The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was all I could manage just to say her name. Which was probably for the best. It was all I needed to say.

  She came out of the blankets and into my arms. I saw the bruises on her wrists, the deep cut that ran from her shoulder almost to her elbow in a track of clotted brown blood. But I did not ask her about these things, and I understood the wisdom of Ashlee’s advice: I couldn’t un-wound her. I could only hold her.

  “I’m here to take you home,” I said.

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes but she said, almost inaudibly, “Thank you.”

  Another breeze kicked up the flap of the tent, and Kaitlin shivered. I told her to get dressed quick as she could. She pulled on a pair of ragged denims and a cheap serape.

  And I shivered myself, and it occurred to me that the air was a little too cold for this sun-hammered morning — unnaturally cold.

  Outside, Hitch was calling my name.

  “Get her into the van,” he told me, “and you best be quick about it. This wasn’t part of the deal — I bargained for you to talk, not to take her away.” He turned his face into the wind. “I get the feeling things are happening a little faster than we planned.”

  Kaitlin tumbled onto one of the van’s back benches and wrapped a loose blanket around herself. I told her to keep her head down, just a little while. Hitch locked the door and went to corral Ashlee.

  Kait sniffled, and not just because she was close to tears. She had caught something, she said, a flu or possibly one of the intestinal diseases that were circulating through Portillo as the crowds grew thirstier and the water sellers less scrupulous. Her eyes were filmed and a little vague. She coughed into her fist.

  Outside, tents and canvas shelters clapped in the stiffening wind. Hajists began to crawl out, evicted by the noisy weather, dozens of bewildered pilgrims in Kuinist gear and torn clothing shading their eyes and wondering — beginning to wonder — whether this gale might mark the beginning of a sacred event, a Chronolith announcing itself in the dropping temperature and the peaking breeze.

  And maybe it was. The Kuin of Jerusalem had appeared more decisively than this and with less warning, but it was a fact that Chronolith arrivals varied from place to place (and time to time) in their intensity, duration, and destructiveness. Sue Chopra’s calculations were based on somewhat problematic satellite data and could have been skewed by several hours or more.

  In other words, we might be in mortal danger.

  A gust rocked the van and provoked Kaitlin’s attention. She pressed her face against the side window, gaped at scalloped clouds of Sonoran dust suddenly billowing inward from the desert. “Daddy, is this — ?”

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  I looked for Ash, but she was hidden by the increasingly anxious crowd of hajists. I wondered how far west of central Portillo we were, but that was impossible to estimate… a mile, say, at best. And there was no telling precisely where the Chronolith would appear, no way of calculating the perimeter of the danger zone.

  I told Kait to stay under the blanket.

  The crowd began to move then, almost as if the hajists had reached an unspoken consensus, out of this dirt-pack lot toward the connecting streets, toward town. I caught sight of Hitch’s coiled black beard, then Hitch himself, and Ashlee, and Adam.

  Hitch appeared to be arguing with Ashlee, and Ash was arguing with her son, her hands on Adam’s arms as if she were begging him. Adam stood resolutely still, enduring the embrace, while the wind whipped his blond hair in front of his eyes. If the haj had been hard on him, he didn’t show it. He looked impassively from his mother’s face to the darkening sky. He retrieved what looked like a rolled thermal jacket from his backpack.

  I don’t know what Ashlee said to Adam — she has never discussed this with me — but it was obvious even at this distance that Adam wouldn’t be coming back with us. A lifetime of frustration was written into the body language of that encounter. What Ashlee couldn’t admit — tugging at her son, pleading with him — was that Adam simply didn’t care what she wanted; that he hadn’t cared for a long time; that he might have been born unable to care. She was simply a distraction from the deeply interesting event that had apparently begun, the physical manifestation of Kuin, of the idea or the mythology in which he had invested all his loyalty.

  Now Hitch was pulling at Ashlee, trying to bring her back to the van, his face screwed up against the abrasive wind but his gestures nearly frantic. Ashlee ignored him as long she could, until Adam broke away from her and only Hitch’s support kept her from falling to her knees.

