David Mitchell - The Bone Clocks

Later I would learn what this puzzling terminology entailed.

“If you’ll pardon the indelicate question, Marinus,” Claudette-Holokai’s fingers traced her string of pearls, “when were you born?”

“640 A.D.,” I answered, a little drunk on the novelty of sharing the truth about myself. “I was Sammarinese in my first life. I was the son of a falconer.”

Holokai gripped her armchair as if hurtling forward at an incredible speed. “You’re more than twice my age, Marinus! I don’t have an exact birth year, or place. Probably Tahiti, possibly the Marquesas, I’d know if I went back, but I don’t care to. It was a horrible death. My second self was a Muhammadan slave boy in the house of a Jewish silversmith, in Portugal. King João died while I was there, tethering my stay to the fixed pole of 1433. Xi Lo, however …”

Clouds of aromatic cigar smoke hung at various levels.

“I was first born at the end of the Zhou Dynasty,” said the man I’d been calling Mr. Davydov, “on a boat in the Yellow River delta. My father was a mercenary. The date would have been around 300 A.D. Fifty lifetimes ago, now, or more. I notice you appear to understand this language without difficulty, Miss Koskov, yes?”

Only as I nodded did I realize he was speaking in Chinese.

“I’ve had four Chinese lives.” I pressed my rusted Mandarin back into service. “My last was in the middle years of the Ming, the 1500s. I was a woman in Kunming then. An herbalist.”

“Your Chinese sounds more modern than that,” said Xi Lo.

“In my last life I lived on the Dutch Factory in Nagasaki, and practiced with some Chinese merchants.”

Xi Lo nodded at an accelerating pace, before declaring in Russian, “God’s blood! Marinus — the doctor, on Dejima. Big man, red face, white hair, Dutch, an irascible know-it-all. You were there when HMS Phoebus blasted the place to matchwood.”

I experienced a feeling akin to vertigo. “You were there ?”

“I watched it happen. From the magistrate’s pavilion.”

“But — who were you? Or who were you ‘in’?”

“I had several hosts, though no Dutchmen, or I might have known you for an Atemporal, and saved Klara Koskov a world of bother. You Dutch were marooned by the fall of Batavia, you’ll recall, so my route in and out of Japan was via the Chinese trading junks. Magistrate Shiroyama was my host for some weeks.”

“I visited the magistrate several times. There was a big, buried scandal around his death. But what took you to Nagasaki?”

“A winding tale,” said Xi Lo, “involving a colleague, Ōshima, who was Japanese in his first life, and a nefarious abbot named Enomoto, who unearthed a pre-Shinto psychodecanter up in Kirishima.”

“Enomoto visited Dejima. His presence made my skin creep.”

“The wisdom of skin is underappreciated. I used an Act of Suasion to persuade Shiroyama to end Enomoto’s reign. Poison. Regrettably, it cost the magistrate his life, but such was the arithmetic of sacrifice. My turn will come, one day.”

Jasper the dog took advantage of Vasilisa’s immobility to jump onto her lap, a liberty that my foster mother never granted.

I asked, “What’s ‘suasion’? Is it like a ‘hiatus’?”

“Both are Acts of Psychosoterica,” said Holokai-in-Claudette. “Where an Act of Hiatus freezes, an Act of Suasion forces. I presume your only present means of improving the lots of your lowerborn lives,” she indicated the Koskovs’ warm but humble parlor, “is by acquiring patrons, patronesses, and such?”

“Yes. And the accrued knowledge of my lifetimes. I gravitate towards medicine. For my female selves, it’s one of the few ways up.”

Galina was still chopping vegetables in the kitchen.

“Let us teach you shortcuts, Marinus.” Xi Lo leaned forward, his fingers drumming his cane. “Let us show you new worlds.”

• • •

“SOMEONE’S MILES AWAY.” Unalaq leans on the door frame, holding a mug emblazoned with the logo of Metallica, the death-defying heavy-metal group. “The mug? A gift from Inez’s kid brother. Two updates: L’Ohkna’s paid for seven days on Holly’s hotel room; and Holly was beginning to stir, so I hiatused her until you’re ready.”

“Seven days.” I put the felt cover over the piano keys. “I wonder where we’ll be in seven days. To work, then, before Holly’s snatched from under my nose again.”

“Ōshima said you’d be flagellating yourself.”

“He’s not up and about already, is he? He didn’t go to bed last night, and he spent the morning being an action hero.”

“Sixty minutes’ shut-eye and he’s up and off like a cocaine bunny. He’s eating Nutella with a spoon, straight from the jar. I can’t watch.”

“Where’s Inez? She shouldn’t leave the apartment.”

“She’s helping Toby, the bookshop owner. Our shield covers the shop, but I’ve warned her not to go further afield. She won’t.”

“What must she think of all this insanity and danger?”

“Inez grew up in Oakland, California. That gave her a grounding in the basics. C’mon. Let’s go Esther-hunting.” So I follow her downstairs to the spare room, where Holly is lying hiatused on a sofa bed. Waking her up seems cruel. Ōshima appears from the library. “Sweet tinkling, Marinus.” He mimes piano fingers.

“I’ll pass my hat around later.” I sit down next to Holly and take her hand, pressing my middle finger against the chakra on her palm.

I ask my colleagues, “Is everyone ready?”

HOLLY JERKS UPRIGHT, as if her torso is spring-loaded, and struggles to make sense of a present perfect of homicidal policemen, of my Act of Hiatus, of Ōshima, Unalaq, and me, and of this strange room. She notices she’s digging her nails into my wrist. “Sorry.”

“It’s perfectly all right, Ms. Sykes. How’s your head?”

“Scrambled eggs. What part of it was real?”

“All of it, I’m afraid. Our enemy took you. I’m sorry.”

Holly doesn’t know what to make of this. “Where am I?”

“154 West Tenth Street,” says Unalaq. “My apartment, mine and my partner’s. I’m Unalaq Swinton. And it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, on the same day. We figured you needed a little sleep.”

“Oh.” Holly looks at this new character. “Nice to meet you.”

Unalaq sips her coffee. “The honor’s all mine, Ms. Sykes. Would you like some caffeine? Any other mild stimulant?”

“Are you like … Marinus and the — the other one, that …?”

“Arkady? Yes, though I’m younger. This is only my fifth life.”

Unalaq’s sentence reminds Holly of the world she’s fallen into. “Marinus, those cops … they … I think they wanted to kill.”

“Hired assassins,” states Ōshima. “Real flesh-and-blood people whose job is not to fix teeth or sell real estate or teach math but to murder. I made them shoot each other before they shot you.”

Holly swallows. “Who are you? If it’s not rude …”

Ōshima’s mildly amused. “I’m Ōshima. Yes, I’m another Horologist, too. Enjoying my eleventh life, since we’re counting.”

“But … you weren’t in the police car … were you?”

“In spirit, if not in body. For you, I was Ōshima the Friendly Ghost. For your abductors, I was Ōshima the Badass Sonofabitch. Won’t deny it, that felt good.” The city’s hiss and boom are smudged by steady drizzle. “Though our long cold War just got hotter.”

“Thank you, then, Mr. Ōshima,” says Holly, “if that’s the appropri—” A barbed thought snags her: “ Aoife! Marinus — those police officers, theytheythey said Aoife’d been in an accident!”

I shake my head. “They lied. To lure you into the car.”