Master of the Revels Read online

  Very early on, before DODO were a big secret operation, the very nicely muscled and straight-toothed Tristan Lyons did find himself doing “recon” in London of 1601, whilst I was there myself as a spy for Grace O’Malley (Pirate Queen of Connaught and the noblest soul Ireland ever begat).

  I came to understand what Tristan and his ilk were all about. After pretending to be pleased to help them, I devised to bring myself forwards to the twenty-first century, when all of this terrible nonsense was afoot.

  By that point, DODO was a massive bureaucratic sprawl, and the gorgeously bicepted Tristan and his owlish little concubine, Melisande, had been outranked by a handsomely coiffed but otherwise silly fellow name of Dr. Roger Blevins. Instantly I ingratiated myself to your man Blevins and mentally seduced him, although ’twas hard to do, given that (as you well know) in this contemporary world, even the strongest witch may work no magic unless she’s in a feckin’ ODEC.

  I came to the twenty-first century because I aim to be magic’s champion. I aim to somehow prevent its 1851 disappearance—and thus prevent its indentured reappearance decades later, when ’tis controlled by eejits wanting it for their own fell and nasty purposes. Thus I must, as your generation would say, be “reverse engineering” history to eliminate all those things which snuffed out magic. Thus keeping it in the control of none but witches, as is proper. And you, friend witch, should join me to make it so, in defense of magic.

  But behold my predicament: should I be doing anything too drastic in my reverse engineering, I’d trigger Diachronic Shear, and I’m no fool so I’ll not chance calamity. Instead, I must find subtler ways to erode the forces that tamped down magic—that being all manner of technologies. ’Tis tricky. And trickier still is that I may discuss my plans with no other soul alive—unless you, Cara, upon reading this, join my crusade. None at DODO have a clue this be my end game; they consider me the Blevins’s adoring lieutenant, committed like him to his nation’s fecked overreaching ambitions. Were I to be found out, ’tis treason they’d be calling it, and off with my head. So ’tis a lonely, desperate mission I am on now. But confident I am, my friend, that once you read this, you’ll be forswearing your employers and leaping to my cause at once. For ’tis your cause too! Aren’t you a witch? Is right you are, and a cleverer one than most I know.

  And now, I must tell you something of your overlords, friend Cara, for I am sure they’ve sung a different song to you about all this. The Fugger banking family used witches to their own financial benefit for centuries, across all of Europe and much of the New World, Hong Kong, and so on. Even during those many decades when there was no magic, they benefited, for in July of 1851, they were alerted (accidentally) to the imminent-but-temporary lack of magic, so ’twas some savvy long-term investments they were able to make. This included—heed me now!—this included the decision to track the descendants of the witches in their employ, so that when magic was eventually reignited by DODO, the Fugger descendants would know the witches’ descendants, and thereby snag one of them at once and train her to be “the Fugger witch” as ’twas of old.

  And that witch, Cara? ’Tis you.

  I know not how Frederick Fugger, with his jaunty haberdashery and old-world manners and peculiar eyes, coaxed you to work for the Fugger Bank; I know not how he approached, convinced, nor trained you. But you should know that his family has been stalking your foremothers since 1851, waiting for the ODEC to make magic possible again—and if that sends no shivers down your spine, then scrape the ink right off this parchment and go enjoy your Neiman Marcus sales and dental benefits. If you continue to do his bidding, you will never be anything more than a cog in the machinery of the Fugger Bank, and magic will never be anything more but a means for all the patriarchs of industry to prosper selfishly. But if you will join me, and bind yourself to my mission, you will help me to liberate magic from its chains and return it to its rightful place in the world.

  The Fuggers be the only folk, saving certain wee sections of the U.S. government, who do grasp what all DODO is about. Determined they are, to keep their hand in the magic game ever so subtly. ’Tis why they found you, my friend. ’Tis also why they have cornered the market on rare-earth elements needed to create ODECs.

  My enemies, although there be but a handful of them, have fled from DODO and are now amassed together to undo my efforts. Their reason is that I nearly succeeded in offing one of them. (And also the trifling fact that they consider the unravelling of science to be a naughty thing.) They’ve a witch among them, Erzsébet, a haughty Hungarian bitch, to be honest, who should be on my side, but all the devils of Hell put a pox upon her, for she is choosing instead to be an eejit traitor to her race.

