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

by Neal Stephenson

  She was ignoring me, her intense black eyes studying Gráinne’s face. “Why does it end? What stops it?”

  “Photography,” said Gráinne confidingly.

  Xiu Li received this and mused upon it for a moment. “I see,” she said at last—as if she really did see, although she obviously lacked the education to grasp it in the manner that we at DODO did. “How long do we have before it is gone?”

  “July next year,” said Gráinne sympathetically. “There’s a solar eclipse, witnessed by everyone in Europe, and someone takes a photograph of it, and that’s that.” She snapped her fingers. “It’s over. So you’d best consider our offer and come forward with us.”

  I stared at Gráinne. She was strikingly well-informed for an Anachron. Who would have told her something that specific? It must have been Erszebet.

  Xiu Li’s pale skin had paled even further hearing this. She sank onto a stool, her heavy silk dress shifting gracefully around her legs so that she appeared almost a mermaid. “This is dreadful news.”

  “Yes,” said Gráinne, with no sense of dread at all. “You take some time to think it over. Melisande, let’s be seeing the city, and we’ll return by teatime.”

  She took me by the hand in her casually familiar way and led me out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, and back out into the square.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Sure I’d love to see the city,” said Gráinne. “But in truth there’s a gentleman here to introduce ourselves to.”

  “What gentleman?” I demanded. “I don’t recall that being part of the DEDE.”

  “Not that DEDE as written,” agreed Gráinne. “But there is more going on than meets the eye here. Blevins set me on to him, and explained he could not put it down into the official assignment because it is, what was that phrase he was using now? Deep cover? Black cops?”

  “Black ops,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Black operations. Covert activity.”

  “Covert, aye, there you go,” said Gráinne, without a shred of the sober demeanor one associates with such discussions. “One reason he wanted us to come here together was so that you could be witness to it all, but off the record, like. In fact, this whole DEDE is a different beast than you are currently thinking.”

  I felt a wave of alarm but pushed it aside. This was irregular, but not dangerous. “Will you explain yourself?” I said.

  “Surely,” said Gráinne. “There’s a Fugger here, a direct male descendant of the one I know in my generation. He knows to expect us, and he’ll help us with the DEDE.”

  The more she revealed the more confounding it seemed. “How?” I demanded. “How on earth can he possibly know to expect us? Nobody has ever been close to this DTAP before.”

  “Melisande,” she said in a confiding, delighted voice. “What is the one thing you can carry through time with you?”

  “Information,” I said.

  “Indeed,” she said. “And it’s a wide varieties of ways, so it is, that information can be carried through time. If it’s going back in time, the information’s got to move magically. But if it’s coming forward, it can be planted and moved through generations.”

  “Do you mean you told this fellow’s ancestor to meet you in San Francisco in 1850? And they’ve passed the information along, accurately and without embellishment, for two and a half centuries?” I was incredulous—this was an extremely dangerous way to work with historical agents.

  “It’s not nearly that specific,” said Gráinne blithely. “Think of it more as a mythology. The Fuggers know—all of them—that there’s an immortal red-haired Irish witch named Gráinne who is an ally of the family, in any generation, and the family knows this and keeps it close to themselves. And ’tis true enough that this witch, in 1602, did recommend to the family patriarch of the time to keep an eye westward, ever westward, over the generations. It has served them well, and this is as westward as it gets. So I was not surprised, when I did my Internet research, to be confirmed in my belief that there would be a Fugger already here, opening a bank and prepared to make ungodly profits. And he is already an ally though he has never met me, nor has his sire, grandsire, great-grandsire going back many generations . . . but they know about me. It’s delighted he’ll be by our presence, and he’ll help us, no questions asked. ’Tis a remarkable boon for our needs.”

  “What will he do?” I asked, struggling to keep up with all this. Did Tristan know any of this? Surely Frank Oda or Mortimer must, as they oversaw the Chronotron data and none of this could be managed without tremendous Chronotron oversight. Why had I not been told?

