The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She smiled sadly. “All right. Ray is still wandering in the wilderness. Me, I’m seeing this woman I met at a bar. She’s very sweet. She has red hair and collects Dresden china and tropical fish. But it’s not serious.”

  Of course not. Sue conducted her love affairs almost at a distance, deferentially and with the expectation of disappointment.

  Her real romance was with her work, which was what she preferred to talk about. “The thing is, Scotty, we’ve had a little bit of a breakthrough. That’s what’s obsessing everybody right now. Most of this is classified, but since there are rumors all over the net I can tell you at least a little bit about it.”

  She told me probably more than she should have, but much of it went over my head. The gist was that someone at MIT had succeeded in conjuring negative-tau particles out of the vacuum (which is in any case a seething cauldron of what physicists call “virtual” particles) and stabilizing them long enough to demonstrate the effect. These were hadrons with, essentially, negative duration. They carved holes, if you like, into the past — about a millisecond of the past, not Kuin’s ponderous twenty years and three months, but in principle it was the same phenomenon.

  “We’re very close,” Sue said, “to understanding exactly what it is Kuin is doing. And even Kuin might not have figured all the angles. Given enough time, we can create whole new technologies. I mean, star travel, Scotty: that’s a real possibility!”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters! We’re talking about a potential new era in the history of the fucking species — yes it matters!”

  “Kuin has already put his fingerprints on half the world, Sue. I would hate to see him extend his reach beyond the surface of the planet.”

  “Well, but this is the key to that, too. If we can figure out how a Chronolith works, we can interfere with it. With the right application we might be able to make a Chronolith simply go away.”

  “And achieve what?” The last few days had pumped up my cynicism. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t. Remember, it isn’t Kuin we have to be afraid of. It’s not even the Chronoliths. Feedback, Scotty, that’s the key. The real problem here is the perception of Kuin’s invincibility, which rests on the invincibility of his monuments. Destroy one, and you destroy the myth. Suddenly he’s not a godlike force anymore, he’s just another would-be Hitler or Stalin.”

  Still, I suggested, it might be too late for that.

  “Not if we can demonstrate his weakness.”

  “Can you?”

  She paused. Her smile faltered. “Well, maybe. Maybe soon,” she said.

  But not soon enough for Kait, who was probably in Mexico, imbued with her own notions of Kuin’s invincibility and promise. I reminded Sue that I had things to do. She said, “I’m sorry if I kept you up, Scotty, but I really do think it’s important for us to keep in touch.”

  Because, of course, she had not abandoned her own faux-Jungian idea that our futures were intertwined — that Kuin, among other things, had imposed on us a fate.

  “Anyway, that’s the real reason I called,” she said. “I told somebody about your problem. And he wants to help you.”

  “Not Morris,” I said. “I like Morris well enough, but even Morris will tell you he’s not an experienced field agent.”

  “No, not Morris, although he’d love to help. No, this is someone with a whole different kind of experience.”

  I should have seen it coming. It was Sue, after all, who had looked most deeply into my past, particularly the time at Chumphon. But I was blindsided all the same.

  “Maybe you remember him,” she said. “His name is Hitch Paley.”

  Fourteen

  Sometime during that week — before Hitch arrived, before events began to tumble out of control — Ashlee said, in the middle of a phone conversation, “You know the Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol?”

  “What about it?”

  “I was thinking about Kuin and the Chronoliths and all that. You know in Dickens where Scrooge goes into the future and sees his own funeral? And he says to the ghost, ‘Are these the shades of things that must be, or things that may be?’ Or something like that?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So the Chronoliths, Scott, are they must be or may be?”

  I told her no one was certain about that. But if I understood Sue correctly, the events marked by the already existing Chronoliths were must-bes in one form or another. There was no bright alternative future in which we stopped Kuin before his conquests and made the Chronoliths into harmless free-floating paradoxes. Kuin would conquer Chumphon, Thailand, Vietnam, Southeast Asia; time might be fluid, but the monuments themselves were immutable and fundamental.

  Then why not despair? I suppose Sue’s answer would be that the battle wasn’t finished. Much of the civilized world was still free of Chronoliths, which suggested that Kuin’s conquests were a steplike process with gains and reversals. There had not yet been a Chronolith on North American soil. Maybe there never would be, if we did the right thing. Whatever the right thing was.

  Sue had broached to me the idea of “negative feedback.” If what Kuin was doing with the Chronoliths represented a kind of positive feedback — a signal reinforced and amplified through time and human expectation — then the solution might be the opposite. A Chronolith that appeared and was subsequently destroyed would cast doubt on the process; the cancerous impression of Kuin’s invincibility would be, if not shattered, at least weakened.

  He might take half the Earth, but not our half.

  That was Sue Chopra’s faith. I hoped she was right I was prepared to act on that assumption.

  In all honesty, however, I cannot say that I believed it.

  Well, then, here was Hitch Paley, stepping out of a battered Sony compact (which by all rights should have been a motorbike) into the motel parking lot. We had agreed to meet at nine this morning. He was fifteen minutes late. In a sense, ten years late.

