The Sphere: A Journey In Time (5 page)

"Wednesday, November 18th, 1598. Today was dull. William was gone for most of it, so I had almost no interaction with him. The scout plugged tomorrow as the day he finishes his 20th sonnet. I feel I'm ready. He shows me almost everything he writes now, and frequently asks for my thoughts. Wish I had brought some sort of stronger alcohol to spike his drink with, and loosen his tongue a bit. Guess I'll have to rely on my wits alone."

Even without Connery’s surreal voice transcription I knew it was going to take a fair amount of work to get the journal ready for the planters. It hadn’t been hard to learn the rules of Elizabethan era grammar and verb conjugation based on my status. Even getting the accent down had been a relatively simple thing, but the speech patterns were so different it was hard to come up with sentences on the fly. It had helped that I wasn’t supposed to be a terribly intelligent person or have very involved conversations. The vocabulary I had used was very limited and the more time I spent there listening to other people the easier it came to me. My journal, on the other hand, was very much written in my style of thought and speech patterns. The task wouldn’t be as simple as changing verb forms and replacing some words. Perhaps the rewriting would actually take the whole week.

I pushed myself to finish the rest of the trail run, then walked back to my apartment, eager for a long hot shower, even though I was also looking forward to seeing Noah. "Mail. Respond Noah. Hi Noah! I'm about to hop in the shower in an effort to procrastinate starting my post trip work. Care to help me in that? The procrastination, not the shower. Nothing scheduled today so let me know when you're free. Addy."

By the time I had finished with my shower Noah had responded with a suggestion of lunch. Given my early start to the day, that still left me with a few hours to kill, so I sat down at my desk and pulled up my journal again. I stared at the first entry for a few minutes and wondered if anyone in this place could produce a translator that would convert my text into Elizabethan style English.

Once I got started, creating a more thorough narrative of my time in Stratford was more fun than I thought it would be. Though I didn’t write many descriptions of people in the original journal, I had a firm remembrance of impressions and personality types. It was easy to expand upon the inn keeper’s slave driving attitude and Mary’s innocent mischievousness. Since everyone involved had been dead for a long time already, I didn’t have to worry about accuracy of characters until I got to Shakespeare himself. But even Shakespeare had been written about in such a variety of ways it probably wouldn’t matter how I portrayed him in the end. Though for my own conscience I wanted to represent him as accurately as possible.

I added in a little background about myself as well. I made sure to mention my father and his desire that I became educated to account for the fact that I could read and write in the first place. Mary was the only person I had talked to at length about my life history. No one else cared and most people would have found it inappropriate to have a conversation of that nature with me. Naivety was also simple to impart by just narrating things at face value and focusing on relatively banal parts of my days.

The difficulty came with the actual grammar and speech I used. I found myself frequently double checking words I used to be sure someone of my stature in that time period would have written them. I tried to avoid idioms and metaphors as well.

After three hours I had made a decent dent in the first section of my journal. It spanned my arrival in Stratford to when I was picked to replace the maid who disappeared from Shakespeare’s house. I felt like it sounded sufficiently uneducated. I reread through it once to check for anachronisms and decided that was enough for the morning.

I pulled on a red wrap around tunic and black drawstring pants. As much as I missed the fashion choices of the outside world, I had to admit the clothes they gave us were at least more comfortable than anything I remembered from my prior life. I asked Jim about it once and he rambled off some excuse about remaining inconspicuous and blending in with all the other types of lab workers. As though if we all looked the same, people would just assume we all did the same things. It seemed unnecessary to me. It wasn’t like me putting on jeans was the equivalent of wearing a big “librarian” sign across my chest. And “librarian” didn’t sound anything like what my job actually entailed, aside from the research aspects of it.

I looked around my kitchen for something to take to lunch with me-a well ingrained courtesy leftover from my time before coming to the lab. It was only a halfhearted attempt. I knew Noah would have more than enough lunch prepared for us, so I gave up quickly and headed for the door. As it slid open and I stepped outside I was greeted by a gloomy, ominous looking sky. My favorite kind.

Chapter 5

Noah was on almost the exact opposite side of the living quarters dome. I set out across the central courtyard in a nearly perpendicular path from my own door and wound my way through the copse of elm trees that marked the center of the dome. I paused in the middle of the trees and looked up for a moment. The silence was oppressive. In Stratford there were birds flying about and insects buzzing and people and carts and horses. I had forgotten how artificial this place was while I was gone. There was a low drone in the distance that gave away the presence of some massive power generator, and the faint noise of a few voices also wandering about in the dome, but otherwise it was too quiet.

