The Chronoliths (31 page)

“Why?”

“Because there’s actually a fairly high level of ionizing radiation out here. You’re getting a chest X-ray every twenty minutes.” And then she smiled. “But mainly because I find your presence reassuring.”

It was a good enough reason, and I would have gone with her, but that was when we felt the crump of a distant explosion. The sound of gunfire erupted again, much closer than it should have been.

Sue instinctively dropped to her knees. Idiotically, I remained standing. The firing began as a pop-pop staccato but immediately increased to a nearly continuous volley. The fence (and a big gate) was yards behind us. I looked that way and saw Uniforces personnel taking cover and raising their weapons, but the source of the fire wasn’t immediately obvious.

Sue had fixed her eyes on the bluff. I followed her gaze.

Wispy smoke issued from the Uniforces observation point there.

“The
journalists
,” she whispered.

But of course they weren’t journalists. They were Kuinists—a group of militiamen bright enough to have highjacked a network truck outside of Modesty Creek and savvy enough to have passed themselves off plausibly to our media-handlers at the gate. (Five genuine net newspeople were later found beaten and strangled in the rabbitbrush twenty miles down the road.) A dozen less presentable Kuinists in unmarked cars were smuggled in as technicians; weapons were effectively hidden amidst a cargo of lenses, broadcast apparatus, and imaging gear.

These people installed themselves on the bluff overlooking the tau core, near the Uniforces observation point. When they saw Hitch bring the last truck up to the bunker, they understood that to mean that the arrival was imminent. They destroyed the Uniforces outpost with an explosive device, picked off any survivors, then focused their efforts on the tau core.

I saw the puffs of smoke from their rifles, faint against the blue sky. They were too far from the core for accurate marksmanship, but sparks flew where their bullets struck the steel frame. Behind us, Uniforces gatekeepers began to return fire and radioed for support. Unfortunately the bulk of the forces were concentrated at the south gate, where the Kuinist mob had begun to fire on them in earnest.

Belatedly, I squatted in the dirt next to Sue. “The core is pretty heavily shielded—”

“The core is, I guess, but the cables and connectors are vulnerable—the
instrumentation
, Scotty!”

She rose and ran for the bunker. I had no choice but to follow, but first I waved in Hitch, who had just arrived and must have confused the gunfire from the bluff with the skirmish to the south of us. But when he saw Sue’s awkward headlong dash he understood the urgency.

The air was suddenly much colder, and a wind came gusting from the dry prairie, dust-devils marching like pilgrims into the heart of the tau event.

Even the heated concrete-lined bunker was colder than Sue had predicted as the thermal shock began to ramp up. It numbed the extremities, cooled the blood, imposed a strange languid slowness on a sequence of terrifying events. We all struggled into thermally-adaptive jackets and headgear as Hitch sealed the door behind him.

Like clockwork, the tau-core initiation process proceeded; like clockwork, it was immune at this point to human intervention. Technicians sat by their monitors with clenched fists, nothing to do but hope a stray bullet didn’t interrupt the flow of data.

I had seen the core’s connectors and cables, Teflon-insulated and Kevlar-sheathed and thick as firehoses. I didn’t think conventional bullets fired from a great range posed much danger, despite Sue’s fears.

But the militiamen had brought more than rifles.

The countdown clock passed the five-minute point when there was the rumble of a distant detonation. Dust shook down from the plank ceiling and the lights in the bunker winked off.

“Hit a generator,” I heard Hitch say, and someone else howled, “We’re fucking screwed!”

I couldn’t see Sue—I couldn’t see anything at all. The darkness was absolute. There were nearly forty of us crowded into the bunker behind its elaborate earthworks.

Our backup generator had obviously failed. Auxiliary batteries restored the pilot lights on the electronic gear but cast no useful light. Forty people in a dark, enclosed space. I pictured in my mind the entrance, a steel door set at the top of a concrete stepway maybe a yard from where I stood, fixing the direction in my mind.

And then—the arrival.

The Chronolith reached deep into the bedrock.

