Master of the Revels Read online

  Luckily, due to her many missions helping DODO, the witch Goody Fitch found my arrival unremarkable. Without comment, she dressed me in the same clothes Mel has borrowed from her so many times: a linen smock covered by a sleeveless waistcoat and skirt, a small collar for my neck, a long apron, and a simple linen cap. She also offered me a pair of her husband’s worn leather boots. None of it fit well, but that hardly mattered for the purpose.

  I was relieved to see no similarity in our faces; that would have distracted me, I think. I did not tell her I am her descendant (nor that a great-granddaughter of hers will, fifty years hence, meet a horrid end in Salem). I explained only what we needed to do. The science of it was unfamiliar to her, but she trusted me because I am Mel’s colleague. Once I had fully recovered from my disorientation, she led me to the farm where the infected girl lived. This was a quarter mile away along an ox path through the woods (or, as she called it, a highway).

  Armchair botanist that I am, I was fascinated by what I saw around me. The forest was oak chiefly, but also plenty of white pine interspersed, and most of the trees were enormous by today’s standards—well over a hundred feet tall, and the trunks at least a yard in diameter. There were also beech groves and the occasional chestnut and sugar maple. The undergrowth was huckleberry and blueberry, with a few puckered berries still clinging to their branches in the humidity. The woodland sounds were so agreeable and gentle compared to modern city noise. Not just the absence of traffic but even the subtle noises my own house makes without my consciously noticing: the buzz of electronics, the furnace kicking on and off, the pipes banging. These woods were so alive and yet so peaceful. The humus of the soil absorbed sound, so that even the quietness was more quiet than I’m used to.

  We passed half a dozen homesteads that, like the Fitches’, had been nearly clear-cut for lumber and agriculture. The houses were all alike, small and squat, wattle and daub with thatch roofs. Some of them had trails of gray smoke rising from chimneys in the center of the house.

  Goody Brown, the mother of the sick girl, was a solidly built woman with curly hair and very red cheeks. She gave me an unfriendly look when we arrived at their farm.

  “And who be this?” she asked Goody Fitch.

  “A stranger, traveled from afar,” said Goody Fitch. “Too weary for conversation so do not tax her with questions.”

  “She’s too old to have traveled from very far. Does the minister know she’s here?”

  “I heard the girl was ill, so I’ve come to see her and offer healing,” said Goody Fitch. “Not to encourage gossip.”

  Goody Brown’s eyes scanned between Goody Fitch’s face and mine suspiciously. But her concern for her daughter outweighed her curiosity of me, and she returned her full attention to the witch.

  “Will you use magic, then?” she asked quietly. “To heal, I mean? The good sort of magic that we need not mention to the minister.” (In a world as rough as this, it was not practical to associate all magic with witchcraft.)

  “Of course,” said Goody Fitch, impatient. “Bring her out. I must lance her sore, it is necessary for the magic to work.”

  The girl was summoned from the back room. She was ten or so, with neat pale braids, wearing a long white linen smock, her face pink with fever. Her mother told her that the witch would need to stab her with an iron needle, and I saw the girl blanch, but she resolutely approached us, rolled up one sleeve, and held her arm out toward us. There were three red blisters along her inner upper arm.

  “Take a breath, child,” said Goody Fitch in a gentler voice than she’d used with the mother. (Goody Fitch is not rough, but neither is she gentle. She is firm and carries herself with the air of the slightly aggrieved.) The girl breathed in, blinking rapidly from nerves. The witch took firm hold of the girl’s wrist, pulled a pin from her waistcoat hem, and plunged it laterally through one of the blisters, so that it pierced it and came out again, without going into the flesh of the arm. The girl made a terrible face and whimpered, but did not cry out.

  Goody Fitch withdrew the needle and held it upright, examining it in the light from the open doorway. “Good girl,” she said, releasing her wrist. The mother pressed her apron against the daughter’s arm. “Goody Brown, your daughter shall be healed in two days’ time, I swear it upon the son of our Lord.”

  “I thank you, Goody Fitch. What payment need you for this service?”

  Goody Fitch shook her head, still examining the needle. “You did not summon me, I volunteered my services.”

