The Chronoliths

One

It was Hitch Paley, rolling his beat-up Daimler motorbike across the packed sand of the beach behind the Haat Thai Dance Pavilion, who invited me to witness the end of an age. Mine, and the world’s. But I don’t blame Hitch.

Nothing is coincidental. I know that now.

He was grinning as he approached, generally a bad omen with Hitch. He wore the American-in-Thailand uniform of that last good summer, army shorts and John the Baptist sandals, oversized khaki T-shirt and a flowered spandex headband. He was a big man, an ex-Marine gone native, bearded and developing a paunch. He looked formidable despite his clothes, and worse, he looked mischievous.

I knew for a fact that Hitch had spent the night in the party tent, eating the hash-laced spice cookies a German diplomatic-corps functionary had given him and feeding the same to her, until she went out with him at high tide to better appreciate the moonlight on the water. He shouldn’t have been awake at this hour, much less cheerful.

I shouldn’t have been awake either.

After a few hours at the bonfire I had gone home to Janice, but we hadn’t slept. Kaitlin had come down with a head cold, and Janice had spent the evening alternately soothing our daughter and battling an infestation of thumb-sized cockroaches that had colonized the warm and greasy passages of the gas stove. Given that, and the hot night, and the tension that already existed between us, it was probably inevitable that we had argued almost until dawn.

So neither Hitch nor I was fresh or perhaps even thinking clearly, though the morning sunlight coaxed a false alertness out of me, the conviction that a world so brightly lit must also be safe and enduring. Sunlight glossed the heavy water of the bay, picked out fishing sloops like dots on radar, promised another cloudless afternoon. The beach was as broad and flat as a highway, a road toward some nameless and perfect destination.

“So that sound last night,” Hitch said, beginning this conversation the way he began most, without preamble, as if we had been apart for no significant time, “like a Navy jet, you heard that?”

I had. I’d heard it about four a.m., shortly after Janice stomped off to bed. Kaitlin was asleep at last, and I was alone at our burn-scarred linoleum kitchen table with a cup of sour coffee. The radio was linked to a U.S. jazz station, turned down to polite chatter.

The broadcast had turned brittle and strange for about thirty seconds. There was a crack of thunder and a series of rolling echoes (Hitch’s “Navy jet”), and a little after that an odd cold breeze rattled Janice’s potted bougainvilleas against the window. The window blinds lifted and fell in a soft salute; Kaitlin’s bedroom door opened by itself, and she turned in her netted crib and made a soft unhappy sound but didn’t wake.

Not quite a Navy jet, but it might have been summer thunder, a newborn or senescent storm mumbling to itself out over the Bay of Bengal. Not unusual, this time of year.

“Party of caterers stopped by the Duc this morning and bought all our ice,” Hitch said. “Heading for some rich man’s dacha. They said there was real action out by the hill road, like fireworks or artillery. A bunch of trees blew down. Want to go see, Scotty?”

“As well one thing as another,” I said.

“What?”

“Means yes.”

It was a decision that would change my life beyond repair, but I made it on a whim. I blame Frank Edwards.

Frank Edwards was a Pittsburgh radio broadcaster of the last century who compiled a volume of supposedly true miracle lore (Stranger Than Science, 1959), featuring such durable folktales as the Mystery of Kaspar Hauser and the “spaceship” that blew up over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1910. The book and its handful of sequels were big items in our household when I was naive enough to take such things seriously. My father had given me Stranger Than Science in a battered library-discard edition and I had finished it — at the age of ten — in three late-night sessions. I suppose my father considered this the kind of material that might stimulate a boy’s imagination. If so, he was right. Tunguska was a world away from the gated Baltimore compound where Charles Carter Warden had planted his troubled wife and only child.

I outgrew the habit of believing this sort of thing, but the word “strange” had become a personal talisman. Strange, the shape of my life. Strange, the decision to stay in Thailand after the contracts evaporated. Strange, these long days and drugged nights on the beaches at Chumphon, Ko Samui, Phuket; strange as the coiled geometry of the ancient Wats.

Maybe Hitch was right. Maybe some dark miracle had landed in the province. More likely there had been a forest fire or a narcotics shoot-out, but Hitch said the caterers had told him it was “something from outer space” — and who was I to argue? I was restless and facing the prospect of another empty day fielding Janice’s complaints. And not relishing it. So I hopped on the back of Hitch’s Daimler, fuck the consequences, and we motored away from the coast in a cloud of blue exhaust. I didn’t stop to tell Janice I was going. I doubted she would be interested; anyway, I’d be home by nightfall.

Lots of Americans disappeared in Chumphon and Satun in those days, kidnapped for ransom or murdered for pocket change or recruited as heroin mules. I was young enough not to care.

We passed the Phat Duc, the shack where Hitch supposedly sold fishing tackle but in fact did a brisk trade in native marijuana to the party crowd, and turned onto the new coast road. Traffic wasn’t heavy, just a few eighteen-wheelers out of the C-Pro fish farms, jitneys and songthaews decorated like carnival wagons, tourist buses. Hitch drove with the verve and fearlessness of a native, which made the journey an exercise in bladder control. But the rush of humid air was cooling, especially as we turned onto the feeder road toward the interior, and the day was young and pregnant with miracles.

Away from the coast, Chumphon is mountainous. When we turned inland we had the road very nearly to ourselves, until a phalanx of border police roared past us in a hail of gravel. So something was definitely up. We stopped long enough for Hitch to relieve himself in a gas station hawng nam while I tuned my portable radio to the English-language radio station out of Bangkok. Lots of U.S. and U.K. top forty, no word of Martians. But just as Hitch came ambling back from the urinal trough a brigade of Royal Thai soldiers roared past us, three troop carriers and a handful of rattletrap humvees, going the same direction the local police had been headed. Hitch looked at me, I looked at him. “Get the camera out of the saddlebag,” he said, not smiling this time. He wiped his hand on his shorts.

Up ahead, a bright column of fog or smoke spiked the tumbled hills.

What I did not know was that my daughter Kaitlin, five years old, had awakened from her morning nap with a raging fever, and that Janice had wasted a good twenty minutes trying to locate me before she gave up and took Kait to the charity clinic.

The clinic doctor was a Canadian who had been in Chumphon since 2002 and had established a fairly modern surgery with funds donated by some department of the World Health Organization. Doctor Dexter, the beach people called him. The man to see for syphilis or intestinal parasites. By the time he examined Kaitlin, her fever had peaked at 105 degrees and she was only intermittently lucid.

Janice, of course, was frantic. She must have feared the worst: the Japanese encephalitis we all read about in the papers that year, or the dengue that had killed so many people in Myanmar. Doctor Dexter diagnosed a common influenza (it had been going around the Phuket and Ko Samui crowd since March) and pumped her full of antivirals.

Janice settled down in the clinic waiting room, still trying periodically to phone me. But I had left my phone in a backpack on a shelf in the rental. She would have tried Hitch, maybe, but Hitch didn’t believe in unencrypted communication; he carried a GPS locator and a compass and figured that was more than enough for any truly rugged male.

When I first glimpsed the pillar through a scrim of forest I took it to be the chedi of a distant Wat, one of the Buddhist temples scattered throughout Southeast Asia. You can find a photograph of Angkor Wat, for instance, in any encyclopedia. You’d recognize it if you saw it: stone reliquary towers that look weirdly organic, as if some enormous troll had left its bones to fossilize in the jungle.

But this chedi — and I saw more of it as we followed the switchback road up a long ridge — was the wrong shape, the wrong color.

We crested the ridge into a roadblock of Royal Thai Police, border patrol cars, and assorted armed men in rust-pocked SUVs. They were turning away all traffic. Four of the soldiers had trained their weapons on an ancient Hyundai songthaew packed with squawking chickens. The border police looked both very young and very hostile, wearing khakis and aviator glasses and holding their rifles at a nervous angle. I didn’t want to challenge them and I told Hitch so.

I don’t know if he heard me. His attention was on the monument — I’ll use that word for now — in the distance.

We could see it more clearly now. It sat astride a higher terrace of the hill, partially obscured by a ring of mist. Without any visible reference the size of it was difficult to judge, but I guessed it must have been at least three hundred feet tall.

In our ignorance we might have mistaken it for a spaceship or a weapon, but the truth is that I recognized it as a kind of monument as soon as I could see it clearly. Imagine a truncated Washington Monument made of sky-blue glass and gently rounded at all corners. I couldn’t guess who had made it or how it had got here — apparently in a single night — but for all its strangeness it did look distinctly man-made, and men make such things for a single purpose: to announce themselves, to declare their presence and display their power. That it should be here at all was dazzlingly strange, but there was no mistaking the solidity of it — the weight, the size, the stunning incongruity.

Then the mist rose up and obscured our view.

Two uniformed men strode toward us, loose-limbed and surly. “By the look of it,” Hitch said — his muted Southwestern drawl sounding a little too lazy, given the circumstances — “we’ll probably have U.S. and U.N. assholes all over us before long, plus a lot more fucking BPP.” Already, an unmarked but obviously military helicopter was circling the ridge, its downdraft stirring the ground haze.

“So we go back,” I said.

He snapped a single photograph, then tucked the camera away. “We don’t have to. There’s a smuggler’s trail up around that hill. It leaves the road about a half mile back. Not too many people know about it.” He grinned again.

I suppose I smiled back. The second thoughts were coming thick and fast, but I knew Hitch and I knew he wouldn’t be argued out of this. I also knew I didn’t want to be left at this checkpoint without a ride. He wheeled the motorcycle around and we left the Thai cops glaring at our tailpipe.

This was maybe two or three in the afternoon, about the time Kaitlin began to ooze bloody pus from her left ear.

We circled up the smugglers’ trail as far as the Daimler would take us, then concealed the bike in a thicket and hiked a quarter mile more.

The trail was rough, designed for maximum concealment but not maximum comfort. Steep real estate, Hitch called it. Hitch carried hiking boots in the Daimler’s saddlebag but I had to make do with my high-tops, and I worried about snakes and insects.

Had we followed the trail far enough we would no doubt have arrived at some hidden drug cache, an extraction factory, maybe even the Burmese border, but twenty minutes took us as close to the monument as we cared to get — as close as we could get.

We came within a thousand yards of it.

We weren’t the first people to see it at that proximity. It had blocked a road, after all, and it had been there for at least twelve hours, assuming the sound of last night’s “Navy jet” had in fact marked the arrival of the artifact.

But we were among the first.

Hitch stopped at the fallen trees. The forest here — pines, mostly, and some wild bamboo — had collapsed in a radial pattern around the base of the monument, and the wreckage obliterated the path. The pines had obviously been toppled by some kind of pressure wave, but they hadn’t been burned. Quite the opposite. The leaves of the uprooted bamboo were still green and only beginning to wither in the afternoon heat. Everything here — the trees, the trail, the ground itself — was crisply cool. Cold, in fact, if you put your hand down among the windfall. Hitch pointed this out. I was reluctant to take my eyes off the monument itself.

If I had known what was to come, my awe might have been tempered. This was — in light of what followed — a relatively minor miracle. But all I knew was that I had stumbled into an event immensely stranger than anything Frank Edwards had uncovered in the back numbers of the Pittsburgh Press, and what I felt was partly fear, partly a dizzy elation.

The monument. It was not, first of all, a statue; that is, it was not a representation of a human or animal figure. It was a four-sided pillar, planed to a smooth, conical apex. The material of which it was made suggested glass, but on a ridiculous, impossible scale. It was blue: the deep, inscrutable blue of a mountain lake, somehow peaceful and ominous at once. It was not transparent but carried the suggestion of translucency. From this side — the northern side — it was scabbed with patches of white: ice, I was astonished to realize, slowly sublimating in the humid daylight. The ruined forest at its base was moist with fog, and the place where the monument met the earth was invisible under mounds of melting snow.

It was the ice and the waves of unnaturally cool air wafting out from the ruined forest that made the scene especially eerie. I imagined the obelisk rising like an immense tourmaline crystal from some underground glacier… but such things happen only in dreams. I said so to Hitch.

“Then we must be in Dreamland, Scotty. Or maybe Oz.”

Another helicopter came around the crown of the hill, too low for comfort. We knelt among the fallen pines, the cool air earthy with their scent. When the aircraft crested the hill and was gone, Hitch touched my shoulder. “Seen enough?”

I nodded. It was clearly not wise to stay, although some stubborn part of me wanted to linger until the monument made sense, to retrieve a little sanity from the ice-blue deeps of the thing. “Hitch,” I said.

“What?”

“Down at the bottom of it… does that look like writing to you?”

He gave the obelisk one last hard squint. Snapped a final photograph. “Letters, maybe. Not English. Too far away to make out, and we’re not getting closer.”

We had stayed too long already.

What I learned later — much later — from Janice, was this.

By three p.m., the Bangkok media had obtained video footage of the monument from an American tourist. By four, half the beach-lizard population in Chumphon Province had taken off to see this prodigy for themselves and were turned away en masse at the roadblocks. Embassies were notified; the international press began to sit up and take notice.

Janice stayed with Kaitlin in the clinic. Kaitlin, by this time, was screaming with pain despite the painkillers and antivirals Doctor Dexter had given her. He examined her a second time and told Janice our daughter had acquired a rapidly necrotizing bacterial ear infection, possibly from swimming at the beach. He’d been reporting elevated levels of e. coli and a dozen other microbes for almost a month, but health officials had taken no action, probably because the C-Pro fish farms were worried about their export license and had flexed their muscle with the authorities.

He administered a massive dose of fluoroquinolones and phoned the embassy in Bangkok. The embassy dispatched an ambulance helicopter and cleared space for Kait at the American hospital.

Janice didn’t want to leave without me. She phoned the rental shack repeatedly and, when that failed, left calls with our landlord and a few friends. Who expressed their sympathy but hadn’t seen me lately.

Doctor Dexter sedated Kaitlin while Janice hurried to the shack to pack a few things. When she got back to the clinic the evac helicopter was already waiting.

She told Doctor Dexter I would almost certainly be reachable by nightfall, probably down at the party tent. If I got in touch, he would give me the hospital’s number and I could make arrangements to drive up.

Then the helicopter lifted off. Janice took a sedative of her own while a trio of paramedics pumped more broad-spectrum antibiotics into Kait’s bloodstream.

They would have gained considerable altitude over the bay, and Janice must have seen the cause of all this from the air — the crystalline pillar poised like an unanswerable question above the lush green foothills.

We came off the smugglers’ trail into a nest of Thai military police.

Hitch made a brave attempt to reverse the Daimler and haul ass out of trouble, but there was nowhere to go except back up that dead-end trail. When a bullet kicked up dust by the front wheel, Hitch braked and killed the engine.

The soldiers bade us kneel, hands behind our necks. One of them approached us and put the barrel of his pistol against Hitch’s temple, then mine. He said something I couldn’t translate; his comrades laughed.

A few minutes later we were inside a military wagon, under the guard of four armed men who spoke no English or pretended not to. I wondered how much contraband Hitch was carrying and whether that made me an accomplice or an accessory to a capital offense. But no one said anything about drugs. No one said anything at all, even when the truck lurched into motion.

I asked politely where we were going. The nearest soldier — a barrel-ribbed, gap-toothed adolescent — shrugged and waved the butt of his rifle at me in a desultory threat.

They took Hitch’s camera. He never got it back. Nor his motorcycle, come to that. The army was economical in such matters.

We rode in that truck for almost eighteen hours and spent the next night in a Bangkok prison, in separate cells and without communication privileges. I learned later that an American threat-assessment team wanted to “debrief” (i.e., interrogate) us before we talked to the press, so we sat in our isolation cells with buckets for toilets while, across the world, sundry well-dressed men booked flights for Don Muang Airport. These things take time.

My wife and child were less than five miles away in the embassy hospital, but I didn’t know that and neither did Janice.

Kaitlin bled from her ear until dawn.

Doctor Dexter’s second diagnosis had been correct. Kaitlin had been infected with some ominously poly-drug-resistant bacteria that dissolved her tympanic membrane as neatly — one doctor told me — as if someone had poured a vial of acid into her ear. The surrounding small bones and nervous tissue were also affected, in the time it took for multiple doses of fluoroquinolones to battle back the infection. By the following nightfall two things were clear.

One, Kaitlin’s life was no longer in danger.

Two, she would never hear with that ear again. She would retain some hearing in her right ear, but it would be impaired.

Or maybe I should say three things became clear. Because it was plain to Janice by the time the sun went down that my absence was inexcusable and that she wasn’t prepared to forgive me for this latest lapse of adult judgment. Not this time — not unless my corpse washed up on the beach, and maybe not even then.

The interrogation went like this.

