The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Hitch and I were among the first to witness the Chumphon Chronolith, and in the great conflation of time and mind that followed… well, yes, it has occurred to me to wonder how much of my own pessimism (or my father’s) I fed into that loop.

  Not to mention a touch of madness on the maternal side. Cold air filtered into the darkened coach, and I remembered how fervently my mother had despised the cold. She had taken it personally, especially in her last years. A personal affront. She was an enemy of ice, plagued by snow.

  She told me once that snow was the fecal matter of angels: it didn’t stink, being angelic in origin, but it was an insult nevertheless, so pure it burned like fire on mortal skin.

  Tucking away my ticket stub in a jacket pocket, I noticed that the index number printed under the AmMag logo was 2,041 — same as the due date inscribed on the Kuin stone.

  At the depot in Minneapolis/St. Paul I picked up the local news and a pop-science magazine with an article about the Chronolith.

  The science magazine featured a number of photos of the Thai site, much changed from the day Hitch and I had visited it. A vast blankness had been bulldozed into the brown earth surrounding the pillar, and the cleared perimeter was pockmarked with tents, polygonal equipment sheds, makeshift laboratories, and an array of ochre-painted Porta-Potties. A multinational pool of scientific investigators had been installed by the Pacific Treaty powers, mostly materials scientists who were at this point admittedly baffled. The Chronolith was spectacularly inert. It seemed not to react with its environment at all, could not be etched with acid or cut with lasers; deep digging had not yet reached the roots of it; its temperature, at least since the icy blast of its arrival, had never varied from ambient by so much as a fraction of a centigrade degree. The tiling was spectacularly aloof.

  Spectral analysis of the pillar had proved especially unrewarding. The Chronolith passed and scattered light in the blue-green portion of the visible spectrum and, inexplicably, at a few harmonic wavelengths both infrared and ultraviolet. At other frequencies it was either purely reflective — impossibly reflective — or purely absorptive. Net input-output appeared to sum to zero, but no one was certain of that, and even that putative symmetry defied easy explanation. The article went on to speculate about a wholly new state of matter, which was less an explanation than a confession of ignorance phrased so as not to disturb the smooth flow of investigatory funding.

  Speculation about the legend inscribed on the Chronolith was even gaudier and even less enlightening. Was “time travel” really a practical possibility? Most authorities dismissed the notion. The inscription was then perhaps a form of stealthing, a clue designed to mislead. Even the name “Kuin” was spectacularly uninformative. If it was a proper name, it might have been Chinese but was more commonly Dutch; the word also turned up in Finnish and Japanese; there was even a tribe of indigenous Peruvians called the Huni Kuin, though they could hardly be held responsible.

  The alternate possibility — that some Asian warlord a mere twenty years hence had created a monument to a minor victory and projected it into the recent past — was simply too ridiculous to be true. (If this seems shortsighted now, consider that the scientific community had already been forced to swallow a number of evident absurdities about the Kuin stone and understandably balked at this ultimate impossibility. People used the word “impossible” more freely then.)

  Such was the consensus, circa autumn of 2021.

  I had bought the local paper for a more practical purpose. I searched its classified pages for rental properties close to the ring of suburban digital design consortia. The search coughed up a list of possibilities, and by Wednesday I had bribed my way into a one-bedroom walkup just west of the Twin Cities Agricultural Enclave. The room was unfurnished. I bought a chair, a table, and a bed. Anything more would have been a confession of permanency. I decided I was “in transition.” Then I looked for a job. I didn’t call Janice, at least not right away, because I wanted something to show her, first, some token of my credibility: an income, for example. If there had been a merit badge for Good Citizenship I would have applied for that, too.

  Of course, none of this helped. There is no retrieving the past, a fact the reader almost surely understands. The younger generation knows these things better than my peers ever did. The knowledge has been forced on them.

  Three

  By February of 2022 Janice and Kaitlin had moved into a pleasant suburban co-op, far from Janice’s work but close to good schools. The divorce contract we had finalized in December included a custody agreement that gave me Kaitlin for an average of one week per month.