  He hadn’t changed much. I recognized him immediately, even from a dozen yards away under the shade of the coffee shop awning. I was delighted and I was afraid.

  He wore a full beard and a dung-green leather jacket. He had put on a little weight, which only served to emphasize his broad nose, his high cheekbones, the Neanderthal slope of his skull. He spotted me, walked bandy-legged across the sunny space between us, and put out his huge right hand.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said. “You got that package I asked you to pick up?”

  I muttered something about the package; he grinned and slapped me on the back and said, “I’m just shitting you, Scotty; we’ll talk about that later.” We went into the coffee shop and occupied a booth.

  Of course Sue Chopra had known about Hitch. All my efforts on his behalf — to avoid implicating him during the polygraph interview, for instance — had been obvious and futile. Hitch was one of Sue’s so-called primary observers, and he must have figured in her connect-the-dots project from the very beginning. Hitch had been deep into the tau turbulence, certainly as deep as I had been.

  I had assumed Hitch would also be unfindable, but he had probably hung around Chumphon a little longer than he might have had he understood just how closely witnesses were being scrutinized — long enough for the FBI to target his internet signature or even plant a locator on him. In any case, they had found him.

  They had found him, and Sue had offered him the alternative of prompt arrest or a job. Hitch had made the wise choice.

  “It’s not exactly an office job,” he said. “Good pay, travel, no strings. Supposedly a clean criminal record at the end of it, though the end is nowhere in sight. First thing they did was send me around the Pacific Rim hunting rumors about Kuin, not that anything substantial came of it. But I been busy, Scotty. Scouting touchdown sites in, you know, Ankara, Istanbul, doing little unofficial things here and there, talking to Kuinists — lately, talking to the homegrown kind. Copper
heads and hajists.”

  “You’re a spy?”

  He gave me a sour look. “Right, I’m a spy. I drink martinis and play a lot of baccarat.”

  “But you know about the haj thing.”

  “I know more about the ‘haj thing’ than most people. I’ve been inside it. And I will do whatever I can to help you find Kait.”

  I sat back in the booth, wondering if this was what I wanted. If this was wise.

  “You know,” Hitch said, “when I think of Kaitlin, I still think of her at Chumphon. The way she’d run down the tide line in that pink one-piece Janice liked to dress her in, leaving these footprints in the sand like little bitty bird footprints, heel-and-toe. We should have taken better care of her, Scotty.”

  He said “we” to be friendly. He was talking about me.

  Hitch did not reminisce much, nor did he waste time. He had already gotten the details of the situation from Ramone Dudley, and I added what little I had personally learned while we stared at the coffee shop menus.

  He said, “Mexico is a good bet. But we have to know more than we do before we come to any conclusions.”

  He suggested another talk with Whit Delahunt. I agreed, on the condition that we not alarm Janice unduly. “And we should talk to Ashlee Mills, too. If she’s home, we could pick her up on the way to see Whit.”

  “Not good,” Hitch said, “to get too many people involved here.”

  “Ashlee’s as involved as I am. She’s been more helpful than the police, actually.”

  “You vouch for her, Scotty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He looked at me critically. “You haven’t been eating or sleeping much, it looks like.”

  “It shows?”

  “Maybe you ought to try the steak and eggs.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Steak and eggs, Scotty. For Kait’s sake, let’s say.”

  I didn’t want the food, but it looked good when the waitress delivered it. I had surprisingly little trouble emptying the plate.

  “Feel better?” Hitch asked.

  “What I feel is the hardening of my arteries.”

  “Bullshit. You need the protein. We have some work ahead of us, and not just today.”

  I heard myself say, “Can we really get her back?”

  “We’ll get her back. Count on it.”

  Ashlee did a double take when she saw Hitch Paley for the first time, then shot me a look: You have friends like this?

  Which was fair enough. Hitch still looked like a small-time criminal — he could have passed for a drug dealer à la Cheever Cox, or maybe the kind of bulky individual who collects on bad debts. I sketched out some of our past and repeated some of what Hitch had told me. Ashlee nodded but clearly continued to suspect that Hitch was something more than Sue Chopra’s ears on the underworld.

  She took me aside and said, “Can he help us find Kait and Adam? That’s all I really need to know.”

  “I think he can.”

  “Then let’s go see this Whitman Delahunt.”

  I drove. The afternoon air was gently breezy, the sky raked with high cloud. Hitch was silent in the car. Ashlee hummed a tune I recognized as an old Lux Ebone song, something sad. Something from the time when songs still mattered, when everyone knew the same songs. This year’s popular songs all sounded like marching music to me: drums and cymbals and trumpet notes drowning in their own echoes. But I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves.

  Hitch had spotted the nicotine stains on Ashlee’s fingers. “You can go ahead and smoke,” he said, “I don’t give a fuck.”

  The house where Whit and Janice lived had not aged especially gracefully, nor had the neighborhood it inhabited, but both were still well above the national average. People here could afford to have their trash hauled away, even during the collectors’ strike. The lawns were green. Here and there, rust-speckled landscape robots crawled among the hedges like sluggish armadillos. If you squinted a little, it looked like the last ten years hadn’t happened.