Three polite men arrived at the prison and apologized contritely for the conditions in which we were being held. They were in touch with the Thai government on our behalf “even as we speak,” and in the meantime, would we answer a few questions?

For instance, our names and addresses and Stateside connections, and how long had we been in Thailand, and what were we doing here?

(This must have been fun for Hitch. I simply told the truth: that I had been in Bangkok doing software development for a U.S.-based hotel chain and that I had stayed on for some eight months after my contract lapsed. I didn’t mention that I had planned to write a book about the rise and fall of expatriate beach culture in what the Thai travel guides are pleased to call the Land of Smiles — which had turned from a nonfiction work into a novel before it died aborning — or that I had exhausted my personal savings six weeks ago. I told them about Janice but neglected to mention that, without the money she had borrowed from her family, we would have been destitute. I told them about Kaitlin, too, but I didn’t know Kaitlin had nearly died a mere forty-eight hours earlier… and if the suits knew, they didn’t elect to share the information.)

The rest of their questions were all about the Chumphon object: how we had heard about it, when we had first seen it, how close we had come, our “impressions” of it. A Thai prison guard looked on glumly as a U.S. medic took blood and urine samples for further analysis. Then the suits thanked us and promised to get us out of confinement ASAP.

The following day three different polite gentlemen with a fresh set of credentials asked us the same questions and made the same promises.

We were, at last, released. Some of the contents of our wallets were returned to us and we stepped out into the heat and stench of Bangkok somewhere on the wrong side of the Chao Phrya. Abandoned and penniless, we walked to the embassy and I badgered a functionary there into advancing us one-way bus fare to Chumphon and a couple of free phone calls.

I tried to reach Janice at our rental shack. There was no answer. But it was dinnertime and I imagined she was out with Kait securing a meal. I tried to contact our landlord (a graying Brit named Bedford), but I talked to his voicemail instead. At which point a nice embassy staffer reminded us pointedly not to miss our bus.

I reached the shack long after dark, still firmly convinced I’d find Janice and Kaitlin inside; that Janice would be angry until she heard what had happened; that there would follow a tearful reconciliation and maybe even some passion in the wake of it.

In her hurry to reach the hospital Janice had left the door ajar. She had taken a suitcase for herself and Kaitlin and local thieves had taken the rest, what there was of it: the food in the refrigerator, my phone, the laptop.

I ran up the road and woke my landlord, who admitted he had seen Janice lugging a suitcase past his window “the other day” and that Kaitlin had been ill, but in all the fuss about the monument the details had escaped him. He let me use his phone (I had become a phone beggar) and I reached Doctor Dexter, who filled me in on the details of Kaitlin’s infection and her trip to Bangkok.

Bangkok. And I couldn’t call Bangkok from Colin’s phone; that was a toll call, he pointed out, and wasn’t I already behind on the rent?

I hiked to the Phat Duc, Hitch’s alleged bait and tackle shop.

Hitch had problems of his own — he still harbored faint hopes of tracking down the lost Daimler — but he told me I could crash in the Duc’s back room (on a bale of moist sinsemilla, I imagined) and use the shop’s phone all I wanted; we’d settle up later.

It took me until dawn to establish that Janice and Kaitlin had already left the country.

I don’t blame her.

Not that I wasn’t angry. I was angry for the next six months. But when I tried to justify the anger to myself, my own excuses seemed flimsy and inadequate.

I had, after all, brought her to Thailand when her explicit preference had been to stay in the U.S. and finish her postdoc. I had kept her there when my own contracts lapsed, and I had effectively forced her into a poverty-level existence (as Americans of those years understood poverty, anyway) while I played out a scenario of rebellion and retreat that had more to do with unresolved post-adolescent angst than with anything substantial. I had exposed Kaitlin to the dangers of an expatriate lifestyle (which I preferred to think of as “broadening her horizons”), and in the end I had been absent and unavailable when my daughter’s life was threatened.

I did not doubt that Janice blamed me for Kaitlin’s partial deafness. My only remaining hope was that Kait herself would not blame me. At least, not permanently. Not forever.

In the meantime what I wanted was to go home. Janice had retreated to her parents’ house in Minneapolis, from which she was very firmly not returning my calls. I was given to understand that a bill of divorcement was in the works.

All of this, ten thousand miles away.

At the end of a frustrating month I told Hitch I needed a ride back to the U.S. but that my funds had bottomed out.

We sat on a drift log by the bay. Windsurfers rolled out on the long blue, undeterred by the bacteria count. Funny how inviting the ocean can look, even when it’s poisoned.

The beach was busy. Chumphon had become a mecca for photojournalists and the idly curious. By day they competed for telephoto shots of the so-called Chumphon Object; by night they bid up the prices of liquor and lodging. All of them carried more money than I had seen for a year.

I didn’t much care for the journalists and I already hated the monument. I couldn’t blame Janice for what had happened, and I was understandably reluctant to blame myself, but I could without objection blame the mystery object that had come to fascinate much of the world.

The irony is that I hated the monument almost before anyone else did. Before very long the silhouette of that cool blue stone would become a symbol recognized and hated (or, perversely, loved) by the vast majority of the human race. But for the time being I had the field to myself.

The moral, I suppose, is that history doesn’t always put its finger on the nice folks.

And of course: There is no such thing as a coincidence.

“We both need a favor,” Hitch said, grinning that dangerous grin of his. “Maybe we can do one for each other. Maybe I can get you back home, Scotty. If you do something for me in return.”

“That kind of proposition worries me,” I said.

“A little worry is a healthy thing.”

That evening, the English-language papers printed the text of the writing that had been discovered on the base of the monument — an open secret here in Chumphon.

The inscription, carved an inch deep into the substance of the pillar and written in a kind of pidgin Mandarin and basic English, was a simple declarative statement commemorating a battle. In other words, the pillar was a victory monument.

It celebrated the surrender of southern Thailand and Malaysia to the massed forces of someone (or something) called “Kuin,” and beneath the text was the date of this historic battle.

December 21, 2041.

Twenty years in the future.

Two

I flew into the United States on a start-up air carrier with legal berths at Beijing, Dusseldorf, Gander, and Boston — the long way around the planet, with numbing layovers — and arrived at Logan Airport with a set of knockoff designer luggage in the best Bangkok tradition, a five-thousand-dollar grubstake, and an unwelcome obligation, all thanks to Hitch Paley. I was home, for better or for worse.

It was amazing how effortlessly wealthy Boston seemed after a season on the beaches, even before I left the terminal, as if all these gleaming cafés and newsstands had sprung up after a hard rain, bright Disney mushrooms. Nothing here was older than five years, not the terminal annex itself nor the Atlantic landfill that supported it, a facility younger than the great majority of its patrons. I submitted to a noninvasive Customs scan, then crossed the cavernous Arrivals complex to a taxi bay.

The mystery of the Chumphon Chronolith — it had been given that name by a pop-science journalist just last month — had already faded from public attention. It was still making news, but mainly in the supermarket checkout papers (totem of the Devil or trump of the Rapture) and in countless conspiracy-chronicling web-journals. Incomprehensible as it may seem to a contemporary reader, the world had passed on to more immediate concerns — Brazzaville 3, the Windsor weddings, the attempted assassination of the diva Lux Ebone at the Roma Festival just last weekend. It was as if we were all waiting for the event that would define the new century, the thing or person or abstract cause that would strike us as indelibly new, a Twenty-first Century Thing. And of course we didn’t recognize it when it nudged its way into the news for the first time. The Chronolith was a singular event, intriguing but ultimately mystifying, hence ultimately boring. We set it aside unfinished, like the New York Times crossword puzzle.

In fact there was a lot of ongoing concern over the Thai event, but it was restricted to certain echelons of the intelligence and security communities, both national and international. The Chronolith, after all, was an avowedly hostile military incursion conducted on a large scale and with ultimate stealth, even if the only casualties had been a few thousand gnarled mountain pines. Chumphon Province was under very close scrutiny these days.

But that was not my business, and I imagined I could disentangle myself from it simply by flying a few thousand miles west.

We thought like that then.

Unusually cold weather that autumn. The sky was cast over with turbulent clouds, a high wind tormenting the last of the year’s fishing fleet. Outside the street atrium of the AmMag station, a row of flags beat the air.

I paid the taxi driver, crossed the lobby, and bought a ticket for the Northern Tier Express: Detroit, Chicago, and across the prairies to Seattle, though I was only going as far as Minneapolis. Boarding at seven p.m., the vending machine informed me. I purchased a newspaper and read it on a coin monitor until the station’s wall clock showed 4:30.

Then I stood up, surveyed the lobby for suspicious activity (none), and walked out onto Washington Street.

Five blocks south of the magrail station was a tiny, ancient mailbox service called Easy’s Packages and Parcels.

It was a storefront business, not prosperous, with a flyblown mylar shade over the display window. While I watched, a man with a steel walker inched through the front door and emerged ten minutes later carrying a brown paper envelope. I imagined this was the typical customer at an establishment like Easy’s, a golden-ager perversely loyal to what remained of the U.S. Postal Service.

Unless the gentleman with the walker was a criminal in latex makeup. Or a cop.

Did I have qualms about what I was doing? Many… or at least second thoughts. Hitch had bankrolled my trip home, and the favor he had asked in return had seemed simple enough when we were basking penniless on the sand. I had known Hitch for most of a year before the advent of the Chumphon Chronolith; he was one of the few Haat Thai regulars whose conversation extended to anything more advanced than personal sexual conquests and designer drugs. He was a master of unaudited deals and subterranean income, but he was essentially honest and (as I had often insisted to Janice) “not a bad person.” Whatever that meant. I trusted him, at least within the boundaries of his nature.

But as I stood watching Easy’s Packages for evidence of police surveillance — fully aware that I wouldn’t recognize professional surveillance unless the Treasury Department happened to rent a billboard to advertise its presence — all those judgments seemed facile and naive. Hitch had asked me to show up at Easy’s, give his name, and take delivery of “a package,” which I was to hold until he contacted me, no questions asked.

Hitch was after all a drug dealer, though his beach trade had been confined to cannabis, exotic mushrooms, and the milder phenylethylamines. And Thailand was indeed a source country and established commercial route for the narcotics trade since the days of Marco Polo.

I wasn’t modest about intoxicants and I had sampled more than a few. Virtually every psychoactive substance was legal somewhere and almost all of it decriminalized in the liberal Western nations, but the U.S. in general and Massachusetts in particular were still heavily punitive when it came to the transportation of hard narcotics. If Hitch had somehow contrived to mail himself, say, a kilo of black tar heroin — and if his sense of humor extended to giving me custody of it — I might be paying for my ticket home with penitentiary time. I might not see Kaitlin without a sheet of wire-reinforced glass between us, at least until her thirtieth birthday.

Rain came down in a sudden, sheeting torrent. I ran across the street to Easy’s Packages, took a breath of damp air, and stepped inside.

Easy himself, or someone like him — a tall, intricately wrinkled, muscular black man who might have been sixty or eighty — stood behind a hardwood counter, guarding a row of aluminum mailboxes tarnished a foggy gray. He looked at me briefly. “Help you?”

“I’m here to pick up a package.”

“You and everybody else. Mailbox number?”

Hitch hadn’t given me a number. “Hitch Paley said there’d be a package waiting for me.”

His eyes narrowed, and his head seemed to rise a quarter inch in sudden indignation. “Hitch Paley?”

From the tone of his voice this was already going badly, but I nodded.

“Hitch fucking Paley!” He thumped the counter with his fist. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but if you happen to be talking to Hitch Paley, you tell that asshole our scores are not settled! He can keep his fuckin’ packages to himself, too!”

“You don’t have anything for me?”

“Do I have anything for you? Do I have anything for you? The toe of my fucking boot is what I have for you!”

I managed to find the door.

Thus the failed journalist, failed husband, and failed parent became a failed criminal.

Riding the AmMag coach out of Massachusetts, out of the urban corridor into shanty sprawl and dusky farmland, I tried to put these mysteries out of my mind.

Anything could have gone wrong between Hitch Paley and Easy’s Packages, but I told myself it didn’t really matter. I had done what Hitch had asked and I was frankly relieved not be carrying a butcher-paper-wrapped bundle of incriminating evidence. The only potential problem was that Hitch might (and in the near future) want his money back.

Midnight inched past in the rainy dark. I reclined my seat and contemplated the future. West of the Mississippi, the economy was booming. The new covalent processor platforms had enabled oceans of complex new software, and I was certain I could find at least an entry-level gig with one of the Silicon Ring NASDAQ candidates. Put my degree to use before it became obsolete. In time, I could pay Hitch back and null the debt. Thus crime engenders virtue.

In time, I imagined, I would become respectable; I would prove my worth to Janice and be forgiven, and Kait would come toddling back into my arms.

But I couldn’t help thinking of my father — seeing him in my own reflection in the rain-scored window. Failure is entropy, this specter seemed to announce, and entropy is a law of nature. Love becomes pain. Eventually you learn to ignore it. You achieve the nirvana of indifference. It’s not easy. But nothing worth doing is easy.

Hitch and I were among the first to witness the Chumphon Chronolith, and in the great conflation of time and mind that followed… well, yes, it has occurred to me to wonder how much of my own pessimism (or my father’s) I fed into that loop.

Not to mention a touch of madness on the maternal side. Cold air filtered into the darkened coach, and I remembered how fervently my mother had despised the cold. She had taken it personally, especially in her last years. A personal affront. She was an enemy of ice, plagued by snow.

She told me once that snow was the fecal matter of angels: it didn’t stink, being angelic in origin, but it was an insult nevertheless, so pure it burned like fire on mortal skin.

Tucking away my ticket stub in a jacket pocket, I noticed that the index number printed under the AmMag logo was 2,041 — same as the due date inscribed on the Kuin stone.

At the depot in Minneapolis/St. Paul I picked up the local news and a pop-science magazine with an article about the Chronolith.

The science magazine featured a number of photos of the Thai site, much changed from the day Hitch and I had visited it. A vast blankness had been bulldozed into the brown earth surrounding the pillar, and the cleared perimeter was pockmarked with tents, polygonal equipment sheds, makeshift laboratories, and an array of ochre-painted Porta-Potties. A multinational pool of scientific investigators had been installed by the Pacific Treaty powers, mostly materials scientists who were at this point admittedly baffled. The Chronolith was spectacularly inert. It seemed not to react with its environment at all, could not be etched with acid or cut with lasers; deep digging had not yet reached the roots of it; its temperature, at least since the icy blast of its arrival, had never varied from ambient by so much as a fraction of a centigrade degree. The tiling was spectacularly aloof.

Spectral analysis of the pillar had proved especially unrewarding. The Chronolith passed and scattered light in the blue-green portion of the visible spectrum and, inexplicably, at a few harmonic wavelengths both infrared and ultraviolet. At other frequencies it was either purely reflective — impossibly reflective — or purely absorptive. Net input-output appeared to sum to zero, but no one was certain of that, and even that putative symmetry defied easy explanation. The article went on to speculate about a wholly new state of matter, which was less an explanation than a confession of ignorance phrased so as not to disturb the smooth flow of investigatory funding.

Speculation about the legend inscribed on the Chronolith was even gaudier and even less enlightening. Was “time travel” really a practical possibility? Most authorities dismissed the notion. The inscription was then perhaps a form of stealthing, a clue designed to mislead. Even the name “Kuin” was spectacularly uninformative. If it was a proper name, it might have been Chinese but was more commonly Dutch; the word also turned up in Finnish and Japanese; there was even a tribe of indigenous Peruvians called the Huni Kuin, though they could hardly be held responsible.

The alternate possibility — that some Asian warlord a mere twenty years hence had created a monument to a minor victory and projected it into the recent past — was simply too ridiculous to be true. (If this seems shortsighted now, consider that the scientific community had already been forced to swallow a number of evident absurdities about the Kuin stone and understandably balked at this ultimate impossibility. People used the word “impossible” more freely then.)

Such was the consensus, circa autumn of 2021.

I had bought the local paper for a more practical purpose. I searched its classified pages for rental properties close to the ring of suburban digital design consortia. The search coughed up a list of possibilities, and by Wednesday I had bribed my way into a one-bedroom walkup just west of the Twin Cities Agricultural Enclave. The room was unfurnished. I bought a chair, a table, and a bed. Anything more would have been a confession of permanency. I decided I was “in transition.” Then I looked for a job. I didn’t call Janice, at least not right away, because I wanted something to show her, first, some token of my credibility: an income, for example. If there had been a merit badge for Good Citizenship I would have applied for that, too.

Of course, none of this helped. There is no retrieving the past, a fact the reader almost surely understands. The younger generation knows these things better than my peers ever did. The knowledge has been forced on them.

