"Vicki,” he gasped. “Is that you?” He blew out some more water. “Are you okay?"
"I'm okay,” came a labored voice.
Through water-blurred eyes, Paul saw a glowing redness in the distance. Treading water, he shook his head and blinked a few times to clear his vision. The red glow resolved into a word: EXIT.
The swimming pool! Paul stroked toward the sign and heard Vicki following behind. Then, his eyes adjusting to the dim illumination of a starry night sifting in through the windows, he saw her overtake him. She climbed out of the pool at a metal ladder and Paul, following, became engulfed in the torrent of water spilling from her clothes.
"We did it!” shouted Paul when he'd emerged from the pool. He raised his hands in victory. “We've brought Britain back!"
"Gosh,” said Vicki. “I am so glad to be back in this building, chlorine smell and all.” She laughed, then impetuously hugged Paul. Turning then, she pointed to a towel hamper. “Come on. Let's dry off. I'm starting to shiver.” She darted to the hamper, pulled out two towels, and tossed one to Paul. As Vicki toweled herself down, clothes and all, she absently gazed out the window, upward toward the sky—then gasped.
"What's the matter?” Paul joined her near the window and followed her gaze. “What do ... Geez! What's that? It looks like a comet. My god, it's almost as bright as the moon.” He furrowed his forehead in puzzlement. “I didn't know of any comets coming. Certainly not a comet like this.” He looked at the diffuse fiery brightness with its ghostly arced tail. “This is amazing!"
"When beggars die, there are no comets seen," Vicki whispered, her face showing fear. “The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes."
"What?"
"Halley's Comet,” said Vicki, still at a whisper.
"No. Can't be. Halley's Comet isn't due again for years. And Halley's hasn't been this bright since—"
"It was very bright just before the Battle of Hastings.” Vicki broke her gaze from the comet and looked wide eyed at Paul. “1066. It was taken as a portent for William the Conqueror."
"Wait a minute. Are you...” Suddenly the truth and significance of Vicki's words registered. The capsule hadn't pulled modern Britain back from the age of the Anglo-Saxons, but had instead hurtled them into that very Britain—the twenty-first-century kingdom in an eleventh-century world. He staggered, leaning for support against the glass wall of the Sports Centre. Vicki had her world back, but his—everything he knew: Harvard, Boston, the United States, everything but Great Britain—gone. He was an orphan. Everyone who was important to him, everyone except Vicki, lived in another Universe.
Vicki touched his arm. “I'm sure your Dr. Richardson will know what to do."
Paul was too upset to speak and he was angry: angry at the Universe, all of them; angry at himself; angry at Dr. Richardson; and even angry at William the Conqueror. When that bastard William sets foot on England, he's going to be in for one nasty shock. Finally, Paul found his voice. “Come on,” he said, “Let's go find Professor Richardson.” He stormed toward the exit leading to the changing rooms and showers.
"Paul. Stop,” Vicki called after him.
Paul, his eyes watery from the pool's chlorine, spun around.
"The middle of the night might not be the best time for a person to drop in on someone,” said Vicki, “especially if that person is dripping wet and not wearing shoes."
"You think?” he said with a forced smile as he walked to the pool edge. He looked down at the litter of bicycles and packs on the bottom. “I'll get our stuff.” He dived in and as he splashed his way forward he understood that his outburst and wanting to see Richardson was so that he wouldn't have to think about the loss of his family and friends back home—as well as his loss of back home itself. And he sorely needed to believe that Richardson could undo the damage he'd wrought.
In several trips, Paul retrieved their gear and bicycles. The pannier bags dripped lakes. Paul grabbed another towel, dried off again, then sat, resting his back against the towel hamper. “I'm wiped,” he said in a throaty whisper. “I can't even think straight anymore."
"You live off campus, don't you?"
Paul threw a quick glance at his dripping bicycle and sighed. “About a fifteen minute bike ride away."