  Whitman answered the door and recoiled when he saw me. He didn’t like the looks of Hitch or Ashlee, either. His expression turned blank and he said, “Janice is upstairs, Scott. Do you want me to call her?”

  “We just want to ask you a couple of questions,” I said. “Janice doesn’t need to be involved.”

  He clearly didn’t want to invite us in, but he may also have been reluctant to discuss his Copperhead politics in front of any passing neighbors. We stepped into the cool shade of the house. I introduced Hitch and Ashlee without being specific about why I had brought them. When we were away from the door, Hitch took the initiative. He said, “Scotty told me about the club you belong to, Mr. Delahunt. What we need now is a list of the other adult members.”

  “I already gave that to the police.”

  “Yeah, but we need it too.”

  “You have no right to make such a demand.”

  “No,” Hitch said, “and you’re not obliged to give it to us, but it will help us find Kaitlin.”

  “I doubt that.” Whit turned to me. “I could have talked to the police about you, Scott. I wish I had.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, “I talked to them myself.”

  “You’ll be talking to them again if you persist in—”

  “In what,” Hitch interrupted, “trying to save your daughter from this mess she got herself into?”

  Whit looked like he wanted to stamp his foot. “I don’t even know you! What do you have to do with Kaitlin?”

  Hitch smiled faintly. “She used to have a scar under her left knee where she fell on a broken bottle outside the Haat Thai. Does she still have that scar, Mr. Delahunt?”

  Whit opened his mouth to answer, but he was interrupted:

  “Yes.”

  Janice’s voice. It came from the stairway. She had been listening. She came the rest of the way down, regal in her grief. “It’s still there. But it’s mostly faded. Hi, Hitch.”

  This time Hitch’s smile was genuine. “Janice,” he said.

  “You’re helping Scott look for Kaitlin?”

  He said he was.

  “That’s good, then. Whit, would you give these people the information they want?”

  “That’s absurd. They can’t come here and make this kind of demand.”

  “It sounded more like a request. But they might help Kait, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”

  Whit choked back a protest. There was a ferocity hidden in Janice’s voice, an old and potent anger. Maybe Hitch and Ashlee didn’t hear it, but I did. And so did Whit.

  It took a while, but he gave us a mostly-legible handwritten list of names, addresses, terminal numbers.

  “Just keep my name out of it,” he muttered.

  Hitch gave Janice a big hug and Janice returned it. She had never much cared for Hitch Paley, probably for good reason, but the fact that he was here and searching for Kait must have redeemed him in her eyes. She took my hand as we were leaving and said, “Thank you, Scott. I mean it. I’m sorry about what I said a few days ago.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “The police are still telling us Kait’s in town. But she’s not, is she?”

  “Probably not.”

  “God, Scott, it’s just so—” She couldn’t find a word for it. She put her hand to her mouth. “Be careful,” she said. “I mean, find her, but… you be careful.”

  I promised her I would.

  When we left the house Hitch said, “Does Janice know she’s married to an asshole?”

  “She’s beginning to suspect,” I said.

  We went to Ashlee’s for an evening meal and to plot strategy.

  I helped Ash in the kitchen while Hitch used his pocket terminal to make a few calls. Ashlee put together a rice and chicken dish she called “poverty pilaf,” cubing the raw chicken neatly with a cheap steel cleaver. She asked me how long I’d been married to Janice.

  “About five years,” I said. “We were both very
young.”

  “So you’ve been divorced a long time.”

  “It doesn’t seem so long sometimes.”

  “She strikes me as a very together person.”

  “Together if not always very flexible. This has been hard on her.”

  “She’s pretty lucky, living the life she does. She ought to appreciate that.”

  “I don’t think she feels very lucky right now.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “I understand, Ashlee.”

  “Putting my fucking foot in it again.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes.

  “Can I chop those carrots for you?”

  She seasoned the pilaf, meticulously and sensibly. We rejoined Hitch while it baked.

  Hitch had rested his big booted feet on Ashlee’s coffee table. “Here’s what we have,” he said. “This is from Whitman and a couple of other sources including the cop, Ramone Dudley. Whit’s bullshit Copperhead club has twenty-eight regular dues-paying members, and ten of them are upper management from the company he works at, so maybe he’s right about joining for career reasons. Twenty-eight adults, of whom eighteen are single or childless couples. Ten members have kids of various ages but only nine actually introduced their offspring to the Youth Group. Including a pair of sibs, that’s ten kids plus six outsiders like Adam who applied independently. But there was a core group of eight who were deeply involved, including Kait and Adam. They’re the ones who disappeared.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “So let’s assume they left town. They would have been too conspicuous on a plane or a bus, given that they’re traveling together. I doubt the suburban contingent would have agreed to hitchhike, considering the number of fucked-up adults already on the road. So that leaves private transportation. And probably something fairly big. You can stuff eight people into a landau, but not without attracting attention and making everybody grouchy.”

  “This is pretty conjectural,” I said.

  “Okay, but follow me for a minute. If they’re driving, what are they driving?”