Master of the Revels

by Nicole Galland

  While the water was boiling, I summoned those I knew I could reach: Mel’s apartment is not far from East House (she’s between Sicily Strands); Mortimer was at practice in a friend’s martial arts studio; Erzsébet was giving herself a manicure in her room (edit: while listening to an audiobook of Anna Karenina, I am commanded to add). The others—Julie, Felix, and Esme—I did not call, as we’ve decided the smaller our central corps is, the easier it would be to maintain clear communication channels and adapt to dangers quickly. (At the moment the central corps is arguably too small, but this sounded too urgent to take the time to bring those three up to speed.)

  Less than a quarter hour later, the digital trip-wire alarm clarioned Mel’s arrival, and Mortimer was right behind her. As they entered, shaking slush from their boots and hanging up their jackets, Robin waited in Frank’s office, fidgety, her eyes darting around the room until we all entered and settled. She was kneeling at the coffee table with a pile of origami paper, a dozen of which she had already folded into intricate shapes—a mini-parachutist, a clutch of dragonflies (or maybe hang gliders?), chains of abstract geometric spirals, and several modular pieces, especially icosahedrons. She was continuing to fold, almost feverishly, without once glancing at her hands as they worked.

  “Something was different this time,” she said, looking up at all of us. “I hope it’s nothing, I really hope it’s nothing, but I don’t think it is, and I thought it was important to come right back and let you know.”

  “What was different?” asked Mel. Her tone held the slightest soupçon of disbelief, as if she assumed Tristan’s impassioned little sister was overreacting to something.

  “Tilney puts me on inventory my first day. Always happens. He doesn’t really need me to do that—it’s busywork to justify hiring me, because I’m Shakespeare’s cousin, whatever, it’s fine. But this time, the inventory was different. The reflector lantern wasn’t there.” She gave us a spooked, expectant look.

  “What’s a reflector lantern?” I asked.

  “That’s what Tilney said!” She glanced very briefly at the origami paper, adjusted something, and then looked back up at us as she continued to fold it. “It’s not just that there was no lantern in their inventory—it’s that, according to the Master of the Revels, the dude who knows literally everything there is to know about everything in that building, there is no such thing as a reflector lantern.”

  “Maybe he knows it by a different name on that Strand,” said Mortimer.

  “Tried that,” she retorted. “Riflettore, spot, reflector. I described what it does—he thought it was a great idea, but that it surely must require some help from witches to accomplish it, because on this Strand, it’s not a thing. It doesn’t exist.”

  “Okay, that’s worth taking note of,” said Mel. She opened the laptop on Frank’s desk and began to type. “It’s too primitive a technology for Gráinne to feel threatened by, but still, it’s a significant change in a DTAP we know she’s already targeting, so it’s good to have that data. Thank you. Did you finish your DEDE?”

  “Of course. That part all went as usual. Tilney found me uppity, and he was running out of patience with me, but I kept questioning him because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t jumping to conclusions, and I’m not. Not only had he not heard of the reflector lamp, he hadn’t heard of its inventor.”

  Mortimer’s eyebrows went up. “Oh,” he said. “Wow!”

  “Yeah, see?” she said impatiently. “No variation of his name, not one notable accomplishment or invention, rang a bell with Tilney, and Tilney is somebody who would know about him.”

  “Know about who?” demanded Mel.

  Robin tossed the newly finished origami form onto the carpet: a primitive helicopter. “On the Strand I just came from,” she said, “Leonardo da Vinci does not exist.”

  Part

  Two

  Post by Rebecca East-Oda on “Gráinne/DODO Alert” GRIMNIR channel, marked URGENT (cont.)

  “That must explain the Florence DTAP,” Mel said. “She can’t kill off somebody that significant without triggering Diachronic Shear, so she’s trying to interfere with the fate of his forebears, to prevent his being born.”

  “Is that somehow safer?” I asked, skeptical.

  “Safer than murdering him,” said Erzsébet, “but not safe.”

