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

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The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.: A Novel Page 51

by Neal Stephenson


  Utterly baffled was Magnus, and he reached across to prod the bandage. “No pain?” he said.

  “Don’t touch it,” she said with brisk compassion. “No touch.”

  “No pain,” he repeated. “No nothing!”

  The doctor had been dousing her hands with a sort of ointment they use, scented like bad gin. It is a ritual with them.

  “Anesthetic,” she said slowly, and repeated it several times, syllable for syllable. “Makes it numb.”

  “But how? Is it magic?”

  I shook my head. “There is no magic in this time.” He looked astounded at this news, so now I knew I had some insight to offer him that sure would bind him to me.

  The physician now turned her attention to me, and said she’d like to have a look at my skin, all over, as a precaution—for my freckly complexion was of a sort prone to just the sorts of moles she’d lately sliced off of Magnus, and it’s superstitious they are about such things. The assistant shot the curtain across to afford me a bit of privacy, and I pulled up my shift and let the doctor look me over.

  “So the lie doe cain is a numbing agent, is it?” I asked the female physician. “Where does it come from? Seems a remarkable ointment.”

  She shrugged. “It’s very commonplace in this era. You can buy it at any pharmacy. Do you know what a pharmacy is? You might know it as an apothecary, or chemist.”

  “Aye I know it surely, but I doubt he does,” I say. “I’ll explain.”

  No eldritch freckles were to be found on my person and so the lady and her assistant packed up their potions and bandages and absented themselves. This was only one such encounter, for don’t these people have a thousand varieties of doctor, each keen to inspect a different bit of you with a different contraption, and it’s shocked you’d be, my lady, if I told you everywhere they looked.

  When they were leaving us alone, I brought Magnus up to date on all I knew (besides my own schemes, of course). His pale blue eyes were round as platters a fair bit of the time.

  “But you must know,” I told him when I’d said all I knew, “I’ve never left my own age before. Well, not by more than a year or two, for sport. I’ve nothing left to explain, for all the rest will be as new to me as to you.”

  After a few days of this, my fevers broke, and my vigor returned as I was growing accustomed to an existence without magic. When it seemed I was fit for conversation, Tristan returned. He had company: one older gentleman and two women, a bit younger than myself. The younger of the two was very beautiful and wore a dress; the other, plainer, and dressed similarly to the men, and the bearing of a scholar did she have about her, like an abbess.

  “This is Gráinne,” said Tristan, looking tense about the mouth.

  I smiled my charming smile and held out my hand to the gentleman. He stared at me. He was a dignified-enough looking chap, clearly of higher birth from Tristan by the way he carried himself. He had a short, thick mane of grey, swept back as if posing for a statue he was. He reminded me a bit of that right arse Les Holgate who triggered the lomadh and ruined my life. “This is Dr. Roger Blevins,” Tristan says to me, in a heavy-handed sort of way.

  “Well met and God save you, milord,” I say, leaning forward from the divan to clasp his hand gingerly (as the back of my hand had all the needles still).

  “It is good to meet you—but you have defied protocol in coming here,” he says sternly, with great anger in his eyes. So as usually is the case, I begin to cast a spell to soften him to me . . . and at once I realize, with a dreadful feeling in my guts, that it will not work! Tristan spoke true, there was no magic here at all. No wonder I felt at once so heavy and dull.

  “I cry pardon,” I say, trying not to show my dismay. “Things do work best free and easy-like in London, I did not realize how regular in your habits you are here. Isn’t it good I came and learned that?”

  The two men exchanged glances and each sighed, in different keys. Blevins made a gesture with his head, and Tristan nodded as if understanding a secret code he was.

  “Mel,” he said, a bit wearily, to the plainer of the women. “Meet Gráinne. Gráinne, here is Doctor Melisande Stokes. And here is Erszebet.” That being the fine-looking one in the skirt, with the painted face.

