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

by Neal Stephenson

  “He was so disagreeable,” said Erszebet.

  Tristan put his hands on his face and shuddered. “How the fuck am I ever going to explain this to . . . oh, Jesus Christ, you’ve ruined everything. Your own life. Do you understand that? That’s it, it’s over. You’re done. We’re done here.” He was pacing wildly and kept making the same anxious gesture of throwing his hands to either side as if he’d just walked into a spiderweb and were trying to free himself of the gossamer.

  “I mean it,” he said, after a moment of silence. “Leave. Stokes, get out of here before you get embroiled in all of this. Leave her here.”

  “I am no coward, I would not flee,” said Erszebet haughtily.

  “That’s right. You’re going to prison,” he said flatly.

  “That will be more interesting than the nursing home,” she replied, unfazed.

  “Or I might just shoot you myself,” he said, suddenly weary. He uprighted the chair he’d destroyed, discovered it was broken, sat down on the floor.

  Erszebet, perversely, looked delighted with this declaration. “Now you are speaking like a man of action. I have not seen such a side of you before. I approve of it.”

  “I mean it, Stokes,” he said. His voice was husky. “Just get out of here. I’ve got to tell them what happened.” He put his hands over his face and began to mutter the phrases he would soon be typing into a report. “Diachronic effects confirmed . . . results unpredictable . . . Casualties . . . one KIA.”

  Diachronic. Meaning “through time.”

  Department of Diachronic . . . something?

  “Go ahead and fetch his minion. I will Send him somewhere nicer,” Erszebet offered. “And then we can all pretend they never arrived and just go back to what we were doing. Only now we will do more interesting things, yes?”

  Tristan pressed the heels of his hands hard against his closed eyes and groaned. “Shut up,” he said. “Stokes. Go. Really.”

  “Go where?” I asked.

  He moved his hands away from his eyes. “Just get out of town, let me deal with this. Somehow. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come home. Let Professor Oda know what happened so he doesn’t show up in the middle of a shitstorm offering to help with something.” He sighed heavily. “On your way out, tell Ramirez to come down here. I guess I start by breaking the news to him.”

  I hesitated. I had an instinct to go to him, but as if he sensed this, he made a waving-away motion, like he was flicking something from his hand. “Go,” he repeated. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’ll be in touch when I can. Thanks for everything. Leave. Now.” He turned away from me.

  Diachronicle

  DAYS 305–309 (EARLY JUNE, YEAR 1)

  In which not all is lost, although in retrospect perhaps it should have been

  I SHALL SKIP OVER THE miserable, dreadful limbo of the next few days. Suffice it to say: after alerting the professor and his wife of the tragic developments, I retreated to my third-floor walk-up and never went out except to buy groceries.

  I checked Facebook obsessively on the chance Erszebet would reach out to me that way. Nothing. I read the papers, actual and virtual; I ran Google searches (so what if they could trace me, they already knew who I was and where I lived). The dead taltos in Hungary remained an established historical fact. Erszebet Karpathy—the Asset, Schneider had called her—remained nonexistent.

  I sniffed out possible job openings at universities so far below my pay grade that no prospective boss would bother contacting Blevins for a reference.

  And—although this sounds dramatic—I suppose I grieved. I had thrown myself (uncharacteristically) with such abandon into the most remarkable adventure of my regimented little life, had reshaped myself as a trailblazer alongside a man I realized was the most vital human being I’d ever known . . . and now it was all gone. The life, the trail, the trailblazing, the man. I was an unemployed academic with a disastrous employment history and nothing to offer the world but an uncanny facility with (mostly dead and dying) languages. Nothing I might ever do would come close to seizing my attention the same way.

  After what was easily the longest, most uncomfortable four or five days of my life, on an afternoon when I was so close to going mad that I began to re-alphabetize my vintage cookbook collection according to the Japanese syllabary, just to shut my brain up . . . the buzzer to my apartment blared. I almost jumped out of my skin.

  I went to the door. “Who is it?” I shouted into the intercom.

