The Chronoliths (23 page)

“Pretty steep grade.”

“You have a better idea?”

So I turned off the road, drove over brittle scrub grasses and down the berm. The van braked itself sporadically and the dash lit up with function alarms, and I believe we would have overbalanced if not for my iron grip on the steering wheel—which was a matter of instinct, not skill. Hitch and Ashlee were silent, but Kaitlin let out a little sound, about the same pitch as the wind. We had just reached the flat and stony basin when an uprooted acacia flew overhead like a stiff black bird. Even Hitch gasped when he saw that.

“Cold,” Kaitlin moaned.

Ashlee unfolded the last of the blankets, gave two of them to Kait and tossed one up to us. The air inside reeked of hot heater coils, but the temperature had risen only marginally. I had seen the thermal shock in Jerusalem, from a distance, but I hadn’t guessed just how painful it would be, a sudden numbing cold that radiated inward from the extremities to the heart.

Stolen energy, drained from the immediate environment by whatever force it was that could unwind a massive object through time. A fresh wind howled above the arroyo and the sky turned the color of fish scales. We had packed thermally-adaptive body gear, and we broke this out; Ashlee helped Kait into a jacket a size too big for her.

A dire thought occurred to me, and I reached for the handle of the door.

“Scotty?” Hitch inquired.

“I need to drain the radiator,” I said. “If that water freezes, we lose our transportation.”

We had been wise enough to carry our drinking water in flexible bags which would expand as necessary. We had also dumped antifreeze into the van’s radiator. But we hadn’t anticipated being this close to the arrival. A serious flash-freeze would probably demolish the engine’s coolant system and strand us here.

“May not be time.”

“So wish me luck. And hand me the tool box.”

I let myself out into the gale. Wind slammed the door behind me. The wind came up the arroyo from the south, feeding the steep thermoclines of the arriving Chronolith. The air was choked with dust and sand. I had to shield my eyes with my hand in order to open them even a slit. I navigated to the front of the van by touch.

The vehicle had come down at a steep angle into a sandy ridge, and the front of it was entrenched up to the bumper. There was a burst of auroral light overhead as I scooped out a space with my hands. The thermal jacket was keeping my core temperature up—at least so far—but my breath turned to frost with every exhalation and my fingers were clumsy and fiery-numb. Too late to go back for gloves. I managed to open the tool box and fumble out a wrench.

The radiator system was designed to be drained from beneath by loosening a valve nut. I clasped the nut with the wrench but it refused to turn.

Leverage
, I thought, bracing my feet against the tire, leaning into the angle of the wrench like a sculler leaning into an oar. The noise of the wind was overpowering, but under it there was another sound, the thunderclap of the arrival, then the shockwave through the ground, a hard mule-kick from below.

The valve nut popped, and I sprawled into the sand.

A trickle of water ran out and instantly froze against the ground—enough to relieve the pressure inside the radiator, though stray ice could still crack any number of vital systems, if we were unlucky.

I tried to stand and found that I couldn’t.

Instead I rolled into the meager shelter created by the angle of the van against the earth. My head was suddenly too heavy to hold erect, and I put my numbed hands between my thighs and curled into the meager warmth of my thermal jacket and promptly lost consciousness.

When I opened my eyes again the air was still and I was back inside the van.

Sunlight burned on the scrim of ice that had formed on the windshield. The heater was pumping out steamy warm air.

I sat up, shivering. Ashlee was already awake, chafing Kaitlin’s hands between her own, and that sight worried me; but Ashlee said at once, “She’s all right. She’s breathing.”

Hitch Paley had dragged me inside after the worst of the thermal shock had passed. Currently he was outside replacing the valve nut I had loosened. He stood, peered in through the fogged window, and gave me a thumbs-up when he saw that I was awake.

“I think we’ll be okay,” Ashlee said. Her voice was raw, and I realized that my own throat was sore when I swallowed, no doubt from the briefly supercooled air we had all inhaled. Lungs a little achy, too, and fingers and toes still bereft, at their tips, of sensation. Some crusted blood on the palm of my right hand where the freezing wrench had taken away a layer of skin. But Ashlee was right. We had survived.

