The Time Traveler's Almanac (86 page)

Satyavati hunched forward on her chair and shook her head. “It was Sienna’s idea—”

“Oh, so quick to cast away credit and blame,” the poet said, but his eyes twinkled.

Haverson came to stand beside Satyavati’s desk. “Still. Is there any writer or critic who hasn’t wondered, a little, what that young man could have done?”

“Were he more prone to temperance?”

Keats was being charming.
But he’s still John Keats.

“Poets are not temperate by nature,” he said, and smiled. He folded his hands together in front of his belt buckle. His swing jacket, translucent chromatic velvet, caught the light through the window as he moved.

“In another hundred years we’ll change our gender the way we change our clothes.” Haverson pressed her warmth against Satyavati’s arm, who endured it a moment before she leaned away.

“I confess myself uncomfortable with the concept.” Keats’ long fingers fretted the cuff of his gorgeous jacket.

Satyavati, watching him, felt a swell of kinship. “I think there is a biological factor to how gender is expressed. I think my genderbot proves that unequivocally: if we can detect birth gender to such a fine degree—”

“And this is important?” Keats’ expression was gentle mockery; an emergent trace of archaic Cockney colored his voice, but something in the tilt of his head showed Satyavati that it was a serious question.

“Our entire society is based on gender and sex and procreation. How can it
not
be as vital to understanding the literature as it is to understanding everything else?”

Keats’ lips twitched; his pale eyes tightened at the corners. Satyavati shrank back, afraid she’d overstepped, but his voice was still level when he spoke again. “What does it matter where man comes from – or woman either – if the work is true?”

A sore spot.
She sucked her lip, searching for the explanation. “One would prefer to think such things no longer mattered.” With a sideways glance to Baldassare. He gave her a low thumbs-up. “This isn’t my first tenure-track position.”

“You left Yale.” Just a statement, as if he would not press.

“I filed an allegation of sexual harassment against my department chair. She denied it, and claimed I was attempting to conceal a lack of scholarship—”

“She?”

Satyavati folded her arms tight across her chest, half sick with the admission. “She didn’t approve of my research, I think. It contradicted her own theories of gender identity.”

“You think she knew attention would make you uncomfortable, and harried you from the department.”

“I … have never been inclined to be close to people. Forgive me if I am not trusting.”

He studied her expression silently. She found herself lifting her chin to meet his regard, in answer to his unspoken challenge. He smiled thoughtfully and said, “I was told a stableman’s son would be better to content himself away from poetry, you know. I imagine your Master Marlowe, a cobbler’s boy, heard something similar once or twice – and God forbid either one of us had been a girl. It’s potent stuff you’re meddling in.”

Rebellion flared in her belly. She sat up straight on the ridiculous desk, her fingers fluttering as she unfolded her hands and embraced her argument. “If anything, then, my work proves that biology is not destiny. I’d like to force a continuing expansion of the canon, frankly: ‘women’s books’ are still –
still
– excluded. As if war were somehow a more valid exercise than raising a family—”
Shit.
Too much, by his stunned expression. She held his gaze, though, and wouldn’t look down.

And then Keats smiled, and she knew she’d won him. “There are dangers involved, beyond the cost.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” He wore spectacles, a quaint affectation that Satyavati found charming. But as he glanced at her over the silver wire frames, a chill crept up her neck.

“Professor Keats—”

“John.”

“John.” And that was worth a deeper chill, for the unexpected intimacy. “Then make me understand.”

Keats stared at her, pale eyes soft, frown souring the corners of his mouth. “A young man of the Elizabethan period. A duelist, a spy, a playmaker: a violent man, and one who lives by his wits in a society so xenophobic it’s difficult for us to properly imagine. Someone to whom the carriage – the horse-drawn carriage, madam doctor – is a tolerably modern invention, the heliocentric model of the solar system still heresy. Someone to whom your United States is the newborn land of Virginia, a colony founded by his acquaintance Sir Walter Ralegh. Pipe tobacco is a novelty, coffee does not exist, and the dulcet speech of our everyday converse is the yammering of a barbarian dialect that he will find barely comprehensible, at best.”

