The Sphere: A Journey In Time Page 4

  I knew he was not joking and somehow doubted he would let me pick the language. I mixed some brown sugar in with my oatmeal and poured a glass of orange juice before retiring to the couch. "Mail." The screen disappeared from the kitchen and reappeared in the air over the coffee table. My eyes rested on the message from the planters. "Open." The message opened on the screen and the attachment showed up as a smaller document on the side. I read through the first sentence and decided I did not want that sort of formality with my breakfast. I focused on the attachment of my transcribed journal. "Open." I settled down to read through the account of my time in Stratford. Most of the journal entries were fairly banal. My first few weeks I worked as a maid at an inn near the center of town, while working to build up trust with Mary, and arranging a convenient absence of her other maid. Most of the entries were about me complaining of my treatment and my gradual befriending of Mary, but one in particular caught my attention.

  Wednesday, July 8th, 1598

  Another interesting sighting today. Henry Wriothesley, the number one man of interest on my scout’s list came to the inn today and is spending the night. He was accompanied by another man also on my list, but further down, Byron Goodfell. I tried eavesdropping on their conversations but there were so many people about today it was difficult. It mostly sounded like they were talking politics anyway. Henry, like William, largely ignored me but Byron kept giving me queer looks. I wonder if he thought I might be of service in other ways. Something about him seemed off, it was kind of creepy. Maybe I’ll try to talk to him tomorrow, see what he can tell me about Henry.

  I hadn’t paid that much attention to Byron since he wasn’t that high on my list of potential sonnet subjects. But I remembered the feeling he gave me the few times I did see him. It was like he knew something wasn’t right with me. I had shrugged him off as being eccentric at the time. “Search Byron.”

  A list of four more entries popped out to the side of my journal. Each of them had a mention of Byron in them. I focused on the top one first, “Open.”

  Thursday, July 9th, 1598

  Well no luck today. Henry and Byron left rather early to head to William’s house. I asked the innkeeper if they often come through town to visit Shakespeare and he told me to get my head out of the clouds. He said that an Earl would have no interest in a simple maid like myself and I should remember my place. I wanted to smack him, but demurred to his intolerable wisdom. Definitely don’t need to be attracting more attention to myself.

  I didn’t think that entry very interesting, and focused on the next. “Open.”

  Saturday, July 11th, 1598

  I can’t wait to get to the point where I can write about something other than the innkeeper’s daily tortures. Today was a fun one-he found me-

  Nevermind that. Byron just came back. The innkeeper brought him up to my room and told me I had to show him a good time or risk being thrown out in the streets. When the innkeeper left I told him that I hadn’t agreed to this when I was hired. Byron said something about me having nice teeth for such a lowly maid. I pleaded with him to leave me be and he said he would enjoy my company for a few more minutes then tell the innkeeper I had been well worth it.

  I never thought to prepare for this in my training. Perhaps I should step up the timeline. I got lucky with Byron, but who knows who else the innkeeper will bring up to my room. I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could get him trouble with the authorities. Probably not, it would probably just bring them around more often.

  I hadn’t given much thought to the few weeks I had spent at the inn before moving to work for Shakespeare. Frankly, I had wanted to forget most of it since it was largely unpleasant. This entry was the only occasion where the innkeeper had tried to sell me off as more than just a maid. I had forgotten about it almost immediately after leaving the place and wasn’t very keen on reliving it now. Perhaps I would leave this part out of my rewrite. I glanced at the last entry in the search list. “Open.”

  August 1st, 1598

  Byron and Henry came by the house today. Byron gave me a funny look and mentioned how fortuitous it was that I happened to be picked up by William Shakespeare as a maid. I agreed that he was a much better employer than the innkeeper. The smile he gave me betrayed something, I’m just not sure what. I think maybe he knows that I somehow had a hand in the other maid’s unfortunate incident. Perhaps he thinks Mary and I were in on it together. I didn’t notice any particular treatment of Henry by William. I’ll admit, he’s a pretentious little fop, but that’s not unusual for men of his status in this time. They took him somewhere out of the house. At least now he seems to be past his highly focused phase.

  I realized that even if Byron had suspected me of orchestrating the former maid’s demise, there was little to be done about it. Furthermore, it no longer mattered. Byron was long gone and there would be no need to even mention him in my rewrite. I ignored the fourth entry involving him, knowing I would read it soon anyway.

  It took me a good hour to read through my journal. I had no idea where to begin, so I looked back at the message from the planters. Their plan was to create a blank journal and rewrite my embellished journal entries with a quill pen. Then they would chemically age the journal and plant it at an auction for a well known book collector. In the back of my mind, I wondered for a moment if they would also kill a well known book collector to speed the discovery. I made a mental note to mention the thought to Vanessa as a joke at some point.

  I took my dishes back to the kitchen and placed them in the cleaner. There was no sign of my hangover left, so I decided to go for a run. I had gotten a fair amount of exercise in Stratford but it was mostly heavy lifting and climbing stairs. It would feel good to get a nice long jog in and clear my head a bit. I changed clothes and stepped outside my door.

  I paused just outside to gaze at my surroundings. Though I had only been gone a few months, it felt unfamiliar. A short distance to my right I could see the entrance to the Mission Enclosure where I had arrived yesterday. It was where we did our prep work and some of our research for time travel. The faint outline of its own dome-like enclosure was just barely visible on the other side of the glass. Further along the circumference of the main central living dome was the entrance to the agricultural department. Like the living dome, its enclosure was glass to allow sunlight in. It was also much larger than any of the other domes, due to the fact that it housed gardens and fields.

  On the opposite side from the traveling chambers was another enclosed dome, larger than the one I worked in. Next to that, the entrance to the outside world. I had no idea what went on in the other dome. I didn’t even know what it was called. By way of experiment once, I ran around the circumference of the living dome. Though the doors to the agricultural dome and my own research dome slid open easily as I ran by, the other doors did not. I turned left and headed down the row of apartment doors to the gym.

  The place was deserted this early in the morning so I had no trouble finding an empty running simulator. I selected my favorite trail and headed inside. It was a mostly level trail that wound through the woods, across a few small streams and past a waterfall. Within a few minutes of the trail it was painfully obvious that I was out of shape. I stopped near the halfway mark at the waterfall for a break. "Journal entry, November 18th, 1598."

  The general computer voice used for text transcription sounded like Sean Connery to me. It seemed like such an odd choice for something meant to be generic. I paced back and forth in front of the waterfall trying to catch my breath as he repeated the words from my journal entry.

  "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."
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br />   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.