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 Фshima?”
“I heard,” Фshima 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,’ Фshima, 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.”
“I damn near was dead, after finishing with Joseph Rhоmes.”
“A teacher in Norwaygot the truth! A Milwaukee junkie got the truth! Or was not telling me ‘obeying the Script’?”
“No, it was common bloody sense, Фshima.”
Arkady subasks me, Can you believe these two?
“If the Anchorites even suspected I’d survived the First Mission,” says Esther-in-Unalaq, “they would have gone after any possible asylum-giver. Back in 1984, Xi Lo agreed that if our foray to the Chapel ended badly, Pfenninger and Constantin might wipe out all remaining Horologists to give themselves an open field for a decade. That meant you were a target, Фshima. You would’ve only died, you Returnee, but as an unraveled Sojourner I would’ve died-died. The safest play was to seek asylum in a tough Temporal kid who’d survive a few decades, and let nobody know until it was time to wake me up.”
“Holly’s been tough,” I say. “We should let her go now.”
Esther runs Unalaq’s ruby thumbnail up the stem of a purple tulip. “You miss purple, after a few years …”
When Esther dodges a question, I worry. “Holly’s paid enough, Esther. Please. She deserves to be left in peace.”
“She does,” says Esther. “But it’s not that simple.”
“According to the Script?” asks Фshima.
Esther fills Unalaq’s lungs and slowly exhales. “There’s a crack.”
None of us understands. Arkady asks, “A crack in what?”
“A crack in the fabric of the Chapel of the Dusk.”
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.”