“Oh,” said Erzsébet, her pleased expression falling. “I do not think I am going to like you very much.”
“I’m not advocating her philosophy, I’m just saying if you’re interested in self-serving characters, it’s a pretty good read.” Her gaze jerked toward me. She was agitated and trying to hide it, like a person trying not to scratch an itch. “Tristan was never much of a reader. I bet that hasn’t changed. How about you?”
“Mostly I read for work,” I said neutrally.
“And I already know I can’t ask you about your work. So let’s talk about something else.” She glanced around. “Where’s Tristan? Are you the forward guard? If you come out of here alive, that means it’s safe for him?”
“Your brother has many disagreeable traits, but he would never put two defenseless women in danger that way,” scolded Erzsébet.
“It was a joke,” said Robin. “Plus I don’t buy that you’re defenseless. Hey, look, do you need me to walk away and come back and we’ll try this again? I’m genuinely really stoked to meet Tristan’s people—that has basically never happened—so maybe in my excitement I am screwing this up, and I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath, then let it out. Her affect settled somewhat. “Hi, I’m Robin Lyons, I am so pleased to meet you.” She held out her hand again.
“No need,” I said. “It’s fine. Where are you staying? The reservation I made for you starts the twelfth.”
“Yeah, I asked the concierge if they could change the dates, but they’re booked,” she said. “The university’s hosting some kind of Twelfth Night music festival. No worries, I’ll figure something out.”
“I’m guessing you want to crash on Tristan’s couch until you find a room,” I said.
She cocked one eyebrow at me. “Wow. You must have a strangely normal life for somebody in black ops. That has never happened. That will never happen. That dude is paranoid, how can you not know that?”
“Why is he paranoid of you?” demanded Erzsébet.
“Not of her—for her,” I guessed.
Robin nodded. “Well, sort of. Or maybe better to say about me. Having a baby sister’s inconvenient. I signed my first NDA when I was fifteen and I still didn’t learn anything interesting. The only thing I wasn’t supposed to disclose is that he had a sister.”
“And what do you do?” I asked.
“That knife cuts both ways. If I don’t get info, I don’t give info. But I do need a decent night’s sleep, so if Tristan isn’t due to show up here in a couple minutes, I’m going to say a fond farewell and go back to cruising for last-minute cancel—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Erzsébet. “You will come and be my guest.”
“Erzsébet,” I said. “It’s not your house, you don’t have a right to make that offer.”
“Do you think Rebecca would want her roaming the streets?” Erzsébet said. “A young woman by herself with nobody to protect her, dependent on strangers for her safety?”
“That is downright twentieth century of you,” said Robin.
“Nineteenth century,” Erzsébet said breezily.
I was chewing my lower lip but made myself stop. This was certainly his sister—besides the physical resemblance, there was a familiar vibe to her. (Anyone who knows me can attest that I’m not the vibe-sensing type, but that’s the only way to describe it. As if she had Tristan’s energy, but Tristan channeled it like a laser, while hers was more like fireworks being set off by hobbyists.)
“You want me to prove I’m his sister,” said Robin. “Ask me anything. He went to West Point. Studied physics.”
“Anyone could know that.”
“His favorite color is royal blue, he played the trumpet very badly in junior high for about a minute, and he has a weakness for sugary breakfast cereals, which he eats too fast. Actually he eats everything too fast, sometimes I wonder if he even has taste buds.”
“Okay, let’s bring her back to East House,” I said (although I hadn’t known about the trumpet). “If it doesn’t work for Rebecca, we’ll find a hotel somewhere, but I’m sure you’re right, she can stay there. I’m not sure when Tristan will be back.”
I studied her expression. It struck me that although she was pleased with this development, she had not expected it. So: here was somebody who would hop a bus and show up in New England unannounced in January with no plans for where to stay. Tristan would do that, but only if there was a reason. She seemed to have done it on impulse.
“Do you need me to sign a new NDA?” she asked.