  “Stokes!” came a blessedly familiar voice through the crackle of crappy wiring.

  I shouted with relief as I buzzed him in; he bounded up the stairs, and as he neared me, I can’t believe I did this, but I threw my arms around his neck and gave him an enormous hug. “Tristan!” I cried, and even planted a wet one on kissed his cheek. “You’re in one piece!”

  Almost equally surprising, he was hugging me back, and he being so much taller than I, by the time he reached the landing, he had hoisted me off the ground. He squeezed me hard and then released me. “Better than one piece, even. Good to see you, Stokes.”

  “Where’s Erszebet? What’s happened?”

  “She’s fine, I’ll explain. What do you have for beer? Those pencil-pushers in DC all drink Bud Light.” He strode into the apartment. “Missed you, Stokes.” He gestured grandly around the small room. “This is where it all began. Someday there’ll be a plaque down front saying that.”

  “What’s going on?” I demanded, opening the fridge. From the door I took the last Old Tearsheet Best Bitter from the six-pack he’d brought up the first day we met. He took it from me, found the opener, and a moment later was seated happily on my couch. He patted the spot next to himself and I sat.

  “They were batshit-insane-happy about the diachronic effects,” he said. “They’re all about the time travel.”

  “But she killed someone!” I said.

  “That’s why they’re all about the time travel. It got results. General Schneider gets a star on the wall.”

  “Huh?”

  “He has been declared a martyr for his country.”

  “How is that helpful? Are they going to trick our enemies into standing in an ODEC so Erszebet can Send them to the moon?”

  “See, what you and I were too freaked out to think about is that it’s possible to get sent back in time and not end up dead,” said Tristan. “It’s actually possible to go back in time and do stuff. In fact, it may have happened already.”

  “What?”

  He sat up and took a big swig of his beer. “The intel community has been noticing some inexplicable shit going on, but it’s a little less inexplicable if it is the case that foreign powers are engaging in diachronic operations.”

  He gave me a moment to digest this. “DODO,” I said. “Department of Diachronic Operations. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”

  “We have suspected. Now we know.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He nodded.

  “You mean there’s another Erszebet out there?”

  He shrugged.

  “What exactly are you saying, Tristan?”

  “Well . . .” He sat up straighter, put the beer on the coffee table, rested his forearms on his knees, and looked at me. “IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been running this thing until now—thinks other countries might have, or might soon have, access to . . . others like Erszebet. Somehow. Purely theoretical at this stage, but the time travel was new information, and all of a sudden, pieces started to fit together. So in case certain other countries have found their own Erszebets and are sending people back in time to fiddle with things, the DNI doesn’t want to see a Magic Gap opening up.”

  “DNI?”

  “Director of National Intelligence. General Octavian Frink. Reports directly to POTUS. The Director of IARPA reports to Frink. General Schneider, God rest his soul, worked for a black-budget arm of IARPA. And what has happened now—less than twenty-four hour
s ago, Stokes—is that DODO has been bumped up the org chart. Now it’s directly under General Frink, with a dotted line to Dr. Rudge at IARPA.”

  “Dotted line?”

  “It just means Rudge is an advisor. We keep him in the loop.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Well . . . I have been promoted to lieutenant colonel and made the acting head of the Department of Diachronic Operations. I’ve been tasked with taking the ODEC and Erszebet to the next level, focusing entirely on time travel.”

  For a moment I was so amazed by this reversal of fortune I couldn’t respond. Then: “Great! So . . . you’re not in trouble.”

  “I’m not in trouble,” he said with a small, contented smile.

  “Wow, Tristan!” I hooked one arm around his neck and gave him a side-hug. He grinned but took it a little stiffly. “That’s amazing. Erszebet’s willing to cooperate?”

  He rolled his eyes, but did not look too worried. “We’re working on that. The Asset likes to be pandered to by powerful men in suits. She likes Constantine Rudge because he wears cuff links and went to Oxford. So I think I can chart a course.”

