Читать книгу The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. - Nicole Galland - Страница 9

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

MAY 18

Temperature about 64F, moist, no breeze. Barometer rising.

Flowers and vegetables fending for themselves due to ODEC activity.

To begin, this morning the new ODEC was “successful,” insofar as Tristan came out of it in the same state the cat once used to come out of the old ODEC. Melisande kept her head better than I did when I first saw the cat, but was clearly concerned. The following conversation, more or less:

FRANK: I predict Tristan will be fine shortly. But I don’t think we should allow anyone to go into the ODEC until we have figured out how to protect them from that effect.

MEL: What is the effect? Why is it happening?

FRANK: He is teetering on the edge of becoming non-local.

MEL: Non-what?

FRANK: His brain was suddenly not sure which precise reality it was operating in—and perhaps his body too. So much to discover still! (NB: sounding like an eager child. Sounding as if none of it happened thirty years ago.)

Five minutes pass

TRISTAN (fully recovered): Why didn’t you take notes of what I said when I first came out?

MEL: Trust me, you said absolutely nothing noteworthy.

TRISTAN : That just sounds like your usual lip. I need corroboration.

FRANK: We were all here. She’s right.

TRISTAN : You do it, Stokes, so I can see what happens when you come out.

MEL: I don’t think so. Seriously, it was as if you’d gotten plastered at a frat party.

TRISTAN : Sounds like fun. Give it a go.

FRANK: I really don’t think that you should push her— (interrupted by)

TRISTAN : She could use a little loosening up. Come on, Stokes, it’s a hazard of the job.

MEL: I fail to see how “becoming non-local” falls within the parameters of my contractual obligations as a translator of dead languages.

TRISTAN : It falls within the parameters of your wanting to know what it’s like.

MEL: Apparently it’s like being drunk. Been there, done that.

TRISTAN : Y’know, you could be stuck in your tiny little office right now, grading papers about Aramaic declensions. Get your butt in there. Somebody get her a snowsuit. With a balaclava. And an oxygen mask.

I wish that had been the end of the nonsense. It was barely the beginning.

Diachronicle

DAY 294 (CONTD.)

NINETY MINUTES LATER, DESPITE MY own best judgment, I was geared up and ready to begin the most ill-considered experiment of my life (to that point, I mean. Clearly I have engaged in more boneheaded enterprises since then, else I would not currently be sitting here trying not to spill ink on my borrowed day dress.).

I hope it does not reflect badly on me to admit that I would have refused obstinately were I not so keen to please Tristan. A ridiculous impulse, given that he seemed to treat me as if I were his personal R2-D2 (which was still preferable to Blevins’s modus operandi). But there was something about his relentless, focused clarity of purpose that made all things else fade in significance—including my own mental balance. I submit that I was not falling in love with him, but there was inarguably an intellectual seduction at work. He operated on my psyche the way a lively Mozart sonata might.

And so, suited up to look like a cartoon character, I toddled into the ODEC. It was frigid inside, and my breath came out in clouds until I put the oxygen mask on. The cavity had a cool, clinical feel with all those LEDs staring at me. I felt as if I were on the set of a half-assed low-budget sci-fi flick. “All right,” I said with a purposeful nod, and the door closed. I could feel my pulse at my temples, hear my breath amplified within the mask. It was frightening and exhilarating and I had never felt so alive! Blevins could eat my shorts.

I cannot describe what happened next, because I do not remember. Immediately, it seemed, I found myself in a very bland, undecorated office, in a hard plastic chair near a Formica table under ugly fluorescent lights, shaking uncontrollably for no good reason. I was not cold or scared, simply . . . confused. And exhausted.

“Fascinating,” said a very handsome fellow about my age, with dazzling green eyes and neat, close-cropped hair, who was standing over me and contemplating me with a grin. “If that’s what you were like when you got drunk in college, no wonder you don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Give her a few moments,” I heard an older, softer male voice say. I knew that voice had a name attached to it—Yoda? No, Yoda was from Star Wars. Star Wars was on my mind because of R2-D2. And the fellow in front of me, I had seen him brushing his teeth before, so if he wasn’t my boyfriend maybe he was a brother I’d forgotten about.

He began to laugh. “Stokes,” he said, “you’re saying all of that out loud. I wouldn’t speak until you feel like yourself. But hurry up with it!” He leaned closer and whispered into my ear, “We’ve got our witch vault. Let’s go get our witch.”

Diachronicle

DAY 294 (CONTD.)

In which we meet Erszebet. And then we meet Erszebet.

FIRST TRISTAN HAD TO BREAK the news to the Maxes and the Vladimirs that they had been working all this time on a project whose end goal was magic. He did this in the one remaining non-demolished office, so I didn’t have the satisfaction of seeing it happen. They seemed to me to be biting back amusement when they filed out of the briefing: to a man, they all avoided direct eye contact and the corners of their pursed lips occasionally wiggled.

Tristan and I arrived at 420 Common Street in Belmont in earliest afternoon, to find—to our dismay—a desanctified church converted into some kind of institutional group housing. WELCOME TO ELM HOUSE read a non-elucidating pastel-blue plastic sign planted in the forecourt.

“Hmm,” I said.

“Could be interesting,” said Tristan. “Could mean someone’s messing with us.”

We parked on the street and followed the walkway around the side of the old church and across a modest lawn dotted with generic, dutiful landscaping. The old church had been built on a very large lot, much of which was now occupied by three- and four-story buildings with a decidedly mid-twentieth-century institutional vibe. The main entrance was in one of those. The inside was bland and sterile, like a hospital admitting room. There was a linoleum lobby floor and laminate receiving desk, where two bored thirty-something women chatted quietly and ignored the handful of elders beyond them, in a carpeted room full of primary-color bingo charts and large posters of MGM movie stars.

“At least it’s not a loony bin,” Tristan muttered, relieved.

All of the residents were either asleep, or muttering to themselves despondently, or staring up at a very loud screening of The African Queen. It smelled of old furniture in here, and disinfectants.

As we stepped into the lobby, a twig of an ancient woman, keen-featured and remarkably upright, immediately approached us. She was wearing a 1950s-style cocktail dress, which might have flattered her in the 1950s, but looked absurd on her now. She was clutching a large Versace knockoff bag under one arm.

Before I even had the presence of mind to greet her, she spoke in a hushed but furious tone, with a well-educated Eastern European accent: “I cannot believe how long you have kept me waiting, Melisande! It is very rude and after all this time I deserve better. I see you cut your hair. It looked better long. With those bangs you resemble a rodent.”

I stopped so abruptly that Tristan bumped into me. He began to say something, but she pushed ahead before he could: “You must be Mr. Tristan Lyons. Are you her lover?”

“Did she say I was?” Tristan asked immediately, which was a pretty good recovery.

The old woman made a dismissive tch. “No. Only she is a woman of unreliable morals, and you have a powerful secret government position, so I presumed.”

“Ma’am, how about we talk in private,” Tristan said. “You’ve cited a few things that raise security questions.”

“Of course we talk in private. You’re taking me to the ODEC—this instant.”

Tristan took her skinny arm in his large hand and stood over her, his chin a hand-span above the top of her head. “Ma’am,” he asked very softly, “where did you hear that term?”

“From her,” she said impatiently, poking me in the shoulder.

“I have never met this woman,” I said to Tristan, recoiling from her, and then to her: “I have never met you.”

“Not yet, but you will,” she retorted impatiently. “I am Erszebet Karpathy. It is absolutely time to get out of here and go to the ODEC. I dressed specially.” She gestured to her cocktail dress. “Do you know how long I have been waiting for this day?”

“Ma’am,” said Tristan. It seemed he was stalling for time until he could form a complete sentence. “How long have you been waiting?”

“Far too long,” she said.

“Her first post to me on Facebook was a month ago,” I offered.

“You’ve been waiting a month?” asked Tristan.

“Pft,” she said. “That’s because I got tired of waiting for you to find me. I joined Facebook as soon as it was available to the public, as you told me to.”

A pause as Tristan considered this. “You’re saying you’ve been waiting more than a decade for us to come and find you?”

“Ha!” It was a dry, humorless sound. “I have been waiting for more than one century and a half. And this woman”—she pressed on, before we could interrupt incredulously—“gives me the words Facebook and Tristan Lyons and ODEC and tells me this, now, this is the exact month to use those words to find you after so much time. So. We have found each other. Take me to the ODEC.”

Tristan nudged his shoulder against my back, encouraging me to speak. Was it possible he was speechless? And did he expect me to be less so than himself? “Why are you so eager to get to the ODEC?” I asked.

“Because I can do magic again in the ODEC,” she said impatiently. “Obviously.”

Tristan frowned at her. “Ma’am, I need you to know that if this is your idea of a joke, you’re making trouble for yourself. If somebody has put you up to saying these words, I need to know who it is, and why—”

“Her! It’s her!” she said irritably, jabbing her bony little finger into my shoulder again. “I would be dead right now except for her. I have stayed alive all these years because she commanded it.”

“Ma’am, I’ve never met you—” I protested again.

