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

by Neal Stephenson

  “Diachronic Ops-misc” ODIN channel

  DAY 1943 (MONDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, YEAR 5)

  Post from Dr. Melisande Stokes:

  Checking on a DEDE assignment I just got that confuses me. In two days I’m supposed to go to San Francisco 1850 to recruit an immigrant Chinese witch there. It’s listed as a one-day DEDE, so I’ll be home in time for Thanksgiving dinner, supposedly.

  Chinese is my weakest language. We have five DOers who are fluent, three of them ethnically Chinese, at least one of those (Julie Lee) not only currently available but also (FWIW) a MUON. I’m curious why I was assigned this DEDE?

  Also, regardless of who goes, I’d like to see the Chronotron data on why we need to recruit this witch so close to July 1851. Whether the goal is to bring her forward to work as a contemporary witch, or to do some final magical adjustments in those last few months . . . why not go back several years earlier and recruit her directly from China? I’m sure that data has already been crunched by the Chronotron (cc’ing Dr. Oda and Mortimer for confirmation), but I find this puzzling.

  Reply from Mortimer Shore:

  Dr. Oda is still “on vacation” (read: getting ready for the ATTO move on Friday). I will look into all this ASAP but I am a little overwhelmed with work right now. My understanding is that Gordon Healey and Mary Case are our data-whisperers there at the moment and they’re both cool. They’re not great at communicating in regular English though. I can ask them to summarize stuff for me and I’ll get back to you about it.

  From Dr. Roger Blevins:

  Dr. Stokes,

  I understand you have reservations about your Wednesday assignment, and out of respect for your senior position within DODO, I am willing to respond to them, although it is against protocol for a DOer to question their mission. While I understand that you would like an explanation, you do not require one to do your job.

  I’ve told Mortimer Shore that—as he already knows, of course—he needs to focus his time and energies on projects that actually require his attention, so please do not expect him to follow up on his last offer to you regarding Chronotron data.

  Mel, I do realize it must be unnerving to go to a DTAP that is so close to the very end of magic. As Erszebet has recalled on innumerable occasions, she was hardly able to perform magic at all for the last year or so before the eclipse. So I have a proposal that I hope will reassure you: when you go to the San Fran DTAP, Gráinne has offered to go with you, and as soon as you’ve accomplished your DEDE (which if I recall correctly is to recruit a witch from that era), Gráinne will Send you back here immediately. She will then get back here with the help of the KCW—she’s not nearly as unnerved about the timing as you are, and is happy to make the journey if it will help you feel more secure about returning.

  So, in short: Don’t worry about it. Just do it. After all, it’s your job.

  Exchange of posts by DODO staff

  on private ODIN channel

  DAYS 1943–1944

  (MONDAY AND TUESDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, YEAR 5)

  Post from Dr. Melisande Stokes to LTC Tristan Lyons and Mortimer Shore:

  Any thoughts on this DEDE? Gráinne seems awfully cozy with Blevins lately. Also, Mortimer, are you being blocked from Chronotron data?

  Mel

  Reply from LTC Tristan Lyons:

  It’s fine, Mel. Gráinne’s resourceful, she’ll get both of you back here safely. She’s hardwired subversive when it comes to authority (I heard the coders classified her Chaotic Neutral)—she’s playing Blevins, survival instinct, force of habit. Erszebet genuinely likes her and Erszebet would not like her if she took the Gráinne/Blevins thing seriously. Gráinne’s got your back.

  If you’re still gone on Friday, I’ll have Erszebet Send me back to help you out.

  Tristan

  From Mortimer Shore:

  Hey, Mel, not being blocked, really am swamped with a sudden wave of mundane coding assignments that came unexpectedly from Blevins. Nobody else (except Oda) has the security clearance to do it and he’s busy on ATTO moving.