  Melisande, without a smile of greeting but a look of some checked amusement in her eye, held out her hand and shook mine. “It’s an honour to meet you, Gráinne. We are very much in your debt. Welcome to America.”

  Much quieter is Melisande than I was anticipating her to be. She must be clever in hidden, subtle ways, not the way of educated women in Elizabeth’s court who are falling all over each other to outshine one another. Her light is a secret that she uses as a tool, and sure there is something tough there underneath it, which I do respect well enough. ’Tis clear enough from watching her and Tristan that there should be fire between them, certainly some congress, but just as clear that admitting to it is something you’ll find neither of them doing. Still the attraction hangs in the air almost visibly. I believe when I go back there—now that I have a plan, which shortly I shall tell you of—I must find a way to use that.

  And as for Erszebet, their original witch, she is fair indeed, but she is not a happy lass. Her discontentment fairly radiates from her fiery dark eyes, and her face is fashioned, as if from birth, to have a bit of a pout or sneer. And yet strangely charming (excuse the term) I found her to be at once.

  Rather than taking my proffered hand to shake, she took it and kissed my knuckles. “I greet you as a sister,” says she. “As I greet all the witches who dwell in my house, and come under my aegis.”

  “Now wait a moment,” says Tristan. “We don’t know we’ll be keeping her on as an employee.”

  “And I don’t know I’ll be staying,” says I, “if this is how I’m to be spoken of—like as if I weren’t even in the room.”

  “Gráinne, don’t you understand, you can’t leave,” said Tristan with some irritation. “Once an historical agent has come forward, they cannot go back, they have too much knowledge of what is here to safely take back.”

  “Then staying’s what I’ll do,” I said agreeably.

  Now the Blevins is watching all of this back-and-forth with what I’m sure he imagines to be a canny and knowing mien. Ever so stern he was in the beginning, with his talk of protocols, but now doesn’t he change his tune and become the friend and protector of poor Gráinne.

  “Did you have in mind making the poor woman a detainee?” says the Blevins, taking a wee step closer to me, as if he’s going to ward off the others’ wicked assaults. “No, we need her abilities in the ATTO. This has been in the works for months, Tristan. Perhaps you missed it, when you were off becoming a hero and a saint, and watching Diachronic Shear in Pera, and vacationing in France; but Gráinne, though she showed up early, came here to work for me. And once we have matters sorted out, she’ll enjoy the same freedoms and privileges as any other anachronic employee.”

  During the ensuing silence, while Tristan and Mel are rolling their eyes at this peroration, Erszebet steps in.

  “She’s not an employee,” says Erszebet. “She has not signed your nonsense papers. She has only helped you from the generosity of her heart. You have no hold on her. As I know the story, you are deeply in her debt and have made absolutely no attempt to recompense her.” To me, she says, “This is a terrible world and I would not stay if I could leave, but I have obligations I must honor. You do not. If I were you, I would leave at once. If you want to stay, I will do all in my power to make things less wretched for you than they have been for me.”

  More sympathy’s what I’d be feeling, if these words came from an unkempt beggar, but here she is wearing a gown as fine as any at Bess’s court might wear, although scandalously short of length the skirt was. So I do wonder a wee bit about how easily she finds things miserable. But she is offering me a place at her table, and I accept with graciousness.

  “I will show you everything you need to know to survive in this st
range world,” she says firmly, as if in defiance of the men, whom she does not waste even a flicker of her attention on now. “These people think they have set up an initiation into these times, for Anachrons who come forward. What they offer is feeble. I will give you my own attention, as I do every witch. You will be comfortable and safe, and most important, you will understand things. These men do not think witches need to understand much, as if we were just cogs in a bit of machinery, they have no regard for our human rights.”

  “Our what?” asks I, as I see it’s Blevins’s turn to be rolling his eyes a bit.

