The Chronoliths

Eighteen

Time has an arrow, Sue Chopra once told me. It flies in one direction. Combine fire and firewood, you get ashes. Combine fire and ashes, you don’t get firewood.

Morality has an arrow, too. For example: Run a film of the Second World War backward and you invert its moral logic. The Allies sign a peace agreement with Japan and promptly bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazis extract bullets from the heads of emaciated Jews and nurse them back to health.

The problem with tau turbulence, Sue said, is that it mingles these paradoxes into daily experience.

In the vicinity of a Chronolith, a saint might be a very dangerous man. A sinner is probably more useful.

Seven years after Portillo, with the military monopolizing the output of the communication and computation industries, a secondhand processor substrate of decent consumer quality would draw as much as two hundred dollars on the open market. A Marquis Instruments strat board of 2025 vintage outperformed its modern consumer equivalents in both speed and reliability; ounce for ounce, it was worth more than gold bullion. I had five of them in the trunk of my car.

I drove myself and my strat boards and my collection of surplus connectors, screens, dishes, codems, and outboard accessories to the open market at Nicollet Mall. It was a bright and pleasant summer morning, and even the empty windows of the Halprin Tower — abandoned in mid-construction when its financial backing collapsed last January — seemed cheerful, up there in the relatively clean air.

A homeless man had unrolled his blanket in the spot by the fountain that was my customary location, but he didn’t object when I asked him to move along. He understood the drill. Market niches were jealously guarded, vendor seniority scrupulously respected. Many of the Nicollet vendors had been here since the beginning of the economic contraction, when local police had been known to enforce the anti-peddling laws at gunpoint. That kind of hardship breeds solidarity. We all knew one another, and though conflicts were hardly unusual, vendors as a rule honored and would protect one another’s spaces. Veterans of long standing held the best spots; newcomers took the dregs and often had to wait months or years for a vacancy to come up.

I was somewhere between the veterans and the newbies. The fountain spot was away from the prime aisles but spacious enough that I could park the car and unload my folding table and stock without having to use a handcart… as long as I got there early and set up before the crowds began to gather.

This morning I was a little late. The vendor next to me, a man named Duplessy who sold and tailored used clothing, had already set up shop. He strolled over as I was unpacking my goods.

He eyed the fresh merchandise. “Whoa, strat boards,” he said. “Are they authentic?”

“Yup.”

“Looks like quality. Are you hooked up with a supplier?”

“Just got lucky.” In fact I had bought the boards from an amateur office-furniture and lighting-fixture liquidator who had no idea of their resale value. It was a one-shot deal, alas.

“You want to trade something for one of those? I could put you in a nice formal suit.”

“What would I want with a suit, Dupe?”

He shrugged. “Just asking. Hope we get some customers today. In spite of the parade.”

I frowned. “Another parade?” I should have paid attention to the news.

“Another A P parade. All flags and assholes, no confetti. No clowns… in the narrow sense of the word.”

Adapt and Prosper was a hard-core Kuinist faction, despite their occasional conciliatory rhetoric, and every time they carried their blue-and-red banner through the Twin Cities there were bound to be counter-demonstrations and some photogenic head-knocking. On parade days, noncombatants tended to stay out of the streets. I guessed the Copperheads still had a right to voice their opinions. Nobody had repealed the Constitution. But it was a pity they had to pick a day like this — blue sky and a cool breeze, perfect shopping weather.

I watched Dupe’s goods for him while he ran off to grab breakfast from a cart. By the time he got back I had sold one of my boards to another vendor, and by lunch, though crowds were light, two more had gone, all at premium prices. I had made a decent profit on the day and as the streets emptied around one o’clock I packed up again. “Afraid of a little old street fight?” Dupe called out from his heaped mounds of cotton and denim.

“Afraid of the traffic.” Police roadblocks were sure to be going up all over the urban core. Already, as the crowds thinned, I had seen grim young men with A P armbands or K+ tattoos gathering on the sidewalks.

