The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I’m not in the mood.”

  “Hitch has been talking to you, I gather?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed. “Well, give me a minute.”

  She lifted her pear-shaped body out of the Jacuzzi and peeled off the headgear, her hair springing out like a caged animal. “I like the deck chairs by the window,” she said, “if you’re not too warm in those clothes.”

  “I’m all right,” I said, though the air was tropical and reeked of chlorine. The discomfort seemed somehow appropriate.

  She stretched out a bath towel and seated herself regally. “Hitch told you about Adam Mills?”

  “Yes, he did. I haven’t told Ashlee yet.”

  “Don’t, Scotty.”

  “Don’t tell Ashlee? Why, are you planning to tell her yourself?”

  “Certainly not, and I hope you won’t, either.”

  “She thinks he may be dead. She has a right to know if that’s not true.”

  “Adam is alive, no doubt about it. But you have to ask yourself: What purpose would it serve to tell Ashlee? Is it really better for Ash to know that Adam is alive and that he’s a murderer?”

  “A murderer? Is he?”

  “Yes. We established that fact beyond any doubt. Adam Mills is a devoted hard-core Kuinist and a multiple murderer, a hatchetman for one of the most vicious P-K gangs in the country. Do you think Ashlee needs to know that? Do you want to tell her her son is leading the kind of life that will likely get him killed or imprisoned in the very near future? And if that happens, do you want to watch her grieve all over again?”

  I hesitated. I had been putting myself in Ashlee’s position: If I had been wondering for seven years whether Kait had survived Portillo, any information would have been welcome.

  But Adam was not Kaitlin.

  “Look at what she’s gained since Portillo. A job, a family, a real life — equilibrium, Scotty, in a world where that’s a rare commodity. Obviously you know her better than I do. But think about it before you take all that away from her again.”

  I decided to shelve the question. It wasn’t what had brought me here, not primarily. “I’d be taking all that away from her just as surely if I went out west with you — which is what Hitch claims you want.”

  “Yes, but only for a little while. Scotty, will you please sit down? I hate talking up. It makes me nervous.”

  I pulled a second deck chair in front of hers. Beyond the steam-hazed window, the city baked in afternoon sunlight. Sunlight glittered off windows, rooftop arrays, mica-studded sidewalks.

  “Now listen to me,” she said. “This is important, and I want you to keep an open mind, hard as that may be under the circumstances. I know there are a lot of things we’ve kept from you, but please understand, we had to be careful. We had to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind about Kuin — no, don’t act insulted, stranger things have happened — or that you weren’t caught up in Copperhead circles like Janice’s husband, whatsisname, Whitman. Morris keeps insisting we can’t trust anyone, though I told him you’d be all right. Because I know you, Scotty. You’ve been in the tau turbulence almost from the beginning. Both of us have.”

  “We have a sacred kinship. Bullshit, Sue.”

  “It’s not bullshit. It’s not just conjectural, either. Admittedly, I’m interpreting, but the math suggests—”

  “I really don’t care what the math suggests.”

  “Then just listen to me, and I’ll tell you what I think is the truth.”

  She looked away, her eyes distantly focused. I didn’t like the expression on her face. It was earnest and aloof, almost inhuman.

  “Scotty,” she said, “I don’t believe in destiny. It’s an archaic concept. People’s lives are an incredibly complex phenomenon, far less predictable than the lives of stars. But I also know that tau turbulence splashes causality up and down the timeline. Is it really a coincidence that you and Hitch both ended up working for me, or that Adam Mills shared the turbulence with us in Portillo? In either case you can construct a logical sequence of events that’s almost but not quite satisfying as an explanation. I connected with Hitch Paley through the events at Chumphon, not quite at random; you met Ashlee because both of you had children caught up in the same haj, fine. But, Scotty, step back and take a longer look. It knits together way too neatly. The antecedent causes are insufficient. There has to be a postcedent cause.”

