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

by Neal Stephenson

  After we’d had a few drinks and a good dinner we stood up and began to head back to the barracks. But we’d only gone about a hundred strides when he turned to me and said, “Would you like to go see your namesake?”

  Having no idea what he was talking about, I agreed. We were near the border of the Venetian quarter, but now he led me back into the heart of it. We walked for about a hundred yards through winding streets. The sun was setting (time of year was midsummer, sunset was late). We came to a Roman Catholic church where vespers were under way. This is the Church of St. Bartholomew for those of you who would care to visit it. Later it was destroyed on all of the Strands I’m aware of, so it doesn’t exist in our present. Point being, for purposes of this story, its west entrance was lit up by the sunset when we arrived.

  He led me into the church, both of us crossing ourselves in the traditional manner as we entered (I doubt Magnus is a practicing Christian of any stripe, and when the VG guards the Empress at religious services, it’s an Orthodox church, so he must have vestigial muscle memory from childhood re: how to behave in a church).

  We went inside just far enough that we could turn around and look at the stained glass windows in the west front without drawing the attention of the congregants or the priest. There’s a big round window in the middle and some smaller ones to the sides. As is typical of churches like this, the big one depicts scenes from the life of Jesus, with emphasis on St. Bartholomew (one of the twelve Apostles), and the peripheral ones depict various other saints.

  One of the stained glass windows depicted a knight with yellow hair holding what appeared to be a boat oar. Scattered around him on the ground were the supine forms of what I took to be defeated enemies. Behind him was a crude rendering of a church. A scroll above his head identified him as St. Tristan of Dintagel.

  As you can all imagine, I was astonished and speechless for a minute. I became conscious of the fact that Magnus was studying my face intently. When I finally came to my senses, I said, “I had no idea that my saintly namesake had been commemorated in a church so far from home!” and thanked him for making me aware of it. I fell to my knees in a show of piety, offered up a prayer to St. Tristan, and purchased a candle, which I lit and placed beneath the window in question.

  Magnus and I then walked back up to the barracks without further discussion of this incident. As far as I can tell, he accepts my story, which is that I was named after a saint who dwelled in my part of the world 150 years ago.

  But until this incident I had no idea that there was such a thing as a St. Tristan of Dintagel recognized by the Catholic Church. Since I came back I’ve found traces of him on the Internet, but it’s all pretty sketchy and obscured by GLAAMR. I’m guessing that St. Tristan became a thing on certain Strands but not others. Any ideas, people?

  Reply from Dr. Melisande Stokes:

  On it. Will get back to you with any findings.

  It kinda sounds like Magnus set you up. Any worries on that front?

  From LTC Lyons:

  He didn’t call me out. But I won’t BS you, Stokes, it’s worrisome and I think he senses something’s weird about me. On the other hand, it’s only two weeks until the Crusaders storm Galata Tower and then we’ll be going our separate ways, so I intend to go back to the DTAP on schedule tomorrow. For me to just disappear would confirm any suspicions he might be harboring.

  From Dr. Stokes:

  Can you delay your return to C’ople? A bunch of us are working this and coming up with spotty/fluctuating results. There is heavy GLAAMR around St. Tristan of Dintagel and so we’re seeing entire Wikipedia articles warping in and out of existence. Some risk that merely Googling the name is tending to make it more real.

  From LTC Lyons:

  So what is the point of my delaying return to C’ople? Shizzle’s about to go down, you know this. We’ve been working toward it for three years.

  From Dr. Stokes:

  We can get better answers by sending some Sages back to other Strands where we think that the St. Tristan legend is more firmly entrenched. We need to know more before Sending you into a potentially messed-up situation.

  And by “messed-up situation” I mean “alternate universe in which you are a two-hundred-year-old warrior saint.”

  From LTC Lyons:

  No research needed. St. Tristan is damn well entrenched in the Strand I’m working—I already told you he has at least one stained glass window. So we have to stick with the story I told Magnus, which is that I’m simply named after him. Stokes, this is ubiquitous—almost everyone back then is named after a saint.

  LETTER ON PARCHMENT, HANDWRITTEN IN LATIN BY PROFESSIONAL SCRIBE, CONSTANTINOPLE

  JUNE 1203

  Brother Ando:

  May the Lord find you and our mother well. Upon receiving this letter please respond as swiftly as you may. I have met a valiant warrior here in Byzantium, a Varangian Guard like myself, but of a name too familiar, that is Tristan of Dintagel, which lies in England. The rantings of the Frankish priests are gibberish to me, so I care not for their saints. Nor was I ever one to listen to the songs around the hearth, but I know you were. Do you not recall a song about a great hero who hailed from a remote part of England and who had appeared suddenly in our region and fended off a tribe with whom we feuded? He was credited with saving the village and made a saint by the Christians. It strikes me as a remarkable coincidence to meet another man with such a name. There is some quality to this man that I cannot quite describe, but he seems like a man apart, as belonging to some other race.