  Your employers, the Fuggers, not wanting any instability to threaten their spectacular money-fying efforts, do insist we all feign to be civilised, one to the other, and the Fuggers are the ones who keep the lights on, as they say. ’Tis been made plain to me that I shall come to harm if I attempt to kill or disable anyone in the present era, no matter how much they deserve it. Thus, civilised we must remain . . . in the present era.

  I have determined to lure my enemies, each in turn, to epochs where the Fugger reach is weak or nonexistent and then pluck them off one by one. Ha! I have just now come from my first triumph, and flushed with victory I am, having destroyed the eldest of them, the physicist. And furthermore, haven’t I accomplished this using the most potent eldritch spell that ever witches wove? Is right I have! A charm so maleficent that many witches would have banned it even when magic was at its apex! ’Tis just a few lines of chanted verse, yet its effect is so vicious as to resemble Diachronic Shear, if Shear could be directed to swaddle just one human in its fire. I shall explain more in detail, if and when you join me.

  I will be writing you, in this missive here, the story of how I go about my great Unmaking of mankind’s great Making. That way, when you choose to join me, you may leap into the work with all necessary foreknowledge. I intend to lance the boil from several angles all at once (in addition to removing my enemies, I mean). That way, if my enemies do thwart one operation, still there will be other of my efforts that may yet thrive. I’ve convinced a DODO witch to Send me back here to seventeenth-century Eire regular-like, on the pretext that I need to smell the salt sea air as it was in my youth. There are scant things I miss from the old country, but sure the pure, clean Irish air is chief among them. The smell of the soil and the sea and the gentle summer wind, they tug at me heart . . .

  . . . or so I tell folk anyhow. And true that is, but given the feckin’ dampness and rot and sheep stink everywhere, ’tis not enough to really make the journey, were there not something greater at stake. I come here only to write these words that will convince you, Cara, to be leaving off your present employment and join me.

  The queerest thing about my life now is this: because the Fuggers forbid disruptions of any sort, my enemies and I must live within the same city and encounter each other as if we were not enemies! And thus it is I found myself mere hours ago—just before I reduced Oda-sensei to ash and then came here to write you—face-to-face with my chief nemesis, the one named Melisande.

  And where did we meet, of all mad places, but within a shop.

  Upon that broad street known to the locals as Mass Ave (although it’s naught to do with church), there be many large shops selling all manner of goods. One in particular is unique in selling what it does label “rare and exotic spirits,” although many are familiar quaffs to myself, such as apple wine and stiffer spirits from the Northlands. But they also vend contemporary libations of outstanding merit, and I’ve arranged to have an unlimited expense account courtesy of the Chief Minion Blevins. As I desired to have a nice pour awaiting me after my return from my diachronic errands, I was perusing my options.

  And didn’t it happen that I was not the only one in search of spirits? Indeed I wasn’t.

  Post by Melisande Stokes on “Gráinne/DODO Alert” GRIMNIR (secure chatnet) channel

&nbs
p; DAY 1986 (5 JANUARY, YEAR 6)

  Twenty minutes ago found me making small talk with Gráinne in the liquor aisle at Sundry’s Groceries on Mass Ave.

  My simply writing that WTF sentence demonstrates we need to document What Happens Now. So. I’m starting a new channel just to chronicle any and all encounters we have with DODO personnel. Maybe we’ll get lucky and discover some of them are secretly on our side, but let’s not count on that.

  Here’s what happened. I’d gone to the pharmacy for a surgical needle to prepare the smallpox vaccination. Since I was so close to Sundry’s, I stopped in there to pick up one of their magnum packages of ramen plus, per Tristan’s request, a bottle of Yggdrasil liqueur. His baby sister is graduating a semester early, and I was tasked with buying her favorite inebriant as a graduation gift. (Her name is Robin, she’s in grad school somewhere in New York, and I didn’t know she existed until three days ago, so don’t anybody else feel left out. But kudos to you, Tristan. A brotherly gesture while your own world is tilting off the rails—you’re a mensch.)