  “Here’s the second part you do not know,” she said. “We’re not actually meant to bring her forward in time.”

  “What?” I cried. “Then what are we doing here?”

  “We’re here to recruit her,” said Gráinne. “Much as I recruited the Fuggers. If she comes forward in time, what do we have? One more witch. But if we leave her here, educated and motivated to pass a family legend down, then we can sculpt her to our needs, and seven generations hence, it’s allies we’ll have in all her dutiful descendants. And if we set her up so that her descendants will be people of power in America, then when we come to them in the twenty-first century, it’s powerful allies we will have. They will have things that we need—because we will arrange now for them to have such things.”

  Again, I was utterly gobsmacked—what a very clever and extremely dangerous methodology. And shocking that I had not been told of it. Again, I wondered: Had Tristan? Was he also in the dark, or had he begun to keep secrets from me?

  Three banks had already opened in or near Portsmouth Square, and the third bank was owned by the current Mr. Fugger. Gráinne wrote a note to have delivered to him, and after we waited for a few minutes in the brick lobby (brick! In that time and place! Proof these were no ordinary bankers), the gentleman appeared, in very fine and sober attire, and received Gráinne as if she were Santa Claus and he a toddler. They exchanged certain code phrases that she had planted with his ancestor, to reassure each other (or to reassure him; Gráinne had this insouciantly in hand). He was only too happy to follow us back to the St. Francis, where his duty would be to set up Xiu Li as the wealthiest Chinese immigrant in all of California.

  I do not know—I suppose I shall never know now—if Gráinne offered him other incentives to fork over a chunk of his private fortune to a total stranger, and a Chinese woman no less. But determined, even eager, was he to fork it over.

  “Now,” said Gráinne, as we all stepped lightly across the square, “it’s hopeful I am of this matter being wrapped up quick enough, but ’tis a matter of logistics that we will have a gentleman caller who must be dispatched politely. This may require you to pretend to be Melisande’s companion for an hour.”

  Young Fugger regarded me with skepticism but was too polite to express his disappointment. His eyes, however, strayed not infrequently to Gráinne’s curvier shape as we walked back toward the St. Francis.

  Back in the upstairs rooms, we found a grim Xiu Li.

  “I am not yet resolved to go,” she said, almost pouting—if pouting can be applied to a woman of such mature and majestic bearing.

  “There is another way,” said Gráinne. This immediately commanded Xiu Li’s attention. “Yes. There’s always the option to stay here and swap out magic for dosh, if you have that phrase here. Money. This gentleman is an associate of ours, and he will happily set you up for life, and for your children’s lives, and your children’s children’s lives.”

  Xiu Li’s bright eyes narrowed, and she looked back and forth between them. I might as well have not been present. “There is always a condition to these matters,” she said. “What is the condition here? Must I marry this Caucasian? I am already the mistress of the Celestial Jong Li.”

  Gráinne shook her head. “No condition but that you think well of us—myself and the gentleman here. And that you breed, if you haven’t yet, but choose the man yourself, sure. T
hen raise your children to think well of our memory, and to raise their children to do likewise, and their children, and so on down the line. One day in the future I might be meeting one of your descendants, and I would have them very well-disposed toward me.”

  With a wink to me, as if I were a part of all of this unsettling collusion, she commented, “Worked a wonder with the Fuggers, might as well try it again, isn’t it?”

  Xiu Li thought this over. “When magic disappears,” she said, “are witches gone? Do the powers lie dormant through the generations or are they entirely snuffed out?”

  “Oh, the magic comes back just fine, so it does,” said Gráinne. “Although it takes the witches a while to get the feel for it.”

  “So a distant daughter of mine—”

  “—is what I’m saying,” said Gráinne, nodding.

  Xiu Li pursed her lips and looked out the window. It seemed to me an eternity passed, and I was not comfortable about this, as time was drawing near for Francis Overstreet to return to “test the wares,” and I did not like the idea of pretending to be a prostitute with Mr. Fugger as my client.

