REVISE THE WORLD
by Brenda W. Clough
copyright © 2001 Brenda W. Clough
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Cover photo by Mila Zinkova licensed under GNU Free Documentation License. The image has been cropped.
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The first section of this novel appeared as a novella in Analog Science Fiction magazine (April 2001) under the title May Be Some Time. It was a finalist for both the Nebula and the Hugo awards.
Published by Book View Press
A Smashwords edition
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REVISE THE WORLD
by Brenda W. Clough
EPIGRAPH
Ah Love! Could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits – and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
From the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald, 1879.
Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17 [1912]. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all down the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.
Should this be found I want these facts recorded ... We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not -- would not -- give up hope till the very end ... He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning -- yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since ... We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.
From Scott's Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott, 1913.
REVISE THE WORLD
PART ONE
It’s said that death from exposure is like slipping into warm sleep. Briefly, Titus Oates wondered what totty-headed thick had first told that whisker. He no longer remembered what warmth was. He had endured too many futile hopes and broken dreams to look for an easy end now. Every step was like treading on razors, calling for a grim effort of will. Nevertheless without hesitating he hobbled on into the teeth of the Antarctic storm. He did not look back. He knew the Polar Expedition's tent was already invisible behind him.
Finer than sand, the wind-driven snow scoured over his clenched eyelids, clogging nose and mouth. The cold drove ferocious spikes deep into his temples and gnawed at the raw frostbite wounds on brow and nose and lip. Surely it was folly to continue to huddle into his threadbare windproof. What if he flung all resistance aside, and surrendered himself to the wailing blizzard? Suddenly he yearned to dance, free of the weighty mitts and clothing. To embrace death and waltz away!
He had left his finnesko behind. Gangrene had swollen his frozen feet to the size of melons, the ominous black streaks stealing up past the ankles to his knees. Yesterday it had taken hours to coax the fur boots on. Today he had not bothered. Now his woolen sock caught on something. Excruciating pain jolted his frozen foot, suppurating from the stinking black wounds where the toes used to be. Too weak to help himself, he stumbled forward. His crippled hands, bundled in their dogskin mitts, groped to break his fall. They touched nothing. He seemed to fall and fall, a slow endless drop into blank whiteness.
And it was true! A delicious warmth lapped him round like a blanket. Tears of relief and joy crept down his starveling cheeks and burnt in the frost fissures. He was being carried, warm and safe. Rock of Ages, cleft for me!
For a very long time he lay resting, not moving a muscle. Stillness is the very stuff of Heaven, when a man has marched thirteen hundred miles, hauling a half-tonne load miles a day for months, across the Barrier ice, up the Beardmore Glacier, to the South Pole and back. He slept, and when he wasn't asleep he was inert.
But after some unknowable span Titus slowly came to awareness again. He felt obscurely indignant, cheated of a just due. Wasn't Heaven supposed to be a place of eternal rest? He'd write a letter to the Times about it ...
“Maybe just a touch more?” one of the celestial host suggested, in distinctly American accents. Silly on the face of it, his unanalyzed assumption that all the denizens of Heaven must be British ...
“No, let's see how he does on four cc. How's the urine output?”
Shocked, Titus opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was lying down, clothed in a pure white robe, all correct and as advertised. But were those a pair of angels lifting the hem? He used the drill-sergeant rasp he had picked up in the Army. “What the hell are you at!”
Both angels startled horribly. Something metallic slipped from a heavenly hand and landed with a clatter on the shiny-clean floor. A beautiful angel with long black hair stared down at him, eyes blue as the Aegean and wide as saucers. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Shell! Look at this -- he's conscious! Piotr will be like a dog with two tails!”
“Damn it, now the meter’s gone.”
As the other angel stooped nearer to pick up her tool Titus stared at her face. It was tanned but flushed with irritation. The nose had freckles. She wore huge coppery hoop earrings, and her short curly hair was dull blonde, almost mousy. “You,” Titus stated with conviction, “are not an angel.”
The happy angel -- no, blister it, a woman! -- exclaimed, “An angel, Shell, did you hear that? He called you an angel.”
“He did not! Don't you ever listen, Sabrina? He just said I was not an angel.”
“This isn't the afterlife,” Titus pursued doggedly. “Am I even dead?”
“Shell, this what we have you for. Hit it, quick!”
The irritable angel elbowed her companion into silence and spoke, clear and slow. “No, Captain Oates, you are not dead. We are doctors. I am Dr. Shell Gedeon, and this is Dr. Sabrina Trask. You are safe here, under our care.”
Titus could hardly take her words in. His mind hared off after irrelevancies. He wanted to retort, “Stuff and nonsense! Women can't be doctors. They don’t have the intellect!” But he clung to the important questions: “What about my team? Bowers, Wilson, Scott: Are they safe too?”
Dr. Trask drew in a breath, glancing at her colleague. Dr. Gedeon's voice was calm. “Let's stop the drip now, why don’t we?”
“Excellent idea. If you'll pass me that swab ...”
“They are all right, aren't they?” Titus demanded. “You rescued me, and you rescued them.” The doctors didn't look round, fiddling with their mysterious instruments. “Aren't they?”
He wanted to leap up and search for his friends, or shake the truth out of these bogus ministering angels, these impossible doctors. But a wave of warm melting sleep poured over him, soft as feathers, inexorable as winter, and he floated away on its downy tide.
oOo
Again when he woke he was met with pleasure: smooth sheets and a cool clean pillow. No reindeer-skin sleeping bag, no stink of horsemeat hoosh and unwashed men! He lay tasting the delicious sleek linen with every nerve and pore. How very strange to be so comfortable. His gangrened feet no longer hurt even where the covers rested on them. Double amputation above the knee, probably – the only treatment that could have saved his life. He was reconciled to the idea of footlessness. Lazily he reached down the length of his left leg with one hand to explore the stump.