"Well, I'm in Highfield Hall, virtually just down the street.” Vicki paused. “I don't think you should bike home. It's late. You're wet. You'll catch pneumonia. Why don't you stay over at my place?"
Paul accepted the offer with heavy thanks, and the two left the humid pool with its heavy smell of chlorine.
As they walked their bicycles out of the Sports Centre, Paul glanced stealthily from side to side. He didn't want to encounter anyone, especially anyone he knew. He felt guilty about his part in the catastrophe, and he couldn't shake the notion that anyone he might meet would instantly know he was guilty by observing the soggy condition of his apparel.
"The campus seems too quiet,” said Vicki, softly as if reluctant to violate the silence. “Not a person in sight.” She shivered in her wet clothes. “I wonder if something has gone very wrong and there are no people left in England."
Paul gave an uneasy laugh. “That's impossible."
"Is it? I'd have thought what's already happened to be impossible also."
They walked in silence. As they approached the Maison Francaise, lying between them and Highfield Hall, they jumped at the sound of cheering. It came from the windows of the French dorm. As Paul and Vicki looked up toward the source of the exuberance, they saw a window thrown open and a student wave out as if he were the Pope. "On Capte a nouveau la television Francaise!" he announced loudly to the campus.
Vicki gazed up at him with wide, startled eyes.
Paul lowered his gaze to Vicki. “What did he say?"
"He said French television is broadcasting again.” She found Paul's eyes. “How is that possible?"
"I don't...” The answer occurred to him and Paul gasped. “It must be that instead of contemporary England switching to join the modern world, the modern world switched to join England.” He jerked his head up toward the student in the window. “Are you sure?” Paul shouted.
The student looked away for a few seconds, then leaned out the window again. “Yes. We're getting satellite channels from all over Europe now."
"Thank you!” Paul raised a hand in a V for victory.
Vicki's eyes showed a lack of comprehension.
"It looks like,” said Paul, glancing up at the comet, “when we switched to the modern England in the eleventh century, we pulled the rest of the world we transferred from with us—but naturally enough, not the rest of the Universe.” He smiled, thinking of the implications. “Since whatever happens here on Earth can't affect them, we'll see all the astronomical activities of a thousand years replayed: comets, meteor showers and impacts, supernovae—and we'll be prepared to observe them."
"Then everything is all right now,” said Vicki.
"Yes, except for time.” Paul laughed. “Who knows what to call today's date? The Greenwich Observatory will probably not be pleased. A very nasty time for them."
Copyright (c) 2008 Carl Frederick
* * * *
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Short Story: COLD FIRE by Alan Dean Foster
By four P.M. the arctic sky was ablaze with a haunting wispy green that twisted and writhed in front of the stars like the fluttering wing
feathers of a frightened tropical songbird, and Morgan knew he was freezing to death.
As if that wasn't bad enough, he was sure the wolf was laughing at him.
It stood above him, silhouetted by starlight on the rim of the depression where he had sought shelter and found only death. Little puffs of laughter emerged from the lips of the formidable gray eminence, crystallizing in the air before the wind flung them off to the north. They were only fitful congregations of breath; soft, anxious, canid exhalations. But in the haze and daze that was slowly smothering his thoughts, Morgan was sure it must be laughter. When the powerful predator was through chuckling at his predicament, it would surely begin to eat him. Gazing up from where the heavy steel leg trap held him pinned to the bottom of what he had hoped would prove to be a sheltering hollow in the tundra, he imagined that the eyes of the wolf were like emeralds lit from within.
Might as well be eaten, he thought resignedly, by something beautiful.
