The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

by Neal Stephenson

  It would have been extremely rude for me to say so, but I was in no hurry to be fed. My digestion was a mess. Our research into the fate of the late General Schneider had uncovered evidence of an epidemic that had started in the village of Nagybörzsöny at the same time as his brief stay there. It was some sort of bowel complaint that had taken a number of lives before burning itself out. The village’s isolation had prevented it from spreading farther, and the surviving locals had, of course, attributed it to witchcraft. But the lesson to us was obvious: time travelers could infect historical communities with diseases to which they had no immunity, and vice versa. So I’d been given every vaccination and antiviral drug known to modern science before stepping into the ODEC, to protect myself. And to protect the people of Muddy River, I’d taken a course of antibiotics that had killed everything in my gut, and scrubbed with disinfectant immediately before the mission. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I ate Goody Fitch’s gruel.

  I began to tie the skirt at my waist, and opened my mouth to speak, but before I could say anything she spoke again, and as she did so, also came to fuss over my skirt.

  “They’ve been mad with witch-hunt zeal because ’38 nearly killed us all,” she said. “Muddy River had just been chartered, we had all barely begun to build our homes and clear our gardens, and we were almost destroyed before we could take root. We had to plant the corn twice because it rotted in the frozen ground, then the spring was too wet, the summer too hot, and full of tempests, then it rained all autumn until October, when the snow came and never left. Many other settlements along the Charles did not survive the year. They attributed Mother Nature’s handiwork to witchcraft, and the survival of the village to the Lord’s Grace. I saved the village, but they do not know it, and they may never know it. If they even suspected, they would not thank me, they would kill me for witchcraft because they believe witchcraft is the work of the devil. Stupid folk.” She tied the drawstring sharply tight around my waist. “That was the very year they excommunicated Anne Hutchinson, one of the best among them. And then brought in a slave-ship. And they call themselves Christians. Thick-waisted you are, for your size,” she said.

  “I did not grow up wearing stays. No women of my time did.”

  She made a bemused sound, and then continued her monologue as she helped me into the waistcoat. “Stab themselves in the foot. I cannot imagine this place will ever amount to anything.”

  “Why did you come, then?” I asked.

  “I wanted to meet new witches,” she said. “I am from a family of chroniclers and sages, I have always been encouraged to learn as much as possible. I was curious to compare information with the witches here—I assumed there must be some. My husband was never a Puritan but he favored their thinking and was anxious to be gone from England for his own reasons. So we sailed to Boston. Later we took the first chance to settle away from the peninsula. I had great hopes. But the settlers are all such sanctimonious asses that none of the native witches will speak to me about witchcraft, or anything else. They fear I will try to lead them away from their own gods and beliefs, that is how relentless and irritating these Puritans are. There are so many plants here we don’t have back home, and I fain would learn them, but I find nobody who can teach me.”

  That was my in. “Like partridge-berry?” I said as casually as possible. “Or perhaps you still call it squaw-vine?”

  She stopped suddenly as she was buttoning the waistcoat, and then resumed. “How do you know about that?” she asked. “That is the very plant I am most keen to understand. It seems to me it requires magic to find out all its possibilities.”

  “And cranberries,” I added, “but maybe those are easier to understand.”

  “Cranberries are magnificent,” she agreed. “And the elderflower, which I know from its cousin in England. But the squaw-vine is something else again.”

  “It grows near pine trees,” I said. “Do you know that much as yet?” She nodded cautiously, looking at me with new interest. Thank you, Rebecca, I thought. Well done.

  “I know a lot about it,” I continued, in an offering tone. “How and when best to harvest it, what parts of the plant are most useful—I know a great deal, although not of course what can only be known through magic, since I’m not a witch. But I can help you. If you’ll help me.”

  She was tempted by this offer, I could tell, but remained uncertain. “Do you understand the danger you are putting both of us in?” she asked.

  “I also know some interesting things about skullcap,” I added. “And bee-balm.”

