The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “What I figured.”

  He followed me out of the store and squinted down the line of trucks. “Looks like the circus came to town.” He spat absentmindedly into the dust.

  “Is there a key to the toilet?”

  “On the hook around the side.” He hooked a thumb to the left. “Show some mercy and flush when you’re done.”

  The location of the arrival — identified by satellite surveillance and refined by on-the-spot measurement of ambient radiation — was as enigmatic and as unenlightening as so many other Chronolith sites.

  Rural, small-town, or otherwise relatively undestructive Chronoliths were generally labeled “strategic,” whereas city-busters like the Bangkok or Jerusalem stones were “tactical.” Whether this was a meaningful distinction or just happenstance was subject to debate.

  The Wyoming stone, however, clearly fell into the “strategic” category. Wyoming is essentially a high, barren mesa interrupted by mountains — “the land of high altitudes and low multitudes,” a twentieth-century governor had called it. Its oil reserves and its cattle business were hardly vulnerable to a Kuin stone, and in any case the projected arrival site featured neither of those resources — featured nothing at all, in fact, apart from a few crumbling farm structures and prairie-dog nests. The nearest town was a post-office village called Modesty Creek, fifteen miles up a two-lane tarmac road that ran through brown meadowland and basalt outcroppings and sparse stands of cottonwood. We traversed this secondary road at a cautious speed, and Sue took time off from her monologue to admire the waves of sage and wild nettles as we approached our destination.

  What purpose, I asked her, could a Chronolith serve in a place like this?

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s a good and reasonable question to ask. It must mean something. It’s like playing a game of chess and suddenly your opponent moves his bishop off to the rim for no apparent reason. Either it’s an implausibly stupid mistake, or it’s a gambit.”

  A gambit, then: a distraction, false threat, provocation, lure. But it didn’t matter, Sue insisted. Whatever purpose the Chronolith was meant to serve, we would nevertheless prevent its arrival. “But the causality is extremely tangled,” she admitted. “Very densely knotted and recomplicated. Kuin has the advantage of hindsight. He can work against us in ways we can’t anticipate. We know very little about him, but he might know a great deal about us.”

  By nightfall we had pulled all our vehicles off the road. An advance party had already scouted the site and marked its rough perimeter with survey stakes and yellow tape. There was enough light left in the sky for Sue to lead some of us up a rise, and from there we looked out across a meadow as prosaic as the surveyed ground of a shopping-mall project.

  This was wild country, originally part of a privately-owned land parcel, never cultivated and seldom visited. At dusk it was a solemn place, rolling prairie edged on its eastern extremity by a steep bluff. The soil was stony, the sagebrush gray at the end of a dry summer. It would have been utterly quiet if not for the sound of the engineering crew pumping compressed air into the frames of a dozen inflatable quonsets.

  Atop the bluff, an antelope stood in silhouette against the fading blue of the sky. It raised its head, scented us, trotted out of view.

  Ray Mosely stepped up behind Sue and took her arm. “You can sort of feel it,” he said, “can’t you?”

  The tau turbulence, he meant. If so, I was immune to it. There might have been a faint scent of ozone in the air, but all I could feel for certain was the cooling wind at my back.

  “It’s a pretty place,” Sue said. “But stark.”

  In the morning we filled it with earthmovers and graders and razored all its prettiness away.

  The civilian telecom network, like so many other public works, had lately fallen into disrepair. Satellites dropped out of their orbits and were not replaced; lightpipes aged and cracked; the old copper wires were vulnerable to weather. Despite all that I was lucky enough, the following night, to get a voice line through to Ashlee.

  Our first day at the dig had been enormously busy but surprisingly productive. Sue’s technical people had triangulated the center of the arrival site, where the military engineers graded a level space and poured a concrete slab to serve as a foundation for the tau-variable device, called “the core” for short. It wasn’t, of course, a nuclear core in the conventional sense, but the fragment of exotic matter it was designed to produce required similar shielding, both thermal and magnetic.

  Smaller foundations were poured for the several redundant diesel generators that would power it and for the smaller generators that ran our string of lights and our electronics. By the second sunset we had turned our isolated highland into an industrial barrens of almost Victorian bleakness and had frightened away an astonishing number of jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and snakes. Our lamps glowed in the darkness like the ancient sentinel fires of the Crow or the Blackfoot, the Sioux or the Cheyenne; the air stank of volatiles and plastic.

  Sue had assigned me lookout duty, but that was so obviously a piece of make-work that I had traded it for the less glamorous but infinitely more useful work of digging pit latrines and hauling lime. Just before sunset, numb with exhaustion, I carried my pocket terminal to the rising ground below the bluff and established the link with Ashlee. There was bandwidth enough for voice, not images, but that was all right. It was her voice I needed to hear.

  Everything was fine, she said. The money Hitch had advanced us was paying some bills we had long needed to pay, and she had even taken Kaitlin out to a couple of movies. She didn’t understand, she said, why it had been necessary to leave Morris Torrance there to keep an eye on her — he was sitting in his car on the street outside the apartment. He wasn’t a nuisance, she said, but he made her feel like she was under surveillance.