Satyavati opened her mouth to make some answer. Keats held up one angular hand. As if to punctuate his words, the rumble of a rising semiballistic rattled the windows. “A young man, I might add” – as if this settled it—”who must be plucked alive from the midst of a deadly brawl with three armed opponents. A brawl history tells us he instigated with malice, in a drunken rage.”

“History is written by the victors,” Satyavati said, at the same moment that Baldassare said “Dr. Keats. The man who wrote
Faustus,
sir.”

“If a man he is,” Keats answered, smiling. “There is that, after all. And there would be international repercussions. UK cultural heritage is pitching a fit over ‘the theft of their literary traditions.’”

“Because the world would be a better place without John Keats?” Satyavati grinned, pressing her tongue against her teeth. “Hell, they sold London Bridge to Arizona. I don’t see what they have to complain about: if they’re so hot to trot, let them build their own time device and steal some of our dead poets.”

Keats laughed, a wholehearted guffaw that knocked him back on his heels. He gasped, collected himself, and turned to Haverson, who nodded. “John, how can you possibly resist?”

“I can’t,” he admitted, and looked back at Haverson.

“How much will it cost?”

Satyavati braced for the answer and winced anyway. Twice the budget for her project, easily.

“I’ll write a grant,” Baldassare said.

Keats laughed. “Write two.
This
project, I rather imagine there’s money for. It will also take a personal favor from Bernard. Which I
will
call in. Although I doubt very much we can schedule a retrieval until next fiscal. Which makes no difference to Marlowe, of course, but does mean, Satyavati, that you will have to push your publication back.”

“I’ll consider it an opportunity to broaden the database,” she said, and Keats and Haverson laughed like true academics at the resignation in her voice.

“And—”

She flinched. “And?”

“Your young man may prove thoroughly uncooperative. Or mentally unstable once the transfer is done.”

“Is the transition really so bad?” Baldassare, with the question that had been on the tip of Satyavati’s tongue.

“Is there a risk he will reject reality, you mean? Lose his mind, to put it quaintly?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t say what it will be like for him,” he said. “But I, at least, came to you knowing the language and knowing I had been about to die.” Keats rubbed his palms together as if clapping nonexistent chalk dust from his palms. “I rather suspect, madam doctors, Mr. Baldassare” – Satyavati blinked as he pronounced Baldassare’s name correctly and without hesitation; she hadn’t realized Keats even
knew
it— “we must prepare ourselves for failure.”

*   *   *

Kit twisted away from the knife again, but Skeres had a grip on his doublet now, and the breath went out of him as two men slammed him against the wall. Cloth shredded; the broken bottle slipped out of Kit’s bloodied fingers as Frazier wrenched his arm behind his back.

Poley blasphemed. “
Christ on the cross
—”

Frazier swore too, shoving Kit’s torn shirt aside to keep a grip on his flesh. “God’s wounds, it’s a wench.”

A lax moment, and Kit got an elbow into Frazier’s ribs and a heel down hard on Poley’s instep and his back into the corner one more time, panting like a beaten dog. No route to the window. No route to the door. Kit swallowed bile and terror, tugged the rags of his doublet closed across his slender chest. “Unhand me.”

“Where’s Marley?” Poley said stupidly as Kit pressed himself against the boards.

“I am Marley, you fool.”

“No wench could have written that poetry—”

“I’m no wench,” he said, and as Frazier raised his knife, Christofer Marley made himself ready to die as he had lived, kicking and shouting at something much bigger than he.

*   *   *

Seventeen months later, Satyavati steepled her fingers before her mouth and blew out across them, warm moist breath sliding between her palms in a contrast to the crisping desert atmosphere. One-way shatterproof bellied out below her; leaning forward, she saw into a retrieval room swarming with technicians and medical crew, bulwarked by masses of silently blinking instrumentation – and the broad space in the middle of the room, walled away from operations with shatterproof ten centimeters thick. Where the retrieval team would reappear.

With or without their quarry.

“Worried?”

She turned her head and looked up at Professor Keats, stylishly rumpled as ever. “Terrified.”

“Minstrels in the gallery,” he observed. “There’s Sienna…” Pointing to her blond head, bent over her station on the floor.

