The Chronoliths (25 page)

Ashlee and I had rented this fifth-floor apartment shortly after we were married, six years ago in July. Rent was controlled under the Stoppard Act but building maintenance was casual to the point of sloppy. The upstairs neighbor’s water pipes had leaked through our kitchen cupboards, until Ash and I went up there with plumbing tools and PVC and patched up the problem ourselves. But our living-room windows looked southwest across low suburbs—shingles, solar cells, tree-tops—and tonight there was a big moon riding the horizon, almost bright enough to read by.

“Hard to believe,” Kait said, also entranced by the moon, “people used to live up there.”

A lot of things about the past had become hard to believe. Last year I had watched through this same window when the abandoned Corning-Gentell orbital factory burned its way through the atmosphere, shedding molten metal like a Fourth of July sparkler. A decade ago there had been seventy-five human beings living in Earth orbit or beyond. Today there were none.

I stood up to open the curtains a little wider. That was when I noticed the old GM efficiency vehicle parked in front of the barred door of the Mukerjee Dollar Bargain Store, and the bearded man’s face in the automobile window, illuminated, until he looked away, by the glare of a sulfur-dot streetlight.

I couldn’t say for sure that this was the same twitch who had been haunting my table at the Nicollet Mall, but I would have been willing to bet on it.

I didn’t mention this to the family, just sat back down and made myself smile—all our smiles were fabricated tonight. David talked a little more, over coffee, about what he might be facing with the Uniforces over the term of his conscription. Unless he was lucky enough to land a clerical or tech position, he would probably end up in China with the infantry. But the fighting couldn’t go on much longer, he told Kait, so that was okay; and we all pretended to believe this absurd untruth.

David would have been deferred, of course, had Kaitlin been pregnant, but that was not a possibility. The infection she had picked up in Portillo had scarred her uterus and left her infertile. She and David could still have children but they would have to be conceived in vitro, a process none of us could afford. To my knowledge David had never even raised that subject—the impossibility of a childbirth deferral—with Kait. He loved her, I believe, very genuinely. Deferral marriages were common enough in those days, but it was never an issue for David and Kaitlin.

Ashlee served coffee and made cheerful conversation while I tried not to think about the man outside. I found myself watching Kait as she quietly watched David, and I felt very proud of her. Kait had not led a simple life (none of us had, deep as we were in the Age of the Chronoliths), but she had come to possess an immense personal dignity that at times seemed to shine through her skin like a bright light. It was the miracle of our brief time together that Janice and I had produced, all unaware, this powerfully alive human soul. We had propagated goodness, in spite of ourselves.

Kait and David needed their last few hours together, however. I asked Ashlee to drive them back home. Ash was surprised by the request and gave me a sharp inquisitive look, but agreed.

I shook David’s hand warmly and wished him the best. I gave Kait a long hug. And when the three of them were gone I went into the bedroom and fetched my pistol from the top shelf of the linen cupboard and unlocked and removed the trigger guard.

I already mentioned, I think, that I had grown up in the anti-gun revulsion of the early decades of the century. (This century which hovers, as I write these words, on the brink of its last quarter… but I don’t mean to get ahead of myself.)

Handguns had come back into vogue during the troubles. I did not like owning one—among other things, it made me feel like a hypocrite—but I had become convinced that it was prudent. So I had taken the required courses, filled out all the forms, registered both the weapon and my genome with ATF, and purchased a small-caliber handgun that recognized my fingerprints (and no one else’s) when I picked it up. I had owned this device for some three years now and I had never fired it outside of the training range.

I put it in my pocket and walked down four flights of stairs to the lobby of the building and then across the street toward the parked car.

The bearded man in the driver’s seat showed no sign of alarm. He smiled at me—smirked, in fact—as I approached. When I was close enough to make myself heard I said, “You need to explain to me what you’re doing here.”

His grin widened. “You really don’t recognize me, do you? You don’t have the faintest idea.”

Which was not what I had expected. The voice did sound familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

He stuck his hand out of the car window. “It’s me, Scott—Ray Mosely. I used to be about fifty pounds heavier. The beard is new.”