“No, because we’re not going to tell you anything about our work,” I said. “We’re just giving you a place to stay the night. You have to petition your brother about easing the separation of church and state.”
“Cool, so it comes down to dueling redheads,” she said. Her eyes, which had seemed so sharp and clear moments earlier, were now a little foggy. “Henry VIII versus Thomas Jefferson.”
Erzsébet and I looked at her blankly.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Henry VIII—church and state are the same thing. Jefferson—separation of powers. Speaking of Henry VIII,” she continued, but only to Erzsébet, “if you’re working your way through the Shakespeare canon, do yourself a favor and skip that one. Seriously. Watch The Tudors or Wolf Hall or something.”
“I don’t watch television,” said Erzsébet.
“You can stream them.”
“Are you a historian?” I asked, trying to make sense of her rambling interlocution. And also trying to figure out if she was indeed drunk.
“Depends on who you ask, I guess,” she said. “Is this East House place in walking distance?”
She was not quite drunk, but she was not quite sober either. Perhaps the rambling was due to drinking, and once she sobered up her affect would be more like Tristan’s as well. We got her back to the house without incident, and she managed to genuinely shake off whatever had distressed her when she’d noticed Erzsébet’s copy of Macbeth. She was friendly and chipper with Rebecca, thanking her heartily as she peeled off her bright red L.L.Bean vest and hung it on a peg in the hall. She grinned almost flirtatiously at Mortimer when he stuck his head out of Frank’s office, then returned her attention to her Timberland boots. Once those were off, she rubbed her arms briskly, turning in a circle to admire the ancient family portraits, ancient wallpaper, and ancient lighting fixtures in the front hall.
“Who is Inigo Jones?” asked Rebecca, reading the back of her hoodie.
“Renaissance dude,” said Robin, eyes still on the family portraits as they faded into the darkness upstairs. “Architect. Brought the Italian neoclassical style back to Britain, first guy to use Vitruvian perspective in British design. I wrote my undergraduate thesis about his work. Back when Tristan still approved of me. I don’t suppose I can take a shower?”
“Of course you can,” said Erzsébet, and led her upstairs with anticipatory descriptions of all the various flowery-smelling things in the guest bathroom.
Once she was upstairs and the bathroom door closed, the three of us—Rebecca, Mortimer, and I—exchanged looks.
“You can see a family resemblance,” said Rebecca almost fondly. “But will he be glad to see her?”
“I don’t think he’s going to. He’ll probably be gone a couple weeks. I’m going to give her a rain check, send her back to New York in the morning,” I said. With a gesture I indicated I was returning to my Macbeth research. Curled up back on the couch, I opened the laptop and my eyes raced over the small print to find the passage I’d been reading earlier:
The superstition behind Macbeth being bad luck has many supposed origins, but the oldest goes back to the first recorded performance in April 1606. According to a virulent rumor as memorialized in a tavern ballad of 1608, one of the witches’ spells was put to use immediately after the debut performance by a rumored witch, who used the charms to kill a fellow audience member as he was leaving the yard. Per the words of the ballad, “some claimed ’tw
as but a lovers’ spat, / whilst others whispered ’twas to do / with darkly occult matters that / e’en the Star Chamber feared were true.” Adding to the unsettling mystery, the audience member was a man known to nobody else in the crowd—every variant of the ballad describes him as a large, fair-haired stranger—and his death perfectly resembles Victorian-era depictions of spontaneous combustion. Cementing this story in the annals of Shakespearean conspiracy theory, Shakespeare himself (according to the ballad and all subsequent variations) was moved and shaken by the man’s death as if a kinsman had died, but, other than saying the stranger was from the Isle of Man, refused to identify him. There is no mention, in any telling, of what happened to the witch who killed him.
“What’s wrong?” asked Rebecca, shaking my shoulder.
I looked up. Rebecca, Erzsébet, and Mortimer were clumped together staring at me over the laptop, with identical worried expressions.
“You were shouting,” said Mortimer.
“When?” I managed to say.
“Just now. That’s . . . why we came in here. You were shouting.”
