The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  I wondered about that. “It still seems like a big risk. Once you’ve done it, why push the button a second time?”

  “Who knows? Ideology, delusions of grandeur, blind ambition, a self-destructive impulse. Or just because he has to, as a last resort in the face of military reversals. Maybe it’s a different reason every time. Anyway you look at it, he’s right in the middle of the feedback loop. He’s the signal that generates the noise.”

  “So a small noise becomes a loud noise,” Morris said. “A fart becomes a thunderclap.”

  Sue nodded eagerly. “But the amplification factor isn’t just time. It’s human expectation and human interaction. The rocks don’t care about Kuin, the trees don’t give a shit, it’s us. We act on what we anticipate, and it gets easier and easier to anticipate the all-conquering Kuin, Kuin the god-king. The temptation is to give in, to collaborate, to idealize the conqueror, to be part of the process so you don’t get ground under.”

  “You’re saying we’re creating Kuin.”

  “Not us specifically, but people, yeah, people in general.”

  Morris said, “That’s how it was with my wife before we broke up. She hated the idea of disappointment so much, it was always on her mind. It didn’t matter what I did, how much I reassured her, what I earned, whether I went to church every week. I was on permanent probation. ‘You’ll leave me one day,’ she used to say. But if you say something like that often enough, it has a way of coming true.”

  Morris thought about what he’d said, pushed away his glass of wine, reddened.

  “Expectation,” Sue said, “yes, feedback. Exactly. Suddenly Kuin embodies everything we fear or secretly want—”

  “Slouching toward Jerusalem,” I said, “to be born.”

  It was an idea that seemed to cast a chill across the room. Even the rowdy IDF teenagers were quieter now.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s not especially reassuring, but I can follow the logic. What’s Minkowski ice?”

  “A metaphor of a different color. But that’s enough of this talk for tonight. Wait till tomorrow, Scotty. Ray’s explaining it to the Defense Minister.”

  She smiled forlornly as Ray puffed up.

  We broke up after coffee, and I went to my room alone.

  I thought about calling Janice and Kaitlin, but the desk manager interrupted my dial-out to tell me the bandwidth was at capacity and I would have to wait at least an hour. So I took a beer from the courtesy cooler and put my feet up on the windowsill and watched a car race down the dark streets of the exclusion zone. The floodlights on the Dome of the Rock made that structure look as venerable and solid as history itself, but in less than forty-eight hours there would be a taller and more dramatic monument a scant few miles away.

  I woke at seven in the morning, restless but not hungry. I showered and dressed and wondered how far the security people would let me go if I tried to do a little sightseeing — a walk around the hotel, say. I decided to find out.

  I was stopped at the elevator by one of two natty FBI men, who looked at me blankly. “Whereabouts you headed, chief?”

  “Breakfast,” I said.

  “We’ll need to see your badge first.”

  “Badge?”

  “Nobody gets on or off this floor without a badge.”

  I don’t need no stinkin’ badge — but I did, apparently. “Who’s handing out badges?”

  “You need to talk to the people who brought you, chief.”

  Which didn’t take long, because Morris Torrance came hurtling up behind me, bade me a cheerful good morning and pinned a plastic I.D. tag to the lapel of my shirt. “I’ll come down with you,” he said.

  The two men parted like the elevator doors they were guarding. They nodded to Morris, and the less aggressive of the two told me to have a nice day.

  “Will do,” I said. “Chief.”

  “It’s just a precaution,” Morris said as we rode down.

  “Like harassing my father? Like reading my medical records?”

  He shrugged. “Didn’t Sue explain any of this to you?”

  “A little. You’re not just her bodyguard, are you?”

  “But that, too.”

  “You’re the warden.”

  “She’s not in prison. She can go anywhere she wants.”

  “As long as you know about it. As long as she’s watched.”

  “It’s a kind of deal we made,” Morris said. “So where do you want to go, Scotty? Breakfast?”

  “I need some air.”

  “You want to do the tourist thing? You realize what a bad idea that is.”

  “Call me curious.”

  “Well — I can get us an IDF car with the right tags, I suppose. Even get us into the exclusion zone, if that’s really what you want.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Otherwise,” he said, “you’re pretty much stuck in the hotel, the situation being what it is.”

  “Do you enjoy this kind of work?”

  “Let me tell you about that,” Morris said.

  He borrowed a blue unmarked automobile with all-pass stickers pasted to the windshield and an elaborate GPS system sprawling onto the passenger side of the dash. He drove down Lehi Street while I stared (yet again) out the window.

  It was another rainy day, date palms drooping along the boulevards. By daylight the streets were far from empty: there were civil-defense wardens at the major intersections, cops and IDF patrols everywhere, and only the exclusion zone around the anticipated touchdown site had been wholly evacuated.

  Morris drove into the New City and turned onto King David Street, the heart of the exclusion zone.

