I’ve told Mortimer Shore that—as he already knows, of course—he needs to focus his time and energies on projects that actually require his attention, so please do not expect him to follow up on his last offer to you regarding Chronotron data.
Mel, I do realize it must be unnerving to go to a DTAP that is so close to the very end of magic. As Erszebet has recalled on innumerable occasions, she was hardly able to perform magic at all for the last year or so before the eclipse. So I have a proposal that I hope will reassure you: when you go to the San Fran DTAP, Gráinne has offered to go with you, and as soon as you’ve accomplished your DEDE (which if I recall correctly is to recruit a witch from that era), Gráinne will Send you back here immediately. She will then get back here with the help of the KCW—she’s not nearly as unnerved about the timing as you are, and is happy to make the journey if it will help you feel more secure about returning.
So, in short: Don’t worry about it. Just do it. After all, it’s your job.
Exchange of posts by DODO staff
on private ODIN channel
DAYS 1943–1944
(MONDAY AND TUESDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, YEAR 5)
Post from Dr. Melisande Stokes to LTC Tristan Lyons and Mortimer Shore:
Any thoughts on this DEDE? Gráinne seems awfully cozy with Blevins lately. Also, Mortimer, are you being blocked from Chronotron data?
Mel
Reply from LTC Tristan Lyons:
It’s fine, Mel. Gráinne’s resourceful, she’ll get both of you back here safely. She’s hardwired subversive when it comes to authority (I heard the coders classified her Chaotic Neutral)—she’s playing Blevins, survival instinct, force of habit. Erszebet genuinely likes her and Erszebet would not like her if she took the Gráinne/Blevins thing seriously. Gráinne’s got your back.
If you’re still gone on Friday, I’ll have Erszebet Send me back to help you out.
Tristan
From Mortimer Shore:
Hey, Mel, not being blocked, really am swamped with a sudden wave of mundane coding assignments that came unexpectedly from Blevins. Nobody else (except Oda) has the security clearance to do it and he’s busy on ATTO moving.
I agree with Tristan. But heads-up Tristan, you can’t go back to help Mel out because you are about to get a whopper new DEDE—earliest era witch-recruitment we’ve had yet: 20,000 BC Germany. I only know because Erszebet has been surfing the wiki doing research—she needs some kind of reference point to Send you to. I turned her on to the Hohle Fels caves in the Ach Valley. Have fun! LOL
From LTC Lyons:
I haven’t heard anything about that, but I’ll start brushing up on my cave art. Wonder how the hell they expect me to recruit a witch who can Send me back here.
From Mortimer Shore:
That’s why they pay you the big bucks. See you both when you’re back from your Extreme DTAPs lol
Peace out
Mortimer
PART
FIVE
Diachronicle
DAY 1945 (DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING, YEAR 5)
In which the road to perdition is paved with gold
GRáINNE AND I HAD ARRIVED in San Francisco without benefit of the level of research to which I was accustomed. Blevins, clearly smitten with Gráinne, had allowed—one might even say encouraged—her to learn all manner of Internet searching, and she assured me that she had done all the background work for this DTAP. There were no particular skills required, it was argued, as San Francisco in 1850 was such a madcap swill of different cultures (and so extremely under-populated by women) that even if I wore pants and chewed gum I would not stand out as irregular, while no matter how prepared I was, I would still stand out for being female. Because we were so close to the end of magic, the intention was to get in and out quickly.
As arrival was always in the nude, and this was San Francisco at the start of the Gold Rush, it was sensible to arrive in a brothel. Gráinne had chosen the Golden Mounds, right on Portsmouth Square, which was so new (having been rebuilt twice in the past year due to monstrous fires) that it still smelled of pine sap and paint, which stale beer and stale sweat had not yet masked. Imagine whatever tawdry image of Gold Rush whorehouses you like; this one was surprisingly well-appointed, despite the slapdash construction. Somebody, somewhere, had come into massive amounts of gold leaf, and the whole place glittered. You’ve surely seen the photographs of prostitutes of this era, I need not spend the ink describing them—but I was not prepared for the loud, rowdy, almost assembly-line attitude of the place. Curtains, at best, separated nooks for nookie sexual congress. There was nothing close to privacy. It was a madhouse of copulation. This made our arrival—in the corner of a large room with some eight beds all sectioned off by hanging “tapestries”—entirely unnoticed.
We both stumbled to our knees. I recovered quickly, for I had been Sent many times. Gráinne was a little slower to shake it off—but then she was more in her element than I, and in a trice she had pinched a couple of day-dresses. Corsets and blouses generally remained on the girls, at least at this tier of low-latency prostitutional services.
“We’ll do better to find their non-work clothes,” I said, as Gráinne tossed me the more modest of the two dresses. “Since we shall have to go out on the street.”
“No need to dress primly here at all,” she replied cheerily. “Not for the time that’s in it. Here’s some knickers that look clean enough”—and she tossed me some linen bloomers. (Not unlike the ones I am wearing now, although these are a much finer weave and mercifully much cleaner. I must be grateful for these small blessings now.) We made our way downstairs and headed for the main door, when a wasp-wasted figure stepped between us and our egress. “Who are you?” demanded this older woman (dressed more as one imagines ladies dressing in the early Victorian era—so clearly the madam of the place). She aimed the query straight at me, and I, unprepared, without the usual backstory we were always careful to produce, hesitated.
“It’s grand, ma’am, surely,” said Gráinne, with a winsome smile. “Mary it was sent us over from the other place, there’s a ship arrived with lots of new women, and they haven’t the beds set up. If you don’t want us we’ll be striking out on our own, but we’ve heard such agreeable things about your terms. Will you take us, so? Shall we just be fetching our bags from the harborside? Pay my cousin no mind, she’s deaf and dumb.”
The woman frowned. “Mary should know we don’t take Irish,” she said.
“It’s a surfeit of English ladies you’ve got, is it?” Gráinne asked in a playfully disbelieving voice. And then, in an odd accent somewhere between London and Appalachian, she asked, “What if we were English, then? Would that work for your johns? We can easily be English. My cousin here, she can be anything!”
Now the woman looked confused, but in a way that suggested Gráinne would get her way. With a brusque gesture she motioned toward the door. “Very well, then, get your things and come back, we can use the help.”
“Help,” Gráinne quoted with a snigger, and out we went to meet the city.