Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 32

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 ident.i.ty."

"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 G.o.d 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-" s.h.i.+t. 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 Balda.s.sare 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. "h.e.l.l, 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," Balda.s.sare 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?" Balda.s.sare, 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. Balda.s.sare"-Satyavati blinked as he p.r.o.nounced Balda.s.sare'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 s.h.i.+rt aside to keep a grip on his flesh. "G.o.d'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 ma.s.ses of silently blinking instrumentation-and the broad s.p.a.ce 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 ma.s.s 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 h.e.l.l? 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 s.h.i.+elded 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-d.a.m.n, look at that wrist. That must have been one h.e.l.l of a fight."

"It was," Tony Balda.s.sare 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 cla.s.sically Roman features. She stepped away, reclaiming her s.p.a.ce. "I hope this is the worst retrieval I ever have to go on-although Haverson a.s.sures me that I made the grade, and there will be more. d.a.m.n, 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."

Balda.s.sare 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-"

Balda.s.sare grinned, and flicked Satyavati with the damp end of his towel. "Well," he said, "she can be herself from now on, can't she? a.s.suming 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sing 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.

"Aye, very," he agreed as she came alongside the bed. Her hair was silver, loose on her shoulders in soft waves like a maiden's. He blinked. Her skin was mahogany, her eyes angled at the corners like a cat's and s.h.i.+ny as gooseberries. She was stunning and not quite human, and he held his breath before he spoke. "Madam, I beg your patience at my impertinence. But, an it please you to answer-what are you?"

She squinted as if his words were as unfamiliar to her as hers to him. "Pray," she said, self-consciously as one speaking a tongue only half-familiar, "say that again, please?"

He tugged his bonds, not sharply. The sensation was dulled, removed. Drunk or sick, he thought. Forsooth, drunk indeed, not to recollect drinking ... Robin. Robin and his villains-But Kit shook his head, shook the hair from his eyes, and mastered himself with trembling effort. He said it again, slowly and clearly, one word at a time.

He sighed in relief when she smiled and nodded, apprehending to her satisfaction. In her turn, she spoke precisely, shaping the words consciously with her lips. He could have wept in grat.i.tude at her care. "I'm a woman and a doctor of philosophy," she said. "My name is Satyavati Brahmaputra, and you, Christopher Marlowe, have been rescued from your death by our science."

Science?

She frowned as she sought the word. "Natural philosophy."

Her accent, the color of her skin. He suddenly understood. "I've been stolen away to Spain." He was not prepared for the laughter that followed his startled declaration.

"Hardly," she said. "You are in the New World, at a university hospital, a-a surgery?-in a place called Las Vegas, Nevada-"

"Madam, those are Spanish names."

Her lips twitched with amus.e.m.e.nt. "They are, aren't they? Oh, this is complicated. Here, look." And heedlessly, as if she had nothing to fear from him-they know, Kit. That's why they left only a wench to guard thee. An Amazon, more like: she's twice my size-she crouched beside the bed and unknotted the bonds that affixed him to it.

He supposed he could drag down the curtain bars and dash her brains out. But he had no way to know what sort of guards might be at the door; better to bide his time, as she seemed to mean him no injury. And he was tired; even with the cloths untied, lethargy pinned him to the bed.

"They told me not to do this," she whispered, catching his eye with her dark, glistening one. She released a catch and lowered the steel railing. "But in for a penny, in for a pound."

That expression, at least, he understood. He swung his feet to the floor with care, holding the gaping gown closed. The dizziness moved with him, as if it hung a little above and to the left. The floor was unfamiliar too; no rushes and stone, but something hard and resilient, set or cut into tiles. He would have crouched to examine it-and perhaps to let the blood run to his brain-but the woman caught his hand and tugged him past the curtains and toward a window shaded with some ingenious screen. He ran his fingers across the alien surface, gasping when she pulled a cord and the whole thing rose of a piece, hard scales or s.h.i.+ngles folding as neatly as a drawn curtain.

And then he looked through the single enormous, utterly transparent pane of gla.s.s before him and almost dropped to his knees with vertigo and wonder. His hand clenched on the window ledge; he leaned forward. The drop must have measured hundreds upon hundreds of feet. The horizon was impossibly distant, like the vista from the mast of a sailing s.h.i.+p, the view from the top of a high, lonely down. And before that horizon rose fanciful towers of a dominion vaster than London and Paris made one, stretching twenty or perhaps fifty miles away: however far it took for mountains to grow so very dim with distance.

