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

by Neal Stephenson

  Finally General Frink showed up, preceded and followed by more aides, some civilians, others in uniforms of various services. He had a row of three stars on each lapel, which even I knew made him a very big deal. I wouldn’t need to Google this fellow. He was the Director of National Intelligence, reporting directly to the President. He was Rudge’s boss, and now Tristan’s. As he blew in, he was in full conversation with two members of his entourage, and scarcely seemed to notice that he had entered another room with a different set of humans in it. His crew formed a sort of football huddle around him for a minute and they held an acronym-studded conference that didn’t concern us. Then half of them speed-walked out of the room. Of those who remained, some took up seats along the wall. General Frink slammed his formidable arse down into a chair that had been pulled out for him by a junior officer. That seemed to be Tristan’s signal to sit back down—for he had exploded out of his chair when Frink had entered the room, and stood at attention waiting to be noticed.

  A civilian aide skimmed a sheet of paper onto the table directly in front of General Frink. Frink reached into the breast pocket of his uniform, which was stiff with ribbons and decorations, and drew out a pair of reading glasses, put them on, and scanned the page for a minute before finally looking up and acknowledging our presence. “Yes,” he said, “Department of Diachronic Operations.” His eyes scanned the row of faces on our side of the table, and I suppose it was a credit to his powers of discipline that he lingered only briefly on Erszebet. The civilian whispered something in his ear, and I was pretty sure I heard the sibilant word “Asset,” which was the term that the late General Schneider had used to refer to Erszebet. Frink’s eyes went back to her for a moment and he nodded. He then thought silently for a while, and heaved a sigh.

  “I am going so far out on a limb for you people,” he said, “that if I hadn’t seen even stranger things during my career in Intelligence I would shitcan this project in a heartbeat. But all the evidence points to this being real. Roger Blevins has vouched for it, and that means a lot to me.”

  “Roger Blevins?” I blurted out.

  A few moments of silence ensued. Everyone was startled—most of all me. I’m not a blurter in general. But hearing that name in this context could not have been more astonishing. Tristan kicked me under the table.

  More whispering from the civilian aide: a buff-looking bro in his early thirties, with heavily gelled hair. “You’re Stokes,” Frink said. “Roger’s your mentor. At Harvard.”

  This really did render me speechless, but Tristan kicked me again just to be sure. “General Frink, if I may, Dr. Stokes here is just a little surprised to hear Dr. Blevins’s name brought up, because she doesn’t know of his connection to the program. Operational security.”

  “Ah, I see. Very good, Lyons. Ms. Stokes, the connection goes way back—Roger and I went to school together,” General Frink explained. “When we first began observing these historical anomalies, he—along with Dr. Rudge here—were part of the brain trust we brought together to seek explanations.”

  I was thoroughly tongue-tied now, but the ice was broken as far as Frink was concerned. He pulled off his reading glasses and fidgeted with them as he went into a long mansplanation of what magic was and why the United States needed to avoid a “Magic Gap” with other nations.

  “Excuse me,” Erszebet said sharply, as Frink began wandering into an explanation of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory that even I could sense was painfully cack-handed. “Have you taken up a day of my life and quite a lot of taxpayer money to bring me in your foul-smelling airplane, all the way here, to this room, where you do not have the courtesy of introducing yourself to me . . . just so you can inform me who I am, and why that is important to you? Is this what you have done here?”

  It was the first time I’d ever been grateful for Erszebet’s . . . Erszebetness. Frink gave her a slightly offended look and tried to carry on his monologue, now aiming it exclusively at me, but she was having none of that.

  “This is a yes-or-no question I’ve asked you,” she said, standing up and placing herself in front of me to intercept his gaze. “Are you incapable of answering yes or no?” She looked at Tristan, appalled. “Do not work for this man. This man is an imbecile.”

  Within three minutes, she had berated Frink into a huffy submission, enough that he rose to his feet and gruffly shook hands with each of us. During this little outbreak of sociability, I also learned the name of the civilian aide-bro: Les Holgate, who went around and shook hands with the perky vigor of a man who had sat through one too many free webinars about the importance of networking.

