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

by Neal Stephenson

I realize that it’s something of a mouthful to use in conversation. Around the office, we have taken to calling it the Jargon and Acronym Policy, and I encourage the rest of you to follow suit.

  Follow-up from Stoll, two hours later:

  In the wake of a very respectful and sensitive exchange of feelings with Dr. Oda, I would like to amend the above to “Acronym and Jargon Policy.” Please refer to DODO’s Diversity Policy for more on these matters, which we take extremely seriously.

  Follow-up from Stoll, one hour later:

  I have been made aware that our Diversity Policy is still being drafted. I assumed we had one in place already, but the unusual operational environment of DODO apparently makes it more complicated. In the meantime let’s all just use common sense, please.

  AFTER ACTION REPORT

  DEBRIEFER: Dr. Melisande Stokes

  DOER: Chira Yasin Lajani

  THEATER: Constantinople

  OPERATION: Antwerp witch recruitment

  DEDE: Obtain/secure viable kalonji seeds for later p/u

  DTAP: Blachernae Palace, Constantinople, August 1202

  STRAND: Fourth and last repetition of this DEDE

  Note: Will avoid undue repetition of physical details, etc. from previous three Strands.

  Erszebet Sent Chira via ODEC #2 at 11:15 of Day 626, without incident.

  Chira materialized in the unlit brick bathhouse of the women’s apartments of Blachernae Palace. We had already confirmed a witch in Blachernae on previous Strands: Basina, illegitimate granddaughter of Empress Irene (née Bertha).

  Chira arrived in the dark hours of the morning but moonlight shone in to give illumination to the room. (She has drawn detailed diagram of bathhouse, scanned and converted to 3-D renderings; refer to DORC Cartographic and Architectural Database.) General setting: large striated-brick hall with marble baths heated from below, running water available via lead pipes.

  From prep research combined with past Strand experience, she knew that for efficiency in plumbing, the laundry was beside the bathhouses, and a connecting room between the two held cabinets with clean shmatas/drab shifts to be worn by women working in either chamber. After waiting in the shadows to ensure that the coast was clear, she moved quietly to this cabinet and donned one; it would pass as a servant’s nightdress.

  Chira found a small amphora, filled it with water, and carried it from the bathhouse to the stairs for the Empress’s apartments. Nearing the foot of the stairs, she encountered two armed Varangian Guards (for more on what we know of the arms and armor of this class of fighter, refer to Mortimer Shore’s MARS [Martial Arts Research Summary] #12). She approached them carrying the amphora. They challenged her in accented Greek; she identified herself as a new servant of Basina’s, sent to fetch her mistress scented water for a headache. The taller guard was about to let her go, but the shorter one expressed skepticism and proposed accompanying her back upstairs.

  Speaking in what might have been a Norman dialect, the taller Varangian rebuked the shorter one. Chira cannot understand circa 1200 Norman, beyond some ability to pick out French and Anglo-Saxon loan words. Having been on this DEDE several times now, she is fairly certain that the topic of conversation was a woman named Candida. Body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and one unmistakable Anglo-Saxon word all suggested that the short Varangian was seeking an excuse to visit Candida in the middle of the night for the purposes of sexual intercourse, and that the taller Varangian disapproved of it.

  The short, horny Varangian disagreed with this assessment and, as proof of its inaccuracy, suggested he remain below while the tall one accompany Chira upstairs to Basina. Tall one agreed to this and marched Chira up three broad, shallow flights of marble steps, finally arriving at tall, decorated double doors, visible as a tangerine-colored sunrise was coming in through windows overlooking the stairwell.

  At this point, more Varangian Guards challenged them, speaking in Anglo-Saxon, which Chira also does not speak. After a brief conversation, during which Chira’s physical endowments were obviously being closely assessed, she and the tall Varangian were allowed into the antechamber of the apartments, made of marble with serpentine inlaid heavily in patterns on the floor; high ceilings; eunuchs in abundance. Chira was handed over to one of them, and tall Varangian was dismissed. The eunuch took her into a chamber with windows overlooking a courtyard.

