The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  There Esther sits, at the end of the jetty, as Holly saw her on that hot, thirsty day. I transverse down the embankment and along the planks. Like an Oriental ghost I lack feet, but my progress is soundtracked by Holly’s memories of her own footsteps. Look. Esther’s cropped gray hair, grubby safari shirt, and floppy leather hat.

  I subspeak: Esther? It’s Marinus.

  But Esther doesn’t react in any way.

  I transverse around her, to study her face.

  My old friend flickers like a dying hologram.

  Am I wrong? Is this just Holly’s memory of Esther?

  Then her chakra-eye glows dimly. Holly couldn’t have seen it. I subaddress her: Moombaki of the Noongar People.

  Nothing. Esther fades like a shadow as the sun goes in.

  Her chakra-eye flickers open, shuts, open, shuts. I try to ingress, but instead of strong, coherent memories, like in Holly’s parallax, I find only a nebula of moments. Dewdrops, clinging to a spider’s web on a golden wattle flower; a dead infant, flies drinking from his eyes; eucalyptus trees crackling into flame and parrots shrieking through smoke; a riverbed alive with naked-backed men panning for gold; the warbling throat of a butcher bird; a line of Noongar men in chains, lugging blocks of stone; and then I’m out the other side of Esther’s head. Her mind’s gone. It’s smashed. Just those shards remain.

  The hologram solidifies and speaks: “Cold tea do you?”

  False hope hurts like a broken rib: Esther, it’s Marinus.

  “Five perch. One trout. A slow afternoon.”

  This is recorded ghost speech, uttered by the Esther Little whom Holly remembers, not spoken by Esther’s soul here and now.

  Esther, you’re trapped in a memory in the mind of Holly Sykes.

  A bee lands on the brim of her hat. “Lucky you’re not fussy.”

  Esther, you sought asylum here, but you forgot who you are.

  “I may need asylum.” She watches me, sniperlike. “A bolt-hole.”

  Horology needs you for a Second Mission to the Chapel of the Dusk, Esther. You left me signs.

  “You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”

  Esther, what do I do? How can I bring you back?

  She fades to a shimmer. I’m too late, years too late. Esther’s soul has cooled to an ember that only Esther herself, or maybe Xi Lo, could have breathed back to life. I cannot. The misery I feel at finding her but losing her this way is insupportable. I look out across the memory-generated Thames. What now? Abort the Second Mission? Resign myself to managing Horology’s slow decline? Circles radiate out from Esther’s float. And Holly’s memory-Esther takes a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a slat of wood: MY—

  Another word on the next slat: LONG—

  Then one more word: NAME—

  AS ESTHER WRITES the final E the loop ends, the time resets to three P.M. Once more Esther sits gazing at the Star of Riga, going nowhere, the weather-bleached planks by her foot not yet written on.

  Yet those three words mattered. They matter now.

  Holly must have thought that Esther Little was a crazy old witch but what if Esther was transmitting an instruction to me? I begin to subrecite Esther Little’s name, her true name, her living name that she taught me three selves ago, to Pablo Antay Marinus in the half hour between night and the pink-and-blue Australian dawn on the Emu’s Claw rock over the Swan River valley. Esther fixed it indelibly, she said. Could she truly have seen so far ahead, so long ago? One by one I subintone the syllables. Hesitantly at first, afraid to make an error and invalidate the sequence, but the pace picks up until the name is the player and I the instrument. Is it wishful thinking, or do I sense a coalescence in the head of the memory-Esther? Word by phrase by line, archaic Wadjuk Noongar gives way to nineteenth-century Wadjuk Noongar. The space around us brightens as particles and threads of Esther’s soul reassemble, reintegrate, reravel …

  … and without noticing I’ve finished, I’ve finished.

  Esther Little gazes out at the Star of Riga. The ship blasts its horn. Across the water, in Essex, a vehicle reflects a tiny pinprick of June sunshine. Esther picks up her flask and peers down it. It looks as if the loop is restarting.

  Why hasn’t it worked?

  A subvoice tells me, You speak Noongar like a chain saw.