Ray Mosely. Sue Chopra’s understudy and hopeless courtier.

I hadn’t seen him since before Kait’s adventure in Portillo—since I retired from all that business to make a new life with Ashlee.

“Well, damn,” was all I managed.

“You look about the same,” he said. “That made it easier to find you.”

Without the body fat he looked almost gaunt, even with the beard. Almost a ghost of himself. “You didn’t have to stalk me, Ray. You could have come up to the table and said hello.”

“Well, people change. For all I know you could be a firebreathing Copperhead by now.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“Because it’s important. We kind of need your help.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Sue, for one. She could use a place to stay for a little while.”

I was still trying to cope with that information when the rear window rolled down and Sue herself poked her big ungainly peanut-shaped head out of the darkness.

She grinned. “Hey there, Scotty,” she said. “We meet again.”

In the past seven years I had told Ashlee a great deal about Sue Chopra and her friends. That didn’t mean Ash was pleased to come home and find two of these worthies occupying her living-room sofa.

It had seemed obvious to me, after Portillo, that I would have to choose between my life with Ashlee and my work for Sue. Sue persisted in her belief that the advance of the Chronoliths could be turned back, given the right technology or even the appropriate degree of understanding. Privately, I doubted it. Consider the word itself, “Chronolith”—an ugly portmanteau word coined by some tone-deaf journalist shortly after Chumphon, a word I had never liked but which I had come to appreciate for its aptness.
Chronos
, time, and
lithos
, stone, and wasn’t that the heart of the matter? Time made solid as rock. A zone of absolute determinacy, surrounded by a froth of ephemera (human lives, for instance) which deformed to fit its contours.

I did not wish to be deformed. The life I wanted with Ashlee was the life the Chronoliths had stolen from me. We had come back from Tucson, Ash and I, to lick our wounds and to take from each other what strength we were able to give. I could not have given Ashlee much if I had gone on working for Sulamith Chopra, if I had continued to dip into the tau turbulence, if I persisted in making myself an instrument of fate.

Not that we had lost contact entirely. Sue still called on me occasionally for consultation, though there was little I could do professionally without access to her mil-spec code incubators. More often, she called to keep me up to date, share her optimistic or pessimistic moods, gossip. She took, I think, a vicarious pleasure in the life I had made for myself—as if it were somehow exotic; as if there weren’t a million families like mine, making do in hard times. Certainly I had not expected her to arrive at my doorstep in this cloak-and-dagger fashion.

Ash had exchanged a few words with Sue on the phone but they had never been formally introduced, and Ray was a stranger to her. I made the introductions with a gusto that was perhaps too obviously insincere. Ashlee nodded and shook hands and retreated to the kitchen “to make coffee,” i.e., to work out her concerns about their presence here.

It
was
only a visit, Ray insisted. Sue still maintained her network of connections with the remaining Chronolith researchers, and she had been doing some connecting during this trip west. The vascular ebb and flow of federal funding had turned her way once again, though she still had detractors in Congress. These days, she said, all her work was stealthy, half-hidden, concealed by one agency from another, embedded in bureaucratic rivalries she barely understood. Yes, she was in Minneapolis on business, but basically she just wanted a friendly place to stay for a couple of evenings.

“You could have called ahead.”

“I suppose so, Scotty, but you never know who’s listening. Between the closet Copperheads in Congress and the crazies on the street…” She shrugged. “If it’s inconvenient, we’ll take a hotel room.”

“You’ll stay here,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

Plainly there was more to this than a friendly reunion. But neither she nor Ray would volunteer details, and I guessed that was all right with me, at least for tonight. Sue and all her furor and obsession seemed a long time gone. Many things had changed since Portillo.

Oh, I still watched the news of Kuin’s advances, when the bandwidth allowed, and I still occasionally wondered what “tau turbulence” might mean and how it might have affected me. But these were night fears, the kind of thing you think about when you can’t sleep and rain taps on the window like an unwelcome visitor. I had given up attempting to understand any of this in Sue’s terms—her conversations with Ray always veered too quickly into C-Y geometry and dark quarks and such esoteric matters. And as for the Chronoliths themselves… should I be ashamed to admit that I had achieved a private, separate peace with them? That I was resigned to my own inability to influence these vast and mysterious events? Maybe it was a small treason. But it felt like sanity.

