Post from Dr. Melisande Stokes:
Welcome back from vacation, everyone. I am assuming you have all seen Esme Overkleeft’s incident report. It sounds like Magnus knows too much. Should we consider bringing him forward?
Reply from Macy Stoll:
Please keep in mind that the Anachron Management Team, which bears the brunt of looking after all of these people who are brought forward, is currently operating at capacity. Some Anachrons are easier to handle than others. If this Magnus is so burning with curiosity that he would traverse half the known world to pursue this matter, then he’ll cause just as much trouble for us here if we bring him forward.
From LTC Tristan Lyons:
Respectfully, Macy, if we bring him forward we will at least have some oversight re: his troublemaking. If that requires additional resources for the Anachron Management Team, then there are channels for requesting same.
From Dr. Roger Blevins:
Magnus’s psych profile suggests he will probably be considered a “nut job” (possessed by demons, etc.) by anyone in his era. While he might cause problems, they don’t warrant us spending the resources on housing him here for the rest of his life. He isn’t sophisticated enough to figure the whole thing out—or to be useful to us if he’s here. It’s not worth the resources to bring him.
From LTC Lyons:
Respectfully, I can vouch for Magnus’s abilities, having fought beside him on several occasions in Constantinople DTAPs. Contrary to Dr. Blevins’s assessment, I cannot think of a better soldier to help train DOers who will be operating in the Viking/Norman world. I should have proposed recruiting him already. My department has a number of physically active DOers who are currently in turnaround. If we bring him forward I’ll be his minder until we’ve taken proper measure of him.
From Dr. Stokes:
Just bumped into Esme in the cafeteria—she had to do one more Strand on DTAP 1205 Collinet, and says Imblen reports that Magnus has now advanced his theory.
Given that Tristan of Dintagel of legend came to Normandy as a fortune-seeker, and then (as Magnus sees it) almost certainly came forward in time, he is evidence that time travel is an excellent way to seek one’s fortune. Apparently Magnus would like to employ the same method. He is asking Imblen what fee she would accept to Send him in one direction or another. She has reverted to typical witch maneuvers of requesting impossible-to-get things (in this case myrrh from the cradle of Baby Jesus). He threatened her—highly unusual behavior toward a witch—and she had to render him mute for an hour to put him in his place.
Esme hasn’t had time yet to file a full report, but I’ll link in this thread when she does. Please reconsider bringing Magnus forward.
From Dr. Blevins:
Anyone stupid enough to threaten an active witch will never get his head around what is really going on here.
But since he is now a threat to one of our human assets, and Tristan seems to think he can contain him, I’ll (dispassionately) second Melisande’s suggestion to bring him forward.
From LTG Octavian K. Frink:
Have been monitoring this thread.
Bring Magnus forward. Even if he doesn’t figure anything out, we’re dealing with the specter of Diachronic Shear if he says something to somebody more clever than he is. If we keep him busy as a combat instructor he’ll probably think he’s died and gone to Valhalla.
Private message from LTC Lyons to Dr. Stokes:
Don’t correct him about Valhalla, Stokes. I know you want to. Don’t.
GRÁINNE’S
FINAL LETTER
to GRACE O’MALLEY
PART 1
Summer Solstice, 1603
Faith and Auspiciousness to Your Grace!
It’s a very long letter I’ll be writing you this day, and the last one ever, for certain this time. I’ve been to the future and back again, so I have, and am about to go again—and this time, I am quite certain there’ll be no returning. So you’ll never know the end of my story, Your Grace, but now in your closing weeks, before you cease to draw breath, it’s a remarkable adventure I’m leaving you to dwell upon, that you might not forget your little Gráinne as the veils lower between the worlds to receive you.
So to get on with the telling:
Rose Sent me forward, to the same place we have both so oft sent Tristan and the others. I arrived in a place so shocking that I doubt our fair language has words harsh and perverse enough to do it justice. As Tristan had already revealed to me, in this future day there’s only a small, airless chamber where magic’s working, with just enough room for two people, barely larger than a garderobe it is. The walls are slick and peculiar, like tiles made of painted wood. And no smells in it at all, not a one. How can that be?
