“Department of Diabolical Obscurantism,” I guessed.
Tristan was still frozen in midsentence, like a video when you hit the “pause” button, thumb in the air, gazing at me patiently while he chewed a biscuit he had somehow snagged from my side of the table. “Anyway,” I continued, “you can’t just modify someone else’s building . . . can you?”
“We will acquire the building,” he announced. Then he extended his index finger. “Two, design of the human-rated ODEC. Three, its construction. Four, find somebody who can do magic.” He looked around at us. “Conveniently, there’s four of us. Professor, you work up a design, then oversee the construction. My bosses can fly up some fellows from DC to work with us, Stokes and I will help—you can manage a screw gun, can’t you, Stokes?” This was a throwaway, almost rhetorical, question; he did not even glance at me.
Oda nodded, his face still but radiant. I could see him restraining himself from glancing at his wife. Her face was also still, but not so radiant. “We’ll need people with expertise in bulk cryogenics.”
“NASA,” Tristan said dismissively. “Those guys don’t have enough to do. Then there’s procuring and installing all the hardware. We can get as much computational muscle as we need from cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Weird fabrication can be sourced from Los Alamos. Witches is you, Stokes. Ask around at New Agey places. Yoga studios or whatever. That should be easy enough, and you look the part.”
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“Grad student. Primary demographic for magical thinking.”
“Tristan. It’s the twenty-first century. Get a clue. I will look for witches online.”
He was already shaking his head. “No. You can’t leave a paper or electronic trail. You have to show up somewhere witchy in person and ask questions, without giving them any information about yourself.” Before I could respond he turned to Rebecca. “Wanna help Stokes find a witch?”
Rebecca said, “No.” She said it politely, calmly stroking a calico cat that was curled placidly on her lap. It was clear that she would not be changing her mind about it.
“You’re the one who gets credit for thinking of it,” he said, almost (by Tristan standards) cajoling.
“I am here for Frank,” she said. “I’m not a soldier in your army, Mr. Lyons.”
“All right then,” Tristan said, after a pause. He suddenly brightened, grinned at me. “Stokes, you own witches.”
“What the hell, Tristan. How does one find a witch, anyhow? Not in a yoga studio, that’s for sure. Nobody’s been able to do magic for about a hundred and seventy-five years, so what does that even mean, for somebody to ‘be a witch’?”
“In Japan, still today, there are tsukimono-suji,” said Oda, as casually as if he were discussing lunch. “Witch families. Witchcraft is considered hereditary—matrilineal—and I don’t know what kind of magic they claim to do, but the witch identity remains.” He grinned slightly. “Maybe if you find the descendant of a witch, you’ve found a witch waiting for her broomstick.”
“Very funny,” said Rebecca. When Tristan and I turned curious eyes upon her, she explained in a desultory tone, “An ancestress of mine was hanged in the Salem witch trials. Frank finds that exotic.”
“Salem doesn’t count,” I said. “That was mass hysteria induced by ergot-tainted rye.”
“Correct,” said Rebecca in a so-there tone, her eyes darting toward her husband.
“But Salem is the epicenter of modern American witchiness,” said Tristan.
“That’s a bunch of commercial tourist-trap nonsense, and anyhow, what would I be looking for?” I asked again.
“If there really were witches,” Oda-sensei suggested, “maybe there are people today who know they were descended from them, and who continue some of the ritual elements even if the magic isn’t active. That is probably the case with the tsukimono-suji.”
“We can work with that,” said Tristan. “Stokes, get on it.”
“Salem won’t have any witch-descendants because—as I just said—Salem never had witches to start with,” I insisted. “If we’re looking for witch-spawn, we should check out someplace like New Orleans.”
Tristan considered this. “Go poke around Salem first. If you don’t find anything, maybe I’ll send you to New Orleans.”
Crikey, that was easy. And a perk I’d never get under Blevins! “Is this taxpayer-funded?” I asked. “No judgment. Just curious.”
“Classified,” he said, and gave me a wink.
Diachronicle
DAYS 222–244 (MARCH, YEAR 1)
In which there are constructive developments
TRISTAN LATER MODIFIED HIS PLAN, deciding not to send me witch-hunting until we had a feasible chamber in which to put our witch. As there was nothing to occupy me, and I’d let slip that I had taken (one semester-long) shop class in high school, he declared me his aide-de-camp for the campaign of Office Reform that was to come.
During the next few weeks the office, as I had known it, rapidly ceased to exist. Even before taking ownership of the building, Tristan had, with sledgehammer and Sawzall, wrought changes on it that, at the time, had struck me as quite material. He had perfected the art of gazing thoughtfully at a wall between office suites, casting his gaze hither and yon, and blithely announcing that it was not load-bearing and hence a candidate for being knocked out. In this manner the original DODO office had tripled its square footage during the time I had been working there, with several of its walls already marked for death whenever the neighboring start-ups went “Tango Uniform.”
“Department of Demolishing Offices” was all I could say the next time I went to the building after our teatime strategy session at the Odas’ house. Less than twenty-four hours had passed, but Tristan appeared to have spent most of them walking freely through the building with a can of fluorescent green spray paint marking doors, walls, and other impedimenta with the word DEMO or, when he ran low on spray paint, with a simple X. In the center of the building was a large conference room, meant to be shared by all of the tenants. Tristan had hurled the conference table against the wall, Xed it, and then spray-painted a huge rectangle directly onto the industrial-carpeted floor and filled it in with the inevitable X. Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market.
“So you’re going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?” I inquired.
“The conference room will cease to exist,” he said. “DODO is not about meetings. Not about PowerPoints.”