  Hitch tangling with Adam, for that matter. More than coincidence. But also uninterpretable. “That’s an item of faith,” I said softly.

  “Then look at me, Scotty! Look at the power I hold in these two hands!” She turned her pale palms up. “The power to bring down a fucking Chronolith! That makes me important. It makes me a player in the resolution of these events. Scotty, I am a postcedent cause!”

  “There is such a thing,” I said, “as megalomania.”

  “Except I didn’t make this up, any of this! It’s not a fantasy that I happen to understand Chronolith physics as well as anyone on the planet — and I’m not being vain, either. It’s not a fantasy that you and Hitch were at Chumphon and Portillo or that you and I were at Jerusalem. Those are facts, Scotty, and they demand an interpretation that goes beyond happenstance and blind chance.”

  “Why do you want me in Wyoming?”

  She blinked. “But I don’t. I don’t want you there. You’re probably safer here. But I can’t ignore the facts, either. I believe — and yes, this is intuition, probably unscientific, but I don’t care — I believe you have a role to play in the endgame of the Chronoliths. For good or ill, I don’t really know, though I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me or to further the interests of Kuin. I think it would be better if you came with us because you carry something special with you. The fact of Adam Mills is like a billboard. Chumphon, Jerusalem, Portillo, Wyoming. You. You may not like it, Scotty, but you matter.” She shrugged. “That’s what I believe, and I believe it very fervently. But if I can’t convince you to come, you won’t come, and maybe that’s what our destiny is, maybe that’s how we’re tied together, by your refusal.”

  “You can’t put that weight on me.”

  “No, Scotty, I can’t.” She blinked sadly. “But I can’t take it away, either.”

  None of this sounded quite sane to me. No doubt because of my mother, I had developed a sensitive ear for the irrational. Even as a child I had known at once when my mother began to veer into madness. I recognized the grandiose assertions, the inflated self-importance, the hints of imminent threat. And it always provoked the same reaction in me, a withdrawal verging on disgust, a rapid emotional deep-freeze.

  “Do you remember Jerusalem?” Sue asked. “Remember those young people, the ones who were killed? I think of them often, Scotty. I think of that young girl who came to me just when the Chronolith was arriving, when the tau turbulence was peaking. Her name was Cassie. Do you remember what Cassie said?”

  “She thanked you.”

  “She thanked me for something I hadn’t done, and then she died. I think it’s possible she was as deep in the tau turbulence as anyone can be, that the fact of her death had spilled over into the last minutes of her life. I don’t know exactly why she thanked me, Scotty, and I’m not sure she knew, either. But she must have sensed something… momentous.”

  Sue turned her eyes away from me almost sheepishly, an expression that returned us to the scale of the merely human. “I need to live up to that,” she said. “At least, I need to try.”

  Every two people who have ever fallen in love have a special place. A beach, a back yard, a park bench by a library. For Ashlee and me it was a landscaped park a few blocks east of our apartment, an ordinary suburban park with a concrete-rimmed duck pond and a playground and a cut-grass softball field. We had come here often in the days after Portillo, when Ash was recovering from the loss of Adam and after I had severed my contacts with Sue and company.

  I had proposed marriage to her here. We had brought food for a picnic, but
storm clouds came careening over the horizon and rain began to fall suddenly and copiously. We ran as far as the softball field and sheltered on the roofed bleachers. The air grew colder and the wet wind prompted Ashlee to curl against my shoulder. The park’s huge elms reared back from the storm, branches laced like fingers together, and I chose that moment to ask Ashlee whether she would consent to be my wife, and she kissed me and said yes. It was as simple and as perfect as that.

  I took her there again.

  The city had created perhaps too many of these parks in the urban-upgrade mania of the early century. Several had been rezoned for poverty housing or had deteriorated beyond all utility. This one was an exception, still stubbornly claimed by local families, defended by a host of local ordinances, patrolled after dark by community volunteers. We arrived in the late afternoon of a day cooler than the scorching day before, the kind of summer day so fine you want to fold it up and put it in your pocket. There were picnickers by the pond, toddlers swarming over the recently repainted swing sets and climbing gear.

