The Chronoliths (18 page)

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Okay, Ash, I’m sorry, don’t mind me. You want something? A little more than the druggist is willing to sell you?”

“I want to ask you some questions about Adam.”

“Yeah, but that can’t be all you want.”

Cox made it obvious that he would have nothing to say unless Ashlee bought something from him. Business is business, he said.

“It’s about my son, Cheever.”

“I know, and I love you and Adam both, but Ashlee, it’s
business
.”

So she paid him for a carton of what she called “loose smokes,” which Cox fetched from the basement. She held the box in her lap. The box reeked.

Cox settled into his chair. “What it is,” he told Ashlee, “is, I go into the squatters’ buildings a lot, especially down on Franklin, or Lowertown, or the old Cargill warehouses, so I see these kids. And, you know, Adam hung with that crowd, too. It’s not a big market for me because these kids don’t have any money, basically. They’re shoplifting food. But every once in a while one of ‘em comes by some cash, I don’t ask how, and they want a carton, two cartons, smokes and drinks and chemicals and so forth. A lot of times it was Adam who would come to me, because I knew him from when you and I did business on a more regular basis.”

Ashlee lowered her eyes at this assertion but said nothing.

“Also, frankly, Adam has a little more on the ball than most of those people. They call themselves hajists or Kuinists but they’re about as political as bricks. You know who does the real haj thing? Rich kids. Rich kids and celebs. They go to Israel or Egypt and burn their scented candles or whatever. Downtown, it’s different. Most of these kids wouldn’t go out of their way for Kuin if he was holding a coronation ball in their back yard. Well, Adam figured that out. That’s why he was fooling around with the Copperhead clubs in Wayzata, Edina—looking for people who think the way he does but are maybe a little more gullible and a little more flush than the downtown crowd.”

“Cheever,” Ashlee said, “can you tell me if he’s still in town?”

“I can’t tell you a firm yes or no, but I doubt it. If he is, I haven’t seen him. I talk to people, you know, I follow the links, I keep my ear to ground. There are always rumors. You remember Kirkwell?”

Last summer, a clinically paranoid retired butcher in Kirkwell, New Mexico, had announced that he was measuring increased background radiation at a dry spring outside the city limits—his own property, by coincidence. Probably he hoped to make the site a tourist attraction. He succeeded. By September, ten thousand destitute young hajists had camped there. The National Guard dropped food and water rations and exhorted the pilgrims to go home, but it was an outbreak of cholera that finally succeeded in clearing the property. The retired butcher promptly disappeared, leaving a number of class-action and public nuisance lawsuits in his wake.

“These rumors come and go,” Cox said, “but the big one right now is Mexico. Ciudad Portillo. Adam was in this room three weeks ago and he was talking about it then—not that anybody paid much attention to him. That’s why he hooked up with the suburban Copperheads, I think, because he wanted to go to Mexico and he thought that crowd could supply at least a little money, some transportation.”

Ashlee said, “He went to
Mexico
?”

Cox held up his hands. “I can’t tell you that for sure. But if I had to bet I’d say he was on the road and bound for the border, if he hasn’t already crossed it.”

Ashlee said nothing. She looked pensive and pale, almost beaten. Cox made a sympathetic sound. “That’s the trouble,” he said. “Stupid people do stupid things, but Adam is smart enough to do something
really
stupid.”

We talked it around a little more, but Cox had said all he had to say. Finally Ashlee stood up and stepped toward the door.

Cox hugged her again.

“Come see me when your script runs out,” he said.

I asked her on the drive back how she had known Adam was missing.

She said, “What do you mean?”

“It sounds like Adam was connected with squatter circles. If he wasn’t living at home, how did you know he was missing?”

We pulled up at the curb. Ashlee said, “I’ll show you.”

She unlocked the street door and walked me up a narrow flight of stairs to her apartment. The apartment was laid out like any other railway flat: a big front room facing the street, two tiny bedrooms off a corridor, a square kitchen with a window over the rear alley. The apartment was stuffy; Ashlee said she preferred to keep the windows shut during the garbage strike. But it was neatly and sensibly furnished. It was the home of someone possessing taste and common sense, if not much capital.