  The evacuation of a major urban area is more than just people-moving, though it’s that, certainly, on an almost unmanageably large scale. Some of it is engineering. Most of the damage a Chronolith causes is a result of the initial cold shock, the so-called thermal pulse. Close enough to the arrival, any container with liquid water in it will burst. Property owners in Jerusalem had been encouraged to drain their pipes before leaving, and the municipal authorities were trying to preserve the waterworks by depressurizing the core zone, though that would make firefighting difficult — and inevitably there would be fires, when volatile liquids and gases escaped containers ruptured or weakened by the cold. The gas mains had already been shut off. Theoretically, every toilet tank should have been emptied, every gas tank drained, every propane bottle removed. In reality, without an exhaustive door-to-door search, no such outcome could be guaranteed. And close to the arrival point, the thermal pulse would turn even a bottle of milk into a potentially lethal explosive device.

  I didn’t speak as we drove past the shuttered businesses, windows striped with duct tape; the darkened skyscrapers, the King David Hotel as lifeless as a corpse.

  “An empty city is an unnatural thing,” Morris said. “Unholy, if you know what I mean.” He slowed for a checkpoint, waved at the soldiers as they spotted his stickers. “You know, Scotty, I really don’t take any pleasure in dogging you and Sue.”

  “Am I supposed to be reassured by that?”

  “I’m just making conversation. The thing is, though, you have to admit it makes sense. There’s a logic to it.”

  “Is there?”

  “You’ve had the lecture.”

  “The thing about coincidence? What Sue calls ‘tau turbulence’? I’m not sure how much of that to believe.”

  “That,” Morris said, “but also how it looks to Congress and the Administration. Two true facts about the Chronoliths, Scotty. First, nobody knows how to make one. Second, that knowledge is being brewed up somewhere even as we speak. So we give Sue and people like Sue the means to figure out how to build such a thing, and maybe that’s precisely the wrong thing to do, the knowledge is set loose, maybe it gets into the wrong hands, and maybe none of this would have happened if we hadn’t opened the whole Pandora’s box in the first place.”

  “That’s circular logic.”

  “Does that make it
wrong? In the situation we’re in, are you going to rule out a possibility because it doesn’t make a nice tight syllogism?”

  I shrugged.

  He said, “I’m not going to apologize for the way we looked into your past. It’s one of those things you do in a national emergency, like drafting people or holding food drives.”

  “I didn’t know I’d been drafted.”

  “Try thinking of it that way.”

  “Because I went to school with Sue Chopra? Because I happened to be on the beach at Chumphon?”

  “More like, because we’re all tied together by some rope we can’t quite see.”

  “That’s… poetic.”

  Morris drove silently for a time. The sun came through gaps in the cloud, pillars of light roaming the Judean hills.

  “Scotty, I’m a reasonable person. I like to think so, anyhow. I still go to church every Sunday. Working for the FBI doesn’t make a person a monster. You know what the modern FBI is? It isn’t cops and robbers and trench coats and all that shit. I did twenty years of desk work at Quantico. I’m qualified on the firing range and all, but I’ve never discharged a weapon in a police situation. We’re not so different, you and I.”

  “You don’t know what I am, Morris.”

  “Okay, you’re right, I’m assuming, but for the sake of the argument let’s say we’re both normal people. Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven. People call me levelheaded. Boring, even. Do I strike you as boring?”

  I let that one go.

  He said, “But I have dreams, Scotty. The first time I saw the Chumphon thing was on a TV set in D.C. But the amazing thing is, I recognized it. Because I’d seen it before. Seen it in dreams. Nothing specific, nothing like prophecy, nothing I could prove to anybody. But I knew as soon as I saw it, that this was something that would be part of my life.”

  He stared straight ahead. “It’ll be good if these clouds pass by tomorrow night,” he said. “Good for observation.”

  “Morris,” I said, “is any of this the truth?”

  “I wouldn’t shit you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Well, maybe because I recognized you, too, Scotty. From my dreams, I mean. First time I saw you. You and Sue both.”

  Nine

  Looking back at these pages, it seems to me I’ve said too much about myself and not enough about Sue Chopra. But I can only tell my own story as I experienced it. Sue, I thought, was preoccupied with her work and blind to the forces that had infantilized her, made her a ward of the state. Her acceptance of her condition bothered me, probably because I was chafing under the same restraints and reaping the same rewards. I had access to the best and newest processor platforms, the sleekest code incubators. But I was at the same time an object of scrutiny, paid to donate DNA and urine samples to the infant science of tau turbulence.

  I had promised myself that I would endure this until I had financed at least the lion’s share of Kaitlin’s surgery. Then all bets were off. If the march of the Chronoliths continued, I wanted to be home and near Kaitlin as the crisis worsened.

  As for Kait… the most I could be for Kait right now was emotional backup, a refuge if things went bad with Whit, a second-string parent. But I had a feeling, maybe as powerful and specific as Morris’s dream, that sooner or later she would need me.

  We were in Jerusalem because the Chronolith had announced itself with murmurs of ambient radioactivity, like the premonitory rumbling of a volcano. Was there also, I wondered, a premonitory tau turbulence, whatever that might mean? A trace of strangeness in the air, a fractal cascade of coincidence? And if so, was it perceptible? Meaningful?