  I wonder if there be miracles and if so, how may I make use of this one—that a hero of legend has seen fit to manifest himself within my ken, just at the moment when we are under siege by the Franks! Please respond to tell me if my memory is correct, and say as much as you can of the old legends concerning this hero. Also send news of our mother and the village if there is any.

  YOUR BROTHER,

  Magnus

  Exchange of posts by DODO staff

  on “Constantinople Theater” ODIN channel

  DAYS 1798–1805 (EARLY JULY, YEAR 5)

  Post from Historical Operations Subject Matter Authority (HOSMA) Dr. Eloise LeBrun:

  I’m just back from 1232 Paris with some results concerning “St. Tristan of Dintagel,” which I will post on this channel as I’ve time to write them up, but the executive summary is that I don’t think LTC Lyons should go back to C’ople. Has he been Sent yet? I can’t make heads or tails of the DEDE scheduling app.

  Reply from Dr. Melisande Stokes:

  He was Sent eight hours ago, and isn’t expected back for two weeks—this is where we complete the DEDE, during the Crusaders’ attack on Galata Tower @ Constantinople. What did you find?

  From Dr. LeBrun:

  Ugh, I just missed him:(

  Well, it’s all academic now, I guess.

  What I found is that on some of these Strands an oral tradition developed in the vicinity of Collinet in which the story of Tristan got inflated into a bigger and bigger yarn and eventually turned into a chanson de geste sung by various troubadours. Apparently it was popular enough that the church decided to capitalize on it by trumping him up enough to canonize him (even though there are no miracles or martyrdom attributed to him)—which is how he found his way into a stained glass window.

  From Dr. Stokes:

  On multiple Strands? But he only hit the burglar with the boat oar on one Strand!

  From Dr. LeBrun:

  Crosstalk between Strands apparently.

  From Dr. Stokes:

  Is that a thing!? Would one of our magic experts please enlighten me?

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  We’ve seen it before in creative arts settings, especially storytelling. If you think about what is going on in a storyteller’s mind when he or she spins a fictional yarn, what they are trying to do is to come up with a story that did not actually happen, but that seems as if it might have happened. In other words, it has to make sense
and to be plausible. Typically such a story makes use of real places, historical events, characters, etc. but the events of the story itself seem to take place in an alternate version of reality.

  The conventionally accepted explanation for this is that storytellers have a power of imagination that makes them good at inventing counterfactual narratives. In the light of everything we’ve learned about Strands at DODO, however, we can now see an alternate explanation, which is that storytellers are doing a kind of low-level magic. Their “superpower” isn’t imagining counterfactuals, but rather seeing across parallel Strands and perceiving things that actually did (or might) happen in alternate versions of reality.

  I think you can see where this is going, Mel. Even if Tristan smacked the burglar with the oar on only a single Strand, it’s possible that storytellers in other, nearby Strands were able to sense it or perceive it and tell the story in a compelling, convincing way. From there, the story could propagate to other Strands—including ours, where just this morning I found an entry on St. Tristan of Dintagel in Alban Butler’s original (1759) edition of Lives of the Saints, which is in our library.

  From Dr. Stokes:

  Holy crap he’s on Wikipedia now too.

  NVM he’s gone now.

  From Dr. LeBrun:

  I don’t have time to translate all of the documents from Latin and medieval French into English, but I’ll post a few snippets.

  From Dr. Roger Blevins:

  Just became aware of this thread and am skimming it.

  Am I to understand that changes have occurred, recently, on the pages of a 250-year-old book in our library!?

  From Dr. Stokes:

  Yes. There are faint traces of GLAAMR around it, according to Erszebet.

  From Dr. Blevins:

  I see. That is troubling. Not the first time diachronic magic has been troubling.

  From Dr. Stokes:

  How so, Dr. Blevins? The entire point of DODO is to change the present by doing things in the past. History books and Wikipedia entries are naturally going to change accordingly.

  From Dr. Blevins:

  Dr. Stokes, I am taking this offline, as the expression goes. Please see me in my office.

  From Dr. LeBrun:

  Here for example is a translation of a letter in clerical Latin from a village priest in Normandy to his bishop, dated 1063:

  The struggle against pagan beliefs and practices in this parish is never-ending, and tests my faith every hour of every day. Of late some of the village wives have been filling their children’s ears with a story that has spread like a grass fire from one household to the next. It is nothing more than an old saga of the Vikings, so far as I can discern. Its hero is one Tristan, a roaming Anglo-Saxon warrior of enormous strength and stature who comes to sojourn in a Norman village for a time. Peaceable by nature, he is roused to action when the village is raided by brigands, and makes an heroic stand on the shore, laying about him with a boat oar until all of the attackers have been slain. Then after accepting the gratitude of the villagers he wanders away to pursue other adventures. As you can see it is just the sort of lay that appeals to the simple minds of the common people and as such is nearly impossible to eradicate.

