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

by Neal Stephenson

  “You look like you could use some relaxing, Tristan Lyons,” I said with a smile, and put my hand on his arm. The gates closed to the theatre and the trumpet sounded within. “Come back to the Tearsheet.” I smiled invitingly.

  He moved away from me, but I noticed it was in the direction of the Tearsheet he was walking anyhow. “That’s right,” I said, purring. “That’s the way you want to be going.” I walked past him toward the tavern. I heard a little irritated sigh as he followed me. “What’s making it so very hard back home?” I asked in a sympathetic voice, looking over my shoulder.

  “There’s a new man where I work,” he said in clipped syllables. “We have different . . . methods. He is more forceful, and I am more strategic.”

  “I like forceful,” I said, smiling. “I pray you, do tell him he’s welcome any time.” Tristan made the briefest expression of dismay, and kept walking.

  We got back to the brewery and marched right up to my closet, as always. By now our established method was that we stood in the room together, he in Ned Alleyn’s stolen costumes, and I Sent him away and then just folded up the clothes and locked them in the chest. But he really did seem so distressed, and I love the scent of a man under pressure. Playful I decided to be, and so I said, “Tell me everything in detail, or I won’t be Sending you home at all.”

  The look of shock on his face was so fetching, I couldn’t keep myself from laughing.

  “I’m codding you, Tristan Lyons—what would I gain by keeping you here when you won’t even kiss me? You’d scare all my customers away and I’d die of starvation, so I would.”

  ’Twas both relieved and annoyed he looked, briefly, then said, “I don’t believe that. You do not make your living as a bawd, as much as you want it to seem so.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him. “Do you know that, or is it guessing you are?”

  “Common sense. If a witch can evade torture, as you mentioned, she can evade poverty and degradation. The harlotry is a cover. For what, I wonder?”

  I leaned in closer to him. “I’ll tell you my secrets if you tell me yours,” said I, and gave him the sweetest smile in my broad collection.

  His eyes narrowed a touch and he looked sideways at me. “I’m not an idiot. Make me that offer without the smile and I’ll consider it.”

  “What if I keep the smile but drop the offer?” I said. “Is it a smile I get from you in exchange? Perhaps a little something more?”

  “We are in league together,” he said, holding up his hand as if I were the devil and he a priest. “I cannot do that with a colleague.”

  “Delighted I am to hear we’re colleagues!” I said. “Pray tell me what scheme it is, in which it’s colleagues we are? And don’t be saying classified because if we’re in league, then we should be pooling our secrets, not keeping them from each other. It’s a waste of your time to be asking me for help if you’re not willing to take me into your confidences.”

  He sat a moment considering, then nodded grimly. “I understand your position, yours and Rose’s. And it is reasonable. Send me home and I shall talk of this with my brethren in my era. I must not act without their knowledge.”

  “That’s grand, but do not come back here unless you are prepared to tell me everything.”

  “So be it.”

  And off I Sent him, once again, and now there’s naught to that but seek out other Strands where he might be carrying on in like manner. Meanwhile I’ve naught else to report to Your Grace, so once again it’s off I go to meet my sweetheart.

  Whether I be near or far, may I hear only good things of you, My Lady! Yours ever, Gráinne in London

  Diachronicle

  DAYS 380–389 (AUGUST, YEAR 1)

  In which we meet the Fuggers

  ANOTHER VENTURE TO 1640 CAMBRIDGE resulted in another failure. This was duly boiled down into a series of bullet points by Les Holgate, and transmitted to Frink in Washington. I’d been doing my best to avoid the man. That said, it was unavoidable but to interact with him. My academic career had left me in possession of a certain toolkit. As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

  Reader, I learned his language. I hoped that mirroring and echoing some of his speech patterns, or (those being non-intuitive) at least inserting some of his vocabulary into my conversation with him, might put him at his ease and allow him to relax enough to behave as a human being might, should he wish to emulate one. What follows is an approximation of my first attempt at such a discourse.