“Don’t you call me ma’am, you hussy! You’re older than I am.” She checked herself, with obvious effort. “That is, you were. When we met. I have now been old for longer than most people have been alive. Do you know how boring that is?”

Tristan had collected himself enough to play the polite West Point cadet card. “We’d love to relieve your boredom, ma’am. Let’s step outside and you can tell us the whole story, how about that?” he said. “Do we have to sign you out or something?”

“Pft,” she harrumphed, with a dismissive gesture toward the reception desk. “Nurse Ratched has given up trying to control me.”

“Which one is she?” Tristan glanced toward the desk.

“Tristan!” I said. “Come on. My not knowing DARPA pales compared to your not knowing Nurse Ratched.”

“I call all of them Nurse Ratched since the movie came out,” Erszebet was meanwhile saying. “It amuses me.”

“You’ve been here since One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest came out?” I asked.

“Yes. Do you see why I want to leave? Boring.”

“Let’s get her outside,” muttered Tristan.

It was cool outside, and nobody else was out there. The uninspired landscaped path wended its way around groupings of wrought iron benches, at which the residents might have a modicum of privacy with guests. Erszebet, with a remarkable grace of movement, seated herself in the center of one bench, leaving me and Tristan to share the one across from her, squinting into the bright spring sunlight.

“This is where people argue with their children about their inheritance,” she informed us. “I have no children, so I do not have this problem.”

“If you will, ma’am, let’s start from the top,” suggested Tristan. “Name, date of birth, place of birth, basic background.”

She sat pertly upright and gave him a self-important look. “You will take notes?”

He tapped his head. “Mental notes, for now. Begin, please.”

“I am Erszebet Karpathy,” she said. “I was born in Budapest in 1832.”

“No,” said Tristan. “No you weren’t, ma’am. That’s absurd.”

She glared at him, and seemed to relish doing so. “Do not disrespect me. I am a witch. When magic was fading from the world, Melisande warned me that it would end soon, and the last magic I ever knew was a spell to slow my aging by as much as possible so that I would still be here, now, when we could be useful to each other. I did not want to do that, you know,” she went on, directly to me. “I could have just grown old and died. Death would have been less boring than surviving this last century. This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You should all be shot. Nevertheless,” she pressed on, when we failed to agree or even respond, “here I am. And here you are. So put me in your automobile and take me to the ODEC. I am very eager to do magic again.”

Tristan rubbed his face with both hands as if he were suddenly very tired. “Give me a moment, ma’am,” he said. He pulled out his phone. “How do you spell your name?”

“If you Google me, you will be disappointed,” she said. “I know how to keep my profile low, as you say.”

“I use a different search engine,” he said. “You’ll be on it. Just spell your name, please.”

The only Erszebet Karpathy in Tristan’s secret search engine was a thirty-seven-year-old aerialist turned legal clerk, currently living in Montreal. There was an Erszebet Karpaty living in Rome, but she was a madam, and anyhow our interlocutor sneered that the name without an h was Ukrainian, which she most certainly wasn’t.

“Then maybe Erszebet Karpathy is not your real name,” said Tristan. “Ma’am.”

“Can we go now?” she said, standing up. “I have been thinking about my first spell for decades, and I am very eager to perform it. And then I want to go roller-skating. They won’t allow that here, those toads.”

Tristan remained seated, and leaned against me to signal me to do likewise. “And what spell might that be?”

She grinned at him. “You’ll just have to see. It’s entirely beneficent, if that’s what you’re worried about. We go.”

“The ODEC doesn’t work yet,” he said, studying her face carefully. “Since you claim to know about it, maybe you can help with that.”

“You need to up the sampling rate on the internal sensors,” recited Erszebet smugly, in a triumphant tone, as if she’d just won a spelling bee.

Wow, I thought.

Testing her, Tristan replied, “It’s going to be hard pushing that much data down the leads.”

“Swap the twisted pair out for fiber,” she rejoined promptly. It was a recitation; something she had memorized the way a child memorizes “indivisible” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

“All right, let’s go,” said Tristan, standing up and again putting his large hand around her tiny arm. “The car’s right there, and you are not leaving my sight until I understand what you’re up to.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Finally.”

She did not say a word on the twenty-minute drive from Belmont to Central Square, merely stared out the window with the bored rapture of a dog or a baby. I used the silence to recollect myself. Everything this woman claimed seemed insane, and yet . . . she knew me by sight, she knew Tristan by name, she knew about the ODEC . . .

To accept her claims meant . . . it meant we were about to witness genuine magic performed for the first time in at least one hundred and seventy years. That rocks! I thought. That was much more exciting than going to New Orleans. I glanced at Tristan as he drove, but he was lost in his own thoughts, which seemed grumpier than mine.

When we pulled up in front of the building, Erszebet sighed heavily. “This is it? Pah, I thought it might be a nice place,” she said from the backseat. “This is worse than where I have been living.”

“It won’t be as boring,” I promised.

“That’s true,” she said with a sudden grin, and leaned forward to tap my shoulder. “I am very much looking forward to this.” Then to Tristan: “I think you will be pleased with the results, Mr. Tristan Lyons.”

“I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what happens, ma’am,” he said tersely.

I realized he was nervous. For what would happen if after all this, we found the world’s only surviving witch and she was a dud? He still wouldn’t tell me who he was answering to, but his derriere was on the line in a way mine wasn’t.

When we entered the building, I walked toward the professor and his wife, gesturing for Erszebet to join me, but she spared them only a brief glance, then waved dismissively in their direction and gazed at the large contraption taking up most of the space.

“Is this it?” she asked Tristan, sounding offended. “But it’s so ugly.”

“She’s a little preoccupied,” I said apologetically to Oda-sensei and Rebecca. They, in turn, were so fascinated by her appearance that they hardly noticed my speaking to them. Likewise, the Maxes stopped their sundry duties and paused to look at her sideways, nudging each other’s shoulders and murmuring between themselves. She took no interest in any of that.

“This?” she demanded again. “I go in here and I can do magic? Just like that?”

“Hang on a moment,” said Tristan, pulling out his phone. “I need to document you, since there’s no record of your existence. I need your signature and a photo.” Before she could object or even notice, he snapped a photo of her on his phone.

“You don’t need my signature,” she said. She stared at the ODEC with a rapture greater even than Oda-sensei’s, face aglow with anticipation. “I forgive its ugliness if it does its job well. I just go in and start doing spells again?”

“That’s what we’re hoping,” said Tristan.

She looked at me, her eyes dewy and bright. “Thank you, Melisande, thank you for bringing me here.” And back her attention went to the ODEC door.

“Hang on,” said Tristan as she approached it. “Let me explain what happens when it’s activated.” He opened the door with an oven mitt and gestured inside—we could all hear her expressions of surprise—and then he leaned in close to her, voice calm and businesslike, detailing what was to come.

The Odas, the Maxes, and I looked round at each other with various facial expressions, all of which were a way of saying, in silence, Holy shit. “This is really happening,” I said, my pulse dancing. Seeing Tristan and a witch standing at the ODEC door suddenly made my heart thrill. But for him, I at this moment would be grading worksheets on syntax.

I sashayed over to them. “Should we put her in the ski suit?” I asked Tristan.

“I need no protection from the forces that restore my magic to me,” Erszebet scoffed.

“But it will be cold in there, like Siberia—”

“Pft,” she said. “It will be invigorating.”

“It might invigorate you to death,” warned Tristan.

She made a face that had already, in the last forty minutes, become her signature look: a dismissive pout with contemptuously knitted brows, head tilted slightly to one side, and a brief subtle eye roll. I suppose on another sort of face—a sexy villainess from a silent movie, perhaps—it would have had a sultry quality, but on a centenarian it just looked silly.

“I am strong in ways you do not know,” she assured him.

Tristan and I exchanged looks. I felt myself increasingly thrilled that this was happening, and impressed with Tristan’s unflappable calm (although it is true his face was proverbially shining with excitement). “Stokes, suit up and be in here with her, will you?”

“Do not call her Stokes, that is disrespectful.” Erszebet scowled. “You are a disrespectful man. You called me a liar before. Do not get on my bad side. You will regret it. But”—and here she turned to me with a smile no less fierce than her scowl—“I agree for Melisande to be with me for the first spell. It is fitting. She was the cause of the last spell.”

Tristan and I exchanged confused looks, without commentary.

“Tell us about this first spell of yours,” Tristan requested.

She shrugged offhandedly as she set her bag on the console and riffled through it. “It is nothing, it is very simple. I must simply undo an earlier spell, that’s all. Then I can begin doing what you ask of me. Hurry, Melisande.”

I left the chamber to find the snowsuit, donned it, and re-entered the ODEC pulling on the oxygen mask. Erszebet regarded me, appalled. She was fidgeting with something I could not see well—through the shield of the mask it looked like she was massaging a mop head. Before I had a chance to ask her about it, she was onto Tristan again:

“You make her dress like that?” she said to him. “I don’t like you at all.”

“It’s for her own protection,” he said tersely. He had stopped calling her “ma’am.”

