And she came close to nailing it on the first try. Two unexpected outcomes messed up her plan. First of all, Erszebet had a change of heart and decided not to Send Tristan into Gráinne’s trap. And second, just at the moment when the EFOT squads were about to pounce on us and round us all up, Magnus launched his raid on the Walmart. It is obvious from the way Gráinne has reacted to this that she wasn’t expecting it and she’s furious.
So, the good news is that Tristan’s safe and that Magnus has thrown a huge monkey wrench into whatever Gráinne was planning. The bad news is that we don’t know how to get Mel back and that the full resources of the Department of Diachronic Operations are now at Gráinne’s beck and call.
Diachronicle
In which I meet my final witch
TODAY I ACCEPTED A LOAN from my patrons to afford a custom-fitted corset, perhaps because I now know that I shall be wearing one for the rest of my days. The end of magic approaches and my last chance for escape has been denied me.
The Great Exhibition—that very event which had such a dreadful influence on magic’s demise—provided me an opportunity to take the air at last. My patrons expressed an interest in attending it, now that the initial flood of visitors has calmed somewhat (it still bustles like a city inside), and allowed that I might go with them without any danger or embarrassment to myself.
I doubt that in the twenty-first century any gathering could marvel the general population the way that the Crystal Palace marvels today. An enormous glass building framed by iron—nearly a million square feet and more than one hundred feet high. In its sheer spectacle it rivals anything in Las Vegas. Within were tens of thousands of items and exhibits, visited by more than forty thousand people a day. It had been built essentially as a giant two-story greenhouse, leaving old-growth trees undisturbed on site and thus creating in certain open areas the quaint feeling of an antique movie set. (Except movies do not yet exist.) I was given leave to roam, with instructions to meet up at the reconstructed Medieval Court (between the Sculpture Garden and Africa) in two hours.
The wonders waiting within include all sorts of mechanical and technical marvels, and samples of the raw materials processed or created by them. Foucault’s pendulum is there, hanging from a roof beam to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. There are envelope-folding machines, musical instruments, inventions from abroad and fabrics from everywhere, an elementary voting machine, at least two enormous diamonds (one pink), a rash of photographs and daguerreotypes (I avoided those, instinctively), tinned foods, a stuffed elephant or two, a locomotive, and for the price of a penny, the novel experience of—gasp!—public lavatories! And foodstuffs from all over the world, or at least the British Empire, which here in 1851 is nearly the same thing.
I had studied the catalog and exhibition layout ahead of time, naturally, and had plotted a course before we arrived. We entered via the vast, vaulted Southern Transept, between wares from China, Tunis, and India, and at the Crystal Fountain I bid my patrons au revoir and turned left. The air had the humid, peaceful heaviness of greenhouses. I hurried past offerings from Africa and Canada, Ceylon, Jersey, and Malta, past inventive labor-saving hardware for housework and industry, past sumptuous furniture and items of leather, fur, rock, paper, scissors (not a joke), and—wait for it—hair, then mounted stairs and continued westward until I had pressed on through the bustle of fascinated faces, all the way to the Western Nave, where I knew I’d find the telescopes and other lens-related hoo-haa items amongst the “philosophical instruments.”
I had come here with the wan hope that astronomy might be of interest to witches, being as ancient as magic is. And I hoped perhaps my presence might leave a trace of glamour that only they could see—in which case perhaps I would be approached by one of them. A far-fetched wish, I realize, but I was in desperate straits (although not yet as desperate as I now feel).
My eyes scanned the crowd, wishing I knew what it was that identified somebody as a witch. Standing with a handsome older couple near one of the largest telescopes (Buron’s, I believe the nameplate said) was a very beautiful young lady, perhaps twenty, who looked like Erszebet Karpathy.
Because it was Erszebet Karpathy.
To be honest, she did not look exactly like Erszebet in our era. While certainly grave and serious, her demeanor was lighter, her presence more buoyant. She was smiling at something the man had just said. It was a charming, unself-consciously girlish grin. She did not carry the weight of centuries upon her shoulders. She was truly, as they say, in the bloom of youth. In that first moment of recognition, I understood, in I way I could not have before, what all those decades of waiting for us had done to her spirit. For a passing moment I was pierced with guilt for what we had done by convincing her to preserve herself.
And then I realized, with a shock, that this was that moment. This was the moment she had referred to when first we’d met: the moment that I convinced her to stay alive into the twenty-first century.
Since she had indeed preserved herself, I already knew that I would be successful—apparently with only one Strand’s effort! This suggested our encounter would be an easy one, and further—oh, the joy of it!—she could Home me. I was saved! I had never felt more grateful to her than I did that moment, although she had not officially even met me yet.
I took several hurried steps towards her, wondering how coy I should be, and then realizing I hadn’t the time to be coy whatsoever.
“Miss Karpathy Erszebet?” I said, approaching with a polite but familiar smile.
She and the two older adults turned to look at me. As she sobered slightly, she looked more familiar, and her familiarity in that setting was so reassuring that I could barely keep myself from embracing her.