  I agree with Tristan. But heads-up Tristan, you can’t go back to help Mel out because you are about to get a whopper new DEDE—earliest era witch-recruitment we’ve had yet: 20,000 BC Germany. I only know because Erszebet has been surfing the wiki doing research—she needs some kind of reference point to Send you to. I turned her on to the Hohle Fels caves in the Ach Valley. Have fun! LOL

  From LTC Lyons:

  I haven’t heard anything about that, but I’ll start brushing up on my cave art. Wonder how the hell they expect me to recruit a witch who can Send me back here.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  That’s why they pay you the big bucks. See you both when you’re back from your Extreme DTAPs lol

  Peace out

  Mortimer

  PART

  FIVE

  Diachronicle

  DAY 1945 (DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, YEAR 5)

  In which the road to perdition is paved with gold

  GRÁINNE AND I HAD ARRIVED in San Francisco without benefit of the level of research to which I was accustomed. Blevins, clearly smitten with Gráinne, had allowed—one might even say encouraged—her to learn all manner of Internet searching, and she assured me that she had done all the background work for this DTAP. There were no particular skills required, it was argued, as San Francisco in 1850 was such a madcap swill of different cultures (and so extremely under-populated by women) that even if I wore pants and chewed gum I would not stand out as irregular, while no matter how prepared I was, I would still stand out for being female. Because we were so close to the end of magic, the intention was to get in and out quickly.

  As arrival was always in the nude, and this was San Francisco at the start of the Gold Rush, it was sensible to arrive in a brothel. Gráinne had chosen the Golden Mounds, right on Portsmouth Square, which was so new (having been rebuilt twice in the past year due to monstrous fires) that it still smelled of pine sap and paint, which stale beer and stale sweat had not yet masked. Imagine whatever tawdry image of Gold Rush whorehouses you like; this one was surprisingly well-appointed, despite the slapdash construction. Somebody, somewhere, had come into massive amounts of gold leaf, and the whole place glittered. You’ve surely seen the photographs of prostitutes of this era, I need not spend the ink describing them—but I was not prepared for the loud, rowdy, almost assembly-line attitude of the place. Curtains, at best, separated nooks for nookie sexual congress. There was nothing close to privacy. It was a madhouse of copulation. This made our arrival—in the corner of a large room with some eight beds all sectioned off by hanging “tapestries”—entirely unnoticed.

  We both stumbled to our knees. I recovered quickly, for I had been Sent many times. Gráinne was a little slower to shake it off—but then she was more in her element than I, and in a trice she had pinched a couple of day-dresses. Corsets and blouses generally remained on the girls, at least at this tier of low-latency prostitutional services.

  “We’ll do better to find their non-work clothes,” I said, as Gráinne tossed me the more modest of the two dresses. “Since we shall have to go out on the street.”

  “No need to dress primly here at all,” she replied cheerily. “Not for the time that’s in it. Here’s some knickers that look clean enough”—and she tossed me some linen bloomers. (Not unlike the ones I am wearing now, although these are a much finer weave and mercifully much cleaner. I must be grateful for these small blessings now.)

  We made our way downstairs and headed for the main door, when a wasp-wasted figure stepped between us and our egress. “Who are you?” demanded this older woman (dressed more as one imagines ladies dressing in the early Victorian era—so clearly the madam of the place). She aimed the query straight at me, and I, unprepared, without the usual backstory we were always careful to produce, hesitated.

  “It’s grand, ma’am, surely,” said Gráinne, with a winsome smile. “Mary it was sent us over from the other place, there
’s a ship arrived with lots of new women, and they haven’t the beds set up. If you don’t want us we’ll be striking out on our own, but we’ve heard such agreeable things about your terms. Will you take us, so? Shall we just be fetching our bags from the harborside? Pay my cousin no mind, she’s deaf and dumb.”

  The woman frowned. “Mary should know we don’t take Irish,” she said.

  “It’s a surfeit of English ladies you’ve got, is it?” Gráinne asked in a playfully disbelieving voice. And then, in an odd accent somewhere between London and Appalachian, she asked, “What if we were English, then? Would that work for your johns? We can easily be English. My cousin here, she can be anything!”

  Now the woman looked confused, but in a way that suggested Gráinne would get her way. With a brusque gesture she motioned toward the door. “Very well, then, get your things and come back, we can use the help.”