“This door,” Ashlee told me, “is Adam’s room. He doesn’t like people going in there, but he’s not around to object.”

In a sense, my first real contact with Adam was this glimpse of his room. I suppose I expected the worst: pornography, graffiti, maybe a shotgun buried in the laundry hamper.

But Adam’s room was nothing like that. It was more than orderly, it was icily neat. The bed was made. The closet door was open and the number of bare hangers suggested that Adam had packed for a long trip, but what remained of his wardrobe was neatly arrayed. The bookshelves were makeshift brick-and-board arrangements but the books were upright and in alphabetical order, not by author but by title.

Books tell you a lot about the people who choose and read them. Adam clearly leaned toward the more technical sort of nonfiction—electronics manuals, textbooks (including organic chemistry and American history),
Fundamentals of Computation
, plus random biographies (Picasso, Lincoln, Mao Zedong),
Famous Trials of the Twentieth Century, How to Repair Almost Anything, Ten Steps to a More Efficient Fuel Cell
. A child’s astronomy book and a spotter’s guide to manned satellite orbits.
Ice and Fire: The Untold Story of the Lunar Base Tragedy
. And, of course, books about Kuin. Some of these were mainstream works, including McNeil and Cassel’s
Asia Under Siege
; most were gaudy fringe publications with titles like
End of Days
and
Fifth Horseman
.

There were no photographs of living human beings visible, but the walls were papered with magazine shots of various Chronoliths. (Briefly, and uncomfortably, I was reminded of Sue Chopra’s office in Baltimore.)

Ashlee said, “Does it look like he never comes home? This is Adam’s ground zero. Maybe he didn’t sleep here every night, but he was here for a good eight or ten hours out of every twenty-four. Always.”

She closed the door.

“Funny,” she said, “I always thought of myself as making a home for Adam. But that’s not how it worked. He made his own home. It just happened to be inside mine.”

She fixed coffee and we talked a while longer, sitting on Ashlee’s long sofa with the sound of street traffic coming through the closed but single-glazed windows. There was something deeply comforting about the moment—Ashlee moving in the kitchen, absentmindedly smoothing her bristly hair with her hand—something almost
viscerally
comforting, a shadow of the kind of domesticity I had misplaced more than a decade ago. I was grateful to her for that.

But the moment couldn’t last. She asked me about Kaitlin and I told her something (not everything) about Chumphon and the way I had spent the last ten years. She was impressed that I had seen the Jerusalem arrival, not because she felt any reverence for Kuin but because it meant I had moved, if only peripherally, among the kind of people she imagined were relatively rich and vaguely famous. “At least you were doing something,” she said, “not just spinning your wheels.”

I told her she had obviously done more than spin her wheels: It couldn’t have been easy for a single woman to raise a child during the economic crisis.

“They call it spinning your wheels,” she said, “when you can’t get traction. And I guess that’s how I feel about Adam. I tried to help him, but I couldn’t get traction.” She paused and then turned to face me, her expression less guarded than it had been. “Suppose they
did
go to Mexico—Adam and Kaitlin and all that group. What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to talk to some people.”

“Would you follow Kaitlin all the way to Portillo?”

“If I thought I could help her. If I thought it would do any good.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“No. I’m not sure.”

My pocket phone rang. It was set to take messages, but I checked the display to see who was calling. It might have been Janice saying Kait had come home, that the whole thing was a stupid misunderstanding. Or it might have been Ramone Dudley calling to tell me the police had found Kait’s body.

It was neither. According to the text display, the call was from Sue Chopra. She had tracked down my private terminal address (despite the fact that I had changed it when I left Baltimore), and she wanted me to reply as soon as possible.

“I should take this in private,” I told Ashlee.

She walked me down the stairs and out to the car I took her hand. It was late, and the street was empty. The streetlights were the old-fashioned mercury vapor kind, and they put amber highlights in Ashlee’s short blond hair. Her hand was warm.

“If you find out something,” she said, “you have to tell me. Promise me that.”