  Goody Brown’s face softened. “I thank you. I suppose we need not mention your friend’s visit to the minister.”

  “Of course you needn’t,” said Goody Fitch. “She’s not the minister’s visitor. God ye good day.”

  Then she hustled me quickly out of sight, carrying the infected needle with her.

  “What will you do to cure her?” I asked, as we headed back up the woody trail toward her homestead.

  “Absolutely nothing,” she said shortly. “Goody Brown thinks every sneeze means either God’s wrath or certain death. Cowpox is naught to worry oneself with; it will pass on its own quickly.” Now that we were safely out of sight, she stopped me in the middle of the track, glancing in either direction. Nobody but us and the trees. “Meanwhile, let us get this done for you. Prepare yourself.”

  She tapped my elbow. I rolled up the sleeve of my borrowed shirt to expose my upper arm. Goody Fitch gave me a moment to draw a deep breath, and then, as I willed myself to relax, she gouged the pin deep into my arm. The iron pins of colonial America are hellishly thick by contemporary standards. I may have cried out.

  She pulled the pin out, then clapped a clean piece of linen hard against the puncture, which began to bleed profusely. I confess to some dizziness and nausea from the pain. Goody Fitch, concerned by my ashen complexion, Homed me from right there on the path.

  I found myself back in the ODEC, naked and even more disoriented than I was when I was Sent, and bleeding, of course. Frank immediately bandaged my arm.

  I arrived back on January 4 at approximately 3:00 p.m. By evening, I was running a fever of 101 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I removed the bandage, I had a sizable sore at the site of the puncture. Despite my discomfort, this development is excellent news.

  I am writing this on a laptop from bed, the afternoon of January 5. The fever rose to 101.6 overnight and has held steady, although I am confident it will subside soon; the sore is clearly developing into a pustule. I predict that by tomorrow, or the next day at the latest, there will be enough fluid to extract and use for a serum for future vaccinations. Frank has suggested, in the spirit of old-school hacks, that as well as refrigeration, we take some of the material and preserve it on glass slides. Just in case Gráinne erases electricity and the refrigerator stops working.

  Would somebody please make sure that Frank has fed the cats? (And himself.) And if he wants some matcha, the bamboo whisk is in the built-in with the teapot, not with the other tea utensils. Thank you.

  FREYA’S TRANSCRIPT OF STRATEGY MEETING

  AT EAST HOUSE

  (later posted to GRIMNIR by Mortimer Shore)

  DAY 1986 (5 JANUARY, YEAR 6)

  MORTIMER: Okay, if you can all identify yourselves by first name and then say a few more sentences so my sweet scribe app Freya can learn your voices. Like this: Hey, Freya, I’m Mortimer, I am the IT wunderkind and sword dude, and tonight it is January 5. Okay, next.

  TRISTAN: Hey, Freya, I’m Tristan, I began DODO and I have operational command of what we’re doing now. I called this meeting to brainstorm what Gronya’s game plan might be. Gronya is an Irish witch who brought herself forward from the early 1600s to the twenty-first century and is now trying to eradicate technology.

  MEL: Hey, Freya, I’m Mel. I’m a historical linguist and helped Tristan out at the start of DODO.

  TRISTAN: Give yourself more credit than that, Stokes.

  MEL: Just FYI, Gronya is spelled G, r, a with a síneadh fada, i, n, n, e. M
ortimer, is there a way to teach the system to transcribe her name correctly?

  MORTIMER: I’ll work on that. Who’s next?

  ?: My name is Erzsébet.

  MORTIMER: You have to start by saying hey followed by Freya followed by I’m followed by your name. Just the first time.

  ?: Why did you create her this way? How can we expect her to understand the subtle nuances of our expressions if she cannot even recognize proper English without using your slang?

  MORTIMER: My bad, that’s just what I told her to do. You just gotta do it once.

  TRISTAN: Please.

  ERZSÉBET: Hey, Freya, I am Erzsébet, the witch who has made all of this possible. I am from Hungary. I am nearly two hundred years old but I appear to be twenty-five because I take extremely good care of myself.

  TRISTAN: And because you put a spell on yourself.

