The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “He makes people believe in him.”

  “In him, in his power, in his glory, in his benevolence. But above all in his inevitability. And that’s what I want to change. Because nothing about Kuin is inevitable, absolutely nothing. We build Kuin every day, we manufacture him out of our hopes and fears. He belongs to us. He’s a shadow we’re all casting.”

  This in itself was nothing new. The politics of expectation had even been debated in the press. But something about this speech made the hairs on my arms stand erect. The degree of her conviction, her casual eloquence. But I think it was more. I think I understood for the first time that Sue had declared a private and very personal war on Kuin. More: that she believed she was at the very center of the conflict now — anointed by the tau turbulence, promoted directly into the Godhead.

  I met Kaitlin for a Sunday dinner out, strictly fast food, this representing the last of the weekend’s windfall money.

  Kait came down from the apartment over Whit’s garage looking brave but inconsolable. She had passed her first couple of nights without David, and it showed. Her eyes were shadowed, her complexion sallow for lack of sleep. The smile she gave me was almost furtive, as if she had no business smiling while David was at war.

  We shared beanpaste sandwiches at a once-brightly-colored but lately scabrous People’s Kitchen. Kait knew that Sue Chopra and Ray Mosley were in town and we talked a while about that, but Kait was plainly not much interested in what she called “the old days.” She had been troubled by nightmares, she said. In her dreams she was back in Portillo, but this time with David, and David was in some mortal danger from which Kait could not rescue him. She was knee-deep in sand, in the dream, the Kuin of Portillo looming over her, nearly alive, gnarled and malevolent.

  I listened patiently and let her wind down. The dream wasn’t difficult to interpret. Finally I said, “Have you heard from David?”

  “A phone call after his bus got into Little Rock. Nothing since then. But I guess boot camp keeps you busy.”

  I guessed it did. Then I asked how her mother and Whit were dealing with it.

  “Mom is a help. As for Whit—” She fluttered her hand. “You know how he is. He doesn’t approve of the war and sometimes he acts like David is personally responsible for it — as if he had a choice about the draft notice. With Whit it’s all big issues, there’s no people involved, except as obstacles or bad examples.”

  “I’m not sure the war is doing any good either, Kait. If David had wanted to duck the draft, I would have helped him dig a hole.”

  She smiled sadly. “I know. David knew that, too. The odd thing is that Whit wouldn’t hear of it. He doesn’t like the war but he couldn’t sanction breaking the law, putting the family in legal jeopardy and all that crap. The thing is, David figured Whit would probably inform on him if he tried to evade the conscription drive.”

  “You think that’s true?”

  She hesitated. “I don’t hate Whit…”

  “I know.”

  “But yes, I think he might be capable of that.”

  It was perhaps not surprising that she suffered from nightmares.

  I said, “Janice must be around the house more since her job evaporated.”

  “She is, and it’s a help. I know she misses David too. But she doesn’t talk about the war, or Kuin, or Whit’s opinions. That’s strictly forbidden territory.”

  Janice’s loyalty to her second husband was remarkable and probably admirable, though I had a hard time seeing it that way. When does loyalty become martyrdom, and just how dangerous was Whitman Delahunt? But I couldn’t ask Kait these questions.

  Kait couldn’t answer them, any more than I could.

  By the time I got home Ashlee had already gone to bed. Sue and Ray were awake at the kitchen table, talking in low tones over a map of the western states. Ray clammed up when I passed through, but Sue invited me to sit down and join them. I declined politely, much to Ray’s relief, and instead joined Ashlee, who was curled up on her left side with the sheet tangled at her feet and a night breeze raising goosebumps on the slope of her thigh.

  Should I feel guilty because in the end I hadn’t sought or achieved a private martyrdom — like Janice, bound to Whit by her sense of duty; like David, aimed at China like a bullet and about as disposable; or like my father, for that matter, who had justified his life as a martyrdom? (I was with her, Scotty.)

