The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  One of the bikers put his helmet in his hand, shook out a flourish of dirty blond hair, and began walking almost lazily down the dirt track toward us.

  And:

  “I’ll be flicked,” Hitch said, “if that isn’t Adam Mills.”

  We were deep in the tau turbulence, I guess Sue might have said; in that place where the arrow of time turns on itself and turns again, that place where there are no coincidences.

  “We just want the lady,” Adam Mills called from a short distance down the road.

  His voice was harsh and high-pitched. It was in some ways almost a parody of Ashlee’s voice. Bereft, that is, of all warmth and subtlety.

  (“We have some strange history behind us,” Ash had once said. “Your crazy mother. My crazy son.”)

  “What lady would that be?” Hitch called back.

  “Sulamith Chopra.”

  “I’m the only one here.”

  “I believe I recognize that voice. Mr. Paley, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve heard that voice. Last time, I think you were screaming.”

  Hitch declined to answer, but I saw him clench the fingers — what remained of them — of his left hand.

  “Just send her out and we’ll be away from here. Can you hear me, Ms. Chopra? We don’t mean to harm you.”

  “Shoot him,” Ray whispered, “just shoot the fucker.”

  “Ray, if I shoot him, they’ll just put a rocket in this window. Of course, they might do that anyhow.”

  “It’s all right,” Sue said suddenly and calmly. “None of this is necessary. I’ll go.”

  Which surprised Hitch and Ray, if not me. Some sense of her intention had begun to dawn.

  Hitch said, “Now that’s just fucking ridiculous. You have no idea — these people are mercenaries. Worse, they have a pipeline straight to Asia. They’d be happy to sell you into the hands of some would-be Kuin. You’re merchandise, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “I know that, Hitch.”

  “High-priced merchandise, and for a good reason. You really want to hand over everything you know to some Chinese warlord? I’d shoot you myself if I thought you’d do that.”

  Sue was as placid now, at least superficially, as a martyr in a medieval painting. “But that’s exactly what I have to do.”

  Hitch looked away. His head was silhouetted in the window. Had it occurred to him to do so, Adam Mills could have taken him out with a well-placed head shot.

  Ray, horrified, said, “Sue, no,” and the tableau was sustained for a fragile moment: Hitch gap-jawed, Ray on the brink of panic. Sue gave me a very quick and meaningful look.

  Our secret, Scotty. Keep our secret.

  Hitch said, “You mean that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He turned his weapon away from the window.

  The building in which we were trapped had probably been erected during one or another of the state’s cyclical oil booms, perhaps to keep prospecting gear out of the rain — not that it seemed to rain much here. The concrete floor was adrift with everything that had blown through the open door frame in fifty or seventy-five years: dust, sand, vegetable matter, the desiccated remains of snakes and birds.

  Hitch stood at the west wall where the cinderblocks were water-stained and eroded. Sue and Ray were together in the northwest corner, and I stood across from Hitch at the eastern wall.

  The light was dim, despite the brightness of the day, and the air a little cooler than the dry air of the prairie, though that would change as sun began to bake the tin roof. Cross drafts stirred up dust and the scent of ancient decay.

  I remember all this vividly. And the sagging wooden roof beams, and the angled sunlight through the empty window, and the dry sagebrush clustered just beyond the doorway, and the glint of sweat on Hitch Paley’s forehead as he aimed his pistol — but only tentatively — at Sue.

  Sue was pale. A vein pulsed in her throat, but she remained quiet.

  “Point that fucking gun away,” Ray said.

  Ray, in his tangled beard and sweat-stained T-shirt, looked like a middle-aged academic gone feral. His eyes were just that wild. But there was something admirable in this strained declaration of defiance, a fierce if fragile courage.

  “I’m serious,” Hitch said. “She does not go out that door.”

  “I have to go,” Sue said. “I’m sorry, Ray, but—”

  She had taken a single step when Ray slammed her back into the corner, restraining her with his body. “Nobody’s going anywhere!”

  “You going to sit on her till doomsday?” Hitch asked.

  “Put your gun down!”

  “I can’t do that. Ray, you know I can’t do that.”

  And now Ray lifted his own weapon. “Stop threatening her or I’ll—”

  But this was beyond the bounds of Hitch Paley’s patience.

  Let me say, in defense of Hitch, that he knew Adam Mills. He knew what was waiting for us out there in the relentless sunlight. He was not about to surrender Sue and I think he would have died rather than surrender himself.

  He shot Ray in the right shoulder — at this proximity, a killing wound.

  I believe I heard the bullet pass through Ray and strike the stone wall behind him, a sound like a hammerblow on granite. Or it might have been the echo of the gunshot itself, deafening in this enclosed space. Dust rose up around us. I was frozen in my own incredulity.

  There was a cough of answering shots from outside and a bullet chinked the cinderblocks near the western window. Sue, suddenly pinned behind the weight of Ray’s body, gasped and pushed him aside. She whispered, “Oh, Ray! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  Tears stood in her eyes. There was blood on her tattered yellow blouse and blood on the wall behind her.

  Ray wasn’t breathing. The wound or the shock had stopped his heart. A blood-bubble formed on his lips and sat there, inert.

