The Chronoliths

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The engineer lurched out. Wind and sand and granules of ice swept in. Had Sue anticipated an arrival as violent as this? Perhaps not — the journalists lined up east of us must have been sprawled in the dirt by now. And I doubted anyone was shooting from the bluff, not anymore.

  The thermal shock had peaked but our body temperatures were still dropping. It’s an odd sensation. Cold, yes, indescribably cold, but lazy, deceptive, narcotic. I felt myself shivering inside my overworked protective clothing. The shivering felt like an invitation to sleep.

  “Stay in the bunker!” Sue shouted from somewhere deep in the trench behind me. “You’ll all be safer in the bunker! Scotty, close that door!”

  But few of the engineers and technicians heeded her advice. They spilled out past me into the screeching wind, running — insofar as the cold allowed them to run; more like a stumbling waltz — toward the line of parked vehicles.

  Some few even managed to climb inside and start their engines. These vehicles had been proofed against the cold shock, but they roared like wounded animals, pistons grinding against cylinders. Arrival winds had battered down the perimeter fence and the civilian faction of our convoy began to vanish into the teeth of the storm.

  West of us, where the Chronolith must have been, I could see nothing but a wall of fog and dust.

  I pushed my way up the steps and pulled the hatch shut. The engineer had left some skin on the frigid lever. I left some of my own.

  Sue secured some battery lamps and began to switch them on. Maybe a dozen of us remained in the bunker.

  As soon we had some light Sue slumped down against one of the inert telemetry devices. I reeled across the room and joined her. Almost fell against her. Our arms touched, and her skin was shockingly cold (as I suppose was my own). Ray was nearby but had closed his eyes and seemed only intermittently conscious. Hitch squatted by the door, stubbornly alert.

  Sue put her head on my shoulder.

  “It didn’t work, Scotty,” she whispered.

  “We’ll think about that later.”

  “But it didn’t work. And if it didn’t work—”

  “Hush.”

  The Chronolith had touched down. The first Chronolith on American soil… and not a small one, judging by the secondary effects. Sue was right. We had failed.

  “But Scotty,” she said, her voice infinitely weary and bewildered, “if it didn’t work… what am I doing here? What am I for?”

  I thought it was a rhetorical question. But she had never been more serious.

  Twenty-five

  I suppose, when history allows a degree of objectivity, someone will write an aesthetic appreciation of the Chronoliths.

  Obscene as this idea may seem, the monuments are arguably specimens of art, each one individual, no two quite alike.

  Some are crude, like the Kuin of Chumphon: relatively small, lacking detail, like sand-cast jewelry; the work of a novice. Others are more finely sculpted (though they remain as bleakly generic as works of Soviet Realism) and more carefully considered. For instance, the Kuins of Islamabad or Capetown: Kuin as gentle giant, benevolently masculine.

  But the most recognizable Chronoliths are the monsters, the city-wreckers. The Kuin of Bangkok, straddling the rude brown water of the Chao Phrya; the Robed Kuin of Bombay; the stern and patriarchal Kuin of Jerusalem, seeming to embrace the world’s faiths even as religious relics lie scattered at his feet.

  The Kuin of Wyoming surpassed all these. Sue had been right about the significance of this monument. It was the first American Chronolith, a proclamation of victory in the heartland of a major Western power, and if its manifestation in this rural wasteland was an act of deference toward the great American cities, the symbolism remained both brazen and unmistakable.

  The cold shock eased at last. We stirred out of our torpor and woke to a dawning awareness of what had happened here and what we had failed to achieve.

  Hitch, characteristically, gave first thought to the practical business of staying alive. “Rouse up,” he said hoarsely. “We need to be away from here before the Kuinists come looking for us, which probably won’t be long. We need to avoid the main road, too.”

  Sue hesitated, regarding the battery-powered gear lining the wall of the bunker. The instrumentation blinked incoherently, starved for input.

  “You, too,” Hitch said.

  “This could be important,” she said. “Some of these numbers pegged awfully high.”