  Erszebet was unconvinced: Frink’s effort at politeness lacked the requisite enthusiasm, and Les Holgate overdid it. We all resumed our seats. Frink took the floor again, and explained to us about How Things Are Done In This Town, including brief introductions to the concepts of Belt Tightening and Fiscal Responsibility. This led to another brief vituperative interjection from Erszebet regarding taxpayer money being used to bring four people to him when wouldn’t it be cheaper for him to just hop aboard a civilian flight and take the T to Central Square, thus saving money that was better used for the collective good? I had not credited her with such socialist sensibilities before. Nor have I seen her express such sentiments since then, so perhaps she was merely being disagreeable for effect.

  It was the kind of sermon that would only be delivered before bad news, and indeed Frink went on to explain that we would be given just enough seed money to figure out how to use magic to self-fund.

  Erszebet, alarmed, put aside her ’tude to explain very plainly that there could be no changing water to wine or lead to gold—to say nothing of plutonium. She wanted it understood that magic could not be used that way in any era, or it would long ago have led to the self-destruction of the human race.

  “I say, to heck with gold!” announced Les Holgate. “There’s something a lot more valuable than that: Microsoft stock. Why not go back in time to the 1980s and buy up some of that?”

  Erszebet drew breath to burn Holgate to the ground, but was cut off by a few words in Hungarian from Dr. Rudge. “Miss Karpathy, if I may.” He turned his attention to Holgate. “Les, this is covered in the briefing documents. Maybe you didn’t get a chance to scan them. I know you’re more of a PowerPoint guy.” This was delivered in such a light tone that Holgate’s face didn’t start turning red until a few seconds later. “The Sending—the movement of the subject to a DTAP, or Destination Time and Place—is a magic-based process. As such, a DOer—a Diachronic Operative—can only be Sent to a place and time where magic works. Between 1851 and now, magic hasn’t worked anywhere. So the most recent DTAP we can Send people to is late July of 1851. The Microsoft gambit can’t work. And we can’t go back in time and kill Hitler either.”

  Holgate hadn’t fully caught on to how deeply Dr. Rudge had just buried him, so he came back for another round. “Okay, well then, go back and invest in whale oil futures or something.”

  “That is in essence what we propose to do, Les,” Tristan said. And he went on to explain the Bay Psalm Book gambit.

  Some years earlier, a copy of this 1640 volume—the first book ever printed in North America—had been unearthed in a church basement, and sold for millions of dollars at auction. Tristan suggested we go back in time, find another copy, conceal it someplace where we could retrieve it in the present day, and put it up for sale. The operation would be relatively simple. It wouldn’t involve killing anyone, or any other heavy-handed intervention in history. It would be confined to the Boston area. And it would generate enough revenue to keep DODO afloat for the better part of a year.

  General Frink liked this idea immensely. Dr. Rudge, acting in his advisory capacity, asked a couple of good questions about the money end of things, then nodded approval. Frink wound up the meeting briskly, and sent us all back to Cambridge to begin the research required for this escapade.

  A few minutes later, having been reunit
ed with our electronic devices, we were out-processing through the security checkpoint, and headed back down the escalators to the Metro stop. We even had time for a quick turn around the Trapezoid City shopping mall, where a young man in the food court approached Erszebet—fresh from raiding a high-end cosmetics boite—and asked her for her autograph. He had no idea who she was. He simply assumed that she was a movie star.

  The Bay Psalm Book gambit had been news to the rest of us. But on the flight home, Rebecca became unexpectedly useful. I had considered her a reluctant soldier, signing on only because Frank wouldn’t do anything without her and she was too indulgent to deny him. But as we flew back, she volunteered a newfound suspicion that her accused ancestress from the Salem witch trials had, in fact, been a witch.

