The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I’m going out in a few minutes. I’d ask you in, but I have to get dressed and all that. What are you doing here?”

  She was, I realized, actually afraid of me — or of being seen with me.

  “Scott?” She looked up and down the corridor. “Are you in trouble?”

  “Why would I be in trouble, Annali?”

  “Well — I heard about you being fired.”

  “How long ago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How long have you known I was going to be fired?”

  “You mean, was it general knowledge? No, Scott. God, that would be humiliating. No. Of course, you hear rumors—”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  She frowned and chewed her lip. That was a new habit. “The kind of work Campion-Miller does, they don’t need trouble with the government.”

  “The fuck does that have to do with me?”

  “You know, you don’t have to shout.”

  “Annali — trouble with the government?”

  “The thing I heard is that some people were asking about you. Like government people.”

  “Police?”

  “No — are you in trouble with the police? No, just people in suits. Maybe IRS, I don’t know.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s just people talking, Scott. It could all be bullshit. Really, I don’t know why they fired you. It’s just that CM, they depend on keeping all their permits in order. All that tech stuff they ship overseas. If somebody comes in asking questions about you, it could endanger everybody.”

  “Annali, I’m not a security risk.”

  “I know, Scott.” She knew nothing of the sort. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Honestly, I’m sure it’s all bullshit. But I really do have to get dressed.” She began to ease the door shut. “Next time, phone me, for God’s sake!”

  She lived on the second floor of a little three-story brick building in the old part of Edina. Apartment 203. I stared at the number on the door for a while. Twenty and three.

  I never saw Annali Kincaid again. Occasionally I wonder what sort of life she led. How she fared during the long hard years.

  I didn’t tell Janice that I had lost my job. Not that I was still trying to prove anything to Janice. To myself, maybe. To Kaitlin, almost certainly.

  Not that Kait cared what I did for a living. At ten, Kait still perceived adult business as opaque and uninteresting. She knew only that I “went to work” and that I earned enough money to make me a respectable if not wealthy member of the grownup world. And that was fine. I liked that occasional reflection of myself in Kait’s eyes: Stable. Predictable. Even boring.

  But not disappointing.

  Certainly not dangerous.

  I didn’t want Kait (or Janice or even Whit) to know I’d been fired… at least not immediately, not until I had something to add to the story. If not a happy ending, then at least a second chapter, a what-comes-next…

  It came in the form of another unexpected phone call.

  Not a happy ending, no. Not an ending at all. Definitely not happy.

  Janice and Whit invited me to dinner. They did this on a quarterly basis, the way you might contribute to a pension plan or a worthy charity.

  Janice was no longer a single mom in a rent-controlled townhouse. She had shed that stigma when she married her supervisor at the biochem lab where she worked, Whitman Delahunt. Whit was an ambitious guy with serious managerial talent. Clarion Pharmaceuticals had prospered despite the Asian crisis, feeding Western markets suddenly deprived of cut-rate Chinese and Taiwanese biochemical imports. (Whit sometimes referred to the Chronoliths as “God’s little tariff,” which made Janice smile uneasily.) I don’t think Whit liked me much, but he accepted me as a sort of country cousin, attached to Kaitlin by an unpleasant and unmentionable accident of paternity.

  To be fair, he tried to make me feel welcome, at least this night. He opened the door of his two-story house, framing himself in warm yellow light. He grinned. Whit was one of those big soft men, teddy-bear-shaped and about as hairy. Not handsome, but the sort women call “cute.” He was ten years older than Janice. Balding, but wearing it well. His grin was expansive if inauthentic, and his teeth were blazing white. Whit almost certainly had the best dentistry, the best radial kariotomy, and the best car on the block. I wondered if it was hard on Janice and Kaitlin, being the best wife and the best daughter.

  “Come on in, Scott!” he exclaimed. “Take off those boots, warm yourself by the fire.”

  We ate in the spacious dining room, where leaded windows of distinguished provenance rattled in their frames. Kait talked a little about school. (She was having trouble this year, particularly in math.) Whit talked with vastly greater enthusiasm about his work. Janice was still running fairly routine protein syntheses at Clarion and talked about it not at all. She seemed content to let Whit do the bragging.

  Kait excused herself first, dashing off to an adjacent room where the television had been mumbling counterpoint to the sound of the wind. Whit brought out a brandy decanter. He served drinks awkwardly, like a Westerner attempting a Japanese tea ceremony. Whit wasn’t much of a drinker.

  He said, “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking. How about you, Scott? How’s life treating you?”

  “ ‘Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.’”

  “Scotty’s quoting poetry again,” Janice explained.

  “What I mean is, I’ve been offered a job.”

  “You’re thinking of leaving Campion-Miller?”

  “I parted ways with Campion-Miller about two weeks ago.”

  “Oh! Gutsy decision, Scott.”

