The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But I thought about Kait constantly. In my mind she was still the Kaitlin of Chumphon, five years old and as fearless as she was curious. Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; mat’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit. Because I had known Kaitlin as a child I had never lost sight of the vulnerable heart of her. Which made it all the more painful to imagine (or struggle not to imagine) where Kaitlin might be now, with whom. The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave.

  I spent much of every night awake, staring out the motel window and drinking, alternately, beer and diet cola (and peeing every half hour), until sleep broke over me like a glutinous wave. What dreams I had were chaotic and futile. Waking up to the brutal irony of spring, of sunlight in a bottomless blue sky, was like waking from a dream into a dream.

  I had figured my contact with Ashlee Mills was a one-shot, but she called me on my pocket phone ten days after Kaitlin’s disappearance. Her voice was businesslike and she came to the point quickly: “I arranged to meet someone,” she said, “a man who might know something about Adam and Kaitlin, but I don’t want to meet him alone.”

  “I’m free this afternoon,” I said.

  “He works nights. If you call what he does work. This might not be pretty.”

  “What is he, a pimp?”

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “He’s a sort of a drug dealer.”

  I had spent much of the last week on the net, researching the phenomenon of “haj youth” and the Kuinist movement, tunneling into their hidden chatrooms.

  There was, of course, no unified Kuinist movement. Lacking a flesh-and-blood Kuin, the “movement” was a patchwork of utopian ideologies and quasi-religious cults, each competing for the title. What they had in common was simply the act of veneration, the worship of the Chronoliths. For the hajists, any Chronolith was a holy object. Hajists attributed all sorts of powers to the physical proximity of a Kuin stone: enlightenment, healing, psychological transformation, epiphanies great and small. But unlike the pilgrims at Lourdes, for instance, the vast majority of hajists were young. It was, in the twentieth century term, a “youth movement.” Like most such movements, it was as much style as substance. Very few Americans ever made a physical pilgrimage to a Chronolith site, but it was not uncommon to see a teenager with a Kuinist logo on his hat or shirt — most often the ubiquitous “K+” in a red or orange circle. (Or any of the subtler and supposedly secret signs: scarred nipples or earlobes, silver ankle bracelets, white headbands.)

  The K+ symbol abounded in Ashlee’s neighborhood, chalked or painted on walls and sidewalks. I pulled up outside the Chinese restaurant at the appointed time, and Ashlee scurried out of her apartment door and into the passenger seat. “It’s good you have a cheap car,” she said. “It won’t attract attention.”

  “Where are we going?”

  She gave me an address five blocks farther into the city, where the only surviving businesses were stock-houses, window-service fast-food outlets, and liquor stores.

  “The guy’s name,” Ashlee said without preamble, “is Cheever Cox, and he’s tied into pretty much all the trade you can’t report on your IRS form. I know him because I used to buy tobacco from him.” She said this in a carefully neutral tone but glanced at me for signs of disapproval. “Before I got my addict’s license, I mean.”

  “What does he know about Kait and Adam?”

  “Maybe nothing, but when I called him yesterday he said he’d heard about a cut-rate haj and some new rumor about Kuin and he didn’t want to talk about it over an unencrypted line. Cheever’s kind of paranoid that way.”

  “You think this is legitimate?”

  “Tell you the truth? I don’t really know.”

  She rolled down the window and lit a cigarette, almost defiantly, waiting for my reaction. Minnesota had some of the harshest tobacco laws in the country. But I was from out-of-state and old enough not to be shocked. I said, “Ashlee? Did you ever consider quitting?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I’m not passing judgment, I’m making conversation.”

  “I don’t especially want to talk about it.” She exhaled noisily. “There hasn’t been a whole lot holding me together the last few years, Mr. Warden.”

  “Scott.”

  “Scott, then. It’s not that I’m a weak person. But… did you ever smoke?”

  “No.” I had been spared the anti-abuse vaccines that were pushed on so many young people in those days (and the resultant risk of adult antibody disorders), but tobacco simply wasn’t my vice.