The shock of touching his foot went all through his body, a galvanic impulse that jerked him upright. He flung back the covers and stared. His feet down to the toes were all present and accounted for, pink and clean and healthy. Even the toenails were just as they used to be, horn-yellow, thick and curved like vestigial hooves, instead of rotten-black and squelching to the touch. He wiggled the toes and flexed each foot with both hands, not trusting the evidence of eyes alone. It was undeniable. He had been restored, completely healed.
He examined the rest of himself. At the end in spite of the dogskin mitts his fingers had been blistered with frostbite to the colour and size of rotten bananas. Then the fluid in the blisters had frozen hard, until the least motion made the tormented joints crunch and grate as if they were stuffed with pebbles. Now his fingers were right as ninepence, flexing with painless ease: long, strong and sensitive, a horseman’s hands.
The constant stab from the old wound in his thigh, grown unbearable from so much sledging, was gone. He leaped to his feet, staggering as the blood rushed dizzily away from his head. He sat for a moment until the vertigo passed, and then rose again to put his full weight on his left leg. Not so much as a twinge! He was clad in ordinary pyjamas, white and brown striped, and he slid the pants down. The ugly twisted scar on his thigh had opened up under the stress of malnutrition and overwork, until one would think the Boers shot him last week instead of in 1901. Now there was not a mark to be seen or felt, however closely he peered at the skin. Most wondrous of all, both legs were now the same length. The Army doctors had promised that, with the left thighbone set an inch shorter than the right, he would limp for the rest of his life.
He had to nerve himself before running a hand down his face. Such a natural action, but the last time he’d tried it the conjunction of blistered fingers and frozen dead-yellow nose had been a double agony so intense the sparks had swum in his eyes. Now it didn’t hurt at all. His nose felt normal, the strong straight Roman bridge no longer swollen like a beet-root. No black oozy frostbite sores, but only a rasp of bristle on his cheek. Even the earlobes – he was certain he’d left those behind on the Polar plateau! Incredulous, he looked round the room for a glass.
It was a small plain chamber, furnished with nothing but the bed and a chair. But there was a narrow window. He leaned on the sill, angling to glimpse his ghostly reflection in the pane. He ran his tongue over his teeth, firmly fixed again and no longer bleeding at the gums. The brown eyes were melancholy under the deep straight arch of brow bone, and his dark hair was shorn in an ordinary short-back-and-sides.
Suddenly he saw not the glass but through it, beyond and down. He leaned his forehead on the cool pane, smearing it with a sudden sweat. He was high, high up. Below was a city the like of which he had never seen, spread from horizon to horizon in the golden slanted light of either dawn or sunset. Buildings spangled with lights, gleaming in sheaths of glass, reared mountain-high. His own little window was thousands of feet up, higher far than the dome of St. Paul's even. Far below, vastly foreshortened, people scurried along the pavements. Shiny metal bugs teemed the ways and flitted through the skies.
“This isn't London.” His voice had a shameful quaver. He forced himself to go on, to prove he could master it. “Nor Cairo. Nor Bombay ...”
“You are in New York City, Captain Oates. As you will have observed, you have traveled in both space and time. This is the year of our Lord 2045. How do you feel?”
Titus turned slowly. Though every word was plain English, he could hardly take in what the man was saying. With difficulty he said the first thing that came into his head: “Who the devil are you?”
Unoffended, the slim fair man smiled, revealing large perfect teeth. “I am Dr. Kevin Lash. And I'm here to help you adjust to life in the 21st century. We're connected, in a distant sort of way. My three-times great-grandmother was Mabel Beardsley, sister of the artist, Aubrey Beardsley. You may know her as a friend of Kathleen Scott.”
“The Owner's wife.” Titus grasped at this tenuous connection to the familiar. “Then -- you're an Englishman!”
Dr. Lash continued to smile. “I was born in America, but yes, I'm of English extraction. Insofar as several generations of the melting pot have left me with any claim to ...”
Titus crossed the room in a bound. He wrung Dr. Lash's slender hand as if he were his best friend in the world. In a sense this was true. The doctor was his only friend. Such was his inner turmoil that Titus only belatedly realized the doctor was continuing to talk. “Sorry -- it's all quite a lot to take in.”
“Absolutely, I don't doubt it.” With an amiable nod Dr. Lash sat down in the chair and waved Titus towards the bed. “A very natural reaction, given the tremendous change in your circumstances. I was outlining your schedule for the next day or so ...”
And Titus was off and away again, sucked into an interlocking series of irrelevancies. It was stress, the alien environment all around, that made it so hard to concentrate. But recognizing why didn't help him focus any better. This time it was Dr. Lash's pronunciation that set Titus off: ‘schedule.’ Titus himself would have said ‘shed-jool.’ But Dr. Lash used ‘sked-jool,’ the American pronunciation. Indeed every word, his every tone and posture and gesture, spoke of the United States. So it must be true. “Damn it! Sorry -- I'm trying to attend, believe me. But I keep going blah. My head's full of cotton wool.”
Dr. Lash smiled. “Not at all, Captain. I'd be happy to repeat or amplify anything you haven't quite grasped. I was giving you a quick outline of time as our theories suggest it applies in temporal travel. No man is an island, you know ...”
Complete unto himself, Titus finished silently. So Lash was a man of education -- must be, if he was a doctor. A doctor of what? Those two women, the sham angels, had obviously been doctors of the medical sort. But curse it, he had to listen!
Lash was saying, “... the tiniest change can have an incalculable impact. The death or life of an insect, a microbe even, may not be inconsiderable. Nothing can be plucked casually from the past, for fear of ...”
The past? But of course. If this was the year 2045, then 1912 was long ago. “Is it possible to go back?” he interrupted.
