The Chronoliths (24 page)

Ashlee was dismayed. She mouthed the words,
tau turbulence
. “Can you catch it,” she asked, “from a thing like this?”

“I doubt it. It’s not a disease, Ash. It’s not contagious. I just don’t care to be reminded.”

She folded the necklace into its handkerchief and put the bundle into her purse again.

We went back to the room. Ashlee turned on the video panel but ignored it. I read a book. After a while she came to the bed and kissed me—not for the first time, but harder than she’d kissed me for a while.

It was good to have her back in my arms, good to fold myself around her small, lithe body.

Later on, I drew open the curtains and we lay invisible in the dark watching cars pass on the highway, headlights like parade torches, taillights like floating embers. Ashlee asked me how the visit with Kait had gone.

“She’s better,” I said. “Janice is flying in tomorrow to take her home.”

“Has she talked about the haj?”

“Very little.”

“She’s been through a lot.”

“There was some scarring,” I said.

“I’ll bet.”

“No. I mean, I talked to her doctor, too. There was a secondary infection, a uterine infection. Something she picked up in Portillo. It’s cured, but there was scarring. Kait can’t have children, not naturally, not without hiring a host. She’s infertile.”

Ashlee pulled away from me and stared out at the darkness and the highway. She groped at the side table for a cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” she said. There was a strained note in her voice.

“She’s alive. That’s what matters.”

(In fact Kait had been silent while the doctor gave me the bad news. She had watched me from her bed, unblinking, no doubt trying to divine my reaction from my face, wanting to know whether I would withdraw my sympathy and leave her stranded under those blank white hospital sheets.)

“I know how she feels,” Ashlee said.

“You’re trembling.”

“I know how she feels, Scott, because they told me the same thing after Adam was born. There were complications. I can’t have any more babies.”

More traffic came down the highway, rolling bars of light over the textured ceiling of the room. We sat in shadow, looking at each other like lost children, and then we came into each other’s arms again.

In the morning we packed for the trip back to Minneapolis. Ashlee left the room briefly while I was shaving.

She didn’t think I saw her when she stepped out the door.

I watched from the window as she crossed the parking lot, dodged the rear bumper of a floral delivery van, fished a folded handkerchief out of her purse, kissed the crumpled package and then tossed it into an open Dumpster.

I returned the favor later that day: I called Sue Chopra and told her I didn’t work for her anymore.

Time has an arrow, Sue Chopra once told me. It flies in one direction. Combine fire and firewood, you get ashes. Combine fire and ashes, you don’t get firewood.

Morality has an arrow, too. For example: Run a film of the Second World War backward and you invert its moral logic. The Allies sign a peace agreement with Japan and promptly bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazis extract bullets from the heads of emaciated Jews and nurse them back to health.

The problem with tau turbulence, Sue said, is that it mingles these paradoxes into daily experience.

In the vicinity of a Chronolith, a saint might be a very dangerous man. A sinner is probably more useful.

Seven years after Portillo, with the military monopolizing the output of the communication and computation industries, a secondhand processor substrate of decent consumer quality would draw as much as two hundred dollars on the open market. A Marquis Instruments strat board of 2025 vintage outperformed its modern consumer equivalents in both speed and reliability; ounce for ounce, it was worth more than gold bullion. I had five of them in the trunk of my car.

I drove myself and my strat boards and my collection of surplus connectors, screens, dishes, codems, and outboard accessories to the open market at Nicollet Mall. It was a bright and pleasant summer morning, and even the empty windows of the Halprin Tower—abandoned in mid-construction when its financial backing collapsed last January—seemed cheerful, up there in the relatively clean air.

A homeless man had unrolled his blanket in the spot by the fountain that was my customary location, but he didn’t object when I asked him to move along. He understood the drill. Market niches were jealously guarded, vendor seniority scrupulously respected. Many of the Nicollet vendors had been here since the beginning of the economic contraction, when local police had been known to enforce the anti-peddling laws at gunpoint. That kind of hardship breeds solidarity. We all knew one another, and though conflicts were hardly unusual, vendors as a rule honored and would protect one another’s spaces. Veterans of long standing held the best spots; newcomers took the dregs and often had to wait months or years for a vacancy to come up.