Erszebet (in her outsized vintage cocktail dress) and I (in my snowsuit, balaclava, and oxygen mask) stood beside each other as Tristan, just outside the ODEC, raised his thumb and closed the door on us. There was a brief wait as Oda and the Maxes and Vladimirs went through their checklists. I glanced at the old lady across from me and felt an extraordinary combination of sentiments all at once—excitement, disbelief, anticipation, confusion, fear, hope. Had anyone told me this would be how my spring were to unfold, I’d have laughed my ass off at them scoffed. Seriously.

I remember what happened for about the next quarter second: the dim sound of the Klaxon outside, the hair standing up on the back of my neck, the lights going out. In that precise moment, a lovely aroma both floral and musky overwhelmed me, and then—as before—I lost all clarity, and the next thing I was aware of was somebody peeling a balaclava off my head. I was lying supine in a vaguely familiar office, my back propped up against that somebody’s knees.

“Stokes? You okay?”

I took a moment to think about this. Only the fellow from the shadowy government entity called me Stokes, so this must be him. His name was something from a medieval romance. Percival? Lancelot?

“Tristan,” he corrected, grinning down at me. “But I get the Lancelot thing a lot.” He roughed up my hair. “Come on, sit up. Meet our new witch.”

Memory came flooding back. “Yes,” I said unsteadily. “Erszebet. I’ve met her.”

“No.” He chuckled. “You haven’t. Take a look.” He propped me farther up so I could look across the room.

About twenty feet away from me, near the control console, stood a stunningly beautiful young woman, hardly more than a girl, wearing Erszebet’s dress. The garment now curved and clung to an exaggeratedly shapely physique, almost perfectly hourglass. Her hair was shoulder-length, thick and full and dark, her eyes a deep green. She mesmerized us all by simply standing there, with a gleeful, impertinent smirk tugging the perfect curve of her mouth to one side.

With Tristan’s assistance, I rose to my feet terribly awkwardly, the snowsuit making synthetic slithery noises as I moved. I felt like a yeti in the presence of a gazelle.

“Meet Erszebet Karpathy,” said Tristan, beaming. “She’s our witch.”

Diachronicle

DAY 294 (CONTD.)

In which every little thing she does is magic

EVERYONE IN THE ROOM WAS staring at her—Oda-sensei, Rebecca, the Maxes. The gleeful impertinent smirk fixed on Tristan.

Tristan started to laugh in a breathy way, trying but failing to suppress glee. “Wow,” he said. Against my upper back, his torso shifted slightly. “We did it.” He sounded giddy. Everyone applauded, looking rapt.

“I did it,” she corrected him. The accent, which had made her sound crabby when she was nearly two hundred years old, now made her exotic, adding to the glimmer of her beauty. “I warned you do not want to get on my bad side.”

“Doesn’t look like you have a bad side,” I said, so that Tristan wouldn’t.

Her attention turned to me, and she grew more serious. “Do I look more familiar now?” she asked. “This is how I appeared when we first met. I was only nineteen, but I was a prodigy. You were lucky that I was the one you found.”

“I’m sorry, but we really have never met before,” I said. And then to Tristan, almost under my breath: “I . . . I’d like to get out of this thing, please.” It was foolish to feel so self-consciously lumbering just because there was another young female in the room who happened to be crazy-gorgeous. I was not used to being fawned on by anyone—Tristan treated me like an extension of himself—but suddenly I felt somewhat gruesome.

Tristan, eyes glued to Erszebet’s face (and curves, I am sure), released me so I could unzip myself from the snowsuit. But even wearing civvies, I felt doltish while this elegant creature held us all entranced. Entranced is not the right word, though—that conjures a sense of a doe-eyed fairy-tale princess, and Erszebet was not that. She was fierce. Not deliberately, not like the Alpha Girl in a high school clique . . . it was effortless on her part, elemental. And she seemed amused by how her transformation distracted the rest of us.

“The experience was very pleasant,” she continued to Tristan, in a so-there tone. “Do not presume to tell me what is good for me or not. Ever again.”

“Got it,” he said almost meekly. His eyes kept sinking toward her boobs breasts bosom, as if lead weights were attached to them; then, with visible effort, he would wrench them back to her face.

There was a long pause as we all continued to register what we were witnessing, and she continued to bask in our collective gaze. Various low voices said “Wow” or something equally articulate. We were more dumbfounded by the fact of the transformation than by its result (although I cannot stress enough how impressive the result was)—but we were definitely dumbfounded. And she was definitely preening.

Then Tristan collected himself. “So.” He coughed slightly. “All right then. How did you just do that?”

“It was a big spell. Not easy,” she said offhandedly. “But I have been thinking about it, rehearsing it in my head, for a hundred and sixty years—since the groundwork for it was laid in Budapest. I did it to see if your ODEC works to my satisfaction.” She smiled, and shifted her hips a few times so that the hem of the cocktail dress swirled around her knees. “It does. In fact it was never so effortless to do a spell as in this ODEC, which I like very much. What shall I do next?”

“What kind of magic were you in the habit of doing before?” Tristan asked. Without taking his eyes from her, he pointed toward the small table on which sat a MacBook Air. “Stokes.”

I collected the laptop and dutifully seated myself, opened the audio recording software, and pressed “record”; for backup I decided to take dictation and remained there, fingers poised over the keyboard.

Erszebet sobered abruptly. Even grave, she was mesmerizingly beautiful. “I was young, and magic was waning, and it was a very turbulent time. My mother was in the service of Lajos Kossuth, and if you know anything about our history, you will realize her magic was often ineffective. I assisted her when she required it.”

Eyes still on Erszebet, Tristan signaled to me. “Lajos Kossuth,” I said, typing.

“With a j—” she said to me; I overlapped: “A j, I know.”

Her beautiful dark eyes flitted back to Tristan. “I like that she is educated,” she said, as if approving of him for this, then continued her narrative: “After the revolution failed, after Kossuth fled in late ’49, the aristocracy would call upon my mother or myself to perform stupid parlor tricks. We would change the color of somebody’s hair, or force somebody to speak a childhood secret out loud. It was deliberately degrading to us, and I resented it, but my mother was so alarmed at our weakening powers that she grew fearful of displeasing those horrid people. She became sycophantic, which disgusted me, and so I went abroad.”

“Where to?” asked Tristan.

“I wanted to follow Kossuth, but his wife did not want me in his sight. Instead I went to Switzerland awhile, to train with a powerful witch who was making sure younger witches still learned certain spells and charms that had fallen out of use as the world perceived we were losing our power and relied on us for fewer things. Her efforts were, in retrospect, somewhat romantic, as if somebody in today’s world were teaching how to measure longitude with a timepiece. I learned much that I had little occasion to use, but I was still glad for the learning, although eventually I rejoined my parents in Budapest.”

“So can you change somebody into a newt?” Tristan asked, getting to the point.

“Of course I can,” she said. “What a stupid question.”

“Can you change them back?” I asked quickly.

“If I feel like it,” said Erszebet complacently. She gave Tristan a slightly defiant look. “Do you wish to test me?”

He pondered a moment, assessing her on so many levels. “Let’s start with an inanimate object,” he said. “I assume that’s possible? I mean, can you . . . transubstantiate inanimate objects?”

“Tell me what you need,” she said with a suddenly inviting smile. Truly, it was almost a grin. For the first time, she and Tristan were in the same groove, and they smiled at each other. He bit his lower lip excitedly, which made him look charmingly like a goof.

Then he clapped his hands together in front of him, actually squatted slightly like a coach laying out a game plan. It was the first time I noticed—fleetingly—that he had a cute butt. “Just going to put you through some paces on the most basic level today. Stokes will take notes. Ms. Stokes will take notes,” he corrected himself quickly, staving off her irritation.

“I wish those stupid aristocrats who made us do parlor tricks were still alive,” Erszebet said eagerly. “The pains I would bring upon them now.”

“Never mind about them,” said Tristan. “You’ll have plenty to occupy you right here.”

For the rest of the afternoon, Tristan tasked Erszebet with simple assignments, for which we were all the amazed witnesses. I can hardly describe the electricity in that dull warehouse that day, our breathless wonder at the impossible-turned-evident. Even though she began with the humblest of efforts, the whole thing was totally fucking mind-blowing. Here follows a sampling, and then I must move on to what happened afterward, as I still have not accustomed myself to writing with a dip pen and this is far more painstaking than I had realized when I began this project—and I am running out of time.

To begin, Tristan put a gallon of white paint into the ODEC with Erszebet, and asked her to turn it black; she did so, and after the Maxes took a sample to have analyzed, she returned it to white, which was also sampled. She could turn it any color, we learned; she could match it perfectly to colored objects Tristan gave her to take into the ODEC with her. (She could not reproduce this effect when the paint or objects sat outside the ODEC, to the frustration of both herself and Tristan.) He then had her bend metal rods into perfect circles; splinter stones; break glass and then restore it.

It was clear now that anybody actually inside the ODEC with her could not (by definition, really) remain mentally coherent, and so each time she set about to work her magic, she did so alone. Sealed up within the ODEC, her workings remained a perfect mystery.

These acts of magic each took between five and thirty minutes to achieve. While happily invigorated after the first dozen or so, she presently showed signs of tiring. Tristan chose not to notice this, and tried to step things up a notch: he asked her to materialize something out of nothing.