  She shook her head. “I know them already. They haven’t the scent of the squaw-vine. They’re just medicinal, not magic. The squaw-vine calls to me. But in a language I do not speak.”

  “We’ll fix that,” I said. “Help me with my errand, and when I return, I’ll tell you everything I know. And then you’ll send me back to where I came from.”

  A pause. “I will,” said Goody Fitch. “What are you called?”

  “Melisande,” I said. “I am unmarried.”

  “I am Goody Fitch,” she said. “My Christian name is Mary.”

  “I know,” I said, then briefly told her my errand: that I must obtain a copy of the newly published Bay Psalm Book, coop it safely into a barrel to protect it from the elements, and then bury it in a very precise spot in a field to the northwest of the palisaded village of Cambridge.

  Instead of questioning why I needed to have the book, or to bury it, she simply asked, “Why there, particularly?”

  I considered how fully to answer. “That is where a descendant of yours will eventually live,” I said. “Someone I know in my time. They need a copy of the book. If I do not . . . reserve one for them now, they will never be able to get one.”

  To my surprise, she responded to this news with an outburst of laughter. “How preposterous to imagine civilization ever flourishing in such a backwater!” she said. “And how disappointing to think my own begotten will not have the sense to get out of such a place!”

  I bristled on behalf of my adopted city. “Cambridge becomes one of the greatest places of learning in the world,” I said—rashly, for it is always ill-advised to speak of future times. “It easily rivals, arguably outshines, its British namesake.”

  “Bollocks,” she said, amused. “A terrified village with the greatest invention in the world—a printing press!—and all they do with it is publish religious nothings. The only school in the New World and what do they teach? Only religion. And only their religion.”

  “Well, in fairness,” I said, “if it weren’t for their religion, none of this would exist right now. You wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’d be in Virginia,” she agreed briskly. “Where the religion is mercantilism. It is a marginally preferable religion, although the Americans suffer more under it than they do under Christianity. Anyhow . . . we’ve finished dressing you, so let’s not tarry. Tell me directly what you need from me.”

  “Most of all, I need you to send me back to where I came from when I return here,” I said. “And if you can point me the way to Cambridge, I’d be grateful.”

  “Easily done. You’ll need toll for the ferry,” she said, and went to one of the chests against the wall. There was a small locked box sitting atop it, about the size of a breadbox; she opened this with a key that she wore around her neck on a thin leather strap. From the box, she removed two tiny spheres, one a lead musket ball, the other larger, much lighter in color and weight, and highly polished. “Each of these will suffice for the ferry toll in one direction. I would give you some commodity money, but my husband keeps track of that and he would notice the absence of a cabbage head.”

  “Have you a shovel I might borrow?”

  She thought a moment. “Yes. But ’tis a strange thing to meet a young woman roving the land by herself, stranger yet if she is brandishing a shovel. Say you are my cousin newly arrived from Shropshire and you are returning it to Goodman Porter in Watertown, you will need to take that road
anyhow. There is none in Cambridge know me enough to ask questions that would get you into trouble. I think there be a cooper there, very near the bookseller’s shop. I can give you nothing to buy his services, though, nor any way to get the book.”

  “I don’t suppose I could ask you to assist me magically?”

  “You can ask whatever you wish, but I will not risk it. I would have in England, if I felt your cause was just. Not here. Still, I wish you luck. You must be desperate in your cause if it forces you to come here. Fortify yourself with the maize-meal and then be off.”

  AS I ATE the tasteless, dry, crappy meal, which would make Cream of Wheat seem like a gourmet dessert, I reviewed what was to happen next. Which meant reviewing what had happened previously—in the distant future, I mean.

