I wondered whether I ought to talk about this. But we were alone, out of earshot. Nobody here but me and Ray and the jackrabbits.
I said, “She’s obviously under stress. And she’s not dealing with it particularly well.”
“Would you? In her position?”
“Probably not. But it’s the way she talks. You know what I mean. It starts to sound a little relentless. And you begin to wonder—”
“Whether she’s sane?”
“Whether the logic that brought us here is as airtight as she thinks it is.”
Ray seemed to consider this. He put his hands in his pockets and gave me a rueful smile. “You can trust the math.”
“I’m not worried about the math. We’re not here for the math, Ray. We’re ten or fifteen leaps of faith beyond that.”
“You’re saying you don’t trust her.”
“What does that mean? Do I think she’s honest? Yes. Do I think she means well? Of course she means well. But do I trust her judgment? At this point, I’m not sure.”
“You agreed to come here with us.”
“She can be convincing.”
Ray paused and looked out into the darkness, out past the tau core in its steel framework, to the scrub and the moonlit wildgrass and the stars. “Think about what she’s given up, Scott. Think about the life she could have had. She could have been loved.” He smiled wanly. “I know it’s obvious how I feel about her. And I know how ridiculous that is. How fucking clownlike. How stupid. She’s not even heterosexual. But if not me, it could have been someone else. One of those women she’s always dating and ignoring, splicing in and out of her life like a spare reel of film. But she pushed those people away because her work was important, and the harder she worked the more important her work became, and now she’s given herself to it altogether, she belongs to it. Every step she ever took was a step toward this place. Right now I think even Sue must be wondering whether she’s delusional.”
“So we owe her the benefit of the doubt?”
“No,” Ray said. “We owe her more than that. We owe her our loyalty.”
Fond as ever of having the last word, he chose that moment to turn and head back for camp.
I stayed behind, standing mute between the moon and the floodlights. From this distance the tau core seemed a small thing. A very small thing with which to lever such a long result.
When I did sleep I slept soundly and long. I woke at noon under the translucent roof of the inflated quonset, alone but for a few off-shift security staff and exhausted night crew.
No one had thought to wake me. Everyone had been too busy.
I stepped out of the shade of the quonset into blistering sunlight. The sky was viciously bright, a thin blue veneer between the prairie and the sun. But it was the noise that struck me more immediately. If you’ve ever been near a sports stadium on the day of a game you know that sound, the rumble of massed human voices.
I found Hitch Paley by the food tent.
“More press than we bargained for, Scotty,” he said. “There’s a whole mob of them blocking the road. We got Highway Patrol trying to clear them off the tarmac. You know we’ve already been denounced in Congress? People covering their asses in case we don’t bring this off.”
“You think we have a chance?”
“Maybe. If they give us time.”
But no one wanted to give us time. The Kuinist militias were arriving by the truckload, and by the following morning the shooting had begun in earnest.
Twenty-four
I know what the future smells like.
The future, that is, imposed on the past; past and future mingled like two innocuous substances which when combined produce a toxin. The future smells like alkaline dust and ionized air, like hot metal and glacier ice. And not a little like cordite.
The night had been relatively quiet. Today, the day of the arrival, I woke from a round of exhausted sleep to the sound of sporadic gunfire — not close enough to inspire immediate panic; close enough that I dressed in a hurry.
Hitch was back at the food tent, complacently eating cold baked beans from a paper bowl. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s under control.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
He stretched and yawned. “What you hear is a bunch of Kuinists south along the road having words with security. Some of them are armed but all they want to do is shoot into the air and shake their fists. Basically, they’re spectators. What we also have is an equal number of journalists trying to get closer than the perimeter fences. The Uniforces are sorting them out. Sue wants them close to the arrival but not, you know, too close.”
“So how close is too close?”
“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? The wonks and the engineers are all clustered down by the bunker. The press people are setting up a little farther east.”
The bunker, so-called, was a trench emplacement with a wooden roof, located a mile from the core, where Sue had set up gear to monitor and initiate the tau event. The trench was equipped with heaters to provide at least a little protection against the cold shock, and in a worst-case scenario the bunker was defensible against small-arms fire.
The core itself remained almost preposterously vulnerable, but the Uniforces people had pledged to protect it as long as they could keep our perimeters intact. The good news was that this ragtag crew of Kuinists down the road did not (Hitch said) constitute anything like a superior force.
“We may just pull this off, Scotty,” he said. “Given a little luck.”
“How’s Sue?”
“I haven’t seen her since sunrise, but — how is she? Wound up, is how she is. It wouldn’t surprise me if she blew an artery.” He looked at me oddly. “Tell me something. How well do you know her?”
“I’ve known her since I was a student.”
“Yeah, but how well? I’ve worked for her a long time, too, but I can’t honestly say I know her. She talks about her work — and that’s all she talks about, at least to me. Is she ever lonely, afraid, angry?”
This was an incongruous conversation to be having, it seemed to me, with the sound of rifle fire still popping down the road. “What’s your point?”
“We don’t know anything about her, but here we are, doing what she tells us. Which strikes me as peculiar, when I think about it.”
