The Best of Nancy Kress Read online

  “Two months, Director,” Her Holiness said. “The week before the All-World Forum convenes to vote on revenue and taxation.”

  “I—”

  “Now I would like to inspect the three holy hostages you already hold for the altruistic prevention of war.”

  Later, Culhane said to Lambert, “He did not explain it very well. It could have been made so much more urgent…it is urgent. Those bodies rotting in Cornwall…” He shuddered.

  Lambert looked at him. “You care. You genuinely do.”

  He looked back at her in astonishment. “And you don’t? You must, to work on this project!”

  “I care,” Lambert said. “But not like that.”

  “Like what?”

  She tried to clarify it for him, for herself. “The bodies rotting…I see them. But it’s not our own history—”

  “What does that matter? They’re still human!”

  He was so earnest. Intensity burned on him like skin tinglers. Did Culhane even use skin tinglers? Fellow researchers spoke of him as an ascetic, giving all his energy, all his time to the project. A woman in his domicile had told Lambert he even lived chaste, doing a voluntary celibacy mission for the entire length of his research grant. Lambert had never met anyone who actually did that. It was intriguing.

  She said, “Are you thinking of the priesthood once the project is over, Culhane?”

  He flushed. Color mounted from the dyed cheeks, light blue since he had been promoted to project head, to pink on the fine skin of his shaved temples.

  “I’m thinking of it.”

  “And doing a celibacy mission now?”

  “Yes. Why?” His tone was belligerent: A celibacy mission was slightly old-fashioned. Lambert studied his body: tall, well-made, strong. Augments? Muscular, maybe. He had beautiful muscles.

  “No reason,” she said, bending back to her console until she heard him walk away.

  The demon advanced. Anne, lying feeble on her curtained bed, tried to call out. But her voice would not come, and who would hear her anyway? The bedclothes were thick, muffling sound; her ladies would all have retired for the night, alone or otherwise; the guards would be drinking the ale Henry had provided all of London to celebrate Elizabeth’s christening. And Henry…he was not beside her. She had failed him of his son.

  “Be gone,” she said weakly to the demon. It moved closer.

  They had called her a witch. Because of her little sixth finger, because of the dog named Urian, because she had kept Henry under her spell so long without bedding him. But if I were really a witch, she thought, I could send this demon away. More: I could hold Henry, could keep him from watching that whey-faced Jane Seymour, could keep him in my bed…She was not a witch.

  Therefore, it followed that there was nothing she could do about this demon. If it was come for her, it was come. If Satan, Master of Lies, was decided to have her, to punish her for taking the husband of another woman, and for…How much could demons know?

  “This was all none of my wishing,” she said aloud to the demon. “I wanted to marry someone else.” The demon continued to advance.

  Very well, then, let it take her. She would not scream. She never had—she prided herself on it. Not when they had told her she could not marry Harry Percy. Not when she had been sent home from the court, peremptorily and without explanation. Not when she had discovered the explanation: Henry wished to have her out of London so he could bed his latest mistress away from Katherine’s eyes. She had not screamed when a crowd of whores had burst into the palace where she was supping, demanding Nan Bullen, who they said was one of them. She had escaped across the Thames in a barge, and not a cry had escaped her lips. They had admired her for her courage: Wyatt, Norris, Weston, Henry himself. She would not scream now.

  The box of light grew larger as it approached. She had just time to say to it, “I have been God’s faithful and true servant, and my husband, the king’s,” before it was upon her.

  “The place where a war starts,” Lambert said to the faces assembled below her in the Hall of Time, “is long before the first missile, or the first bullet, or the first spear.”

  She looked down at the faces. It was part of her responsibility as an intern researcher to teach a class of young, some of whom would become historians. The class was always taught in the Hall of Time. The expense was enormous: keeping the hall in stasis for nearly an hour, bringing the students in through the force field, activating all the squares at once. Her lecture would be replayed for them later, when they could pay attention to it. Lambert did not blame them for barely glancing at her now. Why should they? The walls of the circular room, which were only there in a virtual sense, were lined with squares that were not really there at all. The squares showed actual, local-time scenes from wars that had been there, were there now, somewhere, in someone’s reality.