  Which she was. Sue had been worried that Kuinist elements might have traced her to Minneapolis, and I had insisted on protection for Ash — which took the form of the venerable but well-trained Morris Torrance doing reluctant guard duty. I had refused to leave Ashlee without protection if there was even a vague threat to her safety; Sue had chosen Morris.

  “He’s a nice enough guy,” Ash said, “but it’s a little unnerving, being shadowed by him.”

  “Just until I get back,” I told her.

  “Too long.”

  “Think of it as a way to preserve my peace of mind.”

  “Think of it as a reason to come back soon.”

  “Soon as I can, Ash.”

  “So what’s it like… Wyoming?”

  I lost a syllable or two of that to dropout but took the gist. “Wish you could see it. The sun’s just gone down. The air smells like sagebrush.” The air smelled like creosote and lime and hot metal, but I preferred the lie. “The sky’s almost as pretty as you are.”

  “…Bullshit.”

  “I spent the day digging a latrine.”

  “That’s more like it.”

  “I miss you, Ash.”

  “You, too.” She paused, and there was a sound that might have been the security bell back home; then she said, “I think there’s somebody at the door.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow.”

  “…Tomorrow,” she echoed, and then the line shut down completely.

  But I couldn’t reach her the next day. We couldn’t get a line through anywhere east of the Dakotas, despite all the multiple redundancies still embedded in the networks. A bunch of nodal servers must have gone down, Ray Mosely told me, possibly due to yet another act of Kuinist sabotage.

  It was because of the communications problem that the DOD media guru decided to alert the press a day earlier than we had planned. There were lots of network video stringers still covering the unrest in Cheyenne, but it would take them at least another twenty-four hours to get to Modesty Creek — where they were needed.

  That next night the engineers erected a circle of achingly bright sulfur-dot lamps. We worked while the air was cool and th
e moon was up, carving a blockhouse out of the dry earth a mile from the touchdown site, burying cables and unrolling enormous lengths of link fence. The fencing would keep out both sightseers and Kuinists, should any of them get wind of the effort. Hitch opined that it would keep out antelopes but not any number of larger mammals, not without an armed guard. But we had that, too.

  I crawled into my cot at sunrise bleeding from both my hands.

  The siege was about to begin.

  Twenty-three

  Until now we’d had the site to ourselves. Shortly, the world would be with us.

  And everything that implied. Not just press people, but Kuinists of all stripes… though we hoped the isolated location and short notice would preclude a massive haj. (“This is our haj,” Sue had said more than once. “This one belongs to us.”)

  So our Uniforces troops arrayed themselves around our fenced perimeter and up along the bluff, and we notified the Highway Patrol and state officials, who were deeply unhappy with us for making our work public but lacked the authority to shut us down. Ray Mosely figured we had at most twelve hours before the first outsiders began to arrive. We had already managed to erect a cranelike superstructure above the poured foundation that would support the tau core, and to rig and test all our ancillary equipment. But we weren’t finished.

  Sue hovered around the large flatbed truck which contained the core itself, second-guessing the engineers, until Ray and I distracted her with lunch. We choked down mil-surplus meals under a canvas tent while Ray walked us through a checklist. The work was ahead of schedule, which served to calm some of Sue’s fears.

  At least briefly. Sue was what the doctors call “agitated.” In fact she gave every indication that she was on the brink of nervous collapse. She moved restlessly and aimlessly, drummed her fingers, blinked, confessed she hadn’t been able to sleep. Even when she was engaged in conversation, her eyes tended to stray toward the concrete core emplacement and the glittering steel tubing of the support structure.

  She continued to talk relentlessly about the project. Her immediate fear was that the press might be delayed or the Chronolith arrive prematurely. “It’s not so much what we do here,” she said, “as what we’re seen to do here. We don’t succeed unless the world sees us succeed.”

  (And I considered what a slender reed that really was. We had only Sue’s assurance that destroying a Chronolith at the moment of its arrival might tip the balance of this shadow war — might destabilize the feedback loop on which Kuin allegedly depended. But how much of that was calculation, how much wishful thinking? By virtue of her position and her fervent advocacy Sue had been able to carry us all along with her, invested as she was with the authority of her mathematics and her profound understanding of tau turbulence. But that didn’t mean she was necessarily right. Or even, necessarily, sane.)

  After lunch we watched as a crew of stevedores and a crane operator lifted the tau core from its crate and hauled it as delicately as if it were compressed dynamite to its resting place. The core was a sphere three meters in diameter, anodized black and studded with electronic ports and cable bays. I gathered from what Sue had told me that it was essentially a magnetic bottle in which some exotic form of cold plasma was already contained. When the core was activated, an array of internal high-energy devices would initiate fermionic decohesion and a few nearly massless particles of tau-indeterminate matter would be created.

  This material, Sue claimed, would be sufficient to destabilize the arriving Chronolith attempting to occupy its space. What that meant was still unclear, at least to me. Sue said the interaction of the competing tau spaces would be violent but not “unduly energetic,” i.e., it would probably not wipe out all of Modesty County and us along with it. Probably.