“There is no such thing as nothing. Not even in what you call a vacuum. But I am tired now,” she said, lolling against the control console. “Materialization is a complicated summoning and requires many calculations. And I am tired of taking orders from you, Tristan Lyons. Perhaps tomorrow.”

It was clear from her tone that Tristan should not bother asking more of her. He looked both contented and resigned. “That’s a wrap, then,” he announced to all of us. “Back here at 0900 tomorrow. And Miss Karpathy, thank you for your efforts today. You have begun to change the future of magic. Thank you.”

She made her now-usual dismissive face, and otherwise did not respond.

As the Maxes—who had scarcely left off staring at the beautiful witch when she wasn’t in the ODEC—began to collect their jackets and such like, I had the sudden thought: Where are we going to put her? Clearly we could not return her to the nursing home.

I was startled by Rebecca’s soft voice behind me: “How large is your apartment?”

I turned to her. “Not large enough,” I said.

Rebecca sighed rather pointedly to get Tristan and Oda’s attention. “Well then,” she said in a slightly raised voice. “I suppose we must. But only for the one night.”

Erszebet heard this, and smiled. She straightened up and strolled toward us. And then—in a moment of unguarded bliss—she threw her hands up and cried triumphantly, “How wonderful not to be in prison anymore!”

“How many guest rooms do you have?” Tristan asked Rebecca quietly. “I’m responsible for her, I have—”

“You are not responsible for me,” said Erszebet, immediately exchanging glee for contempt. “And you have no authority over me at all.”

“Excuse me, miss, but if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be a crone living in a retirement community.”

“You had nothing to do with that,” she said dismissively. “It was Melisande who found me. Not that she has authority over me either, but I owe her at least a debt of gratitude.”

Journal Entry of

Rebecca East-Oda

MAY 19

We’ve brought all three home for the night. I made it clear they must respect this as our home, not merely a dormitory for experimental physicists and their sideshow curiosities. (Obviously didn’t say that. Still in shock about Erszebet.)

Immediate disagreements about sleeping arrangements. We have the guest room (double bed) and Mei’s room (twin). Tristan said he would take Mei’s room, but Erszebet demanded to sleep alone. Then:

ERSZEBET: It is ridiculous that you (Tristan/Mel) refuse to share a bed.

MEL: We don’t refuse to—

ERSZEBET: Good, then, do it.

MEL: It’s just that we don’t.

ERSZEBET: Why not?

MEL: We’re not romantically involved.

ERSZEBET: Why not?

MEL: Because we’re just not.

ERSZEBET: That answer is too stupid to justify depriving me of my own room. Even in that prison, I had my own room to sleep in at night.

MEL: He snores very loudly and I won’t be able to sleep.

TRISTAN : Yeah, it’s terrible, women leave me all the time because of it.

ERSZEBET: They leave you for other reasons.

MEL: So please, let’s you and I share the double, and Tristan has his own room.

ERSZEBET: I cannot believe the indignities I am already having to suffer under your regime. Sharing not just a room but a bed. I haven’t had to do that since the 1930s.

TRISTAN : You want to go back to Elm House, I’ll drive you.

MEL: Let’s everyone just calm the f**k down.

Tristan took Mel aside to discuss surveillance of Erszebet. Assuming my role as hostess and lady of the house, I stepped in to see how she was settling in. She had left the elder-hostel with only one large bag of faux leather that looked stolen from a fashion shoot. She was removing her possessions from this bag and laying them out neatly on the painted wooden dresser: ancient boar-bristle hairbrush, couple of camisoles and dresses, small satin bag for toiletries and makeup, nylon stockings. Plus one object made of yarn or string, a kind of fiber-sculpture. The calico had leapt up onto the dresser to examine this, but seemed to know better than to swat at it.

I looked closer at it. It was very old and frayed in places. Its central artery was a length of spun wool perhaps as long as my forearm, and tied to it were several hundred more slender strings, of varying lengths. All bore multiple knots along their lengths—knots of varying shapes, sizes, complexities, and densities. A number of strands were deliberately entangled to each other, and some of the strands were tied together into bundles thick as my thumb, creating an effect like dreadlocks. It resembled a design I remembered from my favorite college class, on South American anthropology, so I assumed that what appeared to be the ruins of a mop was in fact a calculation-and-record-keeping device.

“Looks like an Andean quipu,” I said.

“Mm,” said Erszebet absently, removing her shoes and wiggling her toes. “Mine is better.” She shooed the cat off the dresser. “What do you use?”

“Sorry?” I said.

“What do you—” She stopped herself, blinked, looked lost. “Never mind,” she said, sounding cross but looking confused. “I forget there is no magic now except in this ODEC.” She gave me a searching look. “So you can’t do magic? Ever?”

“That’s right,” I said. Neutral voice, neutral expression.

“Well, you can now, with this ODEC-room,” she said.

“I don’t do magic,” I clarified, hoping Mel would return and interrupt this conversation. “I have no idea how to do it.”

“Ah,” she said, still distracted, and began to brush her hair. “Of course, if it cannot be done, then it cannot be practiced or remembered. I wonder will Tristan Lyons require me to show witches how to do magic. Probably.”

“I don’t see myself volunteering to become a witch,” I said.

She paused in her brushing to give me a curious look. “You are already a witch.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “I don’t know where you would get that impression from. Do you think that just because I knew what a quipu is? That’s nothing to do with magic, it’s because—”

She resumed brushing her hair. “Of course you are a witch,” she said with offhand impatience. “You smell like a witch.”

“What?” I demanded. “What do you mean by that?”

She shrugged. “What is the scent of a baby or an old person or a man in love? There are different human scents. You have the scent of a witch. How wonderful it feels to have a full head of hair to brush again! You take these things for granted when you’re young.”

“Excuse me, I’m not a witch,” I said. “That would be ridiculous.”

“Then your mother’s mothers were,” she said very matter-of-factly, setting the brush on the dresser. “Some ancestress. You carry the blood.”

Suddenly I was irrationally angry at Frank. “Did my husband tell you to say that to me?”

“I would not say something because your husband told me to. Ha! What an idea.”

“I have an ancestor who was hanged in Salem, but she was not a witch—”

“Well, somebody was,” she said, and peered into her toiletries bag for something.

“This is nonsense,” I said, ruffled. “I don’t have one of those”—pointing to the quipu-like object—“and I don’t do magic, and I’m not a witch, and I shall go put on deodorant right now if you think I smell like one.”

“You act as if I have insulted you,” she said, sounding amused. She took a bottle of witch hazel and a cotton pad from the little silk bag. “I have given you the greatest compliment.”

“Not by my lights,” I said.

As soon as I left her, I confronted Frank, who never understands that the Salem witch hysteria is inappropriate for jokes. He claimed innocence, pointed out that he had never been alone with Erszebet, but then—since the matter had been raised, I suppose—repeated his perennial joke-theory that Mary Estey really was a witch. “Now that we know there really are witches, don’t you want to know?” he said with his eager little knowing grin. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

How could I ever fault him his curiosity? So. Made sure the guests were settled in with bath towels and water glasses, and then went up into the attic to Nana’s trunk, which I have managed to avoid opening for a quarter century, despite Frank’s nudging. God knows why I felt compelled tonight. I already know the family tree; I don’t require seeing it in writing. But something pushed me to go up.

I pulled the string on the bare bulb that hangs from the attic ceiling, knelt down by the heavy cedar chest that lives equidistant from the central chimneys, windows, and attic door. Blew the worst of the dust off the top. Grasped the two near corners and lifted carefully as the wood creaked in protest; the clasp broke at least a century ago.

Inside, I saw the sheaf of family papers I knew would be there—but then I saw something I had never noticed before. I thought it was a cowl or scarf, maybe a battered swaddling cloth. Then I realized. Froze. Felt dizzy. Its similarity to Erszebet’s was unmistakable. I should look at that more closely, I thought. I should reach for it. Yes, I’ll reach for it.

My limbs would not obey me. I watched my own hands carefully close the lid of the chest. I stood up and left the room very quickly as if propelled by an external force, shutting the light behind me. I sat on the top stair, staring into the darkness until I was sure even Frank had gone to sleep.

Diachronicle

DAYS 295–304 (LATE MAY, YEAR 1)

In which there isn’t enough magic to go around

THE NEXT DAY WE RETURNED to the ODEC to begin a more sophisticated series of experimentations. Rebecca East-Oda made it clear that she felt Oda-sensei’s involvement in the project had reached the end of its natural course, and so neither of them returned with us.