  “It’s probably killing me, but I don’t have much else.” She seemed to struggle after a thought, then let it go. “It calms me down.”

  “I’m not condemning you for it. Actually, I always liked the smell of burning tobacco. At least from a distance.”

  She smiled wryly. “Uh-huh. You’re a real degenerate, I can tell that about you.”

  “You miss California?”

  “Do I miss California?” She rolled her eyes. “Is this a real conversation or are you just nervous about meeting Cheever? Because you don’t have to be. He’s a little shady but he’s not a bad person.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I said.

  “You’ll see.”

  The address was a run-down semidetached wood-frame house. The porch light was out, probably permanently. The stairs sagged. Ashlee pulled open the rusty fly screen and rapped at the door.

  Cheever Cox opened up when Ashlee identified herself. Cox was a bald man of about thirty-five, wearing Levis and a pale blue shirt with what looked like marinara sauce dribbled down the collar. “Hey, Ashlee,” he barked, hugging her. He gave me a brief glance.

  Ashlee introduced me and said, “It’s about what we talked about on the phone.”

  The front room contained a faded sofa, two wooden folding chairs, and a coffee table with ashtray. Down the dim hallway I could see a corner of the kitchen. If Cox made a lot of money in the illicit drug trade, he wasn’t spending it on decor. But maybe he had a country house.

  He spotted the pack of cigarettes sticking out of Ashlee’s shirt pocket. “Shit, Ashlee,” he said, “you on a script, too? Fucking government’s taking away my business with those little pussy prescription sticks.”

  “I’ll lose my script next year,” Ashlee said, “if I’m not on a patch or a program. Worse, I’ll lose my health insurance.”

  He grinned. “So maybe I’ll see more of you then?”

  “Not a chance.” She glanced at me. “I’ll get my teeth whitened and find a good job.”

  “Be a citizen,” Cox said.

  “Damn right.”

  “Marry your boyfriend, too?”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Okay, Ash, I’m sorry, don’t mind me. You want something? A little more than the druggist is willing to sell you?”

  “I want to ask you some questions about Adam.”

  “Yeah, but that can’t be all you want.”

  Cox made it obvious that he would have nothing to say unless Ashlee bought something from him. Business is business, he said.

  “It’s about my son, Cheever.”

  “I know, and I love you and Adam both, but Ashlee, it’s business.”

  So she paid him for a carton of what she called “loose smokes,” which Cox fetched from the basement. She held the box in her lap. The box reeked.

  Cox settled into his chair. “What it is,” he told Ashlee, “is, I go into the squatters’ buildings a lot, especially down on Franklin, or Lowertown, or the old Cargill warehouses, so I see these kids. And, you know, Adam hung with that crowd, too. It’s not a big market for me because these kids don’t have any money, basically. They’re shoplifting food. But every once in a while one of ‘em comes by some cash, I don’t ask how, and they want a carton, two cartons, smokes and drinks an
d chemicals and so forth. A lot of times it was Adam who would come to me, because I knew him from when you and I did business on a more regular basis.”

  Ashlee lowered her eyes at this assertion but said nothing.

  “Also, frankly, Adam has a little more on the ball than most of those people. They call themselves hajists or Kuinists but they’re about as political as bricks. You know who does the real haj thing? Rich kids. Rich kids and celebs. They go to Israel or Egypt and burn their scented candles or whatever. Downtown, it’s different. Most of these kids wouldn’t go out of their way for Kuin if he was holding a coronation ball in their back yard. Well, Adam figured that out. That’s why he was fooling around with the Copperhead clubs in Wayzata, Edina — looking for people who think the way he does but are maybe a little more gullible and a little more flush than the downtown crowd.”

  “Cheever,” Ashlee said, “can you tell me if he’s still in town?”

