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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Give me a moment,” he called back out, in a hazy voice. “Actually give me five moments.”

  “Look at you, smiling like a girl,” said Erszebet, grudgingly amused. “It is disappointing to me you don’t raise your standards.”

  “Don’t you want to know how it went?” I demanded.

  She shrugged her trademark disdainful shrug. “It does not matter how it went, it is only the first time, he will have to go back and do it again. It will be days before there is anything interesting to hear about.”

  “I’m calling Oda-sensei,” I said, feeling uncharacteristically peevish toward her. Quite suddenly I had a lot of energy and no clear sense of how to channel it. I sent them a text; Rebecca answered and said that they would, naturally, come at once.

  We all convened in an office near the ODEC that we had converted into a briefing and debriefing room. It was equipped with gear for recording audio and video, though we had not yet got in the habit of using it. Tristan smelled of the disinfectant shower he’d just stepped out of. He’d changed back into his jeans and T-shirt and thrown his damp towel around his neck like a shawl. He looked fine, although he was slightly distracted as his tongue worked the small gap in his back teeth due to the missing fillings. I’d handed those back to him upon his return. They now sat before him on the table, giving him something to fidget with. He looked like he could use a beer, and so I got him one.

  “I have good news and bad news,” he began, after whetting his whistle with a swallow of Old Tearsheet. “The good news—the most important news—is that I believe Sir Edward will change his mind about his investment. I believe he will opt for the East India Company over the Boston Council.”

  “On one Strand,” said Erszebet.

  “Yes,” said Tristan. “I realize I need to do it a few more times, although it might be worth Mel’s time to go back to 1640 Cambridge just to see if there’s a difference.”

  “There won’t be,” said Erszebet. “It does not work that way, you’ve already witnessed that. Why would you subject her to that unpleasant effort?”

  “I think it’s worth checking,” Tristan repeated. “To see how much can be accomplished in a single go.”

  There was a loaded pause and then Erszebet said flatly, “Well then, you’ll have to Send her yourself. I will not do it.”

  “You are refusing an order?”

  “I reject the notion you can give me orders,” said Erszebet. “I am simply refusing to do something foolish.”

  “Erszebet,” said Frank Oda, ever the conciliatory force. “You signed papers agreeing to cooperate, do you remember that, in Washington?”

  “I will cooperate,” said Erszebet. “When it is in the interest of the mission. This is just in the interest of Tristan Lyons throwing his weight around, and I did not sign anything saying I would do that.”

  “He’s your superior officer,” I tried tentatively, realizing it was a mistake even as the words came out of my mouth, for she burst out laughing and said, “Him? He’s not my superior anything.” She sobered. “I will Send Tristan back to London in September of 1601, to the Tearsheet Brewery. I will do that as many times as it takes, my guess is four times at least, and only then will we send Melisande back to Cambridge to see if it has worked yet.”

  Tristan took a moment to look silently long-suffering, although in truth I think he did this just to humor her desire to discomfit him. “Fine,” he said at last. “That brings me to the lessons learned. I had an opportunity to test my weapons skills, and I’m a little shell-shocked by how poorly prepared I was. Oh, grappling and knife disarms work as well in that age as today. Swordfighting is a different matter altogether.” He delivered this news in his usual clipped and businesslike Tristan manner, but then paused, staring off into space, as if reviewing some action in his mind’s eye.

  Frank Oda and I exchanged a look.

  “You saw a real swordfight?” Oda-sensei asked, fascinated.

  Tristan seemed not to hear the question. He had slightly extended his right arm, fingers curled as if gripping the hilt of a sword, and was moving it this way and that. Meeting my eye, he pulled the towel off of his neck, revealing a long, superficial cut.

  “You were in a real swordfight!?” I exclaimed.

  This seemed to snap him out of it. He let his hand drop to the table, where he went back to fidgeting with the disembodied fillings. “They have more than one kind of sword,” he announced. “It’s not all just rapiers. There’s an older style too. Bigger, heavier. Kind of like nowadays you might see an older person driving a big old Buick sedan while the younger generation is tooling around in little hybrids. I need to get good at fighting with a Buick. I need a combat historian who can drill me on the nuances of that era. My opponent did something very subtle that I wasn’t expecting.”

  “Should I ask Darren to come back in?”

  Darren was the fight choreographer from Boston Shakespeare. We had sworn him to secrecy and hired him to teach Tristan what he knew.

  “Darren’s wrong for it,” Tristan said. “He’s spot-on with the historical detail, I’ll give him that. But the whole point of stage fighting is that it’s supposed to look as flashy as possible, while being totally safe. And I am here to tell you that real swordfighting is pretty non-flashy and pretty fucking dangerous.”