“What, you, you mean? Return to the place and time you left? I believe it is impossible, Captain. But you would not wish it -- to return and freeze to death in Antarctica? That was another subject of debate: the moral dimension of what we were attempting. It would be surely wrong to wrench away some poor fellow with a life ahead of him, family and friends ...”
My family, Titus thought. Mother, Lilian, Violet, Bryan. My friends. I will never see them again. They might as well be dead. No -- they are dead. Died years ago.
“... an ideal subject,” Dr. Lash was saying. “Not only are you a person rescued from a tragic death, but your removal is supremely unlikely to trigger any change in the time-stream, since your body was lost: presumed frozen solid, entombed in a glacier for eons ...”
Titus stared down in silence at his pale bare feet. They were a little chilly now from resting so long on the uncarpeted floor, but that was all. Impossible to think of them frozen rock-hard, embalmed in eternal ice. Yet only a short time ago (or was it 133 years?) they were nearly so. “My team.”
Interrupted in mid-discourse, Dr. Lash said, “I beg your pardon?”
“The others. Scott, Wilson, Bowers. Did you rescue them too?”
“Ah ... no.”
“Then they made it. They got back to the depot, back home!”
Dr. Lash's copious flow of words seemed to be suffering a momentary blockage. “No.”
Titus sat silent, his shoulders bowed. So his companions too had died. Had it all been for nothing then, all their work and sacrifice and heroism? “Why did you save only me, then?”
“Remember, Captain,” Dr. Lash said patiently. “You are unique. Your body was never found.”
“Just as well, since it was here. I'm here.” He grappled with slippery verb tenses. “This is the future. You must have histories, newspapers. Records of Scott’s Polar Expedition.”
“And you shall see them. But, if I may make a suggestion, not today. You should recover your strength a little. The doctors have further tests –”
Titus growled in disgust. “No more doctors! Now!”
“Tomorrow,” Dr. Lash promised. “Tomorrow I'll get the books. As you can see, it's already evening. Not the time to start a new project.”
Titus stood to look out the window. Only the closest observation revealed that night had fallen. The city outside glowed and throbbed like a gala ballroom, its lights smearing the dark sky, blotting out stars and moon. So beautiful and strange!
“ ... a good night's sleep.” Dr. Lash rose to his feet. “And breakfast. I've tried to have food that isn't too strange for you ...”
Titus hardly noticed the doctor's departure. The moving lights outside held him. The soaring or darting small sparks must be the metal bugs of before, lit for night work. Presumably behind every glowing window were people working and living. There must be thousands, millions of them. By night or by day the city was alive. He leaned his ear to the cold glass and heard its murmur, a dull continuous roar.
He wanted nothing to do with it. This strange monstrous city was far more foreign than the Antarctic ice. The thought came to him that this was all delirium, the final flicker of phantasy in the brain of a dying man already half-buried in blizzard-drift. It wasn’t even a delusion he enjoyed! A tremendous hollow longing for home filled him, for England, his family and friends, anything familiar. And there was nothing left to him now, except perhaps his own renewed body. At least this was as it had always been. He climbed back into bed and hugged himself, curled under the covers, diving into sleep's reprieve.
oOo
With the morning Titus's courage rose. No point getting the wind up, he told himself. I coaxed those sodding ponies halfway to the Pole. I have the sand to cope with anything.
The breakfast Dr. Lash had promised did a great deal to restore his strength of mind -- streaky bacon, odd toasted bready rounds, and buttered eggs. The tea in the flask was cat-lap, weak and bitter at once, and he could not identify the fruit from which the juice had been squeezed. But there was plenty of everything, a heaped plate on the little serving trolley and additional servings on the shelf below under covers to keep them hot. After months of short commons, the sight of so much food made him weak at the knees.
When Drs. Lash, Gedeon and Trask came in, Titus was mopping the plates clean with the last crust of bread. “Where are you putting it all?” Dr. Gedeon said, watching. “It's been a long time since your last decent meal.”
Dr. Lash’s slim fingers twitched in alarm. “Gently there, Shell. I'm trying not to confront him with too much just yet.”
Dr. Trask fished a stethoscope out of her pocket, hung it round her neck by the ear pieces, and beamed upon him as if she offered a splendid gift. “I’m going to check you over, Captain.”
Warily he allowed her to listen to his heart, and look into his eyes and ears with the shiny metal instruments. It was downright indecent, even with full chaperonage, for a woman to do this sort of work on a man. If she had asked him to remove any clothing he would have jibbed. But her mysterious tasks, with rubber tubes and bits, or holding little tools that blinked or flashed colors against his arms and legs, didn’t seem to be impeded by pyjamas. “Physically okay,” she pronounced at last. “He was strong as an elephant in the first place, to survive what he went through. So he had a good foundation to build on.”
“And you always do good work, Sabrina,” Dr. Gedeon said. “What about his mental and cognitive recovery, Kev?”
“Well, yesterday we weren't quite ourselves, were we, Captain?” Dr. Lash said. “But at his suggestion -- his insistence, in fact -- I have a simple test all prepared.”
“All that historical stuff? Don't tell me you want to teach him to use a site.”
“Of course not -- the books will be plenty.” Dr. Lash pushed the serving trolley out into the hall and returned immediately with a different cart, loaded with several dozen books of all sizes. “Captain, you asked about the fate of your friends. As you can see, there's quite some literature on the subject. Also, in preparation for your reception I had much of the archival material, the articles and so on, transferred to hard copy -- forgive me, I should say printed out onto paper and fastened together into these makeshift volumes.”
“These?” Tentatively, Titus touched a stack of weird shiny books. “Are they glass?”
Dr. Trask smiled, but Dr. Gedeon said, “Titus – I hope it’s all right to call you Titus -- I'm going to teach you one of the most important terms of this modern age. No, hush up, Kev -- you have to give the poor man a few tools to handle his environment. These floppy covers are plastic. So is this binding on the spine. Plastic, remember that word.”