What worried me, though, was not the traffic or the threat of violence so much as the lean and bearded man who had twice cruised past my table and was still hovering nearby, looking away with patently fake indifference whenever I glanced in his direction. I had met my share of shy or undecided customers, but this gentleman had given the goods a cursory and superficial look and seemed more interested in repeatedly checking his watch. He was probably an innocent twitch, but he made me nervous.

I had learned to trust these instincts.

I managed to get out of the downtown core before any serious trouble started. Pro-K and anti-K scuffles had become almost routine lately and the police had learned how to manage them. But the residue of the pacification gas (which smells like a combination of moist cat litter and fermented garlic) would linger for days, and it cost the city a small fortune to scrape the oxidizing lumps of barrier foam off the streets.

A lot of things had changed in the seven years since the arrival of the Portillo Chronolith.

Count those years: seven of them, the nervous prewar years, pessimistic years. Years when nothing seemed to go right for the country, even setting aside the economic crisis, the Kuinist youth movement, the bad news from abroad. The Mississippi-Atchafalaya disaster dragged on. Past Baton Rouge, the Mississippi had settled in its new course to the sea. Industry and shipping had been devastated, whole towns drowned or left without drinking water. There was nothing sinister about this, only nature winning a round over the Corps of Engineers. Sedimentation changes river gradients and gravity does the rest. But it seemed, in those days, oddly symbolic. The contrast was inescapable: Kuin had mastered time itself, while we were crippled by water.

Seven years ago, I couldn’t have pictured myself as a glorified scrap dealer. Today I felt fortunate to be in that position. I usually cleared enough money in any given month to pay the rent and put food on the table. A great many people weren’t so lucky. Many had been forced into the dole lines and the soup kitchens, ripe recruiting grounds for the P-K and A-K street armies.

I tried to phone Janice from the car. After a few false starts I got a connection, at some ridiculously diminished baud rate that made her sound as if she was shouting through a toilet-paper roll. I told her I wanted to take Kait and David out for dinner.

“It’s David’s last night,” Janice said.

“I know. That’s why we want to see them. I know it’s short notice, but I wasn’t sure I’d be finished downtown in time.” Or whether I would have the cash to fund even a home-cooked meal for four, but I didn’t say that to Janice. The Marquis boards had subsidized this little luxury.

“All right,” she said, “but don’t bring them back too late. David gets an early start tomorrow.”

David had received his draft notice in June and was off to basic training at a Uniforces camp in Arkansas. He and Kaitlin had been married for just six months, but the draft board didn’t care. The Chinese intervention was eating up ground troops by the boatload.

“Tell Kait I’ll be there by five,” I said, as the phone link crackled and then evaporated. Then I called Ashlee and told her we’d have guests for dinner. I volunteered to do the shopping.

“I wish we could afford meat,” she said wistfully.

“We can.”

“You’re kidding. What — the strat boards?”

“Yup.”

She paused. “There are a lot of places we could put that money, Scott.”

Yes, there were, but I elected to put it on the counter of a butcher shop in exchange for four small sirloin steaks. And at the grocer I picked up basmati rice and fresh asparagus spears and real butter. There’s no point living if you can’t, at least occasionally, live.

Kait and David made their home in a converted storage space over Janice and Whit’s garage. As awful as that sounds, they had managed to turn a chilly peaked-roof attic into a relatively warm and comfortable nest, furnished with Whit’s cast-off sofa and a big wrought-iron bed David had inherited from his parents.

The attic also afforded them a little distance from Whit himself, whose charity they were in no position to refuse. Whit was a dignified Copperhead and disapproved of street fighting; but he took his politics seriously and could be counted on for a little accommodationist lecture whenever the conversation lagged.

I picked up Kait and David and drove them to the small apartment I shared with Ashlee. Kait was quiet in the car, putting on a brave face but obviously worried for her husband. David compensated by chattering about the news (the ousting of the Federal Party, the fighting in San Salvador), but by his voice and gestures he was also nervous. Reasonably so. None of us mentioned China even in passing.