A Chronolith absorbs matter and does not displace it; but the cold shock fractured hidden veins of moisture, creating a shockwave that traveled through the earth. The floor seemed to rise and fall. Those of us who hadn’t grabbed a handhold fell to the ground. I think everyone screamed. It was a terrible sound, far worse than any physical damage done.

The cold got colder. I felt sensation drain from my fingertips.

It was one of our engineers who panicked and pushed his way to the exit hatch. I supect all he wanted was daylight—wanted it so badly that the need had overcome his reason. I was close enough to see him in the dim light from the console arrays. He found the steps, lunged upward on all fours, touched the door handle. The lever must have been shockingly cold—he screamed even as he put his weight against it. The handle chunked down convulsively and the door sprang outward.

The blue sky was gone, replaced by curtains of screaming dust.

The engineer lurched out. Wind and sand and granules of ice swept in. Had Sue anticipated an arrival as violent as this? Perhaps not—the journalists lined up east of us must have been sprawled in the dirt by now. And I doubted anyone was shooting from the bluff, not anymore.

The thermal shock had peaked but our body temperatures were still dropping. It’s an odd sensation. Cold, yes, indescribably cold, but
lazy
, deceptive, narcotic. I felt myself shivering inside my overworked protective clothing. The shivering felt like an invitation to sleep.

“Stay in the bunker!” Sue shouted from somewhere deep in the trench behind me. “You’ll all be safer in the bunker! Scotty,
close that door
!”

But few of the engineers and technicians heeded her advice. They spilled out past me into the screeching wind, running—insofar as the cold allowed them to run; more like a stumbling waltz—toward the line of parked vehicles.

Some few even managed to climb inside and start their engines. These vehicles had been proofed against the cold shock, but they roared like wounded animals, pistons grinding against cylinders. Arrival winds had battered down the perimeter fence and the civilian faction of our convoy began to vanish into the teeth of the storm.

West of us, where the Chronolith must have been, I could see nothing but a wall of fog and dust.

I pushed my way up the steps and pulled the hatch shut. The engineer had left some skin on the frigid lever. I left some of my own.

Sue secured some battery lamps and began to switch them on. Maybe a dozen of us remained in the bunker.

As soon we had some light Sue slumped down against one of the inert telemetry devices. I reeled across the room and joined her. Almost fell against her. Our arms touched, and her skin was shockingly cold (as I suppose was my own). Ray was nearby but had closed his eyes and seemed only intermittently conscious. Hitch squatted by the door, stubbornly alert.

Sue put her head on my shoulder.

“It didn’t work, Scotty,” she whispered.

“We’ll think about that later.”

“But it didn’t
work
. And if it didn’t
work
—”

“Hush.”

The Chronolith had touched down. The first Chronolith on American soil… and not a small one, judging by the secondary effects. Sue was right. We had failed.

“But Scotty,” she said, her voice infinitely weary and bewildered, “if it didn’t work… what am I doing here? What am I
for
?”

I thought it was a rhetorical question. But she had never been more serious.

I suppose, when history allows a degree of objectivity, someone will write an aesthetic appreciation of the Chronoliths.

Obscene as this idea may seem, the monuments are arguably specimens of art, each one individual, no two quite alike.

Some are crude, like the Kuin of Chumphon: relatively small, lacking detail, like sand-cast jewelry; the work of a novice. Others are more finely sculpted (though they remain as bleakly generic as works of Soviet Realism) and more carefully considered. For instance, the Kuins of Islamabad or Capetown: Kuin as gentle giant, benevolently masculine.

But the most recognizable Chronoliths are the monsters, the city-wreckers. The Kuin of Bangkok, straddling the rude brown water of the Chao Phrya; the Robed Kuin of Bombay; the stern and patriarchal Kuin of Jerusalem, seeming to embrace the world’s faiths even as religious relics lie scattered at his feet.

The Kuin of Wyoming surpassed all these. Sue had been right about the significance of this monument. It was the first American Chronolith, a proclamation of victory in the heartland of a major Western power, and if its manifestation in this rural wasteland was an act of deference toward the great American cities, the symbolism remained both brazen and unmistakable.

The cold shock eased at last. We stirred out of our torpor and woke to a dawning awareness of what had happened here and what we had failed to achieve.