  Men died writhing in the mud, arrows through intestines and neck and groin, at Agincourt.

  Women lay flung across the bloody bodies of their children at Cawnpore.

  In the hot sun the flies crawled thick upon the split faces of the heroes of Marathon.

  Figures staggered, their faces burned off, away from Hiroshima.

  Breathing bodies, their perfect faces untouched and their brains turned to mush by spekaline, sat in orderly rows under the ripped dome on Io-One.

  Only one face turned toward Lambert, jerked as if on a string, a boy with wide violet eyes brimming with anguish. Lambert obligingly started again.

  “The place where a war starts is long before the first missile, or the first bullet, or the first spear. There are always many forces causing a war: economic, political, religious, cultural. Nonetheless, it is the great historical discovery of our time that if you trace each of these back— through the records, through the eyewitness accounts, through the entire burden of data only Rahvoli equations can handle—you come to a fulcrum. A single event or act or person. It is like a decision tree with a thousand thousand generations of decisions: Somewhere there was one first yes/no. The place where the war started and where it could have been prevented.

  “The great surprise of time rescue work has been how often that place was female.

  “Men fought wars, when there were wars. Men controlled the gold and the weapons and the tariffs and sea rights and religions that have caused wars, and the men controlled the bodies of other men who did the actual fighting. But men are men. They acted at the fulcrum of history, but often what tipped their actions one way or another was what they loved. A woman. A child. She became the passive, powerless weight he chose to lift, and the balance tipped. She, not he, is the branching place, where the decision tree splits and the war begins.”

  The boy with the violet eyes was still watching her. Lambert stayed silent until he turned to watch the squares—which was the reason he had been brought here. Then she watched him. Anguished, passionate, able to feel what war meant—he might be a good candidate for the time rescue team when his preliminary studies were done. He reminded her a little of Culhane.

  Who right now, as project head, was interviewing the new hostage, not lecturing to children.

  Lambert stifled her jealousy. It was unworthy. And shortsighted: She remembered what this glimpse of human misery had meant to her three years ago, when she was an historian candidate. She had had nightmares for weeks. She had thought the event was pivotal to her life, a dividing point past which she would never be the same person again. How could she? She had been shown the depths to which humanity, without the Church of the Holy Hostage and the All-World Concordance, could descend. Burning eye sockets, mutilated genitals, a general who stood on a hill and said, “How I love to see the arms and legs fly!” It had been shattering. She had been shattered, as the orientation intended she should be.

  The boy with the violet eyes was crying. Lambert wanted to step down from the platform and go to him. She wanted to put her arms around him and hold his head against her shoulder…but was that because of compassion, or was
that because of his violet eyes?

  She said silently to him, without leaving the podium, You will be all right. Human beings are not as mutable as you think. When this is over, nothing permanent about you will have changed at all.

  Anne opened her eyes. Satan leaned over her.

  His head was shaved, and he wore strange garb of an ugly blue-green. His cheeks were stained with dye. In one ear, metal glittered and swung. Anne crossed herself.

  “Hello,” Satan said, and the voice was not human.

  She struggled to sit up; if this be damnation, she would not lie prone for it. Her heart hammered in her throat. But the act of sitting brought the Prince of Darkness into focus, and her eyes widened. He looked like a man. Painted, made ugly, hung around with metal boxes that could be tools of evil—but a man.

  “My name is Culhane.”

  A man. And she had faced men. Bishops, nobles, Chancellor Wolsey. She had outfaced Henry, Prince of England and France, Defender of the Faith.

  “Don’t be frightened, Mistress Boleyn. I will explain to you where you are and how you came to be here.”

  She saw now that the voice came not from his mouth, although his mouth moved, but from the box hung around his neck. How could that be? Was there then a demon in the box? But then she realized something else, something real to hold on to.