  “Help,” Gráinne quoted with a snigger, and out we went to meet the city.

  “Who’s Mary?” I whispered as we exited.

  Gráinne shrugged. “Mary’s such a common name there will always be at least one nearby. ’Tis the best name to be using when you’re counterfeiting.”

  To say that San Francisco in 1850 was a city being built on Gold Rush fever does not begin to capture the chaos, havoc, greed, and rough-hewn glamour that made up the peninsula. It had taken almost no time at all for the sharpest of the ’49ers—or Argonauts, as the tens of thousands who came by sea were called—to realize that the real money was to be made not from mining gold but from selling all manner of goods to the fellows who were trying to mine it. Shops of every conceivable sort had sprung up in buildings around the waterfront and on the route out of town—freshly built wooden buildings that (I did know this much from some hasty research) had already burned in three enormous conflagrations over the past year or so.

  I also knew from my abbreviated Googling that a fourth Great Fire would destroy a swath of the town just a few weeks after our arrival. This, in concert with my awareness that magic was soon to wane entirely, added a certain urgency to our DEDE—I was eager to accomplish it and get out quickly.

  Between credit and gold, the town was obviously, and almost dangerously, wealthy. Grand, elegant palace-like hotels and buildings were being constructed in a slapdash manner even faster than they were burning down. The building we had just exited was three stories tall and brightly painted, facing onto a large city square. I looked to either side—the entire block was a series of theatres, saloons, and inns, bustling in the bright midday sun with prostitutes, gamblers, con men, and the occasional gentleman. Given there was no easy natural source of water or wood, I cannot imagine where all the resources to do this were being obtained.

  “Amazing,” said Gráinne heartily, gazing down the hill toward the harbor—in which was moored many hundreds of tall ships. “Two years ago this was a village; now this. See all them ships? Marooned there by their crews, so they are, the crews having jumped ship to go prospecting. So it’s taking possession the city folk have done, and turned them into homes, inns, taverns, brothels, theatres, and I do believe a jail. And look, that’s where the Chinamen are living.”

  She pointed to a peculiar neighborhood of unaccountably neat and sturdy wooden homes, laid out in a grid, on a slope near the harbor. “Those houses were shipped over here from Canton, in pieces but ready to be assembled. They’re very popular and their owner is about to make a fortune. Can’t say as much for the rest of the Chinese.”

  “Where’s Xiu Li?” I asked, this being the name of the witch we were to recruit. “Since you did all the research I assume you have some idea? I guess the Chinese have brothels as well?”

  Gráinne cut me a look. “Why are you even suggesting that? Do you think all witches are prostitutes?”

  “Well, in all fairness, you—”

  “Sure wasn’t I a spy for the O’Malley!” she said with ferocity. “Prostitution was a front and didn’t I only engage in it to suit my own purposes! Anyhow,” she said, collecting herself and making a let’s-put-this-behind-us gesture, “it certainly isn’t the case here. There be no witches amongst the Chinese tarts, no witch would be finding herself in the straits those poor women are subjected to. No, our lady is right across the square there, in the fancy hotel—the St. Francis. Not much saintly about it from what I hear.” She chuckled her distinctively Gráinne chuckle, took me by the hand, and led me across the dry dirt square.

  We entered the lobby of the St. Francis—like the Golden Mounds, there was tacky, tawdry opulence everywhere, much as I imagine Vegas must look, but without the neon—and a woman unlike any Chinese witch I had expected was standing by a card table in the center of the room.

  Xiu Li was tall and elegant, almost gentlemanly, feet unbound (although I noticed when she walked that she walked stiffly). Her dress was an ingenuous blend of Oriental and Western that revealed just enough flesh to make a gentleman inclined to stare, and yet concealed enough that she could, technically, pass as modest, at least here.

  She was watching the card game, and at a certain point, she settled upon the arm of one player’s chair. She moved with the demure grace of a geisha pouring tea, and yet at the same moment somehow with brazen confidence as well. She was beautiful and spellbinding.

  Literally, spellbinding.

  She was helping her companion cheat at cards.