Three

By February of 2022 Janice and Kaitlin had moved into a pleasant suburban co-op, far from Janice’s work but close to good schools. The divorce contract we had finalized in December included a custody agreement that gave me Kaitlin for an average of one week per month.

Janice had been reasonable about sharing Kait, and I had seen a fair amount of my daughter since the fall. I was scheduled to have Kait this Saturday. But a day together mandated by a divorce court isn’t just a day together. It’s something else. Strange, awkward, and uncomfortable.

I showed up at Janice’s at 8:45, a sunny but viciously cold Saturday morning. Janice invited me into her home and told me Kait was at a friend’s house, watching morning cartoons until the appointed hour.

The co-op apartment had a pleasant odor of fresh broadloom and recent breakfast. Janice, in her weekend-morning blouse and denims, poured me a cup of coffee. It seemed to me that we had reached a sort of rapprochement… that we might even have enjoyed seeing each other, if not for the baggage of pain and recrimination each of us carried into the other’s presence. Not to mention bruised affection, forlorn hope, and muted grief.

Janice sat down with the coffee table between us. She had left a couple of her antiques on the table in a faux-casual display. She collected printed-paper magazines from the last century, Life and Time and so on. They lay in their stiff plastic wrappers like advertisements for a lost age, ticket stubs from the Titanic. “You’re still at Campion-Miller?” she asked.

“Another six-month contract.” And a 3k re-up bonus. At this rate my net income might someday advance all the way from Entry Level to Junior Employee. I had spent most of that bonus on a widescreen entertainment panel so Kait and I could watch movies together. Before Christmas I’d been relying on my portable station for both work and entertainment.

“So it’s looking long-term.”

“As such things go.” I sipped from the cup she had given me. “The coffee’s lousy, by the way.”

“Oh?”

“You always made very bad coffee.”

Janice smiled. “And now you can bring yourself to tell me about it?”

“Mm-hm.”

“All those years, you hated my coffee?”

“I didn’t say I hated it. I said it was bad.”

“You never turned down a cup.”

“No. I never did.”

Kaitlin came in from the neighbors’ — crashed through the front door in dripping plastic boots and a pleated winter jacket. Her glasses immediately frosted over with condensation. The glasses were a new addition. Kaitlin was only modestly nearsighted, but they don’t do corrective surgery on children as young as Kait. She swiped her lenses with her fingers and gazed at me owlishly.

Kait used to give me a big smile whenever she saw me coming. She still smiled at me. But not automatically.

Janice said, “Did you see your cartoons, love?”

“No.” Kait’s eyes remained fixed on me. “Mr. Levy wanted to see the news.”

It didn’t occur to me to ask why Janice’s neighbor had insisted on seeing the news.

But then, if I had asked, I might have missed an afternoon with Kait.

“Have fun with Daddy today,” Janice said. “Do you need to go to the bathroom before you leave?”

Kaitlin was scandalized by this indelicacy. “No!”

“All right, then.” Janice straightened and looked at me. “Eight o’clock, Scott?”

“Eight,” I promised.

We hummed along in my secondhand car, neatly laced into heavy Saturday traffic by proximity protocols. I had promised Kaitlin a trip to an amusement mall, and she was already cycling through waves of elation and exhaustion, jabbering for long stretches of the ride, then lapsing against the upholstery with a forlorn are-we-there-yet? expression on her face.

During her silences I examined my conscience… cautiously, the way you might handle a sedated but venomous snake. I peeked at myself through Janice’s eyes and saw (yet again) the man who had taken her and her daughter to a third-world country; who had nearly stranded them there; who had exposed them to an expatriate beach culture which, though no doubt colorful and interesting, was also drug-raddled, dangerous, and hopelessly unproductive.

The kind word for that sort of behavior is “thoughtless.” Synonyms include “selfish” and “reckless.”

Had I changed? Well, maybe. But I still owed Hitch Paley several thousand dollars (though I hadn’t heard from him in half a year and had begun to harbor hopes that I wouldn’t, ever) — and a life that includes such accessories as Hitch Paley is not, by definition, stable.

Still, here was Kaitlin, unharmed, periodically bouncing against the upholstery like a harnessed capuchin monkey. I had taught her to tie her shoes. I had shown her the Southern Cross, one cloudless night in Chumphon. I was her father, and she suffered my presence gladly.

We spent three hours at the mall, enough to tire her out. Kait was fascinated, if a little intimidated, by the clowns in their morphologically adaptive character suits and makeup. She packed away an astonishing amount of mall food, sat through two half-hour Surround Adventures, and slept sitting up on the way back to my apartment.

Home, I turned up the lights and shut out the prairie-winter dusk. For dinner I heated frozen chicken and string beans, prole food but good-smelling in the narrow kitchen; we watched downloads while we ate. Kaitlin didn’t say much, but the atmosphere was cozy.

And when she looked to the right, I was able to see her deaf ear cosseted in a nest of golden hair. The ear was not grossly deformed, merely puckered where the bacteria had chewed away notches of flesh, pinkly scarred.

In her other ear she wore a hearing aid like a tiny polished seashell.

After dinner I washed the dishes, then coaxed Kaitlin away from cartoons and switched to a news broadcast.

The news was from Bangkok.

“That,” Kaitlin said sourly as she emerged from the bathroom, “is what Mr. Levy wanted to see.”

This was, as you will have guessed, the first of the city-busting Chronoliths — in effect, first notice that something more significant than a Stranger Than Science anecdote was taking place in Southeast Asia.

I sat down next to Kaitlin and let her curl up against my ribs while I watched.

Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another. And they’re ruthless with their attention. She was impressed, if confused, by the helicopter shots of the riverfront neighborhoods destroyed and ice-coated, steaming in the sunlight. But there were only a few of these segments available, and the news networks ran them repeatedly over an aural haze of casualty estimates and meaningless “interpretation.” The palpable atmosphere of confusion, fear, and denial evinced by the commentators kept her frowning a few minutes more, but before long she closed her eyes and her breathing steadied into petite, phlegmatic snores.

We were there, Kait, you and I, I thought.

Ruined Bangkok from the air looked like a misprinted road map. I recognized the Chao Phrya bending through the city, and the devastated Rattanakosin district, the old Royal City, where the Khlong Lawd fed the larger river. A patch of green might have been Lumphini Park. But the gridwork of roads had been reduced to an incomprehensible wasteland of brick and rebar, tin and cardboard and frost-heaved asphalt, all glittering with ice and wound about with fog. The ice had not prevented a number of broken gas mains from catching fire, islands of flame in the glacial wreckage. A great many people had died here, as the commentators took pains to point out. Some of the baggy objects littering the streets were almost certainly human bodies.

The only intact structure closer than the suburbs was at the very center of the disaster: the Chronolith itself.

It was not much like the Chumphon Chronolith. It was taller, grander, more intricately detailed and more finely sculpted. But I immediately recognized the translucent blue surface visible where patches of frost had peeled away, that distinct, indifferent skin.

The monument had “arrived” (explosively) after dark, Bangkok time. These clips were more recent, a few from the chaotic night, most fresh this morning. As time passed, the news networks relayed more aerial video. It was possible to see the new Chronolith in a kind of montage as it shed its cloak of condensed and frozen moisture, changing from what it had seemed to be — a monstrously large, oddly bulky white pillar — into what it really was: the stylized form of a human figure.

It recalled more than anything else the public monuments of Stalinist Russia; the Winged Victory at Leningrad, say. Or maybe the Colossus of Rhodes astride its harbor. Such structures are daunting not only because they are enormous but because they are so coldly stylized. This was not an image but a schematic of a human being, even the face contrived to suggest some generic Eurasian perfection unattainable in the real world. Scabs of ice clung to the domes of the eyes, the crevasses of the nostrils. Beyond its apparent masculinity, the figure might have been anyone. At least, anyone in whom infinite confidence had colluded with absolute power.

Kuin, I supposed. As he would have us see him.

His torso blended into the fundamental columnar structure of the Chronolith. The base of the monument, maybe a quarter mile in diameter, straddled the Chao Phrya, and skins of ice had formed where it met the water. These were breaking up in the sunlight and floating downstream, ice floes in the tropics, bumping the half-sunken hulls of tourist barges.

Janice called at ten, demanding to know what I had done with Kait. I looked at my watch, gritted my teeth and apologized. I explained to Janice how we had spent the day and how I had become distracted by the Bangkok Chronolith.

“That thing,” she said, as if it were already old news. And maybe for Janice it was: she had already processed the Chronoliths into a generalized symbolic threat, terrifying but distant. She seemed unhappy that I had brought it up.

“I can drive Kaitlin back tonight,” I said, “or keep her until morning if that’s more convenient. She’s asleep on the sofa right now.”

“Get her a pillow and a blanket,” Janice said, as if that thought had not already crossed my mind. “I guess she might as well sleep through.”

I did better than that: I carried Kaitlin to the bed and took the sofa for myself. Sat up nearly until dawn watching TV with the sound turned low. The commentary was inaudible and probably better that way. Only the images remained, growing more complex as news crews pushed deeper into the rubble. By morning Kuin’s vast head was wreathed in cloud, and rain had begun to dampen the burning city.

In the summer of that year (the summer Kaitlin learned to ride the bicycle I bought her for her birthday), a third Chronolith cored the living heart out of Pyongyang, and the Asian Crisis began in earnest.

Four

Time passed.

Should I apologize for these lapses — a year here, a year there? History isn’t linear, after all. It runs in shallows and narrows and bayous and bays. (And treacherous undertows and hidden whirlpools.) And even a memoir is a kind of history.

But I suppose it depends on the audience I’m writing for, and that’s still unclear in my mind. Who am I addressing? My own generation, so many of whom have died or are now dying? Our heirs, who may not have experienced these events but who can at least recite them from schoolbooks? Or some more distant generation of men and women who may have been allowed, God willing and impossible as it seems, to forget a little of what passed in this century?

In other words, how much should I explain, and how thoroughly?

But it’s a moot question.

Really, there are only two of us here.

Me. And you. Whoever you are.

Nearly five years passed between my visit to the mall with Kaitlin and the day Arnie Kunderson called me out of a batch-sort test to his office — which was, perhaps, the next significant turning point in my life, if you believe in linear causality and the civilized deference of the future to the past. But taste those years, first: imagine them, if you don’t remember them.

Five summers — warm ones, when the news (between Kuin events) was dominated by the ongoing depletion of the Oglalla Aquifer. New Mexico and Texas had virtually lost the ability to irrigate their dry lands. The Oglalla Aquifer, a body of underground water as large as Lake Huron and a relic of the last ice age, remained essential to agriculture in Nebraska, parts of Wyoming and Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma — and it continued to decline, sucked up from increasing depths by ruthlessly efficient centrifugal pumps. The news feeds featured the farm exodus in repetitive, blunt images: families in battered cargo trucks stalled on the interstates, their sullen children with web toys plugging their ears and masking their eyes. Men and women standing on labor lines in Los Angeles or Detroit, the dark underside of our blossoming economy. Because most of us had work, we allowed ourselves the luxury of pity.

Five winters. Our winters were dry and cold, those years. The well-to-do wore thermally adaptive clothes for the first time, which left the tonier shopping districts looking as if they had been invaded by aliens in polyester jogging suits and respirators, while the rest of us beetled down the street in bulging parkas or stuck as close as possible to the skywalks. Domestic robots (self-guided vacuum cleaners, lawnmowers bright enough not to maim local children) became commonplace; the Sony dogwalker was withdrawn from the market after a well-publicized accident involving a malfunctioning streetlight and a brace of Shi Tzus. In those years, even the elderly stopped calling their entertainment panels “TV sets.” Lux Ebone announced her retirement, twice. Cletus King defeated incumbent Marylin Leahy, giving the White House to the Federal Party, though Democrats continued to control Congress.

Catchphrases of the day, now all but forgotten: “Now give me mine.” “Brutal but nice!” “Like daylight in a drawer.”

Names and places we imagined were important: Doctor Dan Lesser, the Wheeling Courthouse, Beckett and Goldstein, Kwame Finto.

Events: the second wave of lunar landings; the Zairian pandemic; the European currency crisis; and the storming of the Hague.

And Kuin, of course, like a swelling drumbeat.

Pyongyang, then Ho Chi Minh City; eventually Macao, Sapporo, the Kanto Plain, Yichang…

And all the early Kuin mania and fascination, the ten thousand websources with their peculiar and contradictory theories, the endless simmering of the crackpot press, the symposia and the committee reports, the think tanks and the congressional inquiries. The young man in Los Angeles who had his name legally changed to “Kuin,” and all his subsequent imitators.

Kuin, whoever or whatever he might be, had already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more. For that reason, the name was treated with gravitas in respectable circles. For the same reason, it became popular with comedians and T-shirt designers. “Kuinist” imagery was banned from certain schools, until the ACLU intervened. Because he stood for nothing discernible except destruction and conquest, Kuin became a slate on which the disaffected scrawled their manifestos. None of this was taken terribly seriously in North America. Elsewhere, the seismic rumbling was more ominous.

I followed it all closely.

For two years I worked at the Campion-Miller research facility outside of St. Paul, writing patches into self-evolved commercial-interface code. Then I was transferred to the downtown offices, where I joined a team doing much the same work on much more secure material, Campion-Miller’s own tightly-held source code, the beating heart of our major products. Mostly I drove in from my one-bedroom apartment, but on the worst winter days I rode the new elevated train, an aluminum chamber into which too many commuters shed their heat and moisture, mingled body odors and aftershave, the city a pale scrim on steaming white windows.

(It was on one of those trips that I saw a young woman sitting halfway down the car, wearing a hat with the words “TWENTY AND THREE” printed on it — twenty years and three months, the nominal interval between the appearance of a Chronolith and its predicted conquest. She was reading a tattered copy of Stranger Than Science, which must have been out of print for at least sixty years. I wanted to approach her, to ask her what events had equipped her with these totems, these echoes of my own past, but I was too bashful, and how could I have phrased such a question, anyway? I never saw her again.)

I dated a few times. For most of a year I went out with a woman from the quality-control division of Campion-Miller, Annali Kincaid, who loved turquoise and New Drama and took a lively interest in current events. She dragged me to lectures and readings I would otherwise have ignored. We broke up, finally, because she possessed deep and complex political convictions, and I did not; I was a Kuin-watcher, otherwise politically agnostic.

But I was able to impress her on at least one occasion. She had used someone’s credentials at Campion-Miller to wangle us admission to an academic conference at the university — “The Chronoliths: Scientific and Cultural Issues.” (My idea as much as hers this time. Well, mostly mine. Annali had already voiced her objection to the aerial and orbital photographs of Chronoliths with which I had decorated my bedroom, the Kuinist downloads that littered the apartment.) We sat through the presentation of three papers and most of a pleasant Saturday afternoon, at which point Annali decided the discourse was a little too abstract for her taste. But on our way through the lobby I was hailed by an older woman in loose jeans and an oversized pea-green sweater, beaming at me through monstrous eyeglasses.

Her name was Sulamith Chopra. I had known her at Cornell. Her career had taken her deep into the fundamental-physics end of the Chronolith research.

I introduced Sue to Annali.

Annali was floored. “Ms. Chopra, I know who you are. I mean, they always quote your name in the news stories.”

“Well, I’ve done some work.”

“I’m pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.” But Sue hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “Strange I should run into you here, Scotty.”

“Is it?”

“Unexpected. Significant, maybe. Or maybe not. We need to catch up on our lives sometime.”

I was flattered. I wanted very much to talk to her. Pathetically, I offered her my business card.

“No need,” she said. “I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.”

“You can?”

But she was gone in the crowd.

“You’re well connected,” Annali told me on the ride home.

But that wasn’t right. (Sue didn’t call me — not that year — and my attempts to reach her were rebuffed.) I was connected, not well, but not quite randomly, either. Running into Sue Chopra was an omen, like seeing the woman in the commuter car; but the meaning of it was inscrutable, a prophecy in an indecipherable language, a signal buried in noise.

Being called to Arnie Kunderson’s office was never a good sign. He had been my supervisor since I joined Campion-Miller, and I had learned this about Arnie: When the news was good, he would bring it to you. If he called you into his office, prepare for the worst.

I had seen Arnie angry, most recently, when the team I was leading botched an order-sort-and-mail protocol and nearly cost us a contract with a nationwide retailer. But I knew this was something even more serious as soon as I walked into his office. When he was angry, Arnie was ebulliently, floridly angry. Today, worse, he sat behind his desk with the furtive look of a man entrusted with some repellent but necessary duty — an undertaker, say. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I pulled up a chair and waited. We weren’t formal. We had been to each other’s barbecues.

