The Bone Clocks, Page 55
David Mitchell
Holly swallows and composes herself. “I do.”
“The Script insists that Xi Lo is, somehow, alive. To this day.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “if you view Xi Lo as a body snatcher or”—a fierceness is growing in Holly’s whole demeanor—“as a bookshelf, say, of many books, the newest of which is called Jacko Sykes. None of us is saying, ‘If you join the Second Mission, you’ll get your brother back,’ because we’re so much in the dark ourselves, but—”
“Your Xi Lo,” Holly interrupts, “is my Jacko. You loved your founder, your friend, as I loved—love—my brother. Dunno, maybe that makes me an idiot. I mean, you’re a club of immortal professors who’ve probably read these books”—she indicates the four walls of bookshelves, rising to the skylight—“while I left school without one A-level, even. Or maybe I’m even sadder than that, maybe I’m just clutching at straws, magic straws, hoping, hoping, pathetically, like a mother paying her life savings to a psychic shyster to ‘channel’ her dead son … But y’know what? Jacko’s still my brother, even if he is better known as Xi Lo and older than Jesus, and if the shoe was on the other foot, he’d come and find me. So, Marinus, if there’s one chance in a thousand that Xi Lo or Jacko is in this Chapel of the Dusk or Dunes or wherever and this Second Mission of yours’ll get me to him, I’m in. You’re not stopping me. Just you bloody try.”
The oblong of light is back and motes of dust swirl in the sunshine slanting down the wall of books. Golden pollen.
“Our War must strike you as otherworldly, but dying in the Chapel is just as final as dying in a car crash here. Consider Aoife—”
“Earlier, you said you can’t guarantee Aoife’s safety, or mine, unless these Anchorites are taken down. That is right, yeah?”
My conscience wants a recess, but I must agree. “Yes, I stand by that statement. But our enemy is dangerous.”
“Look, I’m a cancer survivor, I’m in my fifties, and I’ve never shot an air pistol even, and I’ve got no”—her hand dances—“psychopowers. Not like you, anyway. But I’m Aoife’s mother and Jacko’s sister and these—these individuals have harmed, or threatened, people I love. So here’s the thing: I’m dangerous.”
For what it’s worth, subremarks Ōshima, I believe her.
“Sleep on it,” I tell Holly. “Decide in the morning.”
April 7
INEZ DRIVES. She’s wearing dark glasses to hide the effects of a sleepless abysmal night. The wipers squelch every few seconds. We don’t say much and there’s not a lot to say. Unalaq sits up front, and Ōshima, Holly, Arkady, and I are squashed into the back. Ōshima’s hosting Esther today. New York is damp, in a hurry, and indifferent to the fact that we Horologists plus Holly are risking our metalives and life for total strangers, their psychovoltaic children, and for the unborn whose parents have not yet met. I notice details I ordinarily overlook. Faces, textures, materials, signs, flows. There are days when New York strikes me as a conjuring trick. All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know. I’ve seen it with my eyes. Today, however, New York’s here-ness is incontestable, as if time is subject to it, not it subject to time. What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks, and more bricks than there are stars? Who could ever have predicted these vertical upthrusts and squally canyons in Klara Koskov’s lifetime, when I first traveled here with Xi Lo and Holokai—my friends the Davydovs? Yet all this was already there, packed into that magpie entrepôt like an oak tree packed into an acorn or the Chrysler Building folded up small enough to fit inside the brain of William Van Alen. If consciousness exists beyond the Last Sea and I go there today, I’ll miss New York as much as anywhere.
Inez turns off Third Avenue into our street. For the last time? These thoughts don’t help. Will I die without ever reading Ulysses to the end? Think of the case files I’m leaving back in Toronto, the paperwork, the emails, the emotions that my colleagues, friends, neighbors, and patients will pass through as I change from being “the AWOL Dr. Fenby” to “the Missing Dr. Fenby” to “Dr. Fenby, presumed dead.” No, don’t think. We pull up to 119A. If Horology has a home, it’s this place, with its oxtail-soup red bricks and darkframed windows of differing shapes. Inez tells the car, “Park,” and the hazards lights flick on.
“Be careful,” Inez says to Unalaq. Unalaq nods.
“Bring her back,” Inez says to me.
“I’ll do my best,” I say. My voice sounds thin.