  LH: As I anticipated, this last insertion to the 1640 DTAP was yet another confirmed failure.

  MS: It was a tactical failure in that it failed to accomplish the primary stated goal, however, it was strategically useful in that it enabled Blue Team Leader to break trail on formation of an alliance with a potential Asset in that DTAP.

  LH: Try to focus, Dr. Stokes. That was not the indicated goal of this mission, nor does it move the needle according to the operative metrics. The goal of this mission is to monetize the skill set we already have on deck in the form of the Asset and the ODEC.

  MS: Yes, but only after we have monetized the skill set by gathering low-hanging fruit. Blue Team’s road map is to utilize the transport modalities available to us due to the Asset and the ODEC, to incept a diachronic network and exploit resulting network effects that will enable DODO to scale.

  LH: That level of strategic vision is above your pay grade, Dr. Stokes. Your task is to maintain laser-like focus on Phase 1 deliverables. And the fact is that in all of your dozens of diachronic transport insertions, which have taken weeks to accomplish and have generated operating costs now far exceeding your allowed budget, you have found a total of three potential but unauthorized Assets in two DTAPS, without any confirmed achievement toward actually securing the monetizable artifact by liquidation of the blocking factor.

  MS: You mean we still haven’t yet secured the psalm book by preventing the maple syrup boiler.

  LH: Isn’t that what I just said?

  With this example, it should come as no surprise to hear that the other five of us got into the habit of meeting away from the office, at Frank and Rebecca’s home. I have no idea what Les was doing most of the time, and I didn’t much care, because he was just an irritant and I’m sure he was getting paid as much as all of us together. He also slightly resembled his uncle, Roger Blevins, chairman of my former department, only without the grey hair, and more slender. But a trick of the voice and the general body language was enough that I had a visceral desire to simply avoid him.

  And I enjoyed the ambience of my alternate workplaces: Rebecca’s home, and Widener Library.

  It was in the latter that I began to dig into the history of the Fuggers. This was the third time in the short history of DODO that the name had unexpectedly come up. And even though they were a famous old banking family, well known to any student of European history, this seemed like too many coincidences to me.

  They had first entered the story very early, when Tristan and I had been going through the boxes of old documents that needed to be translated. Some of them had been marked with a logo that looked familiar to me. I couldn’t place it at the time, and it nagged at me until a few months later, when I was leafing through a copy of The Economist in my dentist’s waiting room and saw a similar logo in an advertisement in the back of the magazine. It was an international charity announcing a job opening. When I pulled on that thread, taking advantage of some of the secret government databases we had access to at DODO, I learned that the charity in question was the non-profit arm of a complex of holding companies that, to make a long story short, was the survival into modern times of the medieval Fuggers.

  The second incident had occurred shortly before General Schneider’s brief but tragically eventful visit to DODO HQ. Tristan had asked Erszebet whether she could turn lead into gold. As I later understood, he didn’t really care about gold at all—what his higher-ups at the Trapezoid really were after was plutonium. But Erszebet
had scoffed at the idea and spoken about the “Fuckers”—her pronunciation of “Fuggers”—in a tone of voice that bordered on fearful. Not her usual style at all.

  And now here was a real live Fugger, one Athanasius, who seemed to be directly intervening in Tristan’s DEDE in Elizabethan London.

  Even with the combined resources of Harvard’s library system and U.S. intelligence databases, I wasn’t able to find much. The medieval part of the story has been common knowledge for centuries. The Fucker family had migrated to Augsburg in 1373 and prospered in textiles. In 1459 the family had produced Jacob, the seventh surviving child in a large brood. Seeing few opportunities at home, where his older brothers were dominating the Fucker family business, Jacob had traveled over the Alps to Venice, where he had served an apprenticeship in the German merchants’ warehouse on the Rialto and learned about banking. Upon his return to Augsburg, Jacob had begun lending money to broke but powerful nobles on stiff terms and, to make a long story short, become the richest person in the world.

