Stories by Elizabeth Bear Part 31

As she watched, he swung his Chinese-slippered feet onto the desk, his fas.h.i.+onably shabby cryosilk smoking jacket falling open as he leaned back. Satyavati leaned on her elbows, avoiding the interface plate on her desktop and hiding a smile; Balda.s.sare's breadth of gesture amused her.

He said, "Women soldiers managed it during the American Civil War."

"Hundreds of years later-"

"Yes, but there's no reason to think Marlowe had to be a woman. He could have been providing a cover for a woman poet or playwright-Mary Herbert, maybe. Sidney's sister-"

"Or he could have been Shakespeare in disguise," Haverson said with an airy wave of her hand. "It's one anomaly out of a database of two hundred and fifty authors, Satyavati. I don't think it invalidates the work. That's an unprecedented precision of result."

"That's the problem," Satyavati answered, slowly. "If it were a pattern of errors, or if he were coming up as one of the borderline cases-we can get Alice Sheldon to come back just barely as a male author if we use a sufficiently small sample-but it's the entire body of Marlowe's work. And it's strongly female. We can't publish until we address this. Somehow."

Balda.s.sare's conservative black braid fell forward over his shoulder. "What do we know about Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Haverson? You've had Early Modern English and Middle English RNA-therapy, haven't you? Does that include history?"

The hologram rolled her eyes. "There's also old-fas.h.i.+oned reading and research," she said, scratching the side of her nose with the gnawed thumbnail. Satyavati grinned at her, and Haverson grinned back, a generational acknowledgment. Oh, these kids.

"Christopher Marlowe. Alleged around the time of his death to be an atheist and a sodomite-which are terms with different connotations in the Elizabethan sense than the modern: it borders on an accusation of witchcraft, frankly-author of seven plays, a short lyric poem, and an incomplete long poem that remain to us, as well as a couple of Latin translations and the odd eulogy. And a dedication to Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, which is doubtless where Balda.s.sare got that idea. The only thing we know about him-really know-is that he was the son of a cobbler, a divinity student who attended Corpus Christi under scholars.h.i.+p and seemed to have more money than you would expect and the favor of the Privy Council, and he was arrested several times on capital charges that were then more or less summarily dismissed. All very suggestive that he was an agent-a spy-for Queen Elizabeth. There's a portrait that's supposed to be him-"

Balda.s.sare jerked his head up at the wall; above the bookcases, near the ceiling, a double row of 2-d images were pinned: the poets, playwrights, and authors whose work had been entered into the genderbot. "The redhead."

"The original painting shows him as a dark mousy blond; the reproductions usually make him prettier. If it is him. It's an educated guess, frankly: we don't know who that portrait is of." Haverson grinned, warming to her subject; the academic's delight in a display of useless information. Satyavati knew it well.

Satyavati's field of study was the late 21st century; Renaissance poets hadn't touched her life in more than pa.s.sing since her undergraduate days. "Did he ever marry? Any kids?" And why are you wondering that?

"No, and none that we know of. It's conventionally accepted that he was h.o.m.os.e.xual, but again, no proof. Men often didn't marry until they were in their late twenties in Elizabethan England, so it's not a deciding factor. He's never been convincingly linked to anyone; for all we know, he might have died a virgin at twenty-nine-" Balda.s.sare snorted heavily, and Haverson angled her head to the side, her steepled hands opening like wings. "There's some other irregularities in his biography: he refused holy orders after completing his degree, and he was baptized some twenty days after his birth rather than the usual three. And the circ.u.mstances of his death are very odd indeed. But it doesn't add up to a pattern, I don't think."

Balda.s.sare shook his head in awe. "Dare I ask what you know about Nashe?"

Haverson chuckled. "More than you ever want to find out. I could give you another hour on Marlowe easy: he's a ninety-minute lecture in my Brit Lit cla.s.s."

The Freshman Intro to British Literature that Haverson taught as wergild for her access to Professor Keats and Ling, and the temporal device. The inside of Satyavati's lip tasted like rubber; she chewed gently. "So you're saying we don't know. And we can prove nothing. There's no period source that can help us?"

"There's some odd stuff in Shakespeare's As You Like It that seems to indicate that the protagonist is intended to be a fictionalized reflection of Marlowe, or at least raise questions about his death. We know the two men collaborated on at least two plays, the first part of Henry VI and Edward III-" Haverson stopped and disentangled her fingers from her wavy yellow hair, where they had become idly entwined. Something wicked danced in her eyes. "An-"

"What?" Satyavati and Balda.s.sare, in unison. Satyavati leaned forward over her desk, closing her hands on the edges.