I was somewhere between the veterans and the newbies. The fountain spot was away from the prime aisles but spacious enough that I could park the car and unload my folding table and stock without having to use a handcart… as long as I got there early and set up before the crowds began to gather.

This morning I was a little late. The vendor next to me, a man named Duplessy who sold and tailored used clothing, had already set up shop. He strolled over as I was unpacking my goods.

He eyed the fresh merchandise. “Whoa, strat boards,” he said. “Are they authentic?”

“Yup.”

“Looks like quality. Are you hooked up with a supplier?”

“Just got lucky.” In fact I had bought the boards from an amateur office-furniture and lighting-fixture liquidator who had no idea of their resale value. It was a one-shot deal, alas.

“You want to trade something for one of those? I could put you in a nice formal suit.”

“What would I want with a suit, Dupe?”

He shrugged. “Just asking. Hope we get some customers today. In spite of the parade.”

I frowned. “Another parade?” I should have paid attention to the news.

“Another A&P parade. All flags and assholes, no confetti. No clowns… in the narrow sense of the word.”

Adapt and Prosper was a hard-core Kuinist faction, despite their occasional conciliatory rhetoric, and every time they carried their blue-and-red banner through the Twin Cities there were bound to be counter-demonstrations and some photogenic head-knocking. On parade days, noncombatants tended to stay out of the streets. I guessed the Copperheads still had a right to voice their opinions. Nobody had repealed the Constitution. But it was a pity they had to pick a day like this—blue sky and a cool breeze, perfect shopping weather.

I watched Dupe’s goods for him while he ran off to grab breakfast from a cart. By the time he got back I had sold one of my boards to another vendor, and by lunch, though crowds were light, two more had gone, all at premium prices. I had made a decent profit on the day and as the streets emptied around one o’clock I packed up again. “Afraid of a little old street fight?” Dupe called out from his heaped mounds of cotton and denim.

“Afraid of the traffic.” Police roadblocks were sure to be going up all over the urban core. Already, as the crowds thinned, I had seen grim young men with A&P armbands or K+ tattoos gathering on the sidewalks.

What worried me, though, was not the traffic or the threat of violence so much as the lean and bearded man who had twice cruised past my table and was still hovering nearby, looking away with patently fake indifference whenever I glanced in his direction. I had met my share of shy or undecided customers, but this gentleman had given the goods a cursory and superficial look and seemed more interested in repeatedly checking his watch. He was probably an innocent twitch, but he made me nervous.

I had learned to trust these instincts.

I managed to get out of the downtown core before any serious trouble started. Pro-K and anti-K scuffles had become almost routine lately and the police had learned how to manage them. But the residue of the pacification gas (which smells like a combination of moist cat litter and fermented garlic) would linger for days, and it cost the city a small fortune to scrape the oxidizing lumps of barrier foam off the streets.

A lot of things had changed in the seven years since the arrival of the Portillo Chronolith.

Count those years: seven of them, the nervous prewar years, pessimistic years. Years when nothing seemed to go right for the country, even setting aside the economic crisis, the Kuinist youth movement, the bad news from abroad. The Mississippi-Atchafalaya disaster dragged on. Past Baton Rouge, the Mississippi had settled in its new course to the sea. Industry and shipping had been devastated, whole towns drowned or left without drinking water. There was nothing sinister about this, only nature winning a round over the Corps of Engineers. Sedimentation changes river gradients and gravity does the rest. But it seemed, in those days, oddly symbolic. The contrast was inescapable: Kuin had mastered time itself, while we were crippled by water.

Seven years ago, I couldn’t have pictured myself as a glorified scrap dealer. Today I felt fortunate to be in that position. I usually cleared enough money in any given month to pay the rent and put food on the table. A great many people weren’t so lucky. Many had been forced into the dole lines and the soup kitchens, ripe recruiting grounds for the P-K and A-K street armies.