  Xiu Li finally turned to us. “I will agree to this. But I want a contract and surety.”

  Mr. Fugger raised his handsome leather briefcase. “I’ve got it all arranged here,” he said. “But this is hardly a place to do respectable business, so I’d like to bring you both to supper where my cook will treat you like royalty.”

  “Both?” I echoed, now feeling even more invisible, in a manner that was beginning to make my hackles rise. “There are three of us here.”

  The gentleman turned to me. “Miss Gráinne said you’d be wanting to return home as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “There’s no need of you to stay here,” said Gráinne cheerfully. “This was really my DEDE all along, we only needed you to come along to cover my tracks. If I return a few scant hours after you, ’tis no concern of anyone there.” With a wink. “And the longer you stay here the likelier you are to be called to service, not that anyone will be too hot to hoist that skirt up off your bony hips.”

  I reviewed my options. Gráinne had entirely commandeered the situation—mostly because I was so unprepared for any of these developments, but it seemed clear enough that Blevins had entrusted her as a DOer. I could not see a benefit to my remaining here any longer. And frankly, it would be helpful to have some time in Cambridge without Gráinne underfoot, to suss out how all of this had come to pass.

  “Thank you, yes, I’ll go home now,” I said.

  “Excellent,” said Gráinne, and turned to Xiu Li. “Do you have much experience Sending people?”

  Xiu Li shrugged. “As children my sisters and I did it as a game, but as magic weakened it became very difficult, the fun not worth the effort.”

  “I’ll be refreshing your memory, then,” said Gráinne. “I shall Home Mel, and you, watching me, will then know how to Home me after our agreeable dinner.”

  Xiu Li nodded.

  “But I need you to be paying particular attention,” said Gráinne, “as a few things will be different. In particular, the coordinates of where we are to end up.”

  “How so?” I asked. “We are both returning to the same place.”

  “No,” said Gráinne, in an amused-yet-apologetic smile. “We’re not, actually, Melisande Stokes.”

  Suddenly I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach—a premonition, which is not, dear reader, something I am prone to. I sensed it had something to do with Gráinne’s detailed knowledge about photography, and the significance of the eclipse. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s back to DODO headquarters for myself, sure,” she said. “I’ve stacks to do there, and I can’t have you underfoot. So it’s elsewhere I am Sending you, where there will be no magic strong enough to Send you forward. God ye good day, Melisande Stokes. ’Tis been a pleasure to serve with you. Fare thee well.”

  Even as she spoke, the room began to dim and tilt about me, and the lovely aroma that always wafted at the edges of my attention when I was Sent—I smelled it, and then . . .

  . . . And then I awoke three weeks ago, naked, cold, on the grimy pavers of a London street at dawn, frantic to know what date it was, like a perversion of Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol (which came out less than a decade ago).

  To make short shrift of it: a beadle was called and I was bundled off to Bedlam, but a physician there sensed there was something different about me (thank God!) and brought me to his home, for he and his wife to try to “salvage.” They have it almost right: they take me for a witch (there are witches in distant branches of his family, and he has watched with compassion as several of them have fallen into despair as their powers waned; one took her own life). So they have offered me shelter, food, the clothes upon my back . . . on the sole condition that I make no attempt to communicate with any witch in any way.

  Not that I know any witches in 1851 London anyhow. And even if I did, it would be a miracle if she had the power left to Send me forward before the eclipse. Which will occur in just seventeen days.

  Post by Mortimer Shore on

  “General” GRIMNIR channel

  DAY 1947 (BLACK FRIDAY, YEAR 5)

  Mortimer here, writing first entry on new GRIMNIR system from safe locale.

  OK, so those of you who are into the Norse mythology might have read a story about Odin disguising himself as a regular mortal for tactical reasons. The name he adopted was Grimnir.

