The Chronoliths (7 page)

“Well—thank you for saying so.”

“That’s not all.” She hesitated. “Ah, Scott, we fucked up pretty badly, didn’t we? Those days in Thailand. It was just too weird. Too strange.”

“I’ve apologized for that.”

“I didn’t call you up for an apology. Do you hear what I’m saying? Maybe it was partly my fault, too.”

“Let’s not play whose fault it was, Janice. But I appreciate you saying so.”

I couldn’t help surveying my apartment as we spoke. It seemed empty already. Under the stale blinds, the windows were white with ice.

“What I want to tell you is that I know you’ve been trying to make it up. Not to me. I’m a lost cause, right? But to Kaitlin.”

I said nothing.

“All the time you spent at Campion-Miller… You know, I was worried when you came back from Thailand, way back when. I didn’t know whether you were going to hang on my doorstep and harass me, whether it would be good for Kaitlin even to see you. But I have to admit, whatever it takes to be a divorced father, you had the right stuff. You brought Kait through all that trauma as if you were walking her through a minefield, taking all the chances yourself.”

This was as intimate a conversation as we had had in years, and I wasn’t sure how to respond.

She went on: “It seemed like you were trying to prove something to yourself, prove that you were capable of acting decently, taking responsibility.”

“Not proving it,” I said. “Doing it.”

“Doing it, but punishing yourself, too. Blaming yourself. Which is part of taking responsibility. But past a certain point, Scott, that becomes a problem in itself. Only monks get to lacerate themselves full-time.”

“I’m not a monk, Janice.”

“So don’t act like one. If this job looks like a good choice, take it.
Take
it, Scott. Kait won’t stop loving you just because you can’t see her on a weekly basis. She’s upset now, but she’s capable of understanding.”

It was a long speech. It was also Janice’s best effort to date to grant me absolution, give me full marks for owning up to the disaster I had made of our lives.

And that was good. It was generous. But it was also the sound of a closing door. She was giving me permission to look for a better life, because any lingering suspicion that we could recreate what was once between us was desperately misplaced.

Well, we both knew that. But what the head admits isn’t always what the heart allows.

“I have to say goodbye, Scotty.”

There was a little catch in her voice, almost a hiccup.

“Okay, Janice. Give Whit my best wishes.”

“Call when you find work.”

“Right.”

“Kait still needs to hear from you, whatever she may think. Times like this, you know, the world being what it is…”

“I understand.”

“And be careful on the way to the airport. The roads are slippery since that last big snow.”

I came into the Baltimore airport expecting a hired driver with a name card, but it was Sulamith Chopra herself who met me.

There was no mistaking her, even after all these years. She towered above the crowd. Even her head was tall, a gawky brown peanut topped with black frazzle. She wore balloon-sized khaki pants and a blouse that might once have been white but appeared to have shared laundry rounds with a few non-colorfast items. Her look was so completely Salvation Army Thrift Shop that I wondered whether she was really in a position to offer anyone a job… but then I thought
academia
and
the sciences
.

She grinned. I grinned, less energetically.

I put out my hand, but Sue was having none of it; she grabbed me and bear-hugged me, breaking away about a tenth of a second before the grip became painful. “Same old Scotty,” she said.

“Same old Sue,” I managed.

“I’ve got my car here. Have you had lunch yet?”

“I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Then it’s my treat.”

She had called me two weeks ago, waking me out of a dreamless afternoon sleep. Her first words were, “Hi, Scotty? I hear you lost your job.”

Note, this was a woman I hadn’t spoken with since our chance meeting in Minneapolis. A woman who hadn’t returned any of my calls since. It took me a few groggy seconds just to place the voice.

“Sorry I haven’t got back to you till now,” she went on. “There were reasons for that. But I kept track of you.”

“You kept
track
of me?”

“It’s a long story.” I waited for her to tell it. Instead, she reminisced for a while about Cornell and gave me the highlights of her career since then—her academic work with the Chronoliths, which interested me enormously. And distracted me, as I’m sure Sue knew it would.