  This room had golden-tiled ceilings and smelled of incense. A woman in her early thirties (Basina) was in the central, extremely ornate bed; there were smaller beds along the walls, and four younger women dressed in long silk gowns were preparing Basina’s jewelry and wardrobe for her. They looked startled by the early morning intrusion. The eunuch presented Chira to Basina saying, “Your Ladyship, this woman was found by guards at the bottom of the stairs, claiming she was your handmaiden.”

  Basina stared at Chira with a slightly mocking air, as if she could not believe an assassin had been stupid enough to approach from such a direct route. Chira met the look calmly, held out the amphora, and said, “The scented water for your headache, m’lady.” She spoke with a small reassuring smile, and then winked at Basina.

  Basina showed no reaction at all to the wink. After a few more heartbeats, she instructed the eunuch, “Leave her here and wait outside.” The eunuch released her and left.

  Before the door had closed, the four young women had surrounded Chira at a distance of perhaps a yard, each with a hand on the eating-knife at her belt (see Mortimer Shore’s MARS #19 for more on these; they are short blades, nominally for cutting food during meals, not considered weapons, but obviously capable of being used as such).

  “What are you wearing under that?” asked Basina of the shift. “That’s from the bathhouse. I would never dress my servants so poorly.” She had a low voice and spoke slowly, sounding sardonically amused.

  Chira set down the amphora and in one smooth gesture pulled the shift over her head; it dropped to the ground at her feet, leaving her nude. Basina continued to stare at her, now a little appraisingly. “I see,” she said. Her attendants sniggered slightly but she made a harsh, wordless noise of disapproval and they all instantly went silent. Finally Basina asked, “Are you a gift? Who sent you?”

  “Someone who would be your friend,” said Chira.

  Basina smiled, then chuckled like a contented hen. “Everyone wants to be my friend,” she said. “Most of them bore me.”

  “I am sent from someone who will not bore you,” Chira said. “But I am under instructions to reveal more only when we are alone together.”

  “We’re alone,” said Basina comfortably. “My women are nothing but an extension of me.”

  Adopting a very gentle tone of voice—almost sympathetic—Chira said, “I have reason to believe that might not be true.” Basina frowned and sat up, throwing the sheets off of herself. The clutch of attendants stepped in closer and brandished their eating-knives.

  “Who says so?” demanded Basina. Chira met her gaze and said nothing. After a long moment, Basina ordered her women, “Check her.”

  Chira then submitted to a body cavity search, which was unpleasant but brief. Once they found nothing on/in her, Basina ordered the four of them out of the room. They protested, shocked and angry, but she grunted at them and they left.

  When Basina and Chira were alone, there was a long pause. “I detect some glamour,” said Basina at length. “Who has Sent you?”

  “Nobody you know, milady,” said Chira. “A company of good men and women who seek your aid. We are from far away, in every possible sense.”

  Basina listened, took a moment—in general her movements and words were slow and languid—and then said, in a bored and long-suffering tone, “What is desired of me?”

  “A clandestine introduction to a member of the court.”

  “It is a rather large court, girl, can you be more specific?”

  “There is a court apothecary who is also responsible for the maintenance of the herb gardens.”

  “
Let me guess,” Basina said with a throaty laugh. “Somebody wants kalonji. It’s always kalonji.”

  Chira suppressed surprise and asked, “Who else wants kalonji?”

  “Everyone. Every witch I’ve ever met, especially Franks, since nobody can seem to make it thrive in the north. Cyril Arcadius—the apothecary—would be a very wealthy man if he sold it. Then he could buy himself as many ladies’ favors as he liked.”

  “He prefers the barter method,” guessed Chira.

  “He finds it romantic.” Basina laughed.

  “I’m prepared to barter,” said Chira. “This should be simple.”

  “Honey-bee,” Basina said in a knowing voice, “nothing is ever simple.”

  Although she was already fairly certain of what was coming, from her experiences on the first three Strands, Chira kept a blank look of innocence on her face and asked, “What isn’t simple about Cyril Arcadius?”

  “He likes a witch to be performing magic—any little spell, nothing dramatic—while he is taking her. Makes him feel like he’s somehow part of the magic-making. It’s pathetic.”