I tried to phone Janice from the car. After a few false starts I got a connection, at some ridiculously diminished baud rate that made her sound as if she was shouting through a toilet-paper roll. I told her I wanted to take Kait and David out for dinner.

“It’s David’s last night,” Janice said.

“I know. That’s why we want to see them. I know it’s short notice, but I wasn’t sure I’d be finished downtown in time.” Or whether I would have the cash to fund even a home-cooked meal for four, but I didn’t say that to Janice. The Marquis boards had subsidized this little luxury.

“All right,” she said, “but don’t bring them back too late. David gets an early start tomorrow.”

David had received his draft notice in June and was off to basic training at a Uniforces camp in Arkansas. He and Kaitlin had been married for just six months, but the draft board didn’t care. The Chinese intervention was eating up ground troops by the boatload.

“Tell Kait I’ll be there by five,” I said, as the phone link crackled and then evaporated. Then I called Ashlee and told her we’d have guests for dinner. I volunteered to do the shopping.

“I wish we could afford meat,” she said wistfully.

“We can.”

“You’re kidding. What—the strat boards?”

“Yup.”

She paused. “There are a lot of places we could put that money, Scott.”

Yes, there were, but I elected to put it on the counter of a butcher shop in exchange for four small sirloin steaks. And at the grocer I picked up basmati rice and fresh asparagus spears and real butter. There’s no point living if you can’t, at least occasionally,
live
.

Kait and David made their home in a converted storage space over Janice and Whit’s garage. As awful as that sounds, they had managed to turn a chilly peaked-roof attic into a relatively warm and comfortable nest, furnished with Whit’s cast-off sofa and a big wrought-iron bed David had inherited from his parents.

The attic also afforded them a little distance from Whit himself, whose charity they were in no position to refuse. Whit was a dignified Copperhead and disapproved of street fighting; but he took his politics seriously and could be counted on for a little accommodationist lecture whenever the conversation lagged.

I picked up Kait and David and drove them to the small apartment I shared with Ashlee. Kait was quiet in the car, putting on a brave face but obviously worried for her husband. David compensated by chattering about the news (the ousting of the Federal Party, the fighting in San Salvador), but by his voice and gestures he was also nervous. Reasonably so. None of us mentioned China even in passing.

David Courtney hadn’t impressed me when Kait first introduced him last year, but I had come to like him very much. He was just twenty years old and displayed that emotional blandness—psychologists call it “lack of affect”—that is the style of this generation raised in the shadow of Kuin. Underneath it, however, David proved to be a warm and thoughtful young man whose affection for Kait was unmistakable.

He was not especially handsome—he had picked up a facial scar in the Lowertown fires of 2028—and he was certainly not rich or well-connected. But he was employed (or had been, until the draft notice arrived) driving a loader at the airport, and he was bright and adaptable, vital qualities in these dark days of a dark century.

Their wedding had been a tiny affair, subsidized by Whit and held in a church in Whit’s parish where half the deacons were probably closet Copperheads. Kait had worn Janice’s old wedding dress, which revived some awkward memories. But it was a fine event by modern standards and both Janice and Ashlee had been moved to tears by the ceremony.

Kaitlin went on up to the apartment as David and I set the car’s alarms and security protocols. I asked him how Kait was dealing with his impending departure.

“She cries sometimes. She doesn’t like it. I think she’ll be okay, though.”

“How about you?”

He brushed his hair away from his eyes, revealing for a moment the scar tissue that marred his forehead. He shrugged.

“All right so far,” he said.

I offered to broil the steaks, but Ashlee wouldn’t have it. We hadn’t seen steak for the better part of a year and she wasn’t about to entrust these to my care. I could chop the onions, she suggested, or better, keep Kait and David company and stay the hell out of the kitchen.

Maybe the steaks were a bad idea. They were celebration food, but there was nothing to celebrate tonight. Kait and David exchanged troubled glances and were clearly making an effort to rise above their anxiety, an effort not even briefly successful. By the time Ash served dinner we were all clearly playing a game of mutual denial.