Most of the early Anachrons were witches. Erszebet, to our surprise, did not fly the coop once she had been made redundant. She rather adopted the air of Cleopatra, and made it clear—to them and to us—that she was now the Alpha Witch. None of the other witches could ever possibly know as much as she did, about the twenty-first century or about DODO’s real missions; likewise, none of us could possibly know how to behave appropriately with the new witches. She maintained all of her charismatic narcissistic bitchiness prepossessing fierceness, but she became, in effect, the Den Mother of Weird Sisters. Frank and Rebecca’s home couldn’t hold them all, so DODO purchased a big old house elsewhere in Cambridge, rigged it up with all kinds of security hardware, and turned it into a kind of sorority for Erszebet and her brood. Vans with blacked-out windows shuttled back and forth between it and DODO headquarters, ferrying witches. They had come from all times and places, but they mostly followed Erszebet’s lead when it came to fashion choices.
There was also a very small cohort of contemporary witches. Erszebet could smell them, and found it perfectly ordinary to approach strangers on Mass Ave and inform them of their latent abilities, to the despair of everyone who cared about security clearance. Those rare few who responded positively were immediately told it was a joke by me (or Rebecca, or whoever was Erszebet-minding that day); meanwhile the attendant DOSECOP (our version of the Secret Service) would capture an image of the woman’s face, and send it electronically for identification and background check. If the DOSECOP got a green light, they would signal the Erszebet-minder, who would backpedal on the “just a joke” line and surreptitiously invite the newfound witch to an interview near (not at, not at first) HQ. There were only three contemp witches at first (there are now about eight). One of these was Julie Lee, aka the Smart-ass Oboist with the tattooed eyebrows from the Apostolic Café. Apparently Erszebet had known her for a witch from day one but did not bother to mention it until the mood possessed her. Another was Tanya Wakessa Washington, a legal clerk in City Hall who was a regular at the café.
The third was Rebecca East-Oda.
She was a grudging convert. I think she agreed to be recruited more for the sake of supporting an endeavor Frank loved than out of any eagerness of her own. That said, she was quite chuffed with herself the first time she turned an apple into an orange. And, with her Congregationalist studiousness, she was apt. Erszebet worked with them every day in one of the ODECs, displaying a patience and good humor she revealed nowhere else, teaching them basic magical spells, but it was slow going. Raised in a civilization from which magic had been eradicated for a century and a half, they all suffered a kind of atrophy of the faculties needed to perform it. Erszebet had told me in private that even Julie—the best of them—was probably years away from being able to Send a DOer with any degree of spatiotemporal accuracy.
Our budget seemed limitless at that time, in no small part because there were multiple variations of the Bay Psalm Book gambit—famous works of art, rare artifacts and antiques, treasure troves of all sorts . . . we made them ours and sold them all for cash. Tristan and I had ethical qualms about this, but Blevins was in charge. The Fugger Bank became our frenemy was neither friend nor foe to us; at some times they checked our strategems, at other times abetted us, according to some larger plan of their own that eluded our understanding. It became increasingly obvious that Dr. Cornelius Rudge, who’d been in on the project from the beginning, had deep connections to the Fuggers, and was basically serving as their man on the inside.
But acquiring treasure was no longer DODO’s primary goal. Oh no, reader, do not think it.
Frink and Blevins had an uber-mission (I wonder, shall it seem antiquated or inconceivable, if these words are ever brought to light?). I can only guess at what this might have been, and at when they conceived it: at the very beginning of the project, or at some point during the years when DODO was growing to the zenith of its power? Only in the last few weeks have I gained an inkling of their true motives. I shall say what I know of these as quickly as I can, because my hand is cramping up like a motherfucker most pitiably; but en route I must explain what happened in the Constantinople Theater.
Yes, DODO had several distinct theatres of operations, of which Constantinople, circa 1200, was the first, the biggest, and the one that most concerned Tristan and myself.
The official rationale for what we were doing there was as follows:
At the time of our great thriving, there were amongst the powers of the globe multiple entities that caused our government concern. These included China, Russia, and certain nefarious elements in the Middle East.
DODO was tasked with discouraging China and Russia from becoming geopolitical BFFs close allies. We were to do this by subtly, retroactively shifting the historical soul of Russia away from the Eastern Orthodox Church and toward the Roman Catholic one, starting just after the Fourth Crusade.
The Fourth Crusade was
an epic clusterfuck
a comic-opera misadventure
a tragic saga with farcical elements. It never even reached its intended target in the Holy Land. Instead the Crusaders—Catholics from Western Europe—invaded the Byzantine Empire, which was a Christian land, and sacked Constantinople.
Its domino effect throughout history is a remarkable lesson in cause and effect that I will return to at another time, if writer’s cramp and leisure time allow it. What matters here is to note the consequences. With the help of the Chronotron and of various Spies and Sages we Sent back to serve as its eyes and ears, we planned out a long interrelated series of DEDEs. Any one of these would seem innocuous unto itself—stealing a pitchfork in some small town in the Urals, digging a trench in the city of Zara, moving a sleeping dog from a hut in a back alley in Budapest to another hut fifty feet away. Collectively, these slight alterations pushed our agenda, shifted the quantum tendencies of reality to allow us to form what we ultimately desired: that Catholicism would spread its wings over more of Christendom, and the Orthodox Church over less of it.
Catholicism unchecked would mean disaster for both the colonizing of North America and the development of science, and so every bit of strengthening that happened on the church’s eastern flank had to be offset on its northwestern one, to maintain within Europe the tensions and conflicts that would lead to a successful Protestant Reformation. That too is a story for another day, but it is important to note here that it involved the collusion of influential bankers, in particular the Fuggers. Gráinne had indirect connections to that family owing to her post-Shear circumstances, and in sundry ways, she greatly assisted us in bringing her generation of Fuggers into the fold, in such manner that subsequent generations were raised to be our natural allies. As I have recently and painfully learned, she had her own reasons for becoming cozy with the Fuggers, but now I am getting ahead of myself.
Back to the uber-mission—or, to be precise, what Frink and Blevins claimed was the uber-mission.