The Bone Clocks

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. Фshima, 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?”

“ Youknow 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.”

Фshima drums his fingers on the table. “ Idon’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 withinthe 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 Фshima. “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.”