The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

I couldn’t say for sure that this was the same twitch who had been haunting my table at the Nicollet Mall, but I would have been willing to bet on it.

  I didn’t mention this to the family, just sat back down and made myself smile — all our smiles were fabricated tonight. David talked a little more, over coffee, about what he might be facing with the Uniforces over the term of his conscription. Unless he was lucky enough to land a clerical or tech position, he would probably end up in China with the infantry. But the fighting couldn’t go on much longer, he told Kait, so that was okay; and we all pretended to believe this absurd untruth.

  David would have been deferred, of course, had Kaitlin been pregnant, but that was not a possibility. The infection she had picked up in Portillo had scarred her uterus and left her infertile. She and David could still have children but they would have to be conceived in vitro, a process none of us could afford. To my knowledge David had never even raised that subject — the impossibility of a childbirth deferral — with Kait. He loved her, I believe, very genuinely. Deferral marriages were common enough in those days, but it was never an issue for David and Kaitlin.

  Ashlee served coffee and made cheerful conversation while I tried not to think about the man outside. I found myself watching Kait as she quietly watched David, and I felt very proud of her. Kait had not led a simple life (none of us had, deep as we were in the Age of the Chronoliths), but she had come to possess an immense personal dignity that at times seemed to shine through her skin like a bright light. It was the miracle of our brief time together that Janice and I had produced, all unaware, this powerfully alive human soul. We had propagated goodness, in spite of ourselves.

  Kait and David needed their last few hours together, however. I asked Ashlee to drive them back home. Ash was surprised by the request and gave me a sharp inquisitive look, but agreed.

  I shook David’s hand warmly and wished him the best. I gave Kait a long hug. And when the three of them were gone I went into the bedroom and fetched my pistol from the top shelf of the linen cupboard and unlocked and removed the trigger guard.

  I already mentioned, I think, that I had grown up in the anti-gun revulsion of the early decades of the century. (This century which hovers, as I write these words, on the brink of its last quarter… but I don’t mean to get ahead of myself.)

  Handguns had come back into vogue during the troubles. I did not like owning one — among other things, it made me feel like a hypocrite — but I had become convinced that it was prudent. So I had taken the required courses, filled out all the forms, registered both the weapon and my genome with ATF, and purchased a small-caliber handgun that recognized my fingerprints (and no one else’s) when I picked it up. I had owned this device for some three years now and I had never fired it outside of the training range.

  I put it in my pocket and walked down four flights of stairs to the lobby of the building and then across the street toward the parked car.

  The bearded man in the driver’s seat showed no sign of alarm. He smiled at me — smirked, in fact — as I approached. When I was close enough to make myself heard I said, “You need to explain to me what you’re doing here.”

  His grin widened. “You really don’t recognize me, do you? You don’t have the faintest idea.”

  Which was not what I had expected. The voice did sound familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  He stuck his hand out of the car window. “It’s me, Scott — Ray Mosely. I used to be about fifty pounds heavier. The beard is new.”

  Ray Mosely. Sue Chopra’s understudy and hopeless courtier.

  I hadn’t seen him since before Kait’s adventure in Portillo — since I retired from all that business to make a new life with Ashlee.

  “Well, damn,” was all I managed.

  “You look about the same,” he said. “That made it easier to find you.”

  Without the body fat he looked almost gaunt, even with the beard. Almost a ghost of himself. “You didn’t have to stalk me, Ray. You could have come up to the table and said hello.”

  “Well, people change. For all I know you could be a firebreathing Copperhead by now.”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  “Because it’s important. We kind of need your help.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Sue, for one. She could use a place to stay for a little while.”

  I was still trying to cope with that information when the rear window rolled down and Sue herself poked her big ungainly peanut-shaped head out of the darkness.

  She grinned. “Hey there, Scotty,” she said. “We meet again.”

  Nineteen

  In the past seven years I had told Ashlee a great deal about Sue Chopra and her friends. That didn’t mean Ash was pleased to come home and find two of these worthies occupying her living-room sofa.