  “I will show you how to order take-out and flush a toilet and use Instagram. Although you are older. Perhaps you would prefer Facebook.” A sly smile of pleasure. “I will take you shopping. For clothing. The other Anachrons are not allowed this, but the witches I take whenever I wish. I think you will enjoy that.”

  None of the others disagreed with her, which I took to mean that this was Erszebet’s role in greeting all new witches. She’d made a gesture on the word “clothing,” gracefully smoothing her hands down either side of her bodice, so that her meaning would be obvious even to those with no modern English.

  Such as Magnus, who had been watching all of this from his divan silently, as a cat gazing into a garden from an open window.

  “Clothing,” he echoed, and they all turned toward him. Clearly he had already been introduced before I arrived, as none of them rushed to shake his hand. “Clothing,” he repeated, imitating Erszebet’s gesture upon his own body.

  Tristan nodded, and fluently enough he spoke to him, in Magnus’s native tongue. I could make out a smattering of familiar words—chemise, pantaloons, cap. Magnus frowned and unconvinced he looked. He responded to Tristan with a growling answer and sure didn’t that answer include a word we had just learned from the physician: lidocaine.

  Tristan looked taken aback. They spoke briefly and then Tristan turned to the others. “He’s curious about the lidocaine Doctor Andrews gave him. Wonders if we are going foraging or raiding for clothes, if we can obtain some.”

  The Blevins made an appalled sound in his throat, which developed into a chuckle. “Foraging or raiding?” Then he laughed out loud.

  “He’s a medieval Norman warrior, sir,” Tristan said. “There’s no word for ‘shopping’ in his language.”

  “Nonsense,” Blevins said. “He’s from circa 1200 and he lived in the most sophisticated city in the world. Even if he was illiterate.”

  “Almost everyone was illiterate,” rejoined Melisande. “That’s why being an historical linguist is such a challenge, Dr. Blevins, or don’t you remember? Oral tradition was—”

  “Oral tradition is why he got into trouble in the first place,” says the Blevins, and to Tristan he says it, not to Mel. “By recognizing you from such an old story.”

  “He put two and two together, and became suspicious that we were time traveling,” Mel agreed, “and that fired his imagination.”

  “I’ll give him that much—he has a vivid imagination,” said the Blevins, “and that he imagines himself a Viking.” And over the lovely face of Tristan don’t I see a look of annoyance flare for a moment, then fade away.

  Magnus knows perfectly well that they’re talking about him. He can’t make out one word in ten, but “viking” he knows. He’s favoring Blevins with an innocent look that I did not for one moment believe was really innocent. I saw at once what Magnus was about: for his own reasons, whatever they be, he was gulling them all into considering him dull-witted. Seeing he now has the Blevins’s attention, he taps his shoulder, and says with deliberately (it seemed to me) child-like delight, “Viking! Viking!” and makes a fist as if he’s holding an axe, and goes into a little pantomime of laying about himself as if in a battle of legendary times. And then doesn’t he laugh like a toddler.

  At this, the Blevins smirks, and says to Tristan, “He’s like that Korean guy we brought from the Silla dynasty.”

  “Who, Yeon Hyeokgeose?” says Melisande curtly. “He was developmentally challenged. He was simple.”

  “This guy’s pretty simple,” says the Blevins with a quick laugh, and gestures to Magnus as if he was a piece of furniture. And then quick as you like, I realize that Magnus has looked round at the rest of us to see our displeasure at whatever Blevins said (and he might, in hindsight, have even recognized the word simple)—and then realizing he’d just been insulted, doesn’t he smile and chuckle at the Blevins as if they were old friends.

  “He is not simple,” Tristan said. “I’ve fought in battle beside him, he is quick-witted and I know his worth.”

