The Chronoliths (12 page)

We cleared this obstacle at dusk and arrived at a major hotel on Mt. Scopus just as the last light was fading from the sky.

Observation posts had been established all over the city: not just ours, but military stations, a U.N. post, delegations from a couple of Israeli universities, and a site for the international press on the Haas Promenade. Mt. Scopus (
Har HaTsofim
, in Hebrew, which also happens to mean “looking over”) was something of a choice spot, however. This was where the Romans had camped in 70 A.D., shortly before they moved to crush the Jewish rebellion. The Crusaders had been here, too, for similar reasons. The view of the Old City was spectacular but dismaying. The evacuation, especially of the Palestinian zones, hadn’t gone easily. The fires were still burning.

I followed Sue through the vacant hotel lobby to a suite of adjoining rooms on the top floor. This was the heart of the operation. The curtains had been taken down and a crew of technicians had set up photographic and monitoring devices and, more ominously, a bank of powerful heaters. Most of these people were part of Sue’s research project, but only a few of them had met her personally. A number of them hurried to shake her hand. Sue was gracious about it but obviously tired.

Morris showed us our private rooms, then suggested we meet in the lobby restaurant once we’d had a chance to shower and change.

Sue wondered aloud how the restaurant had managed to stay open for business during the evacuation. “The hotel’s outside the primary exclusion zone,” Morris said. “There’s a skeleton staff to look after us, all volunteers, and a heated bunker for them in back of the kitchen.”

I took a few minutes in my room just to look at the city folded like a stony blanket across the Judean hills. The nearby streets were empty except for security patrols and occasional ambulances out of Hadassah Mt. Sinai a few streets away. Stoplights twitched in the wind like palsied angels.

The IDF man in the car had said something interesting as we passed the checkpoint. In the old days, he said, the fanatics who came to Jerusalem usually imagined they were Jesus, come again, or John the Baptist, or the first and only true, original Messiah.

Lately, he said, they tended to claim to be Kuin.

A city that had seen far too much history was about to see some more.

I found Sue, Morris, and Ray waiting for me in the hotel’s immense atrium. Morris gestured at the five stories of hanging plants and said, “Check it out, Scotty, it’s the Garden of Babylon.”

“Babylon’s considerably east of here,” Sue said. “But yeah.”

In the lobby restaurant we seated ourselves at a table across the room from the only other patrons, a group of IDF men and women crowded into a red vinyl booth. Our waitress (the only waitress) was an older woman with an American accent. She claimed not to be troubled by the evacuation even though it meant she had to sleep at the hotel: “I don’t like the idea of driving around these empty streets anyway, much as I used to complain about the traffic.” The entree for tonight was chicken almondine, she said. “And that’s about it, unless you’re allergic or anything, in which case we can ask the chef to make an adjustment.”

Chicken all around, and Morris ordered us a bottle of white wine.

I asked about the agenda for tomorrow. Morris said, “Apart from the scientific work, we have the Israeli Defense Minister visiting in the afternoon. Plus photographers and video people.” He added, “There’s no substance to it. We wouldn’t be here if the Israeli government didn’t already have all the information we can give them. It’s a dog-and-pony show for the news pools. But Ray and Sue get to do some interpretation for the laypeople.”

Ray asked, “Are we giving him Minkowski ice or feedback?”

Morris and I looked blank. Sue said, “Don’t leave people out of the conversation, Ray. It’s bad manners. Morris, Scotty, you must have picked up some of this from the congressional briefs.”

“Slow reading,” Morris said.

“We spend a lot of time translating math into English.”

“Hunting metaphors,” Ray said.

“It’s important to make people understand. At least as much as
we
understand. Which is not very much.”

“Minkowski ice,” Ray persisted, “or positive feedback?”

“Feedback, I think.”

Morris said, “I still feel left out.”

Sue frowned and collected her thoughts. “Morris, Scotty, do you savvy feedback?”

Half of what I did with Sue’s code involved recursion and self-amplification. But she was talking far more generally. I said, “It’s what happens when you stand up in the high school auditorium to give the valedictory address and the PA starts to squeal like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”

She grinned. “That’s a good example. Describe the process, Scotty.”