  She looked up at her son and said one more thing. I think it was his name, just as I had called Kaitlin’s name. I’m not sure, since the roar of the wind and the noise of the crowd had grown much louder very quickly, but I believe it was Ashlee’s keening of her son’s name that cut through the thickening air.

  I got behind the wheel of the van. Kaitlin moaned into her blanket.

  Hitch dragged Ashlee to the vehicle and pushed her inside, then climbed into the shotgun seat. I found I had already started the engine.

  “Just fucking drive,” Hitch said.

  But it was almost impossible to make rapid progress against the tide of hajists. If Adam had camped any closer to Portillo we would have been locked in. As it was, we were able to crawl toward the margin of the road and make slow but steady progress westward, the press of pilgrims thinning as we retreated.

  But the sky had grown very dark, and it was cold now, and dust scored the windshield and cut visibility to a few feet.

  I had no idea where this road might lead. This wasn’t the direction we had come. I asked Hitch but he said he didn’t know; the map was stashed in back somewhere, and anyway it didn’t matter; our options had come down to one.

  The duststorm glazed the windshield into opacity and was, by the sound of it, also fouling the engine. I closed the windows and cranked up the vehicle’s heater until we were all sweating. Our dirt track dead-ended at a wooden bridge over a shallow, dry creek bed. The bridge was splintered, rocking in the intensifying wind, and would clearly not support the weight of the van. Hitch said, “Drive down that embankment, Scotty. At least put a little dirt between us and Portillo.”

  “Pretty steep grade.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  So I turned off the road, drove over brittle scrub grasses and down the berm. The van braked itself sporadically and the dash lit up with function alarms, and I believe we would have overbalanced if not for my iron grip on the steering wheel — which was a matter of instinct, not skill. Hitch and Ashlee were silent, but Kaitlin let out a little sound, about the same pitch as the wind. We had just reached the flat and stony basin when an uprooted acacia flew overhead like a stiff black bird. Even Hitch gasped when he saw that.

  “Cold,” Kaitlin moaned.

  Ashlee unfolded the last of the blankets, gave two of them to Kait and tossed one up to us. The air inside reeked of hot heater coils, but the temperature had risen only marginally. I had seen the thermal shock in Jerusalem, from a distance, but I hadn’t guessed just how painful it would be, a sudden numbing cold that radiated inward from the extremities to the heart.

  Stolen energy, drained from the immediate environment by whatever force it was that could unwind a massive object through time. A fresh wind howled above the arroyo and the sky turned the color of fish scales. We had packed thermally-adaptive body gear, and we broke this out; Ashlee helped Kait into a jacket a size too big for her.

  A dire thought occurred to me, and I reached for the handle of the door.

  “Scotty?” Hitch inquired.

  “I need to drain the radiator,” I said. “If that water freezes, we lose our transportation.”

  We had been wise enough to carry our drinking water in flexible bags which would expand as necessary. We had also dumped antifreeze into the van’s radiator. But we hadn’t anticipated being this close to the arrival. A serious flash-freeze would probably demolish the engine’s coolant s
ystem and strand us here.

  “May not be time.”

  “So wish me luck. And hand me the tool box.”

  I let myself out into the gale. Wind slammed the door behind me. The wind came up the arroyo from the south, feeding the steep thermoclines of the arriving Chronolith. The air was choked with dust and sand. I had to shield my eyes with my hand in order to open them even a slit. I navigated to the front of the van by touch.

  The vehicle had come down at a steep angle into a sandy ridge, and the front of it was entrenched up to the bumper. There was a burst of auroral light overhead as I scooped out a space with my hands. The thermal jacket was keeping my core temperature up — at least so far — but my breath turned to frost with every exhalation and my fingers were clumsy and fiery-numb. Too late to go back for gloves. I managed to open the tool box and fumble out a wrench.

  The radiator system was designed to be drained from beneath by loosening a valve nut. I clasped the nut with the wrench but it refused to turn.

