The Bone Clocks

She leaned closer to the fire. I saw European angles to her jaw and nose. “Big word, mister. Ain’t speak English boolatime. F’get boola. But my soul-spot bright.” She tapped her forehead. “You, same. Boylyada maaman. Yurra spirit talker too.”

I tried to etch every detail onto my memory. The four warriors were rifling through Warren’s backpack. The stumpy dog sniffed about. Burning driftwood spat out sparks. Pablo Antay Marinus had happened upon a female Aborigine psychosoteric on the western edge of the Great Southern Continent. She was chewing a sausage now, and belched. “What y’name-it, this … pig-meat-stick?”

“A sausage.”

“Sausage.” She tasted the word. “Mick Little made sausages.”

The statement begged the question: “Who’s Mick Little?”

“This body’s father. Esther Little’s father. Mick Little kill pigs, make sausages, but he die.” She mimed coughing and held out her hand. “Blood. Like this.”

“Your body-father died of tuberculosis? Consumption?”

“That’sitsname it is, aye. Then men sell farm, Esther’s mother, a Noongar woman, she go back in bush. She takes Esther. Esther die, and I go in her body.” She frowned, rocking to and fro on her heels.

After a little time, I spoke up. “This body’s name is Pablo Antay Marinus. But my true name is Marinus. Call me Marinus. Do you have a true name?”

She warmed her hands at the fire. “My Noongar name’s Moombaki, but I’ve a longer name what I ain’t tellin’.”

Now I knew how Xi Lo and Holokai had felt upon entering the Koskov family’s drawing room in Saint Petersburg, fifty years earlier. Quite possibly this Atemporal Sojourner would want nothing to do with Horology, nor care that there were others like her, scattered thinly throughout the world, but I felt heartened that we were a species one individual less endangered than fifteen minutes before. I asked my visitor my next question in subspeech: So do I call you Esther or Moombaki?Time passed and no answer came. The fire shifted its burning bones, and sparks spiraled up as the warriors spoke to one another in quiet voices. Just as I concluded that she wasn’t telepathic, she subreplied: You a wadjela, a whitefella, so t’you, I’m Esther. If yurra Noongar, then I’m Moombaki.

“This is my thirty-sixth body,” I told Esther. “You?”

Esther killed questions she found irrelevant by ignoring them, and she did it now. So I subasked, When did you first come to this land? To Australia?

She patted her dog: I’m always here.

A Sojourner has that luxury. You never left Australia?

She told me, “Aye. I stay on Noongar land.”

I envied her. For a Returnee like myself, each resurrection is a lottery of longitudes, latitudes, and demography. We die, wake up as children forty-nine days later, often on another landmass. Pablo Antay tried to imagine an entire metalife in one place as a Sojourner, migrating out of one old or dying body into a young and healthy one, but never severing one’s ties to a clan and its territory. “How did you find me?”

Esther gave the last lump of sausage to the dog. “The bush talks dunnit? We listen.”

I noticed the four warriors taking the saddlebags from the mule. “Are you stealing my baggage?”

The half-Aborigine rose. We carry y’bags. To our camp. You gunna come?

I looked at Caleb Warren and subworried, Something’ll eat him, if we leave him here. “Or he might just catch fire, or melt.”

Esther inspected her hand. Soon, he wake, his head like bees. He think he kill you already.