He folded his hands and said. “There’s never a good way to do this. What I have to tell you, Scott, is that Campion-Miller isn’t renewing your contract. We’re canceling it. This is official notice. I know you haven’t had any warning and Christ knows I’m incredibly fucking sorry to drop this on you. You’re entitled to full severance and a generous compensation package for the six months left to run.”

I wasn’t as surprised as Arnie seemed to expect. The Asian economic collapse had cut deeply into Campion-Miller’s foreign markets. Just last year the firm had been acquired by a multinational corporation whose management team laid off a quarter of the staff and cashed in most of C-M’s subsidiary holdings for their real-estate value.

I did, however, feel somewhat blindsided.

Unemployment was up that year. The Oglalla crisis and the collapse of the Asian economies had dumped a lot of people onto the job market. There was a tent city five blocks square down along the riverside. I pictured myself there.

I said, “Are you going to tell the team, or do you want me to do it?”

The team I led was working on predictive market software, one of C-M’s more lucrative lines. In particular, we were factoring genuine as versus perceived randomness into such applications as consumer trending and competitive pricing.

Ask a computer to pick two random numbers between one and ten and the machine will cough up digits in a genuinely random sequence — maybe 2,3; maybe 1,9; and so on. Ask a number of human beings, plot their answers, and you’ll get a distribution curve heavily weighted at 3 and 7. When people think “random” they tend to picture numbers you might call “unobtrusive” — not too near the limits nor precisely in the middle; not part of a presumed sequence (2,4,6), etc.

In other words, there is something you might call intuitive randomness which differs dramatically from the real thing.

Was it possible to exploit this difference to our advantage in high-volume commercial apps, such as stock portfolios or marketing or product price-placement?

We thought so. We’d made a little progress. The work had been going well enough that Arnie’s news seemed (at least) oddly timed.

He cleared his throat. “You misunderstand. The team isn’t leaving.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s not my decision, Scott.”

“You said that. Okay, it’s not your fault. But if the project is going forward—”

“Don’t ask me to justify this. Frankly, I can’t.”

He let that sink in.

“Five years,” I said. “Fuck, Arnie. Five years!”

“Nothing’s guaranteed. Not anymore. You know that as well as I do.”

“It might help if I understood why this was happening.”

He twisted in his chair. “I’m not at liberty to say. Your work has been excellent, and I’ll put that in writing if you like.”

“What are you telling me, I made an enemy in management?”

He halfway nodded. “The work we do here is pretty tightly held. People get nervous. I don’t know if you made an enemy, exactly. Maybe you made the wrong friends.”

But that wasn’t likely. I hadn’t made very many friends.

People I could share lunch with, catch a Twins game with, sure. But no one I confided in. Somehow, by some process of slow emotional attrition, I had become the kind of guy who works hard and smiles amiably and goes home and spends the evening with the video panel and a couple of beers.

Which is what I did the day Arnie Kunderson fired me.

The apartment hadn’t changed much since I moved in. (Barring the one wall of the bedroom I used as a sort of bulletin board. News printouts and photos of Chronolith sites plus my copious notes on the subject.) To the degree that the place had improved, it was mostly Kaitlin’s doing. Kait was ten now, eager to criticize my fashion sense. Probably it made her feel grown up. I had replaced the sofa because I had gotten tired of hearing how “uncontemporary” it was — Kait’s favorite word of derision.

At any rate, the old sofa had gone; in its place was an austere blue padded bench that looked great until you tried to get comfortable on it.

I thought about calling Janice but decided not to. Janice didn’t appreciate spontaneous phone calls. She preferred to hear from me on a regular and predictable schedule. And as for Kaitlin… better not to bother her, either. If I did, she might launch into a discourse on what she had done today with Whit, as she was encouraged to call her stepfather. Whit was a great guy, in Kait’s opinion. Whit made her laugh. Maybe I should talk to Whit, I thought. Maybe Whit would make me laugh.

So I did nothing that evening except nurse a few beers and surf the satellites.

Even the cheap servers carried a number of science-and-nature feeds. One of them was showing fresh video from Thailand, of a genuinely dangerous expedition up the Chao Phrya to the ruins of Bangkok, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and a half-dozen corporate donors whose logos were prominently featured in the start-up credits.

I turned off the sound, let the pictures speak for themselves.

Not much of Bangkok’s urban core had been rebuilt in the years since 2021. No one wanted to live or work too close to the Chronolith — rumors of “proximity sickness” frightened people away, though there was no such diagnosis in the legitimate clinical literature. The bandits and the revolutionary militias, however, were quite real and omnipresent. But despite all this there was still a brisk river trade along the Chao Phrya, even in the shadow of Kuin.

The program began with overflight footage of the city. Crude, canted docks allowed access to rough warehouses, a marketplace, stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables, order emerging from the wreckage, streets reclaimed from the rubble and open to commerce. From a great enough altitude it looked like a story of human perseverance in the face of disaster. The view from the ground was less encouraging.

As the expedition approached the heart of the city the Chronolith was present in every shot: from a distance, dominating the brown river; or closer, towering into a tropical noon.

The monument was conspicuously clean. Even birds and insects avoided it. Airborne dust had collected in the few protected crevices of the sculpted face, faintly softening Kuin’s abstracted gaze. But nothing grew even in that protected soil; the sterility of it was absolute. Where the base of the monument touched ground on one bank of the river a few lianas had attempted to scale the immense octagonal base; but the mirror-smooth surface was ungraspable, unwelcoming.

The expedition anchored mid-river and went ashore for more footage. In one sequence, a storm swirled over the ancient city. Rainwater cascaded from the Chronolith in miniature torrents, small waterfalls churning plumes of silt from the river bottom. The dockside vendors covered their stalls with tarpaulins and sheet plastic and retreated beneath them.

Cut to a shot of a wild monkey on a collapsed Exxon billboard, barking at the sky.

Clouds parting around the promontory of Kuin’s vast head.

The sun emerging near the green horizon, the Chronolith shadowing the city like the gnomon of a great bleak sundial.

There was more, but nothing revelatory. I turned off the monitor and went to bed.

We — the English-speaking world — had by this time agreed on certain terms to describe the Chronoliths. What a Chronolith did, for instance, was to appear or to arrive… though some favored touched down, as if it were a kind of stalled tornado.

The newest of the Chronoliths had appeared (arrived, touched down) more than eighteen months ago, leveling the waterfront of Macao. Only half a year earlier a similar monument had destroyed Taipei.

Both stones marked, as usual, military victories roughly twenty years in the future. Twenty and three: hardly a lifetime, but arguably long enough for Kuin (if he existed, if he was more than a contrived symbol or an abstraction) to mass forces for his putative Asian conquests. Long enough for a young man to become a middle-aged man. Long enough for a young girl to become a young woman.

But no Chronolith had arrived anywhere in the world for more than a year now, and some of us had chosen to believe that the crisis was, if not exactly finished, at least purely Asian — confined by geography, bound by oceans.

Our public discourse was aloof, detached. Much of southern China was in a condition of political and military chaos, a no-man’s-land in which Kuin was perhaps already gathering his nucleus of followers. But an editorial in yesterday’s paper had wondered whether Kuin might not, in the long term, turn out to be a positive force: a Kuinist empire was hardly likely to be a benevolent dictatorship, but it might restore stability to a dangerously destabilized region. What was left of the tattered Beijing bureaucracy had already detonated a tactical nuclear device in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy last year’s so-called Kuin of Yichang. The result had been a breached dam and a flood that carried radioactive mud all the way to the East China Sea. And if crippled Beijing was capable of that, could a Kuin regime be worse?

I had no opinion of my own. We were all whistling through the graveyard in those years, even those of us who paid attention, analyzing the Chronoliths (by date, time, size, implied conquest, and such) so that we could pretend to understand them. But I preferred not to play that game. The Chronoliths had shadowed my life since things went bad with Janice. They were emblematic of every malign and unpredictable force in the world. There were times when I was profoundly afraid of them, and as often as not I admitted that fact to myself.

Is this obsession? Annali had thought so.

I tried to sleep. Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve, etc. Sleep that kills the awkward downtime between midnight and dawn.

But I didn’t get even that. An hour before sunrise, my phone buzzed. I should have let the server pick it up. But I groped for the handset and flipped it open, afraid — as always when the phone rings late at night — that something had happened to Kait. “Hello?”

“Scott,” a coarse male voice said. “Scotty”

I thought for one panicky moment of Hitch Paley. Hitch, with whom I had not spoken since 2021. Hitch Paley, riding out of the past like a pissed-off ghost.

But it wasn’t Hitch.

It was some other ghost.

I listened to the phlegmy breathing, the compression and expansion of night air in a withered bellows. “Dad?”

“Scotty…” he said, as if he couldn’t get past the name.

“Dad, have you been drinking?” I was courteous enough to refrain from adding, again.

“No,” he said angrily. “No, I — ah, well, fuck it, then. This is the kind of — the kind of treatment — well, you know, fuck it.”

And he was gone.

I rolled out of bed.

I watched the sun come up over the agricultural coops to the east, the great corporate collective farms, our bulwark against famine. A dusting of snow had collected in the fields, sparkling white between empty cornrows.

Later I drove to Annali’s apartment, knocked on her door.

We hadn’t dated for more than a year, but we were still friendly when we met in the coffee room or the cafeteria. She took a slightly maternal interest in me these days — inquiring after my health, as if she expected something to go terribly wrong sooner or later. (Maybe that day had come, though I was still healthy as a horse.)

But she was startled when she opened the door and saw me. Startled and obviously dismayed.

She knew I’d been fired. Maybe she knew more than that.

Which was why I had come here: on the off chance that she could help make sense of what had happened.

“Scotty,” she said, “hey, you should have called first.”

“You’re busy?” She didn’t look busy. She was wearing loose culottes and a faded yellow shirt. Cleaning the kitchen, maybe.

“I’m going out in a few minutes. I’d ask you in, but I have to get dressed and all that. What are you doing here?”

She was, I realized, actually afraid of me — or of being seen with me.

“Scott?” She looked up and down the corridor. “Are you in trouble?”

“Why would I be in trouble, Annali?”

“Well — I heard about you being fired.”

“How long ago?”

“What do you mean?”

“How long have you known I was going to be fired?”

“You mean, was it general knowledge? No, Scott. God, that would be humiliating. No. Of course, you hear rumors—”

“What kind of rumors?”

She frowned and chewed her lip. That was a new habit. “The kind of work Campion-Miller does, they don’t need trouble with the government.”

“The fuck does that have to do with me?”

“You know, you don’t have to shout.”

“Annali — trouble with the government?”

“The thing I heard is that some people were asking about you. Like government people.”

“Police?”

“No — are you in trouble with the police? No, just people in suits. Maybe IRS, I don’t know.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s just people talking, Scott. It could all be bullshit. Really, I don’t know why they fired you. It’s just that CM, they depend on keeping all their permits in order. All that tech stuff they ship overseas. If somebody comes in asking questions about you, it could endanger everybody.”

“Annali, I’m not a security risk.”

“I know, Scott.” She knew nothing of the sort. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Honestly, I’m sure it’s all bullshit. But I really do have to get dressed.” She began to ease the door shut. “Next time, phone me, for God’s sake!”

She lived on the second floor of a little three-story brick building in the old part of Edina. Apartment 203. I stared at the number on the door for a while. Twenty and three.

I never saw Annali Kincaid again. Occasionally I wonder what sort of life she led. How she fared during the long hard years.

I didn’t tell Janice that I had lost my job. Not that I was still trying to prove anything to Janice. To myself, maybe. To Kaitlin, almost certainly.

Not that Kait cared what I did for a living. At ten, Kait still perceived adult business as opaque and uninteresting. She knew only that I “went to work” and that I earned enough money to make me a respectable if not wealthy member of the grownup world. And that was fine. I liked that occasional reflection of myself in Kait’s eyes: Stable. Predictable. Even boring.

But not disappointing.

Certainly not dangerous.

I didn’t want Kait (or Janice or even Whit) to know I’d been fired… at least not immediately, not until I had something to add to the story. If not a happy ending, then at least a second chapter, a what-comes-next…

It came in the form of another unexpected phone call.

Not a happy ending, no. Not an ending at all. Definitely not happy.

Janice and Whit invited me to dinner. They did this on a quarterly basis, the way you might contribute to a pension plan or a worthy charity.

Janice was no longer a single mom in a rent-controlled townhouse. She had shed that stigma when she married her supervisor at the biochem lab where she worked, Whitman Delahunt. Whit was an ambitious guy with serious managerial talent. Clarion Pharmaceuticals had prospered despite the Asian crisis, feeding Western markets suddenly deprived of cut-rate Chinese and Taiwanese biochemical imports. (Whit sometimes referred to the Chronoliths as “God’s little tariff,” which made Janice smile uneasily.) I don’t think Whit liked me much, but he accepted me as a sort of country cousin, attached to Kaitlin by an unpleasant and unmentionable accident of paternity.

To be fair, he tried to make me feel welcome, at least this night. He opened the door of his two-story house, framing himself in warm yellow light. He grinned. Whit was one of those big soft men, teddy-bear-shaped and about as hairy. Not handsome, but the sort women call “cute.” He was ten years older than Janice. Balding, but wearing it well. His grin was expansive if inauthentic, and his teeth were blazing white. Whit almost certainly had the best dentistry, the best radial kariotomy, and the best car on the block. I wondered if it was hard on Janice and Kaitlin, being the best wife and the best daughter.

“Come on in, Scott!” he exclaimed. “Take off those boots, warm yourself by the fire.”

We ate in the spacious dining room, where leaded windows of distinguished provenance rattled in their frames. Kait talked a little about school. (She was having trouble this year, particularly in math.) Whit talked with vastly greater enthusiasm about his work. Janice was still running fairly routine protein syntheses at Clarion and talked about it not at all. She seemed content to let Whit do the bragging.

Kait excused herself first, dashing off to an adjacent room where the television had been mumbling counterpoint to the sound of the wind. Whit brought out a brandy decanter. He served drinks awkwardly, like a Westerner attempting a Japanese tea ceremony. Whit wasn’t much of a drinker.

He said, “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking. How about you, Scott? How’s life treating you?”

“ ‘Fortune presents gifts not according to the book.’”

“Scotty’s quoting poetry again,” Janice explained.

“What I mean is, I’ve been offered a job.”

“You’re thinking of leaving Campion-Miller?”

“I parted ways with Campion-Miller about two weeks ago.”

“Oh! Gutsy decision, Scott.”

“Thank you, Whit, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.”

Janice said, out of what appeared to be a profounder understanding, “So who are you with now?”

“Well, it’s not for certain, but — you remember Sue Chopra?”

Janice frowned. Then her eyes widened. “Yes! Cornell, right? The junior professor who taught that flaky first-year course?”

Janice and I had met at university. The first time I had seen her she had been walking through the chemistry lab with a bottle of lithium aluminum hydroxide in her hand. If she had dropped it, she might have killed us both. First rule of a stable relationship: Don’t drop the fucking bottle.

It was Janice who had introduced me to Sulamith Chopra when Sue was a ridiculously tall and chunky post-doc building a reputation in the physics department. Sue had been handed (probably as punishment for some academic indiscretion) a second-year interdisciplinary course of the kind offered to English students as a science credit and to science students as an English credit. For which she turned around and wrote a curriculum so intimidating that it scared off everybody but a few naive artsies and confused computer science types. And me. The pleasant surprise was that Sue had no interest in failing anyone. She had put together the course description to scare away parvenus. All she wanted with the rest of us was an interesting conversation.

So “Metaphor and Reality-Modeling in Literature and the Physical Sciences” became a kind of weekly salon, and the only requirement for a passing grade was that we demonstrate that we’d read her syllabus and that she must not be bored with what we said about it. For an easy mark all you had to do was ask Sue about her pet research topics (Calabi-Yau geometry, say, or the difference between prior and contextual forces); she would talk for twenty minutes and grade you on the plausibility of the rapt attention you displayed.

But Sue was fun to bullshit with, too, so mostly her classes were extended bull sessions. And by the end of the semester I had stopped seeing her as this six-foot-four-inch bug-eyed badly-dressed oddity and had begun to perceive the funny, fiercely intelligent woman she was.

I said, “Sue Chopra offered me a job.”

Janice turned to Whit and said, “One of the Cornell profs. Didn’t I see her name in the paper recently?”

Probably so, but that was awkward territory. “She’s part of a federally-funded research group. She has enough clout to hire help.”

“So she got in touch with you?”

Whit said, “That’s maybe not the kindest way to put it.”

“It’s okay, Whit. What Janice means is, what would a high-powered academic like Sulamith Chopra want with a keyboard hack like myself? It’s a fair question.”

Janice said, “And the answer is — ?”

“I guess they wanted one more keyboard hack.”

“You told her you needed work?”

“Well, you know. We stay in touch.”

(I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.)