We were to essentially sequester ourselves for a fortnight as Erszebet eased back into the habit of performing magic and displayed her skills for us. Although we were free to leave the building to eat, exercise, take the air—even to return to my apartment occasionally to shower—Erszebet and I would sleep in the ODEC room; Tristan was already happily ensconced in his bachelor pad of an office. By the time we arrived that first morning, the Maxes had brought in camp cots, towels and linens, a couple of well-fed lab rats and lab-rat grub, a case of Old Tearsheet Best Bitter for Tristan, toothbrushes and toothpaste (oh God, I’d barter my body for a tube of Crest now! Cleaning my teeth with a paste of borax and ground cuttlefish bones, with anise to “sweeten” it. Ych.) . . . and as many breakfast groceries and snacks as the college-dorm-style refrigerator in the upstairs office could hold. There were also several boxes of seemingly random props from a list that Tristan had texted the Maxes the night before. As soon as they’d set up our bunker, the Maxes packed up and moved on, presumably to their next shadowy government assignment. They took all but one of the Vladimirs with them. We still had a full complement of Lukes to guard the building and assure our security, but they were otherwise useless.

The days that followed were long ones, the take-out food we lived on relatively tasteless (by twenty-first-century standards . . . context really is everything!), and by night we were each too tired even for conversation. Tristan in particular was worn down and preoccupied. My memories of that time are drab and bleary, despite the remarkable nature of our undertakings.

The first week’s experiments, dictated by Tristan, included: manifesting inanimate objects, both those occurring in nature (e.g., sticks and stones) and those man-made (e.g., a cap gun . . . or at least something resembling one); changing the chemical composition of liquids (e.g., water to salt water); moving small things (e.g., the manifested cap gun) from one spot in the ODEC to another. The array of requests evolved over the days from the mundane (“turn this sweater inside out”) to the fanciful (“turn this vanilla ice cream into Rocky Road”) to the creepy (“animate the stuffed cat”) to the startling (“turn this lab rat into a newt”).

Erszebet was willing to show off her powers, although after a day or two of adjusting to having them back, she made it very clear that she found the assignments themselves tiresome and stupid. She would, she informed us, perform magic because it pleased her to do so after so many years deprived of it; she would not perform it simply because Mr. Tristan Lyons required it of her. She was flexing a muscle she’d longed to flex for many scores of years, and to a certain degree she was preening. Once the buzz of that wore thin, we knew she would feel no obligation to continue the dog-and-pony show.

Tristan did not waste breath explaining to either of us what his higher-ups were expecting from this sequestration; I just took his lead, trying to learn as much as we could about Erszebet’s powers, although it was a trying undertaking. Erszebet herself had cast us as good cop/bad cop, and it was natural enough to play those roles. Tristan pushed her; I cajoled. He made her feel significant; I made her feel appreciated. Truth be told, after three days of it, his job proved far easier than mine, for she was, to use a post-Victorian turn of phrase, high-maintenance.

Other than her attitude, our biggest headache was that obviously we could not tape or photograph what she was doing in the ODEC; we could not be in there with her without blacking out. She had to thump on the door just to let us know she was finished with each spell.

Our only recourse for research, therefore, was for me to interview her after each exercise. Since she would not answer Tristan’s questions (or rather, answered them, but only with gratuitous derision), he divided his time between measuring and studying whatever object she’d worked her magic on, and hourly emailing his bosses at the shadowy government entity regarding our progress. Apparently the Maxes had delivered glowing reports on the results of Erszebet’s first spell and it seemed the bosses wanted everything she did to be as attention-grabbing as she herself now was.

Erszebet, in these interviews with me, was not illuminating. Here follows almost verbatim, as I can remember it, the gist of an early attempt:

(Upon the occasion of Erszebet taking my sweater into the ODEC with her and changing it from green wool to lavender polyester, which took much longer than we expected—an entire afternoon—and left her strangely exhausted. NB: Yes, Tristan had specific reasons for such peculiar and frivolous-seeming instructions.)

MEL: Can you explain to me how you did this?

ERSZEBET: Pah. I found where you were wearing lavender polyester and brought that here. It was hard to find. There are not many opportunities to find you owning polyester.

MEL: The physicists would say that in some parallel reality to this one in the multiverse, there is a Mel wearing a lavender polyester sweater.

Erszebet makes her dismissive face, and shrugs to make it clear she doesn’t give a fuck care what physicists would say.

MEL: What we want to understand is, how does it end up here, in this reality, and what happens to the original sweater?

ERSZEBET: I summon it here and get rid of the other one.

MEL: How, though? By what mechanism?

ERSZEBET: The same way you do anything. You do what causes the desired result. If you want something to burn, you set it on fire, if you want something to be wet, you pour liquid on it. If you want something that is upstairs to be downstairs, you send someone to collect it. It is exactly the same. Except it is more complicated to calculate what to do—for example, in that metaphor, what route to tell the servant to take upstairs, how fast to move, and so on.

MEL: But can you explain technically, mechanically—not metaphorically—what you are doing and how you do it?

ERSZEBET: Pah, if you don’t understand a perfectly simple explanation, then you are too stupid to understand a more technical one.

MEL: Fine. Can you at least explain to me why some people can perform magic and others can’t?

ERSZEBET: This is like asking why doesn’t a blind person know what blue smells like.

. . . and thus went all interviews. There are transcripts of two dozen such on that original laptop. They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don’t escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.

FURTHER, ERSZEBET WAS capricious, and she knew she held all the power. We were demanding something of her (quite a lot of something, to be fair), while there was nothing we could offer her in recompense. Her greatest desire was fulfilled by circumstance: as a nineteen-year-old bombshell, she would never be re-incarcerated in the retirement home. She had other desires, but expressed them only erratically at first. Most significantly, on our twelfth day in seclusion, when we had stopped for lunch, she announced she wished to go to Hungary “to spit upon the graves of my enemies.”

“We don’t have the budget,” said Tristan, and took a bite of his tuna sandwich. He had said nothing about it, but his mysterious revenue stream seemed to be drying up. Deliveries of liquid helium were fewer and further between, and seemed to involve his spending a lot of time in exhausting phone conversations. He kept having to call Frank Oda in to help debug the ODEC, which I could see he felt bad about, since Frank wasn’t getting paid. And he kept pressing our Lukes and our Vladimir into service doing things that, to judge from the looks on their faces, weren’t in their job descriptions. Tristan had always suffered from a certain ADHD-ness, which was alternately charming and exasperating. His phone had lately been going off every few minutes, which made this even worse. He’d programmed it to produce different ringtones and vibrate-patterns for different incoming callers, so he could tell without even looking at it who was bothering him. One of those was a snatch of John Philip Sousa’s “Liberty Bell March.” It was typical American patriotic bombast, military parade stuff. Overlaid on that was a whole different set of associations based on the fact that it was the theme song for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Every so often I would hear it coming out of Tristan’s phone. When it did, he would drop what he was doing and visibly snap to attention and take that call without delay, hurrying off to a quiet part of the building and saying “Sir!” and “Yes, sir!” a lot. Obviously, this was the ringtone he’d assigned to his boss. What I didn’t know, and what I was dying to ask, was its meaning. Was “Liberty Bell March” just a snatch of patriotic music to him, or a wry allusion to an absurdist British comedy show that had been canceled before he had been born?

We were in the office just outside the ODEC, at the small table where I usually interviewed Erszebet. I had been about to suggest we repair outside to stroll down to the Charles, perhaps even drive to Walden Pond for some fresh air and sunshine (it was Memorial Day weekend in New England and we were living, working, and sleeping in a basement under fluorescent lights. I mean really, WTF.). Often I still wonder how things would be different now if I had pressed for such a constitutional. Surely in some other—better—universe, Mel made that suggestion, and so the trio left the building and was not there when General Schneider arrived.

But in our universe, the trio stayed in the basement, having this conversation:

“If you cooperate with us,” Tristan continued, swallowing his bite of tuna salad, “we can probably get funding, and then if you really want to go spit on the graves of your enemies, we can discuss it.” And then, putting down his sandwich, eyes lighting up: “Wait a minute! We can get our own funding. If you can change water to salt water . . . why not change—”

“—lead to gold,” she said with him, with an adolescent groan of disapproval. “Or anything to gold. That is the most unoriginal suggestion in the world. From the dawn of magic this is the first thing people ask of witches.”

“And?” prompted Tristan.

“We don’t do it,” she said. “Obviously.”

“Why not?”

“Ask the Fuckers.”

“What!?” Tristan and I exclaimed in unison. Erszebet had many disagreeable traits, but use of vulgar language was most certainly not one of them.

She was taken aback by our reaction. “The Fuckers,” she said. “You know. The Fuckers.”

Tristan and I looked at each other as if to verify we’d both heard it.

Erszebet laughed in a way that suggested she wasn’t really all that amused. “You people have such dirty minds. It is a perfectly normal German name. Maybe you spell it F-U-G-G-E-R just to be polite.”

“Oh,” I said, “Fugger, as in the old German banking family.”

“As in them, yes.”

“So, back to where we were,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “You’re saying we should ask some old dead German bankers why you don’t change lead into gold.”

“They are not all dead,” Erszebet corrected him. “If you go down to the financial district, you can probably find one right now, sitting in a nice discreet office.”

“Well,” I said, “obviously bankers would have something to say about changing lead into gold.”

“They would not like it,” Erszebet said. And this was the first time I ever got the sense from her that she actually cared whether someone else would or wouldn’t like a thing. She considered Fuggers—or Fuckers, as she pronounced the name—people to be reckoned with.