  This is not what Chira had expected, as on previous Strands Basina had simply alerted her to various peccadillos of the apothecary’s, none of which fazed her. This variation posed a serious problem, however:

  “I am not a witch,” said Chira. “I can’t offer that.”

  Basina shrugged. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I suppose I could be your proxy. If you will be my proxy for another matter.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I am expected in His Majesty’s chamber this evening,” said Basina.

  Chira knew from DORC-prep that the Emperor—Alexios III Angelos—was married to Euphrosyne Doukaina Kamatera, a first-class Alpha Bitch who, despite being famously adulterous herself, would eviscerate anyone found fiddling with her wussy husband’s tackle-box, especially since she’d only given him daughters. That is not what surprised Chira about the news of this dalliance. Rather it was this: “Aren’t you . . . a kinswoman . . . of his?”

  “Honey-bee,” said Basina, “it’s the imperial court, we’re all each other’s blood-cousins. Why do you think everyone fights so dirty? I would prefer to be in someone else’s bed tonight, that’s all, so I need somebody to distract His Majesty, and I need it to be a stranger so she can vanish before Euphrosyne hunts her down and gouges her eyes out.”

  “Is the Emperor expecting you?”

  “I was summoned by his cupbearer, so somebody is expecting me,” she said. “But it might be his wife trying to entrap me.”

  “Ah,” said Chira.

  “Yes,” said Basina. “If you open that wooden cabinet over there, you’ll find my summer gowns. Help yourself to any but the purple one. I’ll have the maids oil and dress your hair to resemble mine, but I will not trust you with my jewelry.”

  “Very well,” said Chira, wishing DORC’s curriculum included a mandatory anti-assassin workshop.

  “Spend the day in here. You’d be underfoot anywhere else.”

  Chira dressed herself in the most modest of the several gowns—all garish by modern standards, with tremendous amounts of small garnets and turquoise sewn onto the fronts, as well as decorative stitching in silver and gold thread. She then received (grudging and ungentle) ministrations from Basina’s attendants, who attempted to goad her into revealing her identity until Basina told them to shut it. Chira was left alone in the chamber for approximately five hours, until Basina and her entourage returned, the entourage tittering, Basina looking pleased with herself. In her hand Basina held a black silk drawstring bag, half the size of a human fist.

  “That was painless. Here are your kalonji seeds,” she said, and tossed them onto Chira’s lap. “Keep them tied to your belt, or better yet, your wrist.”

  “When am I to go to the Emperor’s chambers?” Chira asked.

  “After nightfall,” said Basina. “One of his eunuchs will come with a summons. Have you eaten today?”

  When Chira said that she had not, Basina sent two of her retinue down to the kitchens to bring up fruit and nuts and cheese, further cementing the attendants’ resentment. A mediocre lute-playing eunuch came in to entertain them, until Basina got tired of him and sent him away, and finally after the sun had set, Basina excused herself to go to her other lover’s bed.

  “Do not abuse her,” she ordered her sulking retinue. “If I hear of any bad behavior on your part, I’ll have you flayed by that Genoan His Majesty keeps in the cellars.”

  She departed, leaving Chira alone with the seething attendants. All efforts on her part to gather intelligence from them met with complete failure as they were barely able to contain themselves from tearing her garments off her à la Cinderella’s stepsisters.

  Finally the Emperor’s eunuch came in search of Basina. When the attendants presented Chira in her stead, he blinked a moment, then sighed, then rolled his eyes, shook his head, and lugubriously gestured her to follow him. The attendants were pleased by this response, and one of them whispered, “Surely he is leading you straight to what should have been Basina’s death. Ha!” Followed by a Greek term with no perfect translation but meant in essence, “Sucker!”