  ERZSÉBET: Freya will not think well of you if we go into the details of why I had to put a spell on myself.

  TRISTAN: Freya is a piece of voice-recognition software. Freya cannot form an opinion, and even if she could, I wouldn’t care what it was.

  MEL: Save it—

  MORTIMER: Okay, next, somebody—

  REBECCA: Hey, Freya, I’m Rebecca, I’m married to Frank and we’re having this meeting in my ancestral home in Cambridge, which has been renamed the East House Trust. I’m recovering from cowpox.

  FRANK: Hey, Freya, I’m Frank, Frank Oda, I’m married to Rebecca. I’m a physicist and I created the original ODEC, which stands for Ontic Decoherence Cavity, which is where the magic happens. Ha, I’ve always wanted an excuse to use that phrase. If you don’t count Erzsébet, I’m the oldest person in the room. Mortimer, should we also mention the others?

  MORTIMER: Thanks, Frank, right. For the record there are three other agents who have abandoned DODO and will help us, but they’re not here now. Their names are Esme, Julie, and Felix. They’re lying low, because we’re not sure if they’re protected by the same, eh, arrangement that is protecting us—which is that this banking family called the Fuggers are marginally aware of all this craziness and don’t want any global markets to freak out, so we all have to pretend that nothing crazy is going on. Anyhow, I’ll get their voices on here as soon as possible.

  MEL: And Chira.

  MORTIMER: Right, we will have to get her voice over the phone.

  MEL: For the record, Chira is our mole—a Diachronic Operative who’s helping us but is continuing to work at DODO. It’s only been a few weeks, but so far nobody seems to suspect her. Sometime soon we should discuss the pros and cons of extracting her.

  MORTIMER: Okay, guys, cool, thanks. Let me tweak Freya and we’ll be good to go for real.

  [three-minute break]

  TRISTAN: Okay, so this meeting is to consider Gráinne’s MO. Her premier targets will likely be photographers—Julius Berkowski, Schulze, Niépce, Daguerre—or Albertus Magnus, or the Amsterdam lens grinders. Somebody tell Chira to look at all the upcoming assigned DEDEs from those DTAPs, especially seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

  MORTIMER: I can do that when she checks in. We’ve arranged for her to call on a burner phone as needed, new phone each time.

  MEL: That will get expensive.

  ERZSÉBET: Those fuckers will cover it, I’m sure.

  MORTIMER: Ha, let me just tweak this, it’s misspelling . . . Okay, got it, go on. Say that again, Erzsébet.

  ERZSÉBET: The Fuggers will pay for the mobile telephones. They must deem it is in their interest for you to know what is going on inside DODO, or they would not be protecting you while we attempt this. But there is no way for you to learn anything, unless your mole contacts you on a burner phone, as you call it.

  REBECCA: Is that quite the right use of the word mole?

  ERZSÉBET: Or double agent. Syrians are good at double-crossing and Chira is a Syrian.

  MEL: Chira is a Kurd.

  ERZSÉBET: Syrian Kurds are worse than regular Syrians. I see it on the news all the time.

  TRISTAN: Aren’t you bunking here for now? Frank and Rebecca don’t do television.

  MORTIMER: I set her up with a laptop and showed her how to stream some, uh, stuff.

  TRISTAN: You are data-mining trash TV to learn about Syrian Kurds?

  ERZSÉBET: I do not watch trash TV.

  REBECCA: Erzsébet, are you doubting Chira’s commitment to what we’re doing?

  ERZSÉBET: I do not doubt it for the present. I do not believe in ever assuming anything about the future because I understand the multiverse. And I do not watch trash TV. I watch documentaries and Masterpiece Theatre.

  TRISTAN: Mortimer, tell Chira to keep eyes and ears out for any chatter associated with any of those. Especially seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

  MORTIMER: Roger that.

  TRISTAN: Even if Gráinne doesn’t go that way right off, she will get to it eventually. I’ve found a potential recruit who can help us in this arena. He’s a guy Felix met doing parkour. Native Dutch speaker, degree in optical engineering, can talk anyone into anything. I’ve reached out to him through some back channels to see if he might be interested in freelance work that requires an NDA. I’m hearing back that he’s interested.

