Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

"It won't do any good, I'm afraid. He's not coherent."

"I'm trying to get through to Jesus to see what they know of his comings and goings."

"Good," she said. "Ask his landlady, too. And get some sleep. I don't want you getting this." She paused. "We've got six more cases."

"Any from South Carolina?"

"No," she said, "and none who couldn't have had contact with Badri. So he's still the index case. Is Colin all right?"

"He's having breakfast," he said. "He's all right. Don't worry about him."

He didn't get to bed until after one-thirty in the afternoon. It took him two hours to get through to all the starred names on Finch's list, and another hour to discover where Badri lived. His landlady wasn't at home, and when Dunworthy got back, Finch insisted on going over the complete inventory of supplies.

Dunworthy finally got away from him by promising to telephone the NHS and demand additional lavatory paper. He let himself into his rooms.

Colin had curled up on the window seat, his head on his pack and a crocheted laprobe over him. It didn't reach as far as his feet. Dunworthy took a blanket from the foot of the bed and covered him up, and sat down in the Chesterfield opposite to take off his shoes.

He was almost too tired to do that, though he knew he would regret it if he went to bed in his clothes. That was the province of the young and non-arthritic. Colin would wake refreshed in spite of digging buttons and constricting sleeves. Kivrin could wrap up in her too-thin white cloak and rest her head on a tree stump none the worse for wear, but if he so much as omitted a pillow or left his shirt on, he would wake stiff and cramped. And if he sat here with his shoes in his hand, he would not get to bed at all.

He heaved himself out of the chair, still holding the shoes, switched the light off, and went into the bedroom. He put on his pajamas and turned back the bed. It looked impossibly inviting.

I shall be asleep before my head hits the pillow, he thought, taking off his spectacles. He got into bed and pulled the covers up. Before I've even switched off the light, he thought, and switched off the light.

There was scarcely any light from the window, only a dull gray showing through the tangle of darker gray vines. The rain beat faintly against the dry leaves. I should have drawn the curtains, he thought, but he was too tired to get up again.

At least Kivrin wouldn't have to contend with rain. It was the Little Ice Age. It would be snow if anything. The contemps had slept huddled together by the hearth until it had finally occurred to someone to invent the chimney and the fireplace, and that hadn't been extant in Oxfordshire villages till the mid- fifteenth century. But Kivrin wouldn't care. She would curl up like Colin and sleep the easy, the unappreciated sleep of the young.

He wondered if it had stopped raining. He couldn't hear the patter of it on the window. Perhaps it had slowed to a drizzle or was getting ready to rain again. It was so dark, and too early for the afternoon to be drawing in. He drew his hand out from under the covers and looked at the illuminated numbers on his digital. Only two. It would be six in the evening where Kivrin was. He needed to phone Andrews again when he woke up and have him read the fix so they would know exactly where and when she was.

Badri had said there was only four hours' slippage, that he'd doublechecked the first-year apprentice's coordinates and they were correct, but he wanted to make certain. Gilchrist had taken no precautions and even with precautions, things could go wrong. Today had proved that.

Badri had had the full course of antivirals. Colin's mother had seen him safely onto the tube and given him extra money. The first time Dunworthy had gone to London he had almost not made it back, and they had taken endless precautions.

It had been a simple there-and-back-again to test the on- site net. Only thirty years. Dunworthy was to go through to Trafalgar Square, take the tube from Charing Cross to Paddington and the 10:48 train to Oxford where the main net would be open. They had allowed plenty of time, checked and rechecked the net, researched the ABC and the tube schedules, double-checked the dates on the money. And when he had got to Charing Cross the tube station was closed. The lights in the ticket kiosks were off, and an iron gate was pulled across the entrance, in front of the wooden turnstiles.

He pulled the blankets up over his shoulder. Any number of things could have gone wrong, things no one had even thought of. It had probably never occurred to Colin's mother that Colin's train would be stopped at Barton. It had not occurred to any of them that Badri would suddenly fall forward into the console.

Mary's right, he thought, you've a dreadful streak of Mrs. Gaddsonitis. Kivrin overcame any number of obstacles to get to the Middle Ages. Even if something goes wrong, she can handle it. Colin hadn't let a little thing like a quarantine stop him. And Dunworthy had made it safely back from London.

He had banged on the shut gate and then run back up the stairs to read the signs again, thinking that perhaps he had come in the wrong way. He hadn't. He had looked for a clock. Perhaps there had been more slippage than the checks indicated, he'd thought, and the underground was shut down for the night. But the clock above the entrance said nine-fifteen.

"Accident," a disreputable-looking man in a filthy cap had said. "They've shut down till they can get it cleaned up."

"B…But I must take the Bakerloo line," he'd stammered, but the man had shuffled off.

He'd stood there staring into the darkened station, unable to think what to do. He hadn't brought enough money for a taxi, and Paddington was all the way across London. He'd never make the 10:48.

"Whah ya gan, mite?" a young man with a black leather jacket and green hair like a cockscomb had said. Dunworthy could scarcely understand him. Punker, he'd thought. The young man had moved menacingly closer.

"Paddington," he'd said, and it had come out as little more than a squeak.

The punker had reached in his jacket pocket for what Dunworthy had been sure was his switchblade, but he'd pulled out a laminated tube pass and begun reading the map on the back. "Yuh cuhn get District or Sahcle from Embankment. Gaw dahn Craven Street and tike a left."

He had run the whole way, certain the punker's gang would leap out at him and steal his historically accurate money at any moment, and when he got to Embankment, he had had no idea how to work the ticket machine.

A woman with two toddlers had helped him, punching in the destination and amount for him and showing him how to insert his ticket in the slot. He had made it to Paddington with time to spare.

"Aren't there any nice people in the Middle Ages?" Kivrin had asked him, and of course there were. Young men with switchblades and tube maps had existed in all ages. So had mothers and toddlers and Mrs. Gaddsons and Latimers. And Gilchrists.

He rolled over onto his other side. "She will be perfectly all right," he said aloud, but softly, so as not to wake Colin. "The Middle Ages are no match for my best pupil." He pulled the blanket up over his shoulder and closed his eyes, thinking of the young man with the green cockscomb poring over the map. But the image that floated before him was of the iron gate, stretched between him and the turnstiles, and the darkened station beyond.

19 December 1320 (Old Style.) I'm feeling better. I can go three or four careful breaths at a time without coughing, and I was actually hungry this morning, though not for the greasy porridge Maisry brought me. I would kill for a glass of orange juice.

And a bath. I am absolutely filthy. Nothing's been washed since I got here except my forehead, and the last two days Lady Imeyne has glued poultices made of strips of linen covered with a disgusting-smelling paste to my chest. Between that, the intermittent sweats that I'm still having, and the bed (which hasn't been changed since the 1200's), I positively reek, and my hair, short as it is, is crawling. I'm the cleanest person here.