The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The presence of groundwater causes a similar phenomenon in soil and bedrock, cracking stone and radiating a ground-borne shockwave.

  All this cooled and moving air creates convection cells, thus severe wind at ground zero and unpredictable and pervasive fogs for miles around.

  Which was why no one objected to the dry heat, the sealed room.

  The white-garbed technicians, most of them graduate students out on loan, manned the row of terminals facing the windows. Their telemetry came from the roof arrays or from remote sensors placed closer to the touchdown zone. Periodically they sang out numbers, none of which meant anything to me. But the level of tension was clearly rising. Sue paced among these eager young people like a fretful parent.

  She paused before us, crisp in fresh blue jeans and a white blouse. “Background counts are way up,” she said, “on extremely steep curves. That’s like a two-minute warning, guys.”

  Morris said, “Should we have goggles or something?”

  “It’s not an H-bomb, Morris. It won’t blind you.”

  And then she turned away.

  One of the monitoring technicians, a young blond woman who looked not much older than Kaitlin, had risen from her chair and approached Sue with a supplicating smile. The IDF security contingent looked sharply at her. So did Morris.

  The girl seemed dazed, maybe a little out of control. She hesitated. Then, in a gesture almost touchingly childlike, she reached for Sue’s hand and took it in her own.

  Sue said, “Cassie? What is it?”

  “I wanted to say… thank you.” Cassie’s voice was timid but fervent.

  Sue frowned. “You’re welcome, but — for what?”

  But Cassie just ducked her head and backed away as if the thought had gone out of her head as quickly as it had entered. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh! I’m sorry. I just — I guess I just felt like I should say it. I don’t know what I was thinking…” She blushed.

  “Best stay in your chair,” Sue said gently.

  We were deep in the tau turbulence now. The room smelled hot and electric. Beyond the window, the city core quivered under a sudden auroral glow.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds, but time was elastic; we inhabited seconds as if they were minutes. I will admit that I was afraid.

  The incidental light created by the arrival was a curtain of quickly shifting color, blue-green deepening to red and violet, hovering over the city and filling the room in which we sat with eerie shadow.

  “Nineteen hundred and seven minutes,” Sue said, checking her watch. “Mark.”

  “It’s already cold,” Morris said to me. “You notice?”

  It felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped by several degrees. I nodded.

  One of the IDF men stood up nervously, fingering his weapon. As quickly as it had come, the light began to fade; and then—

  Then the Chronolith was simply and suddenly present.

  It flashed into existence beyond the Dome of the Rock, taller than the hills, grotesquely large, white with ice under a brittle moon.

  “Touchdown!” someone at the consoles announced. “Ambient radiation dropping. External temps way, way down—”

  “Hold on,” Sue said.

  The shockwave flexed the window glass and roared like thunder. Almost immediately the Chronolith vanished in a white whirlwind, moisture gigged out of the atmosphere by thermal shock. A few miles away, temperature differentials cracked concrete, split timbers, and surely destroyed the living tissue of any creature unfortunate enough to have strayed into the exclusion zone. (There were a few: cats, dogs, pilgrims, skeptics.)

  A wave of whiteness rayed out from the central storm, frost climbing the Judean hills like fire, and a host of urban lights dimmed as power-grid transformers shorted in fountains of sparks. Cloud engulfed the hotel; a hard, fast wind rattled the windows. Suddenly the room was dark, console lights quivering like stars reflected in a pond.

  “Cold as a son of a bitch,” Morris muttered.

  I wrapped my arms around myself and saw Sue Chopra do likewise as she turned away from the window.

  The IDF man who had stood up moments ago raised his automatic rifle. He shouted something that was incomprehensible in the noise of the storm. Then he began to fire into the darkened room.

  The name of the shooter was Aaron Weiszack.

  What I know about him is what I read in the next day’s newspapers, and wouldn’t it save a world of grief if we could read tomorrow’s headlines before they happened?

  Or maybe not.