119A RECOGNIZES HOROLOGISTS and lets us in. Sadaqat greets us behind the inner shield on the first floor. Our faithful warden is dressed like a parody survivalist, with army fatigues and a dozen pockets, a compass around his neck. “Welcome home, Doctor.” He takes my coat. “Mr. L’Ohkna’s in the office. Mr. Arkady, Miss Unalaq, Mr. Ōshima. And Ms. Sykes.” Sadaqat’s face drops. “I only hope you have recovered from the vicious and cowardly attack by the enemy. Mr. Arkady told me what happened.”
Holly: “I’ve been well taken care of. Thank you.”
“The Anchorites are abominable. They are vermin.”
“Their attack persuaded me to help Horology,” says Holly.
“Good,” says Sadaqat. “Absolutely. It is black and white.”
“Holly is joining our Second Mission,” I tell our warden.
Sadaqat shows surprise, and a gram of confusion. “Oh? I was not aware that Ms. Sykes had studied Deep Stream methodology.”
“She hasn’t,” says Arkady, hanging up his coat. “But we all have a role to play in the hours ahead, don’t we, Sadaqat?”
“True, my friend.” Sadaqat insists on collecting everyone else’s coat for the closet. “So true. And are there any other last minute … modifications to the Mission?”
Sadaqat’s been well prepared, but he can’t quite keep the hunger out of his voice.
“None,” I say. “None. We will act with acute caution, but we will take Elijah D’Arnoq at face value—unless he betrays us.”
“And Horology has its secret weapon.” Sadaqat glows. “Myself. But it is not yet ten o’clock, and Mr. D’Arnoq is not due to appear until eleven, so I made some muffins. You can smell them, I think?” Sadaqat smiles like a buxom chocolatier tempting a group of dieters who know they want to. “Banana and morello cherries. An army cannot march on an empty stomach, my friends.”
“I’m sorry, Sadaqat,” I step in, “but we shouldn’t eat. The Way of Stones can induce nausea. An empty stomach is in fact best.”
“But surely, Doctor, just a tiny mouthful can’t hurt? They are fresher than fresh. I put white chocolate chips in the mix, too.”
“They’ll be just as awesome on our return,” says Arkady.
Sadaqat doesn’t push it. “Later, then. To celebrate.”
He smiles, showing twenty thousand dollars’ worth of American dental care, paid for by Horology, of course. Sadaqat owns very little not earned from or given by Horology. How could he? He spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital outside Reading, England. A freelance Carnivore had got herself employed as a secretary in the hospital, and had groomed a psychovoltaic patient who had shared confidences with Sadaqat before the poor woman’s soul was decanted. I disposed of the Carnivore after quite a strenuous duel in her sunken garden, but rather than redact what Sadaqat had learned about the Atemporal world, I set about isolating the section of his brain harboring his schizophrenia and severing its neural pathways to the unimpaired regions. This cured him, after a fashion, and when he declared his undying gratitude I brought him over to New York to be the warden of 119A. That was five years ago. One year ago our faithful retainer was turned during a series of incorporeal encounters and rendezvous in Central Park, where Sadaqat exercises daily, whatever the weather. Ōshima, who first noticed the Anchorites’ fingerprints on our warden, was all for redacting the last six years from Sadaqat’s memory and suasioning him aboard a container ship to the Russian Far East. A mixture of sentimentality
and a reluctant intuition that we could deploy the Anchorites’ mole against his new masters persuaded me to stay Ōshima’s hand. It has been a perilous twelve months of second- and third-guessing our enemy’s intentions, and L’Ohkna had to recalibrate 119A’s sensors to detect toxins in case Sadaqat was ordered to poison us, but it all comes to an end this very morning, for good or for ill.
How I loathe this war.
“Come,” Ōshima tells Sadaqat. “Let’s check the circuitry in our box of tricks one last time …”
They go upstairs to ensure the hardware needs no last-minute adjustments. Arkady goes up to the garden to do Tai Chi in the halfhearted drizzle. Unalaq retreats to the common room to send instructions to her Kenyan network. I go to the office to transfer the Horology protocols to L’Ohkna. The task is soon done. The young Horologist shakes my hand and tells me he hopes we’ll meet again, and I tell him, “Not as much I do.” Then he departs 119A through the secret exit. Thirty minutes remain before D’Arnoq’s appearance. Poetry? Music? A game of pool.
