Reparations
By Merrie Haskell

We arrive.

It's a beautiful day, summery and bright. It always is. An all-clear siren sounds in the distant city. It always does.

"We have fifteen minutes from that siren," I say to the newbie. She's gawking, staring at the serene mountainscape around us. And she's not paying attention to me.

I sit down, spread out my equipment. I check the map, noting the interdicted zones. Some are interdicted because they're too dangerous, some because I've already been there. No one knows what happens if we meet ourselves on the street. No one wants to find out.

"Really. No time to waste," I say, pounding on the map with a finger.

She comes over and sits down. I point out the pickup points, the one for today, and the one for if we miss a pickup.

"How often does that happen?" she asks.

"It never has," I say. "Don't you be the first."

She clutches her bag, and keeps looking at it, into it, not paying attention to the map. I hate training newbies, with their nervousness and their questions. The smart ones have even more nerves and more questions. And this one's name makes me suspicious: Josephine Smart. Dr. Smart.

I can't wait.

I fold up the map, and while I prepare the cocktails, she picks through her bag, fingering the gauze, the bandages, the iodine, the pills. "How?" she asks. "How is this enough?"

"It's not," I say, quite the gruff and grizzled veteran.

"Then why do it, if it's not enough?"

"It's not enough, but it's what we do, what we have to do."

There's a breathy sob of air from nowhere as the others all drop in together. I frown at them.

"Late," I say.

They aren't pleased either. They all need time to prepare, too. Ken tells me: "They're training a new tech. But she did good, don't you think? Four of us at once. Just a little late."

I just swab my arm and administer the cocktail, a booster for my radiation immunization. The taste of brass fills my mouth in seconds, and I know that the cocktail has flooded my system. With this stuff burbling inside, I can stare down three sieverts without blinking, or, more importantly, losing my immune system, teeth, hair, and intestines.

When I finish with my dose, I grab the skin on the newbie's arm, swab her and shoot her up, too. "Ow!" She jumps and rubs her arm. I watch carefully to see her smack her lips at the taste. "You could've warned me."

"No time," I say, doctoring Ken and the others just as abruptly. We're pressed, and they know it.

We're all nice and anodized on the inside at 8:12. We're waiting for 8:16, or thereabouts. There aren't any atomic clocks in 1945, so all times are approximate, internally speaking. And from here on in, there's no point speaking any other way.

I look around, at the summer sun, the lovely mountainside. Today, I can see the planes, all three of them, high up. I don't say anything, but Ken points them out to the newbie. She looks scared again. I silently curse him.

Our arrival point today is behind a nice thick berm, a gentle hillock right in the center of God's green. The nervous ones hunker early. I put on my glasses, and the world dims to a starless night. I take one last breath of the pure, clean air, and hunker down with the others, wrapping myself in my habit.

The world fills with light; it would be bright yellow-white, but for the glasses. Heat creeps up the berm and trundles down the other side, touching us all, but it's not bad; we're always more than four and a half klicks away, covered and protected by our clothes, which are armored against the effect. The explosion comes, and that's when I realize: I forgot my earplugs. I can hear the newbie moaning. I clap my hands over my ears, and curl up on myself.

Then it's over.

We stand up, clutch our shiny black doctor bags, and head down the mountainside, toward the city. The group disperses at the first crossroads, and I'm alone with the newbie again.

The day has already forgotten summer. The storm is coming. Every damn day, I'm amazed by how fast it happens, how the sun is shining, and then it's not.

"They made a desolation and called it peace," the newbie--Dr. Smart--says. "Now I understand."

"That's Tacitus, talking about Rome."

"Oh." She frowns, shaking her head. "Rome's desolations were nothing compared to this."

"Tell that to the Ordovices," I say.

"Who?"

Not that smart. I'm smug.

In the distance, over the city, clouds of smoke are rising, and if we were closer, we could probably hear the lesser explosions. Smugness fades quickly.

And then the tide comes in. We pass a procession of refugees. The first ones are dazed, horrified, in shock. A few have wounds, some shrapnel, some burns, and these we stop, to offer them medical attention in our micro-chipped Japanese. Fluency is not a requirement for this job, not with language technology as advanced as it is.

About three klicks from the town, we see the first burning buildings. We commandeer a school that has not burned or fallen, and set up a first aid station. This is as far as we'll go today, since it's the newbie's first time. I usually go much deeper; this is a holiday by comparison.

"Where are we going to put everyone when the school fills up?" she asks. She's already cut through the next few hours in her mind, and come to the inevitable.

I nod to the fields around us.

"Outside?" she says, aghast. "Can't we commandeer another building?"

"Where are you going to find another building?"

She looks at the patients, then out across the valley towards the burning city. There are tears in her eyes. Predictable.