“Cursing,” specified Erzsébet.
I felt as if my body and my brain were in different parts of the house. I could not direct my hands to do anything. The best I could manage was a vague gesture at the laptop. Mortimer spun it around on my lap to face the three of them. They all began to read it. All of them—even Erzsébet—went pale.
“I have to go,” I said. “I have to go back there and keep him from going to the play. I can do that, right?” I asked, staring at Erzsébet. “You can Send me back to the same time you Sent him, you’ve done that before—”
“It’s dangerous,” said Erzsébet. “It’s tricky, and we don’t have the Chronotron to double-check my calculations.”
“But you can do it, right?” I demanded sharply. “You have done it.”
She shrugged in grudging acknowledgment.
“So can you Send me back to before she killed him, so that I can prevent him from being killed? Is that a thing you can do?”
She grimaced. “You people, you all are so obsessed with diachronic travel, and you keep behaving as if it is some well-worn craft we do all the time. It is an ability we have, but we do not like to use it. Like changing diapers for someone else’s baby.”
“You did it on your own the first time!” I snapped at her. “Nobody asked you to Send General Schneider back to medieval Hungary, you just did it.”
“Because it was the only tool available to me in the circumstances,” she said. “You should not treat witches as if we are cogs in a machine. You cannot expect me to be your one-stop infomercial. Some things I know because they are obvious to me. Some things I am not so clear about because I never had cause to consider them. But I suppose, theoretically, this can work.”
I looked at the other two. “I have to go back. It has to be me, right?”
Mortimer shrugged apologetically. “With Frank still on his DEDE, and Tristan gone—”
“Right,” I said, nodding. “We need one techie on site.” I looked at Rebecca. “And also one trustee, in case Blevins tries some legal maneuver to flush us out. Plus of course you want to be here for whenever Frank gets Homed. So you have to stay.”
Rebecca tried to hide her relief at this conclusion and mostly succeeded. “Who else do we have?” she mused.
“I already have some familiarity with the era, from helping Tristan research early on. I think it has to be me.”
“Aren’t you second-in-command after Tristan?” asked Mortimer.
“It’s not like we’ve had time to make an org chart,” I said.
“Maybe I can do it,” Rebecca said, because she is a champion. “Or at least”—here she grabbed Tristan’s laptop and sat in an overstuffed chair—“I can help you prep. What do we need to know?”
“To save Tristan, or to deal with the Macbeth spells?” I said, more sharply than I meant to.
“Sounds like they’re related,” said Mortimer. “I think you should follow Tristan’s trail. Go to the places he was planning to go to, talk to the people he wanted to talk to. It’s all Shakespeare-centric anyhow, right?”
“This makes sense,” said Erzsébet. “Perhaps Rose the witch can advise you when you arrive. She knows Gráinne well, so she might have a sense of what she is up to.”
“So let’s review what you need to get up to speed on,” suggested Rebecca. She was as pale as I felt, and her hands were shaking nearly as much as were mine. “Jacobean politics—”
“Not so much,” I said. “It was mostly the arts scene. He’s got lists—probably on that laptop, Rebecca—of all the actors in Shakespeare’s company, notes about where Shakespeare lived and where the theatre was. But remember after the last time, he said he was trying to do more research on a man named Edmund something? Edmund . . . I think it was Edmund Tilney—”
“You mean the Master of the Revels?” came a vibrant voice from the front hall. Pink-faced from a hot shower, the hair around her face damp, and wrapped in Erzsébet’s flowery pink bathrobe, Robin skipped into the room.
“Say what?” said Mortimer.
“I wrote a paper on him,” she said. “He’s the main reason we all know who Shakespeare is.”
“You’re a historian?” I said. “Do you specialize in Elizabethan cultural history or something?”