  “Do not call me Mistress Boleyn. Address me as Your Grace. I am the queen.”

  The something that moved behind his eyes convinced her, finally, that he was a mortal man. She was used to reading men’s eyes. But why should this one look at her like that? With pity? With admiration?

  She struggled to stand, rising off the low pallet. It was carved of good English oak. The room was paneled in dark wood and hung with tapestries of embroidered wool. Small-paned windows shed brilliant light over carved chairs, table, chest. On the table rested a writing desk and a lute. Reassured, Anne pushed down the heavy cloth of her nightshift and rose.

  The man, seated on a low stool, rose, too. He was taller than Henry—she had never seen a man taller than Henry—and superbly muscled. A soldier? Fright fluttered again, and she put her hand to her throat. This man, watching her—watching her throat. Was he then an executioner? Was she under arrest, drugged and brought by some secret method into the Tower of London? Had someone brought evidence against her? Or was Henry that disappointed that she had not borne a son that he was eager to supplant her already?

  As steadily as she could, Anne walked to the window.

  The Tower Bridge did not lie beyond in the sunshine. Nor the river, nor the gabled roofs of Greenwich Palace. Instead there was a sort of yard, with huge beasts of metal growling softly. On the grass naked young men and women jumped up and down, waving their arms, running in place and smiling and sweating as if they did not know either that they were uncovered or crazed.

  Anne took firm hold of the windowsill. It was slippery in her hands, and she saw that it was not wood at all but some material made to resemble wood. She closed her eyes, then opened them. She was a queen. She had fought hard to become a queen, defending a virtue nobody believed she still had, against a man who claimed that to destroy that virtue was love. She had won, making the crown the price of her virtue. She had conquered a king, brought down a chancellor of England, outfaced a pope. She would not show fear to this executioner in this place of the damned, whatever it was.

  She turned from the window, her head high. “Please begin your explanation, Master…”

  “Culhane.”

  “Master Culhane. We are eager to hear what you have to say. And we do not like waiting.”

  She swept aside her long nightdress as if it were court dress and seated herself in the not-wooden chair carved like a throne.

  “I am a hostage,” Anne repeated. “In a time that has not yet happened.”

  From beside the window, Lambert watched. She was fascinated. Anne Boleyn had, according to Culhane’s report, listened in silence to the entire explanation of the time rescue, that explanation so carefully crafted and revised a dozen times to fit what the sixteenth-century mind could understand of the twenty-second. Queen Anne had not become hysterical. She had not cried, nor fainted, nor professed disbelief. She had asked no questions. When Culhane had finished, she had requested, calmly and with staggering dignity, to see the ruler of this place, with his ministers. Toshio Brill, watching on monitor because the wisdom was that at first new hostages would find it easier to deal with one consistent researcher, had hastily summoned Lambert and two others. They had all dressed in the floor-length robes used for grand academic ceremonies and never else. And they had marched solemnly into the ersatz sixteenth-century room, bowing their heads.

  Only their heads. No curtsies. Anne Boleyn was going to learn that no one curtsied anymore.

  Covertly Lambert studied her, their fourth time hostage, so different from the other three. She had not risen from her chair, but even seated she was astonishingly tiny. Thin, delicate bones, great dark eyes, masses of silky black hair loose on her white nightdress. She was not pretty by the standards of this century; she had not even been counted pretty by the standards of her own. But she was compelling. Lambert had to give her that.

  “And I am prisoner here,” Anne Boleyn said. Lambert turned up her translator; the words were just familiar, but the accent so strange she could not catch them without electronic help.

  “Not prisoner,” the director said. “Hostage.”

  “Lord Brill, if I cannot leave, then I am a prisoner. Let us not mince words. I cannot leave this castle?”

  “You cannot.”

  “Please address me as ‘Your Grace.’ Is there to be a ransom?”

  “No, Your Grace. But because of your presence here thousands of men will live who would have otherwise died.”