“Uh-huh,” Janice said, which was her way of telling me she knew I was lying. But she didn’t press.

“Well, that’s great, Scott,” Whit said. “These are tough times to be out of a job. So, that’s great.”

We said no more about it until the meal was finished and Whit had excused himself. Janice waited until he was out of earshot. “Something you’re not mentioning?”

Several things. I gave her one of them. “The job is in Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“Baltimore. Maryland.”

“You mean you’re moving across the country?”

“If I get the job. It’s not for sure yet.”

“But you haven’t told Kaitlin.”

“No. I haven’t told Kaitlin. I wanted to talk to you about it first.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t know what to say. I mean, this is really sudden. The question is how upset Kait will be. But I can’t answer that. No offense, but she doesn’t talk about you as much as she used to.”

“It’s not like I’ll be out of her life. We can visit.”

“Visiting isn’t parenting, Scott. Visiting is… an uncle thing. But I don’t know. Maybe that’s best. She and Whit are bonding pretty well.”

“Even if I’m out of town, I’m still her father.”

“Insofar as you ever were, yes, that’s true.”

“You sound angry.”

“I’m not. Just wondering whether I should be.”

Whit came back downstairs then, and we chatted some more, but the wind grew louder and hard snow ticked on the windows and Janice fretted out loud over the condition of the streets. So I said goodbye to Whit and Janice and waited at the door for Kait to give me her customary farewell hug.

She came into the foyer but stopped a few feet away. Her eyes were stormy and her lower lip was trembling.

“Kaity-bird?” I said.

“Please don’t call me that. I’m not a baby.”

Then I figured it out. “You were listening.”

Her hearing impairment didn’t prevent her from eavesdropping. If anything, it had made her stealthier and more curious.

“Hey,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. You’re moving away. That’s all right.”

Of all the things I could have said, what I chose was: “You shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations, Kaitlin.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, and turned and ran to her room.

Five

Janice called me a day before I was due to leave for Baltimore and an interview with Sue Chopra. I was surprised to hear her voice on the phone — she seldom called except at our agreed-on times.

“Nothing wrong,” Janice said at once. “I just wanted to, you know, wish you luck.”

The kind of luck that would keep me out of town? But that was petty. I said, “Thanks.”

“I mean it. I’ve been thinking this over. And I wanted you to know — yes, Kaitlin’s taking it pretty hard. But she’ll come around. If she didn’t care about you, she wouldn’t be so upset.”

“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.”

“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.

Six

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.

Morris Torrance was perched in one corner on a wooden chair tilted against the wall, reading the print edition of Golf.

“Is he part of the package?” I asked.

“You can share space for a while. Morris needs to be close to me, physically.”

“Morris is a good friend?”

“Morris is my bodyguard, among other things.”

Morris smiled and dropped his magazine. He scratched his head, an awkward gesture probably meant to reveal the pistol he wore under his jacket. “I’m mostly harmless,” he said.

I shook hands with him again… more cordially this time, since he wasn’t nagging me for a urine sample.

“For now,” Sue said, “you just want to acquaint yourself with the work I’m doing. I’m not a code herder of your class, so take notes. End of the week, we’ll discuss how to proceed.”

I spent the day doing that. I was looking, not at Sue’s input or results, but at the procedural layers, the protocols by which problems were translated into limiting systems and solutions allowed to reproduce and die. She had installed the best commercial genetic apps, but these were frankly inappropriate (or at least absurdly cumbersome) for some of what she was attempting — “sliderule apps,” we used to call them, good to a first approximation, but primitive.

Morris finished looking at Golf and brought in lunch from the deli down the road, along with a copy of Fly Fisherman to while away the shank of the afternoon. Sue emerged periodically to give us a happy glance: We were her buffer zone, a layer of insulation between the world and the mysteries of Kuin.

It dawned on me, driving home to another nearly-empty apartment after my first week with the project, exactly how suddenly and irrevocably my life had changed.

Maybe it was the tedium of the drive; maybe it was the sight of the roadside tent colonies and abandoned, rust-ribbed automobiles; maybe it was just the prospect of a lonely weekend. “Denial” has a bad reputation, but stoicism is supposed to be a virtue, and the key act of stoicism is denial, the firm refusal to capitulate to an awful truth. Lately I had been very stoic indeed. But I changed lanes to pass a tanker truck, and a yellow Leica utility van crowded me from behind, and then the truck began edging out of his lane and into mine. The driver must have had his proximity overrides pulled, a highly illegal act not uncommon among gypsy truckers. I was in his blind spot, and the Leica refused to brake, and for a good five seconds all I could see was a premonitory vision of myself pancaked behind the steering column.

Then the trucker caught sight of me in his side mirror, careened right, and let me pass.

The Leica zoomed on by as if nothing had happened.

And I was left in a cold sweat at the wheel — untethered, essentially lost, hurrying down a gray road between oblivion and oblivion.

There was good news a week later: Janice called to tell me Kait was getting a new ear.

“It’s a complete fix, Scott, or at least it ought to be, given that she was born with normal hearing and probably retains all the neural pathways. It’s called a mastoid-cochlear prosthesis.”

“They can do that?”

“It’s a relatively new procedure, but the success rate has been almost one hundred percent on patients with Kait’s kind of history.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not especially. But it is a major surgery. She’ll be hospitalized for at least a week.”

“When?”

“Scheduled for six months from now.”

“How are you paying for it?”

“Whit has good coverage. His insurance cooperative is willing to take on at least a percentage of the cost. I can get some help through my plan, too, and Whit’s prepared to cover the remainder out of his own pocket. It might mean a second mortgage on the house. But it also means Kaitlin can have a normal childhood.”

“Let me help.”

“I know you’re not exactly wealthy right now, Scott.”

“I have money in the bank.”

“And I thank you for that offer. But… frankly, Whit would be more comfortable taking care of it himself.”

Kait had adjusted well to her hearing loss. Unless you noticed the way she cocked her head, the way she frowned when conversations grew quiet, you might not know she was impaired. But she was inevitably marked as different: condemned to sit at the front of the classroom, where too many teachers had addressed her by exaggerating their vowels and acting as if her hearing problem was an intellectual deficiency. She was awkward in schoolyard games, too easily surprised from behind. All this, plus her own natural shyness, had left her a little net-focused, self-absorbed, occasionally surly.

But that would change. The damage would be undone, apparently, thanks to some recent advances in biomechanical engineering. And thanks also to Whitman Delahunt. And if his intervention on behalf of my daughter was a little ego-bruising… well, I thought, fuck ego.

Kaitlin would be whole again. That was what mattered.

“But I want to contribute to this, Janice. This is something I’ve owed Kaitlin for a long time.”

“Not really, Scott. The ear thing was never your fault.”

“I want to help make it better.”

“Well… Whit would probably let you chip in, if you insist.”

It had been a frugal five years for me. I “chipped in” half the cost of the operation.

“So, Scotty,” Sue Chopra said, “are you rigged for travel?”

I had already told her about Kaitlin’s operation. I said I wanted to be with Kait when she was in recovery — that was nonnegotiable.

“That’s half a year off,” Sue said. “We won’t be gone nearly that long.”

Cryptic. But she seemed prepared, finally, to explain what she had lately been hinting about.

We sat in the spacious but largely empty cafeteria, four of us at a table by the only window, which overlooked the thruway. Me, Sue, Morris Torrance, and a young man by the name of Raymond Mosely.

Ray Mosely was a physics post-grad from MIT who worked with Sue on the hard-science inventories. He was twenty-five, pot-bellied, badly-groomed, and bright as a fresh dime. He was also absurdly timid. He had avoided me for weeks, apparently because I was an unfamiliar face, but gradually accepted me once he decided I wasn’t a rival for Sue Chopra’s affections.

Sue, of course, was at least a dozen years his senior, and her sexual tastes didn’t incline to men of any sort, much less bashful young physicists who thought a lengthy chat on the subject of mu-meson interactions was an invitation to physical intimacy. Sue had explained all this to him a couple of times. Ray, supposedly, had accepted the explanation. But he still gave her mooncalf glances across the sticky cafeteria table and deferred to her opinion with a lover’s loyalty.

“What’s amazing,” Sue began, “is how much we haven’t learned about the Chronoliths in the years since Chumphon. All we can do is characterize them a little bit. We know, for instance, that you can’t topple a Kuin stone even if you dig out its foundations, because it maintains a fixed distance from the Earth’s center of gravity and a fixed orientation — even if that means hovering in midair. We know it’s spectacularly inert, we know it has a certain index of refraction, we know from inspection that the objects are more likely molded than sculpted, and so on and so forth. But none of this is genuine understanding. We understand the Chronoliths the way a medieval theologian might understand an automobile. It’s heavy, the upholstery gets hot in direct sunlight, parts of it are sharp, parts of it are smooth. Some of these details might be important, most are probably not; but you can’t sort them out without an encompassing theory. Which is precisely what we lack.”

The rest of us nodded sagely, as we usually did when Sue began to expound a thesis.

“But some details are more interesting than others,” she continued. “For instance. We have some evidence that there’s a gradual, stepwise increase in local background radiation in the weeks before a Chronolith manifests itself. Not dangerous but definitely measurable. The Chinese did some work on this before they stopped sharing their research with us. And the Japanese had a lucky hit, too. They have a grid of radiation monitors routinely in use around their Sapporo/Technics fusion reactor. Tokyo was trying to pin down the source of all this stray radiation days before the Chronolith appeared. Readings peaked with the arrival of the monument, then fell very rapidly to normal ambient levels.”

“Which means,” Ray Mosely said as if interpreting for the stupid, “although we can’t stop the appearance of a Chronolith, we have a limited ability to predict it.”

“Give people some warning,” Sue said.

“Sounds promising,” I said. “If you know where to look.”

“Aye,” Sue admitted, “there’s the rub. But lots of places monitor for airborne radiation. And Washington has arranged with a number of friendly foreign governments to set up detectors around major urban sites. From the civil-defense point of view, it means we can get people out of the way.”

“Whereas we,” Ray added, “have an interest in being there.”

Sue gave him a sharp look, as if he had stepped on her punch line. I said, “A little dangerous, wouldn’t that be?”

“But to be able to record the event, get accurate measurements of the arrival burst, see the process as it happens… that could be priceless.”

“A view from a distance,” Morris Torrance put in. “I hope.”

“We can minimize any physical danger.”

I said, “This is happening soon?”

“We leave in a couple of days, Scotty, and that may be pushing it a little. I know it’s short notice. Our outposts are already set up and we have specialists in place. Evidence suggests a big manifestation in just about fifteen days. News of the evacuation should hit the papers this evening.”

“So where are we going?”

“Jerusalem,” Sue said.

She gave me a day to pack and get my business in order.

Instead, I went for a drive.

Seven

When I was ten years old, I came home one day from school and found my mother scrubbing the kitchen — which seemed normal enough, until I watched her for a while. (I had already learned to watch her carefully.)

My mother was not a beautiful woman, and I think I knew that, even then, in the distant way children are aware of such things. She had a hard, narrow face and she seldom smiled, which made her smiles a memorable event. If she laughed, I would lie in bed at night reliving the moment. She was, at the time, just thirty-five years old. She never wore makeup and some days didn’t even bother to brush her hair; she could get away with it because her hair was dark and naturally lustrous.

She hated buying clothes. She wore every item in her wardrobe until it was explicitly unwearable. Sometimes, when she took me shopping, I was embarrassed by her blue sweater, which had a cigarette burn on the side, through which I could see the strap of her brassiere; or her yellow blouse, with a bleach stain like a map of California running down the right shoulder.

If I mentioned these things to her she would gaze at me wordlessly, go back into the house, change into something vaguely more presentable. But I hated saying anything because it made me feel priggish and effeminate, the kind of little boy who Cares About Clothing, and that wasn’t it at all. I just didn’t want people looking sideways at her in the aisle of the Food Mart.

She was wearing bluejeans and one of my father’s oversized shirts when I came home that day. Yellow rubber gloves covered her arms up to the elbows — disguising, I failed to notice, a number of deep and freely bleeding scratches. This was her cleaning outfit, and she had cleaned with a vengeance. The kitchen reeked of Lysol and ammonia and the half-dozen other cleansers and disinfectants she kept in the cupboard under the sink. She had tied her hair back under a red bandana, and her attention was focused on the tiled floor. She didn’t see me until I rattled my lunch box down on the counter.

“Keep out of the kitchen,” she said tonelessly. “This is your fault.”

“My fault?”

“He’s your dog, isn’t he?”

She was talking about Chuffy, our Springer Spaniel, and I began to be afraid… not because of what she said, exactly, but because of the way she said it.

It was like the way she said goodnight. Every night she would come into my room and lean over my bed, straighten the cotton sheet and quilted blanket, kiss her fingertips and brush them against my forehead. And 90 percent of the time that was exactly as comforting as it sounds. But some nights… some nights she might have been drinking a little, and then she would loom over me with the feral stink of sweat and alcohol radiating from her like heat from a coal stove, and although she said the same words, the same “Goodnight, Scotty, sleep well,” it sounded like an impersonation, and her fingers against my skin were cold and abrasive. Those nights, I pulled the covers over my head and counted the seconds (one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand) until her footsteps faded down the hall.

She sounded that way now. Her eyes were too round and her mouth was clamped into a narrow line, and I suspected that if I got close to her I would smell the same repulsive salty stench, like a beach at low tide.

She went on cleaning, and I crept into the living room and turned on the TV and stared at a syndicated rerun of Seinfeld until I got to thinking about the remark she’d made about Chuffy.

My mother had never liked Chuffy. She tolerated him, but he was my father’s dog and mine, not hers. If Chuffy had peed on the kitchen floor, say, might that not explain her reaction? And where was Chuffy, anyway? Usually, this time of day, he was up on the sofa wanting his ears scratched. I called his name.

“That animal is filthy,” my mother said from the kitchen. “Leave that animal alone.”

I found Chuffy upstairs, locked in the half-bath that adjoined my parents’ bedroom. His hindquarters and his legs had been scrubbed raw, probably with one of the steel Brillo pads we kept for greasy cookware. His skin where the fur had come away was bleeding in a dozen different places, and when I tried to comfort him he sank his teeth into my forearm.

The years hadn’t been kind to the Maryland suburb where my father lived. The once semi-rural neighborhood had become a nest of strip malls, erotica retailers, and high-rise worker housing. The gated community still existed, but its gatehouse was untended and covered with Arabic graffiti. The house on Provender Lane, the house where I had grown up, was almost unrecognizable behind lumpy hedges of snow. One of the eavestroughs had worked loose from the roof, and the shingles behind it sagged alarmingly. It was not the house as I remembered it, but it seemed very much the kind of house my father would (or maybe ought to) inhabit — unkempt, inhospitable.

I parked, turned off the engine, sat in the car.

Of course it was stupid to have come here. It was one of those reckless impulses, all drama and no content. I had decided I ought to see my father before I left the country (implicitly, before he died) — but what did that mean exactly? What did I have to say to him, and what could he possibly say to me?

I was reaching for the ignition key when he came out onto the creaking wooden porch to pick up his evening paper. The porch light, in a blue dusk, turned his skin jaundiced yellow. He looked at the car, bent to pick up the paper, then looked again. Finally he walked out to the curb wearing his house slippers and a white strap undershirt. The unaccustomed exercise left him panting.

I rolled down the window.

He said, “I thought it was you.”

The sound of his voice set loose a regiment of unpleasant memories. I said nothing at all.

“So come on in,” he said. “Cold out here.”

I locked the car behind me and set the security protocols. Down the street, three blank-faced Asiatic youths watched me follow my dying father to the door.

Chuffy recovered from his injuries, though he never went near my mother again. It was my mother whose injuries were permanent and disabling. I was told, at some point during her decline, that she was the victim of a neurological disease called adult-onset schizophrenia; that it was a medical condition, a failure somewhere in the mysterious but natural processes of the brain. I didn’t believe it, because I knew by direct experience that the problem was both simpler and more frightening: A good mother and a bad mother had begun to cohabit the same body. And because I loved the good mother it became possible, even necessary, to hate the bad one.

Alas, they bled into each other. The good mother might kiss me goodbye in the morning, but when I came home (late, reluctantly) from school, the crazed usurper would have taken control. I had no close friends beyond the age of ten, because when you have friends you have to let them into your house; and the last time I had tried that, when I brought home a timid red-haired boy named Richard who had befriended me in geography class, she lectured him for twenty minutes on the danger posed by video monitors to his future fertility. The language she actually used was considerably more graphic. The next day Richard was aloof and unresponsive, as if I done something unspeakable. It wasn’t my fault, I wanted to tell him, and it wasn’t even my mother’s. We were the victims of a haunting.