  When I rolled into bed Ashlee stirred and mumbled and pressed herself against me, warm in the cool of the night.

  I tried to imagine martyrdom running backward like a broken clock. How sweet to abdicate divinity, to climb down from the cross, to travel from transfiguration to simple wisdom and arrive at last at innocence.

  Twenty

  Hitch came into town missing two fingers from his left hand and walking with a limp. It seemed to me he didn’t smile as readily as he used to, either, though he smiled at Sue and gave me an appraising look that was friendly enough. Certainly he did not make Ashlee smile.

  Ashlee worked at the city water-treatment plant, writing the status reports required by state and federal regulations and staffing an Accounts Receivable desk for the financial manager. She came home tired and she nearly fainted at the sight of Hitch Paley, even though Hitch was dressed in a respectable suit and had even attempted a necktie. Hitch remained a bad memory for Ashlee — Hitch had been with her when she lost Adam.

  She did not, of course, recognize former FBI desk man Morris Torrance, now even balder than Ray Mosely, who had also arrived in the big utility van parked out front. I attempted an introduction, but Ashlee said in a flat tone, “We can’t sleep all these people, Scott. Not even for a night.”

  The catch in her voice reflected a little fear, a lot of resentment.

  “No need for that,” Hitch said hastily. “I just rented a couple of rooms at the Marriott. Good to see you, Ashlee.”

  “You, too, I guess,” she said.

  “And thank you for accommodating us in the meantime,” Sue Chopra put in. “I know it’s been an inconvenience.”

  Ashlee nodded, mollified perhaps by the sight of Sue with her duffel packed. “The Marriott?”

  “Our fortunes,” Sue said, “have changed.”

  I walked out to the van with Hitch while Sue and Ray finished packing. Hitch tucked Sue’s duffel into the cargo bin. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “I could use some help tomorrow, Scotty, if you think you can make the time.”

  “Help with what?”

  “Spending money on heavy machinery. Diesel generators and like that.”

  “I don’t know much about machinery, Hitch.”

  “Mainly I want your company.”

  “Tomorrow’s a working day.”

  “Running that flea market table? Take the day off.”

  “I can’t afford to.”

  “Yeah, you can. We’re budgeted for that.”

  He named an hourly wage for an eight-hour day. A princely sum for the simple act of riding shotgun with him, particularly from a man whose friends had been begging me for sofa space just a few days ago. Hitch had obviously come into town with money, and the offer was tempting. But I was reluctant to accept it.

  “Figure it out,” he said. “We have a Department of Defense charge account, at least for the time being. The cash is available and I know you can’t afford to take time off on short notice. And we really need to discuss a few things.”

  “Hitch—”

  “And what can it hurt?”

  That was the pertinent question. “I’m sensing there’s more here than meets the eye.”

  “Well, yeah. There is. We can talk about it tomorrow. I’ll call from the hotel, we’ll make plans.”

  I said, “Why me?”

  “Because there’s an arrow pointed at you, my friend.” He hoisted himself into the driver’s seat, grimacing as he pulled his lame leg after him. “Or at least that’s what Sue thinks.”

  And so, in the sunny morning light, I drove with Hi
tch Paley into the shabby industrial parks west of the river. The van’s air conditioning was broken. (Which was only to be expected: Spare parts were at a premium, most of them going to the military.) The air outside was dry and climbing toward oven heat and Hitch drove with the tinted windows up but the vents wide open. By the time we reached our destination the interior reeked of hot vinyl and motor oil and sweat.

  Hitch had made an appointment with the sales manager of a machine and machine-parts distributor called Tyson Brothers. I followed Hitch through reception and sat in the man’s office examining his wilted ficus and his generic wall art while Hitch negotiated the outright purchase of two small earthmovers and enough portable generators to power a small town, plus copious spare parts. The sales guy was obviously curious — he asked twice whether we were independent contractors and seemed vexed when Hitch deflected the question. But he was just as obviously delighted to write up the order. For all I know, Hitch may have saved Tyson Brothers from bankruptcy, or at least postponed that inevitable hour.