  “I can’t tell you a firm yes or no, but I doubt it. If he is, I haven’t seen him. I talk to people, you know, I follow the links, I keep my ear to ground. There are always rumors. You remember Kirkwell?”

  Last summer, a clinically paranoid retired butcher in Kirkwell, New Mexico, had announced that he was measuring increased background radiation at a dry spring outside the city limits — his own property, by coincidence. Probably he hoped to make the site a tourist attraction. He succeeded. By September, ten thousand destitute young hajists had camped there. The National Guard dropped food and water rations and exhorted the pilgrims to go home, but it was an outbreak of cholera that finally succeeded in clearing the property. The retired butcher promptly disappeared, leaving a number of class-action and public nuisance lawsuits in his wake.

  “These rumors come and go,” Cox said, “but the big one right now is Mexico. Ciudad Portillo. Adam was in this room three weeks ago and he was talking about it then — not that anybody paid much attention to him. That’s why he hooked up with the suburban Copperheads, I think, because he wanted to go to Mexico and he thought that crowd could supply at least a little money, some transportation.”

  Ashlee said, “He went to Mexico?”

  Cox held up his hands. “I can’t tell you that for sure. But if I had to bet I’d say he was on the road and bound for the border, if he hasn’t already crossed it.”

  Ashlee said nothing. She looked pensive and pale, almost beaten. Cox made a sympathetic sound. “That’s the trouble,” he said. “Stupid people do stupid things, but Adam is smart enough to do something really stupid.”

  We talked it around a little more, but Cox had said all he had to say. Finally Ashlee stood up and stepped toward the door.

  Cox hugged her again.

  “Come see me when your script runs out,” he said.

  I asked her on the drive back how she had known Adam was missing.

  She said, “What do you mean?”

  “It sounds like Adam was connected with squatter circles. If he wasn’t living at home, how did you know he was missing?”

  We pulled up at the curb. Ashlee said, “I’ll show you.”

  She unlocked the street door and walked me up a narrow flight of stairs to her apartment. The apartment was laid out like any other railway flat: a big front room facing the street, two tiny bedrooms off a corridor, a square kitchen with a window over the rear alley. The apartment was stuffy; Ashlee said she preferred to keep the windows shut during the garbage strike. But it was neatly and sensibly furnished. It was the home of someone possessing taste and common sense, if not much capital.

  “This door,” Ashlee told me, “is Adam’s room. He doesn’t like people going in there, but he’s not around to object.”

  In a sense, my first real contact with Adam was this glimpse of his room. I suppose I expected the worst: pornography, graffiti, maybe a shotgun buried in the laundry hamper.

  But Adam’s room was nothing like that. It was more than orderly, it was icily neat. The bed was made. The closet door was open and the number of bare hangers suggested that Adam had packed for a long trip, but what remained of his wardrobe was neatly arrayed. The bookshelves were makeshift brick-and-board arrangements but the books were upright and in alphabetical order, not by author but by title.

  Books tell you a lot about the people who choose and read them. Adam clearly leaned toward the more technical sort of nonfiction — electronics manuals, textbooks (including organic chemistry and American history), Fundamentals of Computation, plus random biographies (Picasso, Lincoln, Mao Zedong), Famous Trials of the Twentieth Century, How to Repair Almost Anything, Ten Steps to a More Efficient Fuel Cell. A child’s astronomy book and a spotter’s guide to manned satellite orbits. Ice and Fire: The Untold Story of the Lunar Base Tragedy. And, of course, books about Kuin. Some of these were mainstream works, including McNeil and Cassel’s Asia Under Siege; most were gaudy fringe publications with titles like End of Days and Fifth Horseman.

  There were no photographs of living human beings visible, but the walls were papered with magazine shots of various Chronoliths. (Briefly, and uncomfortably, I was reminded of Sue Chopra’s office in Baltimore.)

  Ashlee said, “Does it look like he never comes home? This is Adam’s ground zero. Maybe he didn’t sleep here every night, but he was here for a good eight or ten hours out of every twenty-four. Always.”

