Lincoln's Dreams (30 page)
Authors: Connie Willis
In March I took Broun to see his doctor, and he got a clean bill of health.
“He told me I could do anything I wanted, climb stairs, write a book,” he said on the way home. “I want to write a book about Robert E. Lee.” He waited to see what I would say.
“And Traveller,” I said.
“Of course Traveller.”
We started work on the new book. Broun sent me out to Arlington to take notes on the porch and the parlor and the attic where Tom Tita had been imprisoned. There was going to be a military funeral in the afternoon, and they had blocked off the drives. I had to park the car in the visitors’ parking lot and walk up the hill. It was a warm day, the first one in over two months, and the snow that had fallen in February was just now starting to melt. The water ran in rivers along the curving drives.
Custis Walk was blocked off, too. I had to cut across the grass to get to Arlington House. I made it as far as the grave. The workmen had trampled the snow down till you could see the grass in places.
They had used a backhoe to dig the grave, heaping dirty snow at the sides, and it was melting, too, and running across the grass and the snow in muddy rivulets.
The workmen had gone off to eat lunch or smoke a cigarette. They had left a metal clipboard lying under a tree on the far side of the grave, with a piece of paper clipped to it. It would have the name of who the grave was for written on it, and I wanted to walk over to the tree and read it, but I was afraid that I would not be able to get back, that the ground would give way, and I would step on all their mangled bodies.
“It has something to do with Arlington and the unknown soldier and a message,” Annie had said, trying to understand the dreams. “I think he was trying to atone,” and I should have asked her, “How is he trying to atone?” instead of shouting at her. Because of course the dreams were an atonement.
He was trying to warn her. His daughter Annie had died, and he hadn’t been able to do anything to save her. He hadn’t been able to save any of them. Stonewall Jackson or the ragged soldiers he had to keep sending back into battle, or the Confederacy. But he could save Annie. She reminded him of his daughter, and she was twenty-three years old. He was trying to warn her.
The dreams were terrifying, full of images of death and dying. They were meant to frighten her, to make her go see a doctor before it was too late, a warning as clear, as easy to interpret as Lincoln’s dreams of himself in a coffin, only nobody saw it. Except Annie, and she wouldn’t listen.
“It’s the war,” Broun had said. “People do things like that in a war, sacrifice themselves, fall in love.” They had been together night after night, through battle after heartbreaking battle. She was bound to fall in love with him, wasn’t she? And then, even though she knew the dreams were a warning, even though the warnings got plainer and more terrifying, Lee willing even to dream Appomattox again, to
dream his own death for her, to warn her, she couldn’t leave him.
She had stayed with him to the end, as she had promised, and when the snow melted a little more I would be able to see her body, face-down, her arm flung out, still holding on to her Springfield rifle. I leaned against the backhoe, unable to stand.
I could see the square white subway entrances looking like gravestones and beyond them, across the river, the square white tomb of the Lincoln Memorial. I thought about the statue inside, Lincoln sitting with his long legs planted in front of him and his hands on the arms of the chair, looking like a man who has lost a child.
Lincoln had gone out to the cemetery in Georgetown and had the vault opened twice, trying, I think, to convince himself that Willie was really dead, but it hadn’t helped. It hadn’t helped, and he couldn’t sleep, and his grief nearly drove him insane. Until finally, in Broun’s words, Willie’s face had come in dreams to comfort him. As Annie’s face had come to comfort me, though she was dead.
Though she was dead.
It took me a long time to get back to the road, high-stepping like a cat among the snowy graves, and an even longer time to drive home. When I got there, Broun was in the solarium, watering his African violets.
I stood against the door, still in my coat, watching him spill water out of the already-full pots onto the table. He will never look like Lincoln. The heart attacks have aged and somehow saddened his face, and his beard, which has finally, after almost two years, grown in the way he wanted it, is nearly white. He looks like Lee.
I wondered why I had never noticed it before, why I had kept instead the image I had had of him the night of the reception, of someone sharp and disreputable and not to be trusted. He has been nothing but kind to me. And one snowy night he
sold me to Annie, who was having someone else’s dreams.
