The Time Traveler's Almanac (84 page)

“Don’t take it too badly,” said Mendoza a little while later, when we were riding back toward our hotel. “You got what the Company sent you after, didn’t you? I’ll bet there’ll be Security Techs blasting away at Villa Creek before I get home.”

“I guess so,” I said glumly. She snickered.

“And look at the wonderful quality time we got to spend together! And the Pope will get his fancy crucifix. Or was that part just a scam?”

“No, the Company really is bribing the Pope to do something,” I said, “But you don’t—”

“— Need to know what, of course. That’s okay. I got a great meal out of this trip, at least.”

“Hey, are you hungry? We can still take in some of the restaurants, kid,” I said.

Mendoza thought about that. The night wind came gusting up from the city below us, where somebody at the Poulet d’Or was mincing onions for a
sauce piperade,
and somebody else was grilling steaks. We heard the pop of a wine cork all the way up where we were on Powell Street …

“Sounds like a great idea,” she said. She briefly accessed her chronometer. “As long as you can swear we’ll be out of here by 1906,” she added.

“Trust me,” I said happily. “No problem!”

“Trust you?” she exclaimed, and spat. I could tell she didn’t mean it, though.

We rode on down the hill.

THIS TRAGIC GLASS

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a tendency to read the dictionary for fun as a child, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence, and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, and Campbell Award–winning author of twenty-five novels and almost a hundred short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

View but his picture in this tragic glass,

And then applaud his fortunes as you please.

Christopher Marlowe,
Tamburlaine the Great,
Part 1. II. 7–8

The light gleamed pewter under gracious, bowering trees; a liver-chestnut gelding stamped one white hoof on the road. His rider stood in his stirrups to see through wreaths of mist, shrugging to settle a slashed black doublet which violated several sumptuary laws. Two breaths steamed as horse and man surveyed the broad lawn of scythe-cut grass that bulwarked the manor house where they had spent the night and much of the day before.

The man ignored the slow coiling of his guts as he settled into the saddle. He reined the gelding about, a lift of the left hand and the light touch of heels. It was eight miles to Deptford Strand and a meeting place near the slaughterhouse. In the name of Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council, and for the sake of the man who had offered him shelter when no one else under God’s dominion would, Christofer Marley must arrive before the sun climbed a handspan above the cluttered horizon.

*   *   *

“That’s—” Satyavati squinted at her heads-up display, sweating in the under-air-conditioned beige and grey academia of her computer lab. Her fingers moved with automatic deftness, opening a tin and extracting a cinnamon breath mint from the embrace of its brothers. Absently, she crunched it, and winced at the spicy heat. “—funny.”

“Dr. Brahmaputra?” Her research assistant looked up, disconnecting his earplug. “Something wrong with the software?”

She nodded, pushing a fistful of coarse silver hair out of her face as she bent closer to the holographic projection that hung over her desk. The rumble of a semiballistic leaving McCarran Aerospaceport rattled the windows. She rolled her eyes. “One of the undergrads must have goofed the coding on the text. Our genderbot just kicked back a truly freaky outcome. Come look at this, Baldassare.”

He stood, a boy in his late twenties with an intimidatingly Italian name, already working on an academic’s well-upholstered body, and came around her desk to stand over her shoulder. “What am I looking at?”

“Line one fifty-seven,” she said, pushing down a fragment of panic that she knew had nothing to do with the situation at hand and everything to do with old damage and ancient history. “See? Coming up as female. Have we a way to see who coded the texts?”

He leaned close, reaching over her to put a hand on her desk. She edged away from the touch. “All the Renaissance stuff was double-checked by Sienna Haverson. She shouldn’t have let a mistake like that slip past; she did her dis on Nashe or Fletcher or somebody, and she’s just gotten into the Poet Emeritus project, for the love of Mike. And it’s not like there are a lot of female Elizabethan playwrights she could have confused—”

“It’s not a transposition.” Satyavati fished out another cinnamon candy and offered one to Tony Baldassare, who smelled faintly of garlic. He had sense enough to suck on his instead of crunching it; she made a point of tucking hers up between her lip and gum where she’d be less likely to chew on it. “I checked that. This is the only one coming up wrong.”