  He had loved Sue hopelessly and selflessly for many years. But once she had stepped across his motionless legs Sue didn’t look back.

  She walked toward the door — staggered, but didn’t fall.

  The air stank of blood and cordite. Outside, Adam Mills was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out the words over the ringing in my ears.

  The Kuin of Wyoming watched all this from the western horizon. I could see the monument framed in the window behind Hitch, blue on blue, drowsy in the rising heat.

  “Stop,” Hitch said bluntly.

  Sue shuddered at the sound of his voice but took another step.

  “I won’t warn you again. You know I won’t.”

  And I heard myself say, “No, Hitch, let her go.”

  Our secret, Sue had said.

  And: It isn’t a secret if you tell someone.

  So why had she shared it with me?

  At that moment, I thought I knew.

  The understanding was bitter and awful.

  Sue took yet another step toward the door.

  In the sunlight beyond her a swallow rose out of the dry grass, suspended in the air like a piano note.

  “Keep out of it,” Hitch told me.

  But I was more familiar with handguns now than I had been at Portillo.

  When Hitch saw my pistol aimed at him, he said, “This is fucking insane.”

  “She needs to do this.”

  Hitch kept his own gun trained on Sue. Sue nodded and approached the door as if each step drew down a failing reserve of strength and courage. “Thank you, Scotty,” she whispered.

  “I will shoot you,” Hitch said, “if you do not stop where you are.”

  “No,” I said, “you won’t.”

  He growled — it was precisely that sound, like a cornered animal. “Scotty, you cowardly fuck, I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to. Put your weapon down and you, Sue, I said stop right there.”

  Sue hunched her shoulders as if against the impact of a bullet, but she was already in the frame of the door. She took another step.

  For a moment Hitch’s weapon wavered — toward me, to
ward Sue. Then, suddenly resolute, he took aim at her back, the arch of her spine, her big bowed head.

  He began — and I know how absurd it seems, to claim to have witnessed this, but in the overweening stillness of the moment, in the shadow of this bright benevolent afternoon and all of us balanced on the fulcrum of time, I swear I saw his meaty, dark finger begin to close on the trigger of the gun.

  But I was faster.

  The recoil threw back my hand.

  Did I kill Hitch Paley?

  I’m not an objective witness. I’m testifying in my own defense. But I am, finally, here at the end of my life, honest. I have no more secrets to keep.

  The gun recoiled. The bullet was in the air, at least, and then—

  And then everything was in the air.

  Brick, mortar, wood, tin, the dust of ages. My own body, a projectile. Hitch, and the corpse of Ray Mosely. Ray, who had loved Sue far too much to allow her to do what she had to do; and Hitch, who did not love anyone at all.

  Did I see (people have asked me) the destruction of the Chronolith? Was I a witness to the fiery collapse of the Kuin of Wyoming? Did I see the bright light and did I feel the heat?

  No. But when I opened my eyes again pieces of the Chronolith were falling from the sky, falling all around me. Pieces the size of pebbles, rendered now as conventional matter and fused by the heat of their extinction into glassy blue teardrops.

  Twenty-six

  In the great release of energy as the Chronolith collapsed, a shockwave swept outward from its perimeter — more wind than heat, but a great deal of heat; more heat than light, but it had been bright enough to blind.

  The cinderblock shelter lost its roof and its northern and western walls. I was blown free of it and woke a few yards from the standing fragments.

  For some period of time I was not quite coherent or fully conscious. My first thought was for Sue, but Sue was nowhere visible. Gone as well was Adam Mills, and so were his men and their motorcycles, though I did find (later) one overturned Daimler motorbike abandoned in the scrub, its fuel tank cracked, and a single helmet, and a tattered copy of The Fifth Horseman.

  Do I believe Sue gave herself up to the Kuinists in the aftermath of the explosion? Yes, I do. The shockwave would likely not have been deadly to anyone in the open. It was the collapse of the stone shed that had caused my concussion and dislocated my shoulder, not the shockwave itself. Sue had been in the doorway, which was still standing.

  I found Hitch and Ray partially buried in the nibble, plainly dead.

  I spent a few hours trying to dig them out, working with my good hand, until it became obvious that the effort was futile as well as exhausting. Then I rescued some dried rations from the overturned van and ate a little, choking over the food but keeping at least some of it down.

  When I tried my phone there was only a clatter of noise, a distorted “no signal” message drifting across the screen as if through an obscuring tide.

  The sun went down. The sky turned indigo and then dark. On the western horizon, where the Chronolith had been, brushfires burned brightly.

  I turned and walked the other way.

  Twenty-seven

  Lately I have visited two significant places: the Wyoming Crater and the Shipworks at Boca Raton. One a lake polluted with memory, the other a gateway to a greater sea.

  And I thought—

  But no, I’ll get to that.

  Ashlee had been released from the hospital by the time I made it back to Minneapolis.

  I had been in the hospital myself, or at least a little overnight emergency-care clinic in Pine Ridge. Three days wandering with a head injury in the Wyoming backlands had left me sunburned, hungry, and too weak to climb stairs at any speed. My left arm was in a sling.