It struck me as peculiar, too, at least at that moment. What was I doing here? Nothing but risking my life, certainly nothing useful. But that wasn’t what Sue would say. You’re waiting for your time, she would say. Waiting for the turbulence.
I thought of what Hitch had told me in Minneapolis, his flat declaration that he had killed people. “How well do any of us know each other?”
“It’s cooler this morning,” Hitch said. “Even in the sun. You notice that?”
It was some days before this that Adam Mills had arrived at his mother’s door along with five thuggish friends and an assortment of concealed weapons.
I won’t dwell on this.
Adam, of course, was psychotic. Clinically psychotic, I mean. All the markers were there. He was antisocial, a bully and, in a certain perverse way, a natural leader. His mental universe was a cluttered attic of secondhand ideology and blatant fantasy, all centered on Kuin or whatever it was he imagined Kuin to be. He had never formed the natural human attachment to family or friends. He was by all evidence absent a conscience.
Ashlee, in her darker moods, would blame herself for what Adam had become; but Adam was a product of his brain chemistry, not his upbringing. A genome profile and some simple blood tests would have flagged his problem at an early age. He might even have been treatable, to some limited extent. But Ash had never had the money for that kind of up-market medical intervention.
I cannot imagine, and I do not wish to imagine, what Ashlee endured in her few hours with Adam. At the end of it she had revealed the location of the arrival site in Wyoming and the fact that I was there along with Hitch Paley and Sue Chopra — and the key fact
, which was that we expected to disable a Chronolith.
She is not to be blamed for this.
The result was that Adam had reliable information about the Kuin stone and our efforts to destroy it a good forty-eight hours before the news reached the press.
Adam promptly headed west, but he left two of his followers behind to prevent Ashlee from making any inconvenient calls. He could have simply killed her, but he elected instead to keep her in reserve, possibly as a hostage.
Bad as this was, it was not the worst of it.
The worst of it was that Kaitlin came to the apartment not long after Adam left, still ignorant of what had happened to Janice and expecting to join Ashlee for a leisurely lunch and maybe a movie in the evening.
The statistical measurement of low-level ambient radiation had been refined since Jerusalem and Portillo. Sue’s people were able to establish a much more accurate countdown for this arrival. But we didn’t need a countdown to feel it in the air.
Here’s how it stood when I climbed out of the bunker for a last breath of fresh air, some twenty minutes before the core was due to be activated.
There had been more gunfire south along the highway and sporadically at various points along the perimeter fence. So far, local and state police had managed to contain the Kuinists — there was a lot of anti-Kuinist sentiment in Wyoming since the storming of the State House, not least among civil servants and police. One Uniforces soldier had been injured by an Omega militiaman attempting to run the fence in an ATV, and four armed Kuinists of unknown affiliation had been shot to death in an effort to storm the northern checkpoint earlier this afternoon. Since then there had been only gestures and scattered arrests… although the crowd was still growing.
Sue had allowed a body of journalists to set up recording equipment well behind the bunker, and I was able to see them from where I stood, a line of trucks and tripods about a football field’s length to the east. There were dozens of these people, most diverted here from Cheyenne, and they represented all the major news providers and not a few of the more respectable independents. As many of them as there were, they seemed lost in the brown vastness of the land. A second contingent of independent journalists had set up their gear on the bluff above the site, a little closer than Sue would have liked, but our media liaison called these folks “very dedicated and insistent” — that is, stubborn and stupid. I could see their cameras, too, bristling above the rim rock.
Many of our machine operators and manual laborers had already left the site. The remaining civilian engineers and scientific crew were either crowded into the bunker now or watching from behind the line of journalists.
The tau core was suspended in its steel frame over the concrete pad like a fat black egg. A plume of dust in the near distance was Hitch Paley, bringing the last van of our original convoy up the graded access road from the highway to park it near the bunker. All these vehicles had been cold-proofed against the arrival.
Also obvious was the tau chill, the premonitory coolness of the air — and not just of the air but of everything, earth and flesh, blood and bone. We had lost only a fraction of a centigrade degree at this stage. The cold shock was just beginning to ramp up, but it was already perceptible, a delicate prickling of the skin.
I took out my phone and made yet another attempt to reach Ashlee. The call failed to go through, just as all my calls had failed to go through for most of a week now. Sometimes there was a general failure message from the system, sometimes (as now) only a blank screen and a whisper of distorted audio. I put the phone away.
I was surprised when Sue Chopra opened the steel bunker door and stepped out behind me. Her face was wan and she was visibly trembling. She shaded her eyes against the sun.
I said, “Shouldn’t you be down below?”
“It’s all clockwork now,” she said. “It runs itself.”
She stumbled over a mesquite root and I took her arm. Her arm was cold.
“Scotty,” she said, as if recognizing me for the first time.
“Take a deep breath,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Just tired. And I didn’t eat.” She shook her head quizzically. “The question that keeps coming to mind… did something bring me here? Or did I bring myself? That’s the strange thing about tau turbulence. It gives us a destiny. But it’s a destiny without a god. Destiny with no one in charge.”
