The Chronoliths (9 page)

Morris Torrance was perched in one corner on a wooden chair tilted against the wall, reading the print edition of
Golf
.

“Is he part of the package?” I asked.

“You can share space for a while. Morris needs to be close to me, physically.”

“Morris is a good friend?”

“Morris is my bodyguard, among other things.”

Morris smiled and dropped his magazine. He scratched his head, an awkward gesture probably meant to reveal the pistol he wore under his jacket. “I’m mostly harmless,” he said.

I shook hands with him again… more cordially this time, since he wasn’t nagging me for a urine sample.

“For now,” Sue said, “you just want to acquaint yourself with the work I’m doing. I’m not a code herder of your class, so take notes. End of the week, we’ll discuss how to proceed.”

I spent the day doing that. I was looking, not at Sue’s input or results, but at the procedural layers, the protocols by which problems were translated into limiting systems and solutions allowed to reproduce and die. She had installed the best commercial genetic apps, but these were frankly inappropriate (or at least absurdly cumbersome) for some of what she was attempting—“sliderule apps,” we used to call them, good to a first approximation, but primitive.

Morris finished looking at
Golf
and brought in lunch from the deli down the road, along with a copy of
Fly Fisherman
to while away the shank of the afternoon. Sue emerged periodically to give us a happy glance: We were her buffer zone, a layer of insulation between the world and the mysteries of Kuin.

It dawned on me, driving home to another nearly-empty apartment after my first week with the project, exactly how suddenly and irrevocably my life had changed.

Maybe it was the tedium of the drive; maybe it was the sight of the roadside tent colonies and abandoned, rust-ribbed automobiles; maybe it was just the prospect of a lonely weekend. “Denial” has a bad reputation, but stoicism is supposed to be a virtue, and the key act of stoicism is denial, the firm refusal to capitulate to an awful truth. Lately I had been very stoic indeed. But I changed lanes to pass a tanker truck, and a yellow Leica utility van crowded me from behind, and then the truck began edging out of his lane and into mine. The driver must have had his proximity overrides pulled, a highly illegal act not uncommon among gypsy truckers. I was in his blind spot, and the Leica refused to brake, and for a good five seconds all I could see was a premonitory vision of myself pancaked behind the steering column.

Then the trucker caught sight of me in his side mirror, careened right, and let me pass.

The Leica zoomed on by as if nothing had happened.

And I was left in a cold sweat at the wheel—untethered, essentially lost, hurrying down a gray road between oblivion and oblivion.

There was good news a week later: Janice called to tell me Kait was getting a new ear.

“It’s a complete fix, Scott, or at least it ought to be, given that she was born with normal hearing and probably retains all the neural pathways. It’s called a mastoid-cochlear prosthesis.”

“They can do that?”

“It’s a relatively new procedure, but the success rate has been almost one hundred percent on patients with Kait’s kind of history.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not especially. But it is a major surgery. She’ll be hospitalized for at least a week.”

“When?”

“Scheduled for six months from now.”

“How are you paying for it?”

“Whit has good coverage. His insurance cooperative is willing to take on at least a percentage of the cost. I can get some help through my plan, too, and Whit’s prepared to cover the remainder out of his own pocket. It might mean a second mortgage on the house. But it also means Kaitlin can have a normal childhood.”

“Let me help.”

“I know you’re not exactly wealthy right now, Scott.”

“I have money in the bank.”

“And I thank you for that offer. But… frankly, Whit would be more comfortable taking care of it himself.”

Kait had adjusted well to her hearing loss. Unless you noticed the way she cocked her head, the way she frowned when conversations grew quiet, you might not know she was impaired. But she was inevitably marked as different: condemned to sit at the front of the classroom, where too many teachers had addressed her by exaggerating their vowels and acting as if her hearing problem was an intellectual deficiency. She was awkward in schoolyard games, too easily surprised from behind. All this, plus her own natural shyness, had left her a little net-focused, self-absorbed, occasionally surly.