“But the pages inside are plain old paper, just like in your day,” Dr. Lash added.
Titus picked up the topmost book. The slick but stiff substance -- plastic! -- of the cover slipped in his unaccustomed fingers. The book flopped open in its fall to the coverlet, and he looked down at a photograph of a familiar face: Dr. Edward Wilson, his hands in their mitts akimbo on the ski poles, grinning into the camera from under the rolled brim of his sledging cap as if death could never touch him. “Uncle Bill,” he said, stunned.
“We know he was your friend,” Dr. Gedeon said.
Dr. Lash sat down on the bed beside him. “Keep in mind though, Titus, that you've traveled. Even if all had gone well with your Expedition, he would be long deceased. Your loss is no less. But it's inevitable, a natural progression.”
Titus seized a less strange volume, a fat grey book titled Scott’s Antarctic Expedition. More ferocious than the need for food, the thirst for his past was suddenly overwhelming, parching his mouth. “For God's sake, leave me alone and let me read!”
“You wouldn't prefer to have me present, to answer any questions?”
“No -- please! Go away!”
“Come on, Kev.” Dr. Gedeon jerked her blonde head at the door. “Leave him in peace.”
“We can come back in a while,” Dr. Trask said.
Reluctantly Dr. Lash allowed himself to be drawn away in a trail of discourse. “During this initial adjustment period I think that slow progress is the ideal ...” And mercifully they were gone.
The books, the proper ones, were antiques. Everything about them proclaimed it, their smell of yellowy paper and dust, the alarming crack of their spines when Titus opened them, the flakes of brittle glue that sprinkled his pyjama lap. A film of fine grey grime coated the top edges of the pages and rubbed off on his fingers – the dust of ages. How terrifying then, to see the photographs he remembered posing for only months ago! These men, that pony, those dogs: they weren't old. How could they be, when the memory was so new? But the books belied him.
And it was a jolt to read excerpts from Scott's personal diary. The Owner was -- had been -- a meticulous diarist, but the volumes were of course private. Titus flushed with embarrassment, to thus pry into a comrade's innermost thoughts. But here they were, all the juicy tidbits printed in a book, an old one at that. Everything in them was common knowledge, public property for more than a century.
Titus had kept journals himself, sent letters home, written to family and friends. He gulped, wondering now if they were printed here too. Figures of history have no privacy. He remembered at Eton reading of Henry the Eighth’s turbulent married life, or Bonnie Prince Charlie's mistresses.
But enough shilly-shallying! He paged rapidly through the book, skimming along the months and days. The journey to lay One-Ton Depot; daily life in the camp; the Polar trek; a photograph of Roald Amundsen and his team standing bareheaded before the Norwegian flag at the Pole. Titus glowered at it and turned the page. Towards the last he had lost track of the days, but Wilson or Scott would have kept good count.
And here it was. Titus bent over the book, scarcely aware of the chilly floor or the crick in his neck. The end of the story at last: eleven miles short of the depot, Scott and Wilson and Bowers had frozen and starved to death. Titus exhaled a long breath. The unfairness of it, the waste! The print blurred as his eyes filled.
This is history, he reminded himself. It's over, long over, poor devils! Sound reasoning, but his heart refused to go along with it. Suddenly the coolness of the room seemed malevolent. He piled the pillows up at the head of the bed and sat against them, armoured in covers pulled up round his chest, to read – to dive into the books that held all that remained of his world. Automatically he felt at his pyjama pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch, but of course they weren’t there.
He devoured them, the different journals -- the egotists, had every member of the expedition published his journal? -- the scholarly analyses, the biography of Amundsen, the biographies of Scott. The strange floppy books were compendiums of shorter articles culled from scholarly periodicals. When he had read them all, he looked at them again and then yet again, chewing them over, extracting new meanings and significances.
He noticed for instance that different meanings could be wrung out of the same set of events. Scott was praised as a hero and damned as an incompetent, his expedition the last flower of the golden Edwardian afternoon or the first tremor of a collapsing empire. A twitch of history’s kaleidoscope, and all the facts fell into a different pattern.
And the theories of why the expedition failed! There were more candidates than he would have ever imagined: deteriorating washers in the fuel tins, crocked Manchurian ponies, Wilson’s scrappy medical supervision, Scott’s bungling, even – this made him wince – his own excessive endurance and bravery. There was a grain of truth in it. At the end all exploration is a voyage into the self. The prize of his valour, the only tool he had brought from 1912 to 2045, was a will triple-forged like a Damascus blade, the resolution to hew to a path even as the body crumbled and rotted away.
Eeriest of all was reading the accounts of his own death. Scott’s journal entry was quoted time and again. ‘Able and willing to discuss outside subjects’? Titus could recall nothing of it – perhaps he had muttered something about his yacht in semi-delirium. Odd, but entirely characteristic of the Owner to find that admirable. And the paintings and memorial statuettes of himself! He turned past them, averting his eyes.
Vaguely he was aware of Dr. Lash popping in, talking and asking questions, of the rattle of the food trolley as it came in and out. Titus paid none of it any mind, focused with a ferocious concentration on the past. He only looked up when a slim pale hand laid itself flat on his page. “I beg your pardon?”
“Titus, you've been slaving away for the entire day. How do you feel? Shouldn’t you quit for the night? Maybe have a meal? You have to take care of yourself -- “
“Hell’s bells, man, must you hover? I'm perfectly fine!” Titus jumped to his feet and to his dismay fell head-foremost onto the food trolley. He didn't quite faint, but the black buzzing in his eyes was curiously reminiscent of it. There was the hot oily splash of soup or gravy, a tremendous clatter of falling crockery, and over it Dr. Lash shouting for help.