  “I know who to ask,” said Rebecca. She had turned herself into a resourceful Girl Friday, given she had never actually approved of any of this. There wasn’t much we would put past her. Even so, we all turned to see if she was serious. “In the park down the street,” she explained, “in the evenings, when the weather’s good, there’s a group of historical swordfighters who meet to practice.”

  “LARPers?” Tristan asked, clearly skeptical. Seeing that no one besides him knew what a LARPer was, he continued, “Guys who fight with foam weapons?”

  “Not foam,” Rebecca said. “It is steel on steel, I can hear the din of it from my garden. They should be meeting this evening. I’ll go there and make inquiries as soon as you’re done debriefing us.”

  “Great. If we can find one willing to sign the NDA, I want to book him all day tomorrow and the next day, maybe even three days in a row. I need to get back to the Tearsheet as quickly as possible, and I definitely have to be on my game.” His eye fell on the beer bottle in front of him, with its ye olde lettering and its ye olde artist’s conception of the original Tearsheet Brewery. He devoted a few moments to examining this, as if comparing it to the real one he had departed only a few minutes ago.

  Then he turned to Erszebet. “Here’s the other thing. When I go back, I need to go back to a different day, the day before I was last there. How will that affect the Strands?”

  She shrugged, but this time thoughtfully, not disdainfully. “It depends,” she said. “Nothing is ever certain. If you will not be traveling for a few days, I will spend that time with my számológép and try to determine this. The more different moments you visit, the more Strands there are to contend with, and it is an exponential increase in complications. I will tell you something: in the history of magic it is a general trend that all new rulers wish to use our time-transporting skills to their advantage, but the more seasoned they become, the more they understand the complications, and the less they wish to lean upon it.”

  “We’re not in the history of magic,” Tristan replied evenly. “We’re outside of it. That’s sort of the point.”

  “Thank you for . . . doing whatever it is you’re going to be doing with your, mmm, számológép,” I said.

  “What exactly are you going to be doing with it?” asked Frank Oda.

  “I already told you, you cannot touch it,” she said shortly.

  “And I won’t,” said Oda-sensei, ever affable. “But I would so very much like to watch as you do the work. I have been playing with an artifact of Rebecca’s ancestress that reminds me of your számológép. Perhaps I could ask questions and you could explain it to me.” A smile. “I would be so extremely grateful
to be a beginner at the feet of such an expert.”

  “That’s flattery,” said Erszebet, looking pleased about it.

  “It is the truth,” said Oda-sensei. “Sometimes the truth is flattering.”

  She considered him a moment, and then smiled. It was rare she smiled, and it only further emphasized her beauty. “Very well,” she said. “We start tomorrow.”

  And thus began Oda-sensei’s initiation into diachronic calculations.

  Journal Entry of

  Rebecca East-Oda

  JULY 22

  Temperature 82F. High clouds, mild breeze. Barometer rising.

  All herbs faring nicely. Butterfly weed beginning to bloom. Anise hyssop approaching four feet, very healthy. Scarlet elder: flowers past, berries not yet ripe. Vegetables: kale and lettuce in containers coming nicely (lettuce harvestable as baby greens), but I fear I planted the onions too late in the season.

  Generally less time and energy for gardening, to be honest. I am distracted by the distant clinking and clanking of blunt steel weapons in the park down the street, where Tristan has been learning the art of the backsword from one Mortimer Shore, a local historical fencing enthusiast whom I have recruited.

  Have been watching Frank and Erszebet converse, as she attempts to describe to him what her számológép does for her. For all my years of editing his papers and carrying my weight at those awkward faculty parties (in which fundamentally non-social creatures—physicists—were expected to behave like social creatures), I cannot follow most of their discussion. This is not actually due to the calculus or physics, given that Erszebet has absolutely no training in either field. It is rather that I find it exhausting to try to be essentially bilingual, which Frank is so willing to be. She speaks in her eccentric lingo and he finds ways to respond to her with very simply layman’s physics—“When you say XYZ, is that another way of saying ABC?” And she thinks, and sighs, and says she supposes so, if somebody is too thick to simply understand XYZ.

  After several hours of discussion, Frank thanked her, brought home his notes, and sat down with my shaggy family heirloom to experiment with what he’d learned. He has not yet shared any of his discoveries with me—not because he is keeping it a secret, but because he most enjoys bringing me in to his work when he’s accomplished something. I believe he means to construct a számológép/quipu/shaggy-family-artifact-like object that he can use whether or not Erszebet is of a mind to cooperate with Tristan. (Although since she is the only one who can actually make time travel happen, there is no practical benefit to having a quipu unless she is cooperating. There I go being a pragmatist, which is not how Frank is wired.)