But that would change. The damage would be undone, apparently, thanks to some recent advances in biomechanical engineering. And thanks also to Whitman Delahunt. And if his intervention on behalf of my daughter was a little ego-bruising… well, I thought, fuck ego.

Kaitlin would be whole again. That was what mattered.

“But I want to contribute to this, Janice. This is something I’ve owed Kaitlin for a long time.”

“Not really, Scott. The ear thing was never your fault.”

“I want to help make it better.”

“Well… Whit would probably let you chip in, if you insist.”

It had been a frugal five years for me. I “chipped in” half the cost of the operation.

“So, Scotty,” Sue Chopra said, “are you rigged for travel?”

I had already told her about Kaitlin’s operation. I said I wanted to be with Kait when she was in recovery—that was nonnegotiable.

“That’s half a year off,” Sue said. “We won’t be gone nearly that long.”

Cryptic. But she seemed prepared, finally, to explain what she had lately been hinting about.

We sat in the spacious but largely empty cafeteria, four of us at a table by the only window, which overlooked the thruway. Me, Sue, Morris Torrance, and a young man by the name of Raymond Mosely.

Ray Mosely was a physics post-grad from MIT who worked with Sue on the hard-science inventories. He was twenty-five, pot-bellied, badly-groomed, and bright as a fresh dime. He was also absurdly timid. He had avoided me for weeks, apparently because I was an unfamiliar face, but gradually accepted me once he decided I wasn’t a rival for Sue Chopra’s affections.

Sue, of course, was at least a dozen years his senior, and her sexual tastes didn’t incline to men of any sort, much less bashful young physicists who thought a lengthy chat on the subject of mu-meson interactions was an invitation to physical intimacy. Sue had explained all this to him a couple of times. Ray, supposedly, had accepted the explanation. But he still gave her mooncalf glances across the sticky cafeteria table and deferred to her opinion with a lover’s loyalty.

“What’s amazing,” Sue began, “is how much we
haven’t
learned about the Chronoliths in the years since Chumphon. All we can do is characterize them a little bit. We know, for instance, that you can’t topple a Kuin stone even if you dig out its foundations, because it maintains a fixed distance from the Earth’s center of gravity and a fixed orientation—even if that means hovering in midair. We know it’s spectacularly inert, we know it has a certain index of refraction, we know from inspection that the objects are more likely molded than sculpted, and so on and so forth. But none of this is genuine understanding. We understand the Chronoliths the way a medieval theologian might understand an automobile. It’s heavy, the upholstery gets hot in direct sunlight, parts of it are sharp, parts of it are smooth. Some of these details might be important, most are probably not; but you can’t sort them out without an encompassing theory. Which is precisely what we lack.”

The rest of us nodded sagely, as we usually did when Sue began to expound a thesis.

“But some details are more interesting than others,” she continued. “For instance. We have some evidence that there’s a gradual, stepwise increase in local background radiation in the weeks before a Chronolith manifests itself. Not dangerous but definitely measurable. The Chinese did some work on this before they stopped sharing their research with us. And the Japanese had a lucky hit, too. They have a grid of radiation monitors routinely in use around their Sapporo/Technics fusion reactor. Tokyo was trying to pin down the source of all this stray radiation days before the Chronolith appeared. Readings peaked with the arrival of the monument, then fell very rapidly to normal ambient levels.”

“Which means,” Ray Mosely said as if interpreting for the stupid, “although we can’t stop the appearance of a Chronolith, we have a limited ability to predict it.”

“Give people some warning,” Sue said.

“Sounds promising,” I said. “If you know where to look.”

“Aye,” Sue admitted, “there’s the rub. But lots of places monitor for airborne radiation. And Washington has arranged with a number of friendly foreign governments to set up detectors around major urban sites. From the civil-defense point of view, it means we can get people out of the way.”

“Whereas we,” Ray added, “have an interest in
being
there.”

Sue gave him a sharp look, as if he had stepped on her punch line. I said, “A little dangerous, wouldn’t that be?”

“But to be able to record the event, get accurate measurements of the arrival burst, see the process as it happens… that could be priceless.”

“A view from a distance,” Morris Torrance put in. “I hope.”