Kait moaned again. “We’ll keep her covered up,” Ash said. “But she’s already sick, Scott. We need to worry about pneumonia.”

“We need to get her back to civilization.” And up that embankment again, to begin with. Not a sure thing.

When I felt able, I opened the driver’s-side door and climbed out. The air was relatively warm again, and surprisingly fresh, save for a haze of dust that was settling everywhere like fine snow. Prevailing winds had carried the ice fog off to the east.

Frost steamed off the rocks and sand of the creek bed. I climbed to the top of the embankment and looked back at the town—what remained of it.

The Kuin of Portillo was still shrouded in ice, but it was clearly a large monument. The figure of Kuin was standing, one arm upraised in a beckoning gesture.

The town of Portillo lay at his immense feet, dim in the mist but obviously devastated.

The radius of the thermal shock was enormous. All but a few of the hajists must have died, it seemed to me, though I did see some vehicles moving at the perimeter of the town, probably Red Cross mobile stations.

Ashlee came up the slope behind me, panting. Her breath halted briefly when she saw the scope of the destruction. Her lips trembled. Her face was brown with dust, rivered with tears.

“But he might have got away,” she whispered: meaning, of course, Adam.

I said that was possible.

Privately, I doubted it.

By means of a connecting series of dirt roads and cattle tracks we managed to skirt the steaming ruins of Portillo and connect at last with the main road.

The dead—no doubt massive numbers of them—remained in town, but we passed clusters of refugees along the highway. Many were limping, crippled by frostbite. Some had been blinded by ice crystals. Some had sustained injuries from falling masonry or other shockwave events. All sense of threat had vanished from them, and Ashlee twice insisted on stopping to distribute our few blankets and a little food, and to ask about Adam.

But none of these young people had heard of him, and they had more pressing concerns. They begged us to relay messages, call parents or spouses or family in L.A., in Dallas, in Seattle… The parade of misery was overwhelming, and at length even Ashlee had to turn away from it, though she continued to scan the refugees for any sign of Adam until we were farther north than even a healthy hajist could had walked. The sight of relief trucks and military ambulances streaming toward Portillo eased her conscience but not her fears. She lapsed into her seat, stirring only to tend to Kaitlin now and then.

My fears for Kait deepened during the drive. She was sicker than I had realized, and her exposure to the thermal shock had made matters worse. Ashlee took Kait’s temperature with the thermometer from the first-aid kit, then frowned and fed her a couple of antipyretic capsules and a long drink of water. We were forced to stop several times for Kaitlin to lope away from the van and relieve her bowels, and each time she stumbled back she was visibly weaker and unspeakably humiliated.

We needed to get her into a reputable hospital. Hitch placed a call to Sue Chopra and reassured her that we had survived, though Kait was ill. Sue recommended crossing the border, if possible, before admitting Kait for medical care, since young Americans in-country without papers were currently being jailed. The No-gales border crossing was swamped—there had been a rumor, this one false, of an impending arrival in that city—but Sue said she would arrange for someone from the consulate to escort us through. A hospital room would be waiting in Tucson.

Ashlee administered a broad-spectrum antibiotic from our medical kit and Kait slept fitfully through the hot afternoon. Hitch and I exchanged driving duties.

I thought about Ashlee. Ashlee had just lost her son, or believed she had. It was remarkable that she was able to care for Kaitlin at all—moving under the weight of her grief with great deliberation. And Kait responded to this kindness instinctively. She was at ease with her head in Ashlee’s lap.

It occurred to me that I loved them both.

I obeyed Ashlee’s injunction: I did not, then or later, ask Kaitlin what had happened to her during the haj.

Maybe I should qualify that. There was a time, as I sat with Kait in her hospital room in Tucson waiting for the doctor to come back with her bloodwork, when I couldn’t restrain myself. I didn’t ask her directly what had happened in Portillo; only why she had gone there—what had made her leave home and ally herself with the likes of Adam Mills.

She turned her head away from me in acute embarrassment. Her hair fell across the crisp white pillow, and I saw the suture line of her long-healed cochlear surgery, a very faint, pale seam along the descending line of her throat.

