The Chronoliths (16 page)

“I don’t need the manifesto, Whit. What kind of people belong to this committee?”

“Prominent people.”

“How many?”

He blushed again. “Roughly thirty.”

“And you initiated Kait into the children’s auxiliary?”

“Far from it. The young people take these issues more seriously than we do. Than our generation, I mean. They’re not cynical about it. Kaitlin is a perfect example. She’d come home from youth group talking about all the things a leader like Kuin could do, if we weren’t fighting him at every turn. As if you could fight a man who controls time itself! Instead of finding a way to make the future a
functional
place.”

“You ever discuss this with her?”

“I didn’t indoctrinate her, if mat’s what you’re insinuating. I respect Kaitlin’s ideas.”

“But she fell in with radicals, is that right?”

Whit shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t necessarily categorize them as radicals. I know some of those kids. They can be a little over the top, but it’s enthusiasm, not fanaticism.”

“None of them has been seen since Saturday.”

“My feeling is that they’re all right. Things like this happen sometimes. Kids dump their GPS tags, take an automobile and go off somewhere for a few days. It’s not good, but it’s hardly unique. I’m sorry if Kaitlin was misled by a few bad apples, Scott, but adolescence is never an easy time.”

“Did they ever talk about a haj?”

“Pardon me?”

“A haj. Janice used the word.”

“She shouldn’t have. We discourage that word, too. A haj is a pilgrimage to Mecca. But that’s not how the kids use it. They mean a trip to see a Kuin stone, or a place where one is supposed to arrive.”

“You think that’s what they had in mind?”

“I don’t know what they might have had in mind, but I doubt it was a haj. You can’t drive a Daimler to Madras or Tokyo.”

“So you’re not worried.”

He drew back and looked like he wanted to spit. “That’s a vicious thing to say. Of course I’m worried. The world is a dangerous place—more dangerous than it’s ever been, in my opinion. I dread what might happen to Kaitlin. That’s why I intend to let the police do their work without interference. I would suggest you do the same.”

“Thank you, Whit,” I said.

“Don’t make it worse for Janice than it already is.”

“I don’t see how I could do that.”

“Talk to the police. I mean it. Or I’ll talk to them on your behalf.”

He had recovered his poise. I stood up: I didn’t want to hear any more homilies about Kait, not from this man. He sat in his chair like a wounded princeling and watched me leave.

I called Janice again from the car—I wanted to speak to her once more before Whitman did.

Hard times had changed the city. I drove past barred or boarded windows, discount retailers where decent shops used to be, storefront churches of obscure denomination. The trash collectors’ strike had filled the sidewalks with garbage.

I told Janice over the phone that I’d talked to Whit.

“You had to do that, didn’t you? Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”

There was a note in her voice I didn’t like. “Janice—are you afraid of him?”

“Of course not, not physically, but what if he loses his job? What then? You don’t
understand
, Scotty. A lot of what Whit does is just… he has to go along to get along, you know what I mean?”

“My concern is with Kaitlin right now.”

“I’m not sure you’re doing Kait any good, either.” She sighed. “There’s a parents’ group the police told me about, you might want to look into it.”

“Parents’ group?”

“Parents whose kids ran off, usually kids with Kuinist ideas. Haj parents, if you know what I mean.”

“The last thing I’m looking for is a support group.”

“You could compare notes, see what other people are doing.”

I doubted it. But she zipped me the address and I copied it into my directory.

“Meanwhile,” she said, “I’ll apologize to Whit for you.”

“Has he apologized for letting Kait get mixed up in this?”

“That’s none of your business, Scott.”

A month or so after the Jerusalem arrival I had taken myself to a doctor and had a long talk about genetics and madness.

It had occurred to me that Sue’s logic of correlation might have a personal side to it. She was saying, in effect, that our expectations shape the future, and that those of us exposed to extreme tau turbulence might influence it more than most.

And if what was happening to the world was madness, could I have factored in some of it from my own deepest psychic vaults? Had I inherited from my mother a faulty genetic sequence, and was it my own latent insanity that had filled a hotel suite on Mt. Scopus with bullets and glass?