The sky was keeping most people indoors today. I didn’t understand why, since the rain would never touch us in here. The gloomy blue-gray color reminded me of my later days in Stratford. Once the fall season arrived, almost every day had been cold and gray during my residency there. Stratford was given to frequent drizzle, and I always found the patter of raindrops on the roof of the house to be calming. Here the glass ceiling was so high it was impossible to hear the rain unless it was really pouring. And then it just became another muffled drone that added to the ambient noise level.

I knew I would get used to it again. But for a few days at least, I would feel like I had left the real world behind to come back here, to my carefully constructed, isolated home.

I continued on through the courtyard and nodded hello to the couple of people I passed. I recognized them, but again, could not have named them nor said what they did here. Librarians were probably the most gregarious people in the whole laboratory complex, but we also kept to our own kind. Partly by coincidence, but mostly by direction. We all had offices in the Mission Enclosure, but did most of our research in our own apartments.

I knocked on Noah's door and he answered it with a nonchalance that reflected his difference of opinion in the passage of time. Without a moment’s hesitation I assaulted him with a bear hug and a mocking "It's been forever!" He laughed and stepped aside to let me in.

Noah's place mirrored my own in layout but his decorating style always struck me as lacking. It was sparse, with only a handful of personal touches. His furniture choices were very utilitarian, it gave me an impression of an extension of the White Box and the adjoining rooms of the return chambers. Almost immediately off to the right was his kitchen, which was a mess. He had obviously been cooking. I appreciated that he put in the effort and didn’t just order a fully prepared meal from the lab kitchens. It also afforded me the opportunity to try things I would never think to make for myself. I gave him a curious look and asked, "What have you been up to?"

"I'm trying out a new risotto recipe. I think you'll like it." He lifted the lid off the pan and a puff of steam escaped into the air along with a delicious scent. I couldn’t tell what the colorful bits of food speckling the rice were, but I knew based on past experiences that it would be good. Noah's experiments often were. I did remember one experiment involving a new fruit he hadn’t cooked with that turned out too mushy for human consumption, but he had a lot more experience with gauging the consistency of food now. "Outside?" he asked and I nodded in return. I always preferred the grass to his dining area table and chairs. I could never get comfortable in the hard plastic curves of his seating choices.

He spooned servings out into bowls and grabbed a bottle of viognier from the fridge. Though I tended to prefer reds, I trusted his judgment of what would best compliment his creations. I silently grabbed my bowl and two glasses and followed him out to the courtyard. We plopped down in the grass and I held the glasses for him as he poured the wine. He took his glass and held it towards me before taking a sip, "To a successful mission."

I did not hesitate to take the compliment this time so I clinked his glass readily and took a sip. It was perfectly drinkable but I decided to reserve judgment until I tasted how it would complement the risotto.

"So who was the lucky man?" he asked as he started on his food.

"His son, Hamnet."

Noah tried very hard to keep the partially chewed risotto in his mouth as he barked out a laugh. His gaze drifted off to the edge of the dome and I gave him the moment I knew he was taking to mentally review the sonnet. He snickered and shook his head slightly in disapproving amusement. "Oh, how you're going to piss off the literati."

"I hate to think of my poor scout and all his investigative work.” My scout had spent several weeks sneaking around Stratford to figure out the exact dates of events and get a more accurate picture of Shakespeare’s daily life and acquaintances for me. He was also the one who came up with the plan for the maid’s disappearance. “His 'List of close or relevant men' completely led me astray while I was there. I barely paid any attention to the children."

The thought came with a pang of regret. "Had I known they were such an influence in his life I would've made more of an effort to know them," I said. The idea was accompanied by a bit of doubt. The children, while not haughty, gave me little attention as a maid. It’s likely I would have had to be a tutor or some other position more meaningful to them to gain any insight into their lives. It wouldn’t have been hard to prove my qualifications as a tutor. I certainly was educated enough to teach whatever subject they would be learning. It would’ve been more difficult to fake governess credentials though.

Noah gave me a sympathetic look. We both knew it was pointless to think such things. Going back again would absolutely be out of the question. Scouts were the only people allowed to cross visits, and that was only because they were so good at hiding from the rest of us. For some reason they thought that stumbling upon another version of yourself would be disastrous.

I always thought this was a rather silly rule though. If I ran into another version of myself or a colleague, I would understand what was going on. I wouldn’t even think it shocking to find a stranger who appeared to be out of time. I actually found it rather hard to believe that there were not already other people out there traveling through time. If we had the technology, then what was keeping the European Coalition from finding it as well? If there were other travelers, I had to believe they had rules like ours. Maybe our lab just didn’t want other countries to know we had the same technology. It all seemed rather sophomoric to me; the idea that everyone thought they were the only ones with this big secret, when in actuality, everyone had the same one.