  “Well then, congratulations. When do you start?”

  “As soon as we can get ourselves to DC for the swearing-in.”

  “You and Erszebet.”

  He gave me a funny look. “Stokes. We’re going to be sending people back in time.” He jerked his left thumb over his shoulder as if that’s where back-in-time was.

  “Right, I got that.”

  “So?”

  “So, what?”

  “So who do you think is qualified to go back in time?”

  I shrugged. “Athletes? Assassins?” He was shaking his head. “Historians?”

  “Stokes!” He laughed. “Whoever goes has to be able to function in a setting where nobody speaks modern American English. We need polyglots and linguists. We need”—he pointed—“you.”

  I stared at him, eyes wide. I bet my mouth dropped open too.

  “I need you,” he added, realizing I was incapable of speech at that moment. “And I’m pretty sure you’re otherwise unemployed.”

  Although safely seated, I suddenly felt so lightheaded I put a hand on the coffee table to steady myself.

  “So what do you say?” he asked, with a comradely grin. “I can’t promise you’ll get to practice your conversational Sumerian, but you never know.”

  I felt like I was on the crest of a roller coaster, just about to plunge down a steep, joyfully terrifying thrill ride. I would have to be mad to agree to such a thing. “You want to send me back in time?” I heard myself say, not really sounding like myself.

  “Well, not permanently,” he said. “I’d miss you too much, Stokes.” God damn that grin of his. And he even roughed up my hair, the bastard.

  “When do we leave?” I asked.

  PART

  TWO

  MATERIALIZING WAS FAR more startling than any practice session we’d attempted in the ODEC, chiefly because not only was I (as usual) extremely disoriented and confused, but I landed completely naked. Outside.

  My balance wobbly, I felt warm grass and earth under my feet, and then collapsed at once sideways so that the smell of moist, sun-warmed soil filled my nostrils. I spent a few moments just breathing. Consciousness—the here-and-now of the human mind—is linked to the body’s surroundings by a thousand strands, most of which we’re never aware of until all of them are severed. The modern analogy would be to what happens when an errant backhoe slices through a fat underground cable, in an instant cutting off countless phone calls and Internet connections. One’s senses are always tracking sights, sounds, smells, and sensations. When a witch Sends you, all of those are interrupted, and your mind doesn’t know what to do with itself until it has knit itself into its new surroundings. It takes a minute.

  Sun, dappled by the branches of a tree, warmed my left side, as my right side felt the bumps of grass and earth, scattered twigs, knotty roots. As my consciousness adjusted to the new environment, I noticed an absence of the constant ambient noise of modern civilization. In its place was tremendous birdsong and the buzz of insects.

  A whizzing noise droned over me, barely overhead, like a huge insect, and terminated in a thunk. I looked over to see an arrow that had just embedded itself in the protruding root of a huge tree. Its fletchings of grey feathers were just a vibrating blur. It would have hit me if I hadn’t toppled over.

  Immediately the hazy sun was blocked by a tall figure looming over me. Naked, dizzy, and unarmed, I could not protect myself from him. Erszebet had just sent me to my death as surely as she’d sent General Schneider. What fools we’d been to think otherwise! He stepped directly over me, standing astride me, as if I were not there, his long robes covering my naked middle. A minister? A chieftain?

  But the figure shouted in a woman’s voice, deep and stern: “Samuel! Hunting is not for rabbits, you must trap them. We have told you so already. Save your arrows for the deer and do not shoot them so close to my house.” A native English speaker, with a lilt almost Appalachian or Irish. A distant voice, a boy’s, plaintive, giving her some back-sass.

  “Samuel, you saw no such thing, it is your devilish fancy getting the better of you again. You are disobedient. Go in to your mother.” A pause. “Go in to your mother, I say. You may fetch your arrow back later. It is easy to find—in the root of the tree.” And then, a whisper in my direction: “Do not move until I tell you to.” And back up: “Samuel! Now!”

