The Bone Clocks

by David Mitchell

  “Ask it,” says Commander Aronsson.

  “D’you still have insulin in Iceland?”

  The man frowns, but Marinus calls over his shoulder: “It’s the same in Icelandic, Commander. Insúlín. The drug for diabetes.”

  “Ah.” The officer nods. “Yes, we manufacture this drug at a new unit, near the airbase at Keflavík. Two or three thousand of our citizens require it, including our minister of defense. Why do you ask? Does your granddaughter have diabetes?”

  “No,” I reply. “I was just curious.”

  BACK IN OUR kitchen, I put on the solar lamp. It flickers like a candle. Dinner is almost ready, but suddenly none of us is hungry. “Gran,” says Lorelei. “I can’t go to Iceland.”

  This’ll be one of the hardest sells of my life.

  “You’ve got to, Lol!” says Rafiq, and I bless him. “You’ll have a good life there. Won’t she, Mr. Vera—Verac—”

  Marinus is already peering at the books on the shelves. “Those whom I respect I ask to call me ‘Marinus,’ Rafiq, and, yes, your sister will enjoy an incomparably better-nourished, better-educated, and safer life than on Sheep’s Head. As today has proven, I believe.”

  “Then, Lol,” Rafiq says for me, “that ship’s your lifeboat.”

  “A one-way lifeboat,” Lorelei asks Marinus. “Right?”

  The young man frowns. “Lifeboats don’t do return tickets.”

  “Then I’m not going to sail off and leave you all here.” Lorelei sounds so like Aoife when she’s making a stand, it wakes up my old grief. “If you were in my shoes, Raf, you wouldn’t go.”

  Rafiq takes a deep breath. “If you were in my shoes, you’d be diabetic in a country without insulin. Think about it.”

  Lorelei looks away miserably and says nothing.

  “I have a question,” Mo says, lowering herself onto a chair at the kitchen table and hooking her stick over its edge. “Three, in fact. Holly knew your mother, Mr. Marinus, which is all well and good, but why should she trust you to do the right thing by Lorelei?”

  Marinus puts his hands into his pockets and rocks on his heels, like a young man with supple joints. “Professor, I can’t prove to you that I’m the trustworthy, honorable human being that I claim to be, not in forty minutes. I can only refer you to Holly Sykes.”

  “It’s a long, long story,” I tell Mo, “but Marinus—or his mother, I mean, it’s complicated, she saved my life.”

  “There’s a Marinus in The Radio People,” says Mo, the careful and retentive reader, “who plays quite a major role. The doctor in Gravesend.” Mo looks at me. “Any relative?”

  “Yes,” I admit, badly not wanting to get into Atemporals now.

  “That Dr. Marinus was my grandfather,” Marinus only sort of lies, “on my Chinese side. But Holly did a great service to my mother, Iris, and her friends back in the twenties. Which may preempt another of your questions, Professor. I owe Holly Sykes a debt of honor, and giving her granddaughter the chance of a pre-Endarkenment life is one way to repay it.”

  Mo nods at Marinus’s correct guess. “And you’re so up to speed with current events on Sheep’s Head because?”

  “We hack into spy satellites.”

  Mo nods coolly, but the scientist within inquires: “Whose?”

  “The Chinese array is the best, and the Russian satellites work well in clear conditions, but we stream our images from the last functioning American Eyesat. The Pentagon’s given up on security.”

  Rafiq’s incredulous. “You can see what’s going on on Sheep’s Head, from space? That’s like … being God. That’s like magic.”

  “It’s neither.” Marinus smiles at the boy. “It’s technology. I saw the fox attack on your chickens, the other night, and you,” he fondles the ears of Zimbra, who clearly trusts this stranger, “you killer.” He looks at me. “Some months ago L’Ohkna, our IT specialist, detected a tab signal from this area that corresponded to recordings of your voice, Holly, and of course I remembered that you’d retired here, but a chain of crises in Newfoundland distracted us. After the Hinkley Point reactor went critical, though, and we learned about the POC’s withdrawal, I acted with greater urgency, and here we are.” Lorelei’s fiddle catches Marinus’s eye. “Who is the musician?”

  “I play a bit,” says Lorelei. “It was Dad’s.”

  Marinus picks it up and examines it, like an instrument maker, which for all I know he once was. “Beautiful lines.”

  I ask, “What are you doing in Iceland, Marinus?” My feet are hurting too, so I join Mo at the table.