  Aaron Weiszack had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, and immigrated to Israel with his family in 2011. He spent his teenage years in suburban Tel Aviv and had already flirted with a number of radical political organizations before he was drafted in 2020; Weiszack had been briefly detained, but not charged, during the Temple Mount riots of 2025. His IDF record, however, was impeccable, and he had been careful to conceal from his superiors his ongoing association with a fringe “Kuinist” cell called Embrace the Future.

  He was, if not deranged, at least unbalanced. His motives remain unclear. He had not fired more than a couple of rounds before another of the IDF soldiers, a woman named Leah Agnon, cut him down with a brief burst from her own weapon.

  Weiszack died almost instantly of his wounds. But he wasn’t the only casualty in the room.

  I have often thought Aaron Weiszack’s act was at least as portentous as the arrival of the Kuin of Jerusalem — in its way, a far more precise imaging of the shape of things to come.

  Weiszack’s last rifle burst cracked one of the allegedly blast-proof (but apparently not bulletproof) windows, which collapsed in a shower of silvery nuggets. Cold wind and dense fog swept into the room. I stood up, deafened by the gunshots, blinking stupidly. Morris leaped out of his chair toward Sue Chopra, who had fallen to the floor, and covered her with his body. None of us knew whether the attack had finished or had just begun. I couldn’t see Sue under Morris’s bulk, didn’t know whether she was seriously injured, but there was blood everywhere — Weiszack’s blood all over the wallpaper, and the blood of the young technicians speckled across their consoles. I took a breath and began to hear sounds again, the scream of human voices, the scream of the wind. Fine grains of ice flew through the room like shrapnel, propelled by the impossibly steep thermoclines sweeping the city.

  The IDF force surrounded the fallen Weiszack, rifles aimed at his inert body. The FBI contingent spread out to secure the scene, and some of Sue’s post-docs hovered over their fallen companions attempting first aid. Voices, and I thought I heard Morris’s among them, shouted for help. We had a paramedic in the room, but he was surely overwhelmed if he hadn’t been injured.

  I ducked and crawled across the floor to Morris. He had rolled off Sue and was cradling her head in his arms. She was hurt. There was blood on the carpet here, a smattering of red droplets steaming in the brutal cold. Morris glanced at me. “It’s not serious,” he said, mouthing the words broadly over the roar of the wind. “Help me drag her into the hallway.”

  “No!” Sue surged up against him, and I saw the bloody gash where her jeans had been torn by a bullet or shrapnel, a freely-bleeding divot along the fleshy part of her right thigh. But if this was her only wound then Morris was right, she was in no immediate danger.

  “Let us take care of it,” Morris told her firmly.

  “People are hurt!” Her eyes darted toward the row of terminals where her students and technicians were variously paralyzed with terror or slumped in their chairs. “Oh, God — Cassie!”

  Cassie, the winsome postgraduate student, had lost part of her skull to the gunfire.

  Sue closed her eyes and we dragged her out of the cold and Morris spoke intently into his pocket phone as I pressed my palm against her bloody leg.

  By this time the ambulances from Hadassah Mt. Sinai were already on their way, skidding over the crusts of ice still clinging to Lehi Street.

  The paramedics set
up triage in the lobby of the hotel, where they covered broken windows with thermal blankets and ran heaters from the hotel’s generator. One of them put a pressure bandage on Sue’s injury and directed arriving aid to the more critically injured, some of whom had been carried to the lobby, some of whom remained immobilized upstairs. IDF and civilian police cordoned the building while sirens wailed from all points of the compass.

  “She died,” Sue said bleakly.

  Cassie, of course.

  “She died… Scotty, you saw her. Twenty years old. MIT diploma program. A sweet, nice child. She thanked me, and then she was killed. What does that mean? Does that mean something?”

  Outside, ice fell from the cornices and rooftops of the hotel and shattered on the sidewalks. Moonlight penetrated the glassy white ruins and limned the emerging contours of the Kuin of Jerusalem.