  The day after I’d accepted Tristan’s offer, just after sunrise, the whole crew had come back together at Hanscom Field, an Air Force base–cum–executive jet terminal northwest of Boston. For me, air travel had always meant Logan Airport. But it turns out that the kind of people who fly around in private jets fly through Hanscom Field—as do air travelers from the parallel universe of the military. I, Tristan, Erszebet, Oda-sensei, and even, to my amazement, Rebecca piled onto a plane that fit somewhere in the Venn diagram crossover between those two worlds, being a small eight-seater jet with military markings. Before we’d even had time to explore the plane’s comforts, we were landing at Reagan National Airport across the river from Washington, DC. En route Tristan had monopolized the plane’s washroom for a little while and changed into his Army uniform—the first time I had seen him so attired. It was the dress uniform with necktie and all kinds of little badges and insignia that might as well have been a secret code to me. He looked, if I may say it, swashbuckling, in a repressed sort of way.

  I had been assuming a government van would pick us up at the airport, but instead Tristan led us across the skybridge to the Metro station and dealt out keycards. “Faster than fighting traffic—it’s only three stops up the line!” he explained. We got on the next northbound train, passed through Crystal City a few minutes later, and shortly pulled into the Trapezoid City stop. I picked up my bag and got ready to detrain, but Tristan caught my eye and shook his head. “Trapezoid City is a shopping mall, Stokes—not the real deal. If we have time, we can go there when we’re done!”

  Erszebet was bemused by the Metro, and the Metro was fascinated by her. To date, we hadn’t been out together much in public. So I’d had few opportunities to see how random strangers reacted to her looks. Reader, I don’t think it would be boastful for me to say that I am not a bad-looking woman. I get my share of looks and compliments. But sitting near Erszebet on a subway train was enough to make me believe that invisibility potions were a real thing and that she had slipped one into my coffee.

  The next station was called simply TRAPEZOID, but I could have guessed as much from the fact that more than half the people getting on and off the train were dressed in military uniforms of one service or another. We all followed Tristan up the escalators to a bus terminal complex aboveground, and from there to a huge, modern security checkpoint—a separate facility in its own right, built far enough from the subdued limestone façade of the Trapezoid proper to provide a security buffer. We’d arrived during the morning rush, and so ended up standing in line for a few minutes—long enough for me to stare across the parking lots at the front of the famous building, and to develop a sense of this-can’t-be-happening unreality every bit as strong as anything associated with the ODEC. As the headquarters of the American military and presumed ground zero for any hostile military strike, the Trapezoid had, for me, always been more mythic than real. Like Mount Olympus or the River Styx, it was a thing alluded to in books and movies, or used in synecdoche to mean the American military as a whole. The terrorists had targeted it on 9/11, and I could see part of the memorial that had been built on the side where the plane had crashed into it. In a weird way, it was almost a letdown to see that it really existed and that it was, at the end of the day, just another wartime office building with windows and doors like any other.

  Lacking normal credentials such as a birth certificate, Erszebet had to be whisked through a special lane by aides who had come down to meet us. Tristan stayed with her. The rest of us presented our Massachusetts driver’s licenses and got scanned for concealed weapons. Erszebet’s idiosyncratic 1950s-era wardrobe left very few places where she could have hid anything. I suppose they x-rayed her clutch. A lot of walking ensued. Erszebet in her heels and Frank Oda with the weight of his years were not particularly fast walkers, so we dawdled and shuffled down endless corridors in the bowels of the Trapezoid until we came to an elevator that took us up to a nicer-than-normal office zone. “The Acute Angle,” Tristan explained, “the nice one, with the view over the river.”

  Anywhere else they’d have called it what it was: a corner office suite on the top floor. It was nice, old-school, paneled in wood, hung with pictures of battleships from the Age of Sail, Washington at Valley Forge, and the like. After passing through a couple of layers of receptionists and aides, and surrendering our electronic devices, we were ushered into a conference room, invited to take seats, and plied with ice water. Erszebet insisted on water with no ice and gave us all a piece of her mind about the American obsession with putting ice cubes into everything.

  We waited there for twenty minutes or so, which Tristan seemed to think was only mildly remarkable. Then another door—not the one we’d come through—was opened by an aide, and in walked a man in a civilian business suit. Even I, with very little taste in clothes, could tell that this was a fine suit indeed. “Dr. Rudge!” Tristan said. “Good to see you again!”

