Connie Willis - Fire Watch

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FIRE WATCH

by Connie Willis

"History hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over." -Sir Walter

Raleigh

September 20-Of course the first thing I looked for was the fire-watch stone. And of course it

wasn't there yet. It wasn't dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Rev-erend Dean

Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940. I knew that. I went to see the fire-watch stone only

yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow

help. It didn't.

The only things that would have helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little

more time. I had not gotten either.

"Travelling in time is not like taking the tube, Mr. Bartho-lomew," the esteemed Dunworthy had

said, blinking at me through those antique spectacles of his. "Either you report on the twentieth or

you don't go at all."

"But I'm not ready," I'd said. "Look, it took me four years to get ready to travel with St. Paul. St.

Paul. Not St. Paul's. You can't expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days."

"Yes," Dunworthy had said. "We can." End of conversa-tion.

"Two days!" I had shouted at my roommate, Kivrin. "All because some computer adds an

apostrophe s. And the esteemed Dunworthy doesn't even bat an eye when I tell him. `Time travel is

not like taking the tube, young man,' he said. `I'd suggest you get ready. You're leaving the day after

tomor-row.' The man's a total incompetent."

"No," she said. "He isn't. He's the best there is. He wrote the book on St. Paul's. Maybe you

should listen to what he says."

I had expected Kivrin to be at least a little sympathetic. She had been practically hysterical when

she got her practicum changed from fifteenth to fourteenth century England, and how did either

century qualify as a practicum? Even counting infectious diseases they couldn't have been more than

a five. The Blitz is an eight, and St. Paul's itself is, with my luck, a ten.

"You think I should go see Dunworthy again?" I said. "Yes."

"And then what? I've got two days. I don't know the money, the language, the history. Nothing."

"He's a good man," Kivrin said. "I think you'd better listen to him while you can." Good old

Kivrin. Always the sympa-thetic ear.

The good man was responsible for my standing just inside the propped-open west doors, gawking

like the country boy I was supposed to be, looking for a stone that wasn't there. Thanks to the good

man, I was about as unprepared for my practicum as it was possible for him to make me.

I couldn't see more than a few feet into the church. I could see a candle gleaming feebly a long

way off and a closer blur of white moving toward me. A verger, or possibly the Very Reverend Dean

himself. I pulled out the letter from my clergyman uncle in Wales that was supposed to gain me

access to the Dean, and patted my back pocket to make sure I hadn't lost the microfiche Oxford

English Dictionary, Revised, with Historical Supplements, I'd smuggled out of the Bodleian. I

couldn't pull it out in the middle of the conversation, but with luck I could muddle through the first

encounter by context and look up the words I didn't know later.

"Are you from the ayarpee?" he said. He was no older than I am, a head shorter and much thinner.

Almost ascetic look-ing. He reminded me of Kivrin. He was not wearing white, but clutching it to his

chest. In other circumstances I would have thought it was a pillow. In other circumstances I would

know what was being said to me, but there had been no time to unlearn sub-Mediterranean Latin and

Jewish law and learn Cockney and air-raid procedures. Two days, and the esteemed Dunworthy,

who wanted to talk about the sacred burdens of the historian instead of telling me what the ayarpee

was.

"Are you?" he demanded again.

I considered shipping out the OED after all on the grounds that Wales was a foreign country, but I

didn't think they had microfilm in 1940. Ayarpee. It could be anything, including a nickname for the

fire watch, in which case the impulse to say no was not safe at all. "No," I said.

He lunged suddenly toward and past me and peered out the open doors. "Damn," he said, coming

back to me. "Where are they then? Bunch of lazy bourgeois tarts!" And so much for getting by on

context.

He looked at me closely, suspiciously, as if he thought I was only pretending not to be with the

ayarpee. "The church is closed," he said finally.

I held up the envelope and said, "My name's Bartholomew. Is Dean Matthews in?"

He looked out the door a moment longer, as if he expected the lazy bourgeois tarts at any moment

and intended to attack them with the white bundle, then he turned and said, as if he were guiding a

tour, "This way, please," and took off into the gloom.

