“Yes, General Frink?”
“You’re an intelligent woman,” Frink said. “You have to have realized that this is an incredibly expensive and roundabout way to raise what amounts to pocket change, by the standards of the Trapezoid.”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” I admitted.
“Nevertheless, what Les just said to you all is an empty threat. DODO is not going to get shut down. Its management may be changed but it will keep on going.”
“Why?” I asked. “Is it because you want cheap plutonium?”
“I won’t lie to you. There is certainly a lot of interest in that. But even if we can never get the Asset to turn lead into plutonium, this project keeps going. It is distressing that you have bungled this bucket-burying project to the extent that you have. There is no way that this passes a cost-benefit analysis even if you get the bucket and sell the book tomorrow. But we are learning, Dr. Stokes. Painful as this trial-and-error phase may be, DODO is building institutional knowledge of how we can conduct diachronic operations in the future—and how our adversaries may be conducting them even as we speak.”
It wasn’t the first time that someone in my chain of command had dropped a hint that foreign powers might have their own equivalents of DODO. It explained a lot about how willing Frink and others were to keep backing such an unlikely enterprise.
“Well, I am glad that we are making progress, however haphazardly,” I said.
“It’s the haphazard part I would like to work on,” Frink said. “There is far too much unpredictability and randomness in these . . . DEDEs . . . for my taste.” I had to give him credit for nailing the pronunciation. “It is for that reason that I am going to bring Roger Blevins into this in a more serious way.”
The general paused, and I could tell he was awaiting some sort of reaction from me.
Which wasn’t something he’d have done if he’d been expecting a negative reaction. No, he was expecting me to jump out of my chair in transports of joy. He was expecting it because his old school chum Blevins had prepped him for it—told him of the superb mentor/pupil relationship we had enjoyed, or some such bullshit malarky.
Instead I was frozen. Like a deer in the headlights. Not one of my more admirable qualities. Later, when I was going through hand-to-hand combat training with military experts, I heard a lot about the predator/prey relationship, and how it was the natural instinct of many to freeze up when in the grip of a more powerful animal. It turns out you can train yourself to fight, or to run away; but I hadn’t been through such training at the time.
“I’ve been discussing it with Roger,” Frink went on. He seemed a little nonplussed by my reaction, but soon enough worked himself back up to his usual brute intensity. “He speaks highly of you, but we have arrived at a consensus that it might not hurt to have a couple of greybeards in the loop—people who know their way around history and dead languages and such. Constantine Rudge is still following along, but he’s busy and can only put so much time into it. So I have asked Roger. And he has expressed a willingness to take a leave of absence from his position at Harvard so that he can throw himself into DODO with a higher level of commitment. It’ll take a few months for him to disentangle himself, but he’s on it. I wanted you to be the first to know, Stokes. Given your warm relationship with him, I expect this will be a load off your mind.”
“Thanks for letting me know, General Frink,” I said. “Will there be anything else?”
“I look forward to hearing good news from your end in a few hours,” Frink said. “Les is a good man. When he says he’s going to crush it—it’s time to pop some popcorn and pull up a chair.”
“I’ll get popping, then,” I said.
LETTER FROM
GRáINNE to GRACE O’MALLEY
Your Grace—pardon me the rude beginnings, but it’s a terrible, terrible thing that’s happened, I must write quickly to tell you all and I warn you now, it may be the last letter you shall ever receive from me, for reasons that will become clear as you are reading.
Tristan Lyons returned again, still without success, but with a willingness now to be honest with me. But the truth he shared was foul enough to kill an ogre, and that was just the beginning of the woes.
As I told you before, he comes from an era in which magic has been blotted out entirely. Sure he and his brethren are attempting to resuscitate it, but it’s only one witch he has to work with, and it’s a horrible situation she’s in from the sound of it. Lives like a prisoner, she does, under their watch all the time for they want her kept safe else their work comes to naught. So very limited her life sounds. And the worst of it is the work itself! They instruct her on all the magic she may do, and ’tis only ever Sending they want her for, which as you’ve heard myself and my sister Breda tell you, is exhausting and often frustrating, for there are so many particulars to be kept in mind, and the risk of lomadh—and you haven’t the satisfaction of accomplishment, for by its very nature, the results are not where you are.
And even worse than that, ’tis a strange mechanical chamber she must spend her time in, the only place magic will function in their age. Tristan described it somewhat to me and for all the pride in his voice—’tis his creation—it sounds a right horror, so it does. So this poor witch is living under nasty circumstances, and more than that: she is nearly two hundred years old! Magically preserved she is. So for all those years she survived, aging slowly, in a world with no magic, making friends and then watching them die of old age . . . while she waited patiently for the time to come for her to spend her day in a horrible little room doing unpleasant tricks on demand for a secret government.
For that’s the other part of his confession: Tristan and his lot aren’t bringing magic back for the good of the world, or for magic’s own sake, but because his government (what rules over the nation full of Irish who speak English) wants to use magic to spy upon and check the power of other kingdoms. Now I’ve nothing against that, sure we’re doing it ourselves, right now, and who doesn’t? But it’s nothing to the glory of magic, it’s nothing to the artistry or craft, and worst of all, it’s a horrible life they’re giving this witch, by the sound of it. I asked Tristan was she happy, and he said not especially, but he thinks that is due to she’s Hungarian and they’re not a merry race. And he has a point. Still, very sad I was to think of the state of affairs. Not at all as I’d imagined it, when first he told me their aim was to bring back magic.