  MEL: What are the back channels?

  TRISTAN: He called me for my birthday last year and I thought then that he might make a good recruit for DODO. We went for a drink and I broached things in a roundabout way, as per usual. Did a background check and was about to offer him a job when everything went batshit insane. I’m meeting him for a beer next week.

  REBECCA: Oh, good, I can give him cowpox.

  TRISTAN: Any other news while we’re all together? Let’s make sure we’re up to date and getting everything on record.

  FRANK: Erzsébet’s happy with her számológép, but I’m also expanding her digital quipu, to help her estimate the number of Strands any given endeavor will take, given we are now in uncharted waters.

  ERZSÉBET: Yes, this is unprecedented in the history of magic. Nobody has ever had to calculate diachronic travel in response to somebody else’s diachronic travel. That is not a thing any witch should ever have to calculate. You are very lucky I am helping you.

  REBECCA: I’ll second that. I’d have no idea how to do it.

  FRANK: This digital quipu will never be as powerful or comprehensive as the Chronotron, but it’ll help. Mortimer is uploading the historical data he grabbed off ODIN so that Erzsébet will have access to that data, which will help her calculations. And Mortimer and I are working on security issues here.

  REBECCA: Frank. That’s not the big news.

  FRANK: Well, everyone knows the big news already. I’m going to fifteenth-century Kyoto to examine a container Gráinne hid in a Shinto shrine. I’ll be a working part of the experiment and not just the designer of it. I’m excited.

  MORTIMER: Travel safely, Sensei! And me, I’m reformatting everything I uploaded from ODIN to boost the historical data and deprecate the interoffice memos. Like Oda-sensei says, we’ll never have as much data as the Chronotron, but it’s the best we can do. It’s kinda David and Goliath.

  TRISTAN: What’s the alternative?

  MORTIMER: No, I get it, I just want that on record, ’cause I got used to being master of the digital universe. I’m also bulking up the firewall to shield the network the sensors are on. And I’m helping Mel create a new model for the historical database that we will be able to build up over time—the raw data I snagged from the Chronotron before I hightailed it out of DODO would totally overwhelm the scrawny system we have now.

  MEL: Yes, thanks, Mortimer. That’s taking up most of my time at present.

  MORTIMER: Mine too, but I think we’re at a point where you can start driving that bus on your own. Plus I’m helping Oda-sensei set up trip wires around the perimeter of the property, for peace of mind.

  TRISTAN: Isn’t that what the sensors are for?

  REBECCA: He means actual trip wires.

  FRANK: Analog trip wires for the win.<
br />
  REBECCA: In case we lose power and the backup generator fails.

  MORTIMER: Yeah, I’m thinking if the wires are tripped, that opens a chute and releases hungry wolverines.

  FRANK: Wolverines would upset the cats. I like your other idea, about a camouflaged trench of sodium acetate with the steel clicker that gets activated by the wire tripping.

  MORTIMER: Right? And then, snap, the would-be assassins’ feet are encased in a solid—

  FRANK: But it’s a heated solid, and it’s winter out, so that’s considerate of us.

  TRISTAN: So until we hear more from Chira, that’s it.

  MEL: Actually, before we break, Tristan, there’s another issue. Friends and family.

  TRISTAN: There’s nothing to talk about, same SOP as DODO. We don’t tell anyone anything. As an organization, there is no “we.”

  MEL: I just sent your sister her special booze and I had to give the courier—

  TRISTAN: I can’t believe I have to explain this to you after five years, Stokes.

  ERZSÉBET: He still calls you Stokes? Pah.

  TRISTAN: You create a temporary—

  MEL: I know all that. But this is a member of your immediate family, so I’m guessing she’s ahead of whatever curve—

  TRISTAN: Even if she guessed something, she’ll keep it to herself. In terms of our work, don’t tell anyone anything. Period.

  MEL: Okay, Tristan, but you should know—

  TRISTAN: However we refer to ourselves—

  MORTIMER: Alt-DODO?

  REBECCA: Oh, surely not.

  MORTIMER: Neo-Retro-Ragtag-DODO. Acronymically, that’s N, R, R, D . . . Nerrd.