  As I was perusing Sundry’s “rare and exotic spirits” section, I saw a tangle of wild reddish hair at just exactly the right height to be You Know Who, and then the owner of said hair tossed her head back casually in a familiar manner. I felt a buzzing sensation in my midriff as I realized: Oh yes, it’s our own demented Gráinne. Here we were, in all absurd circumstances, in the local grocery store FFS, and now what? She couldn’t do magic on me here, at least. But what etiquette determines how to address someone who, at last meeting, exiled me to 1851 London? “Nice to see you, Gráinne” would be a trifle disingenuous, while “You Gaelic bitch who Sent me to end my days inhaling whale-oil fumes in a Victorian madhouse” might have gotten me thrown out of Sundry’s, and I hadn’t found the Yggdrasil yet. So I stood very still and hoped she would not notice me.

  No such luck. She had just picked up a bottle of Dom Pérignon and turned in my direction as if expecting me. Her eyes got very wide, but she smiled immediately. She was not threatened by my presence. She wasn’t disturbed. If anything she looked delighted, which annoyed me more than it should have. For a moment I thought she was going to embrace me. What she was actually doing was raising her arm to make sure I noticed her expensive champagne.

  “Sure isn’t it Mel, then,” she said gaily, as if we were passing acquaintances. “And a happy New Year to you.” And then she winked at me.

  “Hello, Gráinne,” I said, trying not to grind my teeth. “We’re only a few days in, but it’s been a pretty good year so far. Celebrating?” I asked, nodding toward the bubbly, which was easy to do since she continued to hold it high.

  “What, this shite?” She laughed. “Sure this is what I sweeten my tea with. I brush my teeth with it, so I do. If it was celebrating I was up to, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on commercial brands now, would I?”

  I smiled politely over my adrenaline and rage, excused myself, paid cash for the Yggdrasil and the ramen, and ran back to East House. And by the way, there’s an unmarked government vehicle parked across the street.

  What I realized from those few head-spinning minutes is that GRIMNIR needs to have specific channels for recording literally everything we’re dealing with. We need voice-to-text transcripts for meetings. And Mortimer should set us all up with personal channels, so that we have the privilege of keeping some things to ourselves as long as the world doesn’t blow up somehow—but if the world does blow up somehow, then we can data-mine each other’s stashes. Mortimer, please pipe up and let us know if this can happen.

  Reply from Mortimer Shore:

  Yeah, it can happen. I recommend we keep most communications in a general channel, but if you want to keep a private journal about your love life or something, no worries, nobody else can access it. Not too easily, anyhow.

  From Melisande Stokes:

  Some things should not be online at all.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  Got it. Some things should exist only as typed or handwritten notes that go up on a bulletin board lol. I will make the bulletin board. Its frame shall be welded in the shape of Odin’s shield and it will hang in the hallway between Oda-sensei’s office and the kitchen and it shall be AWESOME.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  If you hang it in that hallway the plumber will be able to see it. It has to live in the basement.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  No offense, Rebecca, but I’m not sure how much more stuff we can cram into your basement. At least with all your grandkids’ toys and stuff still there. Aren’t they teenagers? Do they still need a companion cube? I mean, no judgment, just checking.

  From Frank Oda:

  Rebecca is just finishing her after-action report and then retiring for a nap.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  My bad, I forgot she was going viral. (Ha!)

  AFTER ACTION REPORT

  DOER: Rebecca East-Oda

  THEATER: Colonial Cambridge

  OPERATION: Serums

  DEDE: Bring back cowpox virus to start repository of vaccination serums against smallpox

  DTAP: 1640 Brookline (Muddy River)

  BACKGROUND: As soon as we realized Gráinne’s plans, we immediately set about establishing how to create viable alternatives to DODO’s extraordinary resources (“Gráinne got DODO in the divorce,” as Frank has just commented). In some cases this will be impossible: we cannot re-create the Chronotron, etc. There’s a handful of us, and many hundreds of them. But the most urgent thing to combat is our sudden lack of access to state-of-the-art medical facilities. Specifically, a center that can scrub our DOers clean both inside and out and protect them against deadly diseases from the past (and also protect the past from our biological contaminants). While some vaccinations are easy to come by without attracting attention (a flu shot, for instance, or a COVID-19 booster), others will be trickier.

