The Chronoliths (32 page)

And with nothing left to do, the sun setting beyond the now-distant but still dominating figure of Kuin and a brisk wind combing the wild grass, we huddled in the vehicle and tried to sleep. We didn’t have to try very hard. We were all exhausted. Even Sue slept, though she had revived quickly from her faint and had been alert enough on the drive east.

She slept through the night and was up at dawn.

Come morning, Hitch opened the van’s engine compartment and ran the resident diagnostics. Ray Mosely blinked at the noise but then rolled back to sleep.

I woke hungry, remained hungry (we had only emergency rations), and walked past the paint-scabbed wall of the shed to the place on the grassland where Sue had once again unfolded our tripod and sextant.

The surveyor’s tool was aimed at the distant Chronolith. Sue had opened a top map and laid it at her feet, the corners weighted with rocks. A brisk wind tousled her coiled hair. Her clothes were dirty and her enormous eyeglasses smudged; but, incredibly, she managed to smile when she noticed me.

“Morning, Scotty,” she said.

The Chronolith was an icy pillar silhouetted against the haze-blue horizon. It drew the eye the way any incongruous or shocking thing does. The Kuin of Wyoming gazed eastward from his pedestal, almost directly at us.

Aimed at us, I thought, like an arrow.

I said, trying to restrain the irony, “Are you learning anything?”

“A lot.” She faced me. Her smile was peculiar. Happy-sad. Her eyes were wide and wet. “Too much.
Way
too much.”

“Sue—”

“No, don’t say anything practical. May I ask you a question?”

I shrugged.

“If you were packing for a trip to the future, Scotty, what would you take?”

“What would I
take
? I don’t know. What would
you
take?”

“I would take… a secret. Can you keep a secret?”

It was an unsettling question. It was something my mother used to ask me when she began to bend into insanity. She would hover over me like a malign shadow and say, “Can you keep a secret, Scotty?”

The secret was inevitably some paranoid assertion: that cats could read her mind; that my father was an impostor; that the government was trying to poison her.

“Come on, Scotty,” Sue said, “don’t look at me like that.”

“If you tell me,” I said, “it’s not a secret anymore.”

“Well, that’s true. But I have to tell someone. I can’t tell Ray, because Ray is in love with me. And I can’t tell Hitch, because Hitch doesn’t love anyone at all.”

“That’s cryptic.”

“Yes. I can’t help it.” She glanced at the far blue pillar of the Kuin. “We may not have much time.”

“Time for what?”

“I mean, it won’t last. The Chronolith. It isn’t stable. It’s too massive. Look at it, Scotty. See the way it’s sort of quivering?”

“That’s heat coming off the prairie. It’s an optical illusion.”

“In part. Not entirely. I’ve run the numbers over and over. The numbers that pegged back at the bunker.
These
numbers.” Her notebook. “I triangulated its height and its radius, at least roughly. And no matter how stingy I am with the estimates, it comes up past the limit.”

“The limit?”

“Remember? If a Chronolith is too massive, it’s unstable—if I could have published the work they might have called it the Chopra Limit.” Her peculiar smile faded and she looked away. “I may be too vain for the work I have to do. I can’t let that happen. I have to be humble, Scotty. Because I will, God knows, be
humbled
.”

“You’re saying you think the Chronolith will destroy itself.”

“Yes. Within the day.”

“That would hardly be a secret.”

“No, of course, but the
cause
of it will be. The Chopra Limit is
my
work. I haven’t shared it with anyone, and I doubt anyone else is doing triangulation. The Kuin won’t last long enough for accurate measurement.”

This was making me nervous. “Sue, even if this is all true, people will know—”

“Know
what
? All anyone will know is that the Chronolith was destroyed and that we were here trying to destroy it. They’ll draw the obvious conclusion. That we succeeded, if a little belatedly. The truth will be our secret.”

“Why a secret?”

“Because I
mustn’t
tell, Scotty, and neither must you. We have to carry this secret at least twenty years and three months into the future or else it won’t work.”

“Dammit, Sue—
what
won’t work?”

She blinked. “Poor Scotty. You’re confused. Let me explain.”

I couldn’t follow every detail of her explanation, but this is what I came away with.

We had not been defeated.