“Well,” Baldassare said on a thoughtful breath, “I suppose we can always consider the possibility that Dr. Haverson was drunk that evening—”

Satyavati laughed, brushing Baldassare aside to stand up from her chair, uncomfortable with his closeness. “Or we can try to convince the establishment that the most notorious rakehell in the Elizabethan canon was a girl.”

“I dunno,” Baldassare answered. “It’s a fine line between Marlowe and Jonson for scoundrelhood.”

“Bah. You see what I mean. A nice claim. It would do wonders for my tenure hopes and your future employability. And I know you have your eye on Poet Emeritus, too.”

“It’s a crazy dream.” He spread his arms wide and leaned far back, the picture of ecstatic madness.

“Who wouldn’t want to work with Professor Keats?” She sighed, twisting her hair into a scrunchie. “Screw it: I’m going to lunch. See if you can figure out what broke.”

*   *   *

The air warmed as the sun rose, spilling light like a promise down the road, across the grey moving water of the Thames, between the close-growing trees. Halfway to Deptford, Christofer Marley reined his gelding in to rest it; the sunlight matched his hair to the animal’s mane. The man was as beautiful as the horse – groomed until shining, long-necked and long-legged, slender as a girl and fashionably pallid of complexion. Lace cuffs fell across hands as white as the gelding’s forehoof.

Their breath no longer steamed, nor did the river.

Kit rubbed a hand across the back of his mouth. He closed his eyes for a moment before glancing back over his shoulder: the manor house – his lover and patron Thomas Walsingham’s manor house – was long out of sight. The gelding tossed his head, ready to canter, and Kit let him have the rein he wanted.

All the rein he wants.
A privilege Kit himself had rarely been allowed.

Following the liver-colored gelding’s whim, they drove hard for Deptford and the house of a cousin of the Queen’s beloved secretary of state and closest confidant, Lord Burghley.

The house of Mistress Eleanor Bull.

*   *   *

Satyavati stepped out of the latest incarnation of a vegetarian barbecue joint that changed hands every six months, the heat of a Las Vegas August afternoon pressing her shoulders like angry hands. The University of Nevada campus spread green and artificial across a traffic-humming street; beyond the buildings monsoon clouds rimmed the mountains across the broad, shallow desert valley. A plastic bag tumbled in ecstatic circles near a stucco wall, caught in an eddy, but the wind was against them; there would be no baptism of lightning and rain. She crossed at the new pedestrian bridge, acknowledging Professors Keats and Ling as they wandered past, deep in conversation— “we were going after Plath, but the consensus was she’d just kill herself again” – and almost turned to ask Ling a question when her hip unit beeped.

She dabbed her lips in case of leftover barbecue sauce and flipped the minicomputer open. Clouds covered the sun, but cloying heat radiated from the pavement under her feet. Westward, toward the thunderheads and the mountains, the grey mist of verga – evaporating rain – greased the sky like a thumbsmear across a charcoal sketch by God. “Mr. Baldassare?”

“Dr. Brahmaputra.” Worry charged his voice; his image above her holistic communications and computational device showed a thin dark line between the brows. “I have some bad news…”

She sighed and closed her eyes, listening to distant thunder echo from the mountains. “Tell me the whole database is corrupt.”

“No.” He rubbed his forehead with his knuckles; a staccato little image, but she could see the gesture and expression as if he stood before her. “I corrected the Marlowe data.”

“And?”

“The genderbot still thinks Kit Marlowe was a girl. I re-entered everything.”

“That’s—”

“Impossible?” Baldassare grinned. “I know. Come to the lab; we’ll lock the door and figure this out. I called Dr. Haverson.”

“Dr. Haverson? Sienna Haverson?”

“She was doing Renaissance before she landed in Brit Lit. Can it hurt?”

“What the hell.”

*   *   *

Eleanor Bull’s house was whitewashed and warm-looking. The scent of its gardens didn’t quite cover the slaughterhouse reek, but the house peered through narrow windows and seemed to smile. Kit gave the gelding’s reins to a lad from the stable, along with coins to see the beast curried and fed. He scratched under the animal’s mane with guilty fingers; his mother would have his hide for not seeing to the chestnut himself. But the Queen’s business took precedence, and Kit was – and had been for seven years – a Queen’s man.