  She closed the door.

  “Funny,” she said, “I always thought of myself as making a home for Adam. But that’s not how it worked. He made his own home. It just happened to be inside mine.”

  She fixed coffee and we talked a while longer, sitting on Ashlee’s long sofa with the sound of street traffic coming through the closed but single-glazed windows. There was something deeply comforting about the moment — Ashlee moving in the kitchen, absentmindedly smoothing her bristly hair with her hand — something almost viscerally comforting, a shadow of the kind of domesticity I had misplaced more than a decade ago. I was grateful to her for that.

  But the moment couldn’t last. She asked me about Kaitlin and I told her something (not everything) about Chumphon and the way I had spent the last ten years. She was impressed that I had seen the Jerusalem arrival, not because she felt any reverence for Kuin but because it meant I had moved, if only peripherally, among the kind of people she imagined were relatively rich and vaguely famous. “At least you were doing something,” she said, “not just spinning your wheels.”

  I told her she had obviously done more than spin her wheels: It couldn’t have been easy for a single woman to raise a child during the economic crisis.

  “They call it spinning your wheels,” she said, “when you can’t get traction. And I guess that’s how I feel about Adam. I tried to help him, but I couldn’t get traction.” She paused and then turned to face me, her expression less guarded than it had been. “Suppose they did go to Mexico — Adam and Kaitlin and all that group. What do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have to talk to some people.”

  “Would you follow Kaitlin all the way to Portillo?”

  “If I thought I could help her. If I thought it would do any good.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “No. I’m not sure.”

  My pocket phone rang. It was set to take messages, but I checked the display to see who was calling. It might have been Janice saying Kait had come home, that the whole thing was a stupid misunderstanding. Or it might have been Ramone Dudley calling to tell me the police had found Kait’s body.

  It was neither. According to the text display, the call was from Sue Chopra. She had tracked down my private terminal address (despite the fact that I had changed it when I left Baltimore), and she wanted me to reply as soon as possible.

  “I should take this in private,” I told Ashlee.

  She walked me down the stairs and out to the car I took her hand. It was late, and the street was empty. The streetlights were the old-fashioned mercury vapor kind, and they put amber highlights in Ashlee’s short blond
hair. Her hand was warm.

  “If you find out something,” she said, “you have to tell me. Promise me that.”

  I promised.

  “Call me, Scott.”

  I believe she genuinely wanted me to call her. I believe she doubted that I would.

  “First of all,” Sue said, leaning into the lens so that her face filled the motel terminal’s phone window like a myopic brown moon, “I want you to know I’m not pissed about the way you left town. I understand what that was all about, and if you chose not to confide in me, I guess I have myself to blame. Although — I don’t know why it is, Scotty, you always expect the worst of people. Did it even occur to you we might want to help?”

  “You know about Kait,” I said.

  “We looked into the situation, yeah.”

  “You talked to the police.”

  “I know you’re going to do what you have to do, but I want to make sure you don’t feel like a fugitive.” She added, more plaintively, “I would still like to talk to you once in a while. As far as I’m concerned, you still work here. Ray is a good foil for the math work, and Morris tries hard to understand what we’re doing, but I need someone who’s bright enough to pay attention but doesn’t have any preconceived ideas.” She lowered her eyes and added, “Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just need somebody to talk to.”

  This was, among other things, her way of apologizing for all the invasive prodding of the last few years. But I had never blamed Sue for that. It might have been her ideas about tau turbulence that put me in a vulnerable position, but she had been careful to build a wall between me and the federal juggernaut. The juggernaut had lately turned its attention elsewhere; Sue still wanted to be my friend.

  She said, “I’m so unhappy about what happened with Kaitlin.”

  “The only thing I can tell you about Kait is that she hasn’t come home yet. I’d as soon not dwell on it. So distract me. Gossip. Has Ray found a girlfriend? Have you?”

  “Are you drinking, Scotty?”

  “Yes, but not enough to justify the question.”