“Oh, it’s so much worse than that.” Robin laughed. She failed, absolutely, to pick up our collective upset. “My undergrad was a combined major in Renaissance studies and mechanical engineering. Ergo, Inigo Jones fangirl. That was okay with Tristan, especially the engineering part, of course. But then I caught the acting bug after I was cast in an OP production of Cymbeline—only time my big bro ever saw me onstage—and now, my friends”—and here she stretched her arms wide—“you are looking at a newly minted graduate of Tisch School of the Arts.”
“You’re an actor,” I said, struggling to grasp what was at once so obvious and yet so hopelessly, well, weird.
“Yep,” she said, lowering her arms. “When I was little, Tristan taught me everything there is to know about being a Boy Scout, so he’s kinda disappointed I took this route. But!” she added, holding up a triumphant finger. “I sure know my Edmund Tilney. Want a cheat sheet?”
“What’s an OP production?” I asked.
“Original post,” offered Mortimer, looking confused.
“Oh, yeah, no, Original Practice,” said Robin offhandedly, as if we were all theatre nerds and needed no context. “That’s a thing now.” And then, noticing our expressions, she seemed to realize context was required after all. So, patiently: “There’s been lots of research in the past couple decades about how they believe theatre actually happened back in Shakespeare’s time. The rehearsal process, how the actors spoke, moved around the stage, the whole nine yards. And so now it’s a thing. That’s why Shakespeare’s Globe was rebuilt in London. I did an undergrad semester abroad there. There are some companies and training programs that always present shows according to OP. Except usually they let women play some roles, which didn’t happen back then, of course. Anyhow, first time out, I was just doing it because the theatre nerds had the best parties. But then”—she snapped her fingers—“I was hooked.”
“Really?” said everyone in the room.
“That’s great,” Mortimer went on to say, at the same moment that Rebecca said, “But I don’t think—” and Erzsébet cut her off saying, “It’s her brother!”
For a beat we all stared at her.
The others glanced expectantly at me, then back at her.
“What?” demanded Robin, mystified. “What did I say?”
Post by Robin Lyons on “General” GRIMNIR channel
DAY 1992 (11 JANUARY, YEAR 6)
I’m writing this (at Mortimer’s instruction, although obv it comes from Mel) to record my understanding of wtf is going on. I am being recruited into a counterintelligence organization. Of sorts. It’s the flip side of a secret government agency
that Tristan (and Mel) helped to create and develop five years ago—the Department of Diachronic Operations—which has since been taken over by the bad guys, and so now they’re (we’re) the vigilantes, working out of a retired physicist’s basement, trying to prevent DODO from destroying the world. You couldn’t come up with that premise in the most out-there improv class.
Mortimer has excused me from explaining the bit about quantum theory (but for my own ego gratification, I’m going to give that a shot in a moment anyways). And we’ve already had a chat about DODO overall and Gráinne’s actual secret agenda that Dr. Blevins doesn’t know about, so I don’t have to go into that here. This is what I have to write about to show I understand the details:
Gráinne came forward in time around last September and seems to have started working on her anti-technology agenda actively in October. But if she’s got a comprehensive plan, she hasn’t acted on it yet. It’s a little like playing chess defensively: they are waiting to see what they have to respond to. There is a chance she hasn’t figured out her own game plan yet. She can’t do anything rash because that will lead to something called Diachronic Shear, which sounds like a holocaust (physical not historical). That’s what happens when the space-time continuum (i.e., reality) can’t adjust to accommodate too big a shift all at once. Mel says the earliest depictions of Hell come from people who had the misfortune to witness instances of Diachronic Shear.
A “Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect” (DEDE) is sorta just a jargon way to spell “deed,” since that’s what it is—your action, the thing you do. I will be “Sent” by Erzsébet to a DTAP (Destination Time and Place) to do my DEDE, and then I will be “Homed” by Rose, a seventeenth-century London witch, back to here and now to report on it. This document I’m writing is the litmus test to see if I understand the basic parameters of what I have to do. (How’m I doing so far, Mortimer?)
But first, GUESS WHAT, there’s another element to consider here. Because it turns out that, HOLY SHIT, GRÁINNE WANTS TO KILL MY BROTHER.
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