmary. Allowing their patients to go gadding about. You’ll have a relapse and die, and you’ll have no one but yourself to blame.”

  “No,” Dunworthy said, pushed open the door into the ward, and went inside.

  He had expected the ward to be nearly empty, the patients all sent home, but every bed was full. Most of the patients were sitting up, reading or watching portable vidders, and one was sitting in a wheelchair beside his bed, looking out at the rain.

  It took Dunworthy a moment to recognize him. Colin had said he’d had a relapse, but he had not expected this. He looked like an old man, his dark face pinched to whiteness under the eyes and in long lines down the sides of the mouth. His hair had gone completely white. “Badri,” he said.

  Badri turned around. “Mr. Dunworthy.”

  “I didn’t know that you were in this ward,” Dunworthy said.

  “They moved me here after—” he stopped. “I heard that you were better.”

  “Yes.”

  I can’t bear this, Dunworthy thought. How are you feeling? Better, thank you. And you? Much improved. Of course there is the depression, but that is a normal post-viral symptom.

  Badri wheeled his chair round to face the window, and Dunworthy wondered if he could not bear it either.

  “I made an error in the coordinates when I refed them,” Badri said, looking out at the rain. “I fed in the wrong data.”

  He should say, “You were ill, you had a fever.” He should tell him mental confusion was an Early Symptom. He should say, “It was not your fault.”

  “I didn’t realize I was ill,” Badri said, picking at his robe as he had plucked at the sheet in his delirium. “I’d had a headache all morning, but I put it down to working the net. I should have realized something was wrong and aborted the drop.”

  And I sho
uld have refused to tutor her, I should have insisted Gilchrist run parameter checks, I should have made him open the net as soon as you said there was something wrong.

  “I should have opened the net the day you fell ill and not waited for the rendezvous,” Badri said, twisting the sash between his fingers. “I should have opened it immediately.”

  Dunworthy glanced automatically at the wall above Badri’s head, but there were no screens above the bed. Badri was not even wearing a temp patch. He wondered if it was possible that Badri didn’t know Gilchrist had shut down the net, if in their concern for his recovery they had kept it from Badri as they had kept the news of Mary’s death from him.

  “They refused to discharge me from hospital,” Badri said. “I should have forced them to let me go.”

  I will have to tell him, Dunworthy thought, but he didn’t. He stood there silently, watching Badri torture the sash into wrinkles, and feeling infinitely sorry for him.

  “Ms. Montoya showed me the Probability statistics,” Badri said. “Do you think Kivrin’s dead?”

  I hope so, he thought. I hope she died of the virus before she realized where she was. Before she realized we had left her there. “It was not your fault,” he said.

  “I was only two days late opening the net. I was certain she’d be there waiting. I was only two days late.”

  “What?” Dunworthy said.

  “I tried to get permission to leave hospital on the sixth, but they refused to discharge me until the eighth. I got the net open as soon as I could, but she wasn’t there.”

  “What are you talking about?” Dunworthy said. “How could you open the net? Gilchrist shut it down.”

  Badri looked up at him. “We used the backup.”

  “What backup?”

  “The fix I did on our net,” Badri said, sounding bewildered. “You were so worried about the way Mediaeval was running the drop, I decided I’d better put on a backup, in case something went wrong. I came to Balliol to ask you about it Tuesday afternoon, but you weren’t there. I left you a note saying I needed to talk to you.”

  “A note,” Dunworthy said.

  “The laboratory was open. I ran a redundant fix through Balliol’s net,” Badri said. “You were so worried.”

  The strength seemed suddenly to go out of Dunworthy’s legs. He sat down on the bed.

  “I tried to tell you,” Badri said, “but I was too ill to make myself understood.”

  There had been a backup all along. He had wasted days and days trying to force Gilchrist to unlock the laboratory, searching for Basingame, waiting for Polly Wilson to contrive a way into the University’s computer, and all the while the fix had been in the net at Balliol. “So worried,” Badri had said through his delirium. “Is the laboratory open?” “Back up,” he had said. Backup.

  “Can you open the net again?”

  “Of course, but even if she hasn’t contracted the plague—”

  “She hasn’t,” Dunworthy cut in. “She was immunized.”

  “—she wouldn’t still be there. It’s been eight days since the rendezvous. She couldn’t have waited there all this time.”

  “Can someone else go through?”

  “Someone else?” Badri said blankly.

  “To look for her. Could someone else use the same drop to go through?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long would it take you to set it up so we could try it?”

  “Two hours at the most. The temporals and locationals are already set, but I don’t know how much slippage there’d be.”

  The door to the ward burst open and Colin came in. “There you are,” he said. “The nurse said you’d taken a walk, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. I thought you’d got lost.”

  “No,” Dunworthy said, looking at Badri.

  “She said I’m to bring you back,” Colin said, taking hold of Dunworthy’s arm and helping him up, “that you’re not to overdo.” He herded him toward the door.

  Dunworthy stopped at the door. “Which net did you use when you opened the net on the eighth?” he said to Badri.

  “Balliol’s,” he said. “I was afraid part of the permanent memory had been erased when Brasenose’s was shut down, and there was no time to run a damage assessment routine.”