I go down to the basement, where I find Holly setting up. “I hope it was okay to help myself. Everyone sort of vanished, so I just …”
“Of course. May I join you?”
She’s surprised. “You play?”
“When not battling with the devil over a chessboard, nothing calms the nerves like the click of cue tip on phenolic resin.”
Holly lines up the pack of balls and removes the triangle. “Can I ask another question about Atemporals?” I give her a fire-away face. “Do you have families?”
“We’re often resurrected into families. A Sojourner’s host usually has blood relatives around like Jacko did. We form attachments, like Unalaq and Inez. Until the twentieth century, traveling alone as an unmarried woman was problematic.”
“So you’ve been married yourself?”
“Fifteen times, though not since the 1870s. More than Liz Taylor and Henry the Eighth combined. You’re curious to know if we can conceive children, however.” I make a gesture to brush her awkwardness away. “No. We cannot. Terms and conditions.”
“Right.” Holly chalks her cue. “It’d be tough, I s’pose, to …”
“To live, knowing your kids died of old age decades ago. Or that they didn’t die, but won’t see this loon on the doorstep who insists he’s Mom or Dad, reincarnated. Or discover you’ve impregnated your great-great-grandchild. Sometimes we adopt, and often it works well. There’s never a shortage of children needing homes. So I’ve never borne or fathered a child, but what you feel for Aoife, that unhesitating willingness to rush into a burning building, I’ve felt that too. I’ve gone into burning buildings, as well. And one sizable advantage of infertility was to spare my female selves getting banged up as breeding stock all their lives, as was the fate of most women between the Stone Age and the Suffragettes.” I gesture at the table. “Shall we?”
“Sure. Ed always said I’ve got this nosy streak. Which was brassnecked of Mr. Journalist, mind you.” She takes a coin from her purse. “Heads or tails?”
“Throw me a heads.”
She flips the coin. “Tails. Once I’d’ve known that.” Holly lines up her shot and breaks. The cue grazes the pack, bounces off the bottom cushion, and floats back up to the top.
“I’m guessing that wasn’t beginner’s luck.”
“Brendan, Jacko, and me played at the Captain Marlow, on Sundays when the pub was shut. Guess who usually won?”
I copy Holly’s shot, but play it less well. “He’d been playing since the 1750s, remember. More recently, too. Xi Lo and I played daily on this very table, for most of 1969.”
“Seriously? On this very table?”
“It’s been reupholstered twice since, but yes.”
Holly runs her thumb along the cushion. “What did Xi Lo look like?”
“Shortish, early fifties in 1969, bearded, Jewish, as it happened. He set up comparative anthropology at NYU. There are photos in the archives, if you’d like to see him.”
She considers the offer. “Another time, when we’re not off on a suicide mission. Xi Lo was male back then, too?”
“Yes. Sojourners often have a gender they’re most at home in. Esther prefers being female. We Returnees alternate gender from one resurrection to the next, whether we like it or not.”
“That doesn’t screw your head up?”
“It’s odd for the first few lives, but you get used it.”
Holly hits the cue ball off the side and bottom cushions, and into the loosened pack. “You say things like that as if it’s so … normal.”
“Normal is whatever you have come to take for granted. To your ancestor in 1024, your life in 2024 would seem equally improbable, mystifying, full of marvels.”
“Yeah, but … it’s not quite the same. For that ancestor and me, when we die, we die. For you … What’s it like, Marinus?”
“Atemporality?” I rub blue chalk dust onto the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb. “We’re old, even when young. We’re usually leaving, or being left behind. We’re wary of ties. Until 1821, when Xi Lo and Holokai found me, my loneliness was indescribable yet had to be endured. Even now, what I’d call the ‘ennui of eternity,’ if you will, can be debilitating. But being a doctor, and an horologist, gives my metalife a purpose.”
Holly readjusts her moss-green head-wrap, half removing it, to reveal a scalp of trimmed tufty down. She hasn’t done this in my presence before, and I’m touched. “Last question: Why do Atemporals exist? I mean, did Returnees and Sojourners evolve this way, like the great apes or whales? Or were you … ‘made’? Was it something that happened to you, in your first life?”
“Not even Xi Lo has an answer to that. Not even Esther knows.” I hit the orange 5 ball into the bottom left. “I’m spots, you’re stripes.”