  “We operate a think tank. L’Ohkna named it—modestly—‘Prescience’ before I arrived. Roho, who kept an eye on Aoife during your Manhattan week twenty years ago, is with us, plus a handful of others. We have to be more interventionist politically than—than my mother used to be. By and large, the president values our advice, even if we occasionally put the military’s nose a little out of joint.” Marinus plucks the strings on Lorelei’s fiddle, one by one, testing its tone. “Only thirty minutes to settle Lorelei’s future, Holly.”

  “It’s already settled,” my granddaughter declares. “I can’t leave Gran and Raf. Or Mo.”

  “A noble and worthy response, Lorelei. May I play a few bars?”

  Taken a bit aback, Lorelei says, “Sure.”

  Marinus takes up the bow, puts the fiddle under his chin, and skims through a few bars of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” “Warm tone. Is the E-string a little … flat? Holly, a possibility is occurring to you.”

  I’d forgotten how Marinus knows, or half knows, what you’re thinking. “If Lorelei left with you—if, Lol—she really would be safer?”

  “Indubitably, yes.”

  “So that ship in the bay is a lifeboat to civilization?”

  “Metaphorically, yes.”

  “Commander Aronsson said only Lorelei can go?”

  “Technically, yes.”

  “Could you turn that one space to two spaces? Using your … y’know …” I do a spell-casting gesture with my hands.

  Marinus resembles a lawyer whose line of questioning is proceeding as planned. “Well, now. I’d need to enforce a powerful Act of Suasion on the commander and the lieutenant outside, as they wait; then, as the launch approached the Sjálfstæði, I’d need to transverse to the captain and the first mate and enforce the same act upon them, to ensure poor Rafiq wasn’t returned to shore immediately. Then, during the voyage north, I’d have to renew the Act of Suasion continuously until we were past the point of no return, when all the protagonists would be wondering what had got into them. I won’t lie: It would be a tall, tall order. Only a truly adept follower of the Deep Stream could pull off a trick like that …”

  I feel mild annoyance, gratitude, and hope. “You can do it, then?”

  Marinus puts down the fiddle. “Yes, but only for Lorelei and Rafiq. Many of the Sjálfstæði’s crew members have children of their own, so they’ll be unconsciously sympathetic, and much easier to keep suasioned. Perhaps Xi Lo or Esther Little could have squeezed you and the professor aboard, but I know my limits, Holly. If I tried it would all come tumbling down. I’m sorry.”

  “Doesn’t matter. In Reykjavik, can Lol and Raf stay together?”

  “We’ll find a way.” Marinus’s young eyes are big, gray, and as truthful as Iris Fenby’s. “They can stay with me. We’re housed in the old French consulate. It’s roomy.” He tells Lorelei and Rafiq, “Don’t panic. I’m a more experienced guardian than I look.”

  The clock ticks. We have only twenty-five minutes now.

  “I don’t quite understand, Holly,” says Raf.

  “One moment, love. Lol, if you go, Raf can go with you, up to the land of insulin. If you don’t go, sooner or later there’ll be a medical emergency and … nothing to treat him with. Please. Go.”

  Upstairs a door bangs shut. The evening sunlight’s a mandarin color. Lorelei’s on the edge of tears, and if she starts, there’ll be no stopping me. “Who’d look
after you?”

  “I’ll look after her!” Mo acts grumpy to stop Lorelei crumpling.

  “And the O’Dalys,” I tell her, “the Walshes and the all-new, fortified Sheep’s Head Republic. I’ll get myself elected Minister for Seaweed, so they’ll give me a guard of honor.” Lorelei’s face is unbearable so I look away at the smiling, fading dead, watching me from the mantelpiece from safer worlds, from beyond wooden, plastic, and mother-of-pearl frames. I stand, and press both kids’ heads against my old, aching sides and kiss the tops of their heads. “I promised your mum and dad, Lol, that I’d look after you, and I promised you the same, Raf. Getting you two on that boat, that’s keeping my promise. Nothing will give me more peace or—or,” I swallow, “joy, than knowing you two are safe from all of—all of,” I sweep my hand in the direction of the town, “oh, what happened today. What’s to come. Please. My two treasures. Give me this. If you—” No. If you love me sounds like blackmail. “Because you love me,” my throat’s so tight I can hardly say the word, “go.”