David Courtney hadn’t impressed me when Kait first introduced him last year, but I had come to like him very much. He was just twenty years old and displayed that emotional blandness — psychologists call it “lack of affect” — that is the style of this generation raised in the shadow of Kuin. Underneath it, however, David proved to be a warm and thoughtful young man whose affection for Kait was unmistakable.

He was not especially handsome — he had picked up a facial scar in the Lowertown fires of 2028 — and he was certainly not rich or well-connected. But he was employed (or had been, until the draft notice arrived) driving a loader at the airport, and he was bright and adaptable, vital qualities in these dark days of a dark century.

Their wedding had been a tiny affair, subsidized by Whit and held in a church in Whit’s parish where half the deacons were probably closet Copperheads. Kait had worn Janice’s old wedding dress, which revived some awkward memories. But it was a fine event by modern standards and both Janice and Ashlee had been moved to tears by the ceremony.

Kaitlin went on up to the apartment as David and I set the car’s alarms and security protocols. I asked him how Kait was dealing with his impending departure.

“She cries sometimes. She doesn’t like it. I think she’ll be okay, though.”

“How about you?”

He brushed his hair away from his eyes, revealing for a moment the scar tissue that marred his forehead. He shrugged.

“All right so far,” he said.

I offered to broil the steaks, but Ashlee wouldn’t have it. We hadn’t seen steak for the better part of a year and she wasn’t about to entrust these to my care. I could chop the onions, she suggested, or better, keep Kait and David company and stay the hell out of the kitchen.

Maybe the steaks were a bad idea. They were celebration food, but there was nothing to celebrate tonight. Kait and David exchanged troubled glances and were clearly making an effort to rise above their anxiety, an effort not even briefly successful. By the time Ash served dinner we were all clearly playing a game of mutual denial.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, damn,” was all I managed.

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

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

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

“Fuck you, too.”

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

“Who’s ‘we’?”

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

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

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

Nineteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You could have called ahead.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Afraid?”

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

“Don’t let it worry you.”

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

“I’m not so easy to convince, Ash.”

She rolled on her side, sighing.

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

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

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

And was the technology necessary to create a Chronolith already in Kuin’s hands?

Yes, probably, Sue told me.

This was Sunday morning. Ashlee, still nervous, had gone off to visit her cousin Alathea in St. Paul. (Alathea eked out a living selling decorative copper pots door to door. Visiting Alathea on Sundays was an expression of familial piety on Ashlee’s part, since Alathea was a disagreeable woman with eccentric religious beliefs and no talent for housekeeping.) I sat with Sue at the kitchen table, picking at breakfast and generally savoring my day off, while Ray went out to hunt for a source of fresh coffee — we had used up the house supply.

There were, Sue told me, only a handful of people in the world who understood contemporary Chronolith theory well enough to envision the means to create one. She happened to be one of them. That was why the federal government had taken such an ambivalent interest in her, alternately helping and hindering her work. But that wasn’t the big problem right now. The big problem, she said, was that the increasingly desperate Chinese government had years ago established its own intensive research programs into the practicality of tau-bending technology and had isolated these facilities from the international community.

And why was that a problem?

Because the fragmented Chinese government had finally collapsed under the weight of its own insolvency, and those same research facilities were presumably under the direct control of Kuinist insurgents.

“So it all fits into place,” she said. “Somewhere in Asia there’s a Kuin, and he has the technology in his hands. We’re only a couple of years away from the Chumphon conquest, and that looks like an entirely plausible event. We can’t do anything about it, either. All of Southeast Asia is in the hands of various Kuinist insurgent movements — it would take a huge army to occupy the hills above Chumphon, and that would mean recommitting troops and supplies from China, which nobody is willing to do. So it comes together very, very neatly… you might say, inevitably.”

