Connie Willis - Dooms Day Book

The bells died away slowly, the bell from Oxford leading the way again, though, impossibly, its sound hung longer on the air than any of the others. The sky turned violet-blue, and a star came out in the southeast. Kivrin’s hands were still folded in prayer. “It’s beautiful here.”

Well, Mr. Dunworthy, I’m here. I seem to be in the right place, more or less. I’m not right on the Oxford-Bath road. I’m about five hundred yards south of it on a side road. I can see Oxford. It’s about ten miles away.

I don’t know exactly when I came through, but if it was noon as scheduled, there’s been about four hours’ slippage. It’s the right time of year. The leaves are mostly off the trees, but the ones on the ground are still more or less intact, and only about a third of the fields have been plowed under. I won’t be able to tell my exact temporal location until I reach the village and can ask someone what day it is. You probably know more about where and when I am than I do, or at least you will after you’ve done the fix.

But I know I’m in the right century. I can see fields from the little hill I’m on. They’re classic mediaeval strip fields, with the rounded ends where the oxen turn. The pastures are bounded with hedges, and about a third of them are Saxon dead hedges, while the rest are Norman hawthorn. Probability put the ratio in 1300 at twenty-five to seventy-five per cent, but that was based on Suffolk, which is farther east.

To the south and west is forest—Wychwood?—all deciduous as far as I can tell. To the east I can see the Thames. I can almost see London, even though I know that’s impossible. In 1320 it would have been over fifty miles away, wouldn’t it, instead of only twenty. I still think I can see it. I can definitely see the city walls of Oxford, and Carfax tower.

It’s beautiful here. It doesn’t feel as though I were seven hundred years away from you. Oxford is right there, within walking distance, and I cannot get the idea out of my head that if I walked down this hill and into town I would find all of you, still standing there in the lab at Brasenose waiting for the fix, Badri frowning at the displays and Ms. Montoya fretting to get back to her dig, and you, Mr. Dunworthy, clucking like an old mother hen. I don’t feel separated from you at all, or even very far away.

Badri’s hand came away from his forehead as he fell, and his elbow hit the console and broke his fall for a second, and Dunworthy glanced anxiously at the screen, afraid he might have hit one of the keys and scrambled the display. Badri crumpled to the floor.

Latimer and Gilchrist didn’t try to grab him either. Latimer didn’t even seem to realize anything had gone wrong. Mary grabbed for Badri immediately, but she was standing behind the others and only caught a fold of his sleeve. She was instantly on her knees beside him, straightening him out onto his back and jamming an earphone into her ear.

She rummaged in her shopping bag, came up with a bleeper, and held the call button down for a full five seconds. “Badri?” she said loudly, and it was only then that Dunworthy realized how deathly silent it was in the room. Gilchrist was standing where he had been when Badri fell. He looked furious. I assure you we’ve considered every possible contingency. He obviously hadn’t considered this one.

Mary let go of the bleeper button and shook Badri’s shoulders gently. There was no response. She tilted his head far back and bent over his face, her ear practically in his open mouth and her head turned so she could see his chest. He hadn’t stopped breathing. Dunworthy could see his chest rising and falling, and Mary obviously could, too. She raised her head immediately, already pressing on the bleeper, and pressed two fingers against the side of his neck, held them there for what seemed an endless time, and then raised the bleeper to her mouth.

“We’re at Brasenose. In the history laboratory,” she said into the bleeper. “Five-two. Collapse. Syncope. No evidence of seizure.” She took her hand off the call button and pulled Badri’s eyelids up.

“Syncope?” Gilchrist said. “What’s that? What’s happened?”

She glanced irritably at him. “He’s fainted,” she said. “Get me my kit,” she said to Dunworthy. “In the shopping bag.”

She had knocked the bag over getting the bleeper out. It lay on its side. Dunworthy fumbled through the boxes and parcels, found a hard plastic box that looked the right size, and snapped it open. It was full of red and green foil Christmas crackers. He jammed it back in the bag.

“Come along,” Mary said, unbuttoning Badri’s lab shirt. “I haven’t got all day.”

“I can’t find—” Dunworthy began.

She snatched the bag away and upended it. The crackers rolled everywhere. The box with the muffler came open, and the muffler fell out. Mary grabbed up her handbag, zipped it open, and pulled out a large flat wallet. She opened it and took out a tach bracelet. She fastened the bracelet around his wrist and turned to look at the blood pressure reads on the kit’s monitor.

The wave form didn’t tell Dunworthy anything and he couldn’t tell from Mary’s reaction what she thought it meant. Badri hadn’t stopped breathing, his heart hadn’t stopped beating, and he wasn’t bleeding anywhere that Dunworthy could see. Perhaps he had only fainted. But people didn’t simply fall over, except in books or the vids. He must be injured or ill. He had seemed to be almost in shock when he came into the pub. Could he have been struck by a bicycle like the one that had just missed hitting Dunworthy, and not realized at first that he was injured? That would account for his disconnected manner, his peculiar agitation.

But not for the fact that he had come away without his coat, that he had said, “I need you to come,” that he had said, “There’s something wrong.”

Dunworthy turned and looked at the console screen. It still showed the matrices it had when the tech collapsed. He couldn’t read them, but it looked like a normal fix, and Badri had said Kivrin had gone through all right. There’s something wrong .

With her hands flat, Mary was patting Badri’s arms, the sides of his chest, down his legs. Badri’s eyelids fluttered, and then his eyes closed again.

“Do you know if Badri had any health problems?”

“He’s Mr. Dunworthy’s tech,” Gilchrist said accusingly. “From Balliol. He was on loan to us,” he added, making it sound like Dunworthy was somehow responsible for this, had arranged the tech’s collapse to sabotage the project.

“I don’t know of any health problems,” Dunworthy said. “He’d have had a full screen and seasonals at the start of term.”

Mary looked dissatisfied. She put on her stethoscope and listened to his heart for a long minute, rechecked the blood pressure reads, took his pulse again. “And you don’t know anything of a history of epilepsy? Diabetes?”

“No,” Dunworthy said.

“Has he ever used drugs or illegal endorphins?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. She pressed the button on her bleeper again. “Ahrens here. Pulse one ten. BP one hundred over sixty. I’m doing a blood screen.” She tore open a gauze wipe, swabbed at the arm without the bracelet, tore open another packet.

Drugs or illegal endorphins. That would account for his agitated manner, his disconnected speech. But if he used, it would have shown up on the beginning-of-term screen, and he couldn’t possibly have worked the elaborate calculations of the net if he was using. There’s something wrong.

Mary swabbed at the arm again and slid a cannula under the skin. Badri’s eyelids fluttered open.