  In any case, he debited more money in a couple of hours than I had earned over the course of the last year. He left a contact number with the distributor and told him someone would be in touch to arrange delivery, waved his good right hand at the receptionist, and sauntered back out into the heat. In the van I said, “You’re doing what, exactly — digging a hole and lighting it up?”

  “We’re a little more ambitious than that, Scotty. We’re going to bring down one of those Kuin stones.”

  “With a handful of earthmovers?”

  “That’s just filling in the shortfall. We’ve got very nearly a battalion of military engineers and gear ready to roll when Sue says the word.”

  “You seriously mean to demolish a Chronolith?”

  “Sue says we can. She thinks.”

  “Which one were you planning to take down?”

  “The one in Wyoming.”

  “There is no Chronolith in Wyoming.”

  “Not yet there isn’t.”

  Hitch explained all this as he understood it. Sue filled in the details later.

  It had been a busy few years for Sulamith Chopra.

  “You dropped out of it,” Hitch said, “made a little life for yourself with Ashlee, and more power to you, Scotty, but the rest of us didn’t exactly stand still just because you stopped breeding our code.”

  I did not then and do not now understand the physics of the Chronoliths, except in the pop-science sense. I know the technology involves the manipulation of Calabi-Yau spaces, which are the smallest constituent parts of both matter and energy, and that it uses a technique called slow fermionic decohesion to do this at practical energy levels. As to what really happens down there in the tangled origami of spacetime, I remain as ignorant as a newborn infant. They say nine-dimensional geometry is a language unto itself. I don’t happen to speak it.

  But Sue did, and I think the depth of her understanding was unappreciated. The federal government had both cultivated her as an ally and pursued her as a liability, but they had also consistently underestimated her. She was so completely at ease with Calabi-Yau geometry that I came to believe a part of her lived in that world — she had inhabited these abstractions the way an astronaut might inhabit a strange and distant planet. There is no such thing as a paradox, Sue once said to me. A paradox, she said, is just the illusion created when you look at an n-dimensional problem through a three-dimensional window. “All the parts connect, Scotty, even if we can’t see the loops and knots. Past and future, good and evil, here and there. It’s all one thing.”

  In more particular terms, Sue’s collaborators had already succeeded in producing tau-turbulent events on a small scale. Grains of sand to Kuin’s Chronoliths, of course, but in principle the same. Now Sue believed she could disrupt the arrival of a Chronolith by performing this same manipulation in the physical space where the Chronolith was about to manifest.

  She had been urging this action for most of a year, but the global systems that monitored and predicted arrivals were either highly classified or in disarray, or both, and it had taken time for the military bureaucracy to examine her proposals and approve them. Wyoming was the first real opportunity, Hitch said — and maybe the last. And even Wyoming wasn’t without its dangers; it had become a mecca for Copperhead militias of various (often incompatible) political stripes. The good news was a generous three-week arrival-warning window, plus full military support. The effort was not being publicized, for fear of attracting yet more Kuinists; it would be stealthy, but it would not be halfhearted.

  That was all well and good, I told Hitch, but it didn’t explain why I was sitting in his truck listening to what sounded increasingly like a sales pitch.

  Hitch became solemn. “Scotty,” he said, “this isn’t anything like a pitch. At least not from me. I like you as a person but I’m not convinced you’d be an asset to this particular expedition. I respect all that you achieved here, and God knows it’s hard enough keeping a family together in this day and age, but what we need are technicians and engineers and guys who can handle heavy equipment, not somebody who sells secondhand crap at a flea market.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “No offense. I mean, am I wrong?”

  “No, you’re not wrong.”

  “It’s Sue who wants you with us, for reasons she just sort of hints at.”

