The Chronoliths (11 page)

I sat with my father a few more minutes, then told him I had to leave. The faint daylight beyond the window had faded altogether. The house was drafty and smelled of dust and dry heat.

He stirred in his chair and said, “You came a long way just to drink coffee and mumble. Look, I know why you’re here. I’ll tell you, I’m not especially afraid of dying. Or even of talking about it. You wake up, you read the mail, you say to yourself, well, it won’t be today. But that’s not the same as not knowing.”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. But I’m glad you came.”

It was an astonishing thing for him to say. I couldn’t muster a response.

He stood up. His pants rode low on his bony hips. “I didn’t always treat your mother the way I should have. But I was there, Scotty. Remember that. Even when she was at the hospital. Even when she was raving. I didn’t take you mere unless I knew she was having a good day. Some of the things she said would peel your skin. And then you were off at college.”

She had died of complications of pneumonia the year before I graduated. “You could have called me when she got sick.”

“Why? So you could carry away the memory of your own mother cursing you from her deathbed? What’s the point?”

“I loved her, too.”

“It was easy for you. Maybe I loved her and maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember anymore. But I was with her, Scotty. All the time. I wasn’t necessarily nice to her. But I was
with
her.”

I went to the door. He followed a few paces, then stopped, breathless.

“Remember that about me,” he said.

When we came into Ben Gurion the airport was chaotic, crowded with fleeing tourists. The inbound El Al flight—delayed for four hours by weather, after a three-day “diplomatic” delay Sue refused to talk about—had been nearly empty. It would be filled to capacity on the way out, however. The evacuation of Jerusalem continued.

I left the aircraft in a core group with Sue Chopra, Ray Mosley, and Morris Torrance, surrounded by a cordon of FBI agents with enhanced-vision eyetacts and concealed weapons, escorted in turn by five Israeli Defense Force conscripts in jeans and white T-shirts, Uzis slung over their shoulders, who met us at the foot of the ramp. We were conducted quickly through Israeli Customs and out of Ben Gurion to what looked like a
sheruti
, a private taxi van, commandeered for the emergency. Sue scooted into the seat beside me, still dazed by travel. Morris and Ray climbed in behind us, and the power plant hummed softly as the van pulled away.

A monotonous rain slicked Highway One. The long line of cars crawling toward Tel Aviv glistened dully under a rack of clouds, but the Jerusalem-bound lanes were utterly empty. Ahead of us, vast public-service roadside screens announced the evacuation. Behind us, they marked the evacuation routes.

“Makes you a little nervous,” Sue said, “going someplace everybody else is leaving.”

The DDF man—he looked like a teenager—in the seat behind us snickered.

Morris said, “There’s a lot of skepticism about this. A lot of resentment, too. The Likkud could lose the next election.”

“But only if nothing happens,” Sue said.

“Is there a chance of that?”

“Slim to none.”

The IDF man snorted again.

A gust of rain rattled down on the
sheruti
. January and February are the rainy season in Israel. I turned my head to the window and watched a grove of olive trees bend to the wind. I was still thinking about what Sue had told me on the plane.

She had been inaccessible for days after I drove back from my father’s house, smoothing over whatever diplomatic difficulty it was that had kept us in Baltimore until very nearly the last minute.

I spent the week revising code and wasted a couple of evenings at a local bar with Morris and Ray.

They were more pleasant company than I would have guessed. I was angry with Morris for tracking me down to my father’s house… but Morris Torrance was one of those men who make an art of affability. An art, or maybe a tool. He rebuffed anger like Superman bouncing bullets off his chest. He wasn’t dogmatic about the Chronoliths, nursed no particular convictions about the significance of Kuin, but his interest obviously ran deep. What this meant was that we could bullshit with him: float ideas, some wild, without fear of tripping over a religious or political fixation. Was this genuine? He did, after all, represent the FBI. Likely as not, everything we said to him found its way into a file folder. But Morris’s genius was that he made it seem not to matter.