  A long pause, as I began to collect my wits. Massachusetts Bay Colony. August 1640. The village of Muddy River, someday to be more attractively renamed Brookline. Yes, it was coming into focus now.

  Finally, the woman stepped back from me, and I could see her clearly. She was a Puritan, in a fitted dark blue top and long skirt, and a simple white cap. A large white collar covered her throat and shoulders. I had expected her to look like this, and yet seeing it was dizzying. She was not wearing a costume, she was simply wearing her clothes. I was here. It was happening.

  I would judge her to be about forty years of age, but I knew her from our research to be closer to thirty. She gave me a critical look. “Why have you come?” she demanded. “This is no place for us. How thoughtless of you, to appear where anyone may see you or harm you. That arrow would hit you another time. And the boy saw you. You have made me a liar to say he didn’t. If he calls us out, we’ll both be hanged.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry, Goody Fitch, I . . .”

  “Stay down,” she said, completely unsurprised that I called her by name. “I will get something to cover you.” She turned and walked out of my view.

  I raised my head a little. The silence and birdsong continued their counterpoint, and in the distance now I could hear, and smell, a river. The still air had the clinging, heavy humidity of high summer. I was a stone’s throw from a small wattle-and-daub house with a thatched roof, a small door, but no windows on the back wall. A hundred paces away in either direction, barely in view, were similar dwellings. The land had mostly been cleared, with big axe-scarred tree stumps still protruding from tilled ground here and there, but a few huge old trees, too much effort to chop down, remained scattered about. I was beneath one such, a sugar maple.

  Behind the house was a fine, verdant kitchen garden, and beyond that, a forest, densely leafed, mostly oak, some pine. The boy whom Goody Fitch had scolded had been to the right of me—to the south, I realized, superimposing the map of Muddy River over what I could see. That meant it was the Griggs family. Samuel Griggs . . . the name was not familiar, but I hadn’t memorized the whole village, just enough that I could passably seem to be familiar with it. Perhaps he would die before he reached maturity.

  It was a settlement of fewer than two hundred souls, so of course I could not convince anyone that I belonged here. But these lots were large—a dozen acres or more—and so it should have been easy to arrive unnoticed. That had been the intention: I was to arrive on the property of someone w
e believed to be a witch, out of sight of prying eyes. A fine scheme if there were no complications.

  Dear reader: there are always complications. Every fucking time.

  Goody Fitch returned with a thin dun-colored woolen blanket and offered it down to me. “Come inside quickly,” she said. “We are about the same size, I will clothe you. And then you must leave quickly in case Goody Griggs comes here, set on by her son.” A pause, as I gathered the blanket around my shoulders and carefully got to my feet. She did not offer a hand to assist, just stood watching me, evaluating. “But before you go, you will tell me why you are here.”

  “I’m here on an—”

  Her eyes flicked sideways, noticing some distant movement. “Inside.”

  Her caution seemed extreme; we were in the middle of the wilderness. But I pursed my lips closed to reassure her and followed her around the house, past an axe resting on a pile of recently split firewood. Rosemary bushes grew to either side of the door, flanked by chamomile plants. A remarkable coincidence: Rebecca East-Oda’s cellar hatchway was framed by the same set of plants.

  The atmosphere in the house was far more pleasant than I’d expected. The floor was pounded dirt, and therefore both cool and cooling. There were glowing coals on the hearth but the room was not hot, as the southward-facing door stood open. Two windows—one east, one west—were unglazed, so a very feeble breeze could move through the space. Beside the hearth was an open doorway into a back room, where I saw beds.

  This main room was uncluttered and unadorned, every item in it neat and practical and made of wood: two small benches, a stool, one central table and another along the wall; two chests.

  “Sit,” said Goody Fitch, gesturing toward the stool. She disappeared into the back room and returned a brief moment later with clothes draped over one arm: a sleeveless white linen smock, a reddish skirt and matching waistcoat, a simple decorative collar, and a long apron (somewhat stained). In her other hand, she held a linen cap, a small drawstring bag, and a belt.