But ’tis nothing compared to what happens when the door of the chamber opes. ’Twould take me half a lifetime to describe to you the wonders and the horrors of the future world. The garderobe, what they call the ODEC, is housed within a large chamber—a strange room with mechanical monstrosities and a dreadful buzz in the air as if lightning were always just about to strike, a sound they are all indifferent to, much as I became indifferent to the odors of Southwark. And this chamber in turn is inside a vast building, which is on a street full of vast buildings, in a city of streets with vast buildings. Larger than cathedrals some of them, but without ornament or even shape. Like building blocks for giants, so they are. No imagination or love of beauty at all.
Everything functions without human or magical assistance, but I confess most breathlessly that whatever power keeps humanity and its many mechanical servants humming . . . it is far more dazzling than any magic I have ever seen performed.
And I tell you straight out: suspicious this makes me, for what is the cause to bring magic back when it has been replaced by something clearly more serviceable? So the first riddle I put my mind to was this: in a world where carriages travel without beasts to pull them, and food is effortlessly abundant, and there is ample light to sunder any darkness, from all manner of peculiar torches, none of them given to burning down a place even if it is all wood, and where all and sundry wear grander clothes than most anyone in London and an astonishing variety what’s more . . . something there must be, some commodity or advantage, that magic can attain but mankind cannot yet. Nothing material can it be, for no magic I ever knew summoned such luxuries for royalty as everyday folk here take as commonplace.
The environs are not the point of my tale so I shall omit most of the gobsmacking details, but please know I will happily discourse upon it if you’re requesting it of me, Your Grace. To the Kingdom of Heaven I know you are bound soon, but it might not contain half the wonders of yon twenty-first century.
So to get to the telling at last:
Greeted I was by the lady-in-waiting of the ODEC—the first woman ever I met of that time, in that time, and wasn’t she strangely dressed! With teeth every bit as fine as Tristan’s. When I gave her courtesy, why, she was astonished, for isn’t my name one of glorious renown in the future? It is, sure. She proffered me a thick white cotton shift with a belt sewn into it, from a pile of them beside the door, and then a set of absurdly short stockings from another pile (socks, she called them), instructed me to don it all, and asked me to wait—as if I’d anywhere to go now that I’d arrived. Then she spoke directly to her desk, so she did, asking it to send her Lieutenant Colonel Lyons on account of Gráinne had arrived from London.
Within moments there he was, my handsome fella, looking at me through a wall made of the most perfect glass that can be imagined—so smooth and flawless as to be invisible. He looked ever so bizarre in the weeds he must wear in that future time, monotone and snug but shapeless, not glorifying his marvelous shape and yet neither hiding it for modesty as priests are wont to do. ’Twas incredibly dull he looked. After giving me a look up and down, he nodded as if to say “Sure that be Gráinne” and then went to a door in the glass wall, out of my view.
Meanwhile I was hustled away by an
other young man with gorgeous teeth, who smelled like something I might like to lick (but refrained), escorting me out of the room of the ODEC, he did, under horrible illumination that buzzed fiendishly and made everyone look dead, along a corridor covered in some kind of short, stubby pelt, very firmly set upon the boards, and then into a room tiled with a marvelous substance such as my stockinged feet had never felt before—it both gave way and yet slightly gripped the stocking. This room was blindingly bright and cold, everything made of metal like an armory, but even brighter somehow, as if everything were the color of a new sword—whole walls like silver. Most peculiar it was. At this point, Your Grace, I wouldn’t be lying to say that I was that fatigued and weak, as if all my humors were being slowly drained from me. It occurred to me that a good slumber would be most agreeable. As if he were reading my thoughts, the young man led me to a peculiar piece of furniture, something between a couch and a throne, a sort of upright divan I suppose it was. ’Twas soft and padded and strewn about with blankets and in other ways most inviting for one about to swoon.
But then Tristan came into the room, and that brought me back to my senses.
“God ye good morrow,” myself said gaily. “There’s no need to be looking so surprised, Tristan, sure Rose is attending to my duties in Southwark, and I’d a mind to see for myself the Great Work I am helping build with my journeyman’s efforts. I know you were wanting me to come, so I thought I’d better leg it to you quick as I could.”