It was not supposed to be this way. He had set off from Barrow with his cameras and one big thermos of hot coffee and another of rich chicken soup in hopes of capturing some panoramic scenes of the deep arctic winter. It was mid December on the North Slope, a time when only the most fitful illumination glazed the landscape like glistening honey between ten in the morning and two in the afternoon. Before and thereafter, the sky was as black as the oil that gushed out of the ground at Prudhoe Bay, far to the east. When some of the staff at the hotel in Barrow had expressed reservations about him traveling alone out into the shadowy tundra, he had smiled cheerfully and assured them he had plenty of fuel to make it to the little village of Atqasuk, only sixty miles distant. His all-weather GPS would keep him from getting lost, and he had plenty of experience on snowmobiles (or snow machines, as they called them up here) back home in Wisconsin.
Except ... this wasn't Wisconsin, the satchel holding his GPS unit and cell phone had been crushed when he had dumped and damaged the snow machine halfway between Barrow and Atqasuk, and both the coffee and chicken soup had long since been consumed. Their life-sustaining heat had dissipated throughout his bruised body hours ago. Then the wind had come up out of nowhere, a cold flailing vampire sucking what heat remained in his body out through the exposed frozen flesh of his face.
He had sought temporary shelter in the inviting depression. Perhaps the wolf had come seeking shelter there as well, only to find that today the usually empty hollow was offering board as well as room. A logical place, Morgan had realized too late, for a trapper to set his deadly steel.
He was out of food, out of drink, out of hope. Very soon now, with the questing, relentless cold beginning to work its inexorable way through his multiple layers of clothing, he would be out of time. The irony was that the North Slope was experiencing a heat wave. The temperature when he had left town had been almost five degrees above zero Fahrenheit. He had seen chattering Inupiaq women grocery shopping in socks and flip-flops.
It didn't matter. Even in the absence of wind, he was still going to freeze to death. And it felt much colder now. A still, dry pain had begun to numb his muscles and seep into his bones. Coming in slower, longer heaves, his breath crackled like moistened breakfast cereal.
Emerald eyes, burning as they came closer. Fixated and hungry. The two-legged prey in the depression showed no sign of trying to flee, evinced no evidence of being able to offer resistance. Baring her teeth, the solitary female raised her head and prepared to pass the word to her nearby pack. Morgan felt himself losing consciousness as a chill, dark blanket began to settle over him.
Something sharper than a snap of thumb against finger reignited his hearing. A wheeze of snow coughed skyward just to the left of the wolf's front paw. Her head swung around up, the fire in her eyes flickered briefly, and she turned and bolted. Had she ever been there, or had he imagined her? As his thoughts faded into the swirling snow around him, Morgan could not help but lament the loss of what would have been a great picture. If he'd had one of his cameras with him. If he'd had the strength to aim it and take the shot. If he had been able to lift his head. Dimly, he heard a voice.
"Damn. Missed her."
Thump, shuffle, thump. Retreating to the warm safety of childhood, Morgan remembered the muffled sound his favorite stuffed dinosaur had made every time he had happily punched the crap out of it. A terrible pressure left his cramped calf as the jaws of the steel trap were pulled apart and his leg was gently but firmly lifted and laid aside. Then he was moving, rising, and sitting up, though not of his own accord. Strong arms beneath his own, short and powerful like the concrete pillars that held buildings above the permafrost in Barrow, were lifting him.
"Come on, man. Help me. I don't want to have to drag you all the way."
Rejuvenated by the sound of another human, and one exuding soft-voiced confidence as well, Morgan summoned reserves he had long since given up for lost. In an instant of wonderment he found himself standing again on two feet.
Half awake, half dead, and unsure which way the balance was tilting, he leaned on the shorter man as they stumbled out of the hollow. Instead of a bright red snowsuit like the photographer wore, his unexpected savior was clad in a traditional heavy parka of dark blue material. Colorful abstract embroidered patterns decorated the sleeves and hem. The wide neck ruff was of wolf; perhaps a cousin of the female who had been about to make a meal of the incapacitated visitor from Wisconsin. The bottom hem, wrists, and hood were trimmed with wolverine fur, which strongly resists freezing even when wet. Rendered harmless by needlework, a set of threatening claws that had belonged to the fur's former owner hung close to the heavy-duty zipper.