  It had seemed obvious to me, after Portillo, that I would have to choose between my life with Ashlee and my work for Sue. Sue persisted in her belief that the advance of the Chronoliths could be turned back, given the right technology or even the appropriate degree of understanding. Privately, I doubted it. Consider the word itself, “Chronolith” — an ugly portmanteau word coined by some tone-deaf journalist shortly after Chumphon, a word I had never liked but which I had come to appreciate for its aptness. Chronos, time, and lithos, stone, and wasn’t that the heart of the matter? Time made solid as rock. A zone of absolute determinacy, surrounded by a froth of ephemera (human lives, for instance) which deformed to fit its contours.

  I did not wish to be deformed. The life I wanted with Ashlee was the life the Chronoliths had stolen from me. We had come back from Tucson, Ash and I, to lick our wounds and to take from each other what strength we were able to give. I could not have given Ashlee much if I had gone on working for Sulamith Chopra, if I had continued to dip into the tau turbulence, if I persisted in making myself an instrument of fate.

  Not that we had lost contact entirely. Sue still called on me occasionally for consultation, though there was little I could do professionally without access to her mil-spec code incubators. More often, she called to keep me up to date, share her optimistic or pessimistic moods, gossip. She took, I think, a vicarious pleasure in the life I had made for myself — as if it were somehow exotic; as if there weren’t a million families like mine, making do in hard times. Certainly I had not expected her to arrive at my doorstep in this cloak-and-dagger fashion.

  Ash had exchanged a few words with Sue on the phone but they had never been formally introduced, and Ray was a stranger to her. I made the introductions with a gusto that was perhaps too obviously insincere. Ashlee nodded and shook hands and retreated to the kitchen “to make coffee,” i.e., to work out her concerns about their presence here.

  It was only a visit, Ray insisted. Sue still maintained her network of connections with the remaining Chronolith researchers, and she had been doing some connecting during this trip west. The vascular ebb and flow of federal funding had turned her way once again, though she still had detractors in Congress. These days, she said, all her work was stealthy, half-hidden, concealed by one agency from another, embedded in bureaucratic rivalries she barely understood. Yes, she was in Minneapolis on business, but basically she just wanted a friendly place to stay for a couple of evenings.

  “You could have called ahead.”

  “I suppose so, Scotty, but you never know who’s listening. Between the closet Copperheads in Congress and the crazies on the street…” She shrugged. “If it’s inconvenient, we’ll take a hotel room.”

  “You’ll stay here,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

  Plainly there was more to this than a friendly reunion. But neither she nor Ray would volunteer details, and I guessed that was all right with me, at least for tonight. Sue and all her furor and obsession seemed a long time gone. Many things had changed since Portillo.

  Oh, I still watched the news of Kuin’s advances, when the bandwidth allowed, and I still occasionally wondered what “tau turbulence” mig
ht mean and how it might have affected me. But these were night fears, the kind of thing you think about when you can’t sleep and rain taps on the window like an unwelcome visitor. I had given up attempting to understand any of this in Sue’s terms — her conversations with Ray always veered too quickly into C-Y geometry and dark quarks and such esoteric matters. And as for the Chronoliths themselves… should I be ashamed to admit that I had achieved a private, separate peace with them? That I was resigned to my own inability to influence these vast and mysterious events? Maybe it was a small treason. But it felt like sanity.

  It was disturbing, then, to be back in the presence of Sue, whose obsessions still burned very brightly. She was polite when we talked about old times or familiar faces. But her eyes brightened and her voice gained a decibel as soon as talk turned to the recent advent of the Freetown Chronolith or the advance of the Kuinist armies into Nigeria.

  I watched her while she talked. That gloriously uncontrollable crown of coiled hair had grayed at the fringes. When she smiled, the skin at the corners of her eyes wrinkled complexly. She was skinny and looked a little careworn whenever the glow of her fervency ebbed.