“You’re two weeks early,” he said.
“’Twas a change of scene I was wanting, all them natural philosophers were growing dull enough to dry snot. Isn’t it right glad you are to see me, so? Sorry my togemans are so homely, they’re all your maid had to offer me. ’Tisn’t even my knees these stockings reach to, I never knew how tawdry your costume was in this era.”
“Listen to me,” Tristan said in the stoic soldierly way of his, which was grand with me as the whole point of coming here was to hear what he had to say. Besides which, I was growing weaker almost every minute. “There are things in the air here that can kill you just from what you breathe or touch. There is an entire protocol you must go through,” and then he went about using lots of words what sounded Latin and of many syllables, and I wasn’t especially interested in them as I was suddenly fain to sit in the divan. Happily ’twas exactly there he placed me, and talking without pause he was, saying he would have to talk to his superiors while I was going through the ordeal he was about to put me through.
A woman dressed all in white appeared in this room, like a religious acolyte of some pagan creed, and didn’t she and the young man begin to work with some alarming mechanical objects, the which seemed to be alive all on their own, with mysterious eyes and lights and noises and movements, full of hoses and tubes they were, transparent like fine glass but bendable like straw, most confounding. And they were bringing these monsters close to me, and I saw all manner of needles at the ends of the tubes. The woman was introduced to me as a physician (truly! A woman physician!) and the young man as her “nurse,” and they explained in a most unmusical and peculiar kind of English that they had to pump me full of medicine to prevent the invisible airborne humours from imbalancing my own. They had nothing practical there, no leeches or poultices or charms or herbs, nothing but these strange mechanical curiosities. The fellow explained they had to stick needles into my arm to fill me with the medicine—in the form of potion it was—and sure it was the closest I have ever come to panicking. Only Tristan’s familiar presence kept me from something near hysteria, and Your Grace knows I am not easily unnerved.
Things were so clean, you could smell the cleanliness, cleaner than soap it was, and very cold to the spirit. The needles did not hurt, and were bound to my arms and the backs of my hands with some kind of sticking tape, and I felt a cold drowsy feeling in my veins, as if someone were binding me with a spell of lethargy. These first moments of my arrival, to speak true, were not even the slightest bit resembling what I imagined.
“You’ll be getting treatment over the course of the next few days,” says the physician, “and you’ll be quarantined in this room for two weeks.”
“And I’ll have to bring Blevins in to see you,” says Tristan, as if aggrieved he were, although of course secretly Blevins was exactly the man I wanted. “Gráinne, I’m shocked you did this without consulting me first.”
“Sure you haven’t been back to see me in weeks,” says I. “How could I consult you if you weren’t there to consult?”
“There have been plenty of agents back in your time,” says he. “You could have given one of them a message.”
“But then I’d miss seeing that look on your face.” I grin. “’Tis all grand, Tristan, we’ll have a grand time of it.”
Unconvinced he looked, and none too happy, but away he went anyhow. Now I was alone. Or so I thought.
The light, which shone impossibly steady right out of the ceiling, was dimmed so that it was perhaps as bright as a cloudy morn—before that it had been as bright as midsummers at noon—and then it dimmed even more so that it resembled nearly sunset, but without the proper kinds of shadows or color. All wrong and strange it was. It’s quite overwhelmed I was finding myself, Your Grace, and I was not at all sure after all that I was really prepared for my adventure. Wasn’t I certain I would need to be finding someone who had my back.
And suddenly I realized I was not alone. As far as one might spit (well, as far as I might spit anyhow, which is farther than some) was a curtain dividing the room, suspended cleverly from a sort of track attached to the ceiling. A hand reached out from its other side and swept it out of the way, revealing another divan-throne, and upon that didn’t there sit a man now with long brown hair, dressed in the same ungainly togemans I was wearing—white robe and insensibly short stockings. And needles sticking out of his arms, so he had, attached to tubes. A sinewy strength he had, rare amongst the city folk of London, even the soldiers, and honestly even Tristan, who is quite the specimen, looked merely bulky in compare. Every visible inch of skin on this fellow’s body was taut. Handsome he was, but not so handsome as Tristan. There was no way to know his rank as he had nothing about him but what I did, that being what we were given to hide our nakedness. He held himself like a soldier and a leader. Common sense declared he, like myself, had recently arrived from elsewhere. Looking him over, as much as I could be seeing of him, it seemed clear to me that he would offer excellent protection, not to mention an excellent fuck, and so I took it upon myself to make friends with him.