Plenty of press folks were doubtless still reporting the arrival, and they would also witness—in a matter of hours if not minutes—the spectacular collapse of the Chronolith. That broadcast image would (Sue claimed) interrupt the feedback loop and shatter Kuin’s aura of invincibility. Win or lose, Kuin would no longer be destiny. He would be reduced to the status of an enemy.

And the world
must
think we had succeeded; the Chopra Limit
must
remain a closely-held secret…

Because, Sue believed, it was not a coincidence that this Chronolith had surpassed the physical limit of stability.

It was, she declared, quite obviously an act of sabotage.

Contemplate that: the sabotage of a Chronolith, by design. Who would commit such an act? Clearly, an insider. Clearly, someone who understood not only the crude physics of the Chronoliths but their finest nuances. Someone who understood the physical limits and knew how to push them.

“That arrow,” Sue said almost sheepishly, shocked at the temerity of her words and not a little frightened: “That arrow is pointing at
me
.”

Of course it was madness.

It was megalomania, self-aggrandizing and self-abnegating, both at once. Sue had elevated herself to the rank of Shiva. Creator, destroyer.

But a part of me wanted it to be true.

I think I wanted an end to the long and disruptive drama of the Chronoliths—not just for my sake but for Ashlee’s, for Kaitlin’s.

And I wanted to trust Sue. After a lifetime of doubt, I think I
needed
to trust her.

I needed her madness to be, miraculously, divine.

Hitch was still working on the van when the twelve motorcycles came down the access road in a billow of gray dust. They came from the direction of the Chronolith.

Sue and I scurried back to the shed as soon as we spotted them. By that time Ray had alerted Hitch. Hitch had come out from under the engine block and was loading and passing out our four handguns.

I took one of these gratefully, but just as quickly disliked the way it felt in my hand—cold and faintly greasy. More than the sight of the approaching strangers, who were almost certainly Kuinists but could have been anyone, it was the pistol that made me feel afraid. A weapon is supposed to boost your confidence, but in my case it only served to emphasize how vulnerable we were, how desperately alone.

Ray Mosely tucked his gun under his belt and began frantically thumbing his pocket phone. But we hadn’t been able to get a call out for days and he wasn’t having any better luck now. The attempt seemed almost reflexive and somehow pitiable.

Hitch held out a gun for Sue, but she pressed her hands to her sides. “No, thank you,” she said.

“Don’t be stupid.”

I was able to hear the motorcycle engines now, the sound of locusts, a plague descending.

“Keep it,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d probably shoot the wrong person.”

She looked at me when she said this, and I was inexplicably reminded of the young girl in Jerusalem who had thanked Sue just before she died. Her eyes, her voice, had conveyed this same cryptic urgency.

“We don’t have time to argue.”

Hitch had taken charge. He was alert and focused, frowning like a chess player facing a skilled opponent. The concrete-block shed possessed a single door and three narrow windows—an easy space to defend but a potential death trap if we were overwhelmed. But the van wouldn’t have been any safer.

“Maybe they don’t know we’re here,” Ray volunteered. “Maybe they’ll ride on past.”

“Maybe,” Hitch said, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”

Ray put a hand on the butt of his pistol. He looked at the door, at Hitch, at the door, as if trying to work out some perplexing mathematical question.

“Scotty,” Sue said, “I’m depending on you.”

But I didn’t know what she meant.

“They’re slowing down,” Hitch said.

“Maybe they’re not Kuinists,” Ray said.

“Maybe they’re nuns on a day trip. But don’t count on it.”

Their disadvantage was, they had no cover.

The land here was flat and grown over with sage-grass. Clearly aware of their vulnerability, the bikers came to an idling stop a distance from the shed, out of easy range.

Watching through the gap in the cinderblocks that passed as a west-facing window, what struck me was the incongruity of all this. The day was fine and cool, the sky as cloudless as crystal. Even the perhaps unstable Chronolith seemed fixed and placid on the horizon. The small sound of sparrows and crickets hung in the air. And yet here were a dozen armed men straddling the road and no help for many miles.

One of the bikers put his helmet in his hand, shook out a flourish of dirty blond hair, and began walking almost lazily down the dirt track toward us.

And:

“I’ll be flicked,” Hitch said, “if that isn’t Adam Mills.”