He came to himself in bed once more, clean and dry in fresh pyjamas, blue and white striped this time. The female doctors were there again, the plumper blonde holding his wrist while the tall dazzling brunette directed mysterious tools at it. “Dr. -- Gedeon, is it,” he murmured. “And Dr., Dr. Trask.”
“Oh, so you're talking again,” Dr. Trask said. “And you remember our names -- that’s a good sign.”
Dr. Gedeon scowled at her little machine, her rather wide mouth downturned. “He read all day yesterday? Wonderful. Very clever of you, Kev.”
“That's unfair, Shell,” Dr. Lash said, tightlipped. “And the vid record will bear me out.”
“He said he felt perfectly fine,” Dr. Trask said.
“And Kev believed him, yeah, right.” Dr. Gedeon folded up one tool and took out another. “A man whose claim to fame is that he committed suicide to save his team. You wouldn't keep a Pomeranian kenneled up this way -- ”
“I'm giving him the dignity of a rational being. Living high on the hog with the Fortie team, you wouldn't realize how few resources I have to work with –
Titus lay back and let the quarrel roll over him. He couldn't grasp what the difficulty was, and didn't care. In the Army he had learned to hole up when the brass had a row. Instead he assessed his surroundings again. Vaguely he remembered that while he was reading the sunshine had crept across the window and faded, an entire day's passage. And then a period of oblivion, and now the light streamed in through the glass again, a new day. Perhaps midmorning, judging from the angle of the light. The trolley stood near the bed, laden anew with covered dishes. It would be a great pity to let the meal get cold. He slid the nearest plate off the shelf onto his knees and seized a fork, suddenly famished. Would he ever get enough food again?
Dr. Lash thumped the hospital bed rail with both hands. “All right, a walk then! But let's try to keep the chronal displacement shock minimal, all right? Through the park, not the streets.”
“Shell will go along, won’t you, Shell.” Dr. Trask’s brilliant blue gaze shifted to her associate. “You can fit him into your exercise routine.”
Dr. Gedeon turned to Titus, who hastily gulped down his mouthful. “Be dressed and ready at 12:30,” she said. “And make them give you a pair of decent shoes. You can't walk in slippers in New York -- there are always jerks who don't scoop after their dogs.”
On that gnomic statement she swept out of the room. “I'd hoped to postpone this, Titus old man,” Dr. Lash said, shaking his head. “But the ladies, God bless 'em ... At any rate, while we fit you up with some walking shoes, we can go over a couple of routines that may ease the chronal displacement for you.”
Titus found this incomprehensible. “How difficult can a walk be?”
Dr. Trask sighed at this, folding up her shining tools.
Titus's cocky self-confidence only began to sag when he and Dr. Lash met Dr. Gedeon in the hall. She wore the most outré clothing he had ever seen on a female. Even the street beggars in Calcutta didn't go about bare to above the knees! It was indecent, shocking – wrong! The only possible conclusion to draw was that the woman was a whore. If they allowed women to become doctors, surely it was not a very much further descent to let in whores? One respected doctors, but light-skirts were owed only contempt. Nothing in Shell’s demeanor seemed to allow disrespect, however. The contradictions inherent in the situation made him giddy. Suddenly Dr. Lash's words, repeated over and over, sank in: “Don't let it get to you. All that stuff, it's unimportant, nothing to do with you. Let it roll off your back, like water off a duck. Accept, nod, and move on ...”
Titus nodded at Dr. Gedeon and moved on. Dash it, there were more important things to do now. He would worry about bare knees later. Dr. Lash held the door for them. Titus followed Dr. Gedeon down and down, dozens of flights of echoing steel stairs quite empty except for themselves. “Does nobody else use this building?”
Dr. Gedeon glanced back, surprised. “Most Paticalars use the elevator -- oops, sorry, Kev!”
Water off a duck, Titus said to himself. Nothing to do with me really. But he was unable to resist adding the new words to the list. Paticalar, elevator, plastic -- he could emulate the Polar scientists and start a notebook, and illustrate the entries with water-colour. “And ought I have a hat?”
“A hat?” Both moderns looked so blank, Titus immediately saw that hats were dead out of fashion. In his day a gentleman rarely stepped out of doors without some sort of head covering, summer or winter. In fact the entire party was free of the impedimentia an Edwardian outing would entail – no gloves or walking sticks, muffs or card-cases, hats or topees, reticules or parasols. For a moment it was discomposing, to have nothing to fill one’s hands. But then he thought of his walks as a child, when the grown-ups had to do all the carrying, and it was deliciously freeing instead.
The stair ended at another door. Through, past a lobby beyond, and ...
Titus felt his mouth go dry. He had stepped into a street as strange as the far side of the moon. And so damn busy! Machines he couldn't name whizzed past, big and small, making noises he had no word for. People surged round him, hatless indeed, dressed in colourful grotesque garb and doing or eating or saying things that he could not name. Were those little machines on their heads, or merely elaborate hairdos? Were those scars on the bare legs and arms, or paint, or some attenuated garment? Strange smells assailed his nose, tempting appetite, revolting, attracting in turn. Colour and light poured over him too quickly for comprehension. And the noise! Worse than the beggars in Cairo, worse than Covent Garden market. The wail and clatter and roar of the 21st century slapped him in the face and drove all rational thought from his head.
He found he was clutching his companions, Dr. Lash on his left and Dr. Gedeon on his right, flank to flank as if they were breasting a mighty river in full flood. Somehow they passed together through the howling chaos to a haven, a refuge of calmness and green, and Titus became aware of Dr. Lash's steady lecturing again. Apparently he had been talking all this while: “Don't think about it. Ignore her. It's all rolling off you. Has no effect, eh? Someday when you're up to it you can easily figure it out. But now, today, you don't have to ...”
“You know,” Titus mumbled.
“Yes?”
“You know, Lash, you can be bloody damn tiresome,” Titus said, all in a breath. His vision cleared. The object in front of him was blessedly familiar. “A tree! First one I've seen in -- “ He halted, confused. Was it a year and a half, or a hundred and thirty?