  We sat down on the untenanted softball bleachers. We had bought takeout food on the way to the park, stringy little chicken pieces fried in batter. Ashlee picked at hers listlessly. Her unease was obvious in every gesture. I suppose mine was, too.

  I had originally planned (at least, perhaps) to tell her about Adam today. Lately I had understood that I wouldn’t. It was a decision by default, arguably a failure of courage. I still believed Ash deserved to know Adam was alive. But Sue was right, too. The news would hurt more than it would heal.

  I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Ash that badly, much as my conscience protested.

  It’s out of decisions like this, I suppose, that fate is constructed, board and nails, like a gallows.

  “You remember the boy?” Ashlee asked, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “The little boy in the ball game?”

  We had come here one Saturday not long after our wedding. There had been a Little League practice game in progress, two coaches and a few parents sharing the bleachers with us. The batter was a kid who looked like he’d been raised on steak and steroids, the kind of eleven-year-old who has to shave before school. The pitcher, contrarily, was a fair-haired waif with a talent for sinker balls. Unfortunately he left one up and over the plate. The ball came off the bat and back to the mound before the elfin pitcher had time to get a glove up — something off toward first base had distracted him — and as he turned his head he was struck squarely in the temple.

  Silence, then gasps and a couple of screams. The pitcher blinked at the ground and fell, fell loose-limbed and suddenly, and lay motionless on the bare dirt patch that served as a mound.

  Here’s the odd part. We weren’t parents or participants, just casual observers on a lazy day off, but I was on the phone to Emergency Services before anyone else in the bleachers had thought to reach into his pocket; and Ashlee, who had some RN training, reached the mound before the coach.

  The injury wasn’t serious. Ash kept the boy still and calmed the terrified mother until the paramedics arrived. Nothing unusual about the incident except that Ash and I had both been so quick off the mark.

  “I remember,” I told her.

  “I learned something that day,” Ashlee said. “I learned we’re both ready for the worst. Always. Maybe, on some level, expecting it. Me, I guess it’s because of my dad.” Ashlee’s father had been an alcoholic, which often enough forces a child into premature adulthood, and he had died of liver cancer when Ashlee was just fifteen. “You because of your mom.” Expecting the worst: Well, yes, of course. (And her voice rang briefly in my head: Scotty, stop looking at me like that!)

  “What that tells me,” Ashlee said, choosing her words carefully, not meeting my eyes, “is that we’re pretty strong people. We’ve faced up to some difficult things.”

  Difficult as a murderous child, resurrected from the dead?

  “So it’s all right,” Ashlee said. “I trust you, Scott. To do what you think is right. You don’t have to break it to me gently. You’re going away with them, aren’t you?”

  “Just for a little while,” I said.

  Twenty-two

  We crossed the state border into Wyoming on the day the governor abdicated.

  One of the so-called Omega militias had occupied the legislature for most of a week, holding Governor Atherton among the sixty hostages. The National Guard finally cleared the building but Atherton resigned as soon as he was released, citing health reasons. (Good ones: He had been shot through the groin and the wound had been allowed to grow septic.)

  Emotions ran high, in other words, out here in big sky country, but all that political ferment was invisible from the road. Where we crossed into the state, the highway was potholed and the vast ranchlands on either side had gone feral and dry in the wake of the retreating Oglalla Aquifer. Flocks of starlings populated the rusted ribs of irrigation piping.

  “Part of the problem,” Sue was saying, “is that people see the Chronoliths as a kind of magic — but they’re not, they’re technology, and they act like technology.”

  She had been talking about the Chronoliths for at least five hours, though not exclusively to me. Sue insisted on driving the last van in the convoy, which contained our personal effects and her notes and plans. We — Hitch or Ray or I — tended to rotate through the passenger seat. Sue had added a kind of nervous loquaciousness to her customary obsessive behavior. She had to be reminded to eat.