AT TEN-FIFTY, HOLLY pots the black to beat me by a single ball. “I’ll give you a rematch later,” she says, picking up her daypack. We walk upstairs to the gallery, where the others are assembled. Ōshima lowers the blinds. Holly goes into the kitchen for a glass of tap water—Only tap water, I subcall after her. Don’t touch the bottled water. It could have been tampered with, I subwarn her—and she returns a minute later, strapping on a small daypack, as if we’re going for a short hike in the woods. I lack the heart to ask her what she’s packed—a flask of tea, a cardigan, a bar of Kendal mint cake for energy? This just isn’t that sort of expedition. We look at the paintings. What’s left to say? We discussed strategy to the saturation point in Unalaq’s library; sharing our fears at this point is unhelpful, and we don’t want to fill the last moments with small talk. Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time calls me over. Xi Lo told me he regretted never switching it for the copy in London, but he couldn’t face all the Acts of Suasion, skulduggery, and subterfuge needed to right the wrong. Fifty years later I stand there with the same regret. For Atemporals, our tomorrows feel like a limitless resource. Now I’ve none left.
“The Aperture,” Unalaq says. “I feel it.”
Six of us look around for the unzipping line …
“There,” says Arkady, “by the Georgia O’Keeffe.”
A vertical black slit draws itself in front of the horizontal yellows and pinks of the New Mexico dawn. A hand appears, the line widens to a slash, and Elijah D’Arnoq emerges. Softly, Holly mangles a swear word and says, “Where did he come from?” and Arkady mutters, “Where we’re going.”
Elijah D’Arnoq needs a shave and his wiry hair looks unkempt. Yes, the strain of being a traitor ought to show. “You’re punctual.”
“Horologists have no excuse for being late,” replies Arkady.
D’Arnoq recognizes Holly. “Ms. Sykes. I’m glad you were rescued the other day. Constantin regards you as unfinished business.”
Holly can’t yet speak to the man who steps out of thin air.
“Ms. Sykes will join our demolition party,” I tell D’Arnoq. “Unalaq will channel her psychosoteric voltage into the cloaking operation.”
“I thought you’d covered all angles?” says Arkady.
“War has no guarantees. You all know that.”
“And Mr. Dastaani here,” I indicate Sadaqat, “will also be joining us. I presume you are familiar with our warden at 119A?”
“Everybody spies,” says D’Arnoq. “What’s Mr. Dastaani’s role?”
“To park his ass,” says Ōshima, “halfway up the Way of Stones and unleash a force-ten psychoferno if anyone wanders up after us. Temporal, Atemporal—anyone in the conduit will be ash.”
D’Arnoq frowns. “Is a psychoferno a Deep Stream invocation?”
“No,” says Ōshima. “It’s my word for what happens if the bomb made of N9D—the famous Israeli-made nano-explosive—currently in Mr. Dastaani’s backpack goes off inside the Way of Stones.”
“It’s insurance against an attack from the rear,” I say, “while we’re taking apart the Chapel.”
“A smart precaution,” says Elijah D’Arnoq, looking impressed. “Though I pray to God you don’t have to use it.”
“How do you feel?” Ōshima asks D’Arnoq. “Defection’s a big step.”
The 128-year-old Carnivore regards the eight-centuries-old Ōshima with defiance. “I’ve been party to decades of indiscriminate evil, Mr. Ōshima. But today I’ll also be party to stopping it.”
“But without your Black Wine,” Ōshima reminds him, “you’ll age, you’ll fade away, you’ll die in a care home.”
“Not if Pfenninger or Constantin stop us before we’ve smashed the Chapel of the Dusk, I won’t. And so. With no further ado?”
ONE BY ONE, we slip through the dark Aperture onto the round floor of rock ten paces across. The unflickering, paper-white Candle of the Dial stands as tall as a child. I’d forgotten the dual claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the smell of locked spaces, and the thin air. Residual color and light from the gallery filters in through the Aperture, held open like a drape by D’Arnoq now for Holly, now for Sadaqat, with his explosive backpack. Sadaqat’s face is a study of nervous awe, while Ōshima, the last to enter, is a study of sulky nonchalance. “This isn’t the Chapel, is it?” Holly mutters. “And why’s my voice so quiet?”