He led me to the right and down the south aisle of the nave. Thank God I had memorized the floor

plan or at that moment, heading into total darkness, led by a raving verger, the whole bizarre

metaphor of my situation would have been enough to send me out the west doors and back to St.

John's Wood. It helped a little to know where I was. We should have been passing number

twenty-six: Hunt's painting of "The Light of the World"-Jesus with his lantern-but it was too dark to

see it. We could have used the lantern ourselves.

He stopped abruptly ahead of me, still raving. "We weren't asking for the bloody Savoy, just a

few cots. Nelson's better off than we are-at least he's got a pillow provided." He brandished the

white bundle like a torch in the darkness. It was a pillow after all. "We asked for them over a

fortnight ago, and here we still are, sleeping on the bleeding generals from Trafalgar because those

bitches want to play tea and crumpets with the tommies at Victoria and the Hell with us!"

He didn't seem to expect me to answer his outburst, which was good, because I had understood

perhaps one key word in three. He stomped on ahead, moving out of sight of the one pathetic altar

candle and stopping again at a black hole. Number twenty-five: stairs to the Whispering Gallery, the

Dome, the library (not open to the public). Up the stairs, down a hall, stop again at a medieval door

and knock. "I've got to go wait for them," he said. "If I'm not there they'll likely take them over to the

Abbey. Tell the Dean to ring them up again, will you?" and he took off down the stone steps, still

holding his pillow like a shield against him.

He had knocked, but the door was at least a foot of solid oak, and it was obvious the Very

Reverend Dean had not heard. I was going to have to knock again. Yes, well, and the man holding

the pinpoint had to let go of it, too, but even knowing it will all be over in a moment and you won't

feel a thing doesn't make it any easier to say, "Now!" So I stood in front of the door, cursing the

history department and the esteemed Dunworthy and the computer that had made the mis-take and

brought me here to this dark door with only a letter from a fictitious uncle that I trusted no more than

I trusted the rest of them.

Even the old reliable Bodleian had let me down. The batch of research stuff I cross-ordered

through Balliol and the main terminal is probably sitting in my room right now, a century out of

reach. And Kivrin, who had already done her practicum and should have been bursting with advice,

walked around as silent as a saint until I begged her to help me.

"Did you go to see Dunworthy?" she said.

"Yes. You want to know what priceless bit of information he had for me? `Silence and humility are

the sacred burdens of the historian.' He also told me I would love St. Paul's. Golden gems from the

master. Unfortunately, what I need to know are the times and places of the bombs so one doesn't fail

on me." I flopped down on the bed. "Any suggestions?"

"How good are you at memory retrieval?" she said.

I sat up. "I'm pretty good. You think I should assimilate?" "There isn't time for that," she said. "I

think you should put everything you can directly into long-term."

"You mean endorphins?" I said.

The biggest problem with using memory-assistance drugs to put information into your long-term

memory is that it never sits, even for a micro-second, in your short-term memory, and that makes

retrieval complicated, not to mention unnerving. It gives you the most unsettling sense of deja vu to

suddenly know something you're positive you've never seen or heard before.

The main problem, though, is not eerie sensations but re-trieval. Nobody knows exactly how the

brain gets what it wants out of storage, but short-term is definitely involved. That brief, sometimes

microscopic, time information spends in short-term is apparently used for something besides

tip-of--the-tongue availability. The whole complex sort-and-file pro-cess of retrieval is apparently

centered in short-term; and without it, and without the help of the drugs that put it there or artificial

substitutes, information can be impossible to re-trieve. I'd used endorphins for examinations and

never had any difficulty with retrieval, and it looked like it was the only way to store all the

information I needed in anything ap-proaching the time I had left, but it also meant that I would never

have known any of the things I needed to know, even for long enough to have forgotten them. If and

when I could retrieve the information, I would know it. Till then I was as ignorant of it as if it were

not stored in some cobwebbed corner of my mind at all.

"You can retrieve without artificials, can't you?" Kivrin said, looking skeptical.

"I guess I'll have to."

"Under stress? Without sleep? Low body endorphin levels?" What exactly had her practicum

been? She had never said a word about it, and undergraduates are not supposed to ask. Stress

factors in the Middle Ages? I thought everybody slept through them.

"I hope so," I said. "Anyway, I'm willing to try this idea if you think it will help."