“You have an amplifier between the mike and the speakers. Worst case, they talk to each other. Whatever goes into the microphone comes out of the speakers, louder. If there’s any noise in the system, it makes a loop.”

“Exactly. Any little sound the microphone picks up, the speaker plays it louder. And the microphone hears that and multiplies it again, and so on, until the system starts ringing like a bell… or squealing like a pig.”

“And this is relevant to the Chronoliths,” Morris said, “because—?”

“Because time itself is a kind of amplifier. You know the old saw about how a butterfly flapping in China can eventually brew up a storm over Ohio? It’s a phenomenon called ‘sensitive dependence.’ A large event is often a small event amplified through time.”

“Like all those movies where a guy travels into the past and ends up changing his own present.”

“Either way,” Sue said, “what you have is an example of amplification. But when Kuin sends us a monument commemorating a victory twenty years from now, that’s like pointing the microphone at the speaker, it’s a feedback loop, a
deliberate
feedback loop. It amplifies itself. We think that may be why the Chronoliths are expanding their territory so quickly. By marking his victories Kuin creates the expectation that he’ll be victorious. Which makes the victory that much more likely, even inevitable. And the next. And so on.”

This was not new territory for me. I had inferred this much from Sue’s work and from speculation in the popular press. I said, “Couple of questions.”

“Okay.”

“I guess the first is, how does this look to Kuin? How does it play out, that first time he sends us the Chumphon stone? Wouldn’t he be changing his own past? Are there two Kuins now, or what?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. You’re asking me whether we understand this better on the theoretical level. Well, yes and no. We’d like to avoid a many-worlds model, if possible—”

“Why? If that’s the easiest answer?”

“Because we have reason to believe it’s not true. And if it
is
true, it limits what we can do about the problem. However, the alternative—”

“The alternative,” Ray supplied, “is that Kuin is committing a kind of suicide every time he does this.”

The waitress brought us our meals on a cart covered with linen, then rolled the emptied cart back toward the kitchen. Across the room the IDF people had finished dinner and were working on dessert. I wondered if this was their first time in a four-star hotel restaurant. They were eating that way—with great attention and a few remarks about what this would have cost them if they’d had to pay for it.

“Changing what he’s been,” Sue said between mouthfuls. “Erasing it, replacing it, but that’s not exactly
suicide
, is it? Imagine a hypothetical Kuin, some back-country warlord who somehow gets hold of this technology. He pulls the switch and suddenly he’s not just Kuin, he’s
the
Kuin, the one everyone was waiting for, he’s the fucking Messiah for all practical purposes, and for him it was never any different. At least some part of his personal history is gone, but it’s a painless loss. He’s glorified, he has lots of troops now, lots of credibility, a bright future. Either that, or the original Kuin’s place has been taken by some more ambitious individual who grew up
wanting
to be Kuin. At worst it’s a kind of death, but it’s also a potential ticket to glory. And you can’t mourn what you never had, can you?”

I wondered about that. “It still seems like a big risk. Once you’ve done it, why push the button a second time?”

“Who knows? Ideology, delusions of grandeur, blind ambition, a self-destructive impulse. Or just because he
has
to, as a last resort in the face of military reversals. Maybe it’s a different reason every time. Anyway you look at it, he’s right in the middle of the feedback loop. He’s the signal that generates the noise.”

“So a small noise becomes a loud noise,” Morris said. “A fart becomes a thunderclap.”

Sue nodded eagerly. “But the amplification factor isn’t just time. It’s human expectation and human interaction. The rocks don’t care about Kuin, the trees don’t give a shit, it’s
us
. We act on what we anticipate, and it gets easier and easier to anticipate the all-conquering Kuin, Kuin the god-king. The temptation is to give in, to collaborate, to idealize the conqueror, to be part of the process so you don’t get ground under.”

“You’re saying
we’re
creating Kuin.”

“Not us specifically, but people, yeah, people in general.”

Morris said, “That’s how it was with my wife before we broke up. She hated the idea of disappointment so much, it was always on her mind. It didn’t matter what I did, how much I reassured her, what I earned, whether I went to church every week. I was on permanent probation. ‘You’ll leave me one day,’ she used to say. But if you say something like that often enough, it has a way of coming true.”

Morris thought about what he’d said, pushed away his glass of wine, reddened.