  “Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

  Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”

  “Well, it’s not for certain, but — you remember Sue Chopra?”

  Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”

  Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.

  It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant surprise was that Sue had no interest in failing anyone. She had put together the course description to scare away parvenus. All she wanted with the rest of us was an interesting conversation.

  So “Metaphor and Reality-Modeling in Literature and the Physical Sciences” became a kind of weekly salon, and the only requirement for a passing grade was that we demonstrate that we’d read her syllabus and that she must not be bored with what we said about it. For an easy mark all you had to do was ask Sue about her pet research topics (Calabi-Yau geometry, say, or the difference between prior and contextual forces); she would talk for twenty minutes and grade you on the plausibility of the rapt attention you displayed.

  But Sue was fun to bullshit with, too, so mostly her classes were extended bull sessions. And by the end of the semester I had stopped seeing her as this six-foot-four-inch bug-eyed badly-dressed oddity and had begun to perceive the funny, fiercely intelligent woman she was.

  I said, “Sue Chopra offered me a job.”

  Janice turned to Whit and said, “One of the Cornell profs. Didn’t I see her name in the paper recently?”

  Probably so, but that was aw
kward territory. “She’s part of a federally-funded research group. She has enough clout to hire help.”

  “So she got in touch with you?”

  Whit said, “That’s maybe not the kindest way to put it.”

  “It’s okay, Whit. What Janice means is, what would a high-powered academic like Sulamith Chopra want with a keyboard hack like myself? It’s a fair question.”

  Janice said, “And the answer is — ?”

  “I guess they wanted one more keyboard hack.”

  “You told her you needed work?”

  “Well, you know. We stay in touch.”

  (I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.)

  “Uh-huh,” Janice said, which was her way of telling me she knew I was lying. But she didn’t press.

  “Well, that’s great, Scott,” Whit said. “These are tough times to be out of a job. So, that’s great.”

  We said no more about it until the meal was finished and Whit had excused himself. Janice waited until he was out of earshot. “Something you’re not mentioning?”

  Several things. I gave her one of them. “The job is in Baltimore.”

  “Baltimore?”

  “Baltimore. Maryland.”

  “You mean you’re moving across the country?”

  “If I get the job. It’s not for sure yet.”

  “But you haven’t told Kaitlin.”

  “No. I haven’t told Kaitlin. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, this is really sudden. The question is how upset Kait will be. But I can’t answer that. No offense, but she doesn’t talk about you as much as she used to.”

  “It’s not like I’ll be out of her life. We can visit.”

  “Visiting isn’t parenting, Scott. Visiting is… an uncle thing. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s best. She and Whit are bonding pretty well.”

  “Even if I’m out of town, I’m still her father.”

  “Insofar as you ever were, yes, that’s true.”

  “You sound angry.”

  “I’m not. Just wondering whether I should be.”

  Whit came back downstairs then, and we chatted some more, but the wind grew louder and hard snow ticked on the windows and Janice fretted out loud over the condition of the streets. So I said goodbye to Whit and Janice and waited at the door for Kait to give me her customary farewell hug.

  She came into the foyer but stopped a few feet away. Her eyes were stormy and her lower lip was trembling.

  “Kaity-bird?” I said.

  “Please don’t call me that. I’m not a baby.”

  Then I figured it out. “You were listening.”

  Her hearing impairment didn’t prevent her from eavesdropping. If anything, it had made her stealthier and more curious.

  “Hey,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. You’re moving away. That’s all right.”

  Of all the things I could have said, what I chose was: “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, Kaitlin.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, and turned and ran to her room.

  Five

  Janice called me a day before I was due to leave for Baltimore and an interview with Sue Chopra. I was surprised to hear her voice on the phone — she seldom called except at our agreed-on times.

  “Nothing wrong,” Janice said at once. “I just wanted to, you know, wish you luck.”

  The kind of luck that would keep me out of town? But that was petty. I said, “Thanks.”

  “I mean it. I’ve been thinking this over. And I wanted you to know — yes, Kaitlin’s taking it pretty hard. But she’ll come around. If she didn’t care about you, she wouldn’t be so upset.”

  “Well — thank you for saying so.”

  “That’s not all.” She hesitated. “Ah, Scott, we fucked up pretty badly, didn’t we? Those days in Thailand. It was just too weird. Too strange.”

  “I’ve apologized for that.”

  “I didn’t call you up for an apology. Do you hear what I’m saying? Maybe it was partly my fault, too.”

  “Let’s not play whose fault it was, Janice. But I appreciate you saying so.”

  I couldn’t help surveying my apartment as we spoke. It seemed empty already. Under the stale blinds, the windows were white with ice.

  “What I want to tell you is that I know you’ve been trying to make it up. Not to me. I’m a lost cause, right? But to Kaitlin.”

  I said nothing.