The shatterproof walls of the retrieval box were holoed to conceal the mass of technology outside them from whoever might be inside; theoretically, the retrievant should arrive sedated. But it wasn’t wise to be too complacent about such things.

The lights over the retrieval floor dimmed by half. Keats leaned forward in his chair. “Here we go.”

“Five.” A feminine voice over loudspeakers. “Four. Three—”

I hadn’t thought he’d look so fragile. Or so young.

*   *   *

Is this then Hell? Curious that death should hurt so much less than living—

*   *   *

“Female,” a broad-shouldered doctor said into his throat microphone. He leaned over the sedated form on his examining table, gloved hands deft and quick.

Marlowe lay within an environmentally shielded bubble; the doctor examined her with built-in gloves. She would stay sedated and in isolation until her immunizations were effective and it was certain she hadn’t brought forward any dangerous bugs from the 16th century. Satyavati was grateful for the half-height privacy screens hiding the poet’s form.
I hadn’t thought it would seem like such an invasion.

“Aged about thirty,” the doctor continued. “Overall in fair health although underweight and suffering the malnutrition typical of Elizabethan diet. Probably parasitic infestation of some sort, dental caries, bruising sustained recently – damn, look at that wrist. That must have been one hell of a fight.”

“It was,” Tony Baldassare said, drying his hands on a towel as he came up on Satyavati’s right. His hair was still wet from the showers, slicked back from his classically Roman features. She stepped away, reclaiming her space. “I hope this is the worst retrieval I ever have to go on – although Haverson assures me that I made the grade, and there will be more. Damn, but you sweat in those moonsuits.” He frowned over at the white-coated doctor. “When do they start the RNA therapy?”

“Right after the exam. She’ll still need exposure to the language to learn it.”

Baldassare took a deep breath to sigh. “Poor Kit. I bet she’ll do fine here, though: she’s a tough little thing.”

“She would have had to be,” Satyavati said thoughtfully, as much to drown out the more intimate details of the doctor’s examination. “What a fearful life—”

Baldassare grinned, and flicked Satyavati with the damp end of his towel. “Well,” he said, “she can be herself from now on, can’t she? Assuming she acclimates. But anybody who could carry off that sort of a counterfeit for nearly thirty years—”

Satyavati shook her head. “I wonder,” she murmured. “What on earth possessed her parents.”

*   *   *

Kit woke in strange light: neither sun nor candles. The room smelled harsh: no sweetness of rushes or heaviness of char, but something astringent and pungent, as like the scent of lemons as the counterfeit thud of a pewter coin was like the ring of silver. He would have sat, but soft cloths bound his arms to the strange hard bed, which had shining steel railings along the sides like the bars on a baiting-bear’s cage.

His view of the room was blocked by curtains, but the curtains were not attached to the strange, high, narrow bed. They hung from bars near the ceiling.
I am captive,
he thought, and noticed he didn’t
hurt.
He found that remarkable; no ache in his jaw where a tooth needed drawing, no burn at his wrist where Frazier’s grip had broken the skin.

His clothes were gone, replaced with an open-backed gown. The hysteria he would have expected to accompany this realization didn’t; instead, he felt rather drunk. Not unpleasantly so, but enough that the panic that clawed the inside of his breastbone did so with padded claws.

Something chirped softly at the bedside, perhaps a songbird in a cage. He turned his head but could only glimpse the edge of a case in some dull material, the buff color called Isabelline. If his hands were free, he’d run his fingers across the surface to try the texture: neither leather nor lacquer, and looking like nothing he’d ever seen. Even the sheets were strange: no well-pounded linen, but something smooth and cool and dingy white.

“Marry,” he murmured to himself. “’Tis passing strange.”

“But very clean.” A woman’s voice, from the foot of the bed. “Good morning, Master Marlowe.”

Her accent was strange, the vowels all wrong, the stresses harsh and clipped. A foreign voice. He turned his face and squinted at her; that strange light that was not sunlight but almost as bright glared behind her. It made her hard to see. Still, only a woman. Uncorseted, by her silhouette, and wearing what he realized with surprise were long, loose trousers.
If a wench with a gentle voice is my warden, perhaps there’s a chance I shall emerge alive.