Chapter 27 #4
We waited a few minutes, and the doctor came in.
She wore a classically styled white doctor’s coat, but there was no stethoscope around her neck.
She exchanged words with Anjari and came over to me.
She peered at my right hand and tapped something on the gel.
It split apart and fell into her hands. She set it on the table behind her and motioned for me to make fists with my fingers.
My fingers were stiff, a fact I communicated through Anjari, but the doctor nodded and smiled and told Anjari it was to be expected for such a severe burn.
The soft tissue was healing well, she said, and the nerve regrowth process had worked as expected.
The stiffness would decrease over the next day or so.
The doctor prodded my ribs and back and came away satisfied. She asked if I was in any pain, and when I shook my head, she said a few things to Anjari, patted my shoulder, and left.
“Are you still willing to meet the others?” Anjari asked.
I hesitated.
“Only a few hours,” she said.
“Okay.”
She flew us to another building on campus.
We could have walked, but Anjari said she wanted the car nearby for later.
We parked on the roof of a large, hexagonal structure next to an open lawn.
Students walked back and forth across the grass, most wearing variations on the sleeved toga. None had backpacks or carried books.
Anjari led me down a series of windowed stairways and into the hexagonal building interior. We came to what looked like a pair of ballroom doors. Anjari stopped outside them. “Are you sure you are willing to do this?”
“Not really. But it will help, right? It’s a good thing to do.”
“It is a good thing to do, but not something you must do.”
“It’s okay. Let’s do it.”
It was as I expected. I stood with Anjari at my side and people streamed up to me, gathering in a semicircle to ask questions. Anjari translated for those who needed translating, although several spoke my twenty-first-century American version of English—“Norte”—as well as or better than Anjari.
They asked about the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
They asked about the times I’d seen between then and now, about the Legion war and about the Machine War, which they all referred to as the Autonomous War, as though humans had nothing to do with it.
And, of course, they asked me about the Word, and about what it was like to travel through time.
I told them what I could, describing it as best as I was able.
They listened and nodded and murmured at different points, as though my words were a revelation.
Anjari took notes on her tablet and interjected with her own questions at times, sometimes to clarify for the speaker and other times, I suspected, for her own research.
A few times questioners frowned at my responses, and one stormed away when I answered an innocuous-sounding question about professional sports in the United States in the early twenty-first century.
I gathered from the question that sports historians believed the NFL to be rather more blood soaked and gladiatorial than it was.
They were quiet whenever I talked about time travel, but they appeared to accept it as true, almost as a matter of course.
I was still the only known person to travel through time, and they assured me they had no idea as to the mechanism by which I was being transported.
There were many competing theories. One woman, I assumed to be a historian of science or a physicist, asked many questions about my experience and listened as Anjari translated my answers.
She was particularly interested to learn Lyle had temporarily disrupted a transit, but when I pressed her for more, she said she didn’t have any idea how he had done it, much less how to reproduce it.
I sensed my experience was so well-known now, such a part of the collective culture thanks to the Word, that it wasn’t alien to them. I was the Traveler. One more piece of history. None seemed overwhelmed to be talking with me.
It began to blur together. Someone brought water and trays of flat, dry crackers with various cheeses.
I ate and kept up a steady stream of answers as more and more people came by.
Each would wait, patiently, listening to the person before them, then step up to ask their question or questions, listen to my answers, and move off, forming little groups that chattered and argued.
The volume level of the large ballroom rose.
The noise and the constant need to pay attention triggered a pulsing throb in my temples.
As the afternoon passed, the pain moved behind my eyes and became stabbing.
I wondered, distantly, if time travel was making my headaches worse.
I’d long had them, mostly induced by poor posture sitting at the computer.
But the ones I was getting even when I wasn’t about to jump through time felt more painful than I remembered.
Anjari scanned my face and called everything to a halt. “I will take you away now. Is that acceptable?”
“Absolutely.”
A few people tried to ask more questions, but they were restrained and well-mannered about allowing us to leave. We left perhaps two hundred academics standing in clusters around the big room, talking and waving their hands.
“You have made their year,” Anjari said as she guided me down the hallway, back toward the aircar. “Maybe some careers, in fact. The ultimate primary source.”
“Glad I could help.”
She peered at me. “I have a mild analgesic in the car.”
“Am I that easy to read?”
“A little, yes.”
“Thanks. I’ll take you up on it.”
“Come, Scott Treder. We will have dinner.”