“These are the shades of things that must be.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re helpless to stop it.”

“Well, I don’t know, Scotty. I think maybe there is something I can do.” Her smile was both mischievous and sad.

But the whole subject made me uneasy, and I tried to divert her by asking whether she had heard from Hitch Paley lately. (I hadn’t: not since Portillo.)

“We’re still in contact,” she said. “He’ll be passing through town in a couple of days.”

I suppose it’s evidence of Sue’s innate (if awkward) charm that by the following evening Ashlee was sitting beside her on the sofa, listening raptly to Sue’s interpretation of the Age of Chronoliths.

As I joined them, Ash was saying, “I still don’t understand why you think it’s so important to destroy one.”

Sue, pondering her response, looked as intensely thoughtful as a religious zealot.

Which, perhaps, she was, at least on her own terms. In her pop-physics seminar at Cornell she had been fond of comparing the particle zoo (hadrons, fermions, and all the varieties of their constituent quarks) to the deities of the Hindu pantheon — all distinct, yet all aspects of a single encompassing Godhead. Sue was not conventionally religious and she had never even visited her parents’ native Madras; she used the metaphor loosely and often comically. But I recalled her description of two-faced Shiva: the destroyer and bringer of life, the ascetic youth and the lingam-wielding impregnator — Sue had detected the presence of Shiva in every duality, every quantum symmetry.

She put the tips of her fingers together. “Ashlee, tell me how you define the word ‘monument.’”

“Well,” Ash said tentatively, “it’s a thing, a structure, like a building. It’s, you know, architecture.”

“So how is it different from a house or a temple?”

“I guess you don’t use a monument, the way you use a house or a church. It just sort of stands there announcing itself.”

“But it does have a purpose, right? The way a house has a purpose?”

“I don’t know if I would say it’s useful… but I guess it serves a purpose. Just not a very practical one.”

“Exactly. It’s a structure with a purpose, but the purpose isn’t practical, it’s spiritual… or at least symbolic. It announces power and preeminence or it commemorates some communal event. It’s a physical structure but all its meaning, all its utility, is invested in it by the human mind.”

“Including the Chronoliths?”

“That’s the point. As a destructive weapon, a Chronolith is relatively trivial. By itself, it achieves nothing in particular. It’s an inert object. All its significance lies in the realm of meaning and interpretation. And that’s where the battle is, Ashlee.” She tapped her forehead. “All the strangest architecture is right up here. Nothing in the physical world compares to the monuments and the cathedrals we build inside our own skulls. Some of that architecture is simple and true and some of it is baroque and some of it is beautiful and some of it is ugly and perilously unsound. But that architecture matters more than any other kind, because we make the future out of it. History is just a fossil record of what men and women construct out of the contents of their minds. You understand? And the genius of Kuin has nothing to do with the Chronoliths; the Chronoliths are just technology, just people making nature jump through hoops. The genius of Kuin is that he’s using them to colonize the world of the mind, to build his own architecture directly into our heads.”

“He makes people believe in him.”

“In him, in his power, in his glory, in his benevolence. But above all in his inevitability. And that’s what I want to change. Because nothing about Kuin is inevitable, absolutely nothing. We build Kuin every day, we manufacture him out of our hopes and fears. He belongs to us. He’s a shadow we’re all casting.”

This in itself was nothing new. The politics of expectation had even been debated in the press. But something about this speech made the hairs on my arms stand erect. The degree of her conviction, her casual eloquence. But I think it was more. I think I understood for the first time that Sue had declared a private and very personal war on Kuin. More: that she believed she was at the very center of the conflict now — anointed by the tau turbulence, promoted directly into the Godhead.

I met Kaitlin for a Sunday dinner out, strictly fast food, this representing the last of the weekend’s windfall money.

Kait came down from the apartment over Whit’s garage looking brave but inconsolable. She had passed her first couple of nights without David, and it showed. Her eyes were shadowed, her complexion sallow for lack of sleep. The smile she gave me was almost furtive, as if she had no business smiling while David was at war.

