The Bone Clocks (57 page)

The recording ends, the tape hisses, I press stop. I’m pummeled by guesses, half guesses, and questions. My friends and I have always believed that Esther’s soul succumbed to its injuries after killing Joseph Rhîmes and redacting Holly Sykes’s memory. How else to explain the absence of contact from Esther since 1984? This cassette flags up a dramatic alternative, however. That after the First Mission, Esther’s soul unraveled to a critical, yet not
quite
fatal, degree. She then sought asylum deep inside an unknowing host, concealed so that no Shaded Way hunter guided by the Counterscript could find and kill her. And that by presending my keys and signs, I could locate and liberate her reraveled soul from its asylum, after forty-one years. This is so slim a hope as to be anorexic. Sentience dissipates after only a few hours in another’s parallax of memories. After so many years of incorporeality, would Esther’s soul even know its name?

I watch Iris Fenby’s reflected face in the window-framed Kleinburg woods. The thickish lips, the flattish nose, the short curly black hair, silvered ever so slightly by middle age. These woods are remnants of the old forest that covered Ontario for most of the Holocene Era. The trees’ war against subdivisions, agro-forestry, sixlane highways, and golf courses is more or less lost. Could Esther Little still be alive? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Esther had command of the Aperture, so why not seek asylum with an Horologist? Because that was too obvious, perhaps. What about the last part of Esther’s message? “An enemy will make a proposal, very soon”? “He’s very close to you already”? It’s midnight in a shielded, bulletproofed house in a well-to-do rural retreat on the northwest fringes of Toronto, forty-one years in the future from the day that Esther spoke the words preserved on this magnetic tape. Even for a precognitive Horologist, it beggars belief that she could accurately have foreseen—

•   •   •

M
Y DEVICE TRILLS
on my lamp stand. Before I answer an instinct makes me hide my parcel from Norway behind some books. My device can’t identify the caller. It’s late. Should I answer? “Yes?”

“Marinus,” says a male voice. “It’s Elijah D’Arnoq.”

I’m shocked by the contact, though after Hugo Lamb’s call in Vancouver, I shouldn’t be. “This is … certainly a surprise.”

A dead silence. “I imagine it must be. I’d feel the same.”

“ ‘Imagine’? ‘Feel’? You flatter yourself.”

“Yeah.” D’Arnoq’s voice is pensive. “Maybe I do.”

Keeping low, I unplug the lamp from the wall so I’m not visible from outside. “I don’t want to seem rude, D’Arnoq, but would you skip to the bit where you gloat about Oscar Gomez, so I can just hang up? It’s late and, as you know, I’ve had a long day.”

A troubled, sloughing silence. “I want it to stop.”

“Stop what? This call? Fine by me. Goodbye—”

“
No
, Marinus—I want to defect.”

I check the last sentence for errors.

D’Arnoq repeats it like a sulky kid: “I want to defect.”

“So I say, ‘Really?’ and you say, ‘In your dreams.’ When I last attended high school, it went something like that.”

“I can’t … can’t endure another decanting. I want to defect.”

Stranger than the Anchorite’s words is his tone, denuded of the usual swagger. But I’m still a light-year from swallowing this. “Well, D’Arnoq,” I say, “now you’re au fait with the arts of feeling and imagining, try this: If you were on my end of the device, how would you respond to this show of remorse from a high-up Anchorite?”

“I’d be bloody skeptical. I’d ask, ‘Why now?’ ”

“What an excellent place to begin. Why now?”

“It’s not now. It’s a … nausea that’s grown over the last … twenty years. But I can’t ignore it anymore. I … I … Look, last year, Rivas-Godoy, the Tenth Anchorite, sourced a five-year-old from Paraisópolis, a favela in São Paolo. Enzo was the kid’s name. Enzo had no dad, he was bullied, friendless, his chakra-eye was
vivid, and Rivas-Godoy became his big brother … A textbook sourcing. I did the ingress-check and Enzo was pure, no sign of Horology. So I approved him, and was in the Chapel for the Rebirthday when Rivas-Godoy walked Enzo up …”

I’ve bitten back five acidic interruptions already.

“… to meet Santa Claus.” There’s a grimace in D’Arnoq’s voice.

“Santa Claus. Caucasian male. About sixty. Nonexistent.”

“Yeah. Enzo’d been picked on for saying Santa might be real. So Rivas-Godoy told Enzo he’d take him to Lapland. So the Way of Stones became the short cut to the North Pole, the Chapel was Santa’s dining room, and the view over the Dusk, that was … Lapland. Enzo’d never left his favela, so”—D’Arnoq lets out a sigh through his teeth—“he didn’t know any better. Rivas-Godoy said I was the vet in case the reindeer got sick. Enzo said, ‘Wow.’ Then Rivas-Godoy told Enzo, ‘Go see Santa’s papa, Enzo, in the painting. It’s a magic talking picture, go say hello.’ The last minute of Enzo’s life was the happiest one, I suppose. But later, on the Solstice Rebirthday, as we drank the Black Wine, and Rivas-Godoy was laughing about this dumb-ass Brazilian kid … I could hardly empty my glass.”