“Jeff’ll take good care of her,” Broun had said, like a man trying to make a deal, “won’t you, Jeff?”
And I had said, “I’ll take good care of her. I promise.”
I think some part of me has blamed him for that all this time, in spite of the fact that he has been nothing but kind, loves me as much, I think, as Lincoln loved Willie, is down here now not because the violets need watering, but because he wondered where I was, because he didn’t know what had happened to me.
I have blamed him for something that wasn’t even his fault. It was love at first sight for both of them, wasn’t it? Didn’t Lee call him “my colt” even before he bought him?
I belonged to her from the minute I saw her standing there in her gray coat, and she took me, her faithful, following companion, from Fredericksburg to Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and finally to Appomattox, and then left me behind.
“I had no business sending you out there,” Broun says.
I cannot answer. I stand there by the door with my head down, winded, blown. Poor Traveller. Did he know that Lee was dead, or, poor dumb animal that he was, had he waited every day for two years for him to come back?
“What happened?” Broun says, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“I have picked up a nail.”
C
ONNIE
W
ILLIS
has won six Nebula Awards (more than any other science fiction writer), six Hugo Awards, and for her first novel,
Lincoln’s Dreams
, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her novel
Doomsday Book
won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her first short-story collection.
Fire Watch
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book. Her other works include
To Say Nothing of the Dog Bellwether, Impossible Thing, Remake, Uncharted Territory, Miracle and Other Christmas Stories
, and
Passage.
Ms Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family and is hard at work on her next novel.
And be sure not to miss Connie Willis’s luminous novella,
BELLWETHER
With her usual wit and dexterity, Willis combines chaos theory and sheep raising, trends and true love, in this remarkable story. Here’s a special preview;
Sandra Foster works at HiTek in Research and Development, looking for the causes of fads and trends. Her topic of choice is hair-bobbing, but the project isn’t going so well. Too many variables, too much confusion. And then, through the auspices of a misdelivered package, she meets Dr. Bennett O’Reilly, a young chaos theorist who is studying information diffusion in macaques. Or would like to be, if he could ever get his grant. So Sandra comes up with a brilliant idea: why not combine their projects? She has access to some sheep; he could teach them simple tasks, and as for her … Well, how better to study the human herd mentality than in the animal that most resembles it?
Her only problem is likely to be the conservative and overly-cautious Management, but even there she has a hook. Management is angling for the rare, prestigious, and highly mysterious Neibnitz Grant—in which an unknown committee, using incomprehensible
criteria, randomly awards their chosen scientists a million dollars free of strings. Now all Sandra needs to do is consult a colleague expert in the ways of manipulating Management….
Gina was addressing bright pink Barbie invitations when I arrived. “I still can’t find a Romantic Bride Barbie anywhere. I’ve called five different toystores.”
I told her my plan.
She shook her head sadly.
“Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.”
“I thought one of the keystones of GRIM was innovation.”
“Are you kidding? If it’s new. Management doesn’t have a form for it, and Management loves forms almost as much as they hate controversy. Sorry.” She went back to addressing envelopes.
“If you’ll help me, I’ll find Romantic Bride Barbie for you,” I said.
She looked up from the invitation. “It has to be Romantic Bride Barbie. Not Country Bride Barbie or Wedding Fantasy Barbie.”
I nodded. “Is it a deal?”
“I can’t guarantee Management will go for it even if I help you,” she said, shoving the invitations to the side and handing me a notepad and pencil. “All right, tell me what you were going to tell Management.”
“Well, I thought I’d start by explaining what happened to the funding form—”
“Wrong,” she said. “They’ll know what you’re up to in a minute. You tell them you’ve been working on this joint project thing since the meeting before last, when they said how important staff input and interaction were. Use words like
optimize
and
patterning systems.
”
“Okay,” I said, taking notes.
“Tell them any number of scientific breakthroughs have been made by scientists working together. Crick and Watson, Penzias and Wilson, Gilbert and Sullivan—”
I looked up from my notes. “Gilbert and Sullivan weren’t scientists.”
