The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Even Ray Mosely opened up in Morris’s company. I had pegged Ray as one of those bright but socially-challenged types, his sexual radar locked hopelessly and inappropriately on Sue. There was some truth in this. But when he relaxed he revealed a passion for American League baseball that gave us some common ground. Ray liked the expansion team from his native Tucson and managed to piss off a guy at the neighboring table with some remarks about the Orioles. From which he did not back down when challenged. Ray was not a coward. He was lonely, but much of this was sheer intellectual loneliness. His conversation tended to trail off when he realized he had progressed to a level we couldn’t follow. He wasn’t condescending about it — at least, not very often — only visibly sad that he couldn’t share his thoughts.

  It was this loneliness, I think, that Sue satisfied for him. No matter that she reserved her physical affection for brief contacts carefully segregated from her work. I think, in some sense, when Ray talked physics with her, he was making love.

  Of Sue we saw very little. “This is what it was like at Cornell,” I told Morris and Ray. “For her students, I mean. She brought us together, but we did some of our best talking after class, without her.”

  “Must have been kind of like a dress rehearsal,” Morris mused.

  “For what? For this? The Chronoliths?”

  “Oh, she couldn’t have known anything about that, of course. But don’t you once in a while get that feeling, that your life has been one big rehearsal for some critical event?”

  “Maybe. Sometimes.”

  “Like she had the wrong cast back there at Cornell,” Morris said, “and the script still needed work. But you must have been good, Scott.” He smiled. “You made the final cut.”

  “So what’s the event?” I asked. “This thing in Jerusalem?”

  “This thing in Jerusalem… or whatever comes after.”

  Sue and I didn’t have a chance to talk privately until we were well over the Atlantic, when she beckoned me to the back of the deserted economy section and said, “I’m sorry about keeping you in the dark, Scotty. And I’m sorry about the thing with your dad. I thought we could make this a day job for you, not…”

  “House arrest,” I offered.

  “Right, house arrest. Because I guess that’s what it is, in a sense. But not just for you. I’m in the same situation. They want to keep us together and under observation.”

  Sue had a head cold and was bulling through it with her usual determination. She sat with her hands in her lap, twisting a handkerchief in a beam of sunlight, as apparently contrite and as fundamentally immovable as Mahatma Gandhi. Up front, an El Al steward was delivering scrambled eggs and toast in plastic trays. I said, “Why me, Sue? That’s the question no one wants to answer. You could have hired a better code herder. I was at Chumphon, but that doesn’t explain anything.”

  “Don’t underestimate your talent,” she said. “But I know what you’re asking. The FBI surveillance, the agents at your father’s house. Scotty, I made the mistake a few years ago of attempting to publish a paper about a phenomenon I called ‘tau turbulence.’ Some influential people read it.”

  An answer that veered into abstract theory promised to be no answer at all. I waited, frowning, while she blew her nose, loudly.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “The paper was about causality, I suppose you could say, with regard to questions of temporal symmetry and the Chronoliths. Mostly math, and most of that dealing with some contentious aspects of quantum behavior. But I also speculated about how the Chronoliths might reconfigure our conventional understanding of macroscopic cause and effect. Basically, I said that in a localized tau event — the creation of a Chronolith, hypothetically — effect naturally precedes cause, but it also creates a kind of fractal space in which the most significant connectors between events become not deterministic but correlative.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Think of a Chronolith as a local event in spacetime. There’s an interface, a border, between the conventional flow of time and the negative-tau anomaly. It’s not just the future talking to the present. There are ripples, eddies, currents. The future transforms the past, which in turn transforms the future. You follow?”

  “More or less.”

  “So what you get is a kind of turbulence, marked not so much by cause and effect or even paradox as by a froth of correlation and coincidence. You can’t look for the cause of the Bangkok manifestation, because it doesn’t exist yet, but you can look for clues in the turbulence, in the unexpected correlatives.”

  “Like what?”

  “When I wrote the paper I didn’t offer examples. But somebody took me seriously enough to work out the implications. The FBI went back and looked at all the people who had been interviewed after Chumphon, which was the smallest and most complete statistical sample at hand. Then they compiled a database with the names and histories of anyone who had ever expressed a public opinion about the Chronoliths, at least in the early days; everyone who did science at the Chumphon site, including the guys who ran the tractors and installed the johns; everybody they interrogated after the touchdown. Then they looked for connections.”

  “And found some, I presume?”

  “Some strange ones. But one of the strangest was you and I.”

  “What, because of Cornell?”

  “Partly; but put it all together, Scotty. Here’s a woman who’s been talking about tau anomalies and exotic matter since well before Chumphon. Who has since become a highly-regarded expert on the Chronoliths. And here’s an ex-student of hers, an old friend who just happened to be on the beach at Chumphon and who was arrested a mile or so from the first recorded Chronolith, a few hours after it appeared.”

  “Sue,” I said, “it doesn’t mean anything. You know that.”

  “It has no causal significance, you’re right, but that’s not the point. The point is, it marks us. Trying to figure out the genesis of a Chronolith is like trying to unravel a sweater before it’s been knitted. You can’t. At best, you can find certain threads that are the appropriate length or similarly colored and make certain guesses about how they might be looped together.”

