Time Travel Short Stories, page 68
And the arm and the hand went under the water; and so they came unto the land and rode forth. And then Sir Arthur saw a rich pavilion. What signifieth yonder pavilion? It is the knight’s pavilion, said Merlin, that ye fought with last, Sir Pellinore, but he is out, he is not there; he hath ado with a knight of yours, that hight Egglame, and they have fought together, but at the last Egglame fled, and else he had been dead, and he hath chased him even to Carlion, and we shall meet with him anon in the highway. That is well said, said Arthur, now have I a sword, now will I wage battle with him, and be avenged on him. Sir, ye shall not so, said Merlin, for the knight is weary of fighting and chasing, so that ye shall have no worship to have ado with him; also, he will not lightly be matched of one knight living; and therefore it is my counsel, let him pass, for he shall do you good service in short time, and his sons, after his days. Also ye shall see that day in short space ye shall be right glad to give him your sister to wed. When I see him, I will do as ye advise me, said Arthur. Then Sir Arthur looked on the sword, and liked it passing well. Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword or the scabbard? Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur. Ye are more unwise, said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the sword, for while ye have the scabbard upon you ye shall never lose no blood, be ye never so sore wounded; therefore, keep well the scabbard always with you. So they rode into Carlion, and by the way they met with Sir Pellinore; but Merlin had done such a craft that Pellinore saw not Arthur, and he passed by without any words. I marvel, said Arthur, that the knight would not speak. Sir, said Merlin, he saw you not; for and he had seen you ye had not lightly departed. So they came unto Carlion, whereof his knights were passing glad. And when they heard of his adventures they marveled that he would jeopard his person so alone. But all men of worship said it was merry to be under such a chieftain that would put his person in adventure as other poor knights did.”
Footnote 2. From M.T.: No matter.
Chapter IV
Sir Dinadan the Humorist
It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully told; but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference; it was pleasant to the others when it was fresh, no doubt.
Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and he soon roused the rest with a practical joke of a sufficiently poor quality. He tied some metal mugs to a dog’s tail and turned him loose, and he tore around and around the place in a frenzy of fright, with all the other dogs bellowing after him and battering and crashing against everything that came in their way and making altogether a chaos of confusion and a most deafening din and turmoil; at which every man and woman of the multitude laughed till the tears flowed, and some fell out of their chairs and wallowed on the floor in ecstasy. It was just like so many children. Sir Dinadan was so proud of his exploit that he could not keep from telling over and over again, to weariness, how the immortal idea happened to occur to him; and as is the way with humorists of his breed, he was still laughing at it after everybody else had got through.
He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech – of course a humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities – but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn’t laugh – I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan’s jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified. I said ‘petrified’ was good; as I believed, myself, that the only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of those jokes was by geologic periods. But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn’t been invented yet. However, I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through. It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn’t ripe yet.
Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me for fuel. It was time for me to feel serious, and I did. Sir Kay told how he had encountered me in a far land of barbarians, who all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did – a garb that was a work of enchantment, and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt by human hands. However he had nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer, and had killed my thirteen knights in a three hours’ battle, and taken me prisoner, sparing my life in order that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court. He spoke of me all the time, in the blandest way, as ‘this prodigious giant,’ and ‘this horrible sky-towering monster,’ and ‘this tusked and taloned man-devouring ogre’, and everybody took in all this bosh in the naivest way, and never smiled or seemed to notice that there was any discrepancy between these watered statistics and me. He said that in trying to escape from him I sprang into the top of a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound, but he dislodged me with a stone the size of a cow, which ‘all-to brast’ the most of my bones, and then swore me to appear at Arthur’s court for sentence. He ended by condemning me to die at noon on the 21st; and was so little concerned about it that he stopped to yawn before he named the date.
I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was hardly enough in my right mind to keep the run of a dispute that sprung up as to how I had better be killed, the possibility of the killing being doubted by some, because of the enchantment in my clothes. And yet it was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-shops. Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail, to wit: many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche blush.
Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea. However, I had read Tom Jones, and Roderick Random, and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and conduct which such talk implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into our own nineteenth century – in which century, broadly speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and real gentleman discoverable in English history – or in European history, for that matter – may be said to have made their appearance. Suppose Sir Walter, instead of putting the conversations into the mouths of his characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? We should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to the unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate. King Arthur’s people were not aware that they were indecent and I had presence of mind enough not to mention it.