Because she disbelieved in her own illness she saw this as my weakness, not hers, and I cannot count the number of times during my teenage years when she demanded that I stop looking at her “like that” — that is, with obvious, wincing dread. One of the ironies of paranoid schizophrenia is that it fulfills its own darkest expectations with almost mathematical rigor. She thought we were conspiring to drive her mad.

None of this brought my father and me closer together. The opposite. He resisted the diagnosis almost as fiercely as my mother did, but his form of denial was more direct. I think he always felt that he had married beneath him, that he had done a favor to my mother’s family in Nashua, New Hampshire, by taking this moody and reclusive daughter off their hands. Maybe he had imagined that marriage would improve her. It hadn’t. She had disappointed him, and perhaps vice-versa. But he continued to hold her to a high standard. He blamed her for every one of her irrational acts just as if she were capable of moral and ethical judgment — which she was, but only sporadically. Thus the good mother suffered for the sins of the bad mother. The bad mother might be bitter and obscene, but the good mother could be cowed and bullied. The good mother could be reduced to a state of craven apology, and he performed this alchemy on her on a regular basis. He shouted at her, occasionally struck her, regularly humiliated her, while I hid in my room trying to imagine a world in which the good mother and I could abandon both him and the invading pseudo-mom. We would live contentedly, I told myself, in the kind of loving home she had once at least attempted to create, while my father continued battling his irrational faux wife in some distant, isolated place — a jail cell, say; a madhouse.

Later, after I had turned sixteen and learned to drive, but before she was committed to the residential home in Connecticut where she spent her final years, my father took us all on a trip to New York City. I think he believed — and he must have been desperate to have grasped at such a fragile straw — that a vacation would be good for her, would “clear her head,” as he was fond of saying. So we packed up the car, had the oil changed and the gas tank filled, and set out like dour pilgrims. My mother insisted on having the back seat to herself. I sat up front, the navigator, occasionally turning back to beg her to stop picking at the skin of her lip, which had begun to bleed.

I have only two vivid memories of the weekend in New York City.

We visited the Statue of Liberty on Saturday, and in my mind’s eye I can practically count the burnished stairs we climbed on the way to the top. I remember the simultaneous sense of smallness and largeness when we arrived there, the smell of perspiration and hot copper on the windless July air. My mother shrank away from the view of Manhattan, keening quietly to herself, while I watched with rapt attention the seagulls diving toward the sea. I brought home from that journey a hollow brass model of Liberty as tall as my hand.

And I remember Sunday morning the same weekend, when my mother wandered out of the hotel room while my father was showering and I was down the hallway pumping quarters into a soft-drink machine. When I came back and found the room empty I panicked, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt my father’s bath, probably because he would have blamed me (or I imagined he would have) for misplacing her. Instead I walked the red-carpeted hallway up and down, past room-service trays and carts of snowy linen, and then rode the elevator to the lobby. I saw my mother’s dark hair disappearing through the rotunda, out the revolving doors. I did not call her name, because that would alarm strangers and provoke a public embarrassment, but I ran after her, almost tripping over the newspaper rack outside the gift shop. But by the time I pushed through the glass door onto the sidewalk she was invisible. The red-suited doorman was blowing his whistle, I didn’t know why, and then I saw my mother lying sprawled across the curb and moaning to herself, while the driver of the floral delivery van that had just broken her legs jumped out of his truck and stood trembling above her, his eyes wide as two full moons. And all I felt was brutally, icily cold.

My mother was committed to the long-term care facility after the New York trip — after her legs had mended, and after the doctors at Central Mercy had been forced to pump her full of Haldol until the casts came off. The living room where I sat with my father had changed remarkably little since that time. It was not that he had made an effort to keep the house as a shrine to her. He simply hadn’t changed anything. It hadn’t occurred to him.

“I was getting all kinds of phone calls about you,” he said. “Thought for a while you’d robbed a bank.”

The curtains were closed. It was the kind of house where not much light gets inside no matter what. Nor did the ancient floor lamp do much to dispel the gloom.

He sat in his tired green easy chair, breathing shallowly, waiting for me to speak.

“It was about a job,” I said. “They were doing a background check.”

“Some job, if you got the FBI making house calls.”

The undershirt exposed his skinny frame. He had been a big man once. Big and easily angered, not the kind of man you trifled with. Now his arms were skeletal, the flesh sagging. His barrel chest had shrunk back to the ribs, and his belt was at least five notches in, the loose end flapping against his high hip joints.

I told him, “I’m going out of the country for a while.”

“How long?”

“Tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“Did the FBI tell you I was sick?”

“I heard.”

“Maybe I’m not as sick as they think. I don’t feel good, but—” He shrugged. “These doctors know fuck-all, but they charge like Moses. You want a cup of coffee?”

“I can get it. I guess the coffee maker’s still where it was.”

“You think I’m too fragile to make coffee?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I can still make coffee, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

He went to the kitchen. I got up to follow but stopped at the doorway when I saw him sneaking a big dollop of Jack Daniel’s into his own cup. His hands shook.

I waited in the living room, looking at the bookshelves. Most of the books had been my mother’s. Her tastes had run to Nora Roberts, The Bridges of Madison County, and endless volumes of Tim LaHaye. My father contributed the ancient Tom Clancy novels and Stranger Than Science. I had owned a lot of books when I lived here — I was a straight-A student, probably because I dreaded leaving school and going home — but I had kept my mystery novels segregated on a shelf in my room, primly unwilling to let Conan Doyle or James Lee Burke mingle with the likes of V.C. Andrews and Catherine Coulter.

My father came back with two mugs of coffee. He handed me the one with CORIOLIS SHIPPING, the name of his last employer, still faintly legible on the side. He had managed the Coriolis distribution network for twenty-three years and still collected a pension check every month. The coffee was both bitter and weak. “I don’t have any regular milk or cream,” he said. “I know you like it white. I used powdered milk.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

He settled back into his chair. There was a remote control on the coffee table in front of him, presumably for his video panel. He looked at it wistfully but didn’t reach for it. He said, “That must be some job you applied for, because those FBI people asked some peculiar questions.”

“Like what?”

“Well, there was I guess the usual, where you went to school and what kind of grades you got and where did you work and all that. But they wanted lots of details. Did you go out for sports, what did you do in your spare time, did you talk about politics or history much. Did you have lots of friends or did you keep to yourself. Who was your family doctor, did you have any unusual childhood diseases, did you ever see a shrink. A lot about Elaine, too. They knew she’d been sick. In that area, I mainly told them to fuck off. But they knew a lot already, obviously.”

“They asked about Mom?”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“What kind of questions?”

“Her, you know, symptoms. When did they come on and how did she behave. How you took it. Things that aren’t anybody’s business but family, frankly. Christ, Scotty, they wanted into everything. They wanted to look at your old stuff that was in the garage. They took samples of the tap water, if you can believe that.”

“You’re telling me they came to the house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did they take anything besides tap water?”

“Not as I noticed, but there was a bunch of ‘em and I couldn’t keep an eye on everybody. If you want to check your old stuff, the box is still there, back of the Buick.”

Curious and unsettled, I excused myself long enough to step into the unheated garage.

The box he was talking about contained unsorted detritus from my high-school years. Yearbooks, a couple of academic awards, old novels and DVDs, a few toys and keepsakes. Including, I noticed, the brass Statue of Liberty I had brought home from New York. The green felt base was frayed, the hollow brass body tarnished. I picked it up and tucked it into my jacket pocket. If there was anything missing from this assortment, I couldn’t place it. But the idea of anonymous FBI agents rummaging through boxes in the garage was chilling.

Beneath this, at the bottom of the box, was a layer of my schoolboy drawings. Art was never my best subject, but my mother had liked these well enough to preserve them. Flaking water-based paints on stiff brown paper the consistency of fallen leaves. Snow scenes, mostly. Bent pines, crude snowbound cabins — lonely things in a large landscape.

Back in the house my father was nodding in his chair. The coffee cup teetered on the padded arm. I moved it onto the table. He stirred when the telephone rang. An old handset-style telephone with a digital adapter where the cord joined the wall.

He picked it up, blinked, said, “Yeah,” a couple of times, then offered the receiver. “It’s for you.”

“For me?”

“You see anybody else here?”

The call was Sue Chopra, her voice thin over the old low-bandwidth line.

“You had us worried, Scotty,” she said.

“It’s mutual.”

“You’re wondering how we found you. You should be glad we did. You caused us a lot of anxiety, running away like that.”

“Sue, I didn’t run away. I’m spending the afternoon with my father.”

“I understand. It’s just that we could have used some warning up front, before you left town. Morris had you followed.”

“Morris can fuck himself. Are you telling me I have to ask permission to leave town?”

“It’s not a written rule, but it would have been nice. Scotty, I know how angry you must feel. I went through the same thing myself. I can’t justify it to you. But times change. Life is more dangerous than it used to be. When are you coming back?”

“Tonight.”

“Good. I think we need to talk.”

I told her I thought so, too.

I sat with my father a few more minutes, then told him I had to leave. The faint daylight beyond the window had faded altogether. The house was drafty and smelled of dust and dry heat.

He stirred in his chair and said, “You came a long way just to drink coffee and mumble. Look, I know why you’re here. I’ll tell you, I’m not especially afraid of dying. Or even of talking about it. You wake up, you read the mail, you say to yourself, well, it won’t be today. But that’s not the same as not knowing.”

“I understand.”

“No you don’t. But I’m glad you came.”

It was an astonishing thing for him to say. I couldn’t muster a response.

He stood up. His pants rode low on his bony hips. “I didn’t always treat your mother the way I should have. But I was there, Scotty. Remember that. Even when she was at the hospital. Even when she was raving. I didn’t take you mere unless I knew she was having a good day. Some of the things she said would peel your skin. And then you were off at college.”

She had died of complications of pneumonia the year before I graduated. “You could have called me when she got sick.”

“Why? So you could carry away the memory of your own mother cursing you from her deathbed? What’s the point?”

“I loved her, too.”

“It was easy for you. Maybe I loved her and maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember anymore. But I was with her, Scotty. All the time. I wasn’t necessarily nice to her. But I was with her.”

I went to the door. He followed a few paces, then stopped, breathless.

“Remember that about me,” he said.

Eight

When we came into Ben Gurion the airport was chaotic, crowded with fleeing tourists. The inbound El Al flight — delayed for four hours by weather, after a three-day “diplomatic” delay Sue refused to talk about — had been nearly empty. It would be filled to capacity on the way out, however. The evacuation of Jerusalem continued.

I left the aircraft in a core group with Sue Chopra, Ray Mosley, and Morris Torrance, surrounded by a cordon of FBI agents with enhanced-vision eyetacts and concealed weapons, escorted in turn by five Israeli Defense Force conscripts in jeans and white T-shirts, Uzis slung over their shoulders, who met us at the foot of the ramp. We were conducted quickly through Israeli Customs and out of Ben Gurion to what looked like a sheruti, a private taxi van, commandeered for the emergency. Sue scooted into the seat beside me, still dazed by travel. Morris and Ray climbed in behind us, and the power plant hummed softly as the van pulled away.

A monotonous rain slicked Highway One. The long line of cars crawling toward Tel Aviv glistened dully under a rack of clouds, but the Jerusalem-bound lanes were utterly empty. Ahead of us, vast public-service roadside screens announced the evacuation. Behind us, they marked the evacuation routes.

“Makes you a little nervous,” Sue said, “going someplace everybody else is leaving.”

The DDF man — he looked like a teenager — in the seat behind us snickered.

Morris said, “There’s a lot of skepticism about this. A lot of resentment, too. The Likkud could lose the next election.”

“But only if nothing happens,” Sue said.

“Is there a chance of that?”

“Slim to none.”

The IDF man snorted again.

A gust of rain rattled down on the sheruti. January and February are the rainy season in Israel. I turned my head to the window and watched a grove of olive trees bend to the wind. I was still thinking about what Sue had told me on the plane.

She had been inaccessible for days after I drove back from my father’s house, smoothing over whatever diplomatic difficulty it was that had kept us in Baltimore until very nearly the last minute.

I spent the week revising code and wasted a couple of evenings at a local bar with Morris and Ray.

They were more pleasant company than I would have guessed. I was angry with Morris for tracking me down to my father’s house… but Morris Torrance was one of those men who make an art of affability. An art, or maybe a tool. He rebuffed anger like Superman bouncing bullets off his chest. He wasn’t dogmatic about the Chronoliths, nursed no particular convictions about the significance of Kuin, but his interest obviously ran deep. What this meant was that we could bullshit with him: float ideas, some wild, without fear of tripping over a religious or political fixation. Was this genuine? He did, after all, represent the FBI. Likely as not, everything we said to him found its way into a file folder. But Morris’s genius was that he made it seem not to matter.

Even Ray Mosely opened up in Morris’s company. I had pegged Ray as one of those bright but socially-challenged types, his sexual radar locked hopelessly and inappropriately on Sue. There was some truth in this. But when he relaxed he revealed a passion for American League baseball that gave us some common ground. Ray liked the expansion team from his native Tucson and managed to piss off a guy at the neighboring table with some remarks about the Orioles. From which he did not back down when challenged. Ray was not a coward. He was lonely, but much of this was sheer intellectual loneliness. His conversation tended to trail off when he realized he had progressed to a level we couldn’t follow. He wasn’t condescending about it — at least, not very often — only visibly sad that he couldn’t share his thoughts.

It was this loneliness, I think, that Sue satisfied for him. No matter that she reserved her physical affection for brief contacts carefully segregated from her work. I think, in some sense, when Ray talked physics with her, he was making love.

Of Sue we saw very little. “This is what it was like at Cornell,” I told Morris and Ray. “For her students, I mean. She brought us together, but we did some of our best talking after class, without her.”

“Must have been kind of like a dress rehearsal,” Morris mused.

“For what? For this? The Chronoliths?”

“Oh, she couldn’t have known anything about that, of course. But don’t you once in a while get that feeling, that your life has been one big rehearsal for some critical event?”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“Like she had the wrong cast back there at Cornell,” Morris said, “and the script still needed work. But you must have been good, Scott.” He smiled. “You made the final cut.”

“So what’s the event?” I asked. “This thing in Jerusalem?”

“This thing in Jerusalem… or whatever comes after.”

Sue and I didn’t have a chance to talk privately until we were well over the Atlantic, when she beckoned me to the back of the deserted economy section and said, “I’m sorry about keeping you in the dark, Scotty. And I’m sorry about the thing with your dad. I thought we could make this a day job for you, not…”

“House arrest,” I offered.

“Right, house arrest. Because I guess that’s what it is, in a sense. But not just for you. I’m in the same situation. They want to keep us together and under observation.”

Sue had a head cold and was bulling through it with her usual determination. She sat with her hands in her lap, twisting a handkerchief in a beam of sunlight, as apparently contrite and as fundamentally immovable as Mahatma Gandhi. Up front, an El Al steward was delivering scrambled eggs and toast in plastic trays. I said, “Why me, Sue? That’s the question no one wants to answer. You could have hired a better code herder. I was at Chumphon, but that doesn’t explain anything.”

“Don’t underestimate your talent,” she said. “But I know what you’re asking. The FBI surveillance, the agents at your father’s house. Scotty, I made the mistake a few years ago of attempting to publish a paper about a phenomenon I called ‘tau turbulence.’ Some influential people read it.”

An answer that veered into abstract theory promised to be no answer at all. I waited, frowning, while she blew her nose, loudly.

“Excuse me,” she said. “The paper was about causality, I suppose you could say, with regard to questions of temporal symmetry and the Chronoliths. Mostly math, and most of that dealing with some contentious aspects of quantum behavior. But I also speculated about how the Chronoliths might reconfigure our conventional understanding of macroscopic cause and effect. Basically, I said that in a localized tau event — the creation of a Chronolith, hypothetically — effect naturally precedes cause, but it also creates a kind of fractal space in which the most significant connectors between events become not deterministic but correlative.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Think of a Chronolith as a local event in spacetime. There’s an interface, a border, between the conventional flow of time and the negative-tau anomaly. It’s not just the future talking to the present. There are ripples, eddies, currents. The future transforms the past, which in turn transforms the future. You follow?”

“More or less.”

“So what you get is a kind of turbulence, marked not so much by cause and effect or even paradox as by a froth of correlation and coincidence. You can’t look for the cause of the Bangkok manifestation, because it doesn’t exist yet, but you can look for clues in the turbulence, in the unexpected correlatives.”

“Like what?”

“When I wrote the paper I didn’t offer examples. But somebody took me seriously enough to work out the implications. The FBI went back and looked at all the people who had been interviewed after Chumphon, which was the smallest and most complete statistical sample at hand. Then they compiled a database with the names and histories of anyone who had ever expressed a public opinion about the Chronoliths, at least in the early days; everyone who did science at the Chumphon site, including the guys who ran the tractors and installed the johns; everybody they interrogated after the touchdown. Then they looked for connections.”