  And Ray Mosely, incredibly, was still in love with her. He did not, of course, say this. I suspect Ray experienced his love for Sulamith Chopra as a private humiliation, forever invisible to outsiders. But it wasn’t invisible. And maybe he had made his own bargain with it: better to nurse a futile affection than to concede to lovelessness. Bearded as he was, thin now almost to the point of anorexia, his hair receding like a childhood memory, Ray still gave Sue those deferential glances, still smiled when she smiled, laughed when she laughed, rose to her defense at the first hint of criticism.

  And when Sue nodded at Ashlee in the kitchen and said, “I envy you, Scotty. I always wanted to settle down with a good woman,” Ray chuckled obediently. And winced, all at once.

  Before I went to bed I turned out the sofa-bed and shook out a set of spare blankets. This could only have been torture for Ray, sleeping next to Sue in absolute and unquestioned chastity, listening to the sound of her breath. But it was the only accommodation I had to offer, apart from the floor.

  Before I went to bed myself I took Sue aside. “It’s good to see you,” I told her. “I mean it. But if you want more from me than a couple of nights on a fold-out, I want to know.”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” she said calmly. “Night, Scotty.”

  Ashlee, in bed, was less sanguine. It was great to meet these people who had once meant so much to me, she said — it made all those stories I had told her come to life. But she was afraid of them, too.

  “Afraid?”

  “The way Kait’s afraid of the draft. For the same reason. They want something from you, Scott.”

  “Don’t let it worry you.”

  “But I have to worry. They’re smart people. And they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think they could talk you into… whatever it is they want you to do.”

  “I’m not so easy to convince, Ash.”

  She rolled on her side, sighing.

  In seven years Kuin had still not planted a Chronolith on American soil, at least not north of the Mexican border. We remained part of an archipelago of sanity in a world besieged by madness, along with northern Europe, southern Africa, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and sundry other holdouts. Kuin’s impact in the Americas had been broadly economic, not political. Global chaos, especially in Asia, had dried up foreign demand for finished goods. Money drained out of the consumer-goods industries and was tunneled into defense. It made for relatively low unemployment (apart from the Louisiana refugees) but lots of spot shortages and some rationing. Copperheads claimed that the economy was being gradually Sovietized, and in this, at least, they may have had a point. There was still no real pro-Kuin sentiment in Congress or the White House. Our Kuinists (and their radical A-K counterparts) were street fighters, not organizers. At least, so far. Respectable Copperheads like Whit Delahunt were another matter — they were everywhere, but they walked very softly.

  I had read some of the Copperhead literature, both the academic writers (Daudier, Pressinger, the Paris Group) and the populist hacks (Forrestall’s Clothing the Emperor when it hit the bestseller list). I had even sampled the works of the musicians and novelists who were the public face of the Kuinist underground. Impressive as some of this was prima facie, it nevertheless struck me as wishful at best, at worst as an attempt to ingratiate either the nation or more likely the writer to some inevitable Kuinist autarchy.

  And still there was no direct evidence of the existence of Kuin himself. No doubt he did exist, perhaps somewhere on the southern Chinese mainland, but most of Asia was closed to media and telecommunications, its infrastructure in a state of radical collapse and millions dead in the famine and unrest. The chaos that helped create Kuin also served to shield him from premature exposure.

  And was the technology necessary to create a Chronolith already in Kuin’s hands?

  Yes, probably, Sue told me.

  This was Sunday morning. Ashlee, still nervous, had gone off to visit her cousin Alathea in St. Paul. (Alathea eked out a living selling decorative copper pots door to door. Visiting Alathea on Sundays was an expression of familial piety on Ashlee’s part, since Alathea was a disagreeable woman with eccentric religious beliefs and no talent for housekeeping.) I sat with Sue at the kitchen table, picking at breakfast and generally savoring my day off, while Ray went out to hunt for a source of fresh coffee — we had used up the house supply.

