The Chronoliths (8 page)

“Kait and I get on all right.”

“You still love your daughter?”

“Yes, Sue, I still love my daughter.”

“Of course you do. How Scotty of you.” She seemed genuinely pleased.

“Well, how about you? You have anything going?”

“Well,” she said. “I live alone. There’s somebody I see once in a while, but it’s not a
relationship
.” Sue lowered her eyes and added, “She’s a poet. The kind of poet who works retail by daylight. I can’t bring myself to tell her the FBI already looked into her background. She’d go ballistic. Anyway, she sees other people too. We’re nonmonogamous. Polyamorous. Mostly we’re barely even
together
.”

I raised a glass. “Strange days.”

“Strange days.
Skol
. By the way, I hear you’re not speaking to your father.”

I almost choked.

“Saw your phone records,” she explained. “He makes the calls. They don’t last more than thirty seconds.”

“It’s kind of a race,” I said. “See who hangs up first. Goddammit, Sue, those are
private
calls.”

“He’s sick, Scotty.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No, really. You know about the emphysema, I guess. But he’s been seeing an oncologist. Liver cancer, nonresponsive, metastatic.”

I put down my fork.

“Oh, Scotty,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You realize, I don’t know you.”

“Of course you know me.”

“I knew you a long time ago. Not intimately. I knew a junior academic, not a woman who gets me fired—and bugs my fucking phone.”

“There’s no such thing as privacy anymore, not really.”

“He’s, what, dying?”

“Probably.” Her face fell when she realized what she’d said. “Oh, God—forgive me, Scott. I speak before I think. It’s like I’m some kind of borderline autistic or something.”

That, at least, I did know about her. I’m sure Sue’s defect has been named and genetically mapped, some mild inability to read or predict the feelings of others. And she loved to talk—at least in those days.

“None of my business,” she said. “You’re right.”

“I don’t need a surrogate parent. I’m not even sure I need this job.”

“Scotty, I’m not the one who started logging your calls. You can take this job or not, but walking away won’t give you a normal life. You surrendered that in Chumphon, whether you knew it or not.”

I thought,
My father is dying
.

I wondered whether I cared.

Back in the car, Sue remained apologetic. “Is it wrong of me to point out that we’re both in a bind? That both our lives have been shaped by the Chronoliths in ways we can’t control? But I’m trying to do the best thing, Scotty. I need you here, and I think the work would be more satisfying than what you were doing at Campion-Miller.” She drove through a yellow light, blinking at the reprimand that flashed on her heads-up. “Am I wrong to suspect that you
want
to get involved with what we’re doing?”

No, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of saying so.

“Also—” Was she blushing? “Frankly, I’d enjoy your company.”

“You must have lots of company.”

“I have
colleagues
, not company. Nobody real. Besides, you
know
it’s not a bad offer. Not in the kind of world we’re living in.” She added, almost coyly, “And you get to travel. See foreign lands. Witness miracles.”

Stranger than science.

In the grand tradition of federal employment, I waited three weeks while nothing happened. Sulamith Chopra’s employers put me up in a motel room and left me there. My calls to Sue were routed through a functionary named Morris Torrance, who advised me to be patient. Room service was free, but man was not meant to live by room service alone. I didn’t want to give up my Minneapolis apartment until I had signed something permanent, and every day I spent in Maryland represented a net fiscal loss.

The motel terminal was almost certainly tapped, and I presumed the FBI had found a way to read my portable panel even before its signal reached a satellite. Nevertheless I did what they probably expected me to do: I continued to collect Kuin data, and looked a little more closely at some of Sue’s publications.

She had published two important papers in the
Nature
nexus and one on the
Science
site. All three were concerned with matters I wasn’t competent to judge and which seemed only distantly related to the question of the Chronoliths: “A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy,” “Non-Hadronic Material Structures,” “Gravitation and Temporal Binding Forces.” All I could discern from the text was that Sue had been breeding some interesting solutions to fundamental physical problems. The papers were focused and, to me, opaque, not unlike Sue herself.