“And found some, I presume?”

“Some strange ones. But one of the strangest was you and I.”

“What, because of Cornell?”

“Partly; but put it all together, Scotty. Here’s a woman who’s been talking about tau anomalies and exotic matter since well before Chumphon. Who has since become a highly-regarded expert on the Chronoliths. And here’s an ex-student of hers, an old friend who just happened to be on the beach at Chumphon and who was arrested a mile or so from the first recorded Chronolith, a few hours after it appeared.”

“Sue,” I said, “it doesn’t mean anything. You know that.”

“It has no causal significance, you’re right, but that’s not the point. The point is, it marks us. Trying to figure out the genesis of a Chronolith is like trying to unravel a sweater before it’s been knitted. You can’t. At best, you can find certain threads that are the appropriate length or similarly colored and make certain guesses about how they might be looped together.”

“That’s why the FBI investigated my father?”

“They’re looking at absolutely everything. Because we don’t know what might be significant.”

“That’s the logic of paranoia.”

“Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with, the logic of paranoia. That’s why we’re both under surveillance. We’re not suspected of anything criminal, certainly not in the conventional sense. But they’re worried about what we might become.”

“Maybe we’re the bad guys, is that what you mean?”

She peered out the airliner’s window at the intermittent cumulus cloud, at the ocean down below us like a burnished blue mirror.

“Remember, Scotty. Whatever Kuin is, he probably didn’t originate this technology. Conquerors and kings tend not to be physics majors. They use what they can take. Kuin could be anyone, anywhere, but in all likelihood he’ll steal this technology, and who’s to say he won’t steal it from us? Or maybe we’re the good guys. Maybe we’re the ones who solve the puzzle. That’s possible, too — a different kind of connection. We’re not just prisoners, or we’d be in jail now. They’re watching us, but they’re also protecting us.”

I checked the aisle to see if anyone was listening, but Morris was up front chatting with a flight attendant and Ray had lost himself in a book. “I can go along with this up to a point,” I said. “I’m reasonably well paid when a lot of people aren’t getting paid at all and I’m seeing things I never thought I’d see.” Feeding my own obsession with the Chronoliths, I did not add. “But only up to a point. I can’t promise—”

To stick with it indefinitely, I meant to say. To become an acolyte, like Ray Mosely. Not when the world was going to hell and I had a daughter to protect.

Sue interrupted with a pensive smile. “Don’t worry, Scotty. Nobody’s promising anything, not anymore. Because nobody’s sure of anything. Certainty is one of the luxuries we’ll have to learn to live without.”

I had learned to do without certainty a long time ago. One of the rules of living with a schizophrenic parent is that weirdness is tolerable. You can endure it. At least — as I had told Sue — up to a point.

Past that point, madness spills all over everything. It gets inside you and makes itself at home, until there’s no one you can trust, not even yourself.

The first Highway One checkpoint was the hardest to get through. This was where the IDF turned away would-be pilgrims attracted, perversely, by the evacuation.

“Jerusalem Syndrome” had been named as a psychiatric condition decades ago. Visitors are occasionally overwhelmed by the city’s cultural and mythological significance. They identify too deeply, dress in bedsheets and sandals, proclaim sermons from the Mount of Olives, attempt to sacrifice animals on the Temple Mount. The phenomenon has kept the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital in business since well before the turn of the century.

The wave of global uncertainty generated by the Chronoliths had already triggered a new wave of pilgrimages, and the evacuation had turned it up to a fever pitch. Jerusalem was being evacuated for the safety of its inhabitants, but when had that ever mattered to a fanatic? We wormed our way through a line of vehicles, some abandoned at the checkpoint when the drivers refused to turn away. There was a steady transit of police cars, ambulances, tow trucks.

We cleared this obstacle at dusk and arrived at a major hotel on Mt. Scopus just as the last light was fading from the sky.

Observation posts had been established all over the city: not just ours, but military stations, a U.N. post, delegations from a couple of Israeli universities, and a site for the international press on the Haas Promenade. Mt. Scopus (Har HaTsofim, in Hebrew, which also happens to mean “looking over”) was something of a choice spot, however. This was where the Romans had camped in 70 A.D., shortly before they moved to crush the Jewish rebellion. The Crusaders had been here, too, for similar reasons. The view of the Old City was spectacular but dismaying. The evacuation, especially of the Palestinian zones, hadn’t gone easily. The fires were still burning.

I followed Sue through the vacant hotel lobby to a suite of adjoining rooms on the top floor. This was the heart of the operation. The curtains had been taken down and a crew of technicians had set up photographic and monitoring devices and, more ominously, a bank of powerful heaters. Most of these people were part of Sue’s research project, but only a few of them had met her personally. A number of them hurried to shake her hand. Sue was gracious about it but obviously tired.

Morris showed us our private rooms, then suggested we meet in the lobby restaurant once we’d had a chance to shower and change.

Sue wondered aloud how the restaurant had managed to stay open for business during the evacuation. “The hotel’s outside the primary exclusion zone,” Morris said. “There’s a skeleton staff to look after us, all volunteers, and a heated bunker for them in back of the kitchen.”

I took a few minutes in my room just to look at the city folded like a stony blanket across the Judean hills. The nearby streets were empty except for security patrols and occasional ambulances out of Hadassah Mt. Sinai a few streets away. Stoplights twitched in the wind like palsied angels.

The IDF man in the car had said something interesting as we passed the checkpoint. In the old days, he said, the fanatics who came to Jerusalem usually imagined they were Jesus, come again, or John the Baptist, or the first and only true, original Messiah.

Lately, he said, they tended to claim to be Kuin.

A city that had seen far too much history was about to see some more.

I found Sue, Morris, and Ray waiting for me in the hotel’s immense atrium. Morris gestured at the five stories of hanging plants and said, “Check it out, Scotty, it’s the Garden of Babylon.”

“Babylon’s considerably east of here,” Sue said. “But yeah.”

In the lobby restaurant we seated ourselves at a table across the room from the only other patrons, a group of IDF men and women crowded into a red vinyl booth. Our waitress (the only waitress) was an older woman with an American accent. She claimed not to be troubled by the evacuation even though it meant she had to sleep at the hotel: “I don’t like the idea of driving around these empty streets anyway, much as I used to complain about the traffic.” The entree for tonight was chicken almondine, she said. “And that’s about it, unless you’re allergic or anything, in which case we can ask the chef to make an adjustment.”

Chicken all around, and Morris ordered us a bottle of white wine.

I asked about the agenda for tomorrow. Morris said, “Apart from the scientific work, we have the Israeli Defense Minister visiting in the afternoon. Plus photographers and video people.” He added, “There’s no substance to it. We wouldn’t be here if the Israeli government didn’t already have all the information we can give them. It’s a dog-and-pony show for the news pools. But Ray and Sue get to do some interpretation for the laypeople.”

Ray asked, “Are we giving him Minkowski ice or feedback?”

Morris and I looked blank. Sue said, “Don’t leave people out of the conversation, Ray. It’s bad manners. Morris, Scotty, you must have picked up some of this from the congressional briefs.”

“Slow reading,” Morris said.

“We spend a lot of time translating math into English.”

“Hunting metaphors,” Ray said.

“It’s important to make people understand. At least as much as we understand. Which is not very much.”

“Minkowski ice,” Ray persisted, “or positive feedback?”

“Feedback, I think.”

Morris said, “I still feel left out.”

Sue frowned and collected her thoughts. “Morris, Scotty, do you savvy feedback?”

Half of what I did with Sue’s code involved recursion and self-amplification. But she was talking far more generally. I said, “It’s what happens when you stand up in the high school auditorium to give the valedictory address and the PA starts to squeal like a pig in a slaughterhouse.”

She grinned. “That’s a good example. Describe the process, Scotty.”

“You have an amplifier between the mike and the speakers. Worst case, they talk to each other. Whatever goes into the microphone comes out of the speakers, louder. If there’s any noise in the system, it makes a loop.”

“Exactly. Any little sound the microphone picks up, the speaker plays it louder. And the microphone hears that and multiplies it again, and so on, until the system starts ringing like a bell… or squealing like a pig.”

“And this is relevant to the Chronoliths,” Morris said, “because — ?”

“Because time itself is a kind of amplifier. You know the old saw about how a butterfly flapping in China can eventually brew up a storm over Ohio? It’s a phenomenon called ‘sensitive dependence.’ A large event is often a small event amplified through time.”

“Like all those movies where a guy travels into the past and ends up changing his own present.”

“Either way,” Sue said, “what you have is an example of amplification. But when Kuin sends us a monument commemorating a victory twenty years from now, that’s like pointing the microphone at the speaker, it’s a feedback loop, a deliberate feedback loop. It amplifies itself. We think that may be why the Chronoliths are expanding their territory so quickly. By marking his victories Kuin creates the expectation that he’ll be victorious. Which makes the victory that much more likely, even inevitable. And the next. And so on.”

This was not new territory for me. I had inferred this much from Sue’s work and from speculation in the popular press. I said, “Couple of questions.”

“Okay.”

“I guess the first is, how does this look to Kuin? How does it play out, that first time he sends us the Chumphon stone? Wouldn’t he be changing his own past? Are there two Kuins now, or what?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. You’re asking me whether we understand this better on the theoretical level. Well, yes and no. We’d like to avoid a many-worlds model, if possible—”

“Why? If that’s the easiest answer?”

“Because we have reason to believe it’s not true. And if it is true, it limits what we can do about the problem. However, the alternative—”

“The alternative,” Ray supplied, “is that Kuin is committing a kind of suicide every time he does this.”

The waitress brought us our meals on a cart covered with linen, then rolled the emptied cart back toward the kitchen. Across the room the IDF people had finished dinner and were working on dessert. I wondered if this was their first time in a four-star hotel restaurant. They were eating that way — with great attention and a few remarks about what this would have cost them if they’d had to pay for it.

“Changing what he’s been,” Sue said between mouthfuls. “Erasing it, replacing it, but that’s not exactly suicide, is it? Imagine a hypothetical Kuin, some back-country warlord who somehow gets hold of this technology. He pulls the switch and suddenly he’s not just Kuin, he’s the Kuin, the one everyone was waiting for, he’s the fucking Messiah for all practical purposes, and for him it was never any different. At least some part of his personal history is gone, but it’s a painless loss. He’s glorified, he has lots of troops now, lots of credibility, a bright future. Either that, or the original Kuin’s place has been taken by some more ambitious individual who grew up wanting to be Kuin. At worst it’s a kind of death, but it’s also a potential ticket to glory. And you can’t mourn what you never had, can you?”

I wondered about that. “It still seems like a big risk. Once you’ve done it, why push the button a second time?”

“Who knows? Ideology, delusions of grandeur, blind ambition, a self-destructive impulse. Or just because he has to, as a last resort in the face of military reversals. Maybe it’s a different reason every time. Anyway you look at it, he’s right in the middle of the feedback loop. He’s the signal that generates the noise.”

“So a small noise becomes a loud noise,” Morris said. “A fart becomes a thunderclap.”

Sue nodded eagerly. “But the amplification factor isn’t just time. It’s human expectation and human interaction. The rocks don’t care about Kuin, the trees don’t give a shit, it’s us. We act on what we anticipate, and it gets easier and easier to anticipate the all-conquering Kuin, Kuin the god-king. The temptation is to give in, to collaborate, to idealize the conqueror, to be part of the process so you don’t get ground under.”

“You’re saying we’re creating Kuin.”

“Not us specifically, but people, yeah, people in general.”

Morris said, “That’s how it was with my wife before we broke up. She hated the idea of disappointment so much, it was always on her mind. It didn’t matter what I did, how much I reassured her, what I earned, whether I went to church every week. I was on permanent probation. ‘You’ll leave me one day,’ she used to say. But if you say something like that often enough, it has a way of coming true.”

Morris thought about what he’d said, pushed away his glass of wine, reddened.

“Expectation,” Sue said, “yes, feedback. Exactly. Suddenly Kuin embodies everything we fear or secretly want—”

“Slouching toward Jerusalem,” I said, “to be born.”

It was an idea that seemed to cast a chill across the room. Even the rowdy IDF teenagers were quieter now.

“Well,” I said, “that’s not especially reassuring, but I can follow the logic. What’s Minkowski ice?”

“A metaphor of a different color. But that’s enough of this talk for tonight. Wait till tomorrow, Scotty. Ray’s explaining it to the Defense Minister.”

She smiled forlornly as Ray puffed up.

We broke up after coffee, and I went to my room alone.

I thought about calling Janice and Kaitlin, but the desk manager interrupted my dial-out to tell me the bandwidth was at capacity and I would have to wait at least an hour. So I took a beer from the courtesy cooler and put my feet up on the windowsill and watched a car race down the dark streets of the exclusion zone. The floodlights on the Dome of the Rock made that structure look as venerable and solid as history itself, but in less than forty-eight hours there would be a taller and more dramatic monument a scant few miles away.

I woke at seven in the morning, restless but not hungry. I showered and dressed and wondered how far the security people would let me go if I tried to do a little sightseeing — a walk around the hotel, say. I decided to find out.

I was stopped at the elevator by one of two natty FBI men, who looked at me blankly. “Whereabouts you headed, chief?”

“Breakfast,” I said.

“We’ll need to see your badge first.”

“Badge?”

“Nobody gets on or off this floor without a badge.”

I don’t need no stinkin’ badge — but I did, apparently. “Who’s handing out badges?”

“You need to talk to the people who brought you, chief.”

Which didn’t take long, because Morris Torrance came hurtling up behind me, bade me a cheerful good morning and pinned a plastic I.D. tag to the lapel of my shirt. “I’ll come down with you,” he said.

The two men parted like the elevator doors they were guarding. They nodded to Morris, and the less aggressive of the two told me to have a nice day.

“Will do,” I said. “Chief.”

“It’s just a precaution,” Morris said as we rode down.

“Like harassing my father? Like reading my medical records?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t Sue explain any of this to you?”

“A little. You’re not just her bodyguard, are you?”

“But that, too.”

“You’re the warden.”

“She’s not in prison. She can go anywhere she wants.”

“As long as you know about it. As long as she’s watched.”

“It’s a kind of deal we made,” Morris said. “So where do you want to go, Scotty? Breakfast?”

“I need some air.”

“You want to do the tourist thing? You realize what a bad idea that is.”

“Call me curious.”

“Well — I can get us an IDF car with the right tags, I suppose. Even get us into the exclusion zone, if that’s really what you want.”

I didn’t answer.

“Otherwise,” he said, “you’re pretty much stuck in the hotel, the situation being what it is.”

“Do you enjoy this kind of work?”

“Let me tell you about that,” Morris said.

He borrowed a blue unmarked automobile with all-pass stickers pasted to the windshield and an elaborate GPS system sprawling onto the passenger side of the dash. He drove down Lehi Street while I stared (yet again) out the window.

It was another rainy day, date palms drooping along the boulevards. By daylight the streets were far from empty: there were civil-defense wardens at the major intersections, cops and IDF patrols everywhere, and only the exclusion zone around the anticipated touchdown site had been wholly evacuated.

Morris drove into the New City and turned onto King David Street, the heart of the exclusion zone.

The evacuation of a major urban area is more than just people-moving, though it’s that, certainly, on an almost unmanageably large scale. Some of it is engineering. Most of the damage a Chronolith causes is a result of the initial cold shock, the so-called thermal pulse. Close enough to the arrival, any container with liquid water in it will burst. Property owners in Jerusalem had been encouraged to drain their pipes before leaving, and the municipal authorities were trying to preserve the waterworks by depressurizing the core zone, though that would make firefighting difficult — and inevitably there would be fires, when volatile liquids and gases escaped containers ruptured or weakened by the cold. The gas mains had already been shut off. Theoretically, every toilet tank should have been emptied, every gas tank drained, every propane bottle removed. In reality, without an exhaustive door-to-door search, no such outcome could be guaranteed. And close to the arrival point, the thermal pulse would turn even a bottle of milk into a potentially lethal explosive device.

I didn’t speak as we drove past the shuttered businesses, windows striped with duct tape; the darkened skyscrapers, the King David Hotel as lifeless as a corpse.

“An empty city is an unnatural thing,” Morris said. “Unholy, if you know what I mean.” He slowed for a checkpoint, waved at the soldiers as they spotted his stickers. “You know, Scotty, I really don’t take any pleasure in dogging you and Sue.”

“Am I supposed to be reassured by that?”

“I’m just making conversation. The thing is, though, you have to admit it makes sense. There’s a logic to it.”