  OUR LAST MINUTES together were rushed and blurred. Lorelei and Rafiq hurried upstairs to pack for the two-day voyage. Marinus said they’d go shopping in Reykjavik for warmer clothes, as if shops are the most natural thing in the world. I still dream of shops: Harrods in London, Brown Thomas in Cork, even the big Supervalu in Clonakilty. While the kids were still upstairs, Marinus sat in Eilísh’s chair, shut his eyes, and Harry Veracruz’s body and face went still and vacant, while my psychosoteric friend’s soul went outside to implant a strong, false, urgent memory in the minds of the two officers. Mo watched, fascinated, muttering only that I’d have a lot of explaining to do later. Moments later, Marinus’s soul was back in Harry Veracruz’s skull and the two Icelandic officers appeared, saying that the captain had just that minute told them the president was extending his offer of asylum to Lorelei Örvarsdottir’s foster brother, Rafiq Bayati. Both appeared just a trifle dazed as they spoke, like drunk people trying their best to act sober. Harry Veracruz thanked Commander Aronsson and confirmed that both youngsters would be taking up the president’s offer—and would he kindly have the sea chest sent up from the launch at the pier? The officers went and Mo said that she could think of three laws of physics that Marinus had apparently broken but, given time, she was confident of coming up with a few more.

  Soon after, two marines arrived with a carbon-fiber trunk. Marinus unpacked it in my kitchen, taking out ten large sealed containers, each with eighty vacuum-packed tubes of powder inside. “Concentrated field rations,” Marinus said. “Each tube has fifteen hundred calories, plus nutrients and vitamins. Mix with water for supergoo. I’m afraid the only flavor the depot had in stock was Hawaiian pizza, but if you can ignore the pineapple and cheese, they’ll last the two of you nearly three years. Better yet …” He took out a pack of four sheathed tabs and handed me one, explaining they were ethered to one another, so they wouldn’t need the Net to thread a connection. “One for you, me, Lorelei, and Rafiq. Not the same as having them in your kitchen, of course, but this way they’re not gone from your life once we round the headland. They’re powered bioelectrically just by holding them, too, so they’ll function without solar panels.”

  Rafiq’s head appeared between the banisters. “ ’Scuse me, Mr. Marinus? Do you have toothbrushes in Iceland?”

  “A lifetime’s supply. Dentists, too. And it’s just ‘Marinus.’ ”

  “Cool. Okay. Holly, what’s a dentist again?”

  THE BLUR’S OVER. We’re on the pier as dusk dims the Dunmanus Bay, Lorelei, Rafiq, Marinus, six Icelanders, Zimbra, and me, and it’s actually happening. We had to leave Mo up at my gate ’cause the path down’s too crumbled away for her ankle. Her brave face and the kids’ gasps and tears have given me a taster of my own very near future. “Wrap up well,” Mo had told them. “And wave at Dooneen Cottage as the ship leaves the bay. I’ll be waving back.”

  The patrol vessel’s half hidden against the darkening mass of Mizen Head. Only a few spots of light mark its position. On any other evening there’d be skiffs and dinghies taking a closer look at the incredible steel visitor, but today people’re still too occupied with, and too traumatized by, the aftermath of the violence in Kilcrannog, so the Icelandic vessel sits there undisturbed.

  Marinus’s sea chest is being loaded back onto the launch moored to the concrete pier. It now contains the kids’ clothes as well as the Eagle of the Ninth books, Lorelei’s box shrine, her fiddle, and Rafiq’s box of fishing floats and hooks—Marinus assured him the salmon fishing in Iceland is world-class. Rafiq’s key to Dooneen Cottage is still around his neck, by accident or design I don’t know, but it’s his. He picked up two white pebbles from the strip of beach by the pier, I noticed, and put them in his saggy coat pocket. Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose one moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity, like Esther Little did for all those decades, it’d be now, no question. Aoife’s in here too, inside Lorelei, as is Ed, as is Zimbra, with his cold nose and excited whine. He knows something’s up. “Thanks for everything, Gran,” says Lorelei.

  “Yeah,” says Rafiq. “Thanks.”

  “It was my honor,” I tell them.

  We separate, at last. “Take care of them,” I tell Marinus.

  That’s why I came, he subreplies, and says, “Of course.”

  “Say bye from me to Izzy and the O’Dalys and … everyone,” says Lorelei, her eyes streaming, not with the cold.

