The Chronoliths (28 page)

“You can’t put that weight on me.”

“No, Scotty, I can’t.” She blinked sadly. “But I can’t take it away, either.”

None of this sounded quite sane to me. No doubt because of my mother, I had developed a sensitive ear for the irrational. Even as a child I had known at once when my mother began to veer into madness. I recognized the grandiose assertions, the inflated self-importance, the hints of imminent threat. And it always provoked the same reaction in me, a withdrawal verging on disgust, a rapid emotional deep-freeze.

“Do you remember Jerusalem?” Sue asked. “Remember those young people, the ones who were killed? I think of them often, Scotty. I think of that young girl who came to me just when the Chronolith was arriving, when the tau turbulence was peaking. Her name was Cassie. Do you remember what Cassie said?”

“She thanked you.”

“She thanked me for something I hadn’t done, and then she died. I think it’s possible she was as deep in the tau turbulence as anyone can be, that the fact of her death had spilled over into the last minutes of her life. I don’t know exactly
why
she thanked me, Scotty, and I’m not sure she knew, either. But she must have sensed something… momentous.”

Sue turned her eyes away from me almost sheepishly, an expression that returned us to the scale of the merely human. “I need to live up to that,” she said. “At least, I need to try.”

Every two people who have ever fallen in love have a special place. A beach, a back yard, a park bench by a library. For Ashlee and me it was a landscaped park a few blocks east of our apartment, an ordinary suburban park with a concrete-rimmed duck pond and a playground and a cut-grass softball field. We had come here often in the days after Portillo, when Ash was recovering from the loss of Adam and after I had severed my contacts with Sue and company.

I had proposed marriage to her here. We had brought food for a picnic, but storm clouds came careening over the horizon and rain began to fall suddenly and copiously. We ran as far as the softball field and sheltered on the roofed bleachers. The air grew colder and the wet wind prompted Ashlee to curl against my shoulder. The park’s huge elms reared back from the storm, branches laced like fingers together, and I chose that moment to ask Ashlee whether she would consent to be my wife, and she kissed me and said yes. It was as simple and as perfect as that.

I took her there again.

The city had created perhaps too many of these parks in the urban-upgrade mania of the early century. Several had been rezoned for poverty housing or had deteriorated beyond all utility. This one was an exception, still stubbornly claimed by local families, defended by a host of local ordinances, patrolled after dark by community volunteers. We arrived in the late afternoon of a day cooler than the scorching day before, the kind of summer day so fine you want to fold it up and put it in your pocket. There were picnickers by the pond, toddlers swarming over the recently repainted swing sets and climbing gear.

We sat down on the untenanted softball bleachers. We had bought takeout food on the way to the park, stringy little chicken pieces fried in batter. Ashlee picked at hers listlessly. Her unease was obvious in every gesture. I suppose mine was, too.

I had originally planned (at least, perhaps) to tell her about Adam today. Lately I had understood that I wouldn’t. It was a decision by default, arguably a failure of courage. I still believed Ash deserved to know Adam was alive. But Sue was right, too. The news would hurt more than it would heal.

I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Ash that badly, much as my conscience protested.

It’s out of decisions like this, I suppose, that fate is constructed, board and nails, like a gallows.

“You remember the boy?” Ashlee asked, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “The little boy in the ball game?”

We had come here one Saturday not long after our wedding. There had been a Little League practice game in progress, two coaches and a few parents sharing the bleachers with us. The batter was a kid who looked like he’d been raised on steak and steroids, the kind of eleven-year-old who has to shave before school. The pitcher, contrarily, was a fair-haired waif with a talent for sinker balls. Unfortunately he left one up and over the plate. The ball came off the bat and back to the mound before the elfin pitcher had time to get a glove up—something off toward first base had distracted him—and as he turned his head he was struck squarely in the temple.

Silence, then gasps and a couple of screams. The pitcher blinked at the ground and fell, fell loose-limbed and suddenly, and lay motionless on the bare dirt patch that served as a mound.

Here’s the odd part. We weren’t parents or participants, just casual observers on a lazy day off, but I was on the phone to Emergency Services before anyone else in the bleachers had thought to reach into his pocket; and Ashlee, who had some RN training, reached the mound before the coach.

