The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel Read online

  For Tristan’s fifth appearance, things were different. This time, he reported to me that his acolyte, a woman named Melisande (not a witch), has been to the nearer future to check the outcome of his labors, but those efforts have been futile. So he asked if rather than repeating our circuit of Whitehall and the Bell Tavern, we might discourse of other ways to effect the necessary change.

  This I knew to be my opportunity to start to work him round my finger. “I might be able to help you,” says I, “if you give me more information than you have been.”

  “Fair enough,” he says—as if being fair were what mattered. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why are you needing this Boston Council scheme to fail? What gain you by that?”

  “In my reality as it now stands, the Council builds something in the New World that we don’t want there. A factory. But it’s in the way of where a house should be, a house that had been there when we began our efforts. We need the house to still be there, meaning we need the factory to never have been built.”

  “Righto, but why were you meddling there to start with? Surely in your future world full of handsome creatures such as yourself, there is little enough you could gain by going to visit some house in the wilderness? What was there for you?”

  He grimaced, for he wasn’t in the humour to go into it, but eventually didn’t I coax from him his story, that being: he and brethren were attempting to make a small fortune for themselves by secreting away an item—a printed book—that was easy enough to get in 1640 but near impossible to get in Tristan’s age, making it of great worth.

  “So you’re thieves and chancers,” said I approvingly.

  “No,” he objected. “It is a strategy. The money is not to save us from having to labor for a living, it is what we need to be able to labor for a living.”

  “Seems peculiar,” I said. “You’re saying once you’ve the money in hand—enough to live on for the rest of your days, in leisure and doing whatever you like—instead of doing that, you’d be using the money for something that requires you to toil more than you’d have to without the money. Be you daft?”

  “The labor we want to do is important work. It means far more to us to do that work than to simply live a life of leisure.”

  I laughed at him. “So it’s Protestant you be!” I said. “Or farmers. Sure none else would make that choice.”

  “Would you not?” he asked. “Is there nothing in the world that means so much to you that if you were given treasure, you would use it not for yourself but to support and protect the thing you love?”

  And then didn’t I shut my mouth and nod, for I understood him.

  “That is why we need the money,” he said. “That we can do our work.”

  “And what be your work?” I asked of course, and of course he answered, “Classified.”

  I shrugged then. “I can’t help you figure out how to accomplish something if you won’t be telling me what you’re trying to accomplish,” I said.

  “All that matters is for the factory to disappear so that we still have a place to hide the book.”

  “So you say. But I need to know the nature of your work, so I know if it’s something I want to be abetting. What if it’s against the interests of Ireland, for all you say we prosper over there in your New World?”

  “It’s got nothing at all to do with Ireland,” he insisted.

  “Then tell me what it’s got to do with. From where I sit, the only thing you’ve got to offer me—besides telling Sir Edward to spend his whoring largesse with me and my sisters—is that you’ve knowledge I have not. That’s the cost of my assisting you: knowledge. Start with something simple. Such as what it is you’re doing. In the bigger sense, I mean.”

  He grimaced. Sat for a bit, he did, as if chewing over the diet of truth in his mind. Then he finally presented this bit of business to me: “In the future—long after you are dead, but long before I am born—magic is completely done away with.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said.

  “I gain nothing by dishonesty,” he said. “I have nothing to offer you but truth.”

  “What destroys it? Is it the Inquisition? Those idiot priests go chasing after innocent women, as if real witches would let themselves be caught and tortured and killed! Almost by definition, anyone who is caught and tortured, and doesn’t free themselves by magic, has no magic powers. It’s simple reason. Is it the Inquisition? How do they ever manage it, thick as they are?”

  He shook his head. “How magic disappears is a separate conversation for another time. What matters is that my fellows and I are trying to bring it back. But to bring it back requires many things, ingredients and props and general expenses that I cannot easily explain. There is only one witch left in my time.”

  “What, in the whole world?” I exclaimed in amazement.

  “To the best of our knowledge. She is very old, and when she was young and learning magic, magic was almost gone. So we are at a disadvantage in my time. We are trying to learn more, that we may bring that knowledge into the future and make sure magic is restored.”

  Now it was my turn to sit a moment grimacing. “As hard as it is to believe this story,” I said, “I believe you are sincere in telling it. Speaking on behalf of my sisters I thank you for the work you’re doing.”

  “Will you aid me to do that work?”

  “As much as I can,” I said, “although many’s the questions I still have about this, more now than before you told me anything at all.”

  “I realize it’s a lot to hear all at once,” said Tristan Lyons. “I hope that you will help me. In this endeavor, and perhaps others.”

  “For the sake of my sisters though I never meet them, I give you my hand and my heart. But we begin with this one task, aye?”

  “Aye,” he said. “Once we have accomplished this, I will know better how to proceed in general. And I’ll have more to tell you.”

  “Is right you will. Well then. We must consider other means through which Sir Edward would not fund this Boston Council.”

