Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog

“ ‘Thank you for your kind offer to send Princess Arjumand to me in the care of Dawson, but my beloved husband and I agree that, given her dislike of water, it is best that she remain in your care. I know that you and your bride Maud will love and cherish her as I have. Mama wrote me of your marriage. Though it seems to me to have been a bit hasty, and I sincerely hope that it was not done on the rebound, I am gladder than I can say that you have been able to forget me, and it is my fervent hope that you will be as happy as I and my beloved husband are! Kiss Princess Arjumand and stroke her dear sweet fur for me, and tell her that her muvver finks of her dearum dearums darling evewy day. Gratefully, Toots Callahan.’ ”

“Poor Cyril,” I said.

“Nonsense,” Verity said. “They were made for each other.”

“So are we,” I said.

She ducked her head.

“So, how’s about it, Harriet?” I said. “We make a jolly good detectin’ team, eh what? What say we make the partnership permanent?”

“No!” Warder shouted. “I told you not to sit down. Look at those wrinkles! Those surplices are linen!”

“Well, Watson?” I said to Verity. “What do you say?”

“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “What if it’s just time-lag? Look at Carruthers. He thinks he’s in love with Warder—”

“That is absolutely out of the question!” Warder snapped at a small boy. “You should have thought of that before you put your surplice on!”

“Look at her! What if, now that this is all over,” Verity said, looking earnestly up at me, you’re able to get some rest, you recover from your time-lag, and decide the entire thing was a dreadful mistake?”

“Nonsense,” I said, backing her against the wall. “Also balderdash, pishtosh, stuff-and-nonsense, humbug, and pshaw! To say nothing of poppycock! In the first place, you know perfectly well that the first time I saw you, wringing out your sleeve on Mr. Dunworthy’s carpet, it was ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to the life-webs flying, mirrors splintering, threads and glass all over the place.”

I put my hand on the wall above her head and leaned toward her. “In the second place,” I said, “it’s your patriotic duty.”

“My patriotic duty?”

“Yes. We’re part of a self-correction, remember? If we don’t get married, something dire’s likely to happen: the Nazis will realize we have Ultra, or Lady Schrapnell will give her money to Cambridge, or the continuum will collapse.”

“There you are,” Finch said, hurrying in with a handheld and a large pasteboard box. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Mr. Dunworthy said you and Miss Kindle were to have one, but I didn’t know if that meant one or two.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but after a week in the Victorian era I was no longer bothered by the fact. “One,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “One,” he said into the handheld and set it down on a monument. “Mr. Dunworthy said that in light of your valuable contributions, you were to have first pick. Did you have a preference in color?” he said, opening the box.

“Yes,” Verity said. “Black. With white paws.”

“What?” I said.

“I told you he was bringing back nonsignificant objects,” Verity said.

“I should hardly call them nonsignificant,” Finch said, and lifted out a kitten.

It was the exact image of Princess Arjumand, down to the white pantaloons on her back feet, only in miniature.

“Where?” I said. “How? Cats are an extinct species.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, handing the kitten to Verity, “but there was an overabundance of them in Victorian times, with the result that farmers frequently drowned litters of kittens in an attempt to keep the population down.”

“And when I brought Princess Arjumand through,” Verity said, holding the kitten in her hand and petting it, “T.J. and Mr. Dunworthy decided to see if the kittens, once they had been put in a bag and thrown in the pond, would be nonsignificant.”

“So you were wandering all over the countryside looking for pregnant cats,” I said, looking in the box. There were two dozen kittens inside, most with their eyes still closed. “Are any of these Mrs. Marmalade’s?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, pointing at several little balls of fur. “These three tabbies and this calico. They are of course all too young to be weaned, but Mr. Dunworthy said to tell you you could have yours in five weeks. Princess Arjumand’s are slightly older since they were not found for nearly three weeks.”

He took the kitten away from Verity. “The cat will not actually belong to you,” Finch said, “and you will need to return it to the lab for cloning and regular breeding. There are not enough yet for a viable gene pool, but we have contacted the Sorbonne, Caltech, and the University of Thailand, and I will be returning to Victorian England for additional specimens.” He put the kitten back in the box.

“Can we come and see it?” Verity said.

“Certainly,” Finch said. “And you will need to be trained in its care and feeding. I recommend a diet of milk and—”

“Globe-eyed nacreous ryunkins,” I said.

Finch’s handheld bleeped. He looked at it and scooped up the pasteboard box. “The archbishop’s here, and the usher guarding the west door says it’s starting to rain. We’re going to have to let the crowd in. I must find Lady Schrapnell. Have you seen her?”

We both shook our heads.

“I’d best go find her,” he said, scooping up the pasteboard box. He bustled off.

“In the third place,” I said to Verity, picking up where I had left off, “I happen to know from that day in the boat that you feel exactly the same way I do, and if you’re waiting for me to propose in Latin—”

“There you are, Ned,” T.J. said. He was carrying a small screen and a portable comp hookup. “I need to show you something.”

“The consecration’s about to start,” I said. “Can’t it wait?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Verity said, “I’ll be right back,” and slipped out of the chapel.

“What is it?” I said to T.J.

“It probably isn’t anything,” T.J. said. “It’s very likely a mathematical error. Or a glitch in the system.”

“What is it?” I repeated.

“All right, do you remember how you asked me to shift the focus of the incongruity to Coventry 1940, and I did, and I told you it matched the Waterloo soup-kettle sim nearly perfectly.”

“Yes,” I said warily.

“Yes, well, ‘nearly’ is the operative word.” He brought one of his blurry gray models up on the screen. “It matched very well in the peripheral slippage, and along the main areas here, and here,” he said, pointing at indistinguishable areas. “But not in the slippage surrounding the site. And although there was slippage at the site of Mrs. Bittner’s bringing the bishop’s bird stump through, it wasn’t radically increased.”

“There wouldn’t have been room for radically increased slippage, would there?” I said. “Lizzie Bittner had to go in within a very narrow window of time — between the time the treasures were last seen and their destruction by the fire. She only had a few minutes. Increased slippage would have put her right in the middle of the fire.”

“Yes, well, even taking that into consideration, there is still the problem of the surrounding slippage,” he said, pointing at nothing. “So,” he said, flicking some more keys, “I tried moving the focus forward.” A nondescript gray picture came up.

“Forward?”

“Yes. Of course, I didn’t have enough data to pick a space-time location like you did, so what I did was to consider the surrounding slippage to be peripheral and to extrapolate new surrounding slippage, and then extrapolate a new focus from that.”