  The Fuggers (somewhere along the line, they’d switched to a more palatable spelling of their name) had become as famous and as well documented as they were rich. The research skills I’d developed while earning my Ph.D. weren’t even needed; hundreds of books about Jacob Fugger and his family could be summoned up with a few keystrokes. The great man had died at the end of 1525 and handed the business off to his nephew Anton, who seemed reasonably talented, and made some investments in the Americas. But he’d been caught in the mangle of the Catholic/Protestant wars, lending money to warmongering kings who didn’t pay it back. In the end he had essentially liquidated the business and distributed the proceeds among a few dozen family members who were content to live off the interest as members of the titled nobility or the landed gentry.

  By 1601—the year that Tristan was visiting—the trail had gone cold. There was no one single entity that could be pointed to as the Fugger bank. The last person to wield any kind of central authority over it had been Markus Fugger, a grandnephew of Jacob, who had died four years earlier after distributing most of the remaining assets to the family. And Markus seemed like someone who would have been interesting to idle away the hours with: a patron of arts, a history buff, a collector of old artifacts, an ancient-languages geek.

  Athanasius Fugger—at least, the Athanasius Fugger described by Tristan—was completely absent from the historical record.

  Which was not a big deal. No one knows better than a historian how tattered that record is. But it did whet my curiosity. The obvious explanation was simple enough: he was some descendant of Markus, sharing the same family name, who had inherited a share of the money and was now hanging around in London just because he liked it there and had the freedom to live wherever he wanted.

  And yet, judging from Tristan’s story, this Athanasius wasn’t merely a drinking buddy. He was acting as some kind of financial advisor to Sir Edward Greylock, which probably meant he was still active in the banking business.

  I tried working from the other direction, getting what information I could about the modern-day organization, and working backwards. But they were discreet to the point of paranoia, running their business through a network of offshore companies registered in places like the Cayman Islands, Jersey, and the Isle of Man. They only allowed the Fugger name to break the surface when it was to their tactical advantage, as when trying to hire employees for one of their humanitarian NGOs.

  So my studies into the Fuggers produced very little that Tristan could actually use. Discussing it over an Old Tearsheet Best Bitter in the Apostolic Café—served as usual by the woman with the eyebrow tattoos, Julie Lee (Professional Smart-ass Oboist)—we agreed on a plausible scenario: some of the younger Fuggers, tired of the wars and turmoil in central Europe, had moved to London and put down roots in its banking scene. Athanasius was one of those, and the business had grown since then as a private bank with tentacles all over the place.

  Erszebet had told us once that a Fugger branch office was probably nearby, and indeed we were able to find that they had an unobtrusive space in an old building near Boston Common. There was a similar but somewhat larger office in lower Manhattan, and others in different financial centers around the world.

  Anyway, the research kept me out of the office, which had become a disagreeable place to work. Tristan was fairly immune to ambience and had a far higher tolerance for annoying personalities than I did, but he was just as happy as I was to avoid Les Holgate.

  The advent of Holgate had dramatically increased Erszebet’s regard for Tristan, now that she had another by-the-book thirty-something white American male to compare him to. She became almost pleasant toward him. That said, when he expressed pleasure that the “node” for diachronic transport was developing in London, Erszebet’s immediate response was suspicion.

  We were in Oda-sensei’s study on a drizzly afternoon, and Rebecca had just served compote of warm peaches. (At the time it seemed so quaint and tasteful—now my stomach nearly heaves at the thought of adding yet more sugar to my diet.)

  “Why do we need a node?” Erszebet asked. “Aren’t we just supposed to make money?”

  “Yes,” said Tristan patiently, who had inhaled all of his peaches without tasting them or possibly even chewing them. “But we’re doing that in order to start funding the actual work that is to be done. Having a node—and later, a network of them, in various DTAPs—will help with all that future work.”