  “Perhaps he squandered his inheritance,” suggested Tristan. “Can you cause that to have happened?”

  I shook my head. “That would be the act of a man of a different character altogether, and so ’twould require too many other changes. It needs must be a simple thing, one specific event. Perhaps he was never born, or died in childhood.”

  “That’s a bit extreme,” said Tristan, who I wouldn’t have taken for the sentimental type. “Plus he has offspring down the line who are important enough to look up in the encyclopedia.”

  “In the what?”

  “He has important descendants who are not born yet. We cannot change the future that much; we must keep him alive.” He thought a moment. “He could put his money into the Boston Council but the ships could all be lost at sea.”

  “We do not exactly do weather magic,” I said, “save in fairy tales. It does not really work that way. ’Tis more specific than just raising a storm to blow a ship off course. More scientific it is, if you understand that concept.”

  “I’m familiar with it,” he said.

  “But let me look into it,” I offered, and from behind the chest I pulled out my áireamhán and held it out before me, to meditate upon it.

  “You’re going to look into it with a broom?” asked Tristan.

  “It’s not a broom,” I said, although I realized I did not know the word in English as I’ve never the cause to utter it. His confusion was understandable. To him it would look like a bundle of branching twigs, bound fast in such-same manner as a sweep-broom. And indeed haven’t I heard tell of witches who sweep the floor with their áireamhán as a way to allay the suspicions of priests and busybodies?

  “It’s a . . . measuring-counter-helper,” I explained. “It’s a strange look you have on your face there, Tristan Lyons. Why would that be?”

  “What do you use it for exactly?” he asked, in a tone and with just the expression of an excited chi
ld first getting to touch a salamander. Wanted to snatch it from me, I think he did, but he restrained himself.

  “It helps me to reckon the odds and the complications of all these undertakings. Without it, I could never have Wended my way to this Strand to assist you. You cannot play such games as you be playing without risk of very serious consequences; this assists me in knowing how those might come out.”

  Carefully controlling his breathing, he was. “Do you know what a quipu is?” he demanded. I shook my head. “How about a számológép?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We have—our witch has—something like that broom of yours, but made of different material. Flexible rather than stiff. But with the same branching, many-stranded structure. She employs it the way you have just now described employing yours. To calculate the possible consequences of her magic. How does it work?”

  “What an idiot question,” I said. “How does writing work? Can you tell me how it is I scratch thrice-ten marks on a piece of vellum and you can look at it and learn every piece of knowledge in the world?”

  “Actually, in my time, we can explain how that happens,” said Tristan.

  “Well then, you tell me how my áireamhán works,” I suggested. “Because I’ve not the faintest idea, I just know it does.”

  So that’s the sort of talk we were having on that Strand, Your Majesty. I did some readings on the áireamhán and from them we concluded that there was no wisdom in trying to sink the ship that takes Sir Edward’s silver across, as the first mate eventually has some offspring who has some other offspring ad nauseam, and one of them eventually writes a book about a fish, that Tristan says is important. And we determined likewise that there be lomadh danger in trying to destroy the factory, as likely the local American tribe would be blamed for it by the Puritans in the nearby village, who would then attack the American tribe, who would then burn down the whole village, and that imperils a school to be built whose existence must not be blotted out. All in all, it seemed to me, his likeliest course of action was for him to stay the course, try two or three more times to sway Sir Edward, and then go back to check again.

  So, not to be putting too much emphasis upon it, we went as ever to the Bell Tavern, and he chatted up Sir Edward and the German, and back we came to the brewery (I do so love that swordfight, and on certain Strands, Tristan is a marvel! Although in fairness, he now knows Herbert’s style very well; poor Herbert has no idea what he is getting into, and moreover seems increasingly distracted by the queer feeling that this has all happened to him before.). Then I Sent him direct to 1640 in America, for the economy of time, by checking for himself if the change had been made. I don’t know if he’ll Home to his own time or back to me, but in either case, it’s here he’ll return on some other Strand, and I shall keep working on him to learn something. His talk of the loss of magic is distressing to me, although it will happen long enough from now that it shall have no bearing on Your Grace’s plans.

  Little to report in other news as I just wrote you so recently. At the Globe they brought back Will’s comedy As You Like It, which I went to see, although it irks me to see him nicking Your Grace’s own story, for Rosalind is a thinly disguised Grace O’Malley (as they call you here) and doesn’t all of London know it? A grand enough play it is, but only one line of true beauty in it: “Whoever loved who loved not at first sight?” And isn’t that a line he stole from Kit Marlowe and furthermore didn’t Kit write that line about meeting me! My poor dead Kit. That poxy arse Will Shakespeare. He’s even the effrontery to speak obliquely of my sweetheart’s demise, for when Will Kempe as the fool Touchstone refers to “a great reckoning in a little room,” don’t we all know he means Kit being murdered in that pub brawl?

  Having finished my message to you, I’m off to dispel my melancholy with my paramour. If I told you who ’twas, you would not believe me, is how discreet I’m being.