Ahead of them a shape loomed out of the wind and dark. Another snow machine, lean and mean but equipped with all the necessary gear to allow its owner to check a winter trapline. At that moment it represented the most exquisite example of modern technology Morgan had ever set eyes upon. In his sudden anxiety to reach it, he tripped against his rescuer. Neither fell. It was like stumbling against a soft, two-legged boulder.
"If you're going to die,” the man shouted genially above the wind, “at least wait until we get to the house. If I have to drag you behind the machine, it will make for one ugly corpse."
He helped the feeble Morgan climb onto the back of the vehicle. Even through the all-encompassing numbness that pervaded his body, the photographer could feel that the surface of the seat beneath him was uneven. Looking down, he saw that much of the space that was supposed to accommodate his butt was presently occupied by the dead bodies of several arctic hares and a white fox.
"Can you hang on?"
"What?"
Settling into the driver's seat, the hunter glanced back and raised his voice. “Can you hang on? It's about ten miles to the house."
Unable to speak, the exhausted photographer responded with a weak nod. It was sufficient. Adjusting his snow goggles, his stocky savior positioned himself. To Morgan, the Chicago Symphony performing Beethoven never made music as exhilarating as the throaty roar of the snow machine's engine rumbling to life. A moment later men and machine were accelerating across the murky, ice-bound landscape.
"I'm Albert Tungarook!” the man yelled back at his passenger. “What happened to you?"
Gasping, leaning forward, his eyes shut tight against the freezing wind as he pressed his face against the soft blue parka in front of him, Morgan explained. The driver listened, occasionally nodding somberly in comprehension as he drove.
"Lucky for you I came along. From the looks of it, I figure you were about two minutes short of becoming a wolfsicle. Sorry I didn't get her, though.” He nodded back and down at his passenger's seat. “Try to stay off the fox. It's frozen and can't bleed, but you don't want to ride all the way back to the house with a femur up your ass."
Ten miles. Ten miles of bumping, jouncing, bone-jarring anguish on the ragged, rugged, uneven tundra. Tungarook dodged ditches that were like zippers in the earth and sped over frozen ponds as easily as Morgan would have negot
iated a sunlit highway back home. How the hunter found his way in the darkness and the flat frozen terrain Morgan did not know. The man never once looked at an instrument of any kind. There was no sun. There were no landmarks. But overhead there were familiar constellations and ribbons of waving, hypnotic aurora to tie the stars together.
Morgan was sure he was dead or dreaming, or maybe dreaming of death, when he saw the pillar of green fire.
Green burnished with red actually. And purple, and a little pale crackle of blue. It plunged downward out of the black night like the lambent stabbing finger of an unseen genie. Hissing softly, it spilled with alacrity upon a small single-story house set hard beside a frozen stream. Behind a single triple-paned window a more familiar yellow light, soft and familiar, beckoned from within. His heart hurt to look at it. All that was needed to complete the picture of bucolic impossibility was a curl of wood smoke coiling aesthetically upward from a brick chimney. But there was no chimney, brick or otherwise, and for hundreds of miles around no wood to fuel it had there been one.
His eyelids fluttered and he passed out against the strong back of Albert Tungarook, dreaming of postcard nirvanas.
* * * *
The aroma of something wonderful packaged in steam dragged him back to awareness. A moment later he was tasting as well as smelling the source. Hot chocolate. It burned his lips. He didn't care. He would not have traded it for all the amphoraed ambrosia of Zeus on Olympus.
Opening his eyes, he saw a round brown face gazing concernedly down at his own. When he met her gaze, the girl smiled. Where the eyes of the wolf had burned, hers sparkled. Carefully, she tilted the dark rim of the heavy ceramic mug to his lips a second time. Reaching up, he took it from her and smiled back. To his surprise, his hands did not tremble and his lips did not crack.
Analog SFF, November 2008 Page 14