  “Fuck the numbers.” He ushered us stumbling to the door.

  Sue wailed at the sight of the Chronolith dominating the sky.

  Ray came up behind her; I followed Hitch. One of our few remaining engineers, a gray-haired man named MacGruder, stepped out and promptly fell to his knees in an act of pure if involuntary worship.

  The Kuin was — well, it beggars description.

  It was immense and it was frankly beautiful. It towered above the nearest large landmark, the stony bluff where the saboteurs had parked themselves. Of the tau core and its attendant structures there was, of course, no sign. The skin of ice on the Chronolith was already dropping away — there had not been much moisture in the ambient air — and the monument’s details were unobscured save by the mists that sublimated from its surface. Wreathed in its own cloud, it was majestic, immense, tall as a mountain. From this angle the expression on the Kuin’s face was oblique, but it suggested a smug complacency, the untroubled confidence of an assured conqueror.

  Ice crystals melted and fell around us as a fine cold mist. The wind shifted erratically, now warm, now cool.

  The main body of Kuinists had gathered to the south of the site. Many of them must have been disabled by the thermal shock, but the perimeter fence there veered a good couple of miles from the touchdown site, and judging by the renewed crackle of gunfire they were still lively enough to keep the Uniforces engaged. Soldiers closer to us had survived in their thermal gear but seemed disoriented and uncertain — their communications equipment had shut down and they were rallying to the flattened ruins of the east gate.

  Of the militiamen who had disabled the tau core there was no sign.

  Ray told the remaining engineers and technicians who shuffled out of the bunker to stick with the Uniforces. The journalists in the lee of the bunker must have had a different thought: They barreled past the fallen fence in their bulletproof vans. They had acquired and were no doubt already broadcasting this stunning image, the vast new Kuin of Wyoming. Our failure was an established fact.

  Ray said, “Help me get Sue to the van.”

  Sue had stopped weeping but was staring fixedly at the Chronolith. Ray stood next to her, supporting her. She whispered, “This isn’t right…”

  “Of course it isn’t right. Come on, Sue. We need to get away.”

  She shook off Ray’s hand. “No, I mean it’s not right. The numbers pegged high. I need a sextant. And a map. There’s a topographical map in the van, but — Hitch!”

  Hitch turned back.

  “I need a sextant! Ask one of the engineers!”

  “The fuck?” Hitch said.

  “A sextant!”

  Hitch told Ray to get the van started while he hurried back with a digital sextant and a tripod from the survey vehicle. Sue set up the instrument despite the gusting wind and scribbled numbers into her notebook. Ray said, gently but firmly, “I don’t think it matters anymore.”

  “What?”

  “Taking measurements.”

  “I’m not doing this,” she said briskly, “for fun,” but when she tried to fold up the tripod she fainted into Ray’s arms, and we carried her to the van.

  I picked her notebook out of the icy mud.

  Hitch drove while Ray and I got a cushion under Sue’s head and a blanket over her body. The Uniforces people tried to flag us down. A guard with a rifle and a nervous expression leaned in the window and glared at Hitch. “Sir, I can’t guarantee your safety—”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know,” and gunned the engine.r />
  We would be safer — Sue would be safer — well away from here. Hitch cut across the flatlands on one of the local roads. These were dirt trails that dead-ended, most of them, at failed ranches or dry cattle tanks. Not an especially promising escape route. But Hitch had always preferred back roads.

  Despite the elaborate coldproofing, our engine had sustained damage in the thermal shock. The van was kicking and dying by nightfall, when we came within sight of a cinderblock shed with a crude tin roof. We stopped here, not because the building was in any way inviting — many seasons of rain had come through the empty windows; generations of field mice had built and abandoned nests inside — but because it would serve to disguise our presence and would shelter the van from easy view. We had at least put a few miles behind us.

  And with nothing left to do, the sun setting beyond the now-distant but still dominating figure of Kuin and a brisk wind combing the wild grass, we huddled in the vehicle and tried to sleep. We didn’t have to try very hard. We were all exhausted. Even Sue slept, though she had revived quickly from her faint and had been alert enough on the drive east.