Management won’t know that. And they might recognize the name. You’ll need a two-page prospectus of the project goals. Put anything you think they’ll think is a problem on the second page. They never read the second page.”
“You mean an outline of the project?” I said, scribbling. Explaining the experimental method we’re going to use and describing the connection between trends analysis and information diffusion research?”
“No,” she said, and turned around to her computer. “Never mind, I’ll write it for you.” She began typing rapidly. “You tell them integrated cross-discipline teaming projects are the latest thing at MIT. Tell them single-person projects are passé.” She hit PRINT, and a sheet started scrolling through the printer.
And pay attention to Management’s body language. If he taps his forefinger on the desk, you’re in trouble.”
She handed me the prospectus. It looked suspiciously like her five all-purpose objectives, which meant it would probably work.
“And don’t wear that.” She pointed at my skirt and lab coat. “You’re supposed to be dressing down.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Do you think this’ll do it?”
“When it’s live-animal research?” she said. “Are you kidding? Romantic Bride Barbie is the one with the pink net roses,” she said. “Oh, and Bethany wants a brunette one.”
I had failed to include all the variables. It was true that Management values paperwork more than anything. Except for the Niebnitz Grant.
I had hardly started into my spiel in Management’s white-carpeted office when Management’s eyes lit up, and he said, “This would be a cross-discipline project?”
“Yes,” I said. “Trends analysis combined with learning vectors in higher mammals. And there are certain aspects of chaos theory—”
“Chaos theory?” he said, tapping his forefinger on his expensive teak desk.
“Only in the sense that these are nonlinear systems which require a designed experiment,” I said hastily. “The emphasis is primarily on information diffusion in higher mammals, of which human trends are a subset.”
“Designed experiment?” he said eagerly.
“Yes. The practical value to HiTek would be better understanding of how information spreads through human societies and—”
“What was your original field?” he cut in.
“Statistics,” I said. “The advantages of using sheep over macaques are—” and never got to finish because Management was already standing up and shaking my hand.
“This is exactly the kind of project that GRIM is all about. Interfacing scientific disciplines, implementing initiative and cooperation to create new workplace paradigms.”
He actually talks in acronyms, I thought wonderingly, and almost missed what he said next.
“—exactly the kind of project the Niebnitz Grant Committee is looking for. I want this project implemented immediately. How soon can you have it up and running?”
“I—it—” I stammered. “There’s some background research we’ll need to do on sheep behavior. And there are the live-animal regulations that have to be—”
He waved an airy hand. “It’ll be our problem to deal with that. I want you and Dr. O’Reilly to concentrate on that divergent thinking and scientific sensibility. I expect great things.” He shook my hand enthusiastically. “HiTek is going to do everything we can to cut right through the red tape and get this project on line immediately.”
And did.
Permissions were typed up, paperwork waived, and live-animal approvals filed almost before I could get down to Bio and tell Bennett they’d approved the project.
“What does ‘on line immediately’ mean?” he said worriedly. “We haven’t done any background research on sheep behavior, how they interact, what skills they’re capable of learning, what they eat—”
“We’ll have plenty of time,” I said. “This is Management, remember?”
Wrong again. Friday Management called me on the white carpet again and told me the permissions had all been gotten, the live-animal approvals approved. “Can you have the sheep here by Monday?”
“I’ll need to see if the owner can arrange it,” I said, hoping Billy Ray couldn’t.
He could, and did, though he didn’t bring them down himself He was attending a virtual ranching meeting in Lander. He sent instead Miguel, who had a nose ring, Aussie hat, headphones, and no intention of unloading the sheep.
“Where do you want them?” he said.
We showed him the paddock gate, and he sighed
heavily, backed the truck more or less up to it, and then stood against the truck’s cab looking put-upon.
“Aren’t you going to unload them?” Ben said finally.
“Billy Ray told me to deliver them,” Miguel said. “He didn’t say anything about unloading them.”
“You should meet our mail clerk,” I said. “You’re obviously made for each other.”