  There is a response from the bishop in which he says that he has heard the same story from other villages in the area, but that in some versions Tristan is a Christian man who is defending the parish church from pagans who have come to defile it and steal its reliquary. He goes on to suggest that rather than trying to stamp out this popular story, the priest should instead co-opt it by re-telling it to his flock as a tale about Christian virtues.

  Jumping forward a hundred years I found a fragment of an obscure chanson de geste. I’m dating it by its form, which fluctuates between the early style (ten-syllable assonant rhyme, in this case on short “i”) and the later one (twelve-syllable monorhyme, in this case long “i”). Here’s a few stanzas just to convey the flavor of it, although of course I’m translating for meaning not nuance. Stanzas are of variable length and most of them too water-damaged to make out. Can go back and do a more careful translation if required, including seeking possible encoded messages/references, not unheard of in this tradition:

  By the banks of the peaceful Dives Tristan reclines,

  Broad-shouldered with noble carriage and proud spirit,

  Flaxen-haired knight of Tintagel, new-pledged to Charlemagne.

  He’s come to serve our king, the servant of Jesus Christ . . .

  (about six stanzas illegible)

  Look! From the loins of his enchanting mistress at dawn he leaps

  To the alarms of the invading baleful-eyed heathens

  Who come to steal the village’s beloved relics of St. Septimus

  To dishonor its Christian spirit, a woe much worse than sin . . .

  (two dozen unreadable stanzas)

  . . . And now does noble Tristan, Charlemagne’s new paladin,

  Clap hand on oar and calling upon Our Lady’s virtues

  Use the humble oar as staff, to smite the unsanctified chins

  Of seven pagan warriors in buckram suits,

  While their gleaming wicked swords no target hit

  On Tristan’s manly, bold, courageous side . . .

  There’s about another nine hundred verses, but most are too water-damaged, and at a glance, the rest seem to be about Tristan’s service at Charlemagne’s court and later his adventures against the Moors, which presumably would justify his canonization. Will now peruse that section and let you know if anything leaps out that might click for Magnus.

  From Dr. Stephen Moore:

  Sorry to be a johnny-come-lately to this thread, but the Bodleian Library was closed yesterday and so I’ve only just been able to visit the rare books room. I was able to find traces of the Tristan legend in a letter written in 1071 to William the Conqueror. The original is, of course, in Latin but I have supplied a hasty translation, copy/pasted below, with apologies for infelicities in language.

  Greetings to my beloved monarch and cherished brother William, by the grace of God King of the English and Duke of the Normans.

  As I circuit the many manors you have seen fit to bestow upon me for my assistance at Hastings, I remain profoundly grateful for your beneficence and generosity. All are bountiful with crops and livestock, the serfs healthy and none excessively aggrieved. In all, I receive it as a tremendous boon.

  However I am sorrowful to inform you that my search for the hero-colony of Dintagel has come to naught. Dintagel, from which sprang that most renowned and admired knight Tristan, who is featured so valiantly in the Song of Collinet in its defense of the holy reliquary of the martyr St. Septimus of Pontchardon against the incursions of the heretics of Lisieux that enthralled us in our youth, has proven to be nothing but a spit of land with a ruined Roman fortress. In the nearby village of Bossiney (Boskyny), my men have asked after the fellowship of knights from which Tristan sprang, and are met universally with stupid looks from the villagers.

  There is however an abundance of sheep, which may be exploited to the profit of your majesty and the greater glory of God.

  Yours in great love and all homage,

  Robert, Count of Mortain and Earl of Cornwall

  Post by Dr. Roger Blevins to LTG Octavian K. Frink on private ODIN channel

  DAY 1805 (JULY, YEAR 5)

  Okie, this is just to give you a heads-up on a possible situation that is developing. You’ll recall a bit of unpleasantness two and a half years ago when Lieutenant Colonel Lyons went off half-cocked during a DEDE in 1045 Normandy and got into a brawl with the locals. I said at the time, and I still maintain, that this was a serious error in judgment that called his qualifications for the job into question. Well, now it looks like the chickens are coming home to roost. LTC Lyons has gone back to 1203 Constantinople to finish out the big DEDE we have been working for the last three years. That’s fine as far as it goes. Unfortunately his actions in Normandy, 160 years earlier, have had incalcu
lable reverberations, with the result that he is now revered as some combination of a romantic folk hero and Christian saint by people all over the Nordic and Christian worlds. One of the Varangian Guards at the Constantinople DTAP seems dangerously close to putting two and two together.

  No action needed or requested at this time, but I wanted to put this up on your radar just in case it blows up in our faces in a few days or weeks.

  I just finished a rather unpleasant meeting with Dr. Stokes who is reflexively defensive of LTC Lyons and doesn’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.

  Reply from LTG Frink:

  Blev, I’ve read this a couple of times and don’t see why you are so excited. I’ve spent my career running operations in places like Fallujah and Jalalabad and I’ve never seen anything go off without glitches. But you have a better grasp of these diachronic operations than I do and so I’ll take it under advisement.