“But somehow you managed, of course.”

“I’m a high-ranking Anchorite! What choice did I have?”

“Step out of the Aperture halfway down Mariana Trench? You’d cure your guilt, contribute to the local aquafauna, and spare me your oh-so-shiny crocodile tears.”

D’Arnoq’s whisper is broken. “The decanting has to stop.”

“Enzo the São Paolo boy must’ve been
truly
cute. You ought to know, by the way, I’m not sure how secure this device—”

“I’m our hacker-in-chief, nobody can hear us. It wasn’t just Enzo. Or Oscar Gomez, today. It’s all of them. Since the day Pfenninger told me of the Blind Cathar, and what he built, and what it does, I’ve been party to … Look, if you need me to use the word ‘evil,’ I’ll use it. I anesthetized myself against it, of course. I ate the lies. I digested the whole ‘What’s four a year out of eight billion?’ schtick … But I’m sick of it. Of the sourcing, of the grooming, of
the murder, of the animacide. Sick of the evil. Horology’s right. You always were.”

“And when your boyish good looks ebb away, D’Arnoq?”

“Then I’d be alive again, and not … what I am now.”

Something creaks on the decking outside.

Am I being set up? I peer out: a raccoon.

“Did you share your new views with Mr. Pfenninger?”

“If you’re going to sit there and take the piss, Marinus,
I’ll
hang up on you. Apostasy is a capital crime in the Shaded Way Codex. A fact you ought to use, by the way—my only chance of survival is to help you annihilate your enemy before they kill me.”

Damn Elijah D’Arnoq, but I have to ask: “How, exactly, do you suggest we annihilate our enemy?”

“By psycho-demolishing the Chapel of the Dusk.”

“We tried that. You’ll be aware of how it ended.” Though I’m less sure I am, after tonight’s box from Norway.

“Defeat for Horology,
but
on your First Trespass, you didn’t know what you were dealing with. Did you?”

“Will you cure us of that ignorance?”

D’Arnoq’s pause goes on a long, long time. “Yes, I will.”

I’d give Elijah D’Arnoq’s defection a five percent chance of being genuine, but Esther Little glimpsed it, and if I’m not mistaken, she wants me to treat D’Arnoq as an ally, or at least let him think I believe him. “I’m all ears.”

“No. We need to meet face-to-face, Marinus.”

Down to one percent. He’ll propose a meeting in a man-trap, and its jaws will snap shut. “Where do you suggest?”

The raccoon turns its Zorro-masked face my way.

“Don’t go all Deep Streamy on me, but I’m speaking from your car, on the drive. My balls are freezing. Get a fire going, will you?”

T
HE AIR IS SHARPER
at the Poughkeepsie station than it was at Grand Central Station, but the sun is out and melting the last of the winter-long snow on the platform. With a cohort of students discussing skiing trips to Europe, internships at the Guggenheim, and viral zoonoses, I walk over the footbridge and through the turnstiles, the churchlike 1920s waiting room, and out to the curbside, where a woman a few years older than I is waiting in a black bodywarmer by a hybrid Chevrolet and holding a board for
DR I. FENBY
. Her foamy hair is dyed auburn but the gray is showing through, and her turquoise-framed glasses only heighten her sickly pallor. An unkind describer might refer to her face as like a party nobody’s turned up to. “Good morning,” I tell her. “I’m Dr. Fenby.”

The driver tenses: “
You
’re Dr. Fenby? You?”

Why the surprise? Because I’m black? In a campus town in the 2020s? “Ye-es … There’s no problem, I trust?”

“
No
. No. No. Climb in. That’s all the luggage you got?”

“I’m only a day-tripper.” Still puzzled, I get into the Chevrolet. She climbs in behind the wheel and puts on her seatbelt. “So it’s up to Blithewood campus today, Dr. Fenby?” Her voice is stippled with bronchial issues.

“That’s right.” Did I misgrade her reaction just now? “Drop me off by the president’s house, if you know it.”

“Not a problem. I must’ve driven Mr. Stein up and down a hundred times. Is it the president you’re visiting today?”

“No. I’m meeting … someone else.”

“Right.” Her driver ID tag reads
WENDY HANGER
. “Off we go,
then. Chevrolet: ignition.” The car turns itself on, the indicator blinks, and we pull away. Wendy Hanger looks jumpy on her ID photo, too. Maybe life’s never allowed her to lower her guard. Maybe she’s just clocked up a fourteen-hour shift. Maybe she just drank too much coffee.