Even Ray Mosely opened up in Morris’s company. I had pegged Ray as one of those bright but socially-challenged types, his sexual radar locked hopelessly and inappropriately on Sue. There was some truth in this. But when he relaxed he revealed a passion for American League baseball that gave us some common ground. Ray liked the expansion team from his native Tucson and managed to piss off a guy at the neighboring table with some remarks about the Orioles. From which he did not back down when challenged. Ray was not a coward. He was lonely, but much of this was sheer intellectual loneliness. His conversation tended to trail off when he realized he had progressed to a level we couldn’t follow. He wasn’t condescending about it—at least, not very often—only visibly sad that he couldn’t share his thoughts.

It was this loneliness, I think, that Sue satisfied for him. No matter that she reserved her physical affection for brief contacts carefully segregated from her work. I think, in some sense, when Ray talked physics with her, he
was
making love.

Of Sue we saw very little. “This is what it was like at Cornell,” I told Morris and Ray. “For her students, I mean. She brought us together, but we did some of our best talking after class, without her.”

“Must have been kind of like a dress rehearsal,” Morris mused.

“For what? For this? The Chronoliths?”

“Oh, she couldn’t have known anything about that, of course. But don’t you once in a while get that feeling, that your life has been one big rehearsal for some critical event?”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“Like she had the wrong cast back there at Cornell,” Morris said, “and the script still needed work. But you must have been good, Scott.” He smiled. “You made the final cut.”

“So what’s the event?” I asked. “This thing in Jerusalem?”

“This thing in Jerusalem… or whatever comes after.”

Sue and I didn’t have a chance to talk privately until we were well over the Atlantic, when she beckoned me to the back of the deserted economy section and said, “I’m sorry about keeping you in the dark, Scotty. And I’m sorry about the thing with your dad. I thought we could make this a day job for you, not…”

“House arrest,” I offered.

“Right, house arrest. Because I guess that’s what it is, in a sense. But not just for you. I’m in the same situation. They want to keep us together and under observation.”

Sue had a head cold and was bulling through it with her usual determination. She sat with her hands in her lap, twisting a handkerchief in a beam of sunlight, as apparently contrite and as fundamentally immovable as Mahatma Gandhi. Up front, an El Al steward was delivering scrambled eggs and toast in plastic trays. I said, “Why
me
, Sue? That’s the question no one wants to answer. You could have hired a better code herder. I was at Chumphon, but that doesn’t explain anything.”

“Don’t underestimate your talent,” she said. “But I know what you’re asking. The FBI surveillance, the agents at your father’s house. Scotty, I made the mistake a few years ago of attempting to publish a paper about a phenomenon I called ‘tau turbulence.’ Some influential people read it.”

An answer that veered into abstract theory promised to be no answer at all. I waited, frowning, while she blew her nose, loudly.

“Excuse me,” she said. “The paper was about causality, I suppose you could say, with regard to questions of temporal symmetry and the Chronoliths. Mostly math, and most of that dealing with some contentious aspects of quantum behavior. But I also speculated about how the Chronoliths might reconfigure our conventional understanding of macroscopic cause and effect. Basically, I said that in a localized tau event—the creation of a Chronolith, hypothetically—effect naturally precedes cause, but it also creates a kind of fractal space in which the most significant connectors between events become not deterministic but correlative.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Think of a Chronolith as a local event in spacetime. There’s an interface, a border, between the conventional flow of time and the negative-tau anomaly. It’s not just the future talking to the present. There are ripples, eddies, currents. The future transforms the past, which in turn transforms the future. You follow?”

“More or less.”

“So what you get is a kind of turbulence, marked not so much by cause and effect or even paradox as by a froth of correlation and coincidence. You can’t look for the
cause
of the Bangkok manifestation, because it doesn’t exist yet, but you can look for clues in the turbulence, in the unexpected correlatives.”

“Like what?”