I promised.

“Call me, Scott.”

I believe she genuinely wanted me to call her. I believe she doubted that I would.

“First of all,” Sue said, leaning into the lens so that her face filled the motel terminal’s phone window like a myopic brown moon, “I want you to know I’m not pissed about the way you left town. I understand what that was all about, and if you chose not to confide in me, I guess I have myself to blame. Although—I don’t know why it is, Scotty, you always expect the worst of people. Did it even occur to you we might want to
help
?”

“You know about Kait,” I said.

“We looked into the situation, yeah.”

“You talked to the police.”

“I know you’re going to do what you have to do, but I want to make sure you don’t feel like a fugitive.” She added, more plaintively, “I would still like to talk to you once in a while. As far as I’m concerned, you still work here. Ray is a good foil for the math work, and Morris tries hard to understand what we’re doing, but I need someone who’s bright enough to pay attention but doesn’t have any preconceived ideas.” She lowered her eyes and added, “Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just need somebody to talk to.”

This was, among other things, her way of apologizing for all the invasive prodding of the last few years. But I had never blamed Sue for that. It might have been her ideas about tau turbulence that put me in a vulnerable position, but she had been careful to build a wall between me and the federal juggernaut. The juggernaut had lately turned its attention elsewhere; Sue still wanted to be my friend.

She said, “I’m so unhappy about what happened with Kaitlin.”

“The only thing I can tell you about Kait is that she hasn’t come home yet. I’d as soon not dwell on it. So distract me. Gossip. Has Ray found a girlfriend? Have you?”

“Are you drinking, Scotty?”

“Yes, but not enough to justify the question.”

She smiled sadly. “All right. Ray is still wandering in the wilderness. Me, I’m seeing this woman I met at a bar. She’s very sweet. She has red hair and collects Dresden china and tropical fish. But it’s not serious.”

Of course not. Sue conducted her love affairs almost at a distance, deferentially and with the expectation of disappointment.

Her real romance was with her work, which was what she preferred to talk about. “The thing is, Scotty, we’ve had a little bit of a breakthrough. That’s what’s obsessing everybody right now. Most of this is classified, but since there are rumors all over the net I can tell you at least a little bit about it.”

She told me probably more than she should have, but much of it went over my head. The gist was that someone at MIT had succeeded in conjuring negative-tau particles out of the vacuum (which is in any case a seething cauldron of what physicists call “virtual” particles) and stabilizing them long enough to demonstrate the effect. These were hadrons with, essentially, negative duration. They carved holes, if you like, into the past—about a millisecond of the past, not Kuin’s ponderous twenty years and three months, but in principle it was the same phenomenon.

“We’re very close,” Sue said, “to understanding exactly what it is Kuin is doing. And even Kuin might not have figured all the angles. Given enough time, we can create whole new technologies. I mean, star travel, Scotty: that’s a real possibility!”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! We’re talking about a potential new era in the history of the fucking species—
yes
it matters!”

“Kuin has already put his fingerprints on half the world, Sue. I would hate to see him extend his reach beyond the surface of the planet.”

“Well, but this is the key to
that
, too. If we can figure out how a Chronolith works, we can interfere with it. With the right application we might be able to make a Chronolith simply
go away
.”

“And achieve what?” The last few days had pumped up my cynicism. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t. Remember, it isn’t Kuin we have to be afraid of. It’s not even the Chronoliths.
Feedback
, Scotty, that’s the key. The real problem here is the perception of Kuin’s invincibility, which rests on the invincibility of his monuments. Destroy one, and you destroy the myth. Suddenly he’s not a godlike force anymore, he’s just another would-be Hitler or Stalin.”

Still, I suggested, it might be too late for that.

“Not if we can demonstrate his weakness.”

“Can you?”

She paused. Her smile faltered. “Well, maybe. Maybe soon,” she said.

But not soon enough for Kait, who was probably in Mexico, imbued with her own notions of Kuin’s invincibility and promise. I reminded Sue that I had things to do. She said, “I’m sorry if I kept you up, Scotty, but I really do think it’s important for us to keep in touch.”