She talked about the physics in greater detail than I was able to follow: Calabi-Yau spaces, something she called “tau turbulence.”

Until at last I asked her, “So, yeah, I lost my job—how did you know?”

“Well, that’s part of why I’m calling. I feel a certain amount of responsibility for that.”

I recalled what Arnie Kunderson had said about “enemies in management.” What Annali had told me about “men in suits.” I said, “Whatever you need to tell me, tell me.”

“Okay, but you have to be patient. I assume you don’t have anywhere to go? No urgent bathroom calls?”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Okay. Well. Where to begin? Did you ever notice, Scotty, how hard it is to sort out cause and effect? Things get tangled up.”

Sue had published a number of papers on the subject of exotic forms of matter and C-Y transformations (“nonbaryonic matter and how to untie knots in string”) by the time the Chumphon Chronolith appeared. Many of these dealt with problems in temporal symmetry—a concept she seemed determined to explain to me, until I cut her short. After Chumphon, when Congress began to take seriously the potential threat of the Chronoliths, she had been invited to join an investigatory effort sponsored by a handful of security agencies and funded under an ongoing federal appropriation. The work, they told her, would be basic research, would be part-time, would involve the collaboration of the Cornell faculty and various elder colleagues, and would look impressive on her
curriculum vitae
. She said it was “Like Los Alamos, you understand, but a little more relaxed.”

“Relaxed?”

“At least at first. So I accepted. It was in those first few months I came across your name. It was all pretty wide-open back then. I saw all kinds of security shit. There was a master list of eyewitnesses, people they had debriefed in Thailand…”

“Ah.”

“And of course your name was on it. We were thinking of bringing all those people in, anybody we could find, for blood testing and whatever, but we decided against it—too much work, too invasive, not likely to produce any substantive results. Plus there were civil-liberties problems. But I remembered your name on that list. I knew it was you because they had practically your entire life history down there, including Cornell, including a hypertext link to
me
.”

And again I thought of Hitch Paley. His name would have been on that list, too. Maybe they had looked a little more deeply into his business activities since then. Maybe Hitch was in jail. Maybe that was why there had been no pickup that day at Easy’s Packages and no word from him since.

But of course I didn’t say any of this to Sue.

She went on, “Well, I made a kind of mental note of it, but that was that, at least until recently. What you have to understand, Scotty, is that the evolution of this crisis has made everyone a lot more paranoid. Maybe
justifiably
paranoid. Especially since Yichang; Yichang just drove everybody completely bugfuck. You know how many people were killed by floodwater
alone
? Not to mention that it was the first nuclear device detonated in a kind-of-sort-of war since before the turn of the century.”

She didn’t have to tell me. I’d been paying attention. It was not even slightly surprising to learn that the NSA or CIA or FBI was profoundly involved with Sue’s research. The Chronoliths had become, at bottom, a defense issue. The image lurking at the back of everyone’s mind—seldom spoken, seldom explicit—was of a Chronolith on American soil: Kuin towering over Houston or New York or Washington.

“So when I saw your name again… well, it was on a different kind of list. The FBI is looking into witnesses again. I mean, they’ve been sort of keeping an eye on you since the word go. Not exactly
surveillance
, but if you moved out of state or something like that, it would be noted, it would go in your file…”

“Christ, Sue!”

“But all that was harmless busywork. Until lately. Your work at Campion-Miller came up on the radar.”

“I write business software. I don’t see—”

“That’s way too coy, Scotty. You’ve done some really sensitive work with marketing heuristics and collective anticipation. I’ve looked at your code—”

“You’ve seen Campion-Miller source code?”

“Campion-Miller elected to share it with the authorities.”

I began to put this together. An interrogatory FBI visit at Campion-Miller could easily have alarmed management, especially if it was core code that had come under scrutiny. And it would explain Arnie Kunderson’s strange intransigence, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell atmosphere that had surrounded the firing.

“You’re telling me you got me fired?”

“It was nobody’s intention for you to lose your job. As it happens, though, that’s kind of handy.”