“Miss Karpathy, I am a friend of yours you haven’t met yet,” I said quietly, barely audible above the general hubbub. I had to risk assuming the two guardians knew her for a witch. “I have been Sent here with a very great request to ask.”
She frowned, and looked confused. Then she glanced at the man and said, “Papa, Ki o˝?” Then turned to me and said, in halting English, “Do you Hungarian? I can only some little bit English.”
“Kicsit,” I said, wishing her native language was Akkadian or classical Hebrew or something I was more familiar with. Given how strong her accent was after at least a century in America, it should not have surprised me that she did not yet speak English, yet it was jarring to suddenly have a language barrier between us.
“I speak English,” said the man. “I will be your translator.” Seeing the wary look on my face, he said, with stern reassurance, “I assume you are working with a witch and perhaps somebody powerful.”
“May we speak in private?” I asked.
He looked around at the crowd. “We hide in plain sight,” he said. “We attract more attention if we huddle in a corner. Here nobody pays attention, we are ignored.”
He had the air of a man unused to changing his mind, and for a moment I felt stymied.
“Nem, Papa,” said lovely young Erszebet, and gave me a shy smile. “Én teázni vele. Azt szeretné gyakorolni az angol tudásom.” To me: “We have tea, yes?”
With a sweetness and grace of movement, the pure fluidity of youth, she held her hand out to me with a smile, and smiled even more happily when I took it.
“Add nekem néhány shillinget,” she said over her shoulder to the man, whose solemnity melted. “Én is fizetek vissza, amikor hazaérünk.” He drew a coin from the wallet in his vest pocket, she accepted the money with a grateful smile and began to pull me through the crowd, down the stairs, to the West Refreshment Court (flanked by those exotic public lavatories). She selected a tea-cart surrounded by little tables and chairs full of flagging matrons.
When we were close to the tea-cart, she gave me a conspiratorial grin, her eyes twinkling as I had never known Erszebet’s eyes to twinkle. “I speak very good English,” she whispered in my ear. “But I do not want him to know that.”
“Thank God,
” I said impulsively. “Erszebet, I am glad to hear it, because truly I must speak to you alone.”
“Very well, let us speak over cakes and tea,” she said, and, smiling, she held up the coin with a flourish.
When we had settled at a small table with our refreshments, she said, eyes still sparkling, “So you have been Sent from the future. That has never happened to me before and I am very happy to meet you. Please tell me about the future. Father would say it is wrong to ask that, but I am so curious. I hope it is better than the present. The present is very difficult for us, for so many reasons. Please tell me magic is repaired soon. Surely it must be, or you could not have been Sent.”
I had never heard Erszebet speak so exuberantly, without an absence of rampaging insults, in all the time I’d known her. I hated that I had to be the one to give her the news.
“I am here to warn you that things will get much worse before they improve,” I said, “and they can only improve at all if you will agree to the request I am about to make.” I hesitated for a moment. Surely Erszebet knew many witches. Should I ask her to tell all of them to preserve themselves? Would that not give us more witches to collect in the twenty-first century?
And yet that would create such a muddle, and I had no Chronotron or even quipu to ask for clarity. I decided to stay within the bounds of what I knew we needed to accomplish. “And you must keep this request a secret. It is only for you.”
“I love secrets,” she said, grinning again. Grinning, she looked like a teenager. “I’m very good at keeping secrets.” She lowered her voice to a whisper, and said confidingly, delighted with herself, “I have a secret lover my parents do not know about. Not even Mother suspects, and she’s a very able witch!”
“I promise not to tell her you have a lover,” I said, forcing myself to grin right back at her. “If you do not tell her this. But, Erszebet, this is something you cannot even tell your lover.”
“That is easy, we do not actually talk very much,” she said slyly, with the tiniest blush of a recent ex-virgin. She giggled. Erszebet Karpathy giggled. It took so much willpower to keep my face smiling, to not close my eyes and shudder a bit at what I was about to ask of her.
“Erszebet, magic is about to end completely. Totally.” She blinked, and suddenly was serious and attentive, vaguely more similar to the Erszebet I knew. “It will stay extinguished for many, many years, and then we will bring it back—you and I, and some other people.” She blinked again, doe-eyed and speechless. “But, Erszebet, this is the most important part: it does not come back for such a long time that you would have died of old age first. So I have come here to tell you to cast a spell upon yourself that will prolong your life as long as possible. To slow your aging enough that you can live for two hundred years.”
She looked almost in a state of shock. “Who are you?” she asked. “Who are you that would ask me to do this?”
“My name is Melisande Stokes, and I am your friend,” I said. “I wish I did not have to ask this of you, but you, and only you, will be able to save magic someday—as long as you cast that spell upon yourself.”
She gave me a distressed look—not the haughty irritation of my Erszebet, but a childlike confusion. “Why me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I had never stopped to think about this, since my experience of our relationship was that she had reached out to me. “Perhaps it is because fate has placed me here at this moment in time, when magic is about to end. It is perhaps that random. I don’t honestly know. What I do know is that it is your destiny to fix it. Extend your life, and Send me back to my own time, and we will meet there eventually and work together.”