“Let’s try a different example, if you don’t like gold,” Tristan said. “I’m going to show my cards a little bit more than I usually do.” And he pocketed his phone, which he’d been looking at under the table, and laid both hands on the table’s upper surface—as if literally showing his cards. “To hell with gold. Could you produce enriched uranium?”

She considered it. “The stuff they use in bombs?”

“The stuff they use in bombs.”

She shook her head. “Certainly not. This would cause too much change too quickly, and bad things happen when magic is used that way.”

“What bad things?”

“Bad things,” she said with finality. “Worse than your ‘nukes.’ We don’t even have words to describe them. So we don’t do that.”

“Then there are rules,” I said, opening the laptop to take notes. “Not changing things too quickly is a rule. What are some other rules?”

“There is no rule,” she said. “We just don’t do it. Is there a rule telling you not to jump off a cliff? No. But you don’t do it.”

“What else don’t you do?” asked Tristan.

“What a ridiculous question,” she said. To me: “He only asks ridiculous questions. I hope he is not your lover, because he is not worthy.”

“Why is it a ridiculous question?” pressed Tristan.

“Can you tell me all the things you would not do? No. You only know what not to do when you’re faced with the prospect of doing it. It’s like that with everything, including magic.”

“Can you give me some examples?” he asked with exaggerated patience.

She looked thoughtful, and for a happily deluded moment, we both thought she was going to be cooperative. “I am tired of doing all the giving,” she said. “So. Your turn to give me something. You will give me a cat.”

After a confused pause, I asked, “As a pet?”

“No, as a cat,” she said.

“A live cat?” asked Tristan.

“Of course a live cat! What would I do with a dead cat?”

“Okay, you can have a cat,” said Tristan indulgently. “We’ll get you a cat next week, as soon as you’ve done something we can show the brass.”

“I will show the brass something after you give me a cat,” she corrected triumphantly.

“Erszebet,” I said in a friendly, intimate tone. “We have no time to go fetch you a cat, or a litterbox, or any of the other stuff a cat needs. But if you would like to be employed again by powerful people, who can give you as many cats as you like, then please cooperate with us for the next few days.”

She pursed her lips and glanced between the two of us. “Put me with those people you speak of. Why am I wasting my time doing stupid tricks for minions?”

“Because these minions have an ODEC,” said Tristan abruptly and openly irritated. “Without this ODEC, you are nothing. And this ODEC is ours. So play nice.”

She gave him a furious, disgusted look. “I want to be very clear with you about something,” she said in a warning tone. “There are many novels in which there is a handsome man and a beautiful woman and they argue all the time and are at odds and constantly clash and it is because secretly they want to make passionate love to each other. That is not the case here.”

At this, Tristan let out a huge guffaw, a rumbling, raucous belly laugh, head thrown back.

“I am serious,” she protested hotly.

“I’m so glad you clarified that,” he said, huffing with laughter. “Because I gotta tell you, with General Schneider breathing down my neck to learn what your magic is good for, with my spending every free waking moment trying to convince him and his bosses that this is useful even if you haven’t already materialized enriched uranium for them, I gotta tell you, when I am so totally preoccupied with your being seen as a valued commodity that the time it takes me to shave feels like a personal overindulgence, I love knowing that your number one priority is devaluing me even more than my bosses want to devalue you. That’s awesome. You’re the best. I’ll be so fucking devastated when they pull the plug on this and you end up in the street without even a nursing home to take care of you.” He stood up and stormed to the far side of the room, his hands at his temples. “Jesus.”

Then he turned back toward us and said, from a distance, “I apologize. That was totally uncalled for and I should have more control over myself. It’s been a tough week.”

“They want to pull the plug?” said Erszebet, scandalized.

“How long has that been true?” I asked, shocked.

He ran his hands through his short hair a few times roughly, and then returned to sit by us again. “Almost from the word go,” he confessed, pained. “General Schneider was excited for about thirty minutes and then he and Dr. Rudge wanted immediate gratification. They wanted her to start manifesting stealth bombers, or teleport invisibly to Syria, that sort of thing.”

This was the first time he had mentioned names. Until then, Tristan had maintained impeccable secrecy concerning his chain of command. Either he really was at the end of his rope, or else he thought he could gain Erszebet’s trust by personalizing the discussion.

If so, it wasn’t working. “And instead you had me turning sweaters inside out?” demanded Erszebet in disgust. “And you wonder why they do not value me? You are more of an idiot even than I thought.”

“Every task I gave you was a beta test for something else that would have obvious military use. They want you to turn a person inside out. Obviously I have to test that on a sweater and not a person, or even on a lab rat. And of course I’ll fulfill their agenda, but ideally I’d like to exceed it. I’ve got more scruples than they do, so I’d like to present you to them—brand you, so to speak—as being useful for something other than turning a person inside out.”

“Such as?”

“Turning lead into gold would be pretty awesome,” he said, sounding wistful.

She shook her head.

“Why don’t you suggest something, then,” he said to her. “Given that you can only work your magic inside the ODEC, you’re a little limited, you realize that?”

“She can turn rats into newts,” I reminded him.

“So can your average kids’-birthday-party magician.”

“Not for real. Anyhow, what about a person?” I said. “What if I let her turn me into a newt?”

“I would not turn a person inside out, probably,” Erszebet informed Tristan. “That would be tasteless. You Americans are so tasteless.”

“Turn me into a newt,” I insisted. “The bosses will like that.”

And that, as I recall, was the moment when Tristan’s phone began playing the “Liberty Bell March.”

He pulled it out of his pocket and double-taked, then used his finger to scroll down. “Snap inspection!” he announced, looking up to make eye contact with me and Erszebet. “Shine your shoes and polish your belt buckles!”

Diachronicle

DAY 304

In which General Schneider is impressed

NO MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES later we were joined by a broad-chested gentleman in uniform, trailed by a younger man, similarly attired, whose sole purpose in life seemed to be to open doors for, and to hold the hat of, the boss.

At the time, I knew nothing of uniforms, rank, or insignia. A few years later, having spent a lot of time around active-duty military, I’d have been able to recognize this man as a brigadier general (one star) and his aide as a lieutenant colonel. Both were wearing dress uniforms—the military-world equivalent of business suits. Conveniently, they were wearing name plates on their right breast pockets, and so I knew that their last names were Schneider and Ramirez even before Tristan made introductions, which he did with even more than his accustomed level of military crispness.

General Schneider moved about the room in an asymmetrical gait, shaking first my hand, then Erszebet’s. His manner was extraordinarily grim and formal. He paid only cursory attention to me. Then his gaze settled on Erszebet, taking her in head to foot, and for a fleeting moment he looked impressed. But then he frowned and turned his attention to Tristan.

“I assume that’s the Asset,” he said, pointing.

“Pointing is very rude,” said Erszebet.

Tristan hastily said, “General Schneider, yes. Miss Karpathy is the one I told you about.”

“This must be the one who wishes me to turn people inside out,” said Erszebet, looking away with wounded dignity. “Very tasteless.”

Schneider gave her a strange look, but then returned his attention to Tristan, who said quickly, “You came at a great time, sir. We were just in the middle of a very productive conversation.”

“You said a couple of weeks, Major Lyons. In my dictionary, ‘a couple’ means ‘two.’ It has been two.”

“General Schneider—”

“You’re not doing what we discussed, Major Lyons. You’re going off script. You’re giving us a science project.”

“Sir, I explained in my report—” Tristan began, but Erszebet talked over him:

“My powers are so little to a man who requires an assistant just to walk into a room?”

“She was just about to turn me into a newt,” I offered urgently.

General Schneider gave me a look and then turned condescendingly to her. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing about the newt thing all week. That might have been impressive a thousand years ago—”

“I was born in 1832, I was not alive a thousand years ago,” she retorted. “If you cannot grasp simple arithmetic, then you will never have any idea what Mr. Tristan Lyons is trying to accomplish here.”

Schneider continued speaking over her: “Those kinds of tricks are nothing in a world with drones, cruise missiles, and assault rifles. And according to Major Lyons’s reports, it takes you all day to pull it off. By the time you get that spell half out of your mouth, I can rack a round into my sidearm and put it between your eyes.”

“Do you need your minion to help you with that too?” she asked.

He looked back over his shoulder at Lieutenant Colonel Ramirez. “Have a look around the facility,” he said. Ramirez departed wordlessly.

“I liked the Maxes better,” Erszebet announced.

“Do you get my point?” General Schneider demanded. “If you want the taxpayers of the United States to go on subsidizing your beauty treatments, you had better impress me. Now. Today. Right now.”

“Very well, then,” purred Erszebet, so immediately cheerful that my skin prickled. I glanced at Tristan; he was looking at her keenly, and not in the usual slack-jawed way that men would look at such a woman.

Erszebet stood and gestured to the open door of the ODEC, smiling like a 1950s housewife on a television advertisement. “If you would like to step inside, General, I will demonstrate the kind of magic you desire. In fact I would be delighted to give you what you’re asking for.”

“General—” said Tristan tentatively.