They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes that they were mightily relieved, at last, when old Merlin swept the difficulty away for them with a common-sense hint. He asked them why they were so dull – why didn’t it occur to them to strip me. In half a minute I was as naked as a pair of tongs! And dear, dear, to think of it: I was the only embarrassed person there. Everybody discussed me; and did it as unconcernedly as if I had been a cabbage. Queen Guenever was as naively interested as the rest, and said she had never seen anybody with legs just like mine before. It was the only compliment I got – if it was a compliment.
Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my perilous clothes in another. I was shoved into a dark and narrow cell in a dungeon, with some scant remnants for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed, and no end of rats for company.
A Brain, A Heart, A Home, The Nerve
Valerie Valdes
Subject: Cecilia Maria Alfonso Martinez.
Timeline Designation: 0000000000001.
“Where do bruises come from?” Ceci whispered as Dr. Lila listened to her chest. Her question was almost smothered by screams from one of the many tiny rooms in the free shot clinic.
The doctor pulled off her stethoscope and leaned down to face the girl. “They come from getting hit, but instead of cutting yourself you bleed inside.” She put the stethoscope back on and lifted Ceci’s shirt, frowning. “Did you hit yourself?”
Ceci shook her head, kicking her legs so that her heels banged the side of the exam table. “Liam hit me at school, on my arm.” That means he likes you, her mother had said. She didn’t say anything now, but shot Ceci a look that made her stop kicking.
“Your arm, huh?” The doctor stood her up and pulled down her pants, turning her left and right before finally sliding her sleeves up to examine the purpling circle on her forearm. “Is everything okay at home?” Dr. Lila asked. “Anything you want to talk about?” Her blue eyes stared out the window behind Ceci’s shoulder.
Ceci’s mother mouthed “No” and Ceci shook her head again.
“You’re sure?”
Ceci nodded.
“Let’s do your shots, then.” Dr. Lila’s smile was too big to be real. “We’ve got four here, but we’ll try to do them quickly.”
The doctor stepped away to get the needles from the counter. Behind her was a picture on the wall: a scene from The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and the rest on the yellow brick road staring at the Emerald City in the distance. Hidden throughout were images from Kansas: her aunt and uncle’s faces nestled in a tree trunk, chickens made of leaves or rocks, even a bicycle with branches for spokes. Things where they didn’t belong, but Dorothy couldn’t see them. Only Ceci could.
She looked down at her forearm just in time to see the bruise vanish. Blink, gone. She’d wished for it so many times…Only she hadn’t been wishing now, had she?
“Doctor,” she said, raising her unblemished arm. “Where do bruises go?”
* * *
“Doctor Martinez? I’m Doctor Bachman.”
“Call me Cecilia, please.” She sat in the doctor’s private office with her wrinkled hands folded in her lap. A holo of what she assumed was his family flickered on the side of his desk, which was obscenely tidy. Empty desk, empty mind, she thought. He looked young, probably in his late thirties, and reminded her of someone she couldn’t place. Big blue eyes.
He waved a hand and charts appeared on the wall next to him. Cecilia stared at them, watery vision barely making out letters and numbers, the orderly assemblage of medical data that formed a picture she had once been able to read. More understandable was the image of her lungs, ghostly, as if filled with cobwebs. A second image was colored, three-dimensional, and this one floated over to sit on that big, clean desk as he rotated it with a finger.
“At this point, the damage is extensive,” he said. “We can attempt surgery, but at your age, anesthesia can be tricky. And temporal redistribution in this case is impossible, as you well know.”
Cecilia thought of her husband Luis, his hand shivering on her face as the clot in his brain exploded.
“Would you like to go over the options?”
“No, thank you,” she said. “I already have a plan in place.”
* * *
Dr. Martinez rubbed her eyes with one hand, her lab briefly blurring into a morass of white, red and gray. She was sure the math checked out, that the simulation was running properly, but the damn machine still wasn’t working. It sat in the middle of the room, taunting her like a sphinx that refused to speak its riddle. Her students would ask her about it in class, and she would have to tell them the same thing she kept telling the administration: not yet, but soon.
Except that wasn’t good enough. This was her last chance. If she couldn’t deliver, her funding was already earmarked for another department, whose chair Dr. Hunt had happened to stop by for a friendly chat that mostly involved him scoping out her lab so he’d know what he could poach. He’d also flirted with her, even though she was married and twenty years his junior, the vulture. Academia was such a pleasure.
One more try and she would call it a night. Morning. Whatever. The medical dummy lay on the machine’s bed, its mouth half-open, its waxy chest gashed courtesy of a scalpel, a bottle of rum and a particularly frustrated lab assistant. Dr. Martinez turned on the machine, watched the calibrations run, then pressed ‘Start.’