Her dark green eyes darted from side to side as she considered this. “If this news is true, then I would prefer,” she said, “that I extend both our lives and you go through this journey with me. Then when the time comes, we will meet your colleagues and work together.”
I believe my heart actually stopped for a beat. “That’s not possible,” I said, thinking fast. “I already exist in that time period, I will be an old woman and a young one simultaneously on the same Strand. Surely that will cause diakrónikus nyírás.”
She thought this over, her mouth setting into a harder line now, a foreshadowing of the Erszebet to come. “This is a terrible thing you are asking me,” she said. “A very, very difficult thing.”
“I realize that, Erszebet,” I said. “But so important. And you choose to do it. And it is the right thing. You are there with me, in the future, and—” I hesitated. It would be a lie to tell her that she was glad of making that choice. She had only ever expressed regret and bitterness. But I had to convince her to do it. “In the future you know that it’s the right thing to have done.”
She stared at me levelly a moment. “Am I happy?” she asked. “Am I joyful? My lover tells me I am joyful. It is my favorite thing to be these days.” I stared at her like a deer in headlights startled fawn, and she knew the answer before I could prevaricate. “I see,” she said. “Not happy. Not joyful.”
“But . . . satisfied that you have done the right thing,” I insisted. “This makes you the most significant witch in the history of the world.”
“And if I say no?”
“Magic will end forever, completely, seventeen days from now, and it will never return.” I realized that was likely a lie, that some agent from some other nation would still manage to recruit some other witch—that I was asking this not for the good of magic but only for the good of the United States’ ability to close the Magic Gap. I chose not to clarify this point.
“So,” she said, “magic will end in seventeen days no matter what I do, but in the next seventeen days, if I put this spell on myself, I will bring it back someday.”
“Yes.”
“What do I do for all the many long years that I am alive? How do I make my way? I am trained only to do magic.”
“I don’t know,” I said, taken aback. “But I know that you land on your feet. When we meet, more than a century from now, you have been staying somewhere for many years where all your needs are taken care of, so somehow you must stumble across money. Perhaps you marry a wealthy man and inherit his fortune. Perhaps you become a schoolteacher or scientist or take up with the Fuggers—remember that name, Erszebet, and ODEC, and Facebook, and—” My mind whirled: What else was I supposed to tell her? What else had the ancient Erszebet claimed I’d told her? “I don’t know, Erszebet. I wish I did. All I know is that if you had not agreed to do this, I would not be here right now.”
“I Sent you back?”
“Not this time. But most of the times that I have been Sent places, you Send me.”
She frowned. “Why do you want to be Sent so often?”
“We work for the government of the United States. It requires us to move around through time.”
Her eyes brightened for a moment. “Will I do that too? Move around in time?”
“You never expressed an interest, but I suppose you could. We can discuss it—but only if you agree to put the spell on yourself and Send me forward to my own time.”
She pursed her lips. “Why does magic end in seventeen days?”
“It’s very complicated,” I said. “Technology—like everything you see here in the Crystal Palace—it interferes with magic. In just over a fortnight, an extremely significant technological achievement will occur and that will end magic.”
“Why not just prevent the technological achievement?” asked Erszebet.
“It’s too important to the rest of the world.”
“More important than magic?”
“Yes,” I said, and she looked displeased in a way that made it clear this would be harder than I’d anticipated.
“Technology should not be more important than magic,” she said earnestly. Very earnestly, and naively, because she was actually only nineteen years old. Not one hundred and eighty appearing to be nineteen. “I will interfere with this technology. What is it?”
<
br /> “It’s too far away,” I said. “It’s something that happens in Prussia.”
“I have friends in Prussia,” she said immediately. “I can communicate with them and tell them to sabotage whatever it is.”
“That will cause diakrónikus nyírás,” I said.
She looked terribly deflated. “I wish I did not know this,” she said.
“There is no other way,” I said. I had never believed much in fate, but I was shaken by how remarkable it was, that I had been sent to this DTAP as an act of Gráinne’s treachery, and yet being here—it turned out—was unavoidable. Perhaps on other Strands I got here by different methods.
“I need to think about this,” she said. “This is so much, so very much, to ask of anyone. Do you understand?”
“I do. I wouldn’t ask if it was not incredibly important. Please let me give you the information that you need in case we are separated.” Out of my reticule I took my journal and a pencil, and wrote down ODEC, Facebook, the approximate date we were to connect in the future, Tristan Lyons, and Fuggers (Bank). Then, remembering that she had impressed Tristan with her understanding of the ODEC’s mechanics, I scribbled what fractured physics-engineering babble I could remember from five years earlier, when Tristan and Oda-sensei were first bonding over developing the ODEC. I tore the leaf from my journal and handed it to her. She hesitantly took it, looked at it, grimly tucked it into her own reticule. I felt faint with gratitude. “So you will say yes?” I said.
“It would be easier if somebody else aged with me.” She looked relieved. “Perhaps my lover!”
“That’s a bad idea,” I said. “Do you know the saying, three may keep a secret if two of them are dead? It will be hard enough for you to pass undetected.”
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Page 61