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

by Neal Stephenson

  From Tristan Lyons, 13:24:

  ????

  From Esme Overkleeft, 13:26:

  Keeping her safe. Got any weapons in there?

  From Tristan Lyons, 13:28:

  Tossed them overboard, as you just instructed.

  From Esme Overkleeft, 13:30:

  Hmm . . . how’s your hand-to-hand combat skills?

  From Tristan Lyons, 13:32:

  A little rusty, frankly. Fortunately I have Felix to practice on. Or vice versa.

  ALTHOUGH THERE IS NO LONGER need of it, I suppose out of habit I shall write this in a tone akin to the Diachronicle, that is to say, in accordance with the literary inflections of my most recent (and enforced) DTAP.

  I fell through fragrant darkness, and fell tumbling hard to ground on a painfully cold, metallic floor that shook and rumbled as if it were a truck being pulled down a country road somewhere, which meant—the ATTO! I had arrived! I was safe!

  —No, I wasn’t!—there were three figures grappling violently above me in the eerie amber-green glow of the ATTO. Their efforts caused the rumbling. Two were clothed, and they were fighting with a third who was naked.

  And who was winning.

  “Stokes! Turn it off! TURN . . . IT . . . OFF . . .”

  Tristan’s voice was familiar even though sounding a little strangled: as my eyes focused I saw that he was in a headlock, his neck crooked in one of the naked man’s massive arms. With his free hand, the man was swatting away Felix Dorn with an almost casual air. The stranger had tangled blond hair tumbling down over his shoulders, and a reddish beard. He was immense.

  Being Sent is no picnic in the best of circumstances, and being in a working ODEC is always disorienting. I forcefully tamped down the part of me that wanted to celebrate my return to the modern world, trying to focus on the fact that my friends were losing a fight to a man-mountain . . . and trying to remember how the ATTO was laid out. I’d never had much to do with the ATTOs, as they were for psy-ops and I had always remained focused on diachronic work.

  Still keeping Tristan’s neck in the crook of his arm, the Viking (I assumed he was a Viking) came toward me at a ponderous gait, kicking empty water bottles out of the way as he planted his feet. Tristan was flailing out, trying to grab anything that would serve as an anchor. Felix fell to his knees, staggered by an elbow to the face. The Viking’s gaze was fixed on something behind me. I turned and saw the control panel at the forward end of the ATTO.

  I scrambled on hands and knees in that direction, hurled myself toward the panel, and mashed the big red button that served as the emergency “off” switch.

  My own momentum then sent me sprawling back to the icy-cold floor, my head clearing now that the system was shut down. I drew myself up into a fetal position, spun around, and watched the progress of the fight.

  Felix’s face was gushing blood, probably from a broken nose. He was getting unsteadily back to his feet, and seemed to have his eye on a fire extinguisher bracketed to the wall at the other end of the ATTO.

  Tristan had managed to reach up and get one hand on the Viking’s face, and was now groping around trying to insert a finger in an eye or mouth, but the Viking kept jerking his head away. Tristan finally got purchase on a handful of Viking hair, but it was a feeble grip compared to what the other had on him.

  I was struck by the Viking’s calm patience. This was not a berserker—indeed, he seemed more like a parent controlling a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum.

  The door of the ATTO was flung open from without, and slanting sunlight flooded in. Backlit and framed in the entrance was a female form; the ATTO light showed her to be a middle-aged woman, wearing a simple housedress with a heavy cardigan over it. She was brandishing a long, double-barreled shotgun. Her breath came out like clouds. I smelled apples baking.

  There was a long moment while we all considered matters. The woman with the shotgun was clearly as surprised by the situation inside the trailer as we were by her sudden appearance. Certainly she had a lot to take in.

  Felix stopped moving for the fire extinguisher and held up his bloody hands. Tristan couldn’t see what was happening. I watched the woman between the tree-trunk legs of the Viking, whose manhood hung down, somewhat obscuring my view. I do believe this organ contracted a smidge when the woman trained the shotgun at him. (In fairness, the cold winter air coming in the open door may have accounted for some of that.) Certainly the gun got his attention: this wasn’t the first time he’d seen a modern firearm. This confused me, for I knew all the DODO Anachrons by sight, and he was not one of them.