"G.o.d in h.e.l.l," he whispered. He'd imagined towers like that, written of them. To see them with his own undreaming eyes-"Sweet Jesu. Madam, what is this?" He spoke too fast, and the brown woman made him repeat himself once more.

"A city," she said quietly. "Las Vegas. A small city, by today's standards. Master Marlowe-or Miss Marlowe, I suppose I should say-you have come some five hundred years into your future, and here, I am afraid, you must stay."

"Master Marlowe will do. Mistress Brahma ..." Marlowe stumbled over Satyavati's name. The warmth and openness Marlowe had shown vanished on a breath. She folded her arms together, so like the Corpus Christi portrait-thinner and wearier, but with the same sardonic smile and the same knowing black eyes-that Satyavati had no doubt that it was the same individual.

"Call me Satya."

"Madam."

Satyavati frowned. "Master Marlowe," she said. "This is a different ... Things are different now. Look at me, a woman, a blackamoor by your terms. And a doctor of philosophy like your friend Tom Watson, a scholar."

"Poor Tom is dead." And then as if in prophecy, slowly, blinking. "Everyone I know is dead."

Satyavati rushed ahead, afraid that Marlowe would crumple if the revelation on her face ever reached her belly. A good thing she's sedated, or she'd be in a ball on the floor. "I'm published, I've written books. I'll be a tenured professor soon." You will make me that. But she didn't say it; she simply trusted the young woman, so earnest and wide-eyed behind the brittle defense of her arrogance, would understand. Which of course she didn't, and Satyavati repeated herself twice before she was certain Marlowe understood.

The poet's accent was something like an old broad Scots and something like the dialect of the Appalachian Mountains. Dammit, it is English. As long as she kept telling herself it was English, that the foreign stresses and vowels did not mean a foreign language, Satyavati could force herself to understand.

Marlowe bit her lip. She shook her head, and took Satyavati's cue of speaking slowly and precisely, but her eyes gleamed with ferocity. "It bears not on opportunity. I am no woman. Born into a wench's body, aye, mayhap, but as surely a man as Elizabeth is king. My father knew from the moment of my birth. S'death, an it were otherwise, would he have named me and raised me as his son? Have lived a man's life, loved a man's loves. An you think to force me into farthingales and huswifery, know that I would liefer die. I will die-for surely now I have naught to fear from h.e.l.l-and the man who dares approach me with woman's garb will precede me there."

Satyavati watched Kit-in that ridiculous calico johnny-brace herself, a.s.suming the confidence and fluid gestures of a swordsman, all masculine condescension and bravado. As if she expected a physical a.s.sault to follow on her manifesto.

Something to prove. What a life- The door opened. Satyavati turned to see who entered, and sighed in relief at the gaudy jacket and red hair of Professor Keats, who paused at the edge of the bedcurtain, a transparent bag filled with cloth and books hanging from his hand. "Let me talk to the young man, if you don't mind."

"She's-upset, Professor Keats." But Satyavati stepped away, moving toward Keats and past him, to the door. She paused there.

Keats faced Marlowe. "Are you the poet who wrote Edward II?"

A sudden flush, and the eyebrows rose in mockery above the twitch of a grin. "I am that."

"It's a fact that poets are liars," the old man said without turning to Satyavati. "But we always speak the truth, and a thing is what you name it. Isn't that so, Marlowe?"

"Aye," she said, her brow furrowed with concentration on the words. "Good sir, I feel that I should know you, but your face-"

"Keats," the professor said. "John Keats. You won't have heard of me, but I'm a poet too."

The door shut behind the woman, and Kit's shoulders eased, but only slightly. "Master Keats-"

"John. Or Jack, if that's more comfortable."

Kit studied the red-haired poet's eyes. Faded blue in the squint of his regard, and Kit nodded, his belly unknotting a little. "Kit, then. I pray you will forgive me my disarray. I have just risen-"

"No matter." Keats reached into his bag. A shrug displayed his own coat, a long loose robe of something that s.h.i.+fted in color, chromatic as a b.u.t.terfly's wing. "You'll like the modern clothes, I think. I've brought something less revealing."

He laid cloths on the bed: a strange sort of close-collared s.h.i.+rt, trews or breeches in one piece that went to the ankle. Low shoes that looked like leather, but once Kit touched them he was startled by the gummy softness of the soles. He looked up into Keats' eyes. "You prove most kind to a poor lost poet."