Bull’s establishment was no common tavern, but the house of a respectable widow, where respectable men met to dine in private circumstances and discuss the sort of business not for common ears to hear. Kit squared his shoulders under the expensive suit, clothes bought with an intelligencer’s money, and presented himself at the front door of the house. His stomach knotted; he wrapped his inkstained fingers together after he tapped, and waited for the Widow Bull to offer him admittance.

*   *   *

The blond, round-cheeked image of Sienna Haverson beside Satyavati’s desk frowned around the thumbnail she was chewing. “It’s ridiculous on the face of it. Christopher Marlowe, a woman? It isn’t possible to reconcile his biography with – what, crypto-femininity? He was a seminary student, for Christ’s sake. People lived in each other’s
pockets
during the Renaissance. Slept two or three to a bed, and not in a sexual sense—”

Baldassare was present in the flesh; like Satyavati, he preferred the mental break of actually going home from the office at the end of the day. It also didn’t hurt to be close enough to keep a weather eye on university politics.

As she watched, he swung his Chinese-slippered feet onto the desk, his fashionably shabby cryosilk smoking jacket falling open as he leaned back. Satyavati leaned on her elbows, avoiding the interface plate on her desktop and hiding a smile; Baldassare’s breadth of gesture amused her.

He said, “Women soldiers managed it during the American Civil War.”

“Hundreds of years later—”

“Yes, but there’s no reason to think Marlowe had to be a woman. He could have been providing a cover for a woman poet or playwright – Mary Herbert, maybe. Sidney’s sister—”

“Or he could have been Shakespeare in disguise,” Haverson said with an airy wave of her hand. “It’s one anomaly out of a database of two hundred and fifty authors, Satyavati. I don’t think it invalidates the work. That’s an unprecedented precision of result.”

“That’s the problem,” Satyavati answered, slowly. “If it were a pattern of errors, or if he were coming up as one of the borderline cases – we can get Alice Sheldon to come back just barely as a male author if we use a sufficiently small sample – but it’s the entire body of Marlowe’s work. And it’s
strongly
female. We can’t publish until we address this. Somehow.”

Baldassare’s conservative black braid fell forward over his shoulder. “What do we know about Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Haverson? You’ve had Early Modern English and Middle English RNA-therapy, haven’t you? Does that include history?”

The hologram rolled her eyes. “There’s also old-fashioned reading and research,” she said, scratching the side of her nose with the gnawed thumbnail. Satyavati grinned at her, and Haverson grinned back, a generational acknowledgment.
Oh, these kids.

“Christopher Marlowe. Alleged around the time of his death to be an atheist and a sodomite – which are terms with different connotations in the Elizabethan sense than the modern: it borders on an accusation of witchcraft, frankly – author of seven plays, a short lyric poem, and an incomplete long poem that remain to us, as well as a couple of Latin translations and the odd eulogy. And a dedication to Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, which is doubtless where Baldassare got that idea. The only thing we know about him – really
know
– is that he was the son of a cobbler, a divinity student who attended Corpus Christi under scholarship and seemed to have more money than you would expect and the favor of the Privy Council, and he was arrested several times on capital charges that were then more or less summarily dismissed. All very suggestive that he was an agent – a spy – for Queen Elizabeth. There’s a portrait that’s supposed to be him—”

Baldassare jerked his head up at the wall; above the bookcases, near the ceiling, a double row of 2-D images were pinned: the poets, playwrights, and authors whose work had been entered into the genderbot. “The redhead.”

“The original painting shows him as a dark mousy blond; the reproductions usually make him prettier. If it is him. It’s an educated guess, frankly: we don’t know who that portrait is of.” Haverson grinned, warming to her subject; the academic’s delight in a display of useless information. Satyavati knew it well.

Satyavati’s field of study was the late 21st century; Renaissance poets hadn’t touched her life in more than passing since her undergraduate days. “Did he ever marry? Any kids?”
And why are you wondering that?