  Janice had been reasonable about sharing Kait, and I had seen a fair amount of my daughter since the fall. I was scheduled to have Kait this Saturday. But a day together mandated by a divorce court isn’t just a day together. It’s something else. Strange, awkward, and uncomfortable.

  I showed up at Janice’s at 8:45, a sunny but viciously cold Saturday morning. Janice invited me into her home and told me Kait was at a friend’s house, watching morning cartoons until the appointed hour.

  The co-op apartment had a pleasant odor of fresh broadloom and recent breakfast. Janice, in her weekend-morning blouse and denims, poured me a cup of coffee. It seemed to me that we had reached a sort of rapprochement… that we might even have enjoyed seeing each other, if not for the baggage of pain and recrimination each of us carried into the other’s presence. Not to mention bruised affection, forlorn hope, and muted grief.

  Janice sat down with the coffee table between us. She had left a couple of her antiques on the table in a faux-casual display. She collected printed-paper magazines from the last century, Life and Time and so on. They lay in their stiff plastic wrappers like advertisements for a lost age, ticket stubs from the Titanic. “You’re still at Campion-Miller?” she asked.

  “Another six-month contract.” And a 3k re-up bonus. At this rate my net income might someday advance all the way from Entry Level to Junior Employee. I had spent most of that bonus on a widescreen entertainment panel so Kait and I could watch movies together. Before Christmas I’d been relying on my portable station for both work and entertainment.

  “So it’s looking long-term.”

  “As such things go.” I sipped from the cup she had given me. “The coffee’s lousy, by the way.”

  “Oh?”

  “You always made very bad coffee.”

  Janice smiled. “And now you can bring yourself to tell me about it?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “All those years, you hated my coffee?”

  “I didn’t say I hated it. I said it was bad.”

  “You never turned down a cup.”

  “No. I never did.”

  Kaitlin came in from the neighbors’ — crashed through the front door in dripping plastic boots and a pleated winter jacket. Her glasses immediately frosted over with condensation. The glasses were a new addition. Kaitlin was only modestly nearsighted, but they don’t do corrective surgery on children as young as Kait. She swiped her lenses with her fingers and gazed at me owlishly.

  Kait used to give me a big smile whenever she saw me coming. She still smiled at me. But not automatically.

  Janice said, “Did you see your cartoons, love?”

  “No.” Kait’s eyes remained fixed on me. “Mr. Levy wanted to see the news.”

  It didn’t occur to me to ask why Janice’s neighbor had insisted on seeing the news.

  But then, if I had asked, I might have missed an afternoon with Kait.

  “Have fun with Daddy today,” Janice said. “Do you need to go to the bathroom before you leave?”

  Kaitlin was scandalized by this indelicacy. “No!”

  “All right, then.” Janice straightened and looked at me. “Eight o’clock, Scott?”

  “Eight,” I promised.

  We hummed along in my secondhand car, neatly laced into heavy Saturday traffic by proximity protocols. I had promised Kaitlin a trip to an amusement mall
, and she was already cycling through waves of elation and exhaustion, jabbering for long stretches of the ride, then lapsing against the upholstery with a forlorn are-we-there-yet? expression on her face.

  During her silences I examined my conscience… cautiously, the way you might handle a sedated but venomous snake. I peeked at myself through Janice’s eyes and saw (yet again) the man who had taken her and her daughter to a third-world country; who had nearly stranded them there; who had exposed them to an expatriate beach culture which, though no doubt colorful and interesting, was also drug-raddled, dangerous, and hopelessly unproductive.

  The kind word for that sort of behavior is “thoughtless.” Synonyms include “selfish” and “reckless.”

  Had I changed? Well, maybe. But I still owed Hitch Paley several thousand dollars (though I hadn’t heard from him in half a year and had begun to harbor hopes that I wouldn’t, ever) — and a life that includes such accessories as Hitch Paley is not, by definition, stable.