“I just wanted things to be different,” she said.

Ashlee stayed with me in Tucson while Kait recovered.

We rented a motel room and lived together chastely for a week. Ashlee’s grief was intensely private, often almost invisible. There were days when she seemed almost herself, days when she would smile when I came in the door with a bag of take-out Mexican or Chinese food. In some part, she may have harbored the hope that Adam had survived (though she refused to discuss the possibility or tolerate the mention of Adam’s name).

But she was subdued, quiet. She slept during the sweltering afternoons and was restless at night, often sitting in front of the ancient cable-linked video panel long after I had gone to bed.

Nevertheless, we had come together in an important way. Our futures had commingled.

We didn’t talk about any of this. All our conversation was pointedly trivial. Except once, when I was leaving the room for a run to the all-night convenience store down the block. I asked her if she wanted anything.

“I want a cigarette,” she said tightly. “I want my son back.”

Kait remained in the hospital for most of another week, regaining her strength and enduring a fresh set of tests. I visited daily, though I kept the visits brief—she seemed to prefer it that way.

During my last visit before her release, Kaitlin and her doctor shared some bad news with me.

I didn’t want to trouble Ashlee with this—at least, not yet. When I came back to the hotel room I found Ash somewhat recovered, more talkative. I took her out to dinner, though not very far out: the motel restaurant. It served us sirloin tips and coffee. The framed faux-Navajo prints and cattle-skull decor were reassuringly classless.

Ashlee talked (suddenly she seemed to need to talk) about her childhood, the time before she married Tucker Kellog, memories consisting not of narratives but of snapshots she had fixed in her mind. A dry, windy day in San Diego, shopping with her mother for linens. A school trip to a petting zoo. Her first year in Minneapolis, how astonished she had been by the winter storms, her commute to work blockaded by snowdrifts and windrows. Old shows she used to watch, some of which I had also seen:
Someday, Blue Horizon, Next Week’s Family
.

Over dessert she said, “I talked to the Red Cross. They’re still down in Portillo, taking names—counting the dead. If Adam survived, he didn’t register with any of the relief agencies. On the other hand, if he’s dead—” She said this with a studied nonchalance, obviously fake. “Well, they haven’t identified his body, and they’re very good at that. I let them call up his genome profile from his medical records. No match. So I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. But I realized something else.”

Her eyes glittered. I said, “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“No, Scott, it’s okay. What I realized is that, alive or dead, I’ve lost him. Maybe I’ll see him again, maybe I won’t, but that’s up to him, if he’s alive, I mean. That’s what he tried to tell me in Portillo. Not that he hates me. But that he’s not mine in any meaningful way anymore. He belongs to himself. I think he always did.”

She was silent for a while, then she drank the last of her coffee and turned away the waitress who offered more.

“He gave me something.”

I said, “Adam did?”

“Yes. In Portillo. He said I could remember him by it. Here, look.”

She had folded the gift into a handkerchief inside her purse. She unwrapped it and pushed it across the table.

It was a necklace, a cheap chain with a pendant. The pendant looked like a lump of pitted black plastic drilled to take an eyelet. It was almost defiantly ugly.

“He said he got it from a vendor in Portillo. It’s a kind of sacred object. The stone isn’t a stone, it’s—”

“An arrival relic.”

“Yes, that’s what Adam called it.”

The arrival of a Chronolith creates odd debris. The steep temperature and pressure gradients near the touchdown site will freeze, crack, warp and otherwise mangle ordinary materials. Souvenir-hunters sell such items to the gullible and they are seldom authentic.

“It’s from Jerusalem,” Ashlee added. “Supposedly.”

If that was true, this misshapen lump might once have been something useful: a doorknob, a paperweight, a pen, a comb.

I said, “I hope it isn’t.”

Ashlee looked crestfallen. “I thought you’d be interested. You were there, in Jerusalem, when it happened. Sort of a coincidence.”

“I don’t like those kinds of coincidences.”

I told her about Sue’s notion of tau turbulence. I said I had been in the turbulence too often, that it had affected my life (if “affected” is the word for an acausal connection) in ways I didn’t like.