  When we got back to Boston where she could get access to genealogical records, Rebecca then traced this unfortunate woman’s lineage back another half-century, to Muddy River, a settlement just inland from Boston. We could not, of course, know if Goody Fitch was a witch, even if we could be sure that her granddaughter Mary Estey had been. Erszebet was cavalier and vague about the hereditary nature of magic, but when pressed by Tristan to give it serious thought, said she supposed it was a matrilineal affair, although she knew plenty of instances of a woman receiving the ability through a paternal ancestress. Goody Fitch being Goody Estey’s maternal grandmother, we had a good chance—but no certainty—of success.

  And for the burying site of the book, that too had been Rebecca’s call. As steward of the oldest house in the area, she was well versed in local history going back to the founding of Cambridge, when it was still the small, wooden-walled village that Goody Fitch had just mocked. Rebecca’s present-day backyard included a large boulder, the only unadulterated topographic detail for blocks in all directions. In the colonial era there was a creek running near the eastern side of it, but that bed would dry up in a year or two, when a mill was built on the Watertown Road and the creek was diverted to power it. We determined I would bury the book, in 1640, against the western side of this boulder, at a distance of my arm’s length and to the depth of my arm’s reach.

  Rebecca and I then researched what I would need to do to “pass” as chronologically local—the manner of dress, of speech, of courtesy—while Tristan established how to best protect the book from the elements during its long rest. He determined that of the resources available at the time, a small watertight barrel filled with flour or dry sand for “packaging” was our best bet.

  I consigned all we had learned to memory, and then prepared to be the first DOer (Diachronic Operative) going back to do the first Deed (or as we spelled it, DEDE—“Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect”) under the banner of the Department of Diachronic Operations.

  HAVING FINISHED THE maize (which sat like a cannonball in my sterilized belly), I rose, and Goody Fitch beckoned me to follow her to the small barn that was a moment’s walk downwind from the house. As a few sheep and one sullen cow stared at us incuriously from the pen, she examined the row of neat farm tools and handed me a long-handled shovel with a pointy tip.

  “My husband and son are out with the oxcart to check the fields, but Goodman Griggs is on his way to the ferry landing this hour,” she said. “I’ll ask him to convey you on the cart. It will save you an hour of walking.”

  Goodman Griggs was dressed like he was right out of Central Casting, in dark doublet and breeches with a wide-brimmed felt hat and a barber’s bib of a collar. He was a farmer, as anyone in this settlement must be, and a bit grizzled. He seemed to do a double take when he saw me, before turning his head sharply away. For a moment I feared I had been detected as a poser, but he said nothing. He radiated the sort of pompous complacency that suggested fundamentalism, so I ran through all my memorized scriptural passages in case I needed to demonstrate my affected faith. But he was not one to speak. He nodded gruffly when I was presented to him, as if he did not approve of me but could not say no; he made no gesture to help me up into the cart, which was filled with barrels of corn and squash.

  A seventeenth-century rustic cart is no BMW convertible. It is not even a carriage, for it has no springs, is purely utilitarian, and bumps one fiendishly with no regard for dignity or comfort. The ox that drew it was flatulent. Being grass-fed (not because it was environmentally correct but because grass was then the cheapest and easiest way to feed an ox in summer), its gas was less odorous than I’d expected, but still was nothing pleasant, and with the fine film of sweat that covered me, I was to feel the putrid scent molecules clinging to my skin all the rest of the day.

  Shortly, we had come through the woods and arrived at the Charles. No clean-cut banks as I knew it, however: across the river was an enormous marsh, broader by half than the river itself. A narrow channel had been hacked and dredged through it so that the ferry could reach the landing. Beyond that, shimmering in the heat, I could see a palisade of vertical logs. This barrier, I assumed, was to protect the town’s most valuable commodity—four-year-old Harvard College—from marauding Indians. There had recently been a war between the Pequot and Mohegan tribes, won by the latter with help from the settlers. But now the Mohegans were quarreling with the Narragansetts. I had not educated myself as to where that feud would lead, lest I inadvertently say something too prescient for 1640. (I was pretty sure it didn’t turn out well for anyone, though.)