“Expectation,” Sue said, “yes, feedback. Exactly. Suddenly Kuin embodies everything we fear or secretly want—”

“Slouching toward Jerusalem,” I said, “to be born.”

It was an idea that seemed to cast a chill across the room. Even the rowdy IDF teenagers were quieter now.

“Well,” I said, “that’s not especially reassuring, but I can follow the logic. What’s Minkowski ice?”

“A metaphor of a different color. But that’s enough of this talk for tonight. Wait till tomorrow, Scotty. Ray’s explaining it to the Defense Minister.”

She smiled forlornly as Ray puffed up.

We broke up after coffee, and I went to my room alone.

I thought about calling Janice and Kaitlin, but the desk manager interrupted my dial-out to tell me the bandwidth was at capacity and I would have to wait at least an hour. So I took a beer from the courtesy cooler and put my feet up on the windowsill and watched a car race down the dark streets of the exclusion zone. The floodlights on the Dome of the Rock made that structure look as venerable and solid as history itself, but in less than forty-eight hours there would be a taller and more dramatic monument a scant few miles away.

I woke at seven in the morning, restless but not hungry. I showered and dressed and wondered how far the security people would let me go if I tried to do a little sightseeing—a walk around the hotel, say. I decided to find out.

I was stopped at the elevator by one of two natty FBI men, who looked at me blankly. “Whereabouts you headed, chief?”

“Breakfast,” I said.

“We’ll need to see your badge first.”

“Badge?”

“Nobody gets on or off this floor without a badge.”

I don’t need no stinkin’ badge—but I did, apparently. “Who’s handing out badges?”

“You need to talk to the people who brought you, chief.”

Which didn’t take long, because Morris Torrance came hurtling up behind me, bade me a cheerful good morning and pinned a plastic I.D. tag to the lapel of my shirt. “I’ll come down with you,” he said.

The two men parted like the elevator doors they were guarding. They nodded to Morris, and the less aggressive of the two told me to have a nice day.

“Will do,” I said. “Chief.”

“It’s just a precaution,” Morris said as we rode down.

“Like harassing my father? Like reading my medical records?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t Sue explain any of this to you?”

“A little. You’re not just her bodyguard, are you?”

“But that, too.”

“You’re the warden.”

“She’s not in prison. She can go anywhere she wants.”

“As long as you know about it. As long as she’s watched.”

“It’s a kind of deal we made,” Morris said. “So where do you want to go, Scotty? Breakfast?”

“I need some air.”

“You want to do the tourist thing? You realize what a bad idea that is.”

“Call me curious.”

“Well—I can get us an IDF car with the right tags, I suppose. Even get us into the exclusion zone, if that’s really what you want.”

I didn’t answer.

“Otherwise,” he said, “you’re pretty much stuck in the hotel, the situation being what it is.”

“Do you enjoy this kind of work?”

“Let me tell you about that,” Morris said.

He borrowed a blue unmarked automobile with all-pass stickers pasted to the windshield and an elaborate GPS system sprawling onto the passenger side of the dash. He drove down Lehi Street while I stared (yet again) out the window.

It was another rainy day, date palms drooping along the boulevards. By daylight the streets were far from empty: there were civil-defense wardens at the major intersections, cops and IDF patrols everywhere, and only the exclusion zone around the anticipated touchdown site had been wholly evacuated.

Morris drove into the New City and turned onto King David Street, the heart of the exclusion zone.

The evacuation of a major urban area is more than just people-moving, though it’s that, certainly, on an almost unmanageably large scale. Some of it is engineering. Most of the damage a Chronolith causes is a result of the initial cold shock, the so-called thermal pulse. Close enough to the arrival, any container with liquid water in it will burst. Property owners in Jerusalem had been encouraged to drain their pipes before leaving, and the municipal authorities were trying to preserve the waterworks by depressurizing the core zone, though that would make firefighting difficult—and inevitably there would be fires, when volatile liquids and gases escaped containers ruptured or weakened by the cold. The gas mains had already been shut off. Theoretically, every toilet tank should have been emptied, every gas tank drained, every propane bottle removed. In reality, without an exhaustive door-to-door search, no such outcome could be guaranteed. And close to the arrival point, the thermal pulse would turn even a bottle of milk into a potentially lethal explosive device.