Once more Esther sits gazing at the Star of Riga, going nowhere, the weather-bleached planks by her foot not yet written on. And Holly’s memory-Esther takes a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a slat of wood: MY-ĪS ESTHER WRITES the final E the loop ends, the time resets to three P.M. What now? Abort the Second Mission? Resign myself to managing Horology’s slow decline? Circles radiate out from Esther’s float. I look out across the memory-generated Thames. The misery I feel at finding her but losing her this way is insupportable. Esther’s soul has cooled to an ember that only Esther herself, or maybe Xi Lo, could have breathed back to life. “You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”Įsther, what do I do? How can I bring you back? Horology needs you for a Second Mission to the Chapel of the Dusk, Esther. “I may need asylum.” She watches me, sniperlike. “Lucky you’re not fussy.”Įsther, yousought asylum here, but you forgot who you are. This is recorded ghost speech, uttered by the Esther Little whom Holly remembers, not spoken by Esther’s soul here and now.Įsther, you’re trapped in a memory in the mind of Holly Sykes.Ī bee lands on the brim of her hat. The hologram solidifies and speaks: “Cold tea do you?”įalse hope hurts like a broken rib: Esther, it’s Marinus. Dewdrops, clinging to a spider’s web on a golden wattle flower a dead infant, flies drinking from his eyes eucalyptus trees crackling into flame and parrots shrieking through smoke a riverbed alive with naked-backed men panning for gold the warbling throat of a butcher bird a line of Noongar men in chains, lugging blocks of stone and then I’m out the other side of Esther’s head. I try to ingress, but instead of strong, coherent memories, like in Holly’s parallax, I find only a nebula of moments. Her chakra-eye flickers open, shuts, open, shuts. Esther fades like a shadow as the sun goes in. I subaddress her: Moombaki of the Noongar People. My old friend flickers like a dying hologram.Īm I wrong? Is this just Holly’s memory of Esther? I transverse around her, to study her face. Esther’s cropped gray hair, grubby safari shirt, and floppy leather hat. Like an Oriental ghost I lack feet, but my progress is soundtracked by Holly’s memories of her own footsteps. I transverse down the embankment and along the planks. There Esther sits, at the end of the jetty, as Holly saw her on that hot, thirsty day. Holokai submentioned he’d lived in Riga for a few months as Claudette Davydov. Esther submentioned the freighter as we all waited for Constantin. I had seen the ship earlier in Tilbury Docks, as I waited in a rented flat in Yu Leon Marinus’s body before transversing over the Thames to the Captain Marlow to ingress Jacko’s head. Esther Little saw the ship “now,” at three P.M. I reverse and inch forward, slowly, to the Thames on my left, and … Oh.įAR OUT IN the Thames sits a cargo ship, halfway between Kent and Essex, and the name of this quarter-mile-long signpost is the Star of Riga. Her backpack’s rubbing her skin, though backpacks were called “rucksacks” in 1984. Holly looks at her watch at 4:20, at 3:49, and again at 3:17 before Ed came along. “Even together, you’re alone.” Slow right down. We pass a couple of anglers, but both look male and neither sports Esther’s famous hat. Holly on the back of Ed’s bike, fish and chips by the sea, more cycling, Ed’s T-shirt glued to his back with sweat. Back to the day before the First Mission. Back through the night, spent in a church, with a teenage Ed Brubeck. Rochester? There are ships below, but we’re still the day afterthe Star of Riga, not the day ofit. Before the blanks I find scenes of a petrol station, and a bridge.
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