  The sunlight glanced off his shoulder, highlighting a red scar—fresh and angry-looking—cutting horizontally across one of his cannonball deltoids.

  The woman demanded, “Relâchez-le immédiatement!” Then getting no reaction, she tried in English, “Leave him go!”

  Tristan, hearing her voice (he couldn’t see the door), said in a strangulated voice, in Norman, “She has a bang-stick!”

  This was the moment I realized the man probably was a Viking, so I tried Old Norse (a recent, somewhat half-baked addition to my linguistic arsenal). “Whoever you are, that thing will kill you.”

  The Viking released Tristan so abruptly that Tristan fell to the floor. The Viking turned around to face me, then reached up and patted the scar on his shoulder. “I know it,” he returned in Norse. “A coward hit me with one of those accursed weapons in the Walmart.”

  “Walmart?” I repeated, flummoxed. “What were you doing in a Walmart?”

  Tristan made a brief sound that might have been coughing or might have been laughter. “Welcome back, Stokes,” he said. “You have a lot to get caught up on.”

  THE ATTO HAD been plonked down in the yard next to the same Normandy farmhouse whence I’d been Homed in 1851. Very little about the property had changed: there were now telephone wires connected from the road; a satellite dish; a sign reading CHEZ ENVOUTEUR, a bed-and-breakfast.

  The woman had run inside to fetch ice for Felix’s nose, and white terry bathrobes for me and the Viking, who called himself Thord (the woman, Tristan said, was Anne-Marie).

  I waited for my bathrobe to arrive while burying my face against Tristan’s chest. I never wanted to let go of him, and his arms gripped me tight. Having just been steeped in Victoriana for the past several weeks, I noted that his delight in seeing me once again (important detail: seeing me entirely unclothed for the first time ever) was reflected in every inch of his healthy and vigorous frame, not excluding the matrimonial organs bestowed upon him by the Creator for the propagation of the race. I put my arms around the small of his back and pulled him into me, just to give him a hint that I had noticed.

  Pressing my head into his shoulder, he muttered, “Damn, I’m glad to see you.”

  “Yes,” I said, then pulled away and looked right at him, eye to eye, nose to nose. “I can tell.”

  He reddened a little, then a lot, then he started laughing and pulled me back against him.

  We had been avoiding this for five years. Time to sort it out.

  BUT NOT IMMEDIATELY. This was France, so first we all had to go inside for coffee, Felix trying to avoid water from leaking onto his jeans as he iced his swelling face. Anne-Marie offered me a woolen dress, which I accepted gratefully. She was nervous about Thord until Tristan took her aside and explained to her that “our Viking friend” would be docile now.

  Most of the farmhouse’s ground floor was one great room, kitchen at one end, dining space at the other, the whole of it spanned with a huge plank table that looked like it was a thousand years old. We sat at one end of this as Anne-Marie prepped food and drink just beyond the other end.

  Over croissants and tartine (which of course Tristan practically inhaled without tasting), Tristan and Felix caught me up on all the dazzling adventures and misadventures I had missed while I was in San Francisco and London, the chief topics of conversation being: the Walmart raid; the ATTO heist shenanigans; and word from Frank that
a shipment of high-temperature superconductors had just appeared on the doorstep of the East House. (Given that the Fuggers owned the company, this put us in their debt.) To bring me up to the minute, there was this further summation: Frank was busy wiring up the superconductors in his cellar to create an ODEC; Julie had rented a hotel suite in Le Havre and was staying there to ensure a base of operations near the port; Rebecca and Mortimer were even now joining her there from their sundry deployments; and Esme was expected to arrive in Le Havre at any moment from Jersey.

  Thord, amazed by the first-time effects of caffeine, was pacing agitatedly around the farmhouse (by around I mean circumambulating it barefoot despite the winter chill). Anne-Marie had fairly decent English, and as she moved from our end of the room to hers, she seemed so unfazed by what she was overhearing that I assumed (correctly) Tristan had already told her more than the average abettor would know.

  “So if I’ve got this all straight,” I said, “now that you’ve stolen the ATTO from the Fuggers who stole it from Magnus who stole it from DODO, the Fuggers are wondering what became of what they thought would be their ATTO.”