“Good,” said General Schneider, all too obviously charmed by Erszebet’s physical endowments. I got the clear sense that in his world he dealt with a lot of submissive women who thought of nothing but pleasing him. “That’s what I was after, Major Lyons. Why did it take me coming all the way up here to get that kind of compliance? Where’s the whatever-it-is I have to wear?”

“In that corner,” I said, gesturing toward the rack of snowmobile suits.

Tristan respectfully asked to speak in private with Schneider. They stepped into the server room for a moment, and I could hear Tristan’s voice trying to explain something and the general’s interrupting him. The door opened suddenly and Schneider limped back in, rolling his eyes. I handed him the snowsuit, and then gestured with my head for Erszebet to step aside with me. She joined me by the console panel and—an occasional habit of hers, like a nervous tic—reached into her bag and riffled through it without looking at what she was doing.

“Don’t turn him inside out,” I said.

She looked insulted. “Of course not. Blood—body fluids—all over my dress.”

“You know what I mean. Don’t hurt him. You said you owed me a debt of gratitude—I’ll consider it fulfilled if you promise me that.”

She smiled innocently, which filled me with a sense of dread. “I promise, I am not going to hurt him.” And then, grinning as broadly as she had her first day with us, she stopped fidgeting with the things in her bag, marched into the ODEC with her dress flouncing about her, and waited for Schneider.

Meanwhile Schneider zipped and velcroed himself into the largest of our snowmobile suits. Schneider was hefty and the suit was tight. I noticed something that explained his rolling, asymmetrical style of walking: he had one artificial leg.

“Give us fifteen minutes, please,” Erszebet called out to Tristan as Schneider squeezed into the ODEC with her. “To impress the general will require some effort.”

We closed the door, and Tristan walked to the control console to turn on the ODEC.

There was, of course, no way we could know what was going on inside the ODEC—that was an unavoidable part of the whole Schrödinger’s cat thing. But after eleven minutes we heard the thump on the door that told us Erszebet was finished.

Tristan went to the console and powered down the ODEC. I slipped on the oven mitts that we used whenever we wanted to touch the dangerously cold door latches, and opened the door.

“And so,” said Erszebet, radiant and fresh-faced, her tone sparkling, “I have shown your master a magic trick.” She walked out into the room, leaving the coast clear for us to see inside. And what we saw—or thought we saw—was the motionless body of General Schneider, crumpled on the floor.

“General Schneider!” Tristan exclaimed, and stepped in through the door. There wasn’t enough room in there for me to join him, so I contented myself with sticking my head in for a look.

Schneider wasn’t actually there. Collapsed on the floor, apparently empty, was the snowmobile suit. An empty oxygen mask was still lodged in its hood. “Where is he?” Tristan demanded, horrified.

“Did you turn him into a newt?” I asked.

She examined her fingernails. “Oh, no! It takes me all day to pull that off.”

Tristan picked up the suit and held it upright; one of the legs fell straight down as if weighted with something, and clanked onto the floor of the ODEC.

“Give it to me,” I suggested, and reached through the doorway. He thrust the shoulders of the suit at me. I grabbed them and pulled the whole thing out through the door and into the room, where I laid it out flat on the floor. Left behind in the ODEC was an articulated contraption consisting of a stump cup, some straps, and a carbon-fiber strut terminating in a man’s dress shoe. Schneider’s artificial leg.

I unzipped the front of the snowmobile suit with some care. I had an idea as to what had happened. Somewhere inside of this bulky garment was a living, breathing newt. I needed to find it, catch it, and return it safely to the ODEC where Erszebet could reverse the spell. No harm done. Point made.

Inside the suit was an empty suit of clothes—shirt buttoned, tie knotted, sleeves of the shirt fitted into the sleeves of the jacket. But no person. Tristan had emerged from the ODEC, carrying the artificial leg in one hand and Schneider’s remaining shoe—sock dangling from it—in the other.

I grabbed the oxygen mask and pulled it carefully away from the snowsuit’s hood. A little gleaming cascade of glinting objects fell out of it, followed by a pair of fake teeth held together by a bridge of pink plastic. That gave me a clue as to the little gleaming things. They were tiny bits of curiously shaped metal.

They were fillings from Schneider’s teeth.

Groping carefully through Schneider’s jacket and shirt, Tristan’s hand found something. He unbuttoned the garments and spread them apart. Exposed in the middle, resting neatly on the back of the white shirt, was a small smooth object with a couple of wires coming out of it.

“That,” Tristan said, “is a pacemaker.”

I couldn’t even speak properly, so I held out my hand with the fillings and the false teeth for Tristan to look at.

Tristan was squatting on his haunches. He looked at these exhibits for a while, thoughtfully. Acting on some kind of military-guy autopilot, he rummaged in Schneider’s clothes until he came out with a small pistol, which Schneider had evidently been packing in a holster on the back of his belt. Tristan ejected its magazine and then worked the slide once to eject a round. Having rendered the weapon safe, he set it back down again, then climbed to his feet and turned to face Erszebet.

“What have you done to him?” Tristan demanded, very calm.

“Google it,” said Erszebet breezily.

“Google what?”

She put her index finger to her chin and looked up at the ceiling. “Mmm, Hungary, Nagybörzsöny, 1564, one-legged man, naked. Perhaps taltos. You might discover something interesting.”

“Stokes!” said Tristan irritably. I grabbed my laptop, brought up Google, and typed in the words. Nothing useful came up.

“Well?” demanded Tristan. I shook my head.

“Try refreshing,” said Erszebet. “Perhaps it takes a moment for it to catch up.”

“Catch up with what?” Tristan demanded.

“With me,” she said, and began humming Liszt to herself.

I opened another window and tried Googling the Hungarian words she’d used. Nagybörzsöny turned out to be the name of a village. Taltos I already knew, it meant something like “warlock.”

I went back to the first window and clicked the refresh button. Tristan came around to my side of the table and stared over my shoulder. Erszebet preened. I refreshed the page a second time.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Try variations,” she suggested, turning away as if in a reverie. “Amputee. Gibberish.”

“Where is he?” Tristan demanded again.

I refreshed the page again. One search result came up.

“There’s a Wikipedia entry,” I said.

“What the—” Tristan muttered, as I clicked on the link.

“I made it into Wikipedia,” sang Erszebet. “I’ll bet none of my enemies ever made it into Wikipedia.”

The page came up, entitled “Nagybörzsöny ‘Warlock’ incident,” containing a short paragraph, with one notification saying the entry was a stub and encouraging us to help them supplement it, and a second saying the article needed additional citations for verification. The paragraph itself read:

In 1564, in the small village of Nagybörzsöny, a naked one-legged man is recorded as having materialized in the middle of a small lane, babbling in an unknown tongue. The townspeople were weary from a recent outbreak of typhus and on edge from years caught between the warring armies of the Ottoman Empire and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. Once they recovered from their astonishment, the villagers bound the man and dragged him to the town square with the intent of burning him at the stake. This was prevented by the local priest of Szent István, who instead caused him to be taken to the dungeon of the Inquisition. The priest examined and interrogated him for several hours, but was unable to make sense of a word of the man’s foreign gibberish. The local mob, by now in a frenzy, finally broke in, dragged the man out, and burned him to death.

I leapt to my feet. We stared in horror at the entry.

“What have you done?” Tristan cried, practically leaping toward her. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “You killed him!”

She struggled against him. “Unhand me. I did not kill him, the mob did. It says so right in Wikipedia. I’ll bite you if you don’t let me go.”

“What did you do?” he demanded, his voice sounding strangled, but then released her.

She shrugged, adjusting her dress. “I Sent him back to 1564. This is all I did. What happens once I Send him is his responsibility.”

“Time travel,” I said hesitantly. “You can send people back in time.”

“People can be moved to other Strands,” she corrected me. “It is usually just a parlor trick, but sometimes it is useful to get somebody’s attention.”

“How much control do you have over it?” Tristan demanded, thinking fast. “Can you bring him back here before the crowd gets to him?”

She shook her head. “No, because I am not there with him. If he had asked a witch in Nagybörzsöny, politely, then she could have Sent him back here.”

“Why didn’t you mention you could do this?” I asked, trying pathetically to reap some useful research out of the situation. In truth, we should have known—it was in a couple of the translated documents, but always dismissed as being of minor significance.

She shrugged her dismissive shrug. “It is not a practical skill, there are so many . . . variables to contend with that it is of no practical use. It is seldom worth the bother.”

“You just murdered someone,” Tristan said.

“I just Sent him away,” she protested. “He was very rude to me.”

“That’s bullshit. You sent him there knowing he could die. You had control over a situation that resulted in a man’s death, how is that not murder?”

“There is never control when magic is involved,” she replied philosophically.

Tristan was nearly hyperventilating. “Moments ago he was in this room and now he’s dead. How is that not at least manslaughter?”

“He was going to shut the ODEC down,” she said. “I had to stop him.”

“You could have just turned him into a newt or something,” I said.

“You already know I can do that,” said Erszebet, preening again. “I wanted to show you something new.” To Tristan : “Isn’t that what you asked for? Something unexpected? To, what was your phrase? To ‘brand’ me?”

“This is a fucking catastrophe,” Tristan shouted, and kicked a chair. It tumbled across the room to the far wall, where the seat busted apart from the legs. “Fuck!”