  Colin backed the door open. “The sister comes on duty in half an hour. You don’t want her to find you up.” He let the door swing shut. “I’m sorry I wasn’t back sooner, but I had to take immunization schedules out to Godstow.”

  Dunworthy leaned against the door. There might be too much slippage, and the tech was in a wheelchair, and he was not sure he could walk as far as the end of the corridor, let alone back to his room. So worried. He had thought Badri meant “You were so worried I decided to refeed the coordinates,” but he had meant “I put on a backup.” A backup.

  “Are you all right?” Colin asked. “You’re not having a relapse or anything, are you?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Did you ask Mr. Chaudhuri if he could redo the fix?”

  “No,” he said. “There was a backup.”

  “A backup?” he said excitedly. “You mean, another fix?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does that mean you can rescue her?”

  He stopped and leaned against the stretcher trolley. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll help you,” Colin said. “What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything you say. I can run errands, and fetch things for you. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  “It might not work,” Dunworthy said. “The slippage …”

  “But you’re going to try, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  A band tightened round his chest with every step, and Badri had already had one relapse, and even if they managed it, the net might not send him through.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to try.”

  “Apocalyptic!” Colin said.

  TRANSCRIPT FROM THE DOMESDAY BOOK

  (078926–079064)

  Lady Imeyne, mother of Guillaume D’Ivene.

  (Break)

  Rosemund is sinking. I can’t feel the pulse in her wrist at all, and her skin looks yellow and waxen, which I know is a bad sign. Agnes is fighting hard. She still doesn’t have any buboes or vomiting, which is a good sign, I think. Eliwys had to cut off her hair. She kept pulling at it, screaming for me to come and braid it.

  (Break)

  Roche has anointed Rosemund. She couldn’t make a confession, of course. Agnes seems better, though she had a nosebleed a little while ago. She asked for her bell.

  (Break)

  You bastard! I will not let you take her. She’s only a child. But that’s your specialty, isn’t it? Slaughtering the innocents? You’ve already killed the steward’s baby and Agnes’s puppy and the boy who went for help when I was in the hut, and that’s enough. I won’t let you kill her, too, you son of a bitch! I won’t let you!

  31

  Agnes died the day after New Year’s, still screaming for Kivrin to come.

  “She is here,” Eliwys said, squeezing her hand. “Lady Katherine is here.”

  “She is not” Agnes wailed, her voice hoarse but still strong. “Tell her to come!”

  “I will,” Eliwys promised, and then looked up at Kivrin, her expression faintly puzzled. “Go and fetch Father Roche,” she said.

  “What is it?” Kivrin asked. He had administered the last rites that first night, Agnes flailing and kicking at him as if she were having a tantrum, and since then she had refused to let him near her. “Are you ill, lady?”

  Eliwys shook her head, still looking at Kivrin. “What will I tell my husband when he comes?” she said, and laid Agnes’s hand along her side, and it was only then that Kivrin realized she was dead.

  Kivrin washed her little body, which was nearly covered with purplish-blue bruises. Where Eliwys had held her hand, the skin was completely black. She looked like she had been beaten. As she has been, Kivrin thought, beaten and tortured. And murdered. The
slaughter of the innocents.

  Agnes’s surcote and shift were ruined, a stiffened mass of blood and vomit, and her everyday linen shift had long since been torn into strips. Kivrin wrapped her body in her own white cloak, and Roche and the steward buried her.

  Eliwys did not come. “I must stay with Rosemund,” she said when Kivrin told her it was time. There was nothing Eliwys could do for Rosemund—the girl still lay as still as if she were under a spell, and Kivrin thought the fever must have caused some brain damage. “And Gawyn may come,” Eliwys said.

  It was very cold. Roche and the steward puffed out great clouds of condensation as they lowered Agnes into the grave, and the sight of their white breath infuriated Kivrin. She doesn’t weigh anything, she thought bitterly, you could carry her in one hand.

  The sight of all the graves angered her, too. The churchyard was filled, and nearly all the rest of the green that Roche had consecrated. Lady Imeyne’s grave was almost in the path to the lychgate, and the steward’s baby did not have one—Father Roche had let it be buried at its mother’s feet though it had not been baptized—and the churchyard was still full.

  What about the steward’s youngest son, Kivrin thought angrily, and the clerk? Where do you plan to put them? The Black Death was only supposed to have killed one third to one half of Europe. Not all of it.

  “Requiescat in pace. Amen,” Roche said, and the steward began shoveling the frozen dirt onto the little bundle.

  You were right, Mr. Dunworthy, she thought bitterly. White only gets dirty. You’re right about everything, aren’t you? You told me not to come, that terrible things would happen. Well, they have. And you can’t wait to tell me I told you so. But you won’t have that satisfaction because I don’t know where the drop is, and the only person who does is probably dead.

  She didn’t wait for the steward to finish shoveling dirt down on Agnes or for Father Roche to complete his chummy little chat with God. She started across the green, furious with all of them: with the steward for standing there with his spade, eager to dig more graves, with Eliwys for not coming, with Gawyn for not coming. No one’s coming, she thought. No one.