  Rudge was trailed by a couple of younger civilian aides who quietly took seats along the wall of the room and opened up their laptops as the rest of us did introductions. “Oh, please, don’t get up,” he told us in the sort of mid-Atlantic accent that I associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and midcentury newsreel announcers. “I’m so sorry to be late, we were detained in the West Wing—everything’s running late there today. Dr. Stokes! Charmed! I’ve heard so much about you and I’m looking forward to talking about the Breton language at some point if we ever have time. Old family connection—long story. And you must be Mrs. East-Oda.”

  And so on. Dr. Constantine Rudge was as immaculate in his manners and breeding as he was in his attire. In his early forties, he had the gravitas of an older man, but was styled younger, with somewhat longer hair than most men in the Trapezoid, and heavy, stylish eyeglasses that I thought of as European. His jovial confidence made me feel somehow as if I were missing something—was this guy really famous? Powerful? Important? Later I Googled him, to discover that he was classic Yale, Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright, City of London, and all that, but kept a low public profile. Rudge was the head of IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which like a lot of the intelligence world was a blend of civilian and military personnel. He’d been the boss of the late General Schneider. As Tristan had already explained, he would be an advisor—a “dotted line” on the org chart—to the newly re-founded and upgraded DODO.

  Anyway, he got off on the right foot with Erszebet by kissing her hand—incidentally giving her a chance to admire his cuff links—and greeting her in what sounded like passable Hungarian. To my astonishment they actually conducted a short exchange in that most difficult of tongues before Rudge begged off, apologized for his butchering the beautiful Magyar language, and switched to High German. Catching my eye at one point, Rudge remarked, “Dr. Stokes will have noticed an Austrian accent. I lived in Vienna for some years in my twenties, working on a dissertation about interwar banking. It took me to Budapest frequently.” And yet somehow Rudge managed to say all of this with little eye rolls and shrugs that actually made it seem self-deprecating.

  I didn’t much care, all I knew was that Erszebet clearly thought Rudge was the only person of any sophistication in the room, which meant tha
t the rest of us didn’t have to expend energy trying to keep her happy. Tristan checked his watch a couple of times, once raising his eyebrows and saying to me, “Looks like we won’t have time to go shopping after all, Stokes!”

  Finally General Frink showed up, preceded and followed by more aides, some civilians, others in uniforms of various services. He had a row of three stars on each lapel, which even I knew made him a very big deal. I wouldn’t need to Google this fellow. He was the Director of National Intelligence, reporting directly to the President. He was Rudge’s boss, and now Tristan’s. As he blew in, he was in full conversation with two members of his entourage, and scarcely seemed to notice that he had entered another room with a different set of humans in it. His crew formed a sort of football huddle around him for a minute and they held an acronym-studded conference that didn’t concern us. Then half of them speed-walked out of the room. Of those who remained, some took up seats along the wall. General Frink slammed his formidable arse down into a chair that had been pulled out for him by a junior officer. That seemed to be Tristan’s signal to sit back down—for he had exploded out of his chair when Frink had entered the room, and stood at attention waiting to be noticed.

  A civilian aide skimmed a sheet of paper onto the table directly in front of General Frink. Frink reached into the breast pocket of his uniform, which was stiff with ribbons and decorations, and drew out a pair of reading glasses, put them on, and scanned the page for a minute before finally looking up and acknowledging our presence. “Yes,” he said, “Department of Diachronic Operations.” His eyes scanned the row of faces on our side of the table, and I suppose it was a credit to his powers of discipline that he lingered only briefly on Erszebet. The civilian whispered something in his ear, and I was pretty sure I heard the sibilant word “Asset,” which was the term that the late General Schneider had used to refer to Erszebet. Frink’s eyes went back to her for a moment and he nodded. He then thought silently for a while, and heaved a sigh.