The hologram solidifies and speaks: “Cold tea do you?”
False hope hurts like a broken rib: Esther, it’s Marinus.
“Five perch. One trout. A slow afternoon.”
This is recorded ghost speech, uttered by the Esther Little whom Holly remembers, not spoken by Esther’s soul here and now.
Esther, you’re trapped in a memory in the mind of Holly Sykes.
A bee lands on the brim of her hat. “Lucky you’re not fussy.”
Esther, you sought asylum here, but you forgot who you are.
“I may need asylum.” She watches me, sniperlike. “A bolt-hole.”
Horology needs you for a Second Mission to the Chapel of the Dusk, Esther. You left me signs.
“You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”
Esther, what do I do? How can I bring you back?
She fades to a shimmer. I’m too late, years too late. Esther’s soul has cooled to an ember that only Esther herself, or maybe Xi Lo, could have breathed back to life. I cannot. The misery I feel at finding her but losing her this way is insupportable. I look out across the memory-generated Thames. What now? Abort the Second Mission? Resign myself to managing Horology’s slow decline? Circles radiate out from Esther’s float. And Holly’s memory-Esther takes a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a slat of wood: MY—
Another word on the next slat: LONG—
Then one more word: NAME—
AS ESTHER WRITES the final E the loop ends, the time resets to three P.M. Once more Esther sits gazing at the Star of Riga, going nowhere, the weather-bleached planks by her foot not yet written on.
Yet those three words mattered. They matter now.
Holly must have thought that Esther Little was a crazy old witch but what if Esther was transmitting an instruction to me? I begin to subrecite Esther Little’s name, her true name, her living name that she taught me three selves ago, to Pablo Antay Marinus in the half hour between night and the pink-and-blue Australian dawn on the Emu’s Claw rock over the Swan River valley. Esther fixed it indelibly, she said. Could she truly have seen so far ahead, so long ago? One by one I subintone the syllables. Hesitantly at first, afraid to make an error and invalidate the sequence, but the pace picks up until the name is the player and I the instrument. Is it wishful thinking, or do I sense a coalescence in the head of the memory-Esther? Word by phrase by line, archaic Wadjuk Noongar gives way to nineteenth-century Wadjuk Noongar. The space around us brightens as particles and threads of Esther’s soul reassemble, reintegrate, reravel …
… and without noticing I’ve finished, I’ve finished.
Esther Little gazes out at the Star of Riga. The ship blasts its horn. Across the water, in Essex, a vehicle reflects a tiny pinprick of June sunshine. Esther picks up her flask and peers down it. It looks as if the loop is restarting.
Why hasn’t it worked?
A subvoice tells me, You speak Noongar like a chain saw.
My soul pulses. My teacher disappeared for forty-one years.
The oldest Horologist looks into her bucket. Not many fish, for forty-one years. I guess my signs found you?
One from Trondheim and one from Poughkeepsie.
Esther allows herself an amused growl. The Script contained an invitation to the Chapel. Is a Second Mission in the offing?
Two days away, or possibly only one by now.
Time we were back, then. Esther’s soul egresses the chakra of her long-ago remembered forehead and hovers, rotating through 360 degrees. Goodbye, she tells the vanished day.
April 6
ESTHER’S SOUL EGRESSES from Holly’s forehead first and I follow, into a new morning. Holly is still lying on the couch, motionless, with my body next to her, motionless. They haven’t seen us. Unalaq is reading a book and Arkady, over from 119A, is writing on his slate. I ingress Iris Marinus-Fenby and rethread my soul to my brain. My nose smells burned toast, my ears hear traffic, my calves and toes are cramped, my stomach’s empty, and my mouth feels like a rodent died in it. Finding my optic nerves always takes longer. Suddenly Unalaq is laughing with astonishment and delight and says, “Be my guest!” so I know where Esther’s soul went. My eyes, when I manage to lift the lids, see Arkady peering up close. “Marinus? Are you back?”
“You’re supposed to be minding Sadaqat.”
“L’Ohkna flew back in last night. Did you find Esther?”
“Why don’t you ask Unalaq if she’s seen her?”
Arkady turns around in time to see Esther-in-Unalaq drop her book, lift her hand, and stare at it, as if freshly fitted. “Fingers,” she says, sounding a little drunk. “You forget. Hell, listen to me.” She flexes the muscles around her mouth. “Arkady. Apparently.”
Arkady leaps to his feet like a guilty character in a melodrama.
“I turn my back for a few paltry decades,” growls Esther-in-Unalaq, “and you go from being a Vietnamese neurologist to a … a power forward with the New York Knicks?”
Arkady looks at me. I nod. “My God. My God. My God.”
“You’ll have to lose that ponytail. And what’s that you’re holding? Don’t tell me that’s what televisions have evolved into?”
“It’s a tab, for the Internet. Like a laptop, minus keyboard.”
Esther-in-Unalaq looks at me. “Was that English? What else has changed since 1984?”
“Oil’s running out,” I say, checking Holly’s pulse and the second hand of the clock. “Earth’s population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era. Apartheid’s dead, as are the Castros in Cuba, as is privacy. The USSR went bankrupt; the Eastern Bloc collapsed; Germany reunified; the EU has gone federal; China’s a powerhouse — though their air is industrial effluence in a gaseous state — and North Korea is still a gulag run by a coiffured cannibal. The Kurds have a de facto state; it’s Sunni versus Shi‘a throughout the Middle East; the Sri Lankan Tamils got butchered; the Palestinians still have to eke out a living off Israel’s garbage dumps. People outsourced their memories to data centers and basic skills to tabs. On the eleventh of September 2001, Saudi Arabian hijackers flew two airliners into the Twin Towers. As a result Afghanistan and Iraq got invaded and occupied for years by lots of American and a few British troops. Inequality is truly Pharaonic. The world’s twenty-seven richest people own more wealth than the poorest five billion, and people accept that as normal. On the bright side, there’s more computing power in Arkady’s slate than existed in the world when you last walked it; an African American president occupied the White House for two terms; and you can now buy strawberries at Christmas.” I check the clock again. “Holly’s pulse is okay, but we should unhiatus her. She’ll be dehydrated. Where’s Ōshima?”
“I heard,” Ōshima appears in the doorway, “that Rip van Winkle was honoring us with an appearance.”
Esther-in-Unalaq looks at her on-and-off partner. “I’d say, ‘You haven’t aged a day,’ Ōshima, but it wouldn’t be true.”
“If you’d let us know that you’d be dropping by, I’d have gone out and found me a prettier body. But we all thought you were dead.”