  Still, here was Kaitlin, unharmed, periodically bouncing against the upholstery like a harnessed capuchin monkey. I had taught her to tie her shoes. I had shown her the Southern Cross, one cloudless night in Chumphon. I was her father, and she suffered my presence gladly.

  We spent three hours at the mall, enough to tire her out. Kait was fascinated, if a little intimidated, by the clowns in their morphologically adaptive character suits and makeup. She packed away an astonishing amount of mall food, sat through two half-hour Surround Adventures, and slept sitting up on the way back to my apartment.

  Home, I turned up the lights and shut out the prairie-winter dusk. For dinner I heated frozen chicken and string beans, prole food but good-smelling in the narrow kitchen; we watched downloads while we ate. Kaitlin didn’t say much, but the atmosphere was cozy.

  And when she looked to the right, I was able to see her deaf ear cosseted in a nest of golden hair. The ear was not grossly deformed, merely puckered where the bacteria had chewed away notches of flesh, pinkly scarred.

  In her other ear she wore a hearing aid like a tiny polished seashell.

  After dinner I washed the dishes, then coaxed Kaitlin away from cartoons and switched to a news broadcast.

  The news was from Bangkok.

  “That,” Kaitlin said sourly as she emerged from the bathroom, “is what Mr. Levy wanted to see.”

  This was, as you will have guessed, the first of the city-busting Chronoliths — in effect, first notice that something more significant than a Stranger Than Science anecdote was taking place in Southeast Asia.

  I sat down next to Kaitlin and let her curl up against my ribs while I watched.

  Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another. And they’re ruthless with their attention. She was impressed, if confused, by the helicopter shots of the riverfront neighborhoods destroyed and ice-coated, steaming in the sunlight. But there were only a few of these segments available, and the news networks ran them repeatedly over an aural haze of casualty estimates and meaningless “interpretation.” The palpable atmosphere of confusion, fear, and denial evinced by the commentators kept her frowning a few minutes more, but before long she closed her eyes and her breathing steadied into petite, phlegmatic snores.

  We were there, Kait, you and I, I thought.

  Ruined Bangkok from the air looked like a misprinted road map. I recognized the Chao Phrya bending through the city, and the devastated Rattanakosin district, the old Royal City, where the Khlong Lawd fed the larger river. A patch of green might have been Lumphini Park. But the gridwork of roads had been reduced to an incomprehensible wasteland of brick and rebar, tin and cardboard and frost-heaved asphalt, all glittering with ice and wound about with fog. The ice had not prevented a number of broken gas mains from catching fire, islands of flame in the glacial wreckage. A great many people had died here, as the commentators took pains to point out. Some of the baggy objects littering the streets were almost certainly human bodies.

  The only intact structure closer than the suburbs was at the very center of the disaster: the Chronolith itself.

  It was not much like the Chumphon Chronolith. It was taller, grander, more intricately detailed and more finely sculpted. But I immediately recognized the translucent blue surface visible where patches of frost had peeled away, that distinct, indifferent skin.

  The monument had “arrived” (explosively) after dark, Bangkok time. These clips were more recent, a few from the chaotic night, most fresh this morning. As time passed, the news networks relayed more aerial video. It was possible to see the new Chronolith in a kind of montage as it shed its cloak of condensed and frozen moisture, changing from what it had seemed to be — a monstrously large, oddly bulky white pillar — into what it really was: the stylized form of a human figure.

  It recalled more than anything else the public monuments of Stalinist Russia; the Winged Victory at Leningrad, say. Or maybe the Colossus of Rhodes astride its harbor. Such structures are daunting not only because they are enormous but because they are so coldly stylized. This was not an image but a schematic of a human being, even the face contrived to suggest some generic Eurasian perfection unattainable in the real world. Scabs of ice clung to the domes of the eyes, the crevasses of the nostrils. Beyond its apparent masculinity, the figure might have been anyone. At least, anyone in whom infinite confidence had colluded with absolute power.

  Kuin, I supposed. As he would have us see him.

