Connie Willis: Dooms Day Book

The carillon had finished obliterating “Jingle Bells” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and was now working on “We Three Kings.” Dunworthy recognized the minor key.

Mary still couldn’t get her umbrella up. She shoved it back in the bag and took off down the pavement again. Dunworthy followed, trying to avoid collisions, past a stationer’s and a tobacconist’s hung with blinking red and green lights, through the door Mary was holding open for him.

His spectacles steamed up immediately. He took them off to wipe at them with the collar of his overcoat. Mary shut the door and plunged them into a blur of brown and blissful silence.

“Oh, dear,” Mary said. “I told you they were the sort that wouldn’t put up decorations.”

Dunworthy put his spectacles back on. The shelves behind the bar were strung with blinking lights in pale green, pink and an anemic blue. On the corner of the bar was a large fiber-op Christmas tree on a revolving stand.

There was no one else in the narrow pub except a beefy– looking man behind the bar. Mary squeezed between two empty tables and into the corner.

“At least we can’t hear those wretched bells in here,” she said, putting her bag down on the settle. “No, I’ll get the drinks. You sit down. That cyclist nearly put you out.”

She excavated some mangled pound notes out of the shopping bag and went up to the bar. “Two pints of bitter,” she told the barman. “Do you want something to eat?” she asked Dunworthy. “They’ve sandwiches and cheese rolls.”

“Did you see Gilchrist staring at the console and grinning like the Cheshire cat? He didn’t even look to see whether Kivrin had gone or whether she was still lying there, half-dead.”

“Make that two pints and a good stiff whiskey,” Mary said.

Dunworthy sat down. There was a creche on the table complete with tiny plastic sheep and a half-naked baby in a manger. “Gilchrist should have sent her from the dig,” he said. “The calculations for a remote are exponentially more complicated than for an on-site. I suppose I should be grateful he didn’t send her lapse-time as well. The first-year apprentice couldn’t do the calculations. I was afraid when I loaned him Badri, Gilchrist would decide he wanted a lapse-time drop instead of a real-time.”

He moved one of the plastic sheep closer to the shepherd. “If he’s aware there’s a difference,” he said. “Do you know what he said when I told him he should run at least one unmanned? He said, ‘If something unfortunate does happen, we can go back in time and pull Ms. Engle out before it happens, can’t we?’ The man has no notion of how the net works, no notion of the paradoxes, no notion that Kivrin is there , and what happens to her is real and irrevocable.”

Mary maneuvered her way between the tables, carrying the whiskey in one hand and the two pints awkwardly in the other. She set the whiskey down in front of him. “It’s my standard prescription for cycling victims and overprotective fathers. Did it catch you in the leg?”

“No,” Dunworthy said.

“I had a bicycle accident in last week. One of your Twentieth Centuries. Just back from a World War I drop. Two weeks unscathed at Belleau Wood and then walked into a high– wheeler on the Broad.” She went back to the bar to fetch her cheese roll.

“I hate parables,” Dunworthy said. He picked up the plastic Virgin. She was dressed in blue with a white cloak. “If he had sent her lapse-time, at least she wouldn’t have been in danger of freezing to death. She should have had something warmer than a rabbit-fur lining, or didn’t it occur to Gilchrist that 1320 was the beginning of the Little Ice Age?”

“I’ve just thought who you remind me of,” Mary said, setting down her plate and a napkin. “William Gaddson’s mother.”

That was a truly unfair remark. William Gaddson was one of his first-year students. His mother had been up six times this term, the first time to bring William a pair of earmuffs.

“He catches a chill if he doesn’t wear them,” she had told Dunworthy. “Willy’s always been susceptible to chill, and now he’s so far away from home and all. His tutor isn’t taking proper care of him, even though I’ve spoken to him repeatedly.”

Willy was the size of an oak tree and looked as susceptible to chill as one. “I’m certain he can take care of himself,” he had told Mrs. Gaddson, which was a mistake. She had promptly added Dunworthy to the list of people who refused to take proper care of Willy, but it hadn’t stopped her coming up every two weeks to deliver vitamins to Dunworthy and insist that Willy be taken off the rowing team because he was over-exerting himself.

“I would hardly put my concern for Kivrin in the same category as Mrs. Gaddson’s overprotectiveness,” Dunworthy said. “The 1300’s are full of cutthroats and thieves. And worse.”

“That’s what Mrs. Gaddson said about Oxford,” Mary said placidly, sipping her pint of ale. “I told her she couldn’t protect Willy from life. And you can’t protect Kivrin. You didn’t become an historian by staying safely at home. You’ve got to let her go, even if it is dangerous. Every century’s a ten, James.”

“This century doesn’t have the Black Death.”

“It had the Pandemic, which killed thirty-five million people. And the Black Death wasn’t in England in 1320,” she said. “It didn’t reach there till 1348.” She put her mug down on the table, and the figurine of Mary fell over. “But even if it had, Kivrin couldn’t get it. I immunized her against bubonic plague.” She smiled ruefully at Dunworthy. “I have my own moments of Mrs. Gaddsonitis. Besides, she would never get the plague because we’re both worrying over it. None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one’s never thought of does.”

“Very comforting.” He placed the blue-and-white Mary next to the figure of Joseph. It fell over. He set it carefully back up.

“It should be comforting, James,” she said briskly. “Because it’s obvious you’ve thought of every possible dreadful thing that could happen to Kivrin. Which means she’s perfectly all right. She’s probably already sitting in a castle having peacock pie for lunch, although I suppose it isn’t the same time of day there.”

He shook his head. “There will have been slippage—God only knows how much, since Gilchrist didn’t do parameter checks. Badri thought it would be several days.”

Or several weeks, he thought, and if it were the middle of January, there wouldn’t be any holy days for Kivrin to determine the date by. Even a discrepancy of several hours could put her on the Oxford-Bath road in the middle of the night.

“I do hope the slippage won’t mean she’ll miss Christmas,” Mary said. “She was terribly keen to observe a mediaeval Christmas mass.”

“It’s two weeks till Christmas there,” he said. “They’re still using the Julian calendar. The Gregorian calendar wasn’t adopted till 1752.”

“I know. Mr. Gilchrist orated on the subject of the Julian calendar in his speech. He went on at considerable length about the history of calendar reform and the discrepancy in dates between the Old Style and Gregorian calendars. At one point I thought he was going to draw a diagram. What day is it there?”

“The thirteenth of December.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well we don’t know the exact time. Dierdre and Colin were in the States for a year, and I was worried sick about them, but out of synch. I was always imagining Colin being run over on the way to school when it was actually the middle of the night. Fretting doesn’t work properly unless one can visualize disasters in all their particulars, including the weather and the time of day. For a time I worried about not knowing what to worry about, and then I didn’t worry at all. Perhaps it will be the same with Kivrin.”