  By sunset the core was fixed in place and linked to our electronics through a bundle of lightpipes and conductors jacketed in liquid nitrogen. We still had much to do, but the heavy lifting and digging was essentially finished. The civilians celebrated with grilled flank steaks and generous rations of bottled beer. A bunch of the older engineers gathered by the roadside after dinner, talked about better days and sang old Lux Ebone songs (much to the chagrin of the young Uniforces troops). I joined in on the choruses.

  We suffered our first casualty that night.

  Isolated we might have been, but there was still occasional traffic on the two-lane county road that had brought us here. We had men north and south along the roadside, soldiers wearing the orange brassards of a highway work crew. They carried glow torches and waved on anyone who seemed more than casually curious about our trucks and gear. The strategy had worked reasonably well so far.

  Not long after moonrise, however, a man in a verdigris-green landau cut his motor and lights at the top of the northern rise and rolled silently into the breakdown lane not fifty feet from our lead truck, in the shadows where the glow of the camp lights began to fade.

  He stepped out onto the gravel berm with his back to two approaching security personnel, and when he turned he revealed a heavy indeterminate shape that proved to be a pump-action shotgun of ancient provenance. He turned and fired it at the Uniforces men, killing one and permanently blinding the other.

  Fortunately the chief of security that night was a bright and well-trained woman named Marybeth Pearlstein, who witnessed the act from a watch station fifty feet up the road. A scant few seconds later she came around the bumper of the nearest truck with her rifle at ready and took down the assailant with one well-placed shot.

  The assailant turned out to be a Copperhead crank well known to local police. A County Coroner’s truck pulled up two hours later and took the bodies away; an ambulance carried the survivor into the Modesty County medical center. There might have been an inquest, I suppose, if events had turned out differently.

  What I didn’t know—

  That is, what I learned later—

  Pardon me, but fuck these stupid and impotent words.

  Can you hear it, grinding away under the printed page, this outrage disinterred from the soil of too many years?

  What I didn’t know was that several of the Texas PK militia — the people Hitch had told me about, the people who had taken two of his fingers — had already followed a trail of clandestine connections as far as the home of Whitman Delahunt.

  Whit, it seemed, had kept his colleagues informed of my comings and goings ever since I had traveled to Portillo in search of Kaitlin. Even then, the PK and Copperhead elites had taken an interest in Sue Chopra: as a potent enemy, or worse, a commodity, a potential resource.

  I don’t imagine Whit could have foreseen the consequences of his actions. He was, after all, only sharing some interesting information with his Copperhead buddies (who shared it with their friends, and so on down the line from Whit’s suburban universe all the way to the underground militant cadres). In Whit’s world consequences were always remote; rewards were immediate, else they were not rewards. There was nothing genuinely political about Whit Delahunt’s Copperhead leanings. For Whit the movement was a kind of Rotary or Kiwanis, dues paid in the coin of information. I doubt he ever really believed in a physical, substantial Kuin. Had Kuin appeared before him, Whit would have been as dumbfounded as a Sunday Christian confronted by the Carpenter of Galilee.

  Which is not, I hasten to add, an excuse.

  But I’m sure Whit never envisioned these Texas militiamen knocking at his door well after midnight, entering his home as if it were their own (because he was one of their own) and extracting from him at gunpoint the address of the apartment where Ashlee and I lived.

  Janice was present when this invasion took place. She tried to persuade Whit not to answer the invaders’ questions, and when he ignored her she tried to phone the police. For this unsuccessful effort she received a pistol-whipping that broke her jaw and fractured her collarbone. They both would have been killed, I’m sure, if not for Whit’s promise to keep Janice under control — he had nothing to gain by reporting any of this and I’m sure
he told himself he was helpless to stop it — and his potential further utility to the movement.

  What neither Whit nor Janice could have known was that one of the militiamen had taken a longtime personal interest in the activities of Sue Chopra and Hitch Paley — this was, of course, Adam Mills. Adam had returned to his hometown in a frenzy of antinostalgia, delighted that the threads of his life had knotted back on themselves in such a strange and satisfying fashion. It gave him a sense of destiny, I suppose; a feeling of profound personal significance.

  Had he known the phrase, he might have considered himself “deep in the tau turbulence.” Adam had lost two fingertips to frostbite in the aftermath of Portillo — not coincidentally, the same fingertips he later subtracted by machete from Hitch — and this had left him with a feeling of entitlement, as if he had been anointed by Kuin himself.

  Kait, thank God, was asleep in the apartment over the garage during these events. There was noise, but not enough to wake her. She wasn’t involved.

  At least, not yet.

  Sleepless in the aftermath of the roadside shooting, I walked a little while with Ray Mosely on the cluttered ground between the core tower and the quonsets.

  Much of the camp had finally settled down, and apart from the muted hum of the generators there was not much noise. In effect, it was possible at last to hear the silence — to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

  I had never been close to Ray, but we had grown a little closer over the duration of this trip. When I first met him he was the kind of book-smart, underconfident overachiever who fears nothing so much as his own vulnerability. It had made him defensive and brittle. He was still that person. But he was also the end result of years of compulsive denial, middle-aged now and a little more cognizant of his own shortcomings.

  “You’re worried about Sue,” he said.