  Ashlee was less fortunate.

  She had warned me, of course, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found when I let myself into the apartment and she called my name from the bedroom.

  The hurt to her body — the burns, the contusions — were invisible under the snowy white linen of the bed. But I winced at the sight of her face.

  I won’t catalog the damage. I reminded myself that it would heal, that the blood pooled in these bruises would fade away, that the broken skin would mend around the sutures and that one day soon she would be able to open her eyes all the way.

  She looked at me through purple slits. “That bad?” she said.

  Some of her teeth were missing.

  “Ashlee,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  She kissed me, wounded as she was, and I held her gently, despite my damaged arm.

  She began to apologize in return. She had been worried that I wouldn’t forgive her for having finally broken and told Adam Mills where to find me. God knows I wanted to apologize for having left her to this.

  But I put my finger, delicately, delicately, against her swollen lips. Why dignify the horror with recrimination? We had survived. We were together. That was enough.

  What I had not known — what I learned after I finally contacted Ashlee — was that Morris Torrance hadn’t abandoned his post outside the apartment.

  Adam Mills had identified Morris as a guard and had taken his men into the building through a rear entrance to avoid alerting him. Morris called Ash shortly before Adam arrived, placing her in the apartment, and he had seen no suspicious activity since then. He logged off after midnight and drove back to the Marriott for a few hours of sleep. He wore a tag alert in case Ashlee needed him in the interim. He received no such alarm. In the morning he called Ash again but couldn’t get past her screen routine. He promptly drove to the apartment, not long after Kaitlin had arrived there, and unsuccessfully attempted another call. Deeply concerned now, Morris buzzed Ashlee from the lobby.

  She answered the buzzer belatedly and her voice was slurred. Morris told Ashlee he was from a package delivery service and he needed her to sign his slate.

  Ash, who must have recognized his voice, told him she couldn’t come to the door right now and asked whether it would be all right if he came back another time.

  He told her could come back but that the package was labeled “perishable.”

  Didn’t matter, Ashlee said.

  Morris then stepped out of camera range, phoned the local police and reported an assault in progress, and let himself into the lobby with the key I had given him. He identified himself (incorrectly and illegally) as a federal agent to the superintendent of the building and obtained a master key to the apartment.

  He knew how long it might take for a police response and he elected not to wait. He rode the elevator to our floor, placed another call to the apartment so that the ringing of the phone would mask the sound of the key in the lock, and entered the apartment with his gun drawn. He was, as he had so often told me, a retired agent without field experience. But he had been trained and he had not forgotten his training.

  Kaitlin, at this point, was locked in a bedroom closet and Ashlee was sprawled on the sofa where she had been left after a beating.

  Without hesitation Morris shot the man who was standing over Ash, then turned his gun on the second Kuinist who had just stepped out of the kitchen.

  The second man dropped a bottle of beer at the sound of the shot and drew his own gun. He took Morris off his feet with one shot but Morris was able to return fire after he had fallen. The dining-room table gave him a little cover. He placed two bullets in the assailant’s head and neck.

  Wounded in the leg — the bullet had carved a divot in his thigh, just like the bullet Sue Chopra took in Jerusalem — Morris was nevertheless able to comfort Ashlee and to release Kaitlin from the locked closet before he fainted.

  Kait — who was mobile but had been beaten and raped — put a pressure bandage on the wound before the police arrived. Ashlee rose from the sofa and loped to the bathroom.

  She soaked a cloth in water and daubed the blood from Morris’s face, and then Kaitlin’s, and then her own.

  “It was foolhardy,” Morris
said when I went to the hospital to thank him.

  “It was the right thing to do.”

  He shrugged. “Well, yeah, I think so too.” He was in a wheelchair, his damaged leg suspended in front of him, swathed in regenerative gels and wrapped in a cast. “They ought to hang a red flag on this,” he said.

  “I owe you more than I can ever repay.”

  “Don’t get sentimental, Scotty.” But he seemed a little teary himself. “Ashlee’s all right?”

  “Improving,” I said.

  “Kaitlin?”

  “It’s hard to say. They’re bringing David home from Little Rock.”

  He nodded. We sat silently for a time.

  Then he said, “I saw it on the news. The Wyoming stone coming down. Took a while, but Sue got what she wanted, right?”

  “She got what she wanted.”

  “Shame about Hitch and Ray.”

  I agreed.

  “And Sue.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Hard to believe she’s really gone.”

  “Believe it,” I said.

  Because a secret isn’t a secret if you share it.

  “You know I’m an old-fashioned Christian, Scotty. I’m not sure exactly what Sue believed in, unless it was that Hindu Shiva bullshit. But she was a good person, wasn’t she?”

  “The best.”

  “Right. Well. I couldn’t figure out why she asked me to stay here and took you to Wyoming with her. No offense, but that really bothered me. But I guess I served a purpose here.”

  “That you did, my friend.”

  “You think she had that in mind all along? I mean, she did have a thing for the future.”

  “I think she knew us both pretty well.”

  She took me, I thought, because Morris wouldn’t have served in my place. He would never have let her walk into the jaws of the wolf. He would certainly not have killed Hitch Paley.