“When I wrote the paper I didn’t offer examples. But somebody took me seriously enough to work out the implications. The FBI went back and looked at all the people who had been interviewed after Chumphon, which was the smallest and most complete statistical sample at hand. Then they compiled a database with the names and histories of anyone who had ever expressed a public opinion about the Chronoliths, at least in the early days; everyone who did science at the Chumphon site, including the guys who ran the tractors and installed the johns; everybody they interrogated after the touchdown. Then they looked for connections.”

“And found some, I presume?”

“Some strange ones. But one of the strangest was you and I.”

“What, because of Cornell?”

“Partly; but put it all together, Scotty. Here’s a woman who’s been talking about tau anomalies and exotic matter since well before Chumphon. Who has since become a highly-regarded expert on the Chronoliths. And here’s an ex-student of hers, an old friend who just happened to be on the beach at Chumphon and who was arrested a mile or so from the first recorded Chronolith, a few hours after it appeared.”

“Sue,” I said, “it doesn’t
mean
anything. You know that.”

“It has no
causal
significance, you’re right, but that’s not the point. The point is, it marks us. Trying to figure out the genesis of a Chronolith is like trying to unravel a sweater before it’s been knitted. You can’t. At best, you can find certain threads that are the appropriate length or similarly colored and make certain guesses about how they might be looped together.”

“That’s why the FBI investigated my father?”

“They’re looking at absolutely everything. Because we don’t know what might be significant.”

“That’s the logic of paranoia.”

“Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with, the logic of paranoia. That’s why we’re both under surveillance. We’re not suspected of anything criminal, certainly not in the conventional sense. But they’re worried about what we might
become
.”

“Maybe we’re the bad guys, is that what you mean?”

She peered out the airliner’s window at the intermittent cumulus cloud, at the ocean down below us like a burnished blue mirror.

“Remember, Scotty. Whatever Kuin is, he probably didn’t originate this technology. Conquerors and kings tend not to be physics majors. They use what they can take. Kuin could be anyone, anywhere, but in all likelihood he’ll
steal
this technology, and who’s to say he won’t steal it from us? Or maybe we’re the good guys. Maybe we’re the ones who solve the puzzle. That’s possible, too—a different kind of connection. We’re not just prisoners, or we’d be in jail now. They’re watching us, but they’re also protecting us.”

I checked the aisle to see if anyone was listening, but Morris was up front chatting with a flight attendant and Ray had lost himself in a book. “I can go along with this up to a point,” I said. “I’m reasonably well paid when a lot of people aren’t getting paid at all and I’m seeing things I never thought I’d see.” Feeding my own obsession with the Chronoliths, I did not add. “But only up to a point. I can’t promise—”

To stick with it indefinitely, I meant to say. To become an acolyte, like Ray Mosely. Not when the world was going to hell and I had a daughter to protect.

Sue interrupted with a pensive smile. “Don’t worry, Scotty. Nobody’s promising anything, not anymore. Because nobody’s sure of anything. Certainty is one of the luxuries we’ll have to learn to live without.”

I had learned to do without certainty a long time ago. One of the rules of living with a schizophrenic parent is that weirdness is tolerable. You can endure it. At least—as I had told Sue—up to a point.

Past that point, madness spills all over everything. It gets inside you and makes itself at home, until there’s no one you can trust, not even yourself.

The first Highway One checkpoint was the hardest to get through. This was where the IDF turned away would-be pilgrims attracted, perversely, by the evacuation.

“Jerusalem Syndrome” had been named as a psychiatric condition decades ago. Visitors are occasionally overwhelmed by the city’s cultural and mythological significance. They identify too deeply, dress in bedsheets and sandals, proclaim sermons from the Mount of Olives, attempt to sacrifice animals on the Temple Mount. The phenomenon has kept the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital in business since well before the turn of the century.

The wave of global uncertainty generated by the Chronoliths had already triggered a new wave of pilgrimages, and the evacuation had turned it up to a fever pitch. Jerusalem was being evacuated for the safety of its inhabitants, but when had that ever mattered to a fanatic? We wormed our way through a line of vehicles, some abandoned at the checkpoint when the drivers refused to turn away. There was a steady transit of police cars, ambulances, tow trucks.