The Chronoliths (3 page)

“That kind of proposition worries me,” I said.

“A little worry is a healthy thing.”

That evening, the English-language papers printed the text of the writing that had been discovered on the base of the monument—an open secret here in Chumphon.

The inscription, carved an inch deep into the substance of the pillar and written in a kind of pidgin Mandarin and basic English, was a simple declarative statement commemorating a battle. In other words, the pillar was a victory monument.

It celebrated the surrender of southern Thailand and Malaysia to the massed forces of someone (or something) called “Kuin,” and beneath the text was the date of this historic battle.

December 21, 2041.

Twenty years in the future.

I flew into the United States on a start-up air carrier with legal berths at Beijing, Dusseldorf, Gander, and Boston—the long way around the planet, with numbing layovers—and arrived at Logan Airport with a set of knockoff designer luggage in the best Bangkok tradition, a five-thousand-dollar grubstake, and an unwelcome obligation, all thanks to Hitch Paley. I was home, for better or for worse.

It was amazing how effortlessly wealthy Boston seemed after a season on the beaches, even before I left the terminal, as if all these gleaming cafés and newsstands had sprung up after a hard rain, bright Disney mushrooms. Nothing here was older than five years, not the terminal annex itself nor the Atlantic landfill that supported it, a facility younger than the great majority of its patrons. I submitted to a noninvasive Customs scan, then crossed the cavernous Arrivals complex to a taxi bay.

The mystery of the Chumphon Chronolith—it had been given that name by a pop-science journalist just last month—had already faded from public attention. It was still making news, but mainly in the supermarket checkout papers (totem of the Devil or trump of the Rapture) and in countless conspiracy-chronicling web-journals. Incomprehensible as it may seem to a contemporary reader, the world had passed on to more immediate concerns—Brazzaville 3, the Windsor weddings, the attempted assassination of the diva Lux Ebone at the Roma Festival just last weekend. It was as if we were all waiting for the event that would define the new century, the thing or person or abstract cause that would strike us as indelibly new, a Twenty-first Century Thing. And of course we didn’t recognize it when it nudged its way into the news for the first time. The Chronolith was a singular event, intriguing but ultimately mystifying, hence ultimately boring. We set it aside unfinished, like the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

In fact there was a lot of ongoing concern over the Thai event, but it was restricted to certain echelons of the intelligence and security communities, both national and international. The Chronolith, after all, was an avowedly hostile military incursion conducted on a large scale and with ultimate stealth, even if the only casualties had been a few thousand gnarled mountain pines. Chumphon Province was under very close scrutiny these days.

But that was not my business, and I imagined I could disentangle myself from it simply by flying a few thousand miles west.

We thought like that then.

Unusually cold weather that autumn. The sky was cast over with turbulent clouds, a high wind tormenting the last of the year’s fishing fleet. Outside the street atrium of the AmMag station, a row of flags beat the air.

I paid the taxi driver, crossed the lobby, and bought a ticket for the Northern Tier Express: Detroit, Chicago, and across the prairies to Seattle, though I was only going as far as Minneapolis. Boarding at seven p.m., the vending machine informed me. I purchased a newspaper and read it on a coin monitor until the station’s wall clock showed 4:30.

Then I stood up, surveyed the lobby for suspicious activity (none), and walked out onto Washington Street.

Five blocks south of the magrail station was a tiny, ancient mailbox service called Easy’s Packages and Parcels.

It was a storefront business, not prosperous, with a flyblown mylar shade over the display window. While I watched, a man with a steel walker inched through the front door and emerged ten minutes later carrying a brown paper envelope. I imagined this was the typical customer at an establishment like Easy’s, a golden-ager perversely loyal to what remained of the U.S. Postal Service.

Unless the gentleman with the walker was a criminal in latex makeup. Or a cop.