"The protagonist of As You Like It-the one who quotes Marlowe and details the circ.u.mstances of his death?"

"Rosalind," Balda.s.sare said. "What about her?"

"Is a young woman quite successfully impersonating a man."

Kit ate sparingly, as always. His image, his patronage, his s.e.xuality, his very livelihood were predicated on the contours of his face, the boyish angles of his body, and every year that illusion of youth became harder to maintain. Also, he didn't dare drop his eyes from the face of Robin Poley, his fair-haired controller and-in Kit's educated opinion-one of the most dangerous men in London.

"Thou shalt not be permitted to abandon the Queen's service so easily, sweet Kit," Poley said between bites of fish. Kit nodded, dry-mouthed; he had not expected Poley would arrive with a guard. Two others, Skeres and Frazier, dined heartily and without apparent regard for Kit's lack of appet.i.te.

"'Tis not that I wish any disservice to her Majesty," Kit said. "But I swear on my honor Thomas Walsingham is her loyal servant, good Robin, and she need fear him not. His love for her is as great as any man's, and his family has ever been loyal-"

Poley dismissed Kit's protestations with a gesture. Ingrim Frazier reached the breadth of the linen-laid table with the long blade of his knife and speared a piece of fruit from the board in front of Kit. Kit leaned out of the way.

"You realize of course that textual evidence isn't worth the paper it's printed on. And if you a.s.sume Marlowe was a woman, and Shakespeare knew it-"

"You rapidly enter the realm of the crackpots. Indeed."

"We have a serious problem."

"We could just quietly drop him from the data-" He grinned in response to her stare. "No, no. I'm not serious."

"You'd better not be," Satyavati answered. She quelled the rush of fury that Balda.s.sare's innocent teasing p.r.i.c.ked out of always-shallow sleep. What happened a decade ago is not his fault. "This is my career-my scholars.h.i.+p-in question."

A low tap on the office door. Satyavati checked the heads-up display, recognized Haverson, and tapped the key on her desk to disengage the lock. The Rubenesque blonde hesitated in the doorway. "Good afternoon, Satya. Balda.s.sare. Private?"

"Same conversation as before," Satyavati said. "Still trying to figure out how to salvage our research-"

Haverson grinned and entered the room in a sweep of crinkled skirts and tunic. She shut the door behind herself and made very certain it latched. "I have your answer."

Satyavati stood and came around her desk, dragging with her a chair, which she offered to Haverson. Haverson waved it aside, and Satyavati sank into it herself. "It a.s.sumes of course that Christopher Marlowe did die violently at Eleanor Bull's house in May of 1593 and did not run off to Italy and write the plays of Shakespeare-" Haverson's shrug seemed to indicate that that was a fairly safe a.s.sumption.

"The Poet Emeritus project?" Balda.s.sare crowed, swinging his arms wide before clapping his hands. "Dr. Haverson, you're brilliant. And what if Marlowe did survive 1593?"

"We'll send back an observer team to make sure he dies. They'll have to exhume the body anyway; we'll need to be able to make that swap for the living Marlowe, a.s.suming the recovery team can get to him before Frazier and company stab him in the eye."

Balda.s.sare shuddered. "I swear that makes my skin crawl-"

"Paradox is an odd thing, isn't it? You start thinking about where the body comes from, and you start wondering if there are other changes happening."

"If there were," Balda.s.sare said, "we'd never know."

Satyavati's dropped jaw closed as she finally forced herself to understand what they were talking about. "No one who died by violence. No one from before 1800. There are rules. Culture shock, language barriers. Professor Ling would never permit it."

Haverson grinned wider, obviously excited. "You know why those rules were developed, don't you?"

"I know it's a History Department and Temporal Studies protocol, and English is only allowed to use the device under their auspices, and compet.i.tion for its time is extreme-"

"The rule developed after Richard I rose from what should have been his deathbed to run through a pair of History undergrads on the retrieval team. We never did get their bodies back. Or the Lionheart, for that matter-" Balda.s.sare stopped, aware of Haverson's considering stare. "What? I'm gunning for a spot on the Poet Emeritus team. I've been reading up."

"Ah."

"We'd never get the paperwork through to pull Christopher Marlowe, though." He sighed. "Although it would be worth it for the looks on the Marlovians' faces."

"You're awfully certain of yourself, son."