  The ferry service was very new, and at present comprised just a dock on either bank plus a flat-bottomed boat, a raft with skeletal bulkheads, really. Standing beside it were two young rowers who looked like brothers. Despite the unflattering Puritan uniform, they had the agreeable build of a crew team, but I knew better than to stare, and averted my eyes.

  “I do not know her, she came from Goody Fitch,” Goodman Griggs said to them in a grumpy tone as he pulled up the ox. The two younger ones gave me a quizzical look, then turned their attention to their work: the three men, forming a line, began to unload the barrels of vegetables into the ferry. I waited until they had finished, then took from the drawstring bag at my belt the little musket shot. I presented it to the nearer ferryman (the younger one) as casually as I could, as if I was accustomed to such barter. The fellow looked at me oddly, and again I feared I was about to be unmasked. He examined the musket shot to make sure it wasn’t scant—lead is such an easy metal to carve off bits of. He put it in his own satchel, wiped his brow with the back of his arm, and paid me no further heed. I took that as allowance to board the ferry.

  The older brother, stabilizing the last of Griggs’s open barrels, glanced at me and . . . smiled. His teeth were grey but well-shaped.

  He caught himself smiling, blushed, and looked away.

  They were strong and fast, those two rowers, for such an unwieldy boat cutting across the current. The older brother was nearer to me, avoiding my gaze; I found my eyes straying from the water to him, and enjoyed watching his movements, sure and confident and smooth despite the oppressive heat and his heavy clothes. He must have felt my stare, for at one moment, between strokes, he turned slightly to look at me, and—as if despite himself—he smiled shyly. I smiled back. He blushed again and looked away. I had not expected Puritan flirtation!

  When we got to the north bank of the Charles, there was another dock at which the boat was roped, and two boys there waiting. I’d watched them splashing water at each other as we approached, and laughing merrily, but now they were all business. I envied them the freedom to frolic in the river—it looked wonderfully cooling. The palisades came down to the river’s edge a stone’s throw to either side of the landing, creating a sense of urgency and purpose, the pretense of a city without any sign of one from here. I’d have to walk several hundred yards up the slope, nearly to the future Harvard Square, before I’d reach actual civilization.

  One of the boys quickly counted the barrels of corn and squash, and nodded, looking satisfied. He turned and ran up toward the town. The other lad helped the two ferrymen to unload the cargo. I disembarked, glancing one
last time at the older rower. He was already staring at me, and our eyes met again. Again he smiled; again I smiled; again he blushed, and turned away. I am not one to make eyes even in my own era. Only an hour in this strange new world and already I was contemplating pulling a Hester Prynne! How very disorienting it all was.

  I began to walk up the wide dirt path to the village, using the shovel as a walking stick.

  Of all the skills I’d had to learn for success in this DTAP (Destination Time and Place), the hardest of all was thievery. Language was no issue, nor was my accent: settlers were coming through Boston from all over England, and the English regional accents of the time were even more diverse than today’s. Learning to dress myself had been simple enough. I’d found a stable at which to practice riding horses for the first time since I was ten, although I was quite certain I’d have no chance of it here. A trip to Plimoth Plantation had felt almost like a cheat sheet, supplemented by a visit to the Americas wing of the Museum of Fine Art. A costume shop that kitted out Boston theatres rented us a colonial outfit—smock, stays, petticoat, skirt, waistcoat, stockings, garter, collar, coif—which I’d practiced lacing and buttoning myself into and out of until I could do it fluidly. I’d memorized and practiced quoting certain passages from the Geneva Bible (very popular among the Pilgrims), and taken a crash course in celestial navigation from an MIT grad student, whom Tristan signed to secrecy and paid well not to ask any questions. This was only the first of many whom we would later call HOSMAs—Historical Operations Subject Matter Authorities—and whom we would end up hiring to teach DOers things they would need to know.

  All of that had been a cinch. Harder by far was to work out how to steal a book from under its owner’s nose. First, there was my own moral and ethical conditioning to overcome. Then there was the matter of simply how to do it. Having so little recon to rely on, Tristan had proposed five possible schemes, and I’d memorized all of them step by step. They all seemed preposterous. Especially now that I was here.