Did I have qualms about what I was doing? Many… or at least second thoughts. Hitch had bankrolled my trip home, and the favor he had asked in return had seemed simple enough when we were basking penniless on the sand. I had known Hitch for most of a year before the advent of the Chumphon Chronolith; he was one of the few Haat Thai regulars whose conversation extended to anything more advanced than personal sexual conquests and designer drugs. He was a master of unaudited deals and subterranean income, but he was essentially honest and (as I had often insisted to Janice) “not a bad person.” Whatever that meant. I trusted him, at least within the boundaries of his nature.

But as I stood watching Easy’s Packages for evidence of police surveillance—fully aware that I wouldn’t recognize professional surveillance unless the Treasury Department happened to rent a billboard to advertise its presence—all those judgments seemed facile and naive. Hitch had asked me to show up at Easy’s, give his name, and take delivery of “a package,” which I was to hold until he contacted me, no questions asked.

Hitch was after all a drug dealer, though his beach trade had been confined to cannabis, exotic mushrooms, and the milder phenylethylamines. And Thailand was indeed a source country and established commercial route for the narcotics trade since the days of Marco Polo.

I wasn’t modest about intoxicants and I had sampled more than a few. Virtually every psychoactive substance was legal somewhere and almost all of it decriminalized in the liberal Western nations, but the U.S. in general and Massachusetts in particular were still heavily punitive when it came to the transportation of hard narcotics. If Hitch had somehow contrived to mail himself, say, a kilo of black tar heroin—and if his sense of humor extended to giving me custody of it—I might be paying for my ticket home with penitentiary time. I might not see Kaitlin without a sheet of wire-reinforced glass between us, at least until her thirtieth birthday.

Rain came down in a sudden, sheeting torrent. I ran across the street to Easy’s Packages, took a breath of damp air, and stepped inside.

Easy himself, or someone like him—a tall, intricately wrinkled, muscular black man who might have been sixty or eighty—stood behind a hardwood counter, guarding a row of aluminum mailboxes tarnished a foggy gray. He looked at me briefly. “Help you?”

“I’m here to pick up a package.”

“You and everybody else. Mailbox number?”

Hitch hadn’t given me a number. “Hitch Paley said there’d be a package waiting for me.”

His eyes narrowed, and his head seemed to rise a quarter inch in sudden indignation. “Hitch
Paley
?”

From the tone of his voice this was already going badly, but I nodded.

“Hitch fucking Paley!” He thumped the counter with his fist. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you happen to be talking to Hitch Paley, you tell that asshole our scores are not settled! He can keep his fuckin’ packages to himself, too!”

“You don’t have anything for me?”

“Do I have anything
for
you? Do I have anything
for
you? The toe of my fucking
boot
is what I have for you!”

I managed to find the door.

Thus the failed journalist, failed husband, and failed parent became a failed criminal.

Riding the AmMag coach out of Massachusetts, out of the urban corridor into shanty sprawl and dusky farmland, I tried to put these mysteries out of my mind.

Anything could have gone wrong between Hitch Paley and Easy’s Packages, but I told myself it didn’t really matter. I had done what Hitch had asked and I was frankly relieved not be carrying a butcher-paper-wrapped bundle of incriminating evidence. The only potential problem was that Hitch might (and in the near future) want his money back.

Midnight inched past in the rainy dark. I reclined my seat and contemplated the future. West of the Mississippi, the economy was booming. The new covalent processor platforms had enabled oceans of complex new software, and I was certain I could find at least an entry-level gig with one of the Silicon Ring NASDAQ candidates. Put my degree to use before it became obsolete. In time, I could pay Hitch back and null the debt. Thus crime engenders virtue.

In time, I imagined, I would become respectable; I would prove my worth to Janice and be forgiven, and Kait would come toddling back into my arms.

But I couldn’t help thinking of my father—seeing him in my own reflection in the rain-scored window. Failure is entropy, this specter seemed to announce, and entropy is a law of nature. Love becomes pain. Eventually you learn to ignore it. You achieve the nirvana of indifference. It’s not easy. But nothing worth doing is easy.

Hitch and I were among the first to witness the Chumphon Chronolith, and in the great conflation of time and mind that followed… well, yes, it has occurred to me to wonder how much of my own pessimism (or my father’s) I fed into that loop.