  My soul pulses. My teacher disappeared for forty-one years.

  The oldest Horologist looks into her bucket. Not many fish, for forty-one years. I guess my signs found you?

  One from Trondheim and one from Poughkeepsie.

  Esther allows herself an amused growl. The Script contained an invitation to the Chapel. Is a Second Mission in the offing?

  Two days away, or possibly only one by now.

  Time we were back, then. Esther’s soul egresses the chakra of her long-ago remembered forehead and hovers, rotating through 360 degrees. Goodbye, she tells the vanished day.

  April 6

  ESTHER’S SOUL EGRESSES from Holly’s forehead first and I follow, into a new morning. Holly is still lying on the couch, motionless, with my body next to her, motionless. They haven’t seen us. Unalaq is reading a book and Arkady, over from 119A, is writing on his slate. I ingress Iris Marinus-Fenby and rethread my soul to my brain. My nose smells burned toast, my ears hear traffic, my calves and toes are cramped, my stomach’s empty, and my mouth feels like a rodent died in it. Finding my optic nerves always takes longer. Suddenly Unalaq is laughing with astonishment and delight and says, “Be my guest!” so I know where Esther’s soul went. My eyes, when I manage to lift the lids, see Arkady peering up close. “Marinus? Are you back?”

  “You’re supposed to be minding Sadaqat.”

  “L’Ohkna flew back in last night. Did you find Esther?”

  “Why don’t you ask Unalaq if she’s seen her?”

  Arkady turns around in time to see Esther-in-Unalaq drop her book, lift her hand, and stare at it, as if freshly fitted. “Fingers,” she says, sounding a little drunk. “You forget. Hell, listen to me.” She flexes the muscles around her mouth. “Arkady. Apparently.”

  Arkady leaps to his feet like a guilty character in a melodrama.

  “I turn my back for a few paltry decades,” growls Esther-in-Unalaq, “and you go from being a Vietnamese neurologist to a … a power forward with the New York Knicks?”

  Arkady looks at me. I nod. “My God. My God. My God.”

  “You’ll have to lose that ponytail. And what’s that you’re holding? Don’t tell me that’s what televisions have evolved into?”

  “It’s a tab, for the Internet. Like a laptop, minus keyboard.”

  Esther-in-Unalaq looks at me. “Was that English? What else has changed since 1984?”

  “Oil’s running out,” I say, checking Holly’s pulse and the second hand of the clock. “Earth’s population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid’s dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China’s a powerhouse—though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state—and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal. The Kurds have a de facto state; it’s Sunni versus Shi‘a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel’s garbage dumps. People outsourced their memories to data centers and basic skills to tabs. On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharaonic. The world’s twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. On the bright side, there’s more computing power in Arkady’s slate than existed in the world when you last walked it; an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now b
uy strawberries at Christmas.” I check the clock again. “Holly’s pulse is okay, but we should unhiatus her. She’ll be dehydrated. Where’s Ōshima?”

  “I heard,” Ōshima appears in the doorway, “that Rip van Winkle was honoring us with an appearance.”

  Esther-in-Unalaq looks at her on-and-off partner. “I’d say, ‘You haven’t aged a day,’ Ōshima, but it wouldn’t be true.”

  “If you’d let us know that you’d be dropping by, I’d have gone out and found me a prettier body. But we all thought you were dead.”

  “I damn near was dead, after finishing with Joseph Rhîmes.”

  “A teacher in Norway got the truth! A Milwaukee junkie got the truth! Or was not telling me ‘obeying the Script’?”

  “No, it was common bloody sense, Ōshima.”

  Arkady subasks me, Can you believe these two?

  “If the Anchorites even suspected I’d survived the First Mission,” says Esther-in-Unalaq, “they would have gone after any possible asylum-giver. Back in 1984, Xi Lo agreed that if our foray to the Chapel ended badly, Pfenninger and Constantin might wipe out all remaining Horologists to give themselves an open field for a decade. That meant you were a target, Ōshima. You would’ve only died, you Returnee, but as an unraveled Sojourner I would’ve died-died. The safest play was to seek asylum in a tough Temporal kid who’d survive a few decades, and let nobody know until it was time to wake me up.”

