The Bone Clocks (71 page)

“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.”

A
T TEN-FIFTY
, H
OLLY
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.”

Elijah D’Arnoq looks dubious, and I wonder if this might jeopardize the Second Mission. “I can’t guarantee her safety.”

“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?”

O
NE 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?”

“This is the Dial of the Way of Stones,” I reply. “The first of the many steps that climb up to the Chapel. The edges of the Dial absorb light and sound, so raise your voice a little to compensate.”

“There’s no color,” observes Holly. “Or is it me?”

“The Candle’s monochrome,” I answer. “It’s been burning for eight centuries.” Behind us, Elijah D’Arnoq is sealing the Aperture. I catch a brief glimpse of Bronzino’s Venus, lightly holding her golden apple, before our way back is gone. No dungeon was ever so secure. Only Esther or a follower of the Shaded Way can unseal the Aperture and get us home. I suffer a jabbing flashback to my last time on the Dial, incorporeally, my and Esther’s souls unraveling, Joseph Rhîmes hard on her heels and gaining. Esther, nestled and hidden in Ōshima’s head, is no doubt remembering too.

“There are letters cut into the stone,” Holly remarks.

“The Cathar alphabet,” I tell her. “No one can read it now, not even heresiologists. The alphabet is descended from Oc, a language older even than Basque.”

“Pfenninger told me,” says D’Arnoq, “the letters are a prayer to God, requesting His help to rebuild Jacob’s Ladder. That’s what the Blind Cathar believed he was building, apparently. Don’t touch the walls. Whatever it’s made of, it and atomic matter”—he produces a coin from his pocket—“do not get on.” He tosses the coin out of the Dial’s perimeter. It vanishes in a blink of phosphorescence. “Don’t lose your footing on the Way of Stones.”

“Which is where?” asks Ōshima.

“It’s cloaked,” D’Arnoq shuts his eyes and opens his chakra-eye, “and moving, to keep out the riffraff. One moment.” He takes short, slow steps to the edge of the Dial, symboling in the staccato manner of the Shaded Way and mumbling an Act of Reveal. Keeping his back to the Candle, he shuffles sideways around the perimeter. “Got it.” Off the edge of the Dial and about one foot higher, a stone slab appears, as long and wide as a table. A second slab leads up from the first, and a third, and a fourth, higher into the blackness.

“Marinus,” Holly asks in my ear, “is this technology? Or …”

I know the missing word. “If you’d cured Henry the Seventh’s TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour’s access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you’re not yet used to.”

“
If
the professor of semantics wouldn’t object,” says Ōshima, “perhaps she’d finish her seminar later?”

E
LIJAH
D’A
RNOQ GOES
first, I follow, then Holly, Arkady, Unalaq, and Sadaqat, with ten kilos of N9D in his bag, and last Ōshima as our rear guard. On the fifth or sixth stone I look back over my companions’ heads, but the Dial is already out of view. Even the Way of Stones’ irregularity is irregular. There are stretches where the steps twist upward, sharp and steep, a stairway in a spire. There are stretches where long slabs of stone form a gently climbing road. There are even places where the climber must jump across from slab to slab, like stepping stones in a river. Better to ignore thoughts of slipping. Soon I work up a sweat. Visibility is poor, akin to climbing a narrow mountain track at night, in grainy fog. The stones glow with a pale light, like that of the Candle of the Dial, but only as we approach, creating an illusion that the Way is building itself as we make our ascent. The darkness all around is oppressive, and seems to conjure up voices from my metalife. I hear my birth father, explaining in vernacular late Latin how to feed a dormouse to a kestrel. Now it’s Sholeetsa, an herbalist of the Duwamish tribe, scolding me for overboiling a root. Now the corvine cackle of Arie Grote, a warehouseman on Dejima. Their bodies were compost long ago, their souls passed to the Last Sea. We Horologists agreed not to subspeak, for fear of being overheard, but I wonder if the others also hear voices from their past lives. I don’t ask in case I distract them from where they’re putting their feet. Who falls off the Way of Stones falls into nothing.

•   •   •

W
E ARRIVE AT
the only triangular slab on the whole climb. It is concave in its center and large enough for all six of us to stand on. “Welcome to the Halfway Station,” says D’Arnoq, and I recall Immaculée Constantin naming it in the same way to Jacko on the First Mission. “I think we’ve found our lookout point for you, Sadaqat,” says Ōshima. “The line of sight looking down is as good it gets. Lie in this hollow, here in the middle, and you’ll see any visitors before they see you.” Sadaqat nods, looks at me and I nod back. “Very good, Mr. Ōshima.” With due diligence, Sadaqat sits down and takes from his backpack a heavily adapted iCube and a thin metallic cylinder. He places the iCube towards the “downhill” corner of the slab.

“Is that the firebomb?” D’Arnoq asks with professional curiosity.

“It’s a Deep Stream cloak generator,” Sadaqat flips open the cuboid’s air-screen and scrolls through options, “and a soul alarm. This noise sounds”—a wild-goose signal honks repeatedly—“when it detects an unidentified soul, such as yours, Mr. D’Arnoq …” Sadaqat’s fingers sidescroll and the air-screen throbs as D’Arnoq’s brain signature is stored. “Now it will know friend from foe.”

“A wise gadget,” says D’Arnoq, “and a clever one.”

“The generator prevents a psychosoteric from using an Act of Suasion to make me deactivate the N9D.” Sadaqat unscrews the top of the metallic cylinder. “And the detector alerts me to the fact that someone has tried—and that it is time to detonate the firebomb, which, of course, is this.” Tripod legs shoot out from the lower end of the cylinder and Sadaqat stands it up. “Ten kilos of N9D have been compressed into this tube—sufficient to turn the Way of Stones into a conduit of flame at five hundred degrees Celsius. If the goose goes ‘honk,’ ” Sadaqat looks at D’Arnoq, “psychoferno.”

“Stay alert,” says Ōshima. “We’re depending on you.”

“I have made my oaths, Mr. Ōshima. This is what I am for.”

“You have a loyal lieutenant,” D’Arnoq tells me. “Ready to make a … the ultimate sacrifice.”

“I know how lucky we are,” I say to Sadaqat.

“Don’t look so grim, Doctor!” Sadaqat stands and shakes hands with us all. “We’ll see each other soon, my friends. I am sure it is Scripted.” When he reaches me he slaps his heart. “Here!”

W
E KEEP CLIMBING
, stone after stone after stone, but it’s difficult to track how high or how far we’ve come since the Dial of the Way, or how many minutes have gone by since we left Sadaqat on sentry duty at the Halfway Station. We left our devices and watches at 119A. Time exists here but it isn’t easily measured, even in an Horologist’s mind. My resolve to count the steps has been sidelined by the voices of the long-dead. So I just follow Elijah D’Arnoq’s back, staying as alert as I can until at last we come to a second circular slab of stone, identical in most features to the Dial at the base of the climb. “The Summit, we call this one,” says D’Arnoq, visibly nervous. “We’re here.”

“Isn’t this where we came in?” asks Holly. “The candle, the circle, the stone circle, the engravings …”

“The stone inscription differs,” I say. “Mr. D’Arnoq?”