"Connie Willis - The Doomsday book" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

"and to abort the drop immediately if he found any errors, no matter what Gilchrist said."
"But surely Gilchrist wouldn't jeopardize Kivrin's safety," Mary protested. "He told me he'd
taken every precaution-"
"Every precaution! He hasn't run recon tests or parameter checks. We did two years of unmanneds
in Twentieth Century before we sent anyone through. He hasn't done any. Badri told him he should
delay the drop until he could do at least one, and instead he moved the drop up two days. The
man's a complete incompetent."
"But he explained why the drop had to be today," Mary said. "In his speech. He said the contemps
in the 1300's paid no attention to dates, except planting and harvesting dates and church holy
days. He said the concentration of holy days was greatest around Christmas, and that was why
Mediaeval had decided to send Kivrin now, so she could use the Advent holy days to determine her
temporal location and ensure her being at the drop site on the twenty-eighth of December."
"His sending her now has nothing to do with Advent or holy days," he said, watching Badri. He was
back to tapping one key at a time and frowning. "He could send her next week and use Epiphany for
a rendezvous date. He could run unmanneds for six months and then send her lapse-time. Gilchrist
is sending her now because Basingame's off on holiday and isn't here to stop him."
"Oh, dear," Mary said. "I rather thought he was rushing it myself. When I told him how long I
needed Kivrin in Infirmary, he tried to talk me out of it. I had to explain that her inoculations
needed time to take effect."
"A rendezvous on the twenty-eighth of December," Dunworthy said bitterly. "Do you realize what
holy day that is? The Feast of the Slaughter of the Innocents. Which, in light of how this drop
is being run, may be entirely appropriate."
"Why can't you stop it?" Mary said. "You can forbid Kivrin to go, can't you? You're her tutor."
"No," he said. "I'm not. She's a student at Brasenose. Latimer's her tutor." He waved his hand
in the direction of Latimer, who had picked up the brass-bound casket again and was peering
absentmindedly into it. "She came to Balliol and asked me to tutor her unofficially."
He turned and stared blindly at the thin-glass. "I told her then that she couldn't go."
Kivrin had come to see him when she was a first-year student. "I want to go to the Middle Ages,"
she had said. She wasn't even a meter and a half tall, and her fair hair was in braids. She
hadn't looked old enough to cross the street by herself.
"You can't," he had said, his first mistake. He should have sent her back to Mediaeval, told her
she would have to take the matter up with her tutor. "The Middle Ages are closed. They have a
ranking of ten."
"A blanket ten," Kivrin had said, "which Mr. Gilchrist says they don't deserve. He says that
ranking would never hold up under a year-by-year analysis. It's based on the contemps' mortality
rate, which was largely due to bad nutrition and no med support. The ranking wouldn't be nearly
as high for an historian who'd been inoculated against disease. Mr. Gilchrist plans to ask the
History Faculty to reevaluate the ranking and open part of the fourteenth century."
"I cannot conceive of the History Faculty opening a century that had not only the Black Death and
cholera, but the Hundred Years War," Dunworthy had said.


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"But they might, and if they do, I want to go."
"It's impossible," he'd said. "Even if it were opened, Mediaeval wouldn't send a woman. An
unaccompanied woman was unheard of in the fourteenth century. Only women of the lowest class went
about alone, and they were fair game for any man or beast who happened along. Women of the
nobility and even the emerging middle class were constantly attended by their fathers or their