  She slept through the night and was up at dawn.

  Come morning, Hitch opened the van’s engine compartment and ran the resident diagnostics. Ray Mosely blinked at the noise but then rolled back to sleep.

  I woke hungry, remained hungry (we had only emergency rations), and walked past the paint-scabbed wall of the shed to the place on the grassland where Sue had once again unfolded our tripod and sextant.

  The surveyor’s tool was aimed at the distant Chronolith. Sue had opened a top map and laid it at her feet, the corners weighted with rocks. A brisk wind tousled her coiled hair. Her clothes were dirty and her enormous eyeglasses smudged; but, incredibly, she managed to smile when she noticed me.

  “Morning, Scotty,” she said.

  The Chronolith was an icy pillar silhouetted against the haze-blue horizon. It drew the eye the way any incongruous or shocking thing does. The Kuin of Wyoming gazed eastward from his pedestal, almost directly at us.

  Aimed at us, I thought, like an arrow.

  I said, trying to restrain the irony, “Are you learning anything?”

  “A lot.” She faced me. Her smile was peculiar. Happy-sad. Her eyes were wide and wet. “Too much. Way too much.”

  “Sue—”

  “No, don’t say anything practical. May I ask you a question?”

  I shrugged.

  “If you were packing for a trip to the future, Scotty, what would you take?”

  “What would I take? I don’t know. What would you take?”

  “I would take… a secret. Can you keep a secret?”

  It was an unsettling question. It was something my mother used to ask me when she began to bend into insanity. She would hover over me like a malign shadow and say, “Can you keep a secret, Scotty?”

  The secret was inevitably some paranoid assertion: that cats could read her mind; that my father was an impostor; that the government was trying to poison her.

  “Come on, Scotty,” Sue said, “don’t look at me like that.”

  “If you tell me,” I said, “it’s not a secret anymore.”

  “Well, that’s true. But I have to tell someone. I can’t tell Ray, because Ray is in love with me. And I can’t tell Hitch, because Hitch doesn’t love anyone at all.”

  “That’s cryptic.”

  “Yes. I can’t help it.” She glanced at the far blue pillar of the Kuin. “We may not have much time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “I mean, it won’t last. The Chronolith. It isn’t stable. It’s too massive. Look at it, Scotty. See the way it’s sort of quivering?”

  “That’s heat coming off the prairie. It’s an optical illusion.”

  “In part. Not entirely. I’ve run the numbers over and over. The numbers that pegged back at the bunker. These numbers.” Her notebook. “I triangulated its height and its radius, at least roughly. And no matter how stingy I am with the estimates, it comes up past the limit.”

  “The limit?”

  “Remember? If a Chronolith is too massive, it’s unstable — if I could have published the work they might have called it the Chopra Limit.” Her peculiar smile faded and she looked away. “I may be too vain for the work I have to do. I can’t let that happen. I have to be humble, Scotty. Because I will, God knows, be humbled.”

  “You’re saying you think the Chronolith will destroy itself.”

  “Yes. Within the day.”

  “That would hardly be a secret.”

  “No, of course, but the cause of it will be. The Chopra Limit is my work. I haven’t shared it with anyone, and I doubt anyone else is doing triangulation. The Kuin won’t last long enough for accurate measurement.”

  This was making me nervous. “Sue, even if this is all true, people will know—”

  “Know what? All anyone will know is that the Chronolith was destroyed and that we were here trying to destroy it. They’ll draw the obvious conclusion. That we succeeded, if a little belatedly. The truth will be our secret.”

  “Why a secret?”

  “Because I mustn’t tell, Scotty, and neither must you. We have to carry this secret at least twenty years and three months into the future or else it won’t work.”

  “Dammit, Sue — what won’t work?”

  She blinked. “Poor Scotty. You’re confused. Let me explain.”

  I couldn’t follow every detail of her explanation, but this is what I came away with.

  We had not been defeated.