  Leverage, I thought, bracing my feet against the tire, leaning into the angle of the wrench like a sculler leaning into an oar. The noise of the wind was overpowering, but under it there was another sound, the thunderclap of the arrival, then the shockwave through the ground, a hard mule-kick from below.

  The valve nut popped, and I sprawled into the sand.

  A trickle of water ran out and instantly froze against the ground — enough to relieve the pressure inside the radiator, though stray ice could still crack any number of vital systems, if we were unlucky.

  I tried to stand and found that I couldn’t.

  Instead I rolled into the meager shelter created by the angle of the van against the earth. My head was suddenly too heavy to hold erect, and I put my numbed hands between my thighs and curled into the meager warmth of my thermal jacket and promptly lost consciousness.

  When I opened my eyes again the air was still and I was back inside the van.

  Sunlight burned on the scrim of ice that had formed on the windshield. The heater was pumping out steamy warm air.

  I sat up, shivering. Ashlee was already awake, chafing Kaitlin’s hands between her own, and that sight worried me; but Ashlee said at once, “She’s all right. She’s breathing.”

  Hitch Paley had dragged me inside after the worst of the thermal shock had passed. Currently he was outside replacing the valve nut I had loosened. He stood, peered in through the fogged window, and gave me a thumbs-up when he saw that I was awake.

  “I think we’ll be okay,” Ashlee said. Her voice was raw, and I realized that my own throat was sore when I swallowed, no doubt from the briefly supercooled air we had all inhaled. Lungs a little achy, too, and fingers and toes still bereft, at their tips, of sensation. Some crusted blood on the palm of my right hand where the freezing wrench had taken away a layer of skin. But Ashlee was right. We had survived.

  Kait moaned again. “We’ll keep her covered up,” Ash said. “But she’s already sick, Scott. We need to worry about pneumonia.”

  “We need to get her back to civilization.” And up that embankment again, to begin with. Not a sure thing.

  When I felt able, I opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out. The air was relatively warm again, and surprisingly fresh, save for a haze of dust that was settling everywhere like fine snow. Prevailing winds had carried the ice fog off to the east.

  Frost steamed off the rocks and sand of the creek bed. I climbed to the top of the embankment and looked back at the town — what remained of it.

  The Kuin of Portillo was still shrouded in ice, but it was clearly a large monument. The figure of Kuin was standing, one arm upraised in a beckoning gesture.

  The town of Portillo lay at his immense feet, dim in the mist but obviously devastated.

  The radius of the thermal shock was enormous. All but a few of the hajists must have died, it seemed to me, though I did see some vehicles moving at the perimeter of the town, probably Red Cross mobile stations.

  Ashlee came up the slope behind me, panting. Her breath halted briefly when she saw the scope of the destruction. Her lips trembled. Her face was brown with dust, rivered with tears.

  “But he might have got away,” she whispered: meaning, of course, Adam.

  I said that was possible.

  Privately, I doubted it.

  Seventeen

  By means of a connecting series of dirt roads and cattle tracks we managed to skirt the steaming ruins of Portillo and connect at last with the main road.

  The dead — no doubt massive numbers of them — remained in town, but we passed clusters of refugees along the highway. Many were limping, crippled by frostbite. Some had been blinded by ice crystals. Some had sustained injuries from falling masonry or other shockwave events. All sense of threat had vanished from them, and Ashlee twice insisted on stopping to distribute our few blankets and a little food, and to ask about Adam.

  But none of these young people had heard of him, and they had more pressing concerns. They begged us to relay messages, call parents or spouses or family in L.A., in Dallas, in Seattle… The parade of misery was overwhelming, and at length even Ashlee had to turn away from it, though she continued to scan the refugees for any sign of Adam until we were farther north than even a healthy hajist could had walked. The sight of relief trucks and military ambulances streaming toward Portillo eased her conscience but not her fears. She lapsed into her seat, stirring only to tend to Kaitlin now and then.

  My fears for Kait deepened during the drive. She was sicker than I had realized, and her exposure to the thermal shock had made matters worse. Ashlee took Kait’s temperature with the thermometer from the first-aid kit, then frowned and fed her a couple of antipyretic capsules and a long drink of water. We were forced to stop several times for Kaitlin to lope away from the van and relieve her bowels, and each time she stumbled back she was visibly weaker and unspeakably humiliated.