  The only other item of note—besides Tristan re-training himself for period combat, which I hope he is never foolhardy enough to use—is that our two young leaders, especially Tristan, seem to be growing tense about how long this is taking. I have spent fifty years married to a man who is delightedly preoccupied with the journey, and now suddenly we are working with those who care only for the destination.

  This does not, in truth, seem to match their personalities, certainly not Mel’s. It clearly originates from higher up the “food chain,” the cast of characters we met around that conference table in the Trapezoid. General Frink must be ultimately responsible; but it is Lester Holgate, Frink’s eager-beaver civilian toady, who seems to be on the other end of most of the phone calls and email threads.

  LETTER FROM

  GRÁINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY

  A Sunday of Mid-Harvest, 1601

  Auspiciousness and prosperity to you, milady!

  It’s mostly Tristan Lyons I’m writing of today, Your Grace, as precious few other developments there’ve been but plenty involving him. He must be in alliance with a proper witch, and depending on who and where she is, she could be useful for Your Grace.

  In order for me to string this together into a proper tale I’ve had to Wend my way to all of the snáithe—the Strands—in which he has appeared to carry out the same set of deeds. As you and I understand, Your Grace, they all happened at once, as choristers in the church nave sing the same tune at the same time; but I cannot write many stories down in such a manner and so I’ll relate them one after the other, like beads on a rosary.

  He has been Sent to several Strands, always on the Sunday, and always with the same task: to convince Sir Edward Greylock to move his financial interests to the East India Company, and away from some queer little joint-stock company called the Boston Council. He wants this as the cause of an effect forty years distant and all the way across the sea. He is not very forthcoming in his plans, except to assure me they have no bearing on Your Grace. I have not yet begun to pry him for important information, as I believe the longer I let him get accustomed to my cooperation, the easier will it be to twist him round my finger when it’s time. So I will continue to knit myself into his affections. I’ve offered him the occasional chance for making the beast with two backs, but he never takes me up on it. It’s a shame since he’s cleaner and better-smelling than any other fellow in the neighborhood (except my sweetheart).

  It’s the same each Strand: he arrives while we are all at mass, dons the shirt and drawers I keep extra at hand, and then waits for me to return from services, when I unlock my chest and give him a few coins and Ned Alleyn’s costume pieces. To keep him in the habit of telling me things (although small things they are, for now), I pester him for information on his future world. I’ve learned things that are pleasing enough to my ear, assuming he’s not codding me. He tells me of all the saints there ever was, it’s only Padraig whose feast day is celebrated in his nation. He tells me the spirit of the Irish where he dwells is powerful, so powerful that many of our countrymen will hold a great many courtly offices, so great that it’s our luchrupán used as a talisman by a guild of men who somehow earn their living playing a game with a pig bladder (I cannot fathom how this happens, but I will query further if Your Grace requests to know it). He spends the night in the bawdy-house, and the next day we venture across the river. Tristan understands he must make the effort several times to see results. It’s four times he’s had the same conversation with the same Sir Edward Greylock at the same tavern near Whitehall. However, there have been two remarkable changes in the routine.

  First of all, when we enter the tavern, ’tis no longer Sir Edward sitting alone we see, looking across the table at the remains of some other diner’s food. In these other Strands, his dinner companion has lingered over his meal, drawing out the conversation. Finely dressed this fella is, in clothes that are dark and even a touch old-fashioned, but ever so well made. He’s wearing a tall hat with a broad brim pulled rakishly down over one eye, sporting a scarlet plume, and when he turns his head to take note of Tristan, it’s a yellow beard that comes into view, trimmed and groomed to a long sharp point. It is, in other words, the German with the white kid gloves who came out of nowhere in the first Strand and prevented Tristan from being murdered in the duel. He sits there quietly, listening to what Tristan has to say. From time to time he and Sir Edward glance across the table at each other in a manner that is full of significance. Anon he excuses himself and leaves the tavern.

  Secondly: on these other Strands, we are chanced upon by the same tosser and the same weedy curmudgeon—Herbert and George—I wrote about before. As before they follow us, and Herbert has a go at Tristan on the Whitehall steps. As before the German’s there, stepping up to act as Tristan’s second. And you might think that Tristan would properly apologize and humble himself to avoid a repetition of the duel. But didn’t he amaze me the first time he came back, accepting George’s backsword straightaway, and disarming Herbert in a trice! His abilities, his skill, his confidence—all these more than trebled from one Strand to the next! I cannot account for the marvel of it, but it does make him even more lovely a fellow to watch now. The German watches all, but does less, as his services are no longer needed, and doesn’t he disappear into the crowd before he can be thanked.

 
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.”