  There were, Sue told me, only a handful of people in the world who understood contemporary Chronolith theory well enough to envision the means to create one. She happened to be one of them. That was why the federal government had taken such an ambivalent interest in her, alternately helping and hindering her work. But that wasn’t the big problem right now. The big problem, she said, was that the increasingly desperate Chinese government had years ago established its own intensive research programs into the practicality of tau-bending technology and had isolated these facilities from the international community.

  And why was that a problem?

  Because the fragmented Chinese government had finally collapsed under the weight of its own insolvency, and those same research facilities were presumably under the direct control of Kuinist insurgents.

  “So it all fits into place,” she said. “Somewhere in Asia there’s a Kuin, and he has the technology in his hands. We’re only a couple of years away from the Chumphon conquest, and that looks like an entirely plausible event. We can’t do anything about it, either. All of Southeast Asia is in the hands of various Kuinist insurgent movements — it would take a huge army to occupy the hills above Chumphon, and that would mean recommitting troops and supplies from China, which nobody is willing to do. So it comes together very, very neatly… you might say, inevitably.”

  “These are the shades of things that must be.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’re helpless to stop it.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Scotty. I think maybe there is something I can do.” Her smile was both mischievous and sad.

  But the whole subject made me uneasy, and I tried to divert her by asking whether she had heard from Hitch Paley lately. (I hadn’t: not since Portillo.)

  “We’re still in contact,” she said. “He’ll be passing through town in a couple of days.”

  I suppose it’s evidence of Sue’s innate (if awkward) charm that by the following evening Ashlee was sitting beside her on the sofa, listening raptly to Sue’s interpretation of the Age of Chronoliths.

  As I joined them, Ash was saying, “I still don’t understand why you think it’s so important to destroy one.”

  Sue, pondering her response, looked as intensely thoughtful as a religious zealot.

  Which, perhaps, she was, at least on her own terms. In her pop-physics seminar at Cornell she had been fond of comparing the particle zoo (hadrons, fermions, and all the varieties of
their constituent quarks) to the deities of the Hindu pantheon — all distinct, yet all aspects of a single encompassing Godhead. Sue was not conventionally religious and she had never even visited her parents’ native Madras; she used the metaphor loosely and often comically. But I recalled her description of two-faced Shiva: the destroyer and bringer of life, the ascetic youth and the lingam-wielding impregnator — Sue had detected the presence of Shiva in every duality, every quantum symmetry.

  She put the tips of her fingers together. “Ashlee, tell me how you define the word ‘monument.’”

  “Well,” Ash said tentatively, “it’s a thing, a structure, like a building. It’s, you know, architecture.”

  “So how is it different from a house or a temple?”

  “I guess you don’t use a monument, the way you use a house or a church. It just sort of stands there announcing itself.”

  “But it does have a purpose, right? The way a house has a purpose?”

  “I don’t know if I would say it’s useful… but I guess it serves a purpose. Just not a very practical one.”

  “Exactly. It’s a structure with a purpose, but the purpose isn’t practical, it’s spiritual… or at least symbolic. It announces power and preeminence or it commemorates some communal event. It’s a physical structure but all its meaning, all its utility, is invested in it by the human mind.”

  “Including the Chronoliths?”

  “That’s the point. As a destructive weapon, a Chronolith is relatively trivial. By itself, it achieves nothing in particular. It’s an inert object. All its significance lies in the realm of meaning and interpretation. And that’s where the battle is, Ashlee.” She tapped her forehead. “All the strangest architecture is right up here. Nothing in the physical world compares to the monuments and the cathedrals we build inside our own skulls. Some of that architecture is simple and true and some of it is baroque and some of it is beautiful and some of it is ugly and perilously unsound. But that architecture matters more than any other kind, because we make the future out of it. History is just a fossil record of what men and women construct out of the contents of their minds. You understand? And the genius of Kuin has nothing to do with the Chronoliths; the Chronoliths are just technology, just people making nature jump through hoops. The genius of Kuin is that he’s using them to colonize the world of the mind, to build his own architecture directly into our heads.”