“You're feeling better,” Dr. Lash noted.
Titus nodded. The vertiginous sense of unreality seeped away as fast as it had come. The vista before him now would have been familiar to a man of any era: rolling grassland studded with handsome clumps of trees. If one didn’t look beyond, at the cliff-like buildings towering above the tree line, it was an environment Titus knew down in his bones. Carefully, he didn’t look. He drew a deep happy breath, eased from a constraint he had not recognized until now.
Dr. Gedeon lifted what he realized was a small rucksack from her back – he had assumed her jacket was merely cut strangely. She took from it two dumbbells. “You want to set the pace, Kev?”
“I'm not going far,” Dr. Lash said. “My asthma will start up if I push it.”
“Let's take the reservoir path then.” Dr. Gedeon clenched a weight in each small fist and began to walk briskly down the path. Titus and Dr. Lash followed.
An almost frightening sense of well-being possessed Titus. He had not felt so fit, so confident, so brimful of vigour, in ages. Everything seemed brilliantly clear, sharply focused. The dear old sun shone behind leaves as cleanly cut as paper, and birds sang with enthusiasm. A breeze blew cool and damp from the reservoir below, freighted with a slight scummy smell. Titus inhaled it like incense. He stretched his legs, striding out with long steps.
Dr. Gedeon grinned at him when he caught her up, her teeth very white. “Great, isn't it?”
“Yes.” Carefully he did not look down past her face. She had accurately pinpointed the medicine he needed. Perhaps she wasn’t a bogus sawbones after all.
“Hold up, you two,” Dr. Lash called. He had fallen far behind, wheezing.
Dr. Gedeon reversed course immediately. “Did you bring your inhaler?”
“Of course.” Dr. Lash sniffed medicine from a large white tube. Concerned, Titus watched him closely. The dose did seem to help.
Dr. Gedeon said, “You'd better go back to the office and take an antihistamine. Shall we come back with you?”
“No, don't bother,” Dr. Lash said. “I'll be fine. This happens all the time,” he added to Titus.
“It shouldn't,” Dr. Gedeon said. “You should have your condition assessed by a qualified allergist. Asthma can be a killer.”
Asthma, Titus mused – another new word. Dr. Lash brushed her concerns aside. “Keep a close eye on Titus,” he said. “Once only around the park, and then come straight back. This is his first experience, remember.”
“A walk round the park?” Titus snorted. “Don't make me laugh.”
“I'll take good care of him,” Dr. Gedeon said. “Now off you go.”
Only when Lash was out of sight did Titus realize how confining his fuss had been. Dr. Gedeon, a real medico and female to boot, had a robust outlook more to Titus's taste. “I think we should run,” he said. “Fast.”
“All right. Race you to that bench!”
And she was off, surprisingly speedy in spite of a womanish rocking-horse gait that would have made a pony blush. How delightful it was, to use the limbs like this! Titus made his best effort, trying to use his greater length of leg to advantage, but she beat him handily. Carrying a weight handicap, too! He felt only a moment of obscure outrage before laughter overtook him. “Bravo!”
She laughed too. “Not a contest, against a disabled vet.”
“Ludicrous. The leg wound hasn't bothered me in years.”
“Not till recently.”
He stared in astonishment – how could anyone know that? He had hidden the disintegrating scar even from Scott and Wilson until the very end. And he knew from the books that Scott, the last expedition member to keep records, had not mentioned it. She went on, “I watched Sabrina glue you back together again, remember? One of the symptoms of scurvy is old wounds breaking out again.”
“Whatever she did patched it up fine. I couldn’t even find the scar.”
“Isn’t she a whiz? It was worth all the expense of cloning to see you trying out your leg, and feeling your toes for the first time.”
“You saw me? But I was alone in my room.”
She grimaced. “Titus, you're unique and valuable: the first and possibly last man to travel through time. And not only that -- you are a patient. We've been monitoring you all during your recovery. You’ve never been alone or unobserved since you arrived.”
He remembered the shiny metal tools, the gleaming examination table cleaner than anything he had ever seen. “How long have I been here?”
“You traveled to the modern era a year and a half ago.”
He stared at the trees, trying to take her words in. For eighteen months he had been dough under the rolling pin, a chunk of inert material upon which skilled hands worked. It was a sodding liberty! And he could not have spent all that time flat on his back in a hospital bed. He had done that in 1901, and knew well how one’s legs became weak as string and the muscles wasted away for want of use. Now his legs were a little shaky and his skin unusually pale, but otherwise he was himself, in good nick. They must have been exercising his limbs, working and testing and using his body in ways he couldn’t conceive of, with all the conscious consent one would get from the clockwork goatherd in a Swiss cuckoo clock. Returning him to consciousness day before yesterday was merely the capstone of a major project – it was obvious in retrospect that his first short encounter with the 21st century, swearing on the shiny-clean table, had been unplanned. He wondered how many people were employed on the task. The thought of unseen eyes spying on him day and night made his spine crawl. “Are they watching us now?”
“Here in the park? Well, I'm in charge, watching you, but that's all. C'mon, Titus, don't let it worry you. There's a lot for you to get used to. Here.” She halted at what seemed to be a pillar-box, a glossy white metal cylinder as high as his chest, and made what he could only call a conjuring gesture – passing her hand over the enameled surface. A hatch popped open lower down, and she took two small pale bottles from inside. Opening one, she passed it over. It was water as cold as sherbet, astonishing on this warm day.
He drank. Emptied, the weird featherweight container was revealed to be almost as frail as paper, light enough to crumple in one hand but sufficiently tough to be re-inflated like a balloon with a puff of breath. “Plastic?”
She smiled. “You're a sharp one.” He felt absurdly chuffed at this praise from a modern, tawdrily clothed though she might be. And how protean this plastic substance must be!