However, in the opposite extreme, if we were the only ones who had the ability to travel through time, then that was definitely something we needed to guard. We were strictly forbidden from making any changes that would seriously alter the course of history. It was hard to not fantasize about killing Hitler and saving the lives of millions of people and preventing a world wide war. I understood the reasoning behind it, but what’s to say another country would agree with that assessment of non-interference?

I thought back again to my journal entries of Byron and realized that the strangeness I felt from him could actually have been a sense of misplacement. "Have you ever suspected someone in the past of actually being from the future?" I asked Noah.

He cocked his head at me and raised an eyebrow. "Where did this come from?"

"I was just thinking about some of the rules. About not going back and interfering with your previous timeline and thinking that at some point in the future, I have to imagine more countries will have this technology and would be sending their own people back."

He mused about the idea for a moment. "Can’t say I ever had that suspicion. Have you?"

I looked down at the wine as I swirled it. It was mostly for dramatic effect, not hesitation. There was nothing I wouldn’t tell Noah. "I think maybe on this mission."

"Did you tell them?" he involuntarily smiled at the idea of me committing a potentially seditious act, even unintentionally. Although Noah enjoyed this life as a librarian, he also found these stretches of real life boring. That was why he developed his hobby of experimental cuisine, to break up the monotony of his time in normal time. Any bit of scandal was exceedingly intriguing to him.

"I'd completely forgotten about him by the time I got back,” I said. “It wasn’t until I reread through my journal that the memory was triggered. Guess they're finding out now." Without realizing it I looked around, as though expecting to see a microphone somewhere. Someone, no doubt, was listening. Someone was always listening in this place, that was no secret. I couldn’t fault them for that. We were dealing with such an explosive technology that they were very serious about guarding our secret. It took an enormous amount of trust on their part just to let us go on a mission in the first place. I figured I might as well expand on it for their benefit. "It was an acquaintance of William's. Actually, it was someone on the list."

"Your scout's list of men of interest?"

"Yep. He came around to the house a couple of times. He seemed different somehow. I don't really have any proof that he wasn't who he said he was. It was just...a feeling. Like he knew more than he was letting on about my being there. Some things he said seemed out of place." I thought back again to my survey this morning of the entries mentioning him. Perhaps his implied suspicions about me were rooted in his own history.

"Maybe he was from another lab, just like ours and on a similar mission," Noah said.

"If so he's very good at it. The two of them were quite chummy when he was around." I frowned at the idea and felt a bit jealous. Though William had liked me well enough there was a definite distance forced by my relative station. Mary had frequently warned me I was too familiar with him, and it was not just her paranoid jealousy speaking.

"You succeeded well enough. We're subject to the rules of the time. It's not like you could've joined his theatre troupe or anything. Any man would have had an advantage over you."

“Ah, wouldn’t that have been sweet though,” I mused. “Performing in a Shakespeare play with him at the helm!” Noah was right, of course, and I felt a little guilty that my obsession with all things Shakespeare was what got me that mission. A man surely would have had an easier time of it. Then again it was also said that if you wanted to know what was going on in a house, work in the kitchen. Mary had certainly known all the dirt on the household and was more than willing to share any gossip.

My mind kept returning to Byron. I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to return and question the man further. Again, a useless thought. I sighed in frustration and said "Well, he doesn't matter. He wasn't the subject of my mission and there's not much in my journal on him." I laughed once without humor. "We need their surveillance systems." I glanced around the grass again.

Noah caught the reference immediately. "They really need to fix that." It irritated him immensely that nothing electronic could be sent through time with us. It was not such a problem for recent trips when we could simply purchase the surveillance products we needed. Though as I had just demonstrated by my lack of memory, there were so many details we missed that could prove essential later on.

"Well, enough of that,” I said, with a dismissive wave of my hand. “ What are you working on?"

"Salem."

"Ooh, a witch hunt?"

He smirked. "Something like that. My scout has nailed down an event that nobody can explain by mere visual examination. A witch survives a burning."

"Really. What happens?" I asked. I was enjoying the wine much more with the risotto, and scarfed down a few more bites of my meal as Noah talked.

"She gets tied to a pole with a bunch of hay and wood piled at the bottom. When they set the hay on fire, she screams for a few minutes as the flames start to engulf her, then she simply jumps off the wood pile and runs away. The crowd is too stunned to do anything. We're pretty sure the fire burns through her binding, but the flames are up to her chest at that point. So, how would she do it?"

"Who are you supposed to be?" I leaned back into the grass on my hands to listen, full from the meal.

"A doctor," he made a quote motion with his fingers, "and sympathizer for the dark arts. I get to befriend her, then be hiding in the woods where she runs to. Try to get to some meetings, see what sorts of rituals they do. It's more a research trip than anything else. They have a low expectation that I'll actually be able to get her to tell me how she does it."