  The Kuin of Jerusalem: a four-sided pillar rising to form a throne on which the figure of Kuin is seated.

  Kuin gazes placidly past the fractured Dome of the Rock, scrutinizing the Judean desert. He is clothed in peasant trousers and shirt. On his head is a band which might be a modest crown, worked with images of half-moons and laurel leaves. His face is formal and regal, the features unspecific.

  The immense base of the monument meets the earth deep in the rains of Zion Square. The peak achieves an altitude of fourteen hundred feet.

  PART TWO

  LOST CHILDREN

  Ten

  What strikes me now — if you can forgive an old man second-guessing the text of his own memoirs — is how strange the advent of the Chronoliths must have seemed to the generation that came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union… my father’s generation, though he didn’t live to see the worst of it.

  They were a generation that had looked on third-world dictatorships less with outrage than with impatience, a generation to whom grandiose palaces and monuments were the embarrassments of an earlier age, haunted houses ready to topple in the stiff winds blowing from the Nikkei and the NASDAQ.

  The rise of Kuin caught them utterly off guard. They were serious about the threat but deaf to its appeal. They could imagine a million underfed Asians paying fealty to the name of Kuin. That was at least distantly plausible. But when they were scorned by their own children and grandchildren, their confidence evaporated.

  They escaped, by and large, into the shelter of arms. Kuin’s monuments might seem magical but they predicted and were ultimately derived from military conquests, and a well-defended nation could not be conquered. Or so the reasoning went. The Jerusalem arrival provoked a second surge of federal investment: in research, detector satellite arrays, a new generation of missile-hunting drones, smart mines, battlefield and supply robots. The draft was reintroduced in 2029 and the standing army increased by half a million inductees. (Which helped to disguise the decline in the civilian economy that followed the aquifer crisis, the battered condition of Asian trade, and the beginning of the years-long Atchafalaya Basin disaster.)

  We would have bombed Kuin in his infancy if anyone had been able to find him. But southern China and most of Southeast Asia were in a state of ungoverned barbarism, a place where warlords in armored ATVs terrorized starving peasants. Any or all of these petty tyrants might have been Kuin. Most of them claimed to be. Probably none of them was. It was far from certain that Kuin was even Chinese. He could have been anywhere.

  What seems obvious now (but wasn’t then) is that Kuin was dangerous precisely because he hadn’t declared himself. He possessed no platform but conquest, no ideology but ultimate victory. Promising nothing, he promised everything. The dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and the merely unhappy were all drawn toward an identification with Kuin. Kuin, who would level the mountains and make the valleys high. Kuin, who must speak with their voice, since no one else did.

  For the generation that followed mine Kuin represented the radically new, the overthrow of antiquated structures of authority and the ascension of powers as cold and ruthlessly modern as the Chronoliths themselves.

  In brief, he took our children from us.

  When I got the call about Kait (from Janice, her video window blanked to hide her tears) I understood that I would have to leave Baltimore and that I would have to do so without Morris Torrance tailing me across seven states.

  Which wouldn’t be easy, but might be easier than it would have been before Jerusalem. Before Jerusalem, Sue Chopra had been overseeing Chronolith research under a generous federal dispensation. That preeminence had been compromised by her devotion to the purely theoretical aspects of Chronolith theory — her obsession with the mathematics of tau turbulence, as opposed to practical questions of detection and defense — and by her disastrous congressional appearance in June of ‘28. In public questioning she had refused to accommodate Senator Lazar’s theory that the Jerusalem Chronolith might be a signal of the End Times. (She called the senator “poorly educated” and the notion of impending apocalypse “an absurd mythology that abets the very process we’re struggling to contain.” Lazar, a former Republican turned Federal Party hatchetman, called Sue “an ivory-tower atheist” who needed to be “weaned from the public teat.”)