She looked at me with that martyred expression and said, "Nothing will help." Thank you, St.

Kivrin of Balliol.

But I tried it anyway. It was better than sitting in Dunworthy's rooms having him blink at me

through his histori-cally accurate eyeglasses and tell me I was going to love St. Paul's. When my

Bodleian requests didn't come, I overloaded my credit and bought out Blackwell's. Tapes on World

War II, Celtic literature, history of mass transit, tourist guidebooks, everything I could think of. Then

I rented a high-speed recorder and shot up. When I came out of it, I was so panicked by the feeling

of not knowing any more than I had when I started that I took the tube to London and raced up

Ludgate Hill to see if the firewatch stone would trigger any memories. It didn't.

"Your endorphin levels aren't back to normal yet," I told myself and tried to relax, but that was

impossible with the prospect of the practicum looming up before me. And those are real bullets, kid.

Just because you're a history major doing his practicum doesn't mean you can't get killed. I read

history books all the way home on the tube and right up until Dunworthy's flunkies came to take me

to St. John's Wood this morning.

Then I jammed the microfiche OED in my back pocket and went off feeling as if I would have to

survive by my native wit and hoping I could get hold of artificials in 1940. Surely I could get through

the first day without mishap, I thought; and now here I was, stopped cold by almost the first word

that was spoken to me.

Well, not quite. In spite of Kivrin's advice that I not put anything in short-term, I'd memorized the

British money, a map of the tube system, a map of my own Oxford. It had gotten me this far. Surely

I would be able to deal with the Dean.

Just as I had almost gotten up the courage to knock, he opened the door, and as with the pinpoint,

it really was over quickly and without pain. I handed him my letter, and he shook my hand and said

something understandable like, "Glad to have another man, Bartholomew." He looked strained and

tired and as if he might collapse if I told him the Blitz had just started. I know, I know: Keep your

mouth shut. The stared silence, etc.

He said, "We'll get Langby to show you round, shall we?" I assumed that was my Verger of the

Pillow, and I was right. He met us at the foot of the stairs, puffing a little but jubilant.

"The cots came," he said to Dean Matthews. "You'd have thought they were doing us a favor. All

high heels and hoity-toity. 'You made us miss our tea, luv,' one of them said to me. `Yes, well, and a

good thing, too,' I said. `You look as if you could stand to lose a stone or two.

Even Dean Matthews looked as though he did not com-pletely understand him. He said, "Did you

set them up in the crypt?" and then introduced us. "Mr. Bartholomew's just got

in from Wales," he said. "He's come to join our volunteers." Volunteers, not fire watch.

Langby showed me around, pointing out various dimnesses in the general gloom and then dragged

me down to see the ten folding canvas cots set up among the tombs in the crypt, also in passing

Lord Nelson's black marble sarcophagus. He told me I didn't have to stand a watch the first night

and suggested I go to bed, since sleep is the most precious commodity in the raids. I could well

believe it. He was clutching that silly pil-low to his breast like his beloved.

"Do you hear the sirens down here?" I asked, wondering if he buried his head in it.

He looked round at the low stone ceilings. "Some do, some don't. Brinton has to have his

Horlich's. Bence-Jones would sleep if the roof fell in on him. I have to have a pillow. The important

thing is to get your eight in no matter what. If you don't, you turn into one of the walking dead. And

then you get killed."

On that cheering note he went off to post the watches for tonight, leaving his pillow on one of the

cots with orders for me to let nobody touch it. So here I sit, waiting for my first air-raid siren and

trying to get all this down before I turn into one of the walking or nonwalking dead.

I've used the stolen OED to decipher a little Langby. Mid-dling success. A tart is either a pastry or

a prostitute (I assume the latter, although I was wrong about the pillow). Bourgeois is a catchall term

for all the faults of the middle class. A Tommy's a soldier. Ayarpee I could not find under any

spell-ing and I had nearly given up when something in the long-term about the use of acronyms and

abbreviations in wartime popped forward (bless you, St. Kivrin) and I realized it must be an

abbreviation. ARP. Air Raid Precautions. Of course. Where else would you get the bleeding cots

from?