“Unless it’s Kuin.”
She frowned. “Oh, no, Scotty. Don’t say that.”
“Not long now. How’s it look downstairs?”
“Like I said. Clockwork. Good, solid numbers. You’re right, I need to go back… but will you come with me?”
“Why?”
“Because there’s actually a fairly high level of ionizing radiation out here. You’re getting a chest X-ray every twenty minutes.” And then she smiled. “But mainly because I find your presence reassuring.”
It was a good enough reason, and I would have gone with her, but that was when we felt the crump of a distant explosion. The sound of gunfire erupted again, much closer than it should have been.
Sue instinctively dropped to her knees. Idiotically, I remained standing. The firing began as a pop-pop staccato but immediately increased to a nearly continuous volley. The fence (and a big gate) was yards behind us. I looked that way and saw Uniforces personnel taking cover and raising their weapons, but the source of the fire wasn’t immediately obvious.
Sue had fixed her eyes on the bluff. I followed her gaze.
Wispy smoke issued from the Uniforces observation point there.
“The journalists,” she whispered.
But of course they weren’t journalists. They were Kuinists — a group of militiamen bright enough to have highjacked a network truck outside of Modesty Creek and savvy enough to have passed themselves off plausibly to our media-handlers at the gate. (Five genuine net newspeople were later found beaten and strangled in the rabbitbrush twenty miles down the road.) A dozen less presentable Kuinists in unmarked cars were smuggled in as technicians; weapons were effectively hidden amidst a cargo of lenses, broadcast apparatus, and imaging gear.
These people installed themselves on the bluff overlooking the tau core, near the Uniforces observation point. When they saw Hitch bring the last truck up to the bunker, they understood that to mean that the arrival was imminent. They destroyed the Uniforces outpost with an explosive device, picked off any survivors, then focused their efforts on the tau core.
I saw the puffs of smoke from their rifles, faint against the blue sky. They were too far from the core for accurate marksmanship, but sparks flew where their bullets struck the steel frame. Behind us, Uniforces gatekeepers began to return fire and radioed for support. Unfortunately the bulk of the forces were concentrated at the south gate, where the Kuinist mob had begun to fire on them in earnest.
Belatedly, I squatted in the dirt next to Sue. “The core is pretty heavily shielded—”
“The core is, I guess, but the cables and connectors are vulnerable — the instrumentation, Scotty!”
She rose and ran for the bunker. I had no choice but to follow, but first I waved in Hitch, who had just arrived and must have confused the gunfire from the bluff with the skirmish to the south of us. But when he saw Sue’s awkward headlong dash he understood the urgency.
The air was suddenly much colder, and a wind came gusting from the dry prairie, dust-devils marching like pilgrims into the heart of the tau event.
Even the heated concrete-lined bunker was colder than Sue had predicted as the thermal shock began to ramp up. It numbed the extremities, cooled the blood, imposed a strange languid slowness on a sequence of terrifying events. We all struggled into thermally-adaptive jackets and headgear as Hitch sealed the door behind him.
Like clockwork, the tau-core initiation process proceeded; like clockwork, it was immune at this point to human intervention. Technicians sat by their monitors with clenched fists, nothing to do but hope a stray bullet didn’t interrupt the
flow of data.
I had seen the core’s connectors and cables, Teflon-insulated and Kevlar-sheathed and thick as firehoses. I didn’t think conventional bullets fired from a great range posed much danger, despite Sue’s fears.
But the militiamen had brought more than rifles.
The countdown clock passed the five-minute point when there was the rumble of a distant detonation. Dust shook down from the plank ceiling and the lights in the bunker winked off.
“Hit a generator,” I heard Hitch say, and someone else howled, “We’re fucking screwed!”
I couldn’t see Sue — I couldn’t see anything at all. The darkness was absolute. There were nearly forty of us crowded into the bunker behind its elaborate earthworks.
Our backup generator had obviously failed. Auxiliary batteries restored the pilot lights on the electronic gear but cast no useful light. Forty people in a dark, enclosed space. I pictured in my mind the entrance, a steel door set at the top of a concrete stepway maybe a yard from where I stood, fixing the direction in my mind.
And then — the arrival.
The Chronolith reached deep into the bedrock.
A Chronolith absorbs matter and does not displace it; but the cold shock fractured hidden veins of moisture, creating a shockwave that traveled through the earth. The floor seemed to rise and fall. Those of us who hadn’t grabbed a handhold fell to the ground. I think everyone screamed. It was a terrible sound, far worse than any physical damage done.
The cold got colder. I felt sensation drain from my fingertips.
It was one of our engineers who panicked and pushed his way to the exit hatch. I supect all he wanted was daylight — wanted it so badly that the need had overcome his reason. I was close enough to see him in the dim light from the console arrays. He found the steps, lunged upward on all fours, touched the door handle. The lever must have been shockingly cold — he screamed even as he put his weight against it. The handle chunked down convulsively and the door sprang outward.
The blue sky was gone, replaced by curtains of screaming dust.
The Chronoliths Page 24