  “All the time you spent at Campion-Miller… You know, I was worried when you came back from Thailand, way back when. I didn’t know whether you were going to hang on my doorstep and harass me, whether it would be good for Kaitlin even to see you. But I have to admit, whatever it takes to be a divorced father, you had the right stuff. You brought Kait through all that trauma as if you were walking her through a minefield, taking all the chances yourself.”

  This was as intimate a conversation as we had had in years, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  She went on: “It seemed like you were trying to prove something to yourself, prove that you were capable of acting decently, taking responsibility.”

  “Not proving it,” I said. “Doing it.”

  “Doing it, but punishing yourself, too. Blaming yourself. Which is part of taking responsibility. But past a certain point, Scott, that becomes a problem in itself. Only monks get to lacerate themselves full-time.”

  “I’m not a monk, Janice.”

  “So don’t act like one. If this job looks like a good choice, take it. Take it, Scott. Kait won’t stop loving you just because you can’t see her on a weekly basis. She’s upset now, but she’s capable of understanding.”

  It was a long speech. It was also Janice’s best effort to date to grant me absolution, give me full marks for owning up to the disaster I had made of our lives.

  And that was good. It was generous. But it was also the sound of a closing door. She was giving me permission to look for a better life, because any lingering suspicion that we could recreate what was once between us was desperately misplaced.

  Well, we both knew that. But what the head admits isn’t always what the heart allows.

  “I have to say goodbye, Scotty.”

  There was a little catch in her voice, almost a hiccup.

  “Okay, Janice. Give Whit my best wishes.”

  “Call when you find work.”

  “Right.”

  “Kait still needs to hear from you, whatever she may think. Times like this, you know, the world being what it is…”

  “I understand.”

  “And be careful on the way to the airport. The roads are slippery since that last big snow.”

  I came into the Baltimore airport expecting a hired driver with a name card, but it was Sulamith Chopra herself who met me.

  There was no mistaking her, even after all these years. She towered above the crowd. Even her head was tall, a gawky brown peanut topped with black frazzle. She wore balloon-sized khaki pants and a blouse that might once have been white but appeared to have shared laundry rounds with a few non-colorfast items. Her look was so completely Salvation Army Thrift Shop that I wondered whether she was really in a position to offer anyone a job… but then I thought academia and the sciences.

  She grinned. I grinned, less energetically.

  I put out my hand, but Sue was having none of it; she grabbed me and bear-hugged me, breaking away about a tenth of a second before the grip became painful. “Same old Scotty,” she said.

  “Same old Sue,” I managed.

  “I’ve got my car here. Have you had lunch yet?”

  “I haven’t had breakfast.”

  “Then it’s my treat.”

  She had called me two weeks ago, waking me out of a dreamless afternoon sleep. Her first words were, “Hi, Scotty? I hear you lost your job.”

  Note, this was a woman I hadn’t spoken with since our chance meeting in Minneapolis. A woman who hadn’t
returned any of my calls since. It took me a few groggy seconds just to place the voice.

  “Sorry I haven’t got back to you till now,” she went on. “There were reasons for that. But I kept track of you.”

  “You kept track of me?”

  “It’s a long story.” I waited for her to tell it. Instead, she reminisced for a while about Cornell and gave me the highlights of her career since then — her academic work with the Chronoliths, which interested me enormously. And distracted me, as I’m sure Sue knew it would.

  She talked about the physics in greater detail than I was able to follow: Calabi-Yau spaces, something she called “tau turbulence.”

  Until at last I asked her, “So, yeah, I lost my job — how did you know?”

  “Well, that’s part of why I’m calling. I feel a certain amount of responsibility for that.”

  I recalled what Arnie Kunderson had said about “enemies in management.” What Annali had told me about “men in suits.” I said, “Whatever you need to tell me, tell me.”

  “Okay, but you have to be patient. I assume you don’t have anywhere to go? No urgent bathroom calls?”

  “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Okay. Well. Where to begin? Did you ever notice, Scotty, how hard it is to sort out cause and effect? Things get tangled up.”

  Sue had published a number of papers on the subject of exotic forms of matter and C-Y transformations (“nonbaryonic matter and how to untie knots in string”) by the time the Chumphon Chronolith appeared. Many of these dealt with problems in temporal symmetry — a concept she seemed determined to explain to me, until I cut her short. After Chumphon, when Congress began to take seriously the potential threat of the Chronoliths, she had been invited to join an investigatory effort sponsored by a handful of security agencies and funded under an ongoing federal appropriation. The work, they told her, would be basic research, would be part-time, would involve the collaboration of the Cornell faculty and various elder colleagues, and would look impressive on her curriculum vitae. She said it was “Like Los Alamos, you understand, but a little more relaxed.”

  “Relaxed?”

  “At least at first. So I accepted. It was in those first few months I came across your name. It was all pretty wide-open back then. I saw all kinds of security shit. There was a master list of eyewitnesses, people they had debriefed in Thailand…”