  Mel turned back to the laptop on Frank’s desk. “All right, I’m going to research whatever we have on GRIMNIR about da Vinci’s family background.” Shifting to Mortimer: “Tell Chira to access any archived data about him at DODO HQ—see if she can find a genealogical connection to that estate. Hard to believe Gráinne would do something so foolhardy.”

  “You think she is some omniscient genius supervillain,” said Erzsébet. “She isn’t. She is a very smart witch with exceptional powers, but she has only been in this century for five months and has the education of a sixteenth-century Irishwoman.”

  “She was a committed autodidact from the moment she arrived here,” I countered. “And she’s savvy. This would be uncharacteristically sloppy for her.”

  “She should have started as close to 1851 as possible and moved backward, not the other way around,” said Mel. “She should have started with Daguerre, or the photo of the eclipse.”

  “I agree,” said Erzsébet. “And when she had me in her confidences, I believed that was her intention.”

  “Maybe she’s been at this longer than we know,” I suggested, “and she’s already effected shifts that we can’t even realize have happened.”

  Mortimer shook his head. “Nothing about photography has shifted.”

  “Nothing that we can be aware of,” corrected Mel. “It would be arrogant of us to assume we will always be aware of changes made.”

  “She’s not being methodical,” I said.

  “This surprises you?” asked Erzsébet.

  “She’s chaotic neutral—or I guess now she’s chaotic evil,” Mortimer explained to Robin, and Robin nodded.

  “She is chaotic, but she is canny,” amended Erzsébet, also delivering this to Robin. “She has very clever ideas. However, her magic is so excellent that when she is not relying on it, she forgets she is not perfect. Luckily for all of you, I don’t make this mistake. On the rare occasions I am not perfect, I admit it.”

  “All right, hold on,” said Mel. “Let’s put a pin in the Leonardo issue until we’ve done more research. That’s what Tristan would advise for now. Thank you for reporting in, Robin, but you need to go back to 1606 London until we get Tristan home safe. Erzsébet, check the Macbeth script—”

  “I have been doing this already,” she said, waving the book in Mel’s direction, opened to a dog-eared page. “And it is not back to the correct version. And now we have tried three Strands, which I calculated was how many times it was necessary.”

  “Any idea why you might have been wrong?” asked Mortimer, which was so cack-handed of him that Mel’s foot actually twitched as if to kick him.

  “I am not wrong,” said Erzsébet, giving him her Hungarian glower. “It means that things are in flux, that perhaps Gráinne is Wending and is winning the numbers game you spoke of before. Or it means perhaps that something else has happened, on another Strand, that has changed all the variables. But. If I calculate three Strands, and then it doesn’t work within three Strands, this means try something else.”

  “That sounds doable,” said Robin. She was already halfway through another origami figure—a unicorn, by the look of it. She sat more upright, her back naturally straight and long like her brother’s, but her bearing not as rigid. Everyone looked at her in surprise. She mirrored our expressions. “I don’t mean I have any ideas,” she clarified. “That’s your department. I don’t write the script, I just perform it.”

  “There are no departments,” said Mel. “There is no script. Everyone wears lots of hats, especially without Tristan here. You’ve been back there, you have the most familiarity with what’s what. Give us your insight. You’re our onl
y expert.”

  She pouted thoughtfully, while her hands continued to work the paper. “So . . . on a practical level, maybe we’re looking at the wrong manuscript. Most of the audience was illiterate, so buying copies of scripts wasn’t really a thing, although it did happen a little. In fact . . . okay, let’s think about this for a moment . . .” She leaned forward, back still very straight, a bright intensity to her face. “Gráinne wants the spells to exist in scripts that people are going to own and read in the future. Post-1606, all the way up till now. Right?”

  “That’s the hypothesis,” I said. “That she wants to embed the spells where they will be accessible to other witches as magic wanes.”

  “Okay, so the good news is, she got that part wrong. She shouldn’t bother with the original script in 1606. The only people who ever saw that were Shakespeare and Tilney and a few of their peeps, like the prompt man.”

  “And the actors, obviously. But what happened to it after 1606?” Mel asked.

