How I loathe this war.
“Come,” Фshima tells Sadaqat. “Let’s check the circuitry in our box of tricks one last time …”
They go upstairs to ensure the hardware needs no last-minute adjustments. Arkady goes up to the garden to do Tai Chi in the halfhearted drizzle. Unalaq retreats to the common room to send instructions to her Kenyan network. I go to the office to transfer the Horology protocols to L’Ohkna. The task is soon done. The young Horologist shakes my hand and tells me he hopes we’ll meet again, and I tell him, “Not as much I do.” Then he departs 119A through the secret exit. Thirty minutes remain before D’Arnoq’s appearance. Poetry? Music? A game of pool.
I go down to the basement, where I find Holly setting up. “I hope it was okay to help myself. Everyone sort of vanished, so I just …”
“Of course. May I join you?”
She’s surprised. “You play?”
“When not battling with the devil over a chessboard, nothing calms the nerves like the click of cue tip on phenolic resin.”
Holly lines up the pack of balls and removes the triangle. “Can I ask another question about Atemporals?” I give her a fire-awayface. “Do you have families?”
“We’re often resurrected into families. A Sojourner’s host usually has blood relatives around like Jacko did. We form attachments, like Unalaq and Inez. Until the twentieth century, traveling alone as an unmarried woman was problematic.”
“So you’ve been married yourself?”
“Fifteen times, though not since the 1870s. More than Liz Taylor and Henry the Eighth combined. You’re curious to know if we can conceive children, however.” I make a gesture to brush her awkwardness away. “No. We cannot. Terms and conditions.”
“Right.” Holly chalks her cue. “It’d be tough, I s’pose, to …”
“To live, knowing your kids died of old age decades ago. Or that they didn’tdie, but won’t see this loon on the doorstep who insists he’s Mom or Dad, reincarnated. Or discover you’ve impregnated your great-great-grandchild. Sometimes we adopt, and often it works well. There’s never a shortage of children needing homes. So I’ve never borne or fathered a child, but what you feel for Aoife, that unhesitating willingness to rush into a burning building, I’ve felt that too. I’ve gone into burning buildings, as well. And one sizable advantage of infertility was to spare my female selves getting banged up as breeding stock all their lives, as was the fate of most women between the Stone Age and the Suffragettes.” I gesture at the table. “Shall we?”
“Sure. Ed always said I’ve got this nosy streak. Which was brassnecked of Mr. Journalist, mind you.” She takes a coin from her purse. “Heads or tails?”
“Throw me a heads.”
She flips the coin. “Tails. Once I’d’ve known that.” Holly lines up her shot and breaks. The cue grazes the pack, bounces off the bottom cushion, and floats back up to the top.
“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.”
AT TEN-FIFTY, HOLLY 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. Фshima 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 Timecalls 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 hecome 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.”