  The eunuch led her through such a maze of torch-and-lamp-lit stairwells, corridors, halls, and yards that she became disoriented and is not able to reconstruct the route for us (shown as, literally, a gray area on the DORCCAD rendering). But eventually, she was brought to a grand set of copper-faced double doors with intricate gold chase-work as decoration. The eunuch rapped on one of these with a particular staccato rhythm, and in response the doors swung outward toward them. Ahead of them was a very small vestibule, candlelit, with one door to the right and one to the left. (We know from old maps—digitized and cleaned up in DORCCAD—that these led to the Emperor’s and Empress’s respective bedchambers.) The eunuch, giving her a mournful look, literally shoved her into the vestibule and turned his back. As the door began to swing shut, a smooth, strong hand grabbed Chira’s arm and she felt a slender blade press against her carotid artery. As her self-defense skill set is of the flight-not-fight variety, she froze.

  “Finally, Basina,” said a woman’s voice, harshly happy. “Finally I have caught you in the act.”

  “I am not Basina, Your Majesty,” said Chira. “I am simply an entertainer obeying a command from my Emperor.”

  There was some cursing, the knife blade was removed, the hand loosened its grip, and she turned so that her back was to the wall and she could face her assailant in the candlelight. The Empress Euphrosyne was considerably older than her but still, in a ravaged, cougar-esque sort of way, definitely pretty hot.

  “Who are you? You can’t go in there,” said Euphrosyne. “I know what happens when a whore gives an emperor a son. If he doesn’t get one from me, he doesn’t get one from anyone. Nobody is going to rob my daughters of the throne.”

  “I’m Jewish,” Chira said. “No son of mine would ever be allowed on the throne, no matter who his father is.”

  Euphrosyne looked surprised. “He would never bed a Jewess,” she said.

  “He saw me dance at a feast a fortnight back and made inquiries. We’ve never spoken in person, but he has already paid a great deal and I am tardy. Given I am no threat to Your Majesty, may I attend to my Emperor’s wishes?”

  Everything about Euphrosyne’s demeanor changed as this sank in. She gestured to the door that led to the imperial bedchamber. “Go on, then,” she said. “I don’t care if you fuck him. In fact, fuck him thoroughly so I don’t have to worry about his fucking anyone else tonight.”

  With these words of encouragement she opened the door herself. It was a very large room, marble floors, and panels of marble for walls, ceiling of glassed gold-leaf tile looking burnished in the flickering light from a dozen beeswax candles. One entire wall opened on to a balcony that overlooked a garden.

  In the middle of the room was the single piece of furniture: a large bed that appeared to be carved out of solid tur
quoise, and on this sat a sickly pale, dark-haired man who did not look at all what Chira expected of an emperor. He was wearing a nightshirt, which was thick white silk with gold thread sewn into the collar, cuffs, and hems. He looked up expectantly when he saw her, and then pulled his head back like a surprised turtle.

  “Where’s Basina?” he demanded, standing nervously.

  “Basina was ill tonight, Your Majesty,” said Chira, with a reassuring smile. “She sent me to entertain you in her absence.”

  “You’re an assassin,” said His Majesty.

  “Of course not, Your Majesty,” said Chira pleasantly. “I am here entirely for your pleasure.”

  “No, you’re an assassin, you must be an assassin, I’ve never seen you before and you came in here without my eunuch.”

  “Your honored wife sent the eunuch away in the antechamber,” said Chira. “She wanted to speak to me in private before I came in to you.”

  “Did she tell you to assassinate me?”

  “Your Majesty,” said Chira, looking graciously shocked. “Of course not. She herself is so solicitous of your safety that she would not allow me in until she had reassured herself of my benign intentions. She has deigned to allow me to enter your bedchamber.”

  “Prove that you are not an assassin,” he said, not moving from his defensive stance by the side of the bed.

  Chira continued to smile at him, adjusting the tone of the smile to try to reassure and calm him. She shimmied easily out of Basina’s long royal-blue robe, which she had not fully secured specifically so that she could remove it easily. Because of all the jewels and stiff metallic thread, it landed inelegantly, but she stepped out of it with a sinuous grace, presenting as much of herself as possible directly to him. She slipped the drawstring of the kalonji-seed bag over her wrist and palmed it. Entirely unclothed, she smiled invitingly at him, crossed to him, and took his hand with her free one. He stared at his hand in hers as if this was an experience he had never had before. She examined his face. He seemed on the verge of a panic attack.