September 21-Now that I'm past the first shock of being here, I realize that the history

department neglected to tell me what I'm supposed to do in the three-odd months of this prac-ticum.

They handed me this journal, the letter from my uncle, and a ten-pound note, and sent me packing

into the past. The ten pounds (already depleted by train and tube fares) is supposed to last me until

the end of December and get me back to St. John's Wood for pickup when the second letter calling

me back to Wales to sick uncle's bedside comes. Till then I live here in the crypt with Nelson, who,

Langby tells me, is pickled in alcohol inside his coffin. If we take a direct hit, will he burn like a torch

or simply trickle out in a decaying stream onto the crypt floor, I wonder. Board is provided by a gas

ring, over which are cooked wretched tea and indescribable kippers. To pay for all this luxury I am

to stand on the roofs of St. Paul's and put out incendiaries.

I must also accomplish the purpose of this practicum, whatever it may be. Right now the only

purpose I care about is staying alive until the second letter from uncle arrives and I can go home.

I am doing makework until Langby has time to "show me the ropes." I've cleaned the skillet they

cook the foul little fishes in, stacked wooden folding chairs at the altar end of the crypt (flat instead

of standing because they tend to collapse like bombs in the middle of the night), and tried to sleep.

I am apparently not one of the lucky ones who can sleep through the raids. I spent most of the

night wondering what St. Paul's risk rating is. Practica have to be at least a six. Last night I was

convinced this was a ten, with the crypt as ground zero, and that I might as well have applied for

Denver.

The most interesting thing that's happened so far is that I've seen a cat. I am fascinated, but trying

not to appear so since they seem commonplace here.

September 22-Still in the crypt. Langby comes dashing through, periodically cursing various

government agencies (all abbreviated) and promising to take me up on the roofs. In the meantime,

I've run out of makework and taught myself to work a stirrup pump. Kivrin was overly concerned

about my memory retrieval abilities. I have not had any trouble so far. Quite the opposite. I called up

fire-fighting information and got the whole manual with pictures, including instructions on the use of

the stirrup pump. If the kippers set Lord Nelson on fire, I shall be a hero.

Excitement last night. The sirens went early and some of the chars who clean offices in the City

sheltered in the crypt with us. One of them woke me out of a sound sleep, going like an air raid siren.

Seems she'd seen a mouse. We had to go whacking at tombs and under the cots with a rubber boot

to persuade her it was gone. Obviously what the history depart-ment had in mind: murdering mice.

September 24-Langby took me on rounds. Into the choir, where I had to learn the stirrup pump

all over again, assigned rubber boots and a tin helmet. Langby says Com-mander Allen is getting us

asbestos firemen's coats, but hasn't yet, so it's my own wool coat and muffler and very cold on the

roofs even in September. It feels like November and looks it, too, bleak and cheerless with no sun.

Up to the dome and onto the roofs which should be flat, but in fact are littered with towers,

pinnacles, gutters, and statues, all designed to catch and hold incendiaries out of reach. Shown how

to smother an incendiary with sand before it burns through the roof and sets the church on fire.

Shown the ropes (literally) lying in a heap at the base of the dome in case somebody has to go up

one of the west towers or over the top of the dome. Back inside and down to the Whispering

Gallery.

Langby kept up a running commentary through the whole tour, part practical instruction, part

church history. Before we went up into the Gallery he dragged me over to the south door to tell me

how Christopher Wren stood in the smoking rubble of Old St. Paul's and asked a workman to bring

him a stone from the graveyard to make the cornerstone. On the stone was written in Latin, "I shall

rise again," and Wren was so im-pressed by the irony that he had the words inscribed above the

door. Langby looked as smug as if he had not told me a story every first-year history student knows,

but I suppose without the impact of the firewatch stone, the other is just a nice story.

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摘要：

FIREWATCHbyConnieWillis"Historyhathtriumphedovertime,whichbesidesitnothingbuteternityhathtriumphedover."-SirWalterRaleighSeptember20-OfcoursethefirstthingIlookedforwasthefire-watchstone.Andofcourseitwasn'tthereyet.Itwasn'tdedicateduntil1951,accompanyingspeechbytheVeryReverendDeanWalterMatthews,andt...

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Connie Willis - Fire Watch

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