  “No, actually, the actors each got only his own individual part written out on a roll. Nobody got a copy of the whole script. That physical book, with Tilney’s stamp on it, is the property of the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatre company. It’s the only copy in existence, and only the prompter uses it, at rehearsals. The Revels Office didn’t keep backups. So here’s the thing.” Her face glowed the way Tristan’s does when he talks physics with Frank. “Some popular scripts were published as little stand-alone booklets, called quartos. But Macbeth was never published that way. The first time anyone could read the whole script of Macbeth—read it, buy it, keep it in their library—wasn’t until the first printed collection of all Shakespeare’s plays came out. In 1623.” Seeing our expressions, she said offhandedly, “Thanks for looking impressed, but any Shakespeare nerd would know that. Anyways, for Gráinne to control what people in the future would know of Macbeth, she should have gone to 1623 and altered that collected work, the First Folio. The Folio is what we need to control.”

  “Good work,” said Mel. Robin’s face flushed with pleasure. “So we’ll Send you to 1623 and you adjust the Folio as needed.”

  Robin grimaced. “That won’t work. The men who put the First Folio together, Heminge and Condell, are actors in the King’s Men, and they’ve just met a young Robin Shakespeare in 1606. I can’t show up seventeen years later the same age. Someone else has to do it.”

  “Just a minute, though, I want to make sure I’ve got it straight,” I said. “The King’s Men kept the actual, physical script—it’s called the prompt copy?”

  “Sure, or promptbook, playbook, manuscript,” said Robin, waving her hand.

  “And it sat in their storehouse, until it went directly to the printer to be typeset?” I pressed. “Because in that case, it’s perfectly sensible of Gráinne to change the original script. And what you should do—as Robin Shakespeare—is alter the script by rewriting those scenes back to their original language while it is in storage with the King’s Men between 1606 and 1623.”

  “It’s not that straightforward,” said Robin. “First of all, they performed it many times, so the script might have been taken out of storage. But really by 1623, plenty of the promptbooks were missing. The copies Tilney stamped weren’t always around. They might have been destroyed when the Globe burned down around 1613, or been stolen, or just mildewed away since the Globe was built on practically a swamp. Sometimes scripts were pirated and then the pirated scripts might be altered. It was the Wild West of IP.”

  “So when the originals were missing or compromised, what was the source material for this Folio compendium?” Mel asked.

  Robin nodded. “Yeah, so Heminge and Condell—the actors who put it together—had to reconstruct a bunch of the scripts from memory, with help from the other actors. Sometimes an actor would still have his role from a show he did years earlier—but like I said, the role was literally a roll of paper, with just his part.”

  “So how can we track the text of Macbeth from Tilney’s office to the printed Folio?” asked Mel, a raggedy impatience shading her tone. “When are the gaps that we could surgically insert you into?”

  Robin shook her head. “That’s what Tristan’s peeps call a known unknown. I’m game to go back to try again with the original, but I’m not your man if you need somebody in 1623, because I’ve already been your boy in 1606. All I can tell you, if it’s helpful, is that Macbeth was never pirated like, say, Hamlet was. Before the Folio, there were several different Hamlets floating around London. There was only one Macbeth.”

  “Well, there’s your answer then,” said Mortimer, scratching his beard thoughtfully. “Go back to 1606 and pirate Macbeth.”

  She stopped folding the origami and gave him a curious look, as did we all.

  “Pirate it,” he repeated, as if his meaning was obvious. “Start with the script Tilney stamped—the one with Gráinne’s spells—but have the King’s Men perform a pirated version that doesn’t have Gráinne’s spells. Gráinne stole it from you on paper? Steal it back from her in performance.”

  “What does that accomplish?” I asked.

  But Robin was immediately on the same page with him. “Oh my God, of course!” she said, her eyes darting. “Shakespeare rips off his own script. Yes. Okay.” Having finished the unicorn, she tossed it onto the pile and started a new form. “This is how it goes. There’s the version with Tilney’s stamp and Gráinne’s spells, and everyone’s rolls are written out using that script, so on paper it’s all aboveboard. But then, in performance, the actors playing the witches say something different, they don’t say Gráinne’s spells, they only speak the words that Shakespeare originally wrote—”

  “Right,” said Mortimer.