Bennett had gone around to the back of the truck and was lifting the bar that held the door shut. “You don’t suppose they’ll all come rushing out at once and trample us, do you?” he said.
No. The thirty or so sheep stood on the edge of the truck bed, bleating and looking terrified.
“Come on,” Ben said coaxingly. “Do you think it’s too far for them to jump?”
“They jumped off a cliff in
Far from the Madding Crowd,
” I said. “How can it be too far?”
Nevertheless, Ben went to get a piece of plywood for a makeshift ramp, and I went to see if Dr. Riez, who had done an equine experiment before he turned to flatworms, had a halter we could borrow.
It took him forever to find a halter, and I figured by the time I got back to the lab it would no longer be needed, but the sheep were still huddled in the back of the truck.
Ben was looking frustrated, and Miguel, up by the front of the truck, was swaying to some unheard rhythm.
“They won’t come,” Ben said. “I’ve tried calling and coaxing and whistling.”
I handed him the halter.
“Maybe if we can get one down the ramp,” he said, “they’ll all follow.” He took the halter and went up the ramp. “Get out of the way in case they all make a mad dash.”
He reached to slip the halter over the nearest sheep’s neck, and there was a mad dash, all right. To the rear of the truck.
“Maybe you could pick one up and carry it off,” I said, thinking of the cover of one of the angel books. It showed a barefoot angel carrying a lost lamb. “A small one.”
Ben nodded. He handed me the halter and went up the ramp, moving slowly so he wouldn’t scare them. “Shh, shh,” he said softly to a little ewe. “I won’t hurt you. Shh, shh.”
The sheep didn’t move. Ben knelt and got his arms under the front and back legs and hoisted the animal up. He started for the ramp.
The angel had clearly doped the sheep with chloroform before picking it up. The ewe kicked out with four hooves in four different directions, flailing madly and bringing its muzzle hard up against Ben’s chin. He staggered and the ewe twisted itself around and kicked him in the stomach. Ben dropped it with a thud, and it dived into the middle of the truck, bleating hysterically.
The rest of the sheep followed. “Are you all right?” I said.
“No,” he said, testing his jaw. “What happened to ‘little lamb, so meek and mild’?”
“Blake had obviously never actually met a sheep,” I said, helping him down the ramp and over to the water trough. “What now?”
He leaned against the water trough, breathing heavily. “Eventually they have to get thirsty,” he said, gingerly touching his chin. “I say we wait ’em out.”
Miguel bopped over to us. “I haven’t got all day, you know!” he shouted over whatever was blaring in his headphones, and went back to the front of the truck.
“I’ll go call Billy Ray,” I said, and did. His cellular phone was out of range.
“Maybe if we sneak up on them with the halter,” Ben said when I got back.
We tried that. Also getting behind them and pushing, threatening Miguel, and several long spells of leaning against the water trough, breathing hard.
“Well, there’s certainly information diffusion going on,” Ben said, nursing his arm. “They’ve all decided not to get off the truck.”
Alicia came in. “I’ve got a profile of the optimum Niebnitz Grant candidate,” she said to Ben, ignoring me. “And I’ve found another Niebnitz. An industrialist. Who made his fortune in ore refining
and
founded several charities. I’m looking into their committees’ selection criteria.” She added, still to Ben, “I want you to come see the profile.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “You obviously won’t miss anything. I’ll go try Billy Ray again.”
I did. He said, “What you have to do is—” and went out of range again.
I went back out to the paddock. The sheep were out of the truck, grazing on the dry grass. “What did you do?” Ben said, coming up behind me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Miguel must have gotten tired of waiting,” but he was still up by the front of the truck, grooving to Groupthink or whatever it was he was listening to.
I looked at the sheep. They were grazing peacefully, wandering happily around the paddock as if they’d always belonged there. Even when Miguel, still wearing his headphones, revved up the truck and drove off, they didn’t panic. One of them close to the fence looked up at me with a thoughtful, intelligent gaze.
This is going to work, I thought.
The sheep stared at me for a moment longer,
dropped its head to graze, and promptly got it stuck in the fence.