The injury wasn’t serious. Ash kept the boy still and calmed the terrified mother until the paramedics arrived. Nothing unusual about the incident except that Ash and I had both been so quick off the mark.

“I remember,” I told her.

“I learned something that day,” Ashlee said. “I learned we’re both ready for the worst. Always. Maybe, on some level,
expecting
it. Me, I guess it’s because of my dad.” Ashlee’s father had been an alcoholic, which often enough forces a child into premature adulthood, and he had died of liver cancer when Ashlee was just fifteen. “You because of your mom.” Expecting the worst: Well, yes, of course. (And her voice rang briefly in my head:
Scotty, stop looking at me like that!)

“What that tells me,” Ashlee said, choosing her words carefully, not meeting my eyes, “is that we’re pretty strong people. We’ve faced up to some difficult things.”

Difficult as a murderous child, resurrected from the dead?

“So it’s all right,” Ashlee said. “I trust you, Scott. To do what you think is right. You don’t have to break it to me gently. You’re going away with them, aren’t you?”

“Just for a little while,” I said.

We crossed the state border into Wyoming on the day the governor abdicated.

One of the so-called Omega militias had occupied the legislature for most of a week, holding Governor Atherton among the sixty hostages. The National Guard finally cleared the building but Atherton resigned as soon as he was released, citing health reasons. (Good ones: He had been shot through the groin and the wound had been allowed to grow septic.)

Emotions ran high, in other words, out here in big sky country, but all that political ferment was invisible from the road. Where we crossed into the state, the highway was potholed and the vast ranchlands on either side had gone feral and dry in the wake of the retreating Oglalla Aquifer. Flocks of starlings populated the rusted ribs of irrigation piping.

“Part of the problem,” Sue was saying, “is that people see the Chronoliths as a kind of magic—but they’re not, they’re technology, and they
act
like technology.”

She had been talking about the Chronoliths for at least five hours, though not exclusively to me. Sue insisted on driving the last van in the convoy, which contained our personal effects and her notes and plans. We—Hitch or Ray or I—tended to rotate through the passenger seat. Sue had added a kind of nervous loquaciousness to her customary obsessive behavior. She had to be reminded to eat.

“Magic is unlimited,” she said, “or limited only by, allegedly, the skill of the practitioner or the whims of the supernatural world. But the limits on the Chronoliths are imposed by nature, and they’re very strict and perfectly calculable. Kuin broadcasts his monuments roughly twenty years into the past because that’s the point at which the practical barriers become insurmountable—any farther back and the energy requirements go logarithmic, shoot up toward infinity for even a very tiny mass.”

Our convoy consisted of eight large enclosed military cargo trucks and twice that number of vans and personnel carriers. Sue had put together, over the years, a small army of like-minded individuals—in particular the academics and grad students who had assembled the tau-intervention gear—and they were bookended, in this expedition, by the military posse. All these vehicles had been painted Uniforces blue so that we would resemble any number of other military convoys, a common-enough sight even on these underpopulated western highways.

Some miles past the border we pulled over to the margin of the road on a cue from the lead truck, lining up for gas at a lonely little Sunshine Volatiles station. Sue switched off the forced-air cooler and I rolled down a side window. The sky was boundless blue, marked here and there with wisps of high cloud. The sun was near zenith. Across a brown meadow, more sparrows swirled over an ancient rust-brown oil derrick. The air smelled of heat and dust.

“There are all kinds of limits on the Chronoliths,” Sue went on, her voice a sleepy drone. “Mass, for instance, or more precisely mass-
equivalency
, given that the stuff they’re made of isn’t conventional matter. You know there’s never been a Chronolith with a mass-equivalency greater than roughly two hundred metric tonnes? Not for lack of ambition on Kuin’s part, I’m sure. He’d build them to the moon if he thought he could. But again, past a certain point, the energy bill shoots up exponentially. Stability suffers, too. Secondary effects become more prominent. Do you know what would happen to a Chronolith, Scotty, if it was even a fraction over the theoretical mass limit?”

I said I did not.