They walked on at a slower pace. The path was narrow here, crowded to the tall wrought-iron park fence by trees and brush. Beyond the palings was a city street, a quieter one, without the surging crowds and thundering vehicular traffic near the first building. Still Titus felt like a lion safe behind the zoo bars. “Are those commercial buildings?”
“Those tall ones over there? Oh no -- co-ops, I think. Damn! What I mean is, they're residences. People live there.” He knew his face was blank with ignorance, because she waved her hands in rhythm with her stride, trying to explain. “I mean separately, not all together. Condos. Cells. Divisions.” She groped for more synonyms.
The penny dropped. “You mean, it's a block of flats.”
“Is that what you call it? Okay then!” She blew out a relieved breath. “Kev only had time to go through his British-versus-American word lists with us once.”
Titus had to smile. “'Two countries, divided by a common tongue.'“
“Exactly. It’s surprising how hard it can be to communicate clearly.”
“And that.” The architecture was so powerfully familiar he could hardly believe it. “A church.”
“Yep.” She peered through the railings at the signboard on the pavement. “Saint Somebody's Noontime Service. And will you look at that sermon! ‘Is God a Fortie?’”
Titus's religion was nominal, no more than a tradition of his class. But the organ music pouring forth from the open doors of the church drew him in like a hooked fish. “I know that tune!” He hummed along, and then sang the words that rose unbidden from the depths of memory. “‘Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne ...’”
Dr. Gedeon sighed. “You must be a Christian. Everybody was, back then. You want to go in? I’m dying to hear that sermon.”
He nodded. She found a gate, and they crossed the street, she holding him back until a gap opened in the traffic. But Titus took the lead up the steps into the dark Romanesque arch of the portico, and dragged Dr. Gedeon into the haven of a pew.
A number of wrongnesses immediately struck him. Electric lights dangled from the arched ceiling and spotlighted the stained glass windows -- Titus could not remember ever seeing a church fitted with electricity. The windows themselves were gratingly ugly in their modernity. Uplifted in the homily, the voice of the celebrant rang jangly and loud, amplified in some uncouth modern way. The dozen members of the pi-squash were almost blasphemously dressed. Were they were all prostitutes and pimps, or was indecency the prevailing mode? Titus gulped down a deep breath and tried to concentrate.
“ – not only are they ineffable. As Jehovah in the Old Testament had his chosen prophets, the Forties communicate through those who can understand them – in this case the scientists and astronomers who have translated their message ...”
Titus scowled, uncomprehending. Were the Forties the time period, the 2040s? Dear God, what had befallen the faith of our fathers! But then a hymn from his boyhood rolled from the organ. The last time he had heard this tune was at Sunday morning prayers in the little stone church in Gestingthorpe village, where as the young squire of the manor he had presided in the family pew. Homesickness rose up in his throat. His soul balked like an over-tried horse at the new and ugly and strange. He ached to go home, to the place and time where such songs were part of daily life. Though he knew the words he could not join in.
It was the closing hymn. The priest pronounced a benediction, and the congregation straggled down the aisle and out into the sunshine. Dr. Gedeon fidgeted but did not rise, while Titus struggled with his misery. The priest, saying goodbye to the tardiest old lady, noticed the new faces in his flock and came down the aisle. Dr. Gedeon smiled up at him. “Just visiting.”
“You're very welcome all the same,” the priest said. He was a tall balding man in a dog collar, the image of the regimental padre.
Dr. Gedeon stood up and shepherded Titus out into the aisle. He noticed with discomfort how much closer to each other the moderns liked to stand -- no sense of a proper distance or respectful room. “I’m so thrilled to hear a homily about the Fortie project!” she said.
“Every denomination has to throw in their two cents’ worth. There’s even a rumor the Pope is writing an encyclical.”
“I think Titus here is an Anglican,” she said. “And I'm Shulamith Gedeon.”
“So you’re the dancing doctor! I'm Rev. Pollard. We call it Episcopal in this country, but that's just terminology.”
“Shulamith?” Titus's jaw slacked with astonishment. ‘Shell’ must be a nickname, just as ‘Titus’ was. “What on earth kind of a name is that?”
“Jewish, isn't it?” Rev. Pollard said.
“My grandmother,” Dr. Gedeon said. “And my father was a Santeria wizard from Bermuda. So I really don't fit in with your churchy stuff -- though the building's absolutely gorgeous.” She looked up at the stained glass windows.
The priest smiled with gentle pride. “All the original Art Moderne glass too -- “
Titus wanted to laugh. “How did you ever become a doctor? A nigger, a Sheeny, and a woman!”
To his complete astonishment Dr. Gedeon turned on her heel and slapped him across the face. He would have tumbled over if the priest had not caught him by the elbow. She continued turning, marching away out the door, her thick strange shoes plopping angrily against the stone floor. “Did I say something wrong?”
Rev. Pollard stared at him from under his grey eyebrows. “You were very rude.”
“Was I?” The padre's cold disapproval whipped the blood to Titus’s cheeks as a blow could not. I can't go back, Titus realized. The world he had known was gone forever, never to be found again. It had been a natural impulse but an utterly false step, to pursue familiar old things like this church service -- to wind himself into a cocoon that resembled, more or less, the past. To retreat rather than advance was shameful, a coward's ploy. He had assumed the job was to retain what he had always been, the well-bred Edwardian soldier and explorer. Now he saw he had been pitchforked into a war, the scope of which made his heart sink: the war to make a life for himself in the year 2045, a fight he had no choice but to wage and win. “You're quite right,” he almost gabbled in his haste. “I must beg her pardon.”
He sprinted down the dim aisle, through the narthex and out into the summer sunshine, acutely aware that she was fleeter than he. If she had run beyond view, he would never be able to follow. He cursed his own helplessness, and grimly promised himself it should be short-lived. But there she was in the street, standing next to a shiny-yellow beetle. “In you go,” she said as he ran down the steps. “Let's go back to the TTD.”