  His torso blended into the fundamental columnar structure of the Chronolith. The base of the monument, maybe a quarter mile in diameter, straddled the Chao Phrya, and skins of ice had formed where it met the water. These were breaking up in the sunlight and floating downstream, ice floes in the tropics, bumping the half-sunken hulls of tourist barges.

  Janice called at ten, demanding to know what I had done with Kait. I looked at my watch, gritted my teeth and apologized. I explained to Janice how we had spent the day and how I had become distracted by the Bangkok Chronolith.

  “That thing,” she said, as if it were already old news. And maybe for Janice it was: she had already processed the Chronoliths into a generalized symbolic threat, terrifying but distant. She seemed unhappy that I had brought it up.

  “I can drive Kaitlin back tonight,” I said, “or keep her until morning if that’s more convenient. She’s asleep on the sofa right now.”

  “Get her a pillow and a blanket,” Janice said, as if that thought had not already crossed my mind. “I guess she might as well sleep through.”

  I did better than that: I carried Kaitlin to the bed and took the sofa for myself. Sat up nearly until dawn watching TV with the sound turned low. The commentary was inaudible and probably better that way. Only the images remained, growing more complex as news crews pushed deeper into the rubble. By morning Kuin’s vast head was wreathed in cloud, and rain had begun to dampen the burning city.

  In the summer of that year (the summer Kaitlin learned to ride the bicycle I bought her for her birthday), a third Chronolith cored the living heart out of Pyongyang, and the Asian Crisis began in earnest.

  Four

  Time passed.

  Should I apologize for these lapses — a year here, a year there? History isn’t linear, after all. It runs in shallows and narrows and bayous and bays. (And treacherous undertows and hidden whirlpools.) And even a memoir is a kind of history.

  But I suppose it depends on the audience I’m writing for, and that’s still unclear in my mind. Who am I addressing? My own generation, so many of whom have died or are now dying? Our heirs, who may not have experienced these events but who can at least recite them from schoolbooks? Or some more distant generation of men and women who may have been allowed, God willing and impossible as it seems, to forget a little of what passed in this century?

  In other words, how much should I explain, and how thoroughly?

  But it’s a moot question.

  Really, there are only two of us here.


  Me. And you. Whoever you are.

  Nearly five years passed between my visit to the mall with Kaitlin and the day Arnie Kunderson called me out of a batch-sort test to his office — which was, perhaps, the next significant turning point in my life, if you believe in linear causality and the civilized deference of the future to the past. But taste those years, first: imagine them, if you don’t remember them.

  Five summers — warm ones, when the news (between Kuin events) was dominated by the ongoing depletion of the Oglalla Aquifer. New Mexico and Texas had virtually lost the ability to irrigate their dry lands. The Oglalla Aquifer, a body of underground water as large as Lake Huron and a relic of the last ice age, remained essential to agriculture in Nebraska, parts of Wyoming and Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma — and it continued to decline, sucked up from increasing depths by ruthlessly efficient centrifugal pumps. The news feeds featured the farm exodus in repetitive, blunt images: families in battered cargo trucks stalled on the interstates, their sullen children with web toys plugging their ears and masking their eyes. Men and women standing on labor lines in Los Angeles or Detroit, the dark underside of our blossoming economy. Because most of us had work, we allowed ourselves the luxury of pity.

  Five winters. Our winters were dry and cold, those years. The well-to-do wore thermally adaptive clothes for the first time, which left the tonier shopping districts looking as if they had been invaded by aliens in polyester jogging suits and respirators, while the rest of us beetled down the street in bulging parkas or stuck as close as possible to the skywalks. Domestic robots (self-guided vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers bright enough not to maim local children) became commonplace; the Sony dogwalker was withdrawn from the market after a well-publicized accident involving a malfunctioning streetlight and a brace of Shi Tzus. In those years, even the elderly stopped calling their entertainment panels “TV sets.” Lux Ebone announced her retirement, twice. Cletus King defeated incumbent Marylin Leahy, giving the White House to the Federal Party, though Democrats continued to control Congress.