Dooms Day Book

“The eleventh,” she said. “I had to think a bit. There at the end things got a bit hectic. Nearly all the staff were down with it, and everyone working double shifts. I quite lost track of the days.” She typed something into the console and looked up at the screens, frowning.

He had already known it before she told him, before he tried to reach the bell to call for help. The fever had made one endless rainy afternoon out of all the delirious nights and drugged mornings he could not remember, but his body had kept clear track of the time, tolling off the hours, the days, so that he had known even before she’d told him. He had missed the rendezvous.

There was no rendezvous, he told himself bitterly. Gilchrist shut down the net. It would not have mattered if he had been there, if he had not been ill. The net was closed and there was nothing he could have done.

January eleventh. How long had Kivrin waited at the drop? A day? Two days? Three before she began to think she had the date wrong, or the place? Had she waited all night by the Oxford-Bath road, huddled in her useless white cloak, afraid to build a fire for fear the light would attract wolves or thieves? Or peasants fleeing from the plague. And when had it come to her finally that no one was coming to get her?

“Is there anything I can fetch for you?” the nurse asked. She pushed a syringe into the cannula.

“Is that something to make me sleep?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said and closed his eyes gratefully.

He slept either a few minutes or a day or a month. The light, the rain, the lack of shadows were the same when he woke. Colin was sitting in the chair beside the bed, reading the book Dunworthy had given him for Christmas and sucking on something. It can’t have been that long, Dunworthy thought wryly, squinting at him, the gobstopper is still with us.

“Oh, good,” Colin said, shutting the book with a clap. “That horrid sister said I could only stay if I promised not to wake you up, and I didn’t, did I? You’ll tell her you woke all on your own, won’t you?”

He took the gobstopper out, examined it, and stuck it in his pocket. “Have you seen

her? She must have been alive during the Middle Ages. She’s nearly as necrotic as Mrs. Gaddson.”

Dunworthy squinted at him. The jacket whose pocket he had stuck the gobstopper in was a new one, green, the gray plaid muffler around his neck even deadlier against the verdure, and Colin looked older in it, as if he had grown while Dunworthy was asleep.

Colin frowned. “It’s me, Colin. Do you know me?”

“Yes, of course I know you. Why aren’t you wearing your mask?”

Colin grinned. “I don’t have to. And at any rate you’re not contagious any more. Do you want your spectacles?”

Dunworthy nodded, carefully, so the aching wouldn’t begin again.

“When you woke up the other times, you didn’t know me at all.” He rummaged in the drawer of the bedstand and handed Dunworthy his spectacles. “You were awfully bad. I thought you were going to pack it in. You kept calling me Kivrin.”

“What day is it?” Dunworthy asked.

“The twelfth,” Colin said impatiently. “You asked me that this morning. Don’t you remember?”

Dunworthy put on his spectacles. “No.”

“Don’t you remember anything that’s happened?”

I remember how I failed Kivrin, he thought. I remember leaving her in 1348.

Colin scooted the chair closer and laid the book on the bed. “The sister told me you wouldn’t because of the fever,” he said, but he sounded faintly angry at Dunworthy, as if it were his fault. “She wouldn’t let me in to see you and she wouldn’t tell me anything. I think that’s completely unfair. They make you sit in a waiting room, and they keep telling you to go home, there’s nothing you can do here, and when you ask questions, they say, ‘The doctor will be with you in a moment,’ and won’t tell you anything. They treat you like a child. I mean, you have to find out sometime, don’t you? Do you know what Sister did this morning? She chucked me out. She said, ‘Mr. Dunworthy’s been very ill. I don’t want you to upset him.’ As if I would.”

He looked indignant, but at the same time tired, worried. Dunworthy thought of him haunting the corridors and sitting in the waiting room, waiting for news. No wonder he looked older.

“And just now Mrs. Gaddson said I was only to tell you good news because bad news would very likely make you have a relapse and die and it would be my fault.”

“Mrs. Gaddson’s still keeping up morale, I see,” Dunworthy said. He smiled at Colin. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of her coming down with the virus?”

Colin looked astonished. “The epidemic’s stopped,” he said. “They’re lifting the quarantine next week.”

The analogue had arrived, then, after all Mary’s pleading. He wondered if it had come in time to help Badri, and then wondered if that was the bad news Mrs. Gaddson didn’t want told. I have already been told the bad news, he thought. The fix is lost, and Kivrin is in 1348.

“Tell me some good news,” he said.