“We can minimize any physical danger.”

I said, “This is happening soon?”

“We leave in a couple of days, Scotty, and that may be pushing it a little. I know it’s short notice. Our outposts are already set up and we have specialists in place. Evidence suggests a big manifestation in just about fifteen days. News of the evacuation should hit the papers this evening.”

“So where are we going?”

“Jerusalem,” Sue said.

She gave me a day to pack and get my business in order.

Instead, I went for a drive.

When I was ten years old, I came home one day from school and found my mother scrubbing the kitchen—which seemed normal enough, until I watched her for a while. (I had already learned to watch her carefully.)

My mother was not a beautiful woman, and I think I knew that, even then, in the distant way children are aware of such things. She had a hard, narrow face and she seldom smiled, which made her smiles a memorable event. If she laughed, I would lie in bed at night reliving the moment. She was, at the time, just thirty-five years old. She never wore makeup and some days didn’t even bother to brush her hair; she could get away with it because her hair was dark and naturally lustrous.

She hated buying clothes. She wore every item in her wardrobe until it was explicitly unwearable. Sometimes, when she took me shopping, I was embarrassed by her blue sweater, which had a cigarette burn on the side, through which I could see the strap of her brassiere; or her yellow blouse, with a bleach stain like a map of California running down the right shoulder.

If I mentioned these things to her she would gaze at me wordlessly, go back into the house, change into something vaguely more presentable. But I hated saying anything because it made me feel priggish and effeminate, the kind of little boy who Cares About Clothing, and that wasn’t it at all. I just didn’t want people looking sideways at her in the aisle of the Food Mart.

She was wearing bluejeans and one of my father’s oversized shirts when I came home that day. Yellow rubber gloves covered her arms up to the elbows—disguising, I failed to notice, a number of deep and freely bleeding scratches. This was her cleaning outfit, and she had cleaned with a vengeance. The kitchen reeked of Lysol and ammonia and the half-dozen other cleansers and disinfectants she kept in the cupboard under the sink. She had tied her hair back under a red bandana, and her attention was focused on the tiled floor. She didn’t see me until I rattled my lunch box down on the counter.

“Keep out of the kitchen,” she said tonelessly. “This is your fault.”

“My fault?”

“He’s your dog, isn’t he?”

She was talking about Chuffy, our Springer Spaniel, and I began to be afraid… not because of what she said, exactly, but because of the way she said it.

It was like the way she said goodnight. Every night she would come into my room and lean over my bed, straighten the cotton sheet and quilted blanket, kiss her fingertips and brush them against my forehead. And 90 percent of the time that was exactly as comforting as it sounds. But some nights… some nights she might have been drinking a little, and then she would loom over me with the feral stink of sweat and alcohol radiating from her like heat from a coal stove, and although she said the same words, the same “Goodnight, Scotty, sleep well,” it sounded like an impersonation, and her fingers against my skin were cold and abrasive. Those nights, I pulled the covers over my head and counted the seconds (
one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand
) until her footsteps faded down the hall.

She sounded that way now. Her eyes were too round and her mouth was clamped into a narrow line, and I suspected that if I got close to her I would smell the same repulsive salty stench, like a beach at low tide.

She went on cleaning, and I crept into the living room and turned on the TV and stared at a syndicated rerun of
Seinfeld
until I got to thinking about the remark she’d made about Chuffy.

My mother had never liked Chuffy. She tolerated him, but he was my father’s dog and mine, not hers. If Chuffy had peed on the kitchen floor, say, might that not explain her reaction? And where
was
Chuffy, anyway? Usually, this time of day, he was up on the sofa wanting his ears scratched. I called his name.

“That animal is filthy,” my mother said from the kitchen. “Leave that animal alone.”

I found Chuffy upstairs, locked in the half-bath that adjoined my parents’ bedroom. His hindquarters and his legs had been scrubbed raw, probably with one of the steel Brillo pads we kept for greasy cookware. His skin where the fur had come away was bleeding in a dozen different places, and when I tried to comfort him he sank his teeth into my forearm.