“In?” He realized it was a vehicle, a fantastically futuristic motor of some sort, and she was holding the door open. Awkwardly he climbed in. She would have banged the door on him, but he kept it from latching and ducked his head through the window to grab her sleeve. “Doctor -- Shell -- I apologise. I'm not sure what I said wrong, but I'll do my best to learn. Please give me a chance.”
“The PTICA-TTD, at 93rd,” she was saying to the driver. “Look Titus, it's not your fault, I know. But even though you don't look it, you're a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic old fart! So let go my arm, okay?”
The grinning driver made a tasteless remark in what Titus recognized as Hindi. Automatically he flung the fellow a viperish oath picked up during his Indian service, and went on: “You can't send me back alone in this thing. I'll suffer from chronal displacement, just like Dr. Lash is afraid of. I'll have the blithering vapours. I'll get lost. I'll be robbed by the driver.”
The cabdriver, cowed by amazement for the moment, seemed unlikely to do anything of the sort. But Dr. Gedeon sighed. “I suppose Kev would never let me forget it.” She pulled the door open again.
Titus made room for her on the slick seat -- plastic again, they must love the substance. And, God! “I'm sorry, I didn't ask if I could call you Shell,” he said quickly.
“What?” Her grey eyes were blank with astonishment.
“It's an unwarranted liberty -- isn't it?”
“Goodness, that's not important. I only assist Sabrina with your treatment as a favor, so we don’t have a doctor-patient relationship. Keep on calling me Shell. Although I know it gives Kev a charge when you call him Dr. Lash, so maybe you should keep that up.”
“I shall. A bit of resolution, and I’ll find my feet -- ”
The vehicle lurched into sudden vehement motion and then screeched to a halt, flinging him against the sliding window that separated the driver from the passenger compartment. The driver turned, shrilling, “Careful! Son of a fool, hold onto the handle!”
Horns blared. Titus obeyed, cursing the driver comprehensively to the third generation. The seemingly solid handhold under his fingers suddenly gave way with an ominous click as some mechanism in the body of the door activated. The door swung perilously open out into unsupported space, taking him with it.
“No, Titus! Not that one!” Shell reached across him and pulled the door to. Titus got a terrifying glimpse of the roadway speeding past not a foot below, before she slammed the door shut.
The vehicle swerved wildly as the driver leaned on the horn while turning to abuse them. “You destroy my beautiful taxi! Taxi-drivers are already driven out of business by automation, without your help!”
“Sorry!”
“Will you keep your eye on the road and drive!” Shell yelled. “And you, Titus, don't touch anything! Just sit!” With a positively mannish strength she pushed him back into his place, touching some button or control with her other hand. A restraining strap slid out of a recess and clasped itself round his torso and waist, pinning him courteously but firmly to the seat. “My God, Kev will wet himself ...”
The vehicle barreled along at an impossible pace, fast as a railway engine but darting in and out like a fish. Every moment new collisions and fresh disaster seemed imminent. Lights blinked in a blare of colour, metal hulls glittered like talons, and the traffic roared its hunger. Titus felt that dizzying disorientation creeping over him again. He licked his dry lips and clutched his hands together in his lap where Shell had placed them for safety. He focused on the turbaned back of the seething driver's head, reasoning away his discomfort. This driver is not a man of unusual gifts, he told himself. I’ve driven motors myself, just not as fast – and the road was empty! I could manage this vehicle. It can't be difficult, if a native can do it. “You see why I need to learn,” he said hardily. “As long as I don't know what's what, I'm a danger, to myself and others.”
“You're preaching to the choir, Titus.” Shell slumped against the seat in not-entirely-exaggerated exhaustion, her short blonde curls escaping from their headband. “You’re going to need a minimum of information before you can even begin to learn. But give yourself some slack, okay? Take your time. The 21st century isn't going anywhere. We don't have to do it all today.”
“You tell him,” the driver snarled. “The fool, the idiot! He cause an accident to my taxi, I sue!”
“What is 'sue'?” Titus demanded of Shell. “It sounds like some hell-and-tommy impertinence.”
“I'll tell you later,” Shell said. “Look, here we are, thank God! One more word out of you, driver, and I'll report you to the taxi commission. No, Titus, don't pull like that! Let me unbuckle it -- oh, all right, unbuckle it yourself. You push this bit right here, and voilà. Yes, yes, here's your fare, and the hell with you, pal. That's right! and if you don't like the tip you can stuff it up your ass and set it afire.”
Titus's mouth dropped open again. In all his wide travels, he had never heard such red-blooded invective from the lips of a female. A hard-bitten cavalry trooper could say no better. Torn between admiration and horror, Titus followed Shell inside.
oOo
Titus began the new regime the next morning by stacking all the antique books back onto their cart and rolling it out into the hallway. He wanted to add a label, the sort they put on steamer trunks: “Not wanted on voyage.” He had learned everything he needed to know about the past. Onwards, to the present! He capped the gesture by demanding the morning paper. “You do still have newspapers?”
“Not paper papers,” Dr. Lash said. “I mean, not usually printed on paper.”
“What do they print them on then?”
“Screens, old man. Like this.” He tipped the sleek little black machine he held so that Titus could see the square glowing window on the front, small as a postcard. It looked nothing at all like what Titus would call a screen -- screens were for fireplaces, to shield the glare. “Trust me, Titus -- you would not understand one word in fifty. It's too soon for you to dive into current affairs. Wouldn't it be easier to start with a précis of world history for the past century and a half? Work yourself up to the present day?”
Titus knew this was only common sense. Nevertheless he felt it was time to be shit or bust. He had pretty well proven that he could do anything he set his will to. “I can do both. I know it.”