  We were less than fifteen hours from the estimated time of touchdown when I woke Thursday morning. Today the entire floor was in lockdown, nobody allowed in or out except for technicians transiting between the indoor monitors and the antenna array on the roof. There had been threats, apparently, from unnamed radical cadres. Meals were delivered from the hotel kitchen on a strict schedule.

  The city itself was still and calm under a dusty turquoise sky.

  The Israeli Minister of Defense arrived for his photo-op that afternoon. Two press-pool photographers, three junior military advisors, and a couple of cabinet ministers followed him into the tech suite. The press guys wore cameras clamped to their shoulders on gymbal mounts. The Minister of Defense, a bald man in khaki, listened to Sue’s description of the reconnaissance equipment and paid dutiful attention to Ray Mosley’s stumbling account of “Minkowski ice” — a clumsy metaphor, in my opinion.

  Minkowski was a twentieth-century physicist who asserted that the universe could be understood as a four-dimensional cube. Any event can be described as a point in four-space; the sum of these points is the universe, past, present, and future.

  Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary. To travel into the past, you would have to uncreate (or, I suppose, thaw) an entire universe. Clearly absurd: what power could rewind the planets, wake dead stars, dissolve babies into the womb? But that wasn’t what Kuin had done, though what he had done was marvelous enough. A Chronolith, Ray said, was like a hot needle driven into Minkowski ice. The effects were striking but strictly local. In Chumphon, in Thailand, in Asia, perhaps ultimately in all the world, the consequences were strange and paradoxical; but the moon didn’t care; the comets were unmoved in their orbits; the stars looked blindly on. The Minkowski ice crystallizes once more around the cooling needle and time flows as before, subtly wounded, perhaps, but substantially unchanged.

  The Defense Minister accepted this with the obvious private skepticism of a Moslem cleric touring the Vatican. He asked a few questions. He admired the blast-proof glass that had replaced the hotel windows and commented approvingly on the dedication of the men and women operating the machinery. He hoped we would all learn something useful in the next several hours if, God forbid, the predicted tragedy actually took place. Then he was escorted upstairs for a look at the antenna arrays, the photographers trailing after, gulping coffee from paper cups.

  All this, of course, would be edited for public consumption, a display of governmental calm in the face of crisis.

  Invisibly, inevitably, the Minkowski ice was melting. The hotel’s links were overwhelmed by our extremely broad-band data-sharing, but I took one call that day: Janice, letting me know my father had died in his sleep.

  It had snowed over most of Maryland that day — about six inches of fine powder. My father wore a medical tag which had issued an alert when he entered cardiac distress, but by the time the ambulance arrived he was beyond resuscitation.

  Janice offered to make the necessary arrangements while I was overseas (there was no other surviving family). I agreed and thanked her.

  “I’m sorry, Scott,” she said. “I know he was a difficult man. But I’m sorry.”

  I tried to feel the loss in a meaningful way.

  Nevertheless I caught myself wondering how much trauma he had avoided by ducking out of history at this juncture, what tithes he would not be obliged to pay.

  Morris knocked at my door as dusk was falling and escorted me back to the tech suite, monitors radiating blue light into the room. As observers, Morris and I were relegated to the line of chairs along the rear wall where we wouldn’t be underfoot. The room was hot and dry, ranks of portable heaters already glowing ferociously. The techs seemed overdressed and were sweating at their consoles.

  Outside, the cloudless sky faded to ink. The city was preternaturally still. “Not long now,” Morris whispered. This was the first time the arrival of a Chronolith had been predicted with any accuracy, but the calculati
ons were still approximate, the countdown tentative. Sue, passing, said, “Keep your eyes open.”

  Morris said, “What if nothing happens?”

  “Then the Likkud loses the election. And we lose our credibility.”

  The minutes drained away. Quilted jackets were handed out to those of us who hadn’t donned protective clothing. Morris leaned out of the shadows again, sweating and obviously restless. “Best guess for touchdown point is in the business district. It’s an interesting choice. Avoids the Old City, the Temple Mount.”

  “Kuin as Caesar,” I said. “Worship whatever gods you like, as long as you bow to the conqueror.”

  “Not the first time for Jerusalem.”

  But maybe the last. The Chronoliths had re-ignited all the apocalyptic fears the 20th Century had focused on nuclear weapons: the sense that a new technology had raised the stakes of conflict, that the long parade of empires rising and empires falling might have reached its final cycle. Which was, just now, all too easy to believe. The valley of Megiddo, after all, was only a few miles from here.

  We were reminded to keep our jackets zipped despite the heat. Sue wanted the room as hot as we could tolerate, a buffer against thermal shock.

  Intense analysis of previous arrivals had given us an idea of what to expect. A Chronolith doesn’t displace the air and bedrock where it appears; it transforms these materials and incorporates them into its own structure. The shockwave is a result of what Sue had dubbed “radiant cooling.” Within a few yards of the Kuin stone the air itself would condense, solidify, and fall to the ground; for some part of a second, air rushing to replace it would be acted upon similarly. Within a slightly broader area the atmosphere would freeze in fractions of its constituent gases — oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Water vapor is precipitated over a much wider perimeter.