The physician I talked to drew a blood sample and agreed to look at my genes for any markers that might suggest late-onset schizophrenia. But it wasn’t as simple as that, he said. Schizophrenia isn’t a purely heritable disorder, although susceptibility has a genetic aspect. That’s why they don’t gene-patch for it. There are complex environmental triggers. The most he could tell me was whether I
might
have inherited a
tendency
toward adult-onset schizophrenia—an almost meaningless factoid and utterly without predictive value.

I thought of it again when I used the motel terminal to call up a map of the world marked with Chronolith sites. If this was madness, here were its tangible symptoms. Asia was a red zone, dissolving into feverish anarchy, though fragile national governments continued to exist in Japan, where the ruling coalition had survived a plebiscite (barely), and in Beijing, though not in the Chinese countryside or far from the coast. The Indian subcontinent was pockmarked with arrivals and so was the Middle East, not only Jerusalem and Damascus but Baghdad, Tehran, Istanbul. Europe was free of the physical manifestation of Kuinism, which had so far stalled at the Bosporus, but not its political counterpart; there had been massive street riots in both Paris and Brussels staged by rival “Kuinist” factions. Northern Africa had endured five disastrous arrivals. A small Chronolith had cored the equatorial city of Kinshasa just last month. The planet was sick, sick unto death.

I dumped the map window and called one of the numbers Janice had given me, a police lieutenant by the name of Ramone Dudley. His interface told me he was unavailable but that my call had been logged for return.

While I waited I entered the other number Janice had pressed on me, the “support group,” which turned out to be the home terminal of a middle-aged woman named Regina Lee Sadler. She wore a bathrobe when she answered, and her hair was dripping. I apologized for calling her out of the shower.

“Makes no mind,” she said, her voice a Southern contralto as dark as her complexion. “Unless you’re calling from that goddamned collection agency, pardon my French.”

I explained about Kaitlin.

“Yes,” she said, “in fact I know about that. We have a couple other parents from that incident just joined us—mostly moms, of course. The dads tend to resist the kind of help we offer, God knows why. You seem not be a member of that stiff-necked clan, however.”

“I wasn’t here when Kait disappeared.” I told her about Janice and Whit.

“So you’re an absentee father,” she said.

“Not by choice. Mrs. Sadler, can I ask you a frank question?”

“I would prefer that to the other kind. And most people call me Regina Lee.”

“Do I have anything to gain by meeting these folks? Will it help me get my daughter home?”

“No. No, I can’t promise you that. Our group exists for our own purposes. We save
ourselves
. A lot of parents in this situation, they are very vulnerable to despair. It helps some people to be able to share then-feelings with others in similar straits. And I suspect you are tuning me out right now, saying to yourself, ‘Well, I don’t need that touchy-feely crap.’ And maybe you don’t. But some of us do, and we are not ashamed of it.”

“I see.”

“Not to say there isn’t a certain amount of networking. A lot of our people have hired private investigators, freelance skip-tracers, deprogrammers, and so on, and they do compare notes and share information, but I will tell you frankly that I have very little faith in such activity and the results I’ve seen bear that out.”

I told her those were the people I’d like to talk to, if only to learn from their failures.

“Well, if you come to our gathering tonight—” She gave me the address of a church hall. “If you show up, you’ll certainly be able to have a conversation of that nature. But may I ask something of you in return? Don’t come as a skeptic. Bring an open mind. About yourself, I mean. You seem all calm and collected, but I know from personal experience what you’re going through, how easy it is to grasp at straws when a loved one is in danger. And make no mistake, your Kaitlin
is
in danger.”

“I do know that, Mrs. Sadler.”

“There’s knowing it and there’s knowing it.” She looked over her shoulder, perhaps at a clock. “I ought to be getting fixed up, but may I say I hope to see you this evening?”

“Thank you.”

“I pray you find a positive outcome, Mr. Warden, whatever you do.”

I thanked her again.