  “Holly’s been tough,” I say. “We should let her go now.”

  Esther runs Unalaq’s ruby thumbnail up the stem of a purple tulip. “You miss purple, after a few years …”

  When Esther dodges a question, I worry. “Holly’s paid enough, Esther. Please. She deserves to be left in peace.”

  “She does,” says Esther. “But it’s not that simple.”

  “According to the Script?” asks Ōshima.

  Esther fills Unalaq’s lungs and slowly exhales. “There’s a crack.”

  None of us understands. Arkady asks, “A crack in what?”

  “A crack in the fabric of the Chapel of the Dusk.”

  THE LIBRARY IN Unalaq and Inez’s apartment is a deep square well, walled with bookshelves. Its parquet floor has just enough room for the round table, but a corkscrew staircase winds up not to one but two narrow balconies that give access to the upper bookshelves, and the Monday-morning sunshine enters through a skylight twenty feet above us. It illuminates an oblong of book spines. Ōshima, Arkady, Esther-in-Unalaq, and I sit around the table and talk about Horology business until there’s a knock at the door and Holly enters, fed, freshly showered, and dressed in baggy clothes borrowed from Inez. Her new head-wrap is deep blue, scattered with white stars. “Hi,” says the tired, lined woman. “I hope I haven’t kept you all waiting.”

  “You hosted me for forty-one years, Ms. Sykes,” says Esther-in-Unalaq. “A few minutes is the least I owe you.”

  “Make it Holly. Everyone. Wow. Look at all these books. It’s rare to see so many, these days.”

  “Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the late 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.”

  Holly asks, “Is that, like … an official prophecy?”

  “It’s the inevitable result,” I say, “of population growth and lies about oil reserves. But please. This chair’s for you.”

  “What a beautiful table,” remarks Holly, sitting down.

  “It’s older than the nation we’re in,” says Arkady.

  Holly runs her fingers for a moment over the grain and knots of the yew wood. “But younger than you lot, right?”

  “Age is a relative concept,” I say, rapping my knuckles on the old, old wood.

  Esther-in-Unalaq pushes back Unalaq’s bronze hair from her face. “Holly. Years ago you made a rash promise to a fisherwoman on a jetty. You couldn’t know the true consequences of that promise, but you kept it anyway. Doing so pulled you into Horology’s War with the Anchorites. When Marinus and me egressed from you earlier, your first role in our War ended. Thank you. From me, from Horology. I owe you my life.” The rest of us signed our agreement. “The good news is this. By six o’clock tomorrow evening, according to the world’s clocks, the War will be over.”

  “A peace treaty?” asks Holly. “Or a fight to the death?”

  “A fight to the death,” answers Arkady, raking his fingers through his lush hair. “Poachers and gamekeepers don’t do peace treaties.”

  “If we win,” says Esther-in-Unalaq, “you’re home free, Holly. If not, we won’t be able to stage any more dramatic rescues. We’ll be dead-dead. And we won’t lie. We can’t know how our enemy’d respond to victory. Constantin, specially, has a long memory.”

  Holly’s troubled, naturally. “Aren’t you precognitive?”

  “You know precognition, Holly,” says Esther. “It’s a flicker of glimpses. It’s points on a map, but it’s never the whole map.”

  Holly considers this. “My first role in your War, you just said. Implying there’s a second.”

  “Tomorrow,” I take over, “a high-ranking Anchorite named Elijah D’Arnoq is due to appear in the gallery at 119A. D’Arnoq proposes to escort us to the Chapel of the Dusk and to help us destroy it. He claims to be a defector who can no longer stomach the moral evil of decanting innocent ‘donors.’ ”

  “You don’t sound as if you believe him.”

  Ōshima drums his fingers on the table. “I don’t.”

  Holly asks, “Can’t you enter the defector’s mind to check?”

  “I did,” I explain, “and what I found backed his story up. But evidence can be tampered with. All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.”

  Holly asks the obvious: “Then why take the risk?”

  “Because now we have a secret weapon,” I answer, “and fresh intelligence.”