"Dr. Haverson-"

Haverson brushed him off with a turn of her wrist. She kept her light blue eyes on Satyavati. "What if I thought there was a chance that Professor Keats could become interested?"

"Oh," Satyavati said. "That's why you came to campus."

Haverson's grin kept growing; as Satyavati watched, it widened another notch. "He doesn't do business by holoconference," she said. "How could Percy Sh.e.l.ley's best friend resist a chance to meet Christopher Marlowe?"

Kit leaned back on his bench, folding his hands in his lap. "Robin, I protest. Walsingham is as loyal to the crown as I."

"Ah." Poley turned it into an accusing drawl: one long syllable, smelling of onions. He straightened, frowning. "And art thou loyal, Master Marley?"

"Thy pardon?" As if a trapdoor had opened under his guts: he clutched the edge of the table to steady himself. "I've proven my loyalty well enough, I think."

"Thou hast grown soft," Poley sneered. Frazier, on Kit's right, stood, and Kit stood with him, toppling the bench in his haste. He found an ale-bottle with his right hand. There was a bed in the close little room in addition to the table, and Kit stepped against it, got his shoulder into the angle the headboard made with the wall.

Ingram Frazier's dagger rose in his hand. Kit looked past him, into Poley's light blue eyes. "Robin," Kit said. "Robin, old friend. What means this?"

Professor Keats looked up as they knocked on his open door: a blatant abrogation of campus security, but Satyavati admitted the cross-breeze felt better than sealed-room climate control. Red curls greying to ginger, his sharp chin softened now by jowls, he leaned back in his chair before a bookshelf stuffed with old leatherbound books and printouts: the detritus of a man who had never abandoned paper. Satyavati's eye picked out the multicolored spines of volumes and volumes of poetry; the successes of the Poet Emeritus project. As a personal and professional friend of the History Department's Bernard Ling, Professor Keats had a.s.sumed the chairmans.h.i.+p of Poet Emeritus shortly after the death of its founder, Dr. Eve Rodale.

Who would gainsay the project's greatest success?

The tuberculosis that would have been his death was a preresistant strain, easy prey to modern antibiotics; the lung damage was repairable with implants and grafts. He stood gracefully as Satyavati, Haverson, and Balda.s.sare entered, a vigorous sixty-year-old who might have as many years before him as behind, and laid aside the fountain pen he still preferred. "It's not often lovely ladies come to visit this old poet," he said. "Can I offer you a cup of tea?"

"Soft," Poley said again, and spit among the rushes on the floor. Bits of herbs colored his saliva green; Kit thought of venom and smiled. If I live, I'll use that- The stink of fish and wine was dizzying. Poley kept talking. "Five years ago thou would'st have hanged Tom Walsingham for the gold in thy purse-"

"Only if he proved guilty."

"Guilty as those idiot students thou did'st see hanged at Corpus Christi?"

Kit winced. He wasn't proud of that. The pottery bottle in his hand was rough-surfaced, cool; he s.h.i.+fted his grip. "Master Walsingham is loyal. Frazier, you're in his service, man-"

"So fierce in his defense." Poley smiled, toxic and sweet. "Mayhap the rumors of thee dropping thy breeches for Master Walsingham aren't so false, after all-"

"Wh.o.r.eson-" Kit stepped up, provoked into abandoning the wall. A mistake, and as his focus narrowed on Poley, Frazier grabbed his left wrist, twisting. Kit raised the bottle-up, down, smashed it hard across the top of Frazier's head, ducking Frazier's wild swing with the dagger. The weaselly Skeres, so far silent, lunged across the table as Frazier roared and blood covered his face.

Satyavati had turned a student desk around; she sat on it now, her feet on the narrow plastic seat, and scrubbed both hands through her thick silver hair. Professor John Keats stood by the holodisplay that covered one long wall of the cla.s.sroom, the twelve-by-fourteen card that Balda.s.sare had pulled down off the wall in Satyavati's office pressed against it, clinging by static charge. Pinholes haggled the yellowed corners of the card; at its center was printed a 2-d image of a painfully boyish, painfully fair young man. He was richly dressed, with huge dark eyes, soft features, and a taunting smile framed by a spa.r.s.e down of beard.

"He would have been eight years older when he died," Keats said.

Haverson chuckled from beside the door. "If that's him."

"If he is a him," Balda.s.sare added. Haverson glared, and the grad student shrugged. "It's what we're here to prove, isn't it? Either the software works, or-"

"Or we have to figure out what this weird outlier means."