It was disturbing, then, to be back in the presence of Sue, whose obsessions still burned very brightly. She was polite when we talked about old times or familiar faces. But her eyes brightened and her voice gained a decibel as soon as talk turned to the recent advent of the Freetown Chronolith or the advance of the Kuinist armies into Nigeria.

I watched her while she talked. That gloriously uncontrollable crown of coiled hair had grayed at the fringes. When she smiled, the skin at the corners of her eyes wrinkled complexly. She was skinny and looked a little careworn whenever the glow of her fervency ebbed.

And Ray Mosely, incredibly, was still in love with her. He did not, of course, say this. I suspect Ray experienced his love for Sulamith Chopra as a private humiliation, forever invisible to outsiders. But it wasn’t invisible. And maybe he had made his own bargain with it: better to nurse a futile affection than to concede to lovelessness. Bearded as he was, thin now almost to the point of anorexia, his hair receding like a childhood memory, Ray still gave Sue those deferential glances, still smiled when she smiled, laughed when she laughed, rose to her defense at the first hint of criticism.

And when Sue nodded at Ashlee in the kitchen and said, “I envy you, Scotty. I always wanted to settle down with a good woman,” Ray chuckled obediently. And winced, all at once.

Before I went to bed I turned out the sofa-bed and shook out a set of spare blankets. This could only have been torture for Ray, sleeping next to Sue in absolute and unquestioned chastity, listening to the sound of her breath. But it was the only accommodation I had to offer, apart from the floor.

Before I went to bed myself I took Sue aside. “It’s good to see you,” I told her. “I mean it. But if you want more from me than a couple of nights on a fold-out, I want to know.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” she said calmly. “Night, Scotty.”

Ashlee, in bed, was less sanguine. It was great to meet these people who had once meant so much to me, she said—it made all those stories I had told her come to life. But she was afraid of them, too.

“Afraid?”

“The way Kait’s afraid of the draft. For the same reason. They want something from you, Scott.”

“Don’t let it worry you.”

“But I have to worry. They’re smart people. And they wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think they could talk you into… whatever it is they want you to do.”

“I’m not so easy to convince, Ash.”

She rolled on her side, sighing.

In seven years Kuin had still not planted a Chronolith on American soil, at least not north of the Mexican border. We remained part of an archipelago of sanity in a world besieged by madness, along with northern Europe, southern Africa, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and sundry other holdouts. Kuin’s impact in the Americas had been broadly economic, not political. Global chaos, especially in Asia, had dried up foreign demand for finished goods. Money drained out of the consumer-goods industries and was tunneled into defense. It made for relatively low unemployment (apart from the Louisiana refugees) but lots of spot shortages and some rationing. Copperheads claimed that the economy was being gradually Sovietized, and in this, at least, they may have had a point. There was still no real pro-Kuin sentiment in Congress or the White House. Our Kuinists (and their radical A-K counterparts) were street fighters, not organizers. At least, so far. Respectable Copperheads like Whit Delahunt were another matter—they were everywhere, but they walked very softly.

I had read some of the Copperhead literature, both the academic writers (Daudier, Pressinger, the Paris Group) and the populist hacks (Forrestall’s
Clothing the Emperor
when it hit the bestseller list). I had even sampled the works of the musicians and novelists who were the public face of the Kuinist underground. Impressive as some of this
was prima facie
, it nevertheless struck me as wishful at best, at worst as an attempt to ingratiate either the nation or more likely the writer to some inevitable Kuinist autarchy.

And still there was no direct evidence of the existence of Kuin himself. No doubt he
did
exist, perhaps somewhere on the southern Chinese mainland, but most of Asia was closed to media and telecommunications, its infrastructure in a state of radical collapse and millions dead in the famine and unrest. The chaos that helped create Kuin also served to shield him from premature exposure.