  We needed to get her into a reputable hospital. Hitch placed a call to Sue Chopra and reassured her that we had survived, though Kait was ill. Sue recommended crossing the border, if possible, before admitting Kait for medical care, since young Americans in-country without papers were currently being jailed. The No-gales border crossing was swamped — there had been a rumor, this one false, of an impending arrival in that city — but Sue said she would arrange for someone from the consulate to escort us through. A hospital room would be waiting in Tucson.

  Ashlee administered a broad-spectrum antibiotic from our medical kit and Kait slept fitfully through the hot afternoon. Hitch and I exchanged driving duties.

  I thought about Ashlee. Ashlee had just lost her son, or believed she had. It was remarkable that she was able to care for Kaitlin at all — moving under the weight of her grief with great deliberation. And Kait responded to this kindness instinctively. She was at ease with her head in Ashlee’s lap.

  It occurred to me that I loved them both.

  I obeyed Ashlee’s injunction: I did not, then or later, ask Kaitlin what had happened to her during the haj.

  Maybe I should qualify that. There was a time, as I sat with Kait in her hospital room in Tucson waiting for the doctor to come back with her bloodwork, when I couldn’t restrain myself. I didn’t ask her directly what had happened in Portillo; only why she had gone there — what had made her leave home and ally herself with the likes of Adam Mills.

  She turned her head away from me in acute embarrassment. Her hair fell across the crisp white pillow, and I saw the suture line of her long-healed cochlear surgery, a very faint, pale seam along the descending line of her throat.

  “I just wanted things to be different,” she said.

  Ashlee stayed with me in Tucson while Kait recovered.

  We rented a motel room and lived together chastely for a week. Ashlee’s grief was intensely private, often almost invisible. There were days when she seemed almost herself, days when she would smile when I came in the door with a bag of take-out Mexican or Chinese food. In some par
t, she may have harbored the hope that Adam had survived (though she refused to discuss the possibility or tolerate the mention of Adam’s name).

  But she was subdued, quiet. She slept during the sweltering afternoons and was restless at night, often sitting in front of the ancient cable-linked video panel long after I had gone to bed.

  Nevertheless, we had come together in an important way. Our futures had commingled.

  We didn’t talk about any of this. All our conversation was pointedly trivial. Except once, when I was leaving the room for a run to the all-night convenience store down the block. I asked her if she wanted anything.

  “I want a cigarette,” she said tightly. “I want my son back.”

  Kait remained in the hospital for most of another week, regaining her strength and enduring a fresh set of tests. I visited daily, though I kept the visits brief — she seemed to prefer it that way.

  During my last visit before her release, Kaitlin and her doctor shared some bad news with me.

  I didn’t want to trouble Ashlee with this — at least, not yet. When I came back to the hotel room I found Ash somewhat recovered, more talkative. I took her out to dinner, though not very far out: the motel restaurant. It served us sirloin tips and coffee. The framed faux-Navajo prints and cattle-skull decor were reassuringly classless.

  Ashlee talked (suddenly she seemed to need to talk) about her childhood, the time before she married Tucker Kellog, memories consisting not of narratives but of snapshots she had fixed in her mind. A dry, windy day in San Diego, shopping with her mother for linens. A school trip to a petting zoo. Her first year in Minneapolis, how astonished she had been by the winter storms, her commute to work blockaded by snowdrifts and windrows. Old shows she used to watch, some of which I had also seen: Someday, Blue Horizon, Next Week’s Family.

  Over dessert she said, “I talked to the Red Cross. They’re still down in Portillo, taking names — counting the dead. If Adam survived, he didn’t register with any of the relief agencies. On the other hand, if he’s dead—” She said this with a studied nonchalance, obviously fake. “Well, they haven’t identified his body, and they’re very good at that. I let them call up his genome profile from his medical records. No match. So I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. But I realized something else.”