  “But that doesn’t change the text that will be used to print the Folio,” objected Mel, her impatience edging closer to the surface, but Robin shook her head and plunged on.

  “Then, the prompt copy gets disappeared, and so do the witches’ rolls—I’ll make sure that happens, that’s a new DEDE. The company has to rewrite the whole thing from memory. And what they will remember is what they heard.”

  “Bingo,” Mortimer said, smiling.

  “If we make sure that they only hear innocuous spells, then they will only remember innocuous spells, and then they will only print innocuous spells.” She smiled gratefully and winked at Mortimer. “Sweet hack, dude!”

  Mortimer actually blushed.

  “Doesn’t Tilney have to give his stamp of approval to a rewritten play?” I asked.

  She moved her head in an animated gesture, something between a shrug and a shake of her head. “The actors, it’s assumed, can be relied on to re-create the same play verbatim, like opera singers reprise a role. It would never occur to Tilney that actors might go off script like that. Anyways, he’s never going to see it in performance—Queen Anne’s keeping him too busy staging masques.”

  Mel asked, “Once Gráinne realizes the actors aren’t saying what she wants them to, what stops her from just showing up at the next performance and using magic to influence them to say her lines?”

  Robin paused from her paper folding and half raised her hand. “Remember when you were explaining to me about the multiverse and the role that perception plays in all this? Like the reason magic stopped in 1851 at the moment one specific photograph was taken of the solar eclipse. It’s because so many people were staring at the eclipse at the same moment. Or the reason that you can Send a sentient being through time but not an inanimate object. Because perception is a part of the equation, not just the cold hard fact of space dust. Right?”

  “Close enough,” I said.

  “By that token,” continued Robin, returning to her origami, a second unicorn, “the first public performance of Macbeth is like that eclipse photo. If enough people see it and remember it, then it is reality. Gráinne would have to change the perceptions and memories of everyone in the original audience who heard it the original way. She sounds pretty powerful so she can probably
do that, but that’s gotta be labor-intensive and she has a lot on her dance card right now. Is it really a good return on the investment of magical output it would take to identify and enthrall all thousand-odd people who were at the first performance?”

  A long pause. We were all sneaking looks at Mel, wanting her to continue her reluctant role as Tristan’s proxy.

  “All right,” she said at last, trying to sound as confident as he always managed to. (Obviously she didn’t quite succeed at this, or I wouldn’t have noticed how hard she was trying.) “Given all the hypotheticals and counterfactuals, let’s focus on the one specific thing we know: we have to make sure Shakespeare’s original script is preserved in human consciousness until it’s printed later for widespread distribution.”

  “I think this is a good plan,” said Erzsébet, who had set down the paperback and picked up her számológép. She ran her fingers through it as if she were massaging it.

  “How to implement the plan is also clear,” said Robin, tossing down the unicorn and reaching for another piece of paper. “There have to be separate, secret rehearsals for the witches, so the company managers don’t freak out about the performers not rehearsing the approved lines. Hey!” Her face lit up. “The witches are going to be boys or young men. So, in the interest of keeping this contained, obviously I should play one, and—”

  “No,” said Mel sharply. “The plan is for you to shelter in place. If you’re rehearsing and performing, then you are out in the open and Gráinne could take a potshot anytime. Tristan would kill me if I green-lighted that. No.”

  “I’ve always wanted to be a witch,” said Robin to Erzsébet with a conspiratorial grin. “You guys are so cool.”

  “I liked you from the moment we met,” Erzsébet said graciously.

  Email from Mei East-Oda to Rebecca East-Oda

  January 29

  Hey, Mom,

  Just got this from Melisande. What’s up? xxM

  PS: Hai, honto desu yo!—your brilliant granddaughters both got perfect scores on their midyear AP Japanese exam. Will text pix for their gaisofu to preen over.