The meeting took place in the assembly hall of a Presbyterian church in what had been a working-class neighborhood before it slipped into outright poverty some few years ago. Regina Lee Sadler, strutting across the stage in a flowered dress and with an old-fashioned handless mike bobbing in front of her head, looked both more robust and about twenty pounds heavier than she had looked in the video window. I wondered if Regina Lee was vain enough to have installed a slimming ap in her interface.

I didn’t introduce myself, just lurked in the back of the hall. It wasn’t exactly a Twelve-Step meeting, but it wasn’t far off. Five new members introduced themselves and their problems. Four had lost children to Kuinist or haj cells within the last month. One had been missing her daughter for more than a year and wanted a place where she could share her grief… not that she had given up hope, she insisted, not at all, but she was just very, very tired and thought she might be able to sleep through the night for a change, if only she had someone to talk to.

There was muted, sympathetic applause.

Then Regina Lee stood up again and read from a printed sheet of news and updates—children recovered, rumors of new Kuinist movements in the West and South, a truckload of underage pilgrims intercepted at the Mexican border. I took notes.

At that point the meeting became more personal as attendees divided up into “workshops” to discuss “coping strategies,” and I slipped quietly out the door.

I would have gone directly back to the motel if not for the woman sitting on the church steps smoking a cigarette.

She was about my age, her expression careworn but thoughtful and focused. Her hair was short and lustrous in the street light. Her eyes were shadowed as she glanced up at me. “Sorry,” she said automatically, stubbing out the cigarette.

I told her it was all right. Under a recent statute tobacco preparations were illegal for trade without an addict’s certificate and a prescription, but I considered myself broadminded—I had grown up in the days of legal tobacco. “Had enough?” she asked, waving a hand at the church door.

“For now,” I said.

She nodded. “Regina Lee is good for a lot of people, and God knows she’s unstoppable. But I don’t need what she’s handing out. I don’t think so, anyhow.”

We introduced ourselves. She was Ashlee Mills, and her son was Adam. Adam was eighteen years old, deeply involved in the local Kuinist network; he had been missing for six days now. Just like Kaitlin. So we compared notes. Adam had been involved with Whit Delahunt’s junior auxiliary, as well as a handful of other radical organizations. So they probably would have known each other.

“That’s a coincidence,” Ashlee said.

I told her no, there was no such thing.

We were still talking when Regina Lee’s meeting began to break up, crowding us off the church steps. I offered to buy her coffee somewhere nearby—she lived in the neighborhood.

Ashlee gave me a thoughtful look, frank and a little intimidating. She struck me as a woman who harbored no illusions about men. Then she said, “Okay. There’s an all-night coffee shop next to the drugstore, just around the corner.” We walked there.

Ashlee was conspicuously not wealthy. Her skirt and blouse looked like Goodwill purchases, cared-for but a long way from new. But she wore them with a dignity that was innate, not practiced. At the restaurant she counted out dollar coins to pay for her coffee; I told her not to bother and pushed my card across the counter. She gave me another long look, then nodded. We found a quiet corner table away from the jabbering video panels.

She said, “You’ll want to know about my son.”

I nodded. “But this isn’t one of Regina Lee’s workshops. What I really want to know is how I can help my daughter.”

“I can’t promise you anything to that effect, Mr. Warden.”

“That’s what everybody tells me.”

“Everybody is right, I’m sorry to say. At least in my experience.”

Ashlee had been born and educated in Southern California, had come to Minneapolis to work as a medical receptionist for her uncle, a podiatrist who had since died of an aneurysm. At the reception desk she had met Tucker Kellog, a tool and dye programmer, and married him at the age of twenty. Tucker left home when their son Adam was five years old. He had been unavailable since. Ashlee filed for divorce and could have sued for child support but chose not to. She was better off without Tucker in her life, she said, even peripherally. She had reverted to her maiden name ten years ago.

She loved her son Adam, but he had been a trial. “Parent to parent, Mr. Warden, there were times when I was in despair. Even when he was little, it was hard keeping Adam in school. Nobody likes school, I guess, but whatever it is that made the rest of us show up every day, sense of duty or fear of the consequences, whatever it is, Adam didn’t feel it. He couldn’t be bullied into it and he couldn’t be shamed into it.”