  With a shock, Lambert saw Anne shrug; the deaths of thousands of men evidently did not interest her. It was true, then. They really were moral barbarians, even the women. The students should see this. That small shrug said more than all the battles viewed in squares. Lambert felt her sympathy for the abducted woman lessen, a physical sensation like the emptying of a bladder, and was relieved to feel it. It meant she, Lambert, still had her own moral sense.

  “How long must I stay here?”

  “For life, Your Grace,” Brill said bluntly.

  Anne made no reaction; her control was aweing.

  “And how long will that be, Lord Brill?”

  “No person knows the length of his or her life, Your Grace.”

  “But if you can read the future, as you claim, you must know what the length of mine would have been.”

  Lambert thought: We must not underestimate her. This hostage is not like the last one.

  Brill said, with the same bluntness that honored Anne’s comprehension—did she realize that?—“If we had not brought you here, you would have died May 19, 1536.”

  “How?”

  “It does not matter. You are no longer part of that future, and so now events there will—”

  “How?”

  Brill didn’t answer.

  Anne Boleyn rose and walked to the window, absurdly small, Lambert thought, in the trailing nightdress. Over her shoulder she said, “Is this castle in England?”

  “No,” Brill said. Lambert saw him exchange glances with Culhane.

  “In France?”

  “It is not in any place on Earth,” Brill said, “although it can be entered from three places on Earth. It is outside of time.”

  She could not possibly have understood, but she said nothing, only went on staring out the window. Over her shoulder Lambert saw the exercise court, empty now, and the antimatter power generators. Two technicians crawled over them with a robot monitor. What did Anne Boleyn make of them?

  “God alone knows if I had merited death,” Anne said. Lambert saw Culhane start.

  Brill stepped forward. “Your Grace—”

  “Leave me now,” she said without turning.

  They did. Of cou
rse, she would be monitored constantly—everything from brain scans to the output of her bowels. Although she would never know this. But if suicide was in that life-defying mind, it would not be possible. If Her Holiness ever learned of the suicide of a time hostage…Lambert’s last glimpse before the door closed was of Anne Boleyn’s back, still by the window, straight as a spear as she gazed out at antimatter power generators in a building in permanent stasis.

  “Culhane, meeting in ten minutes,” Brill said. Lambert guessed the time lapse was to let the director change into working clothes. Toshio Brill had come away from the interview with Anne Boleyn somehow diminished. He even looked shorter, although shouldn’t her small stature have instead augmented his?

  Culhane stood still in the corridor outside Anne’s locked room (would she try the door?). His face was turned away from Lambert’s. Lambert said, “Culhane…you jumped a moment in there. When she said God alone knew if she had merited death.”

  “It was what she said at her trial,” Culhane said. “When the verdict was announced. Almost the exact words.”

  He still had not moved so much as a muscle of that magnificent body. Lambert said, probing, “You found her impressive, then. Despite her scrawniness, and beyond the undeniable pathos of her situation.”

  He looked at her then, his eyes blazing: Culhane, the research engine. “I found her magnificent.”

  She never smiled. That was one of the things she knew they remarked upon among themselves: She had overheard them in the walled garden. Anne Boleyn never smiles. Alone, they did not call her Queen Anne, or Her Grace, or even the Marquis of Rochford, the title Henry had conferred upon her, the only female peeress in her own right in all of England. No, they called her Anne Boleyn, as if the marriage to Henry had never happened, as if she had never borne Elizabeth. And they said she never smiled.

  What cause was there to smile, in this place that was neither life nor death?

  Anne stitched deftly at a piece of amber velvet. She was not badly treated. They had given her a servant, cloth to make dresses—she had always been clever with a needle, and the skill had not deserted her when she could afford to order any dresses she chose. They had given her books, the writing Latin but the pictures curiously flat, with no raised ink or painting. They let her go into any unlocked room in the castle, out to the gardens, into the yards. She was a holy hostage.