“Good day to you,” I said. “Do you speak English?”
It was a queer look he gave me, and then didn’t he answer not in the Queen’s English but in a peculiar patois of Anglo-Norman French. I’m knowing enough French to get along in a whorehouse, but that is the French of our day. His was of an earlier age. But plenty of time we had, and little else to occupy it, and so as the hours went by we explained ourselves to each other.
He is Magnus, from a village in Normandy. He had spent much of his life a-roaming, fighting for the Emperor’s guard in Constantinople. ’Twas all the way forward from the year 1205 or so Magnus had come (he wasn’t much for calendars, he was more of a map fella), and he had been Sent hither to his great surprise and without his leave, as he had begun to sort out that something peculiar was happening with the world. Lest his understanding trigger lomadh (he had a different word for it, but understood it perfectly, as he’d seen it with his own eyes), Tristan and his company had brought him forward, so they had, for everybody’s safety. He had arrived three days before me.
Now this fella, I thought, was one to have on your side if you were feeling weak as a kitten, which I was, being deprived of all magic. So chat him up I did, and between us didn’t we share nuggets of information. He had little to add to my knowledge, of course, as he was no part of Tristan’s company. He hadn’t a strategy as I did, given he didn’t know he would be coming here until moments before it happened. I kept my c
ounsel but was friendly enough. Surely he’s not so evolved as we, in that it’s obsessed he is with gold and such, like all those accursed Norman-type peoples who have run riot over our fair island . . . but he’s canny, that lad. Straight off I sensed that.
The next day the weakness came over me something terrible and I had fevers and aches. As Magnus and I lay there getting potions pumped into our bodies to balance our humors, another physician-type woman came into the room and went straight to Magnus and let him know, by pantomime gestures, that he should be baring his left shoulder. This he did, and immediately she took exception to something on it. It seemed a simple birthmark to me. He looked askance at her interest, and no wonder, for perhaps here as ever people are eager to see marks of the devil upon a body, and especially upon a stranger. He tensed, but the woman did not seem to notice.
“I see why they called me in . . . that does look a little suspicious,” she said, off-hand as all that.
He tensed more.
From her breast pocket the woman removed an object no larger than a playing card. Colored light shone from one face of it, as if ’twere a stained glass window. She let her fingers play over it for a few moments, then spoke: “I’ll be removing that mole for a biopsy.”
After the briefest of pauses, the object—which I later learned is called a phone—spoke to Magnus in his own dialect. Or tried to, anyway, as “biopsy” ain’t a word to those people, any more than it is to you and me—but as best I could discern, it strung a few words together that approximated the idea, which was that she was going to lop the thing off for a closer look.
I could see well enough that this wasn’t Magnus’s first phone-chat, for he was in no way as astonished as I. He rattled something off, and after a few moments the phone translated: “Going to cut it off me?” Magnus was wary but not worried.
To her gentleman attendant she said something about “lie doe cain” which the phone dutifully attempted to translate, but botched it somehow—forgive me, Your Grace, but I was half delirious, and this bit was a sort of comedy of errors involving the phone and the various dialects. Magnus had a lot of questions—not of a suspicious nature, you’ll understand, but simple hunger to know. It was laboriously explained that “lie doe cain” is a potion, not magical in nature (since magic has no purchase in this time and place) but once injected into his shoulder with a wee needle, deadened the pain so that the woman sliced that birthmark off Magnus’s shoulder without him even needing a swig of whiskey! He watched this in fascination and wonder, like a child seeing a magician at his tricks. The assistant bandaged it neatly enough, and said to him, through the phone, “That might hurt after the lie doe cain wears off.”
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel Page 50