  “You mentioned an arrow.”

  “Well, it’s more like a game of connect-the-dots. Can I tell you a story?”

  “If you keep your eyes on the road.” Half the streets in Minneapolis had reverted to their unmonitored status, nothing to prevent a collision but a vehicle’s own built-ins. Hitch had come close enough to a peddler’s cart to set the proximity alarms shrilling.

  “I hate traffic,” he said.

  He had been in El Paso six months ago, doing his thing on Sue’s behalf, tracking down death threats she had been receiving at her home terminal, an address no one but a few close associates should have had.

  Morris Torrance was theoretically in charge of Sue’s security, but it was always Hitch who did the legwork. He was well-connected in Kuinist circles and he possessed enough street credibility to impress any number of thugs. He was good in a fight and no doubt handy with weapons of all kinds, though I didn’t ask.

  Morris had traced the threats to one of the big Kuinist cells operating out of Texas, and Hitch went to El Paso to ingratiate himself with the local street armies. “But I made the obvious mistake,” he told me. “I asked too many questions too soon. You can get away with that if the mood is right. But those Texans are fucking paranoid. Somewhere down the road, somebody decided I was a bad risk.”

  In the end, five Kuinist shock troops had dragged him into the back lot of an auto-repair shop and questioned him with the aid of a saw-toothed machete.

  Hitch held up his left hand and showed me the stumps of his first and second fingers. Both had been severed below the knuckle. Both had been carefully sutured, but the cut had obviously been rough. I thought about that. I thought about the pain.

  “Don’t flinch,” he said. “It could have been worse. I managed to get away.”

  “You acquired that limp at the same time?”

  “A small-caliber bullet in the muscle tissue. As I was leaving the scene. They had this ancient pistol, some twentieth-century junk piece with the stock half rusted off. But the thing is, Scotty, I recognized the one who shot me.”

  “You recognized him?”

  “And I think he knew me, too, or at least knew I seemed familiar. If he hadn’t been a little shook up he might have been a better shot. It was Adam Mills.”

  I scooted away from him almost instinctively, pushed myself up against the passenger door, feeling cold despite the summer heat.

  “Can’t be,” I said.

  “Fuck me if it wasn’t. He didn’t die in Portillo — he must have got out with the refugees.”

  “And you ran into him in El Paso? Just like that?”

>   “It’s not a coincidence, Sue says. It’s tau turbulence. It’s a meaningful synchronicity. And we connect to Adam right through you, Scotty. Adam Mills is the arrow, and he’s pointed straight at you.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “You don’t have to, far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to accept that bullet in my leg, either. If it matters, I had to kill a couple of people to get this information to Sue. What she makes of it, what you make of it, that’s not my business.”

  “You killed a couple of people?”

  “What exactly do you think I do, Scotty? Travel around the country using moral suasion? I’ve killed people, yeah.” He shook his head. “This is exactly what makes me nervous. You look at me and you see this big colorful friend you used to hang out with in Chumphon. But I had killed a man before I ever met you, Scotty. Sue knows that. I was dealing drugs back there, you know, not retailing swimwear. You get in situations sometimes. Then and since. I don’t have your kind of conscience. I know you think you’re some kind of moral leper because you fucked up with Janice and Kait, but deep down, Scotty, you’re a family man. That’s all.”

  “So what does Sue want with me?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Twenty-one

  The Marriott didn’t attract many guests in these diminished days. Sue was alone in the pool and sauna room, though Morris Torrance stood watch outside the entrance.

  She looked up at me from the roiling waters of the whirlpool bath. She wore a fire-engine-red single-piece bathing suit and a yellow elastic hair cap, neither item flattering to her, but Sue had always been indifferent to fashion. Even in the whirlpool she wore her huge archaic eyeglasses, framed in what looked like scuffed black Bakelite. She said, “You should try this, Scotty; it’s very relaxing.”