“He was so disagreeable,” said Erszebet.

Tristan put his hands on his face and shuddered. “How the fuck am I ever going to explain this to . . . oh, Jesus Christ, you’ve ruined everything. Your own life. Do you understand that? That’s it, it’s over. You’re done. We’re done here.” He was pacing wildly and kept making the same anxious gesture of throwing his hands to either side as if he’d just walked into a spiderweb and were trying to free himself of the gossamer.

“I mean it,” he said, after a moment of silence. “Leave. Stokes, get out of here before you get embroiled in all of this. Leave her here.”

“I am no coward, I would not flee,” said Erszebet haughtily.

“That’s right. You’re going to prison,” he said flatly.

“That will be more interesting than the nursing home,” she replied, unfazed.

“Or I might just shoot you myself,” he said, suddenly weary. He uprighted the chair he’d destroyed, discovered it was broken, sat down on the floor.

Erszebet, perversely, looked delighted with this declaration. “Now you are speaking like a man of action. I have not seen such a side of you before. I approve of it.”

“I mean it, Stokes,” he said. His voice was husky. “Just get out of here. I’ve got to tell them what happened.” He put his hands over his face and began to mutter the phrases he would soon be typing into a report. “Diachronic effects confirmed . . . results unpredictable . . . Casualties . . . one KIA.”

Diachronic. Meaning “through time.”

Department of Diachronic . . . something?

“Go ahead and fetch his minion. I will Send him somewhere nicer,” Erszebet offered. “And then we can all pretend they never arrived and just go back to what we were doing. Only now we will do more interesting things, yes?”

Tristan pressed the heels of his hands hard against his closed eyes and groaned. “Shut up,” he said. “Stokes. Go. Really.”

“Go where?” I asked.

He moved his hands away from his eyes. “Just get out of town, let me deal with this. Somehow. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come home. Let Professor Oda know what happened so he doesn’t show up in the middle of a shitstorm offering to help with something.” He sighed heavily. “On your way out, tell Ramirez to come down here. I guess I start by breaking the news to him.”

I hesitated. I had an instinct to go to him, but as if he sensed this, he made a waving-away motion, like he was flicking something from his hand. “Go,” he repeated. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this. I’ll be in touch when I can. Thanks for everything. Leave. Now.” He turned away from me.

Diachronicle

DAYS 305–309 (EARLY JUNE, YEAR 1)

In which not all is lost, although in retrospect perhaps it should have been

I SHALL SKIP OVER THE miserable, dreadful limbo of the next few days. Suffice it to say: after alerting the professor and his wife of the tragic developments, I retreated to my third-floor walk-up and never went out except to buy groceries.

I checked Facebook obsessively on the chance Erszebet would reach out to me that way. Nothing. I read the papers, actual and virtual; I ran Google searches (so what if they could trace me, they already knew who I was and where I lived). The dead taltos in Hungary remained an established historical fact. Erszebet Karpathy—the Asset, Schneider had called her—remained nonexistent.

I sniffed out possible job openings at universities so far below my pay grade that no prospective boss would bother contacting Blevins for a reference.

And—although this sounds dramatic—I suppose I grieved. I had thrown myself (uncharacteristically) with such abandon into the most remarkable adventure of my regimented little life, had reshaped myself as a trailblazer alongside a man I realized was the most vital human being I’d ever known . . . and now it was all gone. The life, the trail, the trailblazing, the man. I was an unemployed academic with a disastrous employment history and nothing to offer the world but an uncanny facility with (mostly dead and dying) languages. Nothing I might ever do would come close to seizing my attention the same way.

After what was easily the longest, most uncomfortable four or five days of my life, on an afternoon when I was so close to going mad that I began to re-alphabetize my vintage cookbook collection according to the Japanese syllabary, just to shut my brain up . . . the buzzer to my apartment blared. I almost jumped out of my skin.

I went to the door. “Who is it?” I shouted into the intercom.

“Stokes!” came a blessedly familiar voice through the crackle of crappy wiring.

I shouted with relief as I buzzed him in; he bounded up the stairs, and as he neared me, I can’t believe I did this, but I threw my arms around his neck and gave him an enormous hug. “Tristan!” I cried, and even planted a wet one on kissed his cheek. “You’re in one piece!”

Almost equally surprising, he was hugging me back, and he being so much taller than I, by the time he reached the landing, he had hoisted me off the ground. He squeezed me hard and then released me. “Better than one piece, even. Good to see you, Stokes.”

“Where’s Erszebet? What’s happened?”

“She’s fine, I’ll explain. What do you have for beer? Those pencil-pushers in DC all drink Bud Light.” He strode into the apartment. “Missed you, Stokes.” He gestured grandly around the small room. “This is where it all began. Someday there’ll be a plaque down front saying that.”

“What’s going on?” I demanded, opening the fridge. From the door I took the last Old Tearsheet Best Bitter from the six-pack he’d brought up the first day we met. He took it from me, found the opener, and a moment later was seated happily on my couch. He patted the spot next to himself and I sat.

“They were batshit-insane-happy about the diachronic effects,” he said. “They’re all about the time travel.”

“But she killed someone!” I said.

“That’s why they’re all about the time travel. It got results. General Schneider gets a star on the wall.”

“Huh?”

“He has been declared a martyr for his country.”

“How is that helpful? Are they going to trick our enemies into standing in an ODEC so Erszebet can Send them to the moon?”

“See, what you and I were too freaked out to think about is that it’s possible to get sent back in time and not end up dead,” said Tristan. “It’s actually possible to go back in time and do stuff. In fact, it may have happened already.”

“What?”

He sat up and took a big swig of his beer. “The intel community has been noticing some inexplicable shit going on, but it’s a little less inexplicable if it is the case that foreign powers are engaging in diachronic operations.”

He gave me a moment to digest this. “DODO,” I said. “Department of Diachronic Operations. You’ve known all along, haven’t you?”

“We have suspected. Now we know.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded.

“You mean there’s another Erszebet out there?”

He shrugged.

“What exactly are you saying, Tristan?”

“Well . . .” He sat up straighter, put the beer on the coffee table, rested his forearms on his knees, and looked at me. “IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has been running this thing until now—thinks other countries might have, or might soon have, access to . . . others like Erszebet. Somehow. Purely theoretical at this stage, but the time travel was new information, and all of a sudden, pieces started to fit together. So in case certain other countries have found their own Erszebets and are sending people back in time to fiddle with things, the DNI doesn’t want to see a Magic Gap opening up.”

“DNI?”

“Director of National Intelligence. General Octavian Frink. Reports directly to POTUS. The Director of IARPA reports to Frink. General Schneider, God rest his soul, worked for a black-budget arm of IARPA. And what has happened now—less than twenty-four hours ago, Stokes—is that DODO has been bumped up the org chart. Now it’s directly under General Frink, with a dotted line to Dr. Rudge at IARPA.”

“Dotted line?”

“It just means Rudge is an advisor. We keep him in the loop.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Well . . . I have been promoted to lieutenant colonel and made the acting head of the Department of Diachronic Operations. I’ve been tasked with taking the ODEC and Erszebet to the next level, focusing entirely on time travel.”

For a moment I was so amazed by this reversal of fortune I couldn’t respond. Then: “Great! So . . . you’re not in trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble,” he said with a small, contented smile.

“Wow, Tristan!” I hooked one arm around his neck and gave him a side-hug. He grinned but took it a little stiffly. “That’s amazing. Erszebet’s willing to cooperate?”

He rolled his eyes, but did not look too worried. “We’re working on that. The Asset likes to be pandered to by powerful men in suits. She likes Constantine Rudge because he wears cuff links and went to Oxford. So I think I can chart a course.”

“Well then, congratulations. When do you start?”

“As soon as we can get ourselves to DC for the swearing-in.”

“You and Erszebet.”

He gave me a funny look. “Stokes. We’re going to be sending people back in time.” He jerked his left thumb over his shoulder as if that’s where back-in-time was.

“Right, I got that.”

“So?”

“So, what?”

“So who do you think is qualified to go back in time?”

I shrugged. “Athletes? Assassins?” He was shaking his head. “Historians?”

“Stokes!” He laughed. “Whoever goes has to be able to function in a setting where nobody speaks modern American English. We need polyglots and linguists. We need”—he pointed—“you.”

I stared at him, eyes wide. I bet my mouth dropped open too.

“I need you,” he added, realizing I was incapable of speech at that moment. “And I’m pretty sure you’re otherwise unemployed.”

Although safely seated, I suddenly felt so lightheaded I put a hand on the coffee table to steady myself.

“So what do you say?” he asked, with a comradely grin. “I can’t promise you’ll get to practice your conversational Sumerian, but you never know.”

I felt like I was on the crest of a roller coaster, just about to plunge down a steep, joyfully terrifying thrill ride. I would have to be mad to agree to such a thing. “You want to send me back in time?” I heard myself say, not really sounding like myself.

“Well, not permanently,” he said. “I’d miss you too much, Stokes.” God damn that grin of his. And he even roughed up my hair, the bastard.

“When do we leave?” I asked.