Handy
was about the last word I would have used.

“See, Scotty, how this hooks together? You’re on the spot when the Chumphon Chronolith arrives, which marks you for life all by itself. Now, five years later, it turns out you’re evolving algorithms that are deeply pertinent to the research we’re doing here.”

“Are they?”

“Trust me. It flagged your file. I put in a good word for you, and that kept them off your tail a little bit, but I have to be frank with you, some very powerful people are getting way too excited. It’s not just Yichang, it’s the economy, the riots, all that trouble during the last election… the level of nervousness is indescribable. So when I heard you got fired I had the brilliant idea of getting you placed
here
.”

“As what, a prisoner?”

“Hardly. I’m serious about your work, Scotty. In terms of code husbandry, it’s absolutely fine. And very, very pertinent. Maybe it doesn’t seem so, but a great deal of what I’ve been looking at lately is modeling the effect of anticipation on mass behavior. Applying feedback and recursion theory to both physical events and human behavior.”

“I’m a keyboard hack, Sue. I’ve grown algorithms I don’t pretend to understand.”

“You’re too modest. This is key work. And it would be much nicer, frankly, if you were doing it for
us
.”

“I don’t understand. Is it my work you’re interested in, or the fact that I was at Chumphon?”

“Both. I suspect it’s not coincidental.”

“But it is.”

“Yes, in the
conventional
sense, but—oh, Scotty, this is too much to talk about over the phone. You need to come see me.”

“Sue—”

“You’re going to tell me you feel like I put your head in a blender. You’re going to tell me you can’t make a decision like this while you’re standing in your PJs drinking bottled beer and feeling sorry for yourself.”

I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Otherwise, she was on the mark.

“So
don’t
decide,” she said. “But do come see me. Come to Baltimore. My expense. We can talk about it then. I’ll make arrangements.”

One of the salient facts about Sulamith Chopra is that when she says she means to do a thing, she does it.

The recession had hit Baltimore harder than it had hit Minneapolis/St. Paul. The city had done all right in the young years of the century, but the downtown core had lost that brief sheen of prosperity, had faded into empty storefronts, cracked plasma displays, gaudy billboards turned pastel by sun and weather.

Sue parked at the back of a small Mexican restaurant and escorted me inside. The restaurant staff recognized her and greeted her by name. Our waitress was dressed as if she had stepped out of a 17th-century mission but recited the daily specials in a clipped New England accent. She smiled at Sue the way a tenant farmer might smile at a benevolent landlord—I gathered Sue was a generous tipper.

We talked for a while about nothing in particular—current events, the Oglalla crisis, the Pemberton trial. This was Sue’s attempt to re-establish the tone of the relationship between us, the familial intimacy she had established with all her students at Cornell. She had never liked being treated as a figure of authority. She deferred to no one and hated being deferred to. Sue was old-fashioned enough to envision working scientists as equal plaintiffs before the absolute bar of truth.

Since Cornell, she said, the Chronolith project had taken up more and more of her time; had become, in effect, her career. She had published important theoretical papers during this time, but only after they had been vetted by national security. “And the most important work we’ve done can’t be published at all, for fear that we’d be putting the weapon into Kuin’s hands.”

“So you know more than you can say.”

“Yes, lots… but not
enough
.” The waitress brought rice and beans. Sue tucked into her lunch, frowning. “I know about you, too, Scotty. You divorced Janice, or vice versa. Your daughter lives with her mom now. Janice remarried. You did five years of good but extremely circumscribed work at Campion-Miller, which is a shame, because you’re one of the brightest people I know. Not genius-in-a-wheelchair smart, but
bright
. You could do better.”

“That’s what they always used to write on my report cards—‘could do better.’”

“Did you ever get over Janice?”

Sue asked intimate questions with the brusqueness of a census taker. I don’t think it even occurred to her that she might be giving offense.

Hence no offense taken.

“Mostly,” I said.

“And the girl? Kaitlin, is it? God, I remember when Janice was pregnant. That big belly of hers. Like she was trying to shoplift a Volkswagen.”