  “Battle’s not about brains, is it,” says the Blevins. It’s not Magnus he’s looking at when he says it, but Tristan, and I can see well enough from that what sort of history lies between these two men. “Tristan, we’re done here. Gráinne needs to be shown every kindness—whether by Erszebet or the rest of the Sea Cod Staff, it’s no concern of mine—or of yours. We’ll get her into the ATTO as soon as we can. As for Hagar the Horrible here, I suspect he’ll end up a useless drain on our resources and our hospitality. But he seems an amiable sort. Once we’re satisfied he has a decent level of impulse control—enough that we can take him off premises without causing an incident—I’ll wager he’d be susceptible to a shock and awe sort of treatment.”

  “It’s going to take a lot to shock him or awe this dude,” Tristan demurred.

  “Viking!” echoes Magnus, and wasn’t his face beaming.

  “Wait until he gets a load of modern video games,” the Blevins insisted. “We’ll get him some toys to play with, settle him down a little, and then see what he can do for us as a trainer.”

  INCIDENT REPORT

  AUTHOR: MAJ Isobel Sloane

  SUBJECT: Magnus and Gráinne

  THEATER: C/COD (present day)

  DTAP: Bio-containment ward

  FILED: Day 1880 (late September, Year 5)

  Pursuant to the Sexual Harassment Policy, information is hereunder presented about a series of incidents in the bio-containment ward involving recently arrived Anachrons Magnus and Gráinne (no last names provided). Technically these do not constitute sexual harassment per se since all activity took place between consenting adults in what they believe to be a private setting. However, DOSECOPS personnel, part of whose job is to continuously monitor the video and audio “feeds” from the room in question, have raised a number of complaints that need to be addressed.

  Without getting into overly lurid details, the basic situation is that after a few days during which she complained of fever, chills, aches, and low energy (all typical for newly arrived Anachrons going through the inoculation protocol), Gráinne has bounced back and returned to a level of vitality and vigor that, though it might be normal for her, is exceptional by our standards. Magnus, of course, had a three-day head start on her in this department, and the inoculations never seemed to make much of a dent on him anyway. They are in adjacent beds, separated only by a curtain, twenty-four hours a day. No one else is in the ward, and they are blissfully unaware of the existence of modern surveillance technology. Beginning three days ago and building from there, the two of them have been engaging in a wide range of sexual activities, as often as four times a day. These activities are quite obviously consensual, so there is no issue where that is concerned. Gráinne, as it turns out, exhibits a pattern of loud, prolonged, and repetitive vocalizations while engaging in such activities—in the vernacular, she is what is known as a “screamer.” All of this comes through in full Dolby 7.1 on the security consoles that DOSECOPS personnel are expected to monitor as a condition of their employment. While it may have had some novelty value at first, it is now to the point of posing a serious distraction at best. At worst it is creating an actively hostile work environment, particularly for female employees and for those whose religious convictions make such viewing problematic.

  Accordingly, I have muted the audio feeds from the bio-containment ward and encouraged security pe
rsonnel to leave the cameras off most of the time, making occasional spot checks only. Since Gráinne and Magnus are locked in, escape is physically impossible, and since our long-suffering medical personnel are on the other side of a door, only a few yards away, with access to the no doubt spectacular bio-monitor readout infographics, there is zero chance of either of these two Anachrons suffering any kind of medical emergency without our knowing of it immediately.

  These measures, which I unilaterally placed into effect this morning after stumbling into the ops center during a particularly egregious transaction between Magnus and Gráinne, have already lifted morale among security staff and eased a tense situation. Lieutenant [name redacted], who first drew my attention to the problem, has been placed on medical leave and assigned to a counselor.

  Exchange of posts by DODO staff

  on “Department Heads” ODIN channel

  DAY 1881

  Post from LTC Tristan Lyons:

  Not to nitpick, but Gráinne’s not a “screamer” in my experience.

  Reply from Dr. Melisande Stokes:

  Could you clarify that please?

  From LTC Lyons:

  Hahaha, yes, happy to clarify (thanks, Stokes!). During various DEDEs in settings where Gráinne was engaged in sexual activity WITH OTHER PEOPLE, I did not observe the vocalizations mentioned in Sloane’s incident report.

 

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