  Tristan nodded. “From their point of view, it vanished from the container port in Le Havre. They had a tractor-trailer ready and everything. They were expecting to tow it away from there and take it to . . . who knows where.” He waved his hand vaguely toward the interior of France. “Someplace safe, anyway. We still don’t know who their witch is.”

  “It’s rather unsportsmanlike of us to deprive them of an ODEC on the heels of their making it possible for us to build our own.”

  “Sportsmanship is for sportsmen,” muttered Felix, a bit nasally with the ice pack pressed to his face.

  “Anyhow, it was all happening at the same time an ocean apart and we’re telling you to come here, so we had to be here,” Tristan added.

  “What do you mean, telling me. You’ve already told me.” Then I realized something didn’t make sense. “Wait—how did you Send Mortimer back to tell me to come here?”

  “We haven’t yet,” said Tristan. “Julie’s going to Send him when they get here.” Seeing the look on my face he added, “I know, it’s pretty freaky, don’t think about it too much.”

  “I can’t even . . .” I shook my head. “Never mind. So who’s Thord, and what’s his involvement in all this?”

  “Yes,” said Anne-Marie suddenly, from the kitchen area. “Who is Thord?”

  “He’s obviously one of the Vikings Magnus recruited,” said Felix. “But no idea why he’s here now.”

  “We could just ask him. I don’t think he’s used to coffee,” Tristan joked.

  Tristan went outside to collect Thord, still clad in his terry bathrobe (which somehow simply made him seem even more naked). He arrived inside staring wide-eyed at the exotic domestication of the great room. Anne-Marie—whom he regarded with the greatest respect, even fear—gestured to the end of the bench, which he plopped down onto wordlessly and quickly, like a chastised child. I told him my name, and asked if we might interview him, explaining that Tristan and I both had limited abilities to speak his language (which had linguistic ties to what Tristan had learned in these very fields, when they were still woods, a thousand years ago). He agreed, and began by confirming Felix’s assumption.

  “When we returned to Sverdvik after the raid, I was the only one without the scars in my back,” Thord said. “This was because I had been injured by the bang-stick. I said to Magnus, ‘Fuck you and your plan, Magnus, I did not want to come in the first place and now look.’ So I did not let them carve maps in my back because I knew that I would then be part of his plan forever.”

  Anne-Marie had cleared the coffee and pastries, replacing them immediately with beer, and now was setting out plates of charcuterie and a fresh loaf of bread, which Thord began tearing into at an impressive pace. He chewed for a few moments, gazing out the window at the sun on the trees, while I translated for Felix (and Anne-Marie, who was swapping out ice packs for Felix’s nose). Thord swiveled his blue-grey eyes back to us, washed the bread down with a swig of beer, and continued: “Magnus after that began to have dreams. They were dreams of his past—of his boyhood in Normandy and his days as a Varangian Guard. But in every single one of those dreams, his life was cut short by murder. He consulted a witch who explained that he was in fact seeing other Strands, and that on each and every one of those Strands, the young Magnus had in fact been assassinated by agents sent back in time by his enemies. Magnus became like ice on a frozen river when it is being melted from below by the warming water of the coming spring, and becomes thin and brittle and you can almost see through it.” Having delivered this poetic metaphor, Thord belched, sighed, and speared a slice of ham. “He understood that he would cease to exist entirely, or be turned into a mere wraith, unless he made an alliance with others skilled in Sending and Homing. Thus he had the witch Send him forward to the ODEC in Boston. There, of course, he found himself in the power of Gráinne, who was most angry with him, but also satisfied, in a way, that Magnus had come crawling back to ask for her help.”

  After another pause for him to eat (and belch) and me to translate, Thord continued: “Gráinne and Magnus made a pact to fight the Fuggers and get this ATTO back in their possession.” He waved in the direction of the yard. “Magnus cannot do magic, but he can fight, and is a good leader. Gráinne can do magic, but only in an ODEC, and she is otherwise helpless and weak in this world of Walmarts and so on. So, they could help each other. Magnus supplies muscle so that Gráinne can get things done. In exchange, he becomes rich by raiding gold from wherever he chooses to go, back in the old days. So, Magnus came back to Sverdvik saying, ‘The Fuggers have stolen the ATTO from us, now we are going to steal it back, I need volunteers.’”