“Is there?”

“You’ve had the lecture.”

“The thing about coincidence? What Sue calls ‘tau turbulence’? I’m not sure how much of that to believe.”

“That,” Morris said, “but also how it looks to Congress and the Administration. Two true facts about the Chronoliths, Scotty. First, nobody knows how to make one. Second, that knowledge is being brewed up somewhere even as we speak. So we give Sue and people like Sue the means to figure out how to build such a thing, and maybe that’s precisely the wrong thing to do, the knowledge is set loose, maybe it gets into the wrong hands, and maybe none of this would have happened if we hadn’t opened the whole Pandora’s box in the first place.”

“That’s circular logic.”

“Does that make it wrong? In the situation we’re in, are you going to rule out a possibility because it doesn’t make a nice tight syllogism?”

I shrugged.

He said, “I’m not going to apologize for the way we looked into your past. It’s one of those things you do in a national emergency, like drafting people or holding food drives.”

“I didn’t know I’d been drafted.”

“Try thinking of it that way.”

“Because I went to school with Sue Chopra? Because I happened to be on the beach at Chumphon?”

“More like, because we’re all tied together by some rope we can’t quite see.”

“That’s… poetic.”

Morris drove silently for a time. The sun came through gaps in the cloud, pillars of light roaming the Judean hills.

“Scotty, I’m a reasonable person. I like to think so, anyhow. I still go to church every Sunday. Working for the FBI doesn’t make a person a monster. You know what the modern FBI is? It isn’t cops and robbers and trench coats and all that shit. I did twenty years of desk work at Quantico. I’m qualified on the firing range and all, but I’ve never discharged a weapon in a police situation. We’re not so different, you and I.”

“You don’t know what I am, Morris.”

“Okay, you’re right, I’m assuming, but for the sake of the argument let’s say we’re both normal people. Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven. People call me levelheaded. Boring, even. Do I strike you as boring?”

I let that one go.

He said, “But I have dreams, Scotty. The first time I saw the Chumphon thing was on a TV set in D.C. But the amazing thing is, I recognized it. Because I’d seen it before. Seen it in dreams. Nothing specific, nothing like prophecy, nothing I could prove to anybody. But I knew as soon as I saw it, that this was something that would be part of my life.”

He stared straight ahead. “It’ll be good if these clouds pass by tomorrow night,” he said. “Good for observation.”

“Morris,” I said, “is any of this the truth?”

“I wouldn’t shit you.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Well, maybe because I recognized you, too, Scotty. From my dreams, I mean. First time I saw you. You and Sue both.”

Nine

Looking back at these pages, it seems to me I’ve said too much about myself and not enough about Sue Chopra. But I can only tell my own story as I experienced it. Sue, I thought, was preoccupied with her work and blind to the forces that had infantilized her, made her a ward of the state. Her acceptance of her condition bothered me, probably because I was chafing under the same restraints and reaping the same rewards. I had access to the best and newest processor platforms, the sleekest code incubators. But I was at the same time an object of scrutiny, paid to donate DNA and urine samples to the infant science of tau turbulence.

I had promised myself that I would endure this until I had financed at least the lion’s share of Kaitlin’s surgery. Then all bets were off. If the march of the Chronoliths continued, I wanted to be home and near Kaitlin as the crisis worsened.

As for Kait… the most I could be for Kait right now was emotional backup, a refuge if things went bad with Whit, a second-string parent. But I had a feeling, maybe as powerful and specific as Morris’s dream, that sooner or later she would need me.

We were in Jerusalem because the Chronolith had announced itself with murmurs of ambient radioactivity, like the premonitory rumbling of a volcano. Was there also, I wondered, a premonitory tau turbulence, whatever that might mean? A trace of strangeness in the air, a fractal cascade of coincidence? And if so, was it perceptible? Meaningful?

We were less than fifteen hours from the estimated time of touchdown when I woke Thursday morning. Today the entire floor was in lockdown, nobody allowed in or out except for technicians transiting between the indoor monitors and the antenna array on the roof. There had been threats, apparently, from unnamed radical cadres. Meals were delivered from the hotel kitchen on a strict schedule.

The city itself was still and calm under a dusty turquoise sky.

The Israeli Minister of Defense arrived for his photo-op that afternoon. Two press-pool photographers, three junior military advisors, and a couple of cabinet ministers followed him into the tech suite. The press guys wore cameras clamped to their shoulders on gymbal mounts. The Minister of Defense, a bald man in khaki, listened to Sue’s description of the reconnaissance equipment and paid dutiful attention to Ray Mosley’s stumbling account of “Minkowski ice” — a clumsy metaphor, in my opinion.

Minkowski was a twentieth-century physicist who asserted that the universe could be understood as a four-dimensional cube. Any event can be described as a point in four-space; the sum of these points is the universe, past, present, and future.

Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary. To travel into the past, you would have to uncreate (or, I suppose, thaw) an entire universe. Clearly absurd: what power could rewind the planets, wake dead stars, dissolve babies into the womb? But that wasn’t what Kuin had done, though what he had done was marvelous enough. A Chronolith, Ray said, was like a hot needle driven into Minkowski ice. The effects were striking but strictly local. In Chumphon, in Thailand, in Asia, perhaps ultimately in all the world, the consequences were strange and paradoxical; but the moon didn’t care; the comets were unmoved in their orbits; the stars looked blindly on. The Minkowski ice crystallizes once more around the cooling needle and time flows as before, subtly wounded, perhaps, but substantially unchanged.

The Defense Minister accepted this with the obvious private skepticism of a Moslem cleric touring the Vatican. He asked a few questions. He admired the blast-proof glass that had replaced the hotel windows and commented approvingly on the dedication of the men and women operating the machinery. He hoped we would all learn something useful in the next several hours if, God forbid, the predicted tragedy actually took place. Then he was escorted upstairs for a look at the antenna arrays, the photographers trailing after, gulping coffee from paper cups.

All this, of course, would be edited for public consumption, a display of governmental calm in the face of crisis.

Invisibly, inevitably, the Minkowski ice was melting. The hotel’s links were overwhelmed by our extremely broad-band data-sharing, but I took one call that day: Janice, letting me know my father had died in his sleep.

It had snowed over most of Maryland that day — about six inches of fine powder. My father wore a medical tag which had issued an alert when he entered cardiac distress, but by the time the ambulance arrived he was beyond resuscitation.

Janice offered to make the necessary arrangements while I was overseas (there was no other surviving family). I agreed and thanked her.

“I’m sorry, Scott,” she said. “I know he was a difficult man. But I’m sorry.”

I tried to feel the loss in a meaningful way.

Nevertheless I caught myself wondering how much trauma he had avoided by ducking out of history at this juncture, what tithes he would not be obliged to pay.

Morris knocked at my door as dusk was falling and escorted me back to the tech suite, monitors radiating blue light into the room. As observers, Morris and I were relegated to the line of chairs along the rear wall where we wouldn’t be underfoot. The room was hot and dry, ranks of portable heaters already glowing ferociously. The techs seemed overdressed and were sweating at their consoles.

Outside, the cloudless sky faded to ink. The city was preternaturally still. “Not long now,” Morris whispered. This was the first time the arrival of a Chronolith had been predicted with any accuracy, but the calculations were still approximate, the countdown tentative. Sue, passing, said, “Keep your eyes open.”

Morris said, “What if nothing happens?”

“Then the Likkud loses the election. And we lose our credibility.”

The minutes drained away. Quilted jackets were handed out to those of us who hadn’t donned protective clothing. Morris leaned out of the shadows again, sweating and obviously restless. “Best guess for touchdown point is in the business district. It’s an interesting choice. Avoids the Old City, the Temple Mount.”

“Kuin as Caesar,” I said. “Worship whatever gods you like, as long as you bow to the conqueror.”

“Not the first time for Jerusalem.”

But maybe the last. The Chronoliths had re-ignited all the apocalyptic fears the 20th Century had focused on nuclear weapons: the sense that a new technology had raised the stakes of conflict, that the long parade of empires rising and empires falling might have reached its final cycle. Which was, just now, all too easy to believe. The valley of Megiddo, after all, was only a few miles from here.

We were reminded to keep our jackets zipped despite the heat. Sue wanted the room as hot as we could tolerate, a buffer against thermal shock.

Intense analysis of previous arrivals had given us an idea of what to expect. A Chronolith doesn’t displace the air and bedrock where it appears; it transforms these materials and incorporates them into its own structure. The shockwave is a result of what Sue had dubbed “radiant cooling.” Within a few yards of the Kuin stone the air itself would condense, solidify, and fall to the ground; for some part of a second, air rushing to replace it would be acted upon similarly. Within a slightly broader area the atmosphere would freeze in fractions of its constituent gases — oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Water vapor is precipitated over a much wider perimeter.

The presence of groundwater causes a similar phenomenon in soil and bedrock, cracking stone and radiating a ground-borne shockwave.

All this cooled and moving air creates convection cells, thus severe wind at ground zero and unpredictable and pervasive fogs for miles around.

Which was why no one objected to the dry heat, the sealed room.

The white-garbed technicians, most of them graduate students out on loan, manned the row of terminals facing the windows. Their telemetry came from the roof arrays or from remote sensors placed closer to the touchdown zone. Periodically they sang out numbers, none of which meant anything to me. But the level of tension was clearly rising. Sue paced among these eager young people like a fretful parent.

She paused before us, crisp in fresh blue jeans and a white blouse. “Background counts are way up,” she said, “on extremely steep curves. That’s like a two-minute warning, guys.”

Morris said, “Should we have goggles or something?”

“It’s not an H-bomb, Morris. It won’t blind you.”

And then she turned away.

One of the monitoring technicians, a young blond woman who looked not much older than Kaitlin, had risen from her chair and approached Sue with a supplicating smile. The IDF security contingent looked sharply at her. So did Morris.

The girl seemed dazed, maybe a little out of control. She hesitated. Then, in a gesture almost touchingly childlike, she reached for Sue’s hand and took it in her own.

Sue said, “Cassie? What is it?”

“I wanted to say… thank you.” Cassie’s voice was timid but fervent.

Sue frowned. “You’re welcome, but — for what?”

But Cassie just ducked her head and backed away as if the thought had gone out of her head as quickly as it had entered. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh! I’m sorry. I just — I guess I just felt like I should say it. I don’t know what I was thinking…” She blushed.

“Best stay in your chair,” Sue said gently.

We were deep in the tau turbulence now. The room smelled hot and electric. Beyond the window, the city core quivered under a sudden auroral glow.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, but time was elastic; we inhabited seconds as if they were minutes. I will admit that I was afraid.

The incidental light created by the arrival was a curtain of quickly shifting color, blue-green deepening to red and violet, hovering over the city and filling the room in which we sat with eerie shadow.

“Nineteen hundred and seven minutes,” Sue said, checking her watch. “Mark.”

“It’s already cold,” Morris said to me. “You notice?”

It felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped by several degrees. I nodded.

One of the IDF men stood up nervously, fingering his weapon. As quickly as it had come, the light began to fade; and then—

Then the Chronolith was simply and suddenly present.

It flashed into existence beyond the Dome of the Rock, taller than the hills, grotesquely large, white with ice under a brittle moon.

“Touchdown!” someone at the consoles announced. “Ambient radiation dropping. External temps way, way down—”

“Hold on,” Sue said.

The shockwave flexed the window glass and roared like thunder. Almost immediately the Chronolith vanished in a white whirlwind, moisture gigged out of the atmosphere by thermal shock. A few miles away, temperature differentials cracked concrete, split timbers, and surely destroyed the living tissue of any creature unfortunate enough to have strayed into the exclusion zone. (There were a few: cats, dogs, pilgrims, skeptics.)

A wave of whiteness rayed out from the central storm, frost climbing the Judean hills like fire, and a host of urban lights dimmed as power-grid transformers shorted in fountains of sparks. Cloud engulfed the hotel; a hard, fast wind rattled the windows. Suddenly the room was dark, console lights quivering like stars reflected in a pond.

“Cold as a son of a bitch,” Morris muttered.

I wrapped my arms around myself and saw Sue Chopra do likewise as she turned away from the window.

The IDF man who had stood up moments ago raised his automatic rifle. He shouted something that was incomprehensible in the noise of the storm. Then he began to fire into the darkened room.

The name of the shooter was Aaron Weiszack.

What I know about him is what I read in the next day’s newspapers, and wouldn’t it save a world of grief if we could read tomorrow’s headlines before they happened?

Or maybe not.

Aaron Weiszack had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, and immigrated to Israel with his family in 2011. He spent his teenage years in suburban Tel Aviv and had already flirted with a number of radical political organizations before he was drafted in 2020; Weiszack had been briefly detained, but not charged, during the Temple Mount riots of 2025. His IDF record, however, was impeccable, and he had been careful to conceal from his superiors his ongoing association with a fringe “Kuinist” cell called Embrace the Future.

He was, if not deranged, at least unbalanced. His motives remain unclear. He had not fired more than a couple of rounds before another of the IDF soldiers, a woman named Leah Agnon, cut him down with a brief burst from her own weapon.

Weiszack died almost instantly of his wounds. But he wasn’t the only casualty in the room.

I have often thought Aaron Weiszack’s act was at least as portentous as the arrival of the Kuin of Jerusalem — in its way, a far more precise imaging of the shape of things to come.

Weiszack’s last rifle burst cracked one of the allegedly blast-proof (but apparently not bulletproof) windows, which collapsed in a shower of silvery nuggets. Cold wind and dense fog swept into the room. I stood up, deafened by the gunshots, blinking stupidly. Morris leaped out of his chair toward Sue Chopra, who had fallen to the floor, and covered her with his body. None of us knew whether the attack had finished or had just begun. I couldn’t see Sue under Morris’s bulk, didn’t know whether she was seriously injured, but there was blood everywhere — Weiszack’s blood all over the wallpaper, and the blood of the young technicians speckled across their consoles. I took a breath and began to hear sounds again, the scream of human voices, the scream of the wind. Fine grains of ice flew through the room like shrapnel, propelled by the impossibly steep thermoclines sweeping the city.

The IDF force surrounded the fallen Weiszack, rifles aimed at his inert body. The FBI contingent spread out to secure the scene, and some of Sue’s post-docs hovered over their fallen companions attempting first aid. Voices, and I thought I heard Morris’s among them, shouted for help. We had a paramedic in the room, but he was surely overwhelmed if he hadn’t been injured.

I ducked and crawled across the floor to Morris. He had rolled off Sue and was cradling her head in his arms. She was hurt. There was blood on the carpet here, a smattering of red droplets steaming in the brutal cold. Morris glanced at me. “It’s not serious,” he said, mouthing the words broadly over the roar of the wind. “Help me drag her into the hallway.”

“No!” Sue surged up against him, and I saw the bloody gash where her jeans had been torn by a bullet or shrapnel, a freely-bleeding divot along the fleshy part of her right thigh. But if this was her only wound then Morris was right, she was in no immediate danger.

“Let us take care of it,” Morris told her firmly.

“People are hurt!” Her eyes darted toward the row of terminals where her students and technicians were variously paralyzed with terror or slumped in their chairs. “Oh, God — Cassie!”

Cassie, the winsome postgraduate student, had lost part of her skull to the gunfire.

Sue closed her eyes and we dragged her out of the cold and Morris spoke intently into his pocket phone as I pressed my palm against her bloody leg.

By this time the ambulances from Hadassah Mt. Sinai were already on their way, skidding over the crusts of ice still clinging to Lehi Street.

The paramedics set up triage in the lobby of the hotel, where they covered broken windows with thermal blankets and ran heaters from the hotel’s generator. One of them put a pressure bandage on Sue’s injury and directed arriving aid to the more critically injured, some of whom had been carried to the lobby, some of whom remained immobilized upstairs. IDF and civilian police cordoned the building while sirens wailed from all points of the compass.

“She died,” Sue said bleakly.

Cassie, of course.

“She died… Scotty, you saw her. Twenty years old. MIT diploma program. A sweet, nice child. She thanked me, and then she was killed. What does that mean? Does that mean something?”

Outside, ice fell from the cornices and rooftops of the hotel and shattered on the sidewalks. Moonlight penetrated the glassy white ruins and limned the emerging contours of the Kuin of Jerusalem.

The Kuin of Jerusalem: a four-sided pillar rising to form a throne on which the figure of Kuin is seated.

Kuin gazes placidly past the fractured Dome of the Rock, scrutinizing the Judean desert. He is clothed in peasant trousers and shirt. On his head is a band which might be a modest crown, worked with images of half-moons and laurel leaves. His face is formal and regal, the features unspecific.

The immense base of the monument meets the earth deep in the rains of Zion Square. The peak achieves an altitude of fourteen hundred feet.