  We all look at Esther-in-Unalaq. “Back in 1984,” she tells Holly, “on what we call our First Mission to our enemy’s fastness, I detected a hairline crack running from the apex to the icon. I believe that I … may be able to split this crack open.”

  “Dusk,” I explain further, “would then flood the Chapel, and destroy it. The Blind Cathar, whose half-sentient vestiges reside within the Chapel, would perish. Any Anchorites touched by the Dusk would die. Any Anchorites elsewhere would have lost their psychodecanter, and be as susceptible to the aging process as the rest of humanity.”

  Holly asks the less-than-obvious: “You said the Blind Cathar was a genius, a mystic Einstein who could ‘think’ matter into being. Why didn’t he notice his masterpiece has a chink in its armor?”

  “The Chapel was built by faith,” replies Esther. “But faith requires doubt, like matter requires antimatter. That crack, that’s the Blind Cathar’s doubt. It dates from before he became what he later became. Doubt that he was doing God’s work. Doubt that he had the right to take the souls of others so that he could cheat death.”

  “So you plan to … stick dynamite into the crack?”

  “Nitroglycerin won’t scratch the paintwork,” says Ōshima. “The place has withstood the Dusk for centuries. A nuclear explosion might do the job, but warheads aren’t very portable. What’s needed is psychosoteric dynamite.”

  Esther clears Unalaq’s throat. “That would be me.”

  Holly checks with me: “A suicide mission?”

  “If our defector is fake, and his promise to show us how to safely demolish the Chapel is a lie and a trap, then that contingency is real.”

  “Marinus means yes,” says Ōshima. “A suicide mission.”

  “Christ,” says Holly. “So are you going up alone, Esther?”

  Esther shakes Unalaq’s head. “If D’Arnoq is luring the last Horologists up the Way of Stones, he’ll want all of the last Horologists, not just one. If the Second Mission is an ambush, I’ll need the others to buy me time. Detonating your soul isn’t a beginner’s party trick.”

&
nbsp; I hear the piano, faintly. Inez is playing “My Wild Irish Rose.”

  Holly asks, “So if Esther has to blow up this—enemy HQ, say, and assuming she succeeds …” She looks at the rest of us.

  “Dusk dissolves living tissue,” says Ōshima. “The End.”

  “Unless,” I venture, “there was a way back to the Light of Day that we don’t yet know about. One built by an ally. On the inside.”

  Half a mile above us, a cloud passes between our skylight and our nearest star and the oblong of sunshine fades away.

  Holly reads me. “What is it you still haven’t told me?”

  I look at Esther, who shrugs Unalaq’s shoulders: You’ve known her the longest. So I say what I won’t be able to unsay later: “On the First Mission, neither I nor Esther actually saw Xi Lo die.”

  At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind. Holly shifts in her seat. “What did you see?”

  “Not a lot in my case,” I say. “I was pouring all my psychovoltage into our shield. But Esther was next to Jacko when Xi Lo’s soul egressed and …” I look at my colleague.

  “And ingressed the chakra-eye on the icon of the Blind Cathar. He wasn’t being dragged like a victim. Xi Lo transversed in, like a bullet. And … the instant before he vanished, I heard Xi Lo subtell me three words: I’ll be here.”

  “We don’t know,” I admit, “if this was a spur-of-the-moment act, or a plan that Xi Lo hadn’t shared, for reasons of his own. If Xi Lo hoped to sabotage the Chapel, he failed. One hundred and sixty-four people have lost their lives and souls in the Chapel of the Dusk since 1984. One poor man was abducted from a secure psychiatric ward in Vancouver only last week. But … Esther thinks that Xi Lo has been preparing the way for the Second Mission. Holly? Are you okay?”

  Holly dabs the sleeves of Inez’s shirt against her eyes. “Sorry, I … That ‘I’ll be here,’ ” she says. “I heard it too. In my daymare, in the underpass, outside Rochester.”

  Esther is fascinated. “Your voices, your certainties, are silent for you now, but do you remember when it used to insist on something? Maybe the sense was obscure, but the Script refused to change. Do you remember how that felt?”