  Whether I be near or far, may I hear only good things of you, My Lady Gráinne! Yours ever, Gráinne in London

  Journal Entry of

  Rebecca East-Oda

  AUGUST 1

  Temperature 90F, extremely muggy. Barometer falling, hopefully rain to come.

  Container garden on front steps: kale harvestable but bitter due to the heat, new generation of lettuce coming in fine. Onions will be ready soon, to my surprise. The rest of it makes do on its own. Have put in an irrigation system as I am growing forgetful of the water rotations. Almost a relief not to have an entire vegetable garden to weed and oversee. How did I ever have the time and energy? I would even forget to feed the cats if they did not remind me.

  Frank continues to crunch numbers and create formulas to further understand the quipu, querying Erszebet about her object and then examining the “witch’s mop” as we call the artifact from the attic chest. Tristan agrees this is a priority. He has determined to save time by traveling directly between 1601 to 1640 if possible, now that we have “Known Compliant Witches” (inevitably “KCWs”) in both of those DTAPs, but it seems foolish to do this without calculating the risks, and Erszebet—although willing to do it—has warned that she can only calculate so fast. In the meanwhile, he has decided to travel from 1601 London to 1640 Cambridge but then return here—so far, without success. The maple syrup boiler remains. At least the yard is no longer getting dug up once a day.

  The other item of note is the addition to our team of a new man. Frink, the fellow with the lapels and the desk in Washington, has sent us his protégé because, he tells us, based on Tristan’s progress reports, we need to “boost our morale,” “take the bull by the horns,” and generally make ourselves more of an historical nuisance than Erszebet feels is a good idea. His name is Lester Holgate (“Call me Les”), and by a strange coincidence—is it a coincidence?—he is the nephew of one Roger Blevins, who was the chair of Melisande’s department at Harvard.

  Rather than attempt to describe Les and his effect on the team, I attach a “hard copy” of a PowerPoint presentation that he accidentally emailed to me.

  SLIDE 1: —CLASSIFIED—

  INTERIM SITREP

  OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

  From: LESTER (“LES”) HOLGATE

  (currently embedded DODO Site Prime—Cambridge, MA)

  To: FRINK—EYES ONLY

  SLIDE 2: DODO PROGRESS TO DATE

  • Key personnel recruited and papered

  • Prof. Blevins

  • Lieutenant Colonel Lyons

  • Dr. Stokes

  • Auxiliary personnel

  • Dr. Oda

  • Rebecca East-Oda

  • The Asset

  • “Elizabeth Karpathy” (real name, DOB unknown—FOREIGN NATIONAL)

  • The Asset’s personal computational device, “Smallogep” (spelling?)

  • Functioning ODEC

  • Magic

  • Diachronic Transport confirmed—multiple insertions/recoveries of 2 DOers (Stokes and Lyons) to 2 DTAPs (Cambridge, MA, 1640; London 1601)

  SLIDE 3: CHALLENGES/ISSUES

  • General Schneider confirmed KIA—possible fratricide incident?

  • Failure to achieve cash flow positivity on sustainable timetable

  • Bay Psalter gambit stalled

  • Requirement for multiple, redundant re-execution of same DEDE in different so-called “Strands” entails massive duplication of effort and prolonged delays

  • Unanticipated requirement to go farther back in time to complete secondary DEDE suggests possible recursive “forking” of tasks/spends

  • No end in sight

  • Unauthorized involvement of irregular/unpapered personnel

  • ? Unprofessional conduct between Stokes and Lyons ?

  • Insubordinate/undisciplined witch—murders colleagues, not on board with mission objectives, declines to disclose functionality of Smallogep

  • Ad hoc/improvised mission plan

  • Lyons: excessive personal investment in current roster & gam
e plan—not enough professional detachment

  SLIDE 4: GOALS OF OPERATION “BOLSTER GAINS”

  • Overriding goal: secure the future of DODO by aggressively monetizing its unique skill set without further delay

  • Strategy: stir the pot/incentivize current roster (the Lyons-led “Blue Team”) via insertion of competitive “Red Team”

  • Provisional “Red Team” leader: Lester (“Les”) Holgate

  • Insert Red Team Leader @ DODO Site Prime ← ACHIEVED

  • Observe/evaluate/report on performance dynamics of existing “Blue Team” ← ACHIEVED

  • Challenge Blue Team to raise expectations/boost performance ← ACHIEVED

  • Spearhead innovative operational modalities

  • Possibly submit Asset’s Smallogep to DC labs for analysis

  • Take executive action with prejudice to get current DEDE back on track

  • Cauterize Blue Team, replace with new personnel if indicated

  SLIDE 5: LESTER (“LES”) HOLGATE

  BACKGROUND/QUALIFICATIONS

  • Education

  • North Pointe Preparatory Academy, Marblehead, MA

  • Captain, chess team

  • Valedictorian

  • Letter (6”) in lacrosse

  • Dartmouth College

  • Magna cum laude