Hitch, characteristically, gave first thought to the practical business of staying alive. “Rouse up,” he said hoarsely. “We need to be away from here before the Kuinists come looking for us, which probably won’t be long. We need to avoid the main road, too.”

Sue hesitated, regarding the battery-powered gear lining the wall of the bunker. The instrumentation blinked incoherently, starved for input.

“You, too,” Hitch said.

“This could be important,” she said. “Some of these numbers pegged awfully high.”

“Fuck the numbers.” He ushered us stumbling to the door.

Sue wailed at the sight of the Chronolith dominating the sky.

Ray came up behind her; I followed Hitch. One of our few remaining engineers, a gray-haired man named MacGruder, stepped out and promptly fell to his knees in an act of pure if involuntary worship.

The Kuin was—well, it beggars description.

It was immense and it was frankly beautiful. It towered above the nearest large landmark, the stony bluff where the saboteurs had parked themselves. Of the tau core and its attendant structures there was, of course, no sign. The skin of ice on the Chronolith was already dropping away—there had not been much moisture in the ambient air—and the monument’s details were unobscured save by the mists that sublimated from its surface. Wreathed in its own cloud, it was majestic, immense, tall as a mountain. From this angle the expression on the Kuin’s face was oblique, but it suggested a smug complacency, the untroubled confidence of an assured conqueror.

Ice crystals melted and fell around us as a fine cold mist. The wind shifted erratically, now warm, now cool.

The main body of Kuinists had gathered to the south of the site. Many of them must have been disabled by the thermal shock, but the perimeter fence there veered a good couple of miles from the touchdown site, and judging by the renewed crackle of gunfire they were still lively enough to keep the Uniforces engaged. Soldiers closer to us had survived in their thermal gear but seemed disoriented and uncertain—their communications equipment had shut down and they were rallying to the flattened ruins of the east gate.

Of the militiamen who had disabled the tau core there was no sign.

Ray told the remaining engineers and technicians who shuffled out of the bunker to stick with the Uniforces. The journalists in the lee of the bunker must have had a different thought: They barreled past the fallen fence in their bulletproof vans. They had acquired and were no doubt already broadcasting this stunning image, the vast new Kuin of Wyoming. Our failure was an established fact.

Ray said, “Help me get Sue to the van.”

Sue had stopped weeping but was staring fixedly at the Chronolith. Ray stood next to her, supporting her. She whispered, “This isn’t right…”

“Of course it isn’t right. Come on, Sue. We need to get away.”

She shook off Ray’s hand. “No, I mean it’s not
right
. The numbers pegged high. I need a sextant. And a map. There’s a topographical map in the van, but—
Hitch
!”

Hitch turned back.

“I need a sextant! Ask one of the engineers!”

“The fuck?” Hitch said.

“A
sextant
!”

Hitch told Ray to get the van started while he hurried back with a digital sextant and a tripod from the survey vehicle. Sue set up the instrument despite the gusting wind and scribbled numbers into her notebook. Ray said, gently but firmly, “I don’t think it matters anymore.”

“What?”

“Taking measurements.”

“I’m not doing this,” she said briskly, “for
fun
,” but when she tried to fold up the tripod she fainted into Ray’s arms, and we carried her to the van.

I picked her notebook out of the icy mud.

Hitch drove while Ray and I got a cushion under Sue’s head and a blanket over her body. The Uniforces people tried to flag us down. A guard with a rifle and a nervous expression leaned in the window and glared at Hitch. “Sir, I can’t guarantee your safety—”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know,” and gunned the engine.

We would be safer—Sue would be safer—well away from here. Hitch cut across the flatlands on one of the local roads. These were dirt trails that dead-ended, most of them, at failed ranches or dry cattle tanks. Not an especially promising escape route. But Hitch had always preferred back roads.

Despite the elaborate coldproofing, our engine had sustained damage in the thermal shock. The van was kicking and dying by nightfall, when we came within sight of a cinderblock shed with a crude tin roof. We stopped here, not because the building was in any way inviting—many seasons of rain had come through the empty windows; generations of field mice had built and abandoned nests inside—but because it would serve to disguise our presence and would shelter the van from easy view. We had at least put a few miles behind us.