  Deadliest and trickiest is smallpox. It’s hard to get the vaccine now that the disease is virtually eradicated. Tristan considered asking some of his friends from the service, but chose not to do anything to attract attention to us. We decided against old-school inoculation—the Onesimus/Cotton Mather variolation approach—because that would require somebody being patient zero, deliberately contracting the actual smallpox virus, without our having perfect control over the environment. We required a vaccination hack.

  Happily, Edward Jenner sorted all that out back in 1796: he observed that dairymaids who’d contracted cowpox (a fairly harmless virus) were naturally immune to smallpox. So he found a dairymaid with cowpox, lanced one of her pus-filled cowpox blisters with a needle, then used that needle to infect a young boy, who presented cowpox symptoms, including a slight fever and a blister on his arm. His own blister could then be lanced to infect somebody else with cowpox. He and the dairymaid (and whoever was infected with his cowpox in turn) were then immune to smallpox. Jenner called this vaccination (Mel surely knows vaccination comes from the Latin for cow—in homage to cowpox).

  So our hack was to find somebody with cowpox, lance one of their sores, and preserve the fluid to immunize new agents (assuming we can recruit any) from smallpox.

  The trick being that nobody gets cowpox anymore. It’s been eradicated. So somebody had to go back to a time and place where they could become infected. But the DOers in our breakaway gang have already been immunized by DODO, and Erzsébet was vaccinated in the mid-twentieth century. That left Frank, Julie, and myself.

  The best choice of DTAP was 1640 Cambridge, since Mel was aware of a specific week during which there had been a case of cowpox. This meant that the appearance of Julie (young Chinese-American) or Frank (elderly Japanese-American) would cause quite a stir, leaving yours truly (elderly WASP) to make the journey.

  I should add, with a certain nervous whimsy, how fitting it is that I bring back the serum, as Frank is the first who will be vaccinated with it. The moment we all broke from DODO, Tristan began gathering intelligence on Gráinne’s activities. He came to lea
rn that Gráinne deposited a box of some kind in a Shinto shrine in an obscure village near Kyoto during the Ashikaga shogunate. Given Frank’s heritage—he even spoke Japanese as a child at home—he was the clear choice to be Sent back there to see what the story is. So he, the elder statesman of the cause, and I, who never had a thought of time travel ourselves, are suddenly a diachronic tag team. I will bring back the serum, he will be vaccinated, and then Erzsébet will Send him back to find the box and see what mischief Gráinne is up to.

  Conveniently, Gráinne was seen when she placed the box there, approximately six hundred years ago, and so to this day there is folklore regarding the demon-woman who gave the shrine a gift. We found the exact shrine in a Google search.

  Frank is tickled to be our new DOer. Physicists generally create opportunities for others’ adventures. He is quietly delighted to have his own adventure.

  For myself, I’ve never had the slightest interest in diachronic travel. In fact, it’s been years since I’ve had even a yen to leave eastern Massachusetts. But of course I went.

  Absent of all the bio-containment protocols we had set up at DODO HQ, I spent January 1–3 fasting and “cleansing,” as they call it in wellness spas, so that I would not excrete any dangerous bugs while there. Tristan and Mortimer jury-rigged a cheap campground-style shower stall in the basement, beside Frank’s new version of the ODEC. I scrubbed myself down with the same antibacterial soap surgeons use before an operation.

  On January 4 at 10:00 a.m., Erzsébet and I went into the ODEC and she Sent me to Muddy River (now Brookline) in 1640. I arrived during a week in late September when we knew there was an active case of cowpox in Goody Fitch’s neighborhood.

  Since I’m the only one of us reading this who had not already experienced diachronic travel, there is no need for me to describe the sensations of it, but good heavens, I’m glad I’m too old to do it frequently. I’ve never been so disoriented in my life. It felt like I was emerging from a coma when I arrived in 1640. Very unsettling. I awoke bewildered under the open sky—stark naked, which has not happened for more than half a century! When I realized it was not a nightmare, I was able to recall my own name and then Frank’s. I sat up, surrounded by huge old trees, and saw the cottage Mel has described so often. I got to my feet, wobbly and blushing to the roots of my hair in all my aged nakedness.