Not to mention a touch of madness on the maternal side. Cold air filtered into the darkened coach, and I remembered how fervently my mother had despised the cold. She had taken it personally, especially in her last years. A personal affront. She was an enemy of ice, plagued by snow.

She told me once that snow was the fecal matter of angels: it didn’t stink, being angelic in origin, but it was an insult nevertheless, so pure it burned like fire on mortal skin.

Tucking away my ticket stub in a jacket pocket, I noticed that the index number printed under the AmMag logo was 2,041—same as the due date inscribed on the Kuin stone.

At the depot in Minneapolis/St. Paul I picked up the local news and a pop-science magazine with an article about the Chronolith.

The science magazine featured a number of photos of the Thai site, much changed from the day Hitch and I had visited it. A vast blankness had been bulldozed into the brown earth surrounding the pillar, and the cleared perimeter was pockmarked with tents, polygonal equipment sheds, makeshift laboratories, and an array of ochre-painted Porta-Potties. A multinational pool of scientific investigators had been installed by the Pacific Treaty powers, mostly materials scientists who were at this point admittedly baffled. The Chronolith was spectacularly inert. It seemed not to react with its environment at all, could not be etched with acid or cut with lasers; deep digging had not yet reached the roots of it; its temperature, at least since the icy blast of its arrival, had never varied from ambient by so much as a fraction of a centigrade degree. The tiling was spectacularly aloof.

Spectral analysis of the pillar had proved especially unrewarding. The Chronolith passed and scattered light in the blue-green portion of the visible spectrum and, inexplicably, at a few harmonic wavelengths both infrared and ultraviolet. At other frequencies it was either purely reflective—impossibly reflective—or purely absorptive. Net input-output appeared to sum to zero, but no one was certain of that, and even that putative symmetry defied easy explanation. The article went on to speculate about a wholly new state of matter, which was less an explanation than a confession of ignorance phrased so as not to disturb the smooth flow of investigatory funding.

Speculation about the legend inscribed on the Chronolith was even gaudier and even less enlightening. Was “time travel” really a practical possibility? Most authorities dismissed the notion. The inscription was then perhaps a form of stealthing, a clue designed to mislead. Even the name “Kuin” was spectacularly uninformative. If it was a proper name, it might have been Chinese but was more commonly Dutch; the word also turned up in Finnish and Japanese; there was even a tribe of indigenous Peruvians called the Huni Kuin, though they could hardly be held responsible.

The alternate possibility—that some Asian warlord a mere twenty years hence had created a monument to a minor victory and
projected it into the recent past
—was simply too ridiculous to be true. (If this seems shortsighted now, consider that the scientific community had already been forced to swallow a number of evident absurdities about the Kuin stone and understandably balked at this ultimate impossibility. People used the word “impossible” more freely then.)

Such was the consensus, circa autumn of 2021.

I had bought the local paper for a more practical purpose. I searched its classified pages for rental properties close to the ring of suburban digital design consortia. The search coughed up a list of possibilities, and by Wednesday I had bribed my way into a one-bedroom walkup just west of the Twin Cities Agricultural Enclave. The room was unfurnished. I bought a chair, a table, and a bed. Anything more would have been a confession of permanency. I decided I was “in transition.” Then I looked for a job. I didn’t call Janice, at least not right away, because I wanted something to show her, first, some token of my credibility: an income, for example. If there had been a merit badge for Good Citizenship I would have applied for that, too.

Of course, none of this helped. There is no retrieving the past, a fact the reader almost surely understands. The younger generation knows these things better than my peers ever did. The knowledge has been forced on them.

By February of 2022 Janice and Kaitlin had moved into a pleasant suburban co-op, far from Janice’s work but close to good schools. The divorce contract we had finalized in December included a custody agreement that gave me Kaitlin for an average of one week per month.

Janice had been reasonable about sharing Kait, and I had seen a fair amount of my daughter since the fall. I was scheduled to have Kait this Saturday. But a day together mandated by a divorce court isn’t just a day together. It’s something else. Strange, awkward, and uncomfortable.