I spent some of that time thinking about Sue. She had been, of course, more than a teacher to those of us who came to know her. But she had never been very forthcoming about her own life. Born in Madras, she had immigrated with her parents at the age of three. Her childhood had been hermetic, her attention divided between schoolwork and her burgeoning intellectual interests. She was gay, of course, but seldom spoke about her partners, who never seemed to stick around for long, and she hadn’t discussed what her coming out might have meant to her parents, whom she described as “fairly conservative, somewhat religious.” She gave the impression that these were trivial issues, unworthy of attention. If she harbored old pain, it was well concealed.

There was joy in her life, but she expressed it in her work—she worked with an enthusiasm that was unmistakably authentic. Her work, or her capacity to do her work, was the prize life had handed her, and she considered it adequate compensation for whatever else she might lack. Her pleasures were deep but monkish.

Surely there was more to Sue than this. But this was what she had been willing to share.

“A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy.” What did that mean?

It meant she had looked closely at the clockwork of the universe. It meant she felt at home with fundamental things.

I was lonely but too unsettled to do anything about it and bored enough that I had begun to scan the cars in the motel parking lot to see if I could spot the one with my FBI surveillance crew inside, should there be such a vehicle.

But when I finally did interact with the FBI there was nothing subtle about the encounter. Morris Torrance called to tell me I had an appointment at the Federal Building downtown and that I should expect to provide a blood sample and submit to a polygraph examination. That it should be necessary to hurdle these obstacles in order to obtain gainful employment as Sue Chopra’s code herder was an indication of how seriously the government took her research, or at least the congressional investment in it.

Even so, Morris had underestimated what would be required of me at the Federal Building. I submitted not only to the drawing of blood but to a chest X-ray and a cranial laser scan. I was relieved of urine, stool, and hair samples. I was fingerprinted, I signed a release for chromosomal sequencing, and I was escorted to the polygraph chamber.

In the hours since Morris Torrance mentioned the word “polygraph” on the telephone I had entertained but a single thought: Hitch Paley.

The problem was that I knew things about Hitch that could put him in prison, assuming he wasn’t there already. Hitch had never been my closest friend and I wasn’t sure what degree of loyalty I owed him, these many years later. But I had decided over the course of a sleepless night that I would turn down Sue’s job offer sooner than I would endanger his freedom. Yes, Hitch was a criminal, and putting him in jail may have been what the letter of the law required; but I didn’t see the justice in caging a man for selling marijuana to affluent dilettantes who would otherwise have invested their cash in vodka coolers, coke, or methamphetamines.

Not that Hitch was particularly scrupulous about what he sold. But I was scrupulous about who
I
sold.

The polygraph examiner looked more like a bouncer than a doctor, despite his white coat, and the unavoidable Morris Torrance joined us in the bare clinic room to oversee the test. Morris was plainly a federal employee, maybe thirty pounds above his ideal weight and ten years past his prime. His hair had receded in the way that makes some middle-aged men look tonsured. But his handshake was firm, his manner relaxed, and he didn’t seem actively hostile.

I let the examiner fix the electrodes to my body and I answered the baseline questions without stammering. Morris then took over the dialogue and began to walk me detail-by-detail through my initial experience with the Chumphon Chronolith, pausing occasionally while the polygraph guru added written notations to a scrolling printout. (The machinery seemed antiquated, and it was, designed to specifications laid down in 20th-century case law.) I told the story truthfully if carefully, and I did not hesitate to mention Hitch Paley’s name if not his occupation, even adding a little fillip about the bait shop, which was after all a legitimate business, at least some of the time.

When I came to the part about the Bangkok prison, Morris asked, “Were you searched for drugs?”

“I was searched more than once. Maybe for drugs, I don’t know.”

“Were any drugs or banned substances found on your person?”

“No.”

“Have you carried banned substances across national or state borders?”