We pass parking lots, a tire-and-exhaust fitters, a Walmart, a school, and a plastic moldings unit. My driver is the silent type, which suits me fine. My thoughts go back to last night’s meeting held in the gallery at 119A. Unalaq, the local, arrived before me; Ōshima flew up from Argentina; Arkady, able to travel more freely now that he is eighteen, came over from Berlin, Roho from Athens, and L’Ohkna from Bermuda. It’s been years since we were all gathered in the same place. Sadaqat submitted to an Act of Hiatus and we began. My five colleagues listened as I set out the facts of Elijah D’Arnoq’s visit two nights ago to my Kleinburg house, his wish to defect, and the proposed Second Mission. Naturally, they were all skeptical.

“So soon?” asked Roho, peering over a canopy of interlaced fingers as slim, dark, and bony as the rest of him. Smooth-shaven, Egyptian-bodied Roho looks designed to slip through narrow spaces nobody else would even think of. He’s young for an Horologist, on only his fifth resurrection, but under Ōshima’s tutelage is becoming a formidable duelist. “The First Mission was five years in the planning, and it ended in disaster. To plan a Second Mission in a matter of days would be …” Roho wrinkles his nose and shakes his head.

“D’Arnoq makes it sound all too easy,” remarked Unalaq. Her first life as an Inuit in northern Alaska dyed her soul indelibly with the far north, but her current midthirties body is pure Boston Irish redhead, though with skin swarming with so many freckles that her ethnicity is far from obvious. “Far too easy.”

“We appear to agree,” said Ōshima. Ōshima is one of the oldest Horologists in both his soul, dating back to thirteenth-century Japan, and body, dating back to 1940s Kenya. He dresses to accentuate what Roho calls his “unemployed jazz drummer” look, in an old trenchcoat and shabby beret. In a pyschoduel, however, Ōshima
is more dangerous than any of us. “D’Arnoq’s proposal has the word ‘trap’ written all over it. In flashing neon.”

“But D’Arnoq
did
let Marinus scansion him,” remarked Arkady. In stark contrast to his last, East Asian self, Arkady’s soul now occupies a big-boned, gangly, blond, acne-prone, Hungarian male body whose teenage voice is not quite settled. “And the self-disgust, the grief about the Brazilian kid,” Arkady double-checks with me, “you did locate them, in his present-perfect memory? And you’re sure they were genuine?”

“Yes,” I conceded, “although they could be implanted memories. The Anchorites would know that we wouldn’t take a defector at face value without a frame-by-frame scansion. It’s perfectly possible that D’Arnoq volunteered to be turned against the Shaded Way by Pfenninger himself, so that D’Arnoq is a true believer in his own false defection …”

“All the way to another firing squad in the Chapel,” agreed Ōshima, “where Pfenninger would redact D’Arnoq’s artificial remorse and psychoslay the Horologists it lured there. I have to admit, it’s clever. It sounds like a Constantin ploy.”

“My vote would be no.” L’Ohkna is residing in a pale, balding, and puffy Ulsterman’s body in its midthirties. L’Ohkna is the youngest Horologist, having been found by Xi Lo in a New Mexico commune in the 1960s during his first resurrection. While L’Ohkna’s psychovoltage is still limited, he has become the principal architect of the Deep Internet, or “Nethernet,” and his dozens of aliases are being fruitlessly hunted by every major security agency on earth. “One misstep and Horology dies. Simple as.”

“But isn’t the enemy taking a big risk, too?” asked Unalaq. “Turning one of their own strongest psychosoterics against the Anchorites and the Blind Cathar?”

“Yes,” agreed Ōshima, “but they know what they’re doing. They need to offer us a shiny prize and a juicy bait. But tell us, Marinus: What are your thoughts about this unexpected overture?”

“I think it’s an ambush, but we should accept it anyway, then, between now and the Second Mission, engineer a means of ambusing
the ambush. We’ll never win the War by force. Every year, we save a few, but look at Oscar Gomez, snatched from a secure unit headed by one of my own students. Social media flag up active chakras before we can inoculate them. Horology’s drifting towards irrelevance. There aren’t enough of us. Our networks are fraying.”

Arkady broke the gloomy silence: “If you think this, so must the enemy. Why would Pfenninger risk giving us access to the Blind Cathar when he can stalemate us to death?”

“Because of his cardinal vice: vanity. Pfenninger wants to annihilate Horology in one glorious act of slaughter, so he’s offering us, his desperate enemy, this trap. But it’ll also give us a narrow window of time inside the Chapel. It won’t come again.”