Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

Dunworthy reached for his coat.

"What is it?" Mary said, reaching for her shopping bag. "Didn't he get the fix?"

Dunworthy didn't answer. He grabbed up his overcoat and took off after Badri. The tech was already halfway down the street, pushing his way through the Christmas shoppers as if they weren't even there. It was raining hard, but Badri seemed oblivious to that, too. Dunworthy pulled his overcoat more or less on and shoved into the crowd.

Something had gone wrong. There had been slippage after all, or the first-year apprentice had made an error in the calculations. Perhaps something had gone wrong with the net itself. But it had safeties and layereds and aborts. If anything had gone wrong with the net, Kivrin simply wouldn't have gone through. And Badri had said he'd got the fix.

It had to be the slippage. It was the only thing that could have gone wrong and the drop still take place.

Ahead Badri crossed the street, narrowly avoiding a bicycle. Dunworthy barged between two women carrying shopping bags even larger than Mary's and over a white terrier on a leash, and caught sight of him again two doors up.

"Badri!" he called. The tech half-turned and crashed straight into a middle-aged woman with a large flowered umbrella.

The woman was bent against the rain, holding the umbrella nearly in front of her, and she obviously didn't see Badri either. The umbrella, which was covered with lavender violets, seemed to explode upward, and then fell top-down onto the pavement. Badri, still plunging blindly ahead, nearly fell over it.

"Watch where you're going, won't you?" the woman said angrily, grabbing at the edge of the umbrella. "This is hardly the place to run, then, is it?"

Badri looked at her and then at the umbrella with the same dazed look he had had in the pub. "Sorry," Dunworthy could see him say and bend to pick it up. The two of them seemed to wrestle over the expanse of violets for a moment before Badri got hold of the handle and righted the umbrella. He handed it to the woman, whose heavy face was red with rage or the cold rain or both.

"Sorry?!" she said, raising the handle over her head as if she were going to strike him with it. "Is that all you've got to say?"

He put his hand uncertainly up to his forehead and then, as he had in the pub, seemed to remember where he was and took off again, practically running. He turned in at Brasenose's gate, and Dunworthy followed, across the quad, in a side door to the laboratory, down a passage, and into the net area. Badri was already at the console, bending over it and frowning at the screen.

Dunworthy had been afraid it would be awash with garbage, or worse, blank, but it showed the orderly columns of figures and matrices of a fix.

"You got the fix?" Dunworthy said, panting.

"Yes," Badri said. He turned and looked at Dunworthy. He had stopped frowning, but there was an odd, abstracted look on his face, as if he were trying hard to concentrate.

"When was…" he said and began to shiver. His voice trailed off as if he had forgotten what he was going to say.

The thin-glass door banged, and Gilchrist and Mary came in, with Latimer at their heels, fumbling with his umbrella. "What is it? What's happened?" Mary said.

"When was what, Badri?" Dunworthy demanded.

"I got the fix," Badri said. He turned and looked at the screen.

"Is this it?" Gilchrist said, leaning over his shoulder. "What do all these symbols mean? You'll need to translate for us laymen."

"When was what?" Dunworthy repeated.

Badri put his hand up to his forehead. "There's something wrong," he said.

" What ?" Dunworthy shouted. "Slippage? Was there slippage?"

"Slippage?" he said, shivering so hard he could hardly get the word out.

"Badri," Mary said. "Are you all right?"

Badri got the odd, abstracted look again, as if he were considering the answer.

"No," he said, and pitched forward across the console.

She heard the bell as she came through. It sounded thin and tinny, like the piped-in bell music they were playing in the High for Christmas. The control room was supposed to be soundproof, but every time someone opened the anteroom door from outside, she had been able to hear the faint, ghostly sound of Christmas carols.

Dr. Ahrens had come in first, and then Mr. Dunworthy, and both times Kivrin had been convinced they were there to tell her she wasn't going after all. Dr. Ahrens had nearly cancelled the drop in hospital, when Kivrin's antiviral inoculation had swelled up into a giant red welt on the underside of her arm. "You're not going anywhere until the swelling goes down," Dr. Ahrens had said, and refused to discharge her from hospital. Kivrin's arm still itched, but she wasn't about to tell Dr. Ahrens that because she might tell Mr. Dunworthy, who had been acting horrified ever since he found out she was going.

I told him two years ago I wanted to go, Kivrin thought. Two years ago, and when she'd gone to show him her costume yesterday, he was still trying to talk her out of it.

"I don't like the way Mediaeval's running this drop," he'd said. And even if they were taking the proper precautions, a young woman has no business going to the Middle Ages alone."

"It's all worked out," she'd told him. "I'm Isabel de Beauvrier, daughter of Gilbert de Beauvrier, a nobleman who lived in the East Riding from l276 to 1332."

"And what was the daughter of a Yorkshire nobleman doing on the Oxford-Bath road alone?"

"I wasn't. I was with all my servants, travelling to Evesham to fetch my brother, who's lying ill in the monastery there, and we were set upon by robbers."

"By robbers," he had said, blinking at her through his spectacles.

"I got the idea from you. You said young women didn't travel anywhere alone in the Middle Ages, that they were always attended. So I was attended, but my servants bolted when we were attacked, and the robbers took the horses and all my goods. Mr. Gilchrist thinks it's a plausible story. He said the probability of — "

"It's a plausible story because the Middle Ages were full of cutthroats and thieves."

"I know," she'd said impatiently, "and disease carriers and marauding knights and other dangerous types. Weren't there any nice people in the Middle Ages?"

"They were all busy burning witches at the stake."

She had decided she'd better change the subject. "I came to show you my costume," she'd said, turning slowly so he could see her blue kirtle and white fur-lined cloak. "My hair will be down for the drop."

"You have no business wearing white to the Middle Ages," he'd said. "It will only get dirty."

He hadn't been any better this morning. He had paced the narrow observation area like an expectant father. She had worried the whole morning that he would suddenly try to call a halt to the whole proceeding.

There had been delays and more delays. Mr. Gilchrist had had to tell her all over again how the Domesday Book worked, as if she were a first-year student. Not one of them had any faith in her, except possibly Badri, and even he had been maddeningly careful, measuring and remeasuring the net area and once erasing an entire series of coordinates and entering it again.

She had thought the time would never come for her to get into position, and after she had, it was even worse, lying there with her eyes closed, wondering what was going on. Latimer told Gilchrist he was worried about the spelling of Isabel they had chosen, as if anyone back then had known how to read, let alone spell. Montoya came and stood over her and told her the way to identify Skendgate was by its church's frescoes of the Last Judgment, something she had told Kivrin at least a dozen times before.

Someone, she thought Badri because he was the only one who didn't have any instructions for her, bent and moved her arm a little in toward her body and tugged at the skirt of her robe. The floor was hard, and something was digging into her side just below her ribs. Mr. Gilchrist said something, and the bell started up again.