Questionable Practices by Eileen Gunn

Author:Eileen Gunn [Gunn, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Collections & Anthologies, General, Short Stories (Single Author), Science Fiction, satire, Literary, Fantasy, short stories, funny, humor, sci-fi, steampunk, Publishers Weekly, wit, starred review, World Fantasy Award, Michael Swanwick, witty, Philip K. Dick Award, Nebula Award, Rudy Rucker
ISBN: 9781618730756
Google: L4uRmgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1618730754
Barnesnoble: 1618730754
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Wessex, 1440 C.E.

The weekly market looked like a rural food co-op run by the Society for Creative Anachronism. People wearing homespun clothing in dull tones of brown and green and blue walked around with baskets, buying vegetables from similarly clad peasants who sat on the ground. In one area, a tinker was mending pots; in another, a shoemaker was stitching clunky but serviceable clogs.

The smell was a little strong — body odors, horse manure, wet hay, rotting vegetation, cooking cabbage — but Ralph felt right at home. He’d devised himself a costume that he thought would look nondescript in any time period, and carried a pocketful of Roosevelt dimes, figuring silver was silver, and Roosevelt did look a little like Julius Caesar.

He looked around nervously, but no one had noticed him materialize, even though he was right in the middle of the crowd. It was as if he’d been there all along, he thought. Ralph was unaware of the most basic tenet of time travel, as we understand it now: that the traveler’s arrival in a timestream changes both the future and the past, because his timeshadow extends for the length of his life. His present is his own, but his past in this timestream belongs to another self, with whom he is now entangled.

Ralph, our Ralph, was hungry, despite the unappetizing stink. There was a woman selling pasties from a pot, and another selling soup that was boiling on a fire. Neither of the women looked very clean, and each of them was coughing a lot and spitting out phlegm on the ground. Ralph decided that the soup was probably the safer choice, until he noticed how it was served: ladled into a bowl that each customer drank from in turn. Next time, he’d remember to bring his own cup.

He noticed a man grilling meat on wooden skewers. Just the thing. There was a small crowd around the charcoal-filled trough: a couple of rough-looking men, an old woman, some younger women with truculent expressions on their faces, and a handful of children. A quartet of buskers was singing a motet in mournful medieval harmony. A girl-child of about twelve watched him solemnly and with interest as he approached. Ralph hoped he hadn’t made some dreadfully obvious mistake in his clothing, so that he looked a foreigner, but no one else seemed to be paying any attention to him.

As he waited his turn, the child’s unblinking stare made him nervous. He was afraid to meet her eyes, and gazed earnestly at his feet, at the ash-dusted charcoal blocks, at the meat. He quickly made his way to the vendor and handed him a dime. The man gazed at it in disbelief, and then looked at Ralph with a canny mixture of greed and suspicion.

“Geunne me unmælice unmæta begas, hæenan hund!”

It was a salad of vowels, fricatives, and glottal stops. But Ralph had realized it would be hard to get a handle on the local dialect, and figured he could get by on charm and sympathy until he worked it out.

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