  She shook her head in an I-don’t-know-about-that way. “I did not promise to do anything beyond helping you make money from the Bay Psalm Book,” she said. “And that is only because I want to go spit on the graves of my enemies.”

  “You won’t be allowed back in the ODEC unless you’re doing the magic we need you to do.”

  “Cruel,” she hissed under her breath.

  “Practical,” said Tristan. She turned her back on him to stare out the window in a sullenly coquettish way (we had become used to that), so he returned his attention to the rest of us sitting around the coffee table, and we continued to discuss strategy: before he returned from the DTAP, Gráinne had demanded more transparency if she were going to continue to abet him.

  Frank Oda and Rebecca both sounded cautious approval of this request.

  “She sounds like a worthwhile connection,” I agreed. “I think you should open up to her a little more. If she is willing to introduce you to the Court Witches, they could provide another angle of approach with Sir Edward.”

  “Good luck with that,” said Erszebet, her back still to us, knees crossed, waggling one high-heeled sandal. “You are not likely to win any witchy friends if the witchy friends knew the whole truth. I certainly would not help you if I had known the whole truth.”

  Reader, know this: I still preferred her to Les Holgate.

  WE RETURNED TO the office so that Erszebet could Send Tristan back to 1601 London. Les was there, with an expensive-looking coffee-like beverage (which smelled like that awful thing I’d ordered from the Smart-ass Oboist at the Apostolic Café the day Tristan had first approached me. How peculiar, the things that summon nostalgia.). Les seemed even more smug than usual, as if he had a secret he was just bursting to share with us, but did not want to give up his privileged position of being the only one with the secret. As usual, we ignored him.

  Erszebet Sent Tristan back to 1601. Although her Sending one of us somewhere was now a fairly regular aspect of our working life, we were still respectful of its significance, and generally made it a practice that whoever was in the office gathered in the control room to watch through the glass and wave to the DOer as they emerged from the sterilizing shower and entered the ODEC. This time, I noticed Les was not present. Some minutes passed while Erszebet performed the Sending. When she had finished and let herself out of the chamber, I noticed Les walking into the control room from the corridor, smiling in a self-congratulatory way as he slipped his phone into his pocket.

  Not ten minutes later, the office phon
e rang: Frink was calling from DC. He demanded to be transferred to a video conference.

  Most of the offices in the building had long since been demolished, but in recent weeks a couple of Maxes had built a new one from scratch in an underused corner of the building. Supposedly it had all kinds of anti-surveillance shielding and other top-secret electronic gear built into its walls. On the inside it looked like just another corporate meeting room, dominated at one end by a flat-panel screen without which Les Holgate would have been effectively deaf and mute, since all of his communication took place through PowerPoint decks. It could also be used for secure, encrypted video conferences with the Trapezoid or other nodes in the dot-mil world. We all gathered around the conference table while Les Holgate connected us.

  “I especially need to speak to the Asset,” Frink said as soon as he appeared onscreen.

  “I have a name,” said Erszebet. She slithered into a slumped position on a rotating office chair and, like a bored, fidgeting schoolgirl, began to push herself back and forth through a wide arc, chin practically resting on her sternum.

  “Glad you’re there. And everyone else? Sound off.”

  “I’m here—Mel—but Tristan has just gone back to the Tearsheet DTAP,” I said.

  “Here,” said Frank and Rebecca at the same moment, since it was already clear Frink hardly registered their presence.

  “Here, sir,” said Les Holgate. He remained standing.

  “Okay, good, here are your orders,” said Frink’s voice. “Elizabeth, Send Les back to the Tearsheet DTAP.”

  “Who is Elizabeth?” asked Erszebet, without interrupting the arc of her fidgets. “How wonderful you have another witch to boss around. I would like a vacation. Elizabeth can fill in for me.”