  Tristan nodded. “Gráinne, through Blevins of course, made arrangements to fly ATTO #2 over to Portsmouth on a cargo plane. Magnus and a bunch of Vikings manifested in that ATTO yesterday—those must have been his volunteers from Sverdvik.”

  Thord listened to my translation of this, then nodded. “He tried to recruit me. I repeated to him that he could go fuck himself. The others went, as you said. They would cross from England to Normandy on a big ship and then follow the ATTO from Le Havre to the fortress of the Fuggers, wherever it might be, and then slaughter them and get it back. Or perhaps hijack it en route.” He shrugged. “Like we do.”

  “But the plan failed,” Tristan prompted him, as I quietly translated for Felix.

  “The plan failed, as you know, because you stole the ATTO and so it did not go onto the wagon that the Fuggers had waiting but instead departed by some other way. There was a big mess, and what it came down to was that Magnus begged me to solve his problem for him. ‘When the ATTO is turned on—which it must be, so that they can save the woman Melisande—then you, Thord, can be Sent there at the same moment. They will try to turn it off as soon as they have Melisande back. You must prevent them from hitting the red button. Then we can Send more fighters, and witches, and fill the whole ATTO with our people in a short period of time, and then it will be ours. It’s just a bit of wrestling, after all, and you’re good at that.’”

  I saw a little grimace on Tristan’s face, and a shake of the head, which I took to mean: Actually you’re a crap wrestler, you’re just overwhelmingly strong.

  “This plan almost worked, as you saw,” Thord continued. “But when I saw Anne-Marie with the bang-stick pointed at me, I thought to myself, ‘Fuck this, I have a wife and children in Iceland, I don’t need to pry any more bang-stick rocks out of my body or even perhaps die just to make everything perfect for Magnus.’ So now I will just wait here in this future until someone can Home me.”

  At this moment we heard car tires crunching the gravel on the drive outside.

  “That’ll be Julie,” said Felix. “She can Home Thord.”

  “She should take you to the hospital first,” said Tristan. “So you stop bleeding all over Anne-Marie’s furniture.”

&nbs
p; “It’s just a broken nose,” said Felix. “I can go to the local walk-in clinic.”

  Tristan gave him a look, which he did not see because the ice pack obscured it. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s one car, and it has to end up back in Le Havre. Go the hell to Le Havre.”

  Felix was so startled by Tristan’s intensity that he removed the ice pack to give Tristan a WTF bro? look. Tristan immediately stared at the floor. Felix glanced at me, then back to Tristan, back to me. He looked around the room, noting who else was here—just Thord—and figured it out.

  “Right, I should go to Le Havre,” he said. “Julie can Home Thord tomorrow.”

  “Right, by tomorrow morning everyone will have congregated in Le Havre and you can all pile in the car and come back out here together,” said Tristan in a rapid monotone, as if needing to rationalize being alone with me overnight as nothing more than a matter of logistics.

  DEAR READER: It was not a matter of logistics. But you knew that.

  When you know something is going to happen but it hasn’t happened yet, there is a surfeit of tension, both pleasurable and otherwise. So it was for several awkward moments, as Julie came in to greet us, registered my presence—and Thord’s—and helped Felix into the car. She was about to ask if I wanted to return with her to Le Havre—Tristan alone needed to stay here, to handle Thord—but then she, like Felix, understood the circumstances, and turned her head away trying to hide a delighted little smirk.

  Tristan felt compelled to see the Viking settled in for the evening, to unburden Anne-Marie of her hostess duties. She vanished into her private rooms, clearly relieved.

  Other than the room where Thord was to stay overnight, there were two guest bedrooms upstairs. They both had double beds. I chose the cozier room with one small dormer window. I half-closed the door and turned off the lamp, leaving the small nightlight on. I began to undress, then hesitated, feeling self-conscious, and sat on the bed, waiting.

  Eventually I heard Thord’s door open and shut, and Tristan’s slow footfall on the landing between rooms. Seeing the dim light from my room, he entered and stood in the doorway. Ever the gentleman. Even when I did not wish him to be so.