“It would become unstable and destroy itself. Probably in a spectacular fashion. Its Calabi-Yau geometry would just sort of
unfold
. In practical terms, that would be catastrophic.”

But Kuin had not been so unwise as to allow that to happen. Kuin, I reflected, had been pretty savvy all along. And this did not bode well for our quixotic little voyage into the sun-ridden western lands.

“I could use a Coke,” Sue said abruptly. “I’m dry as a bone. Would you fetch me a Coke from the gas station, if they have any to sell?”

I nodded and climbed out of the van onto the pebbly margin of the road and walked up past the row of idling trucks toward the Sunshine depot. The fuel station was a lonely outpost, an old geodesic half dome shading a convenience store and a row of rust-spackled holding tanks. The tarmac was lined with miniature windrows of loose dirt. An old man stood in the doorway, shading his eyes with his hand and looking down the long row of vehicles. This was probably more custom than he had seen in the last two weeks. But he didn’t look particularly happy about it.

Automated service modules groped under the carriage of the lead truck, refueling and cleaning it. Charges were displayed on a big overhead panel, its lens gone opaque in the wash of sun and grit.

“Hey,” I said. “Looks like it hasn’t rained around here for a while.”

The gas-station attendant lowered his hand from his eyes and gazed at me obliquely. “Not since May,” he said.

“You got any cold drinks in there?”

He shrugged. “Soda pop. Some.”

“Can I have a look?”

He moved out of the doorway. “It’s your money.”

The interior shade seemed almost frigid after the raw heat of the day. There wasn’t much stock on the store’s shelves. The cooler held a few Cokes, root beers, orange pop. I selected three cans at random.

The attendant rang up the sale, peering at my forehead so intently that I began to feel branded. “Something wrong?” I asked him.

“Just checking for the Number.”

“Number?”

“Of the Beast,” he said, and pointed to a bumper sticker he had attached to the front of the checkout desk: I’M READY FOR THE RAPTURE! HOW ABOUT YOU?

“I guess all I’m ready for,” I said, “is a cold drink.”

“What I figured.”

He followed me out of the store and squinted down the line of trucks. “Looks like the circus came to town.” He spat absentmindedly into the dust.

“Is there a key to the toilet?”

“On the hook around the side.” He hooked a thumb to the left. “Show some mercy and flush when you’re done.”

The location of the arrival—identified by satellite surveillance and refined by on-the-spot measurement of ambient radiation—was as enigmatic and as unenlightening as so many other Chronolith sites.

Rural, small-town, or otherwise relatively undestructive Chronoliths were generally labeled “strategic,” whereas city-busters like the Bangkok or Jerusalem stones were “tactical.” Whether this was a meaningful distinction or just happenstance was subject to debate.

The Wyoming stone, however, clearly fell into the “strategic” category. Wyoming is essentially a high, barren mesa interrupted by mountains—“the land of high altitudes and low multitudes,” a twentieth-century governor had called it. Its oil reserves and its cattle business were hardly vulnerable to a Kuin stone, and in any case the projected arrival site featured neither of those resources—featured nothing at all, in fact, apart from a few crumbling farm structures and prairie-dog nests. The nearest town was a post-office village called Modesty Creek, fifteen miles up a two-lane tarmac road that ran through brown meadowland and basalt outcroppings and sparse stands of cottonwood. We traversed this secondary road at a cautious speed, and Sue took time off from her monologue to admire the waves of sage and wild nettles as we approached our destination.

What purpose, I asked her, could a Chronolith serve in a place like this?

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s a good and reasonable question to ask. It must mean
something
. It’s like playing a game of chess and suddenly your opponent moves his bishop off to the rim for no apparent reason. Either it’s an implausibly stupid mistake, or it’s a gambit.”

A gambit, then: a distraction, false threat, provocation, lure. But it didn’t matter, Sue insisted. Whatever purpose the Chronolith was meant to serve, we would nevertheless prevent its arrival. “But the causality is extremely tangled,” she admitted. “Very densely knotted and recomplicated. Kuin has the advantage of hindsight. He can work against us in ways we can’t anticipate. We know very little about him, but he might know a great deal about us.”