“No.”

“Were you warned of the appearance of the Chronolith before it arrived? Did you have any prior knowledge of the event?”

“No.”

“It came as a surprise to you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know the name Kuin?”

“Only from the news.”

“Have you seen the image carved into the contemporary monuments?”

“Yes.”

“Is the face familiar? Do you recognize the face?”

“No.”

Morris nodded and then conferred privately with the polygraph examiner. After a few minutes of this I was cut loose from the machine.

Morris walked me out of the building. I said, “Did I pass?”

He just smiled. “Not my department. But I wouldn’t worry if I was you.”

Sue called in the morning and told me to report for work.

The federal government, for reasons probably best known to the senior senator from Maryland, operated this branch of its Chronolith investigation out of a nondescript building in a suburban Baltimore industrial park. It was a low-slung suite of offices and a makeshift library, nothing more. The hard end of the research was performed by universities and federal laboratories, Sue explained. What she ran here was more like a think tank, collating results and acting as a consultancy and clearing house for congressional grant money. Essentially, it was Sue’s job to assess current knowledge and identify promising new lines of research. Her immediate superiors were agency people and congressional aides. She represented the highest echelon, in the Chronolith research effort, of what could plausibly be called science.

I wondered how someone as research-driven as Sue Chopra could have ended up with a glorified management job. I stopped wondering when she opened the door of her office and beckoned me in. The large room contained a lacquered secondhand desk and too many filing cabinets to count. The space around her work terminal was crowded with newspaper clippings, journals, hard copies of e-mail missives. And the walls were papered with photographs.

“Welcome to the
sanctum sanctorum
,” Sue said brightly.

Photographs of Chronoliths.

They were all here, crisp professional portraits side by side with tourist snapshots and cryptic false-color satellite photos. Here was Chumphon in more detail than I had ever seen it, the letters of its inscription picked out in a raking light. Here was Bangkok, and the first graven image of Kuin himself. (Probably not a true representation, most experts felt. The features were too generic, almost as if a graphics processor had been asked to come up with an image of a “world leader.”)

Here were Pyongyang and Ho Chi Minh City. Here were Taipei and Macao and Sapporo; here was the Kanto Plain Chronolith, towering over a brace of blasted granaries. Here was Yichang, both before and after the futile nuclear strike, the monument itself aloofly unchanged but the Yellow River transformed into a gushing severed artery where the dam had been fractured by the blast.

Here, photographed from orbit, was the brown outflow draining into the China Sea.

Throughout was Kuin’s immaculately calm face, observing all this as if from a throne of clouds.

Sue, watching me inspect the photographs, said, “It’s almost a complete inversion of the idea of a monument, when you think about it. Monuments are supposed to be messages to the future—the dead talking to their heirs.”

“ ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”

“Exactly. But the Chronoliths have it exactly backward. Not, ‘I was here.’ More like, ‘I’m coming. I’m the future, whether you like it or not.’”

“Look upon my works and be
afraid
.”

“You have to admire the sheer perversity of it.”

“Do you?”

“I have to tell you, Scotty, sometimes it takes my breath away.”

“Me, too.” Not to mention my wife and daughter: It had taken those away, too.

I was disturbed to see my own obsession with the Chronoliths recreated on Sue Chopra’s wall. It was as if I had discovered we shared a common lung. But this was, of course the reason she had been seduced into the work she did here: It gave her the chance to know virtually everything it was possible to know about the Chronoliths. Hands-on research would have confined her to some far narrower angle, counting refraction rings or hunting elusive bosons.

And she was still able to do the deep math—better able, with virtually every piece of highly classified research work crossing her desk on a daily basis.

“This is it, Scotty,” she said.

I said, “Show me where I work.”

She took me to an outer office furnished with a desk, a terminal. The terminal, in turn, was connected to serried ranks of Quantum Organics workstations—more and more sophisticated crunching power than Campion-Miller had ever been able to afford.