  “Magic is unlimited,” she said, “or limited only by, allegedly, the skill of the practitioner or the whims of the supernatural world. But the limits on the Chronoliths are imposed by nature, and they’re very strict and perfectly calculable. Kuin broadcasts his monuments roughly twenty years into the past because that’s the point at which the practical barriers become insurmountable — any farther back and the energy requirements go logarithmic, shoot up toward infinity for even a very tiny mass.”

  Our convoy consisted of eight large enclosed military cargo trucks and twice that number of vans and personnel carriers. Sue had put together, over the years, a small army of like-minded individuals — in particular the academics and grad students who had assembled the tau-intervention gear — and they were bookended, in this expedition, by the military posse. All these vehicles had been painted Uniforces blue so that we would resemble any number of other military convoys, a common-enough sight even on these underpopulated western highways.

  Some miles past the border we pulled over to the margin of the road on a cue from the lead truck, lining up for gas at a lonely little Sunshine Volatiles station. Sue switched off the forced-air cooler and I rolled down a side window. The sky was boundless blue, marked here and there with wisps of high cloud. The sun was near zenith. Across a brown meadow, more sparrows swirled over an ancient rust-brown oil derrick. The air smelled of heat and dust.

  “There are all kinds of limits on the Chronoliths,” Sue went on, her voice a sleepy drone. “Mass, for instance, or more precisely mass-equivalency, given that the stuff they’re made of isn’t conventional matter. You know there’s never been a Chronolith with a mass-equivalency greater than roughly two hundred metric tonnes? Not for lack of ambition on Kuin’s part, I’m sure. He’d build them to the moon if he thought he could. But again, past a certain point, the energy bill shoots up exponentially. Stability suffers, too. Secondary effects become more prominent. Do you know what would happen to a Chronolith, Scotty, if it was even a fraction over the theoretical mass limit?”

  I said I did not.

  “It would become unstable and destroy itself. Probably in a spectacular fashion. Its Calabi-Yau geometry would just sort of unfold. In practical terms, that would be catastrophic.”

  But Kuin had not been so unwise as to allow that to happen. Kuin, I reflected, had been pretty savvy all along. And this did not bode well for our quixotic little voyage into the sun-ridden western lands.

  “I could use a Coke,” Sue said abruptly. “I’m dry as a bone. Would yo
u fetch me a Coke from the gas station, if they have any to sell?”

  I nodded and climbed out of the van onto the pebbly margin of the road and walked up past the row of idling trucks toward the Sunshine depot. The fuel station was a lonely outpost, an old geodesic half dome shading a convenience store and a row of rust-spackled holding tanks. The tarmac was lined with miniature windrows of loose dirt. An old man stood in the doorway, shading his eyes with his hand and looking down the long row of vehicles. This was probably more custom than he had seen in the last two weeks. But he didn’t look particularly happy about it.

  Automated service modules groped under the carriage of the lead truck, refueling and cleaning it. Charges were displayed on a big overhead panel, its lens gone opaque in the wash of sun and grit.

  “Hey,” I said. “Looks like it hasn’t rained around here for a while.”

  The gas-station attendant lowered his hand from his eyes and gazed at me obliquely. “Not since May,” he said.

  “You got any cold drinks in there?”

  He shrugged. “Soda pop. Some.”

  “Can I have a look?”

  He moved out of the doorway. “It’s your money.”

  The interior shade seemed almost frigid after the raw heat of the day. There wasn’t much stock on the store’s shelves. The cooler held a few Cokes, root beers, orange pop. I selected three cans at random.

  The attendant rang up the sale, peering at my forehead so intently that I began to feel branded. “Something wrong?” I asked him.

  “Just checking for the Number.”

  “Number?”

  “Of the Beast,” he said, and pointed to a bumper sticker he had attached to the front of the checkout desk: I’M READY FOR THE RAPTURE! HOW ABOUT YOU?

  “I guess all I’m ready for,” I said, “is a cold drink.”