"It's terrible," she says.

"Of course it is," I say, cranky with her tears. "Stop crying. Sentimentality is dangerous. We're just here to make reparations."

She makes a convulsive, helpless gesture with her whole body. "Reparations. Six doctors, a hundred years late."

"Money wasn't wanted. Money for the descendents doesn't help anyone here and now. And we aren't late. We can never be late again. The miracle of modern time travel."

She's quiet for a moment, thinking about what I've said and calculating the bodies and mats and space left in the school. "You're right. We'll have to put them in the field," she says.

The wounds get worse, the supplies run low. By ten, we're out of bandages, though we get a very temporary reprieve from a neighboring farmer who offers us all his family's clothing for makeshift bandages. By two, we're out of room in the field. The people stream past on the road, and all we can offer are pills and wound-cleaning now. Every day I try to carry more bandages with me, but there's no point. I always run out.

During all of this, rumors fly. Except they aren't rumors. "The entire city is destroyed!" Of course it is. It always is. Dr. Smart tries to talk to them, and I don't stop her. She thinks they will be better off with confirmation. They doubt her when she tells them, though. "How do you know?"

She buttons up, but it's too late. They are suspicious. It's only a matter of time, though; this question always comes. "Are you American?" someone asks, horrified by the prospect.

"No," I say, not too quickly. It's a practiced lie. "We are Irish nuns."

Mollification is immediate, complete. There is a mission near here, and our cover satisfies everyone. It doesn't occur to anyone to ask more. They have more important things to think about, and our style of dress is perfect, our doctoring bags and manners unremarkable.

#

Time always passes quickly in the past, or so it seems; I'm no expert about it. I just know this one day in August a hundred years ago.

There's a very brief lull, and we scarf down sandwiches. Dr. Smart says, "Tomorrow, let's bring more bandages." I just nod.

"Everyone. Everyone in America should have to do this, at least once," she says.

I shake my head. It won't work, and she knows it. "A conscript army would never be able to do this. Nope, volunteers only, and dedicated ones at that. Can you imagine all the training you went through, for just one trip?"

"There are people like that, though, aren't there? People who can't make it."

"A few," I say. We've got an eighty percent attrition rate. We don't mention that to people until we find out they can't hack it. Don't want to set them up for failure.

"I don't know how they bear it," she says.

"The drop-outs?"

"No. The victims.

"Shock is anesthesia."

"But we don't get the shock. How do we bear it?"

"We know it will end."

"Do we?" she asks, pleading and meditative at the same time. I decide then that she's ok for the work. She'll decide it, too, before the day is out.

She doesn't say anything else during our break. This is the worst day of her life. For me, it's merely one of the worst forty.

"Don't get too caught up in it," I warn her. "You have to make it to the pickup site on time. Always remember that."

"But there's the alternate pickup," she says.

"Yeah. You want to spend two days here, waiting for it?"

She shivers.

"That's what I'm saying. Don't get caught up."

"I won't," she says soberly.

"Don't worry. No one has ever had to use it."

The afternoon winds down, and Ken trudges up the hill with the stream of refugees. He's exhausted, and he's destroyed half his clothing to make bandages. He has left his doctoring bag behind. I've done that before. We all have.

"Are you ready?" he asks, and Dr. Smart is looking at him out of the corners of her eyes. I know why. He doesn't look like the same Ken that left this morning. We have a week off in between runs, and it helps; Ken looked much more human this morning. Now he's a Halloween fright.

But he's not badly off, not in this context, just tired and sooty.

"Not just yet," Dr. Smart says. I let her work a little longer. We don't have far to go.

Ken says, "I wouldn't be late. With that new tech running things, she probably won't remember to count the bodies."

Dr. Smart winces at his phrasing, but I'm sure she knows what Ken means. The first window into the past reveals enough so that the tech can count the number of people standing at the site; if the number is wrong, the tech is supposed to wait before opening the second window. Not indefinitely, of course, but a little while.

Ken asks, "How are you doing, Dr. Smart?"

"Well," she says, finishing with her patient and standing back, her hands on her hips, "I've been better."

She'll be back. She just doesn't know it yet. I give Ken the nod, and open my bag to count my pills.

"How many left?" Ken asks, pulling a small notebook from his pocket.

"Forty-three doses." He writes it down.

"Do you need to know how many I have?" Dr. Smart asks.

"Yes."

"Seventy-four. Why?"

"So CTA can revise the morbidity and mortality accordingly."

"Central Time Authority," Dr. Smart says slowly. It takes a while to grow accustomed to the acronyms.

"Yep," Ken says.

"What is--" but she doesn't finish the question. She's looking past us, at the road, at the continuing stream of refugees.