  She was, of course, too valuable to cut loose entirely. But she ceased to be the central figure in the effort to coordinate Chronolith research. She was, instead, kept away from public scrutiny. She remained the nation’s foremost expert on the esoterica of tau turbulence but had ceased to be its poster child.

  The upside of this was that the FBI took a less direct interest in such small fish as myself, even if my files still languished in the digital catacombs of the Hoover Building.

  Morris Torrance had resigned from the Bureau rather than accept reassignment. Morris was a believer. He believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the goodness of Sulamith Chopra, and the veracity of his own dreams. The age of the Chronoliths had made such conversions possible. I think, too, he was a little in love with Sue, though (unlike Ray Mosely) he had never harbored any illusions about her sexuality. He remained as her bodyguard and chief of security, drawing a salary that could only have been a fraction of his government income.

  Both Sue and Morris wanted to keep me close to the project — Sue because I figured into her evolving pattern of meaningful coincidence; Morris because he believed I was important to Sue. Whether they could use legal leverage to keep me there had become debatable. Morris was a civilian now. But I didn’t doubt he would pursue me if I announced I was leaving. Maybe even pull a few strings to keep me in my place. Morris liked me, in his cautious style, but his first loyalty was to Sue.

  Sue was meanwhile trying to reconstruct her fragmented Chronolith project as an Internet circle, sharing any data the Defense Department left unclassified, deepening and expanding the mathematics of tau turbulence. In February of 2031 she lost her Department of Energy bursary and was reduced to another round of fundraising, while money flowed copiously into the glamor projects: the gamma-ray laser collider at Stanford; the Exotic Matter Group working out of Chicago.

  I spent the morning cleaning up some code I had grown for her, a little routine that would go out into the world and search media nodes for relevant synchronicities, according to a noun-sorting algorithm Sue herself had cooked up. Morris passed in and out of the office a couple of times, looking leaner than he used to. Older, too. But still obstinately cheerful.

  Sue was in her own office, and I stopped and knocked to tell her I was leaving. For lunch, I meant, but she must have heard something in my voice. “Long lunch? How far are you planning to go, Scotty?”

  “Not far.”

  “We’re not done, you know.”

  She might have been talking about the code we’d been evolving, but I doubted it.

  Sue’s leg wound had healed years ago, but the Jerusalem experience had left other scars. Jerusalem, she told me once, had made clear to her how dangerous her work was — that by placing herself near the center of the tau turbulence she had put at risk not only herself but
the people around her.

  “But I suppose it’s inevitable,” she had said sadly, “that’s the worst of it. You stand on the train tracks long enough, sooner or later you meet a train.”

  I told her I’d finish the debugging that afternoon. She gave me a long, skeptical glare. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “We’ll talk again,” she said.

  Like most of her prophecies, this one would come true, too.

  Morris offered to join me for lunch but I told him no, I had some errands to do and I’d probably just grab a sandwich on the run. If he found this suspicious, he didn’t show it.

  I closed out my account at Zurich American, transferred most of the funds to a transit card and took the rest in old-fashioned folding green. I drove around a while longer to make sure Morris wasn’t tailing me, unlikely as that was. More probably he had tapped the locator in my car. So I traded in the Chrysler at a downtown dealership, told the salesperson there was nothing I liked on the lot and would she mind if I shopped the other franchises? No, she said, and she’d be happy to walk me through the virtual inventory in the back room. I tentatively selected a snub-nosed Volks Edison in dusty blue, possibly the most anonymous-looking automobile ever manufactured; left my Chrysler at the lot and accepted a courtesy ride halfway across the city. Up close, the Volks looked a little more battered than it had in the virts, but its power plant was sturdy and clean, as near as I could judge.

  All of this amateur espionage bullshit left an e-trail as wide as the Missouri, of course. But while Morris Torrance could surely make a few connections and hunt me down, he couldn’t do it fast enough to keep me in Baltimore. I was two hundred miles west by nightfall, driving into a warm June evening with the windows open, popping antacids to calm the churning in my stomach.