  For a few moments, we watched the card game. Xiu Li’s companion was also Chinese—a gentleman with short hair, cut in the Western style. There were three other players, all white men, one young, two chubby and older. Standing back from the table were an assortment of servant-ish types, including a Chinese man with long hair in a queue.

  “’Tis a weak magic here,” said Gráinne under her breath at last. “She’s using soft magic to influence their choices, rather than what I’d do in her place, change the order of the cards in the deck.” I recalled Erszebet lamenting on the cheap parlor tricks she’d been forced to perform to earn her keep, back in . . . well, just about now, actually. What an odd thought, that at this very moment Erszebet was a young witch somewhere in Eastern Europe, innocent to all that lay ahead.

  We watched the game to its completion—that is to say, to her partner’s satisfaction—and then without hesitation, Xiu Li turned with radiant grace and walked elegantly directly toward us. She greeted Gráinne as if a friend she knew attended her. Not surprising, as I have come to understand that witches recognize each other in subtle ways.

  “You are no witch,” the tall elegant woman said to me.

  “Along for the ride with me, she is. Gráinne I am by name, and this is Melisande, and you are Xiu Li.”

  Xiu Li smiled, her teeth small opalescent pearls. “Yes.”

  “We’ve a proposition for you,” said Gráinne. “Be there a place to talk in private?”

  “There is a room upstairs,” said Xiu Li. “I do most of my business there.”

  I confess deep curiosity to know what her business was, but as Gráinne was clearly the lead DOer here, I satisfied myself with following along quietly. We headed for a wooden staircase.

  It seemed to me that somebody was following us up the stairs, and sure enough, at the top, we were stopped by a Caucasian gentleman who had been just behind us. “Hey, Shirley,” he said, mispronouncing her name in a nasal voice. “Introduce me to your friends here.” He had a flat accent, akin to what I would in my own time describe as midwestern.

  “We talk first, and then we talk to you,” said Xiu Li, with cold friendliness.

  “Hi, I’m Francis Overstreet,” he said, offering his hand to Gráinne, and then to me.

  “St. Francis, is it?” Gráinne smiled.

  “Hardly,” he said, in much the same tone. “Although I am the proprietor of this fine establishment. And as Miss Shirley here knows, when courtesan services are being established, I not only get a cut, but I get to sample the wares.” He turned a leering eye to the two of us, and, determining at once which was more leer-wor
thy, he winked at Gráinne. I confess a certain relief. If he were not handsome, his demeanor would be utterly repugnant. But he was a man in the prime of life, fine looking, his face intelligent. A portrait of him would suggest a man of integrity and dignity. So the leer was more disorienting than disgusting.

  Gráinne was already giving him an inviting smile. “After supper?” she suggested. “I’ve some errand to run before that.”

  “My dance card is otherwise empty.” He smiled back.

  “Oh good,” I said, nudging Gráinne slightly, as I realized that expression would mean nothing to her.

  “Oh good,” she echoed. “Invite a friend,” she added, pushing me slightly toward him.

  He looked nonplussed: further confirmation I was the less delectable morsel.

  Francis Overstreet trotted back down the stairs to oversee his glamorous den of iniquity, as Xiu Li led us a short way down the corridor to a small room made all round of sanded wooden planks, with admirably clean windows, that looked out over the square.

  “Your business?” she asked coolly.

  “Magic’s dying off,” said Gráinne matter-of-factly. “I’m sure you’ve felt it.”

  After a sober, studied pause, Xiu Li nodded once. “I have. I wondered if it was to do with being in this new world that has no history or civilization.”

  “It has plenty of history,” I corrected her. “The native people have had witches and magic all along. But they are feeling the loss as well. Everyone is.”

  “In fact,” continued Gráinne, “we are about to lose magic entirely.”

  Xiu Li’s eyes opened wide. She did not speak.

  “But that is temporary,” I amended. “Many years from now, in the future, magic is restored and used in a very different way in society. We are here to encourage you to come forward with us to a time when magic will be strong again. There are some caveats, but it will be far better than being stuck here in this time and place, especially as a Chinese woman.”