We were deep in the tau turbulence, I guess Sue might have said; in that place where the arrow of time turns on itself and turns again, that place where there are no coincidences.

“We just want the lady,” Adam Mills called from a short distance down the road.

His voice was harsh and high-pitched. It was in some ways almost a parody of Ashlee’s voice. Bereft, that is, of all warmth and subtlety.

(“We have some strange history behind us,” Ash had once said. “Your crazy mother. My crazy son.”)

“What lady would that be?” Hitch called back.

“Sulamith Chopra.”

“I’m the only one here.”

“I believe I recognize that voice. Mr. Paley, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve heard that voice. Last time, I think you were screaming.”

Hitch declined to answer, but I saw him clench the fingers—what remained of them—of his left hand.

“Just send her out and we’ll be away from here. Can you hear me, Ms. Chopra? We don’t mean to harm you.”

“Shoot him,” Ray whispered, “just
shoot
the fucker.”

“Ray, if I shoot him, they’ll just put a rocket in this window. Of course, they might do that anyhow.”

“It’s all right,” Sue said suddenly and calmly. “None of this is necessary. I’ll go.”

Which surprised Hitch and Ray, if not me. Some sense of her intention had begun to dawn.

Hitch said, “Now that’s just fucking ridiculous. You have no idea—these people are
mercenaries
. Worse, they have a pipeline straight to Asia. They’d be happy to sell you into the hands of some would-be Kuin. You’re merchandise, as far as they’re concerned.”

“I know that, Hitch.”

“High-priced merchandise, and for a good reason. You really want to hand over everything you know to some Chinese warlord? I’d shoot you myself if I thought you’d do that.”

Sue was as placid now, at least superficially, as a martyr in a medieval painting. “But that’s exactly what I have to do.”

Hitch looked away. His head was silhouetted in the window. Had it occurred to him to do so, Adam Mills could have taken him out with a well-placed head shot.

Ray, horrified, said, “Sue,
no
,” and the tableau was sustained for a fragile moment: Hitch gap-jawed, Ray on the brink of panic. Sue gave me a very quick and meaningful look.

Our secret, Scotty. Keep our secret
.

Hitch said, “You mean that.”

“Yes, I do.”

He turned his weapon away from the window.

The building in which we were trapped had probably been erected during one or another of the state’s cyclical oil booms, perhaps to keep prospecting gear out of the rain—not that it seemed to rain much here. The concrete floor was adrift with everything that had blown through the open door frame in fifty or seventy-five years: dust, sand, vegetable matter, the desiccated remains of snakes and birds.

Hitch stood at the west wall where the cinderblocks were water-stained and eroded. Sue and Ray were together in the northwest corner, and I stood across from Hitch at the eastern wall.

The light was dim, despite the brightness of the day, and the air a little cooler than the dry air of the prairie, though that would change as sun began to bake the tin roof. Cross drafts stirred up dust and the scent of ancient decay.

I remember all this vividly. And the sagging wooden roof beams, and the angled sunlight through the empty window, and the dry sagebrush clustered just beyond the doorway, and the glint of sweat on Hitch Paley’s forehead as he aimed his pistol—but only tentatively—at Sue.

Sue was pale. A vein pulsed in her throat, but she remained quiet.

“Point that fucking gun away,” Ray said.

Ray, in his tangled beard and sweat-stained T-shirt, looked like a middle-aged academic gone feral. His eyes were just that wild. But there was something admirable in this strained declaration of defiance, a fierce if fragile courage.

“I’m serious,” Hitch said. “She does not go out that door.”

“I have to go,” Sue said. “I’m sorry, Ray, but—”

She had taken a single step when Ray slammed her back into the corner, restraining her with his body. “Nobody’s going
anywhere
!”

“You going to sit on her till doomsday?” Hitch asked.

“Put your gun down!”

“I can’t do that. Ray, you know I can’t do that.”

And now Ray lifted his own weapon. “Stop threatening her or I’ll—”

But this was beyond the bounds of Hitch Paley’s patience.

Let me say, in defense of Hitch, that he knew Adam Mills. He knew what was waiting for us out there in the relentless sunlight. He was not about to surrender Sue and I think he would have died rather than surrender himself.