  The old ODIN system is no longer accessible to me, they have changed the passwords and kicked me out, I’m on the outs, and on the run, with a few of the others. But I set up a new system on the dark net that we can use to stay in touch with each other and make a record of all that’s happening. And I’m calling it GRIMNIR.

  I’m not much of a narrative writer, but here’s what has gone down . . .

  Two days ago, on Wednesday afternoon (the day before Thanksgiving), after some delays, Mel and Gráinne were Sent to the 1850 San Francisco DTAP, supposedly to recruit a Chinese KCW there. The old-school ODECs don’t have enough room inside of them for a Sending witch and two DOers, so this was a dual Send from ATTO #1, which has plenty of room on the interior. By that point it had been hoisted up and mounted on the back of its tractor-trailer rig, making it ready for field trials on the streets of the greater Boston area beginning Friday.

  This was billed as a one-day DEDE, or possibly a one-nighter, but as I said it got off to a late start, and by the time they were going into the ATTO, Mel was resigned to the fact that it was probably going to wipe out most of Thanksgiving Day and that she’d take Friday off instead.

  At the same time (Wednesday) there was a lot of bureaucratic back-and-forth involving Tristan, Erszebet, and Blevins regarding this unusual DEDE that had been planned for Tristan starting Friday morning, where he was being sent back to 20,000 BC Germany. Erszebet was all like, “I am only following orders. Like the indentured servant I have been since I met you.” And so it was up to Tristan to verify and double-check the order with Blevins and interface with the Chronotron crew.

  Gordon Healey, one of the Chronotron nerds, ended up staying late and missing his flight home as he tried to help make sense of the mission and dig up the background information that Tristan needed to prep for it. He and Erszebet booked a slot in ODEC #1 early on Friday morning (that’s today), since the ODECs were already fully booked for the rest of the day and the ATTO would not be available. I volunteered to come in and run the control panel.

  So we arrived this morning, about an hour before the rest of the staff was due in. Tristan had slept well although he still looked a little ruffled about this strange assignment (like I said: 20,000 BC. Dude.). Erszebet had a look of sort of grim resignation to her—but that’s not too unusual for her. We checked the logs to see if Gráinne and Mel had made it back, but there was no sign of them. A little unusual, but nothing that would really raise a red flag yet.

  I
stayed on the outside of the glass wall to run the controls. Erszebet and Tristan went through the usual protocols in the bio-containment ward while I got ODEC #1 powered up and ran the usual checks. Through the glass wall I saw Tristan come out of the sterilization suite in the usual bathrobe. He tossed me a salute and walked into the ODEC.

  Erszebet began to follow him in. Then she hesitated mid-stride, and stepped back away from it. For a long moment she stared into the ODEC. She kind of looked a little queasy.

  I turned on the intercom and asked if there was a problem.

  “Come on, Erszebet,” I heard Tristan say.

  “You will come out of there,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I say you will come out of there. Very quickly. I must tell you something.”

  A sound nearly a harrumph, and then Tristan came out of the ODEC. Erszebet closed the door behind him, and then visibly relaxed—I hadn’t realized she had been tense until I saw the tension leave her shoulders.

  “. . . All right,” said Tristan, bemused. “What’s going on?”

  “There is no real assignment to send you on this DEDE,” she said.

  Tristan was totally still for a moment, and then pursed his lips together until they were colorless.

  “What?” he said at last.

  “It is all faked. Every bit of it. It is all part of a scheme.”

  “What scheme? Who’s behind it?”

  She looked troubled, but resigned. “The scheme requires getting rid of Melisande and yourself. Melisande is gone forever and now I am supposed to get rid of you.”

  The look on Tristan’s face was of even greater shock than I myself was feeling, which is saying a lot. “But Mel’s with . . .” he protested.

  “It is Gráinne’s scheme,” said Erszebet. “It was almost mine as well. But I have been awake all night thinking of Melisande and it is wrong to do this. So I am not doing it.”

  There was complete silence in the chamber except for the background hum of the ODEC.