  “That’s why the FBI investigated my father?”

  “They’re looking at absolutely everything. Because we don’t know what might be significant.”

  “That’s the logic of paranoia.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with, the logic of paranoia. That’s why we’re both under surveillance. We’re not suspected of anything criminal, certainly not in the conventional sense. But they’re worried about what we might become.”

  “Maybe we’re the bad guys, is that what you mean?”

  She peered out the airliner’s window at the intermittent cumulus cloud, at the ocean down below us like a burnished blue mirror.

  “Remember, Scotty. Whatever Kuin is, he probably didn’t originate this technology. Conquerors and kings tend not to be physics majors. They use what they can take. Kuin could be anyone, anywhere, but in all likelihood he’ll steal this technology, and who’s to say he won’t steal it from us? Or maybe we’re the good guys. Maybe we’re the ones who solve the puzzle. That’s possible, too — a different kind of connection. We’re not just prisoners, or we’d be in jail now. They’re watching us, but they’re also protecting us.”

  I checked the aisle to see if anyone was listening, but Morris was up front chatting with a flight attendant and Ray had lost himself in a book. “I can go along with this up to a point,” I said. “I’m reasonably well paid when a lot of people aren’t getting paid at all and I’m seeing things I never thought I’d see.” Feeding my own obsession with the Chronoliths, I did not add. “But only up to a point. I can’t promise—”

  To stick with it indefinitely, I meant to say. To become an acolyte, like Ray Mosely. Not when the world was going to hell and I had a daughter to protect.

  Sue interrupted with a pensive smile. “Don’t worry, Scotty. No
body’s promising anything, not anymore. Because nobody’s sure of anything. Certainty is one of the luxuries we’ll have to learn to live without.”

  I had learned to do without certainty a long time ago. One of the rules of living with a schizophrenic parent is that weirdness is tolerable. You can endure it. At least — as I had told Sue — up to a point.

  Past that point, madness spills all over everything. It gets inside you and makes itself at home, until there’s no one you can trust, not even yourself.

  The first Highway One checkpoint was the hardest to get through. This was where the IDF turned away would-be pilgrims attracted, perversely, by the evacuation.

  “Jerusalem Syndrome” had been named as a psychiatric condition decades ago. Visitors are occasionally overwhelmed by the city’s cultural and mythological significance. They identify too deeply, dress in bedsheets and sandals, proclaim sermons from the Mount of Olives, attempt to sacrifice animals on the Temple Mount. The phenomenon has kept the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital in business since well before the turn of the century.

  The wave of global uncertainty generated by the Chronoliths had already triggered a new wave of pilgrimages, and the evacuation had turned it up to a fever pitch. Jerusalem was being evacuated for the safety of its inhabitants, but when had that ever mattered to a fanatic? We wormed our way through a line of vehicles, some abandoned at the checkpoint when the drivers refused to turn away. There was a steady transit of police cars, ambulances, tow trucks.

  We cleared this obstacle at dusk and arrived at a major hotel on Mt. Scopus just as the last light was fading from the sky.

  Observation posts had been established all over the city: not just ours, but military stations, a U.N. post, delegations from a couple of Israeli universities, and a site for the international press on the Haas Promenade. Mt. Scopus (Har HaTsofim, in Hebrew, which also happens to mean “looking over”) was something of a choice spot, however. This was where the Romans had camped in 70 A.D., shortly before they moved to crush the Jewish rebellion. The Crusaders had been here, too, for similar reasons. The view of the Old City was spectacular but dismaying. The evacuation, especially of the Palestinian zones, hadn’t gone easily. The fires were still burning.

  I followed Sue through the vacant hotel lobby to a suite of adjoining rooms on the top floor. This was the heart of the operation. The curtains had been taken down and a crew of technicians had set up photographic and monitoring devices and, more ominously, a bank of powerful heaters. Most of these people were part of Sue’s research project, but only a few of them had met her personally. A number of them hurried to shake her hand. Sue was gracious about it but obviously tired.

  Morris showed us our private rooms, then suggested we meet in the lobby restaurant once we’d had a chance to shower and change.

  Sue wondered aloud how the restaurant had managed to stay open for business during the evacuation. “The hotel’s outside the primary exclusion zone,” Morris said. “There’s a skeleton staff to look after us, all volunteers, and a heated bunker for them in back of the kitchen.”

  I took a few minutes in my room just to look at the city folded like a stony blanket across the Judean hills. The nearby streets were empty except for security patrols and occasional ambulances out of Hadassah Mt. Sinai a few streets away. Stoplights twitched in the wind like palsied angels.

  The IDF man in the car had said something interesting as we passed the checkpoint. In the old days, he said, the fanatics who came to Jerusalem usually imagined they were Jesus, come again, or John the Baptist, or the first and only true, original Messiah.

  Lately, he said, they tended to claim to be Kuin.

  A city that had seen far too much history was about to see some more.