Keats glanced over his shoulder. "Explain how your program works, Professor?"

Satyavati curled her tongue across her upper teeth and dug in her pocket for the tin of mints. She offered them around the room; only Keats accepted. "It's an idea that's been under development since the late twentieth century," she said, cinnamon burning her tongue. "It relies on frequency and patterns of word use-well, it originated in some of the metrics that Elizabethan scholars use to prove authors.h.i.+p of the controversial plays, and also the order in which they were written. We didn't get Edward III firmly attributed to Marlowe, with a probable Shakespearean collaboration, until the beginning of the 21st century-"

"And you have a computer program that can identify the biological gender of the writer of a given pa.s.sage of text."

"It even works on newsfeed reports and textbooks, sir."

"Have you any transgendered authors entered, Satyavati?"

John Keats just called me by my first name. She smiled and scooted forward half an inch on the desk, resting her elbows on her knees. "Several women who wrote as men, for whatever reason. Each of them confirmed female, although some were close to the midline. Two male authors who wrote as women. An a.s.sortment of lesbians, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, and bis.e.xuals. Hemingway-"

Haverson choked on a laugh, covering her mouth with her hand. Satyavati shrugged. "-as a baseline. Anais Nin. Ovid, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Tori Siikanen."

"I've read her," Keats said. "Lovely."

Satyavati shrugged. "The genderbot found her unequivocally male, when her entire body of work was a.n.a.lyzed. Even that written after her gender rea.s.signment. We haven't been able to track down any well-known writers of indeterminate s.e.x, unfortunately. I'd like to see how somebody born cryptomale and a.s.signed female, for example, would score-"

"What will your 'bot tell us then?"

"Chromosomal gender, I suppose."

"Interesting. Is gender so very immutable, then?" He raised an eyebrow and smiled, returning his attention to Christopher Marlowe. "That's quite the can of worms-"

"Except for his," Satyavati said, following the line of Keats' gaze to the mocking smile and folded arms of the arrogant boy in the facsimile. "What makes him different?"

"Her," Balda.s.sare said, in a feigned coughing fit. "That moustache is totally gummed on. Look at it."

Keats didn't turn, but he shrugged. "What makes any of us different, my dear?" A long pause, as if he expected an attempt to answer what must have been a rhetorical question. He turned and looked Satyavati in the eye. His gingery eyebrows lifted and fell. "Do you understand the risks and costs of this endeavor?"

Satyavati hunched forward on her chair and shook her head. "It was Sienna's idea-"

"Oh, so quick to cast away credit and blame," the poet said, but his eyes twinkled.

Haverson came to stand beside Satyavati's desk. "Still. Is there any writer or critic who hasn't wondered, a little, what that young man could have done?"

"Were he more p.r.o.ne to temperance?"

Keats was being charming. But he's still John Keats.

"Poets are not temperate by nature," he said, and smiled. He folded his hands together in front of his belt buckle. His swing jacket, translucent chromatic velvet, caught the light through the window as he moved.

"In another hundred years we'll change our gender the way we change our clothes." Haverson pressed her warmth against Satyavati's arm, who endured it a moment before she leaned away.

"I confess myself uncomfortable with the concept." Keats' long fingers fretted the cuff of his gorgeous jacket.

Satyavati, watching him, felt a swell of kins.h.i.+p. "I think there is a biological factor to how gender is expressed. I think my genderbot proves that unequivocally: if we can detect birth gender to such a fine degree-"

"And this is important?" Keats' expression was gentle mockery; an emergent trace of archaic c.o.c.kney colored his voice, but something in the tilt of his head showed Satyavati that it was a serious question.

"Our entire society is based on gender and s.e.x and procreation. How can it not be as vital to understanding the literature as it is to understanding everything else?"

Keats' lips twitched; his pale eyes tightened at the corners. Satyavati shrank back, afraid she'd overstepped, but his voice was still level when he spoke again. "What does it matter where man comes from-or woman either-if the work is true?"

A sore spot. She sucked her lip, searching for the explanation. "One would prefer to think such things no longer mattered." With a sideways glance to Balda.s.sare. He gave her a low thumbs-up. "This isn't my first tenure-track position."

"You left Yale." Just a statement, as if he would not press.

"I filed an allegation of s.e.xual hara.s.sment against my department chair. She denied it, and claimed I was attempting to conceal a lack of scholars.h.i.+p-"

"She?"