  Plenty of press folks were doubtless still reporting the arrival, and they would also witness — in a matter of hours if not minutes — the spectacular collapse of the Chronolith. That broadcast image would (Sue claimed) interrupt the feedback loop and shatter Kuin’s aura of invincibility. Win or lose, Kuin would no longer be destiny. He would be reduced to the status of an enemy.

  And the world must think we had succeeded; the Chopra Limit must remain a closely-held secret…

  Because, Sue believed, it was not a coincidence that this Chronolith had surpassed the physical limit of stability.

  It was, she declared, quite obviously an act of sabotage.

  Contemplate that: the sabotage of a Chronolith, by design. Who would commit such an act? Clearly, an insider. Clearly, someone who understood not only the crude physics of the Chronoliths but their finest nuances. Someone who understood the physical limits and knew how to push them.

  “That arrow,” Sue said almost sheepishly, shocked at the temerity of her words and not a little frightened: “That arrow is pointing at me.”

  Of course it was madness.

  It was megalomania, self-aggrandizing and self-abnegating, both at once. Sue had elevated herself to the rank of Shiva. Creator, destroyer.

  But a part of me wanted it to be true.

  I think I wanted an end to the long and disruptive drama of the Chronoliths — not just for my sake but for Ashlee’s, for Kaitlin’s.

  And I wanted to trust Sue. After a lifetime of doubt, I think I needed to trust her.

  I needed her madness to be, miraculously, divine.

  Hitch was still working on the van when the twelve motorcycles came down the access road in a billow of gray dust. They came from the direction of the Chronolith.

  Sue and I scurried back to the shed as soon as we spotted them. By that time Ray had alerted Hitch. Hitch had come out from under the engine block and was loading and passing out our four handguns.

  I took one of these gratefully, but just as quickly disliked the way it felt in my hand — cold and faintly greasy. More than the sight of the approaching strangers, who were almost certainly Kuinists but could have been anyone, it was the pistol that made me feel afraid. A weapon is supposed to boost your confidence, but in my case it only served to emphasize how vulnerable we were, how desperately alone.

  Ray Mosely tucked his gun under his belt and began frantically thumbing his pocket phone. But we hadn�
��t been able to get a call out for days and he wasn’t having any better luck now. The attempt seemed almost reflexive and somehow pitiable.

  Hitch held out a gun for Sue, but she pressed her hands to her sides. “No, thank you,” she said.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  I was able to hear the motorcycle engines now, the sound of locusts, a plague descending.

  “Keep it,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d probably shoot the wrong person.”

  She looked at me when she said this, and I was inexplicably reminded of the young girl in Jerusalem who had thanked Sue just before she died. Her eyes, her voice, had conveyed this same cryptic urgency.

  “We don’t have time to argue.”

  Hitch had taken charge. He was alert and focused, frowning like a chess player facing a skilled opponent. The concrete-block shed possessed a single door and three narrow windows — an easy space to defend but a potential death trap if we were overwhelmed. But the van wouldn’t have been any safer.

  “Maybe they don’t know we’re here,” Ray volunteered. “Maybe they’ll ride on past.”

  “Maybe,” Hitch said, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”

  Ray put a hand on the butt of his pistol. He looked at the door, at Hitch, at the door, as if trying to work out some perplexing mathematical question.

  “Scotty,” Sue said, “I’m depending on you.”

  But I didn’t know what she meant.

  “They’re slowing down,” Hitch said.

  “Maybe they’re not Kuinists,” Ray said.

  “Maybe they’re nuns on a day trip. But don’t count on it.”

  Their disadvantage was, they had no cover.

  The land here was flat and grown over with sage-grass. Clearly aware of their vulnerability, the bikers came to an idling stop a distance from the shed, out of easy range.

  Watching through the gap in the cinderblocks that passed as a west-facing window, what struck me was the incongruity of all this. The day was fine and cool, the sky as cloudless as crystal. Even the perhaps unstable Chronolith seemed fixed and placid on the horizon. The small sound of sparrows and crickets hung in the air. And yet here were a dozen armed men straddling the road and no help for many miles.