Connie Willis: Dooms Day Book

Dunworthy looked around for a microphone. He couldn’t see one. “How were you able to hear Gilchrist’s speech?” he asked Mary.

“Gilchrist pressed a button on the inside there,” she said, pointing at a wall panel next to the net.

Badri had sat down in front of the console again and was speaking into the ear again. The net shields began to lower into place. Badri said something else, and they rose to where they’d been.

“I told Badri to recheck everything, the net, the apprentice’s calculations, everything,” he said, “and to abort the drop immediately if he found any errors, no matter what Gilchrist said.”

“But surely Gilchrist wouldn’t jeopardize Kivrin’s safety,” Mary protested. “He told me he’d taken every precaution—”

“Every precaution! He hasn’t run recon tests or parameter checks. We did two years of unmanneds in Twentieth Century before we sent anyone through. He hasn’t done any. Badri told him he should delay the drop until he could do at least one, and instead he moved the drop up two days. The man’s a complete incompetent.”

“But he explained why the drop had to be today,” Mary said. “In his speech. He said the contemps in the 1300’s paid no attention to dates, except planting and harvesting dates and church holy days. He said the concentration of holy days was greatest around Christmas, and that was why Mediaeval had decided to send Kivrin now, so she could use the Advent holy days to determine her temporal location and ensure her being at the drop site on the twenty-eighth of December.”

“His sending her now has nothing to do with Advent or holy days,” he said, watching Badri. He was back to tapping one key at a time and frowning. “He could send her next week and use Epiphany for a rendezvous date. He could run unmanneds for six months and then send her lapse-time. Gilchrist is sending her now because Basingame’s off on holiday and isn’t here to stop him.”

“Oh, dear,” Mary said. “I rather thought he was rushing it myself. When I told him how long I needed Kivrin in Infirmary, he tried to talk me out of it. I had to explain that her inoculations needed time to take effect.”

“A rendezvous on the twenty-eighth of December,” Dunworthy said bitterly. “Do you realize what holy day that is? The Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Which, in light of how this drop is being run, may be entirely appropriate.”

“Why can’t you stop it?” Mary said. “You can forbid Kivrin to go, can’t you? You’re her tutor.”

“No,” he said. “I’m not. She’s a student at Brasenose. Latimer ’s her tutor.” He waved his hand in the direction of Latimer, who had picked up the brass-bound casket again and was peering absentmindedly into it. “She came to Balliol and asked me to tutor her unofficially.”

He turned and stared blindly at the thin-glass. “I told her then that she couldn’t go.”

Kivrin had come to see him when she was a first-year student. “I want to go to the Middle Ages,” she had said. She wasn’t even a meter and a half tall, and her fair hair was in braids. She hadn’t looked old enough to cross the street by herself.

“You can’t,” he had said, his first mistake. He should have sent her back to Mediaeval, told her she would have to take the matter up with her tutor. “The Middle Ages are closed. They have a ranking of ten.”

“A blanket ten,” Kivrin had said, “which Mr. Gilchrist says they don’t deserve. He says that ranking would never hold up under a year-by-year analysis. It’s based on the contemps’ mortality rate, which was largely due to bad nutrition and no med support. The ranking wouldn’t be nearly as high for an historian who’d been inoculated against disease. Mr. Gilchrist plans to ask the History Faculty to reevaluate the ranking and open part of the fourteenth century.”

“I cannot conceive of the History Faculty opening a century that had not only the Black Death and cholera, but the Hundred Years War,” Dunworthy had said.

“But they might, and if they do, I want to go.”

“It’s impossible,” he’d said. “Even if it were opened, Mediaeval wouldn’t send a woman. An unaccompanied woman was unheard of in the fourteenth century. Only women of the lowest class went about alone, and they were fair game for any man or beast who happened along. Women of the nobility and even the emerging middle class were constantly attended by their fathers or their husbands or their servants, usually all three, and even if you weren’t a woman, you’re a student. The fourteenth century is far too dangerous for Mediaeval to consider sending a student. They would send an experienced historian.”

“It’s no more dangerous than Twentieth Century,” Kivrin had said. “Mustard gas and automobile crashes and pinpoints. At least no one’s going to drop a bomb on me. And who’s an experienced Mediaeval historian? Nobody has on-site experience, and your Twentieth Century historians here at Balliol don’t know anything about the Middle Ages. Nobody knows anything. There are scarcely any records, except for parish registers and tax rolls, and nobody knows what their lives were like at all. That’s why I want to go. I want to find out about them, how they lived, what they were like. Won’t you please help me?”

He had finally said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to speak with Mediaeval about that,” but it was too late.

“I’ve already talked to them,” she said. “They don’t know anything about the Middle Ages either. I mean, anything practical. Mr. Latimer’s teaching me Middle English, but it’s all pronomial inflections and vowel shifts. He hasn’t taught me to say anything.

“I need to know the language and the customs,” she said, leaning over Dunworthy’s desk, “and the money and table manners and things. Did you know they didn’t use plates? They used flat loaves of bread called manchets , and when they finished eating their meat, they broke them into pieces and ate them. I need someone to teach me things like that, so I won’t make mistakes.”

“I’m a twentieth-century historian, not a mediaevalist. I haven’t studied the Middle Ages in forty years.”

“But you know the sorts of things I need to know. I can look them up and learn them, if you’ll just tell me what they are.”

“What about Gilchrist?” he had said, even though he considered Gilchrist a self-important fool.

“He’s working on the re-ranking and hasn’t any time.”

And what good will the re-ranking do if he has no historians to send? Dunworthy thought. “What about Montoya? She’s working on a mediaeval dig out near Witney, isn’t she? She should know something about the customs.”

“Ms. Montoya hasn’t any time either, she’s so busy trying to recruit people to work on the Skendgate dig. Don’t you see? They’re all useless. You’re the only one who can help me.”

He should have said, “Nevertheless, they are members of Brasenose’s faculty, and I am not,” but instead he had been maliciously delighted to hear her tell him what he had thought all along, that Latimer was a doddering old man and Montoya a frustrated archaeologist, that Gilchrist was incapable of training historians. He had been eager to use her to show Mediaeval how it should be done.

“We’ll have you augmented with an interpreter,” he had said. “And I want you to learn Church Latin, Norman French, and Old German, in addition to Mr. Latimer’s Middle English,” and she had immediately pulled a pencil and an exercise book from her pocket and begun making a list.

“You’ll need practical experience in farming—milking a cow, gathering eggs, vegetable gardening,” he’d said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Your hair isn’t long enough. You’ll need to take cortixidils. You’ll need to learn to spin, with a spindle, not a spinning wheel. The spinning wheel wasn’t invented yet. And you’ll need to learn to ride a horse.”