  “And from me too,” says Rafiq, “and tell Mr. Murnane sorry I didn’t get my fractions homework done.”

  “Tell them yourselves,” says Marinus. “Via the tab.”

  I can’t say “Goodbye” because that word’s too painfully final, but I can’t just say “See you then” because when will I ever see these precious people, really, in the flesh? Never again: That’s when. So I just do my best to smile as if my heart isn’t being wrung out like an old dishcloth and watch as Lorelei and Rafiq are helped aboard the launch by Lieutenant Eriksdottir, followed by the youthful ancient Marinus. “We’ll thread you once we’re safe ashore at Reykjavik,” he calls up to me from the boat. “It should be the day after tomorrow.” I call back, “That’s great, do that.” My voice is thin and stretched, like a violin string wound too tight. Rafiq and Lorelei look up from the deck, not sure what to say. Marinus subwishes me, Good luck, Holly Sykes, and I sense that somehow he knows about my resurgent cancer, and my huckleberries in their childproof canisters, stowed safely for if and when. So I just nod back at Harry Marinus Veracruz, no longer trusting my voice. A tall marine unmoors the boat and hunkers down in the prow. Owls in the Knockroe pines hoot. The outboard motor is ripped into life. The noise jolts Lorelei rigid and alert and she’s scared now, and I am too. This is the moment of no turning back. The launch pulls away from the pier in a tight curve. Lorelei’s hair streams across her face. Did she remember her woolly hat? Too late now. Above Knocknamadree Mountain on Mizen Head swim a pair of blurry overlapping moons. I wipe my eyes on the cuff of my ratty old fleece and the two captive planets become one again. Pale gold and badly scratched. I shiver. We’re in for a cold night. Now the launch is skimming off at full speed over the dark and choppy water, and Rafiq’s waving and Lorelei’s waving and I’m waving back until I can’t make out the figures in the noisy blue murk anymore, and the white wake from the outboard engine is widening behind the launch … But not for long. Incoming waves erase all traces of the vanishing boat, and I’m feeling erased myself, fading away into an invisible woman. For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.

  For Noah

  Acknowledgments

  Michel van der Aa, Lisa Babalis, Tom Barbash, Nikki Barrow, Avideh Bashirrad, Manuel Berri, Dominika Bojanowska, John Boyne, Adam Brophy, Ken Buhler, Amber Burlinson, Evan Camfield, Gina Centrello, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Noah Chasin, Kate Childs, Rachel Clements, Patrick Cockburn and his book The Occupation, Toby Cox, Louise Dennys, Walt
er Donohue, Margaret Drabble, Susan Fletcher, Dominique Fortier, Kirsten Foster, Daniel Galera, Tally Garner, Claire Gatzen, Sam Greenwood, Dominic Gribben, Sophie Harris, Aleksandar Hemon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Susan Kamil, Trish Kerr of Kerr’s Bookshop Clonakilty, Jessica Killingley, Martin Kingston (founder of Kilcrannog), Katie Kitamura (sorry I woke Ryu), Hari Kunzru, Seth Marko, Nick Marston, Sally Marvin, Meriç Mekik the Treasure Hunter, Mrs. MacIntosh, Katie McGowan, Caitlin McKenna, Jan Montefiore, Ray Murnane, Neal Murren, Lawrence Norfolk and family, Alasdair Oliver, Hazel Orme, David Peace, Thomas E. Ricks’s Fiasco, Wendell Steavenson’s The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Lana Wachowski, Bing West’s No True Glory, Camilla Young. Apologies to anyone I’ve overlooked—it’s my memory, not ingratitude.

  Thanks to Kathleen Holland Designs for crafting Jacko’s labyrinth.

  Singled-out thanks to David Ebershoff, Jonny Geller, Doug Stewart, and Carole Welch.

  Final thanks to my family.

  BY DAVID MITCHELL

  THE BONE CLOCKS

  THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET

  BLACK SWAN GREEN

  CLOUD ATLAS

  NUMBER 9 DREAM

  GHOSTWRITTEN

  THE REASON I JUMP (TRANSLATOR, WITH KA YOSHIDA)

  About the Author

  DAVID MITCHELL is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, and Ghostwritten. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Mitchell was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2007. With KA Yoshida, Mitchell translated from the Japanese the internationally bestselling memoir The Reason I Jump. He lives in Ireland with his wife and two children.