  I found Sue, Morris, and Ray waiting for me in the hotel’s immense atrium. Morris gestured at the five stories of hanging plants and said, “Check it out, Scotty, it’s the Garden of Babylon.”

  “Babylon’s considerably east of here,” Sue said. “But yeah.”

  In the lobby restaurant we seated ourselves at a table across the room from the only other patrons, a group of IDF men and women crowded into a red vinyl booth. Our waitress (the only waitress) was an older woman with an American accent. She claimed not to be troubled by the evacuation even though it meant she had to sleep at the hotel: “I don’t like the idea of driving around these empty streets anyway, much as I used to complain about the traffic.” The entree for tonight was chicken almondine, she said. “And that’s about it, unless you’re allergic or anything, in which case we can ask the chef to make an adjustment.”

  Chicken all around, and Morris ordered us a bottle of white wine.

  I asked about the agenda for tomorrow. Morris said, “Apart from the scientific work, we have the Israeli Defense Minister visiting in the afternoon. Plus photographers and video people.” He added, “There’s no substance to it. We wouldn’t be here if the Israeli government didn’t already have all the information we can give them. It’s a dog-and-pony show for the news pools. But Ray and Sue get to do some interpretation for the laypeople.”

  Ray asked, “Are we giving him Minkowski ice or feedback?”

  Morris and I looked blank. Sue said, “Don’t leave people out of the conversation, Ray. It’s bad manners. Morris, Scotty, you must have picked up some of this from the congressional briefs.”

  “Slow reading,” Morris said.

  “We spend a lot of time translating math into English.”

  “Hunting metaphors,” Ray said.

  “It’s important to make people understand. At least as much as we understand. Which is not very much.”

  “Minkowski ice,” Ray persisted, “or positive feedback?”

  “Feedback, I think.”

  Morris said, “I still feel left out.”

  Sue frowned and collected her thoughts. “Morris, Scotty, do you savvy feedback?”

  Half of what I did with Sue’s code involved recursion and self-amplification. But she was talking far more generally. I said, “It’s what happens when you stand up in the high school auditorium to give the valedictory address and the PA starts to squeal like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”

  She grinned. “That’s a good example. Describe the process, Scotty.”

  “You have an amplifier between the mike and the speakers. Worst case, they talk to each other. Whatever goes into the microphone comes out of the speakers, louder. If there’s any noise in the system, it makes a loop.”

  “Exactly. Any little sound the microphone picks up, the speaker plays it louder. And the microphone hears that and multiplies it again, and so on, until the system starts ringing like a bell… or squealing like a pig.”

  “And this is relevant to the Chronoliths,” Morris said, “because — ?”

  “Because time itself is a kind of amplifier. You know the old saw about how a butterfly flapping in China can eventually brew up a storm over Ohio? It’s a phenomenon called ‘sensitive dependence.’ A large event is often a small event amplified through time.”

  “Like all those movies where a guy travels into the past and ends up changing his own present.”

  “Either way,” Sue said, “what you have is an example of amplification. But when Kuin sends us a monument commemorating a victory twenty years from now, that’s like pointing the microphone at the speaker, it’s a feedback loop, a deliberate feedback loop. It amplifies itself. We think that may be why the Chronoliths are expanding their territory so quickly. By marking his victories Kuin creates the expectation that he’ll be victorious. Which makes the victory that much more likely, even inevitable. And the next. And so on.”

  This was not new territory for me. I had inferred this much from Sue’s work and from speculation in the popular press. I said, “Couple of questions.”

  “Okay.”

  “I guess the first is, how does this look to Kuin? How does it play out, that first time he sends us the Chumphon stone? Wouldn’t he be changing his own past? Are there t
wo Kuins now, or what?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. You’re asking me whether we understand this better on the theoretical level. Well, yes and no. We’d like to avoid a many-worlds model, if possible—”

  “Why? If that’s the easiest answer?”

  “Because we have reason to believe it’s not true. And if it is true, it limits what we can do about the problem. However, the alternative—”

  “The alternative,” Ray supplied, “is that Kuin is committing a kind of suicide every time he does this.”

  The waitress brought us our meals on a cart covered with linen, then rolled the emptied cart back toward the kitchen. Across the room the IDF people had finished dinner and were working on dessert. I wondered if this was their first time in a four-star hotel restaurant. They were eating that way — with great attention and a few remarks about what this would have cost them if they’d had to pay for it.

  “Changing what he’s been,” Sue said between mouthfuls. “Erasing it, replacing it, but that’s not exactly suicide, is it? Imagine a hypothetical Kuin, some back-country warlord who somehow gets hold of this technology. He pulls the switch and suddenly he’s not just Kuin, he’s the Kuin, the one everyone was waiting for, he’s the fucking Messiah for all practical purposes, and for him it was never any different. At least some part of his personal history is gone, but it’s a painless loss. He’s glorified, he has lots of troops now, lots of credibility, a bright future. Either that, or the original Kuin’s place has been taken by some more ambitious individual who grew up wanting to be Kuin. At worst it’s a kind of death, but it’s also a potential ticket to glory. And you can’t mourn what you never had, can you?”