There's another clump of nasty wounds coming just now; they're all very hurt, the grievously wounded borne along by the less wounded, dying mothers carrying dying children.

But that doesn't account for the shock I see on Dr. Smart's face, and then Ken's. And then I'm shocked, too.

I am shocked when I see a white woman with most of her hair burnt off, wearing the tattered remains of a nun's habit. She's leading a child, and the child leads an old man, and all three of them are bandaged.

I am shocked because I recognize the nun with no hair. She is me. And she sees me. We stare at each other. Her look is pleading, and a bloody gash down her cheek looks like the track of tears.

We're never supposed to meet. We know that. And I can't even tell how long it will be before I'm the one with the gashed cheek and the macabre game of follow-the-leader.

She is wounded. Wounded bad, and barely walking. I hurry over to her, stop just short of touching her. Ken hurries past me, and Dr. Smart does too. Together they check her eyes and pulse, an efficient team.

There's a murmur from the few people aware and awake enough to wonder why there are now two identical nuns. Most people are still too stunned to care. My companions are not.

"What's going on?" Ken asks.

She only has eyes for me.

"You must know why I'm here," she says.

I nod.

"Take Dr. Smart on ahead," I tell Ken.

"No. We're going to figure this out, first."

"Go on."

"No," he says evenly.

Dr. Smart says, "You told me not to get caught up."

I look at her. "I was wrong." I take a step closer to myself.

"Laura!" Ken cries, agonized. We both look at him, and for a dizzy moment, I don't know which set of eyes I'm looking through.

"We don't have time," Ken says.

"You told me to avoid dangerous sentimentality," Dr. Smart adds.

"I was wrong," I say again. I turn my back on them. They're right. We don't have time.

Dr. Smart surprises me. "Let's go." She tugs hard on Ken's sleeve. She passes me with a grim smile, and hands me the rest of her pills. She trudges up the mountain trail, Ken in tow.

I turn to the woman, my future self.

"You missed your pickup, and you're too hurt to wait two days," I tell her.

"Yes." But she doesn't say anything else. She's waiting. For what? For sanction?

"You already know, don't you?" I say. "You know I'll give you my pickup."

"I know what I did," she says, "But maybe you won't do the same. It's a rough two days."

"What happened?"

Her mouth says, "I'm not going to tell you. It's a choice you've got to make, then and now," but her eyes look back at the man and the child.

I take up my bag. "Go. Tell Ken--." But I can't think of anything to tell Ken.

"I'll tell him," she says. "I'll tell him that you shouldn't have bet on him using the pickup first." She heads up the hill towards the crossroads, still leading the old man and child. She doesn't look back.

She might be lying. She might be able to make it two days; the old man and the kid look much worse off than she does. She can survive, but they probably won't.

I realize, then. She's doing it for them, not for herself. I run up the hill after her. "Wait!"

She stops and turns around, every movement reluctant. Her eyes are scared, but brave.

"What's going on?" I ask. "Are you taking them through? That's forbidden, you know."

"Letting me go in your stead is forbidden, too."

"That's not a dangerous sentimentality," I say, recalling my words to Dr. Smart. "It's necessary. We have to survive."

"Here's your dangerous sentimentality." She tugs on the child's hand, pulling him forward, towards me. His eyes are aware; absent is the blessed anesthesia of shock. Those dark, old eyes, they tell me everything. I know I will never rest again until I save this child.

In that moment, the dam of tears I've held for forty days breaks, and I know what choice I'll make, both then and now.

"You have your reasons," I tell her, and wipe my eyes.

"I do. And you've always trusted yourself."

That's true. I let her go.

I begin by scavenging bandages from my wimple. Two days is a long time here, but I'm not going to waste them feeling sorry for myself.

A woman that Dr. Smart helped a few hours ago comes over to me, watching me destroy the wimple. "Where did your sister go?" she asks, and holds out a small length of cloth to me.

"To get more bandages," I say, thinking she means Dr. Smart. I take her cloth with a small bow.

"No, your twin. She was very badly hurt."

"She knows of some people who can help her."

"I'm glad," says the woman. "She helped my uncle this morning. When I got here I thought it was you, but they tell me you've been here all day."

"I have been," I say, rolling the last piece of my veil neatly and stowing it in my bag. "But I'm going down into the city now."

She looks at me, her eyes calm and sorrowful. I wonder which version of me helped her uncle. I wonder why my other self didn't seek out some other pickup point. It comes to me: the new tech, the one Ken thinks will forget to do the body count.

The woman bows and wanders away. I close my bag, and spare only a brief glance up the mountain to where the others went.

I turn my steps towards the burning city and the coming night.

The End

Story copyright Merrie Haskell, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com