It went through all the right motions, and then, finally, not a damn thing happened. Again. She sighed and closed her eyes. It had to work eventually, if her theories were correct. It already had at least once, hadn’t it? But that didn’t mean she would be – had been? – the one to figure it out.
Dr. Martinez wandered over to the dummy and patted its cheek. No sense driving all the way home only to come back in a few hours. “Salpica,” she muttered, shoving the plastic man off the bed and curling up on her side, arms over her chest.
* * *
“It’s not okay,” Marisol said, taking a deep drag from an e-cig. “This is an intervention. Your grades are crap, you’ve stopped talking to everyone, and now this? Ponte pá tu número.”
“You sound like my mother,” Sissy said. A waiter appeared at her elbow to fill her water glass, and she flinched. Embarrassed, she turned the motion into a sunglasses adjustment, accidentally brushing the bruise next to her eye, which began to throb again. “I had that job interview, at least. They’re supposed to call me back today.”
“I hope your makeup didn’t look this bad when you met them.” Marisol leaned closer. “Estas de pipi, mija.”
Sissy felt hot, all right. The sun of a Miami summer scorched her legs through her pants, which weren’t covered by the big umbrella over their table at the café.
“It was an accident,” she said.
“You don’t accidentally punch people in the face.”
“It’s not like that.”
“It’s totally like that.” Marisol reached out to grab her shoulder, and Sissy jumped so hard she knocked over her water. She muttered curses in Spanish under her breath and mopped up the mess with her napkin. Overhead, the sky darkened as a storm rolled in from over the ocean.
“De pipi,” Marisol said, shaking her head. “We’re going to get my cousin’s truck right now and move you out. Don’t even try to argue.”
Thunder grumbled an answer, and Sissy thought of Gabriel. He would be furious.
“It’s going to rain,” she muttered.
“Then we’ll get wet,” Marisol replied.
* * *
Ceci twirled her umbrella in her small hands, watching drops of water fly all over the floor of the Metrorail car. “Mami, why didn’t we tell the doctor about –”
“Cállate. It’s none of her business.” Ceci’s mother got that look, where her eyes got all big and her lips went away, so Ceci stopped talking.
Instead, she watched a man sleep on the seats a few rows behind them. A teenager bobbed her head to music only she could hear. An old lady sat in the seat next to the door, gripping a tiny black dog by the throat. Ceci watched, and watched, and the world passed outside and inside.
* * *
Wiping tears from her cheeks, Cecilia stepped into the elevator of the office building that housed the temporal redistribution clinic. When she first fell ill, it had taken her some time to comb through the personnel files, to find a technician with the skill to accomplish what she needed, but she had known it would happen eventually. Time was a closed loop, after all, wasn’t it? And besides, she had done this before herself.
The walls were a soothing teal, like the clear waters of the Caribbean she had cruised with Luis so many times. She was escorted to a private room and left to wait for the specialist.
The machine looked like one of the old open MRI contraptions phased out a few decades earlier, with a bed for her to lie on and an arced rotating arm that could be moved from head to toe. Cecilia’s breath caught in her throat as she looked at it – her life’s work – which started a coughing fit, her round back shaking as her lungs tried vainly to expel the bits of her that didn’t belong.
“Can I offer you some water, Doctor Martinez?” Dr. Prudhomme crouched next to her, dark hands on his knees.
She shook her head. It would pass, as these things did. Eventually the coughs died down to throat clearing, and Dr. Prudhomme stood.
“I told you to call me Cecilia,” she said.
“And I told you I could not do so, anymore than I could call the President by her first name. You are still certain of what you intend?”
She looked at the machine and nodded. “Yes. It’s time.”
“Then I will retrieve the consent forms.” He helped her stand, and she leaned against his thick body for support.
* * *
Dr. Martinez couldn’t sleep. The bed was uncomfortable, but failure was worse. She had been so sure…It should have worked as well on inanimate objects as it would on living ones. Theoretically. Maybe if she tried it on a small plant? There were no plants in the lab. The only organic thing around was her.
Cecilia Maria Alfonso Martinez, she told herself sternly, you are not going to experiment on yourself.
The thought gave her chills. It went against every shred of logic and reason and training. History was littered with the bones of scientists who had succumbed to the lure of their own vanity. And yet.
Maybe memory is the key, said a tiny voice in the back of her head. Sentimental nonsense, she replied. And yet.