We shared beanpaste sandwiches at a once-brightly-colored but lately scabrous People’s Kitchen. Kait knew that Sue Chopra and Ray Mosley were in town and we talked a while about that, but Kait was plainly not much interested in what she called “the old days.” She had been troubled by nightmares, she said. In her dreams she was back in Portillo, but this time with David, and David was in some mortal danger from which Kait could not rescue him. She was knee-deep in sand, in the dream, the Kuin of Portillo looming over her, nearly alive, gnarled and malevolent.

I listened patiently and let her wind down. The dream wasn’t difficult to interpret. Finally I said, “Have you heard from David?”

“A phone call after his bus got into Little Rock. Nothing since then. But I guess boot camp keeps you busy.”

I guessed it did. Then I asked how her mother and Whit were dealing with it.

“Mom is a help. As for Whit—” She fluttered her hand. “You know how he is. He doesn’t approve of the war and sometimes he acts like David is personally responsible for it — as if he had a choice about the draft notice. With Whit it’s all big issues, there’s no people involved, except as obstacles or bad examples.”

“I’m not sure the war is doing any good either, Kait. If David had wanted to duck the draft, I would have helped him dig a hole.”

She smiled sadly. “I know. David knew that, too. The odd thing is that Whit wouldn’t hear of it. He doesn’t like the war but he couldn’t sanction breaking the law, putting the family in legal jeopardy and all that crap. The thing is, David figured Whit would probably inform on him if he tried to evade the conscription drive.”

“You think that’s true?”

She hesitated. “I don’t hate Whit…”

“I know.”

“But yes, I think he might be capable of that.”

It was perhaps not surprising that she suffered from nightmares.

I said, “Janice must be around the house more since her job evaporated.”

“She is, and it’s a help. I know she misses David too. But she doesn’t talk about the war, or Kuin, or Whit’s opinions. That’s strictly forbidden territory.”

Janice’s loyalty to her second husband was remarkable and probably admirable, though I had a hard time seeing it that way. When does loyalty become martyrdom, and just how dangerous was Whitman Delahunt? But I couldn’t ask Kait these questions.

Kait couldn’t answer them, any more than I could.

By the time I got home Ashlee had already gone to bed. Sue and Ray were awake at the kitchen table, talking in low tones over a map of the western states. Ray clammed up when I passed through, but Sue invited me to sit down and join them. I declined politely, much to Ray’s relief, and instead joined Ashlee, who was curled up on her left side with the sheet tangled at her feet and a night breeze raising goosebumps on the slope of her thigh.

Should I feel guilty because in the end I hadn’t sought or achieved a private martyrdom — like Janice, bound to Whit by her sense of duty; like David, aimed at China like a bullet and about as disposable; or like my father, for that matter, who had justified his life as a martyrdom? (I was with her, Scotty.)

When I rolled into bed Ashlee stirred and mumbled and pressed herself against me, warm in the cool of the night.

I tried to imagine martyrdom running backward like a broken clock. How sweet to abdicate divinity, to climb down from the cross, to travel from transfiguration to simple wisdom and arrive at last at innocence.

Twenty

Hitch came into town missing two fingers from his left hand and walking with a limp. It seemed to me he didn’t smile as readily as he used to, either, though he smiled at Sue and gave me an appraising look that was friendly enough. Certainly he did not make Ashlee smile.

Ashlee worked at the city water-treatment plant, writing the status reports required by state and federal regulations and staffing an Accounts Receivable desk for the financial manager. She came home tired and she nearly fainted at the sight of Hitch Paley, even though Hitch was dressed in a respectable suit and had even attempted a necktie. Hitch remained a bad memory for Ashlee — Hitch had been with her when she lost Adam.

She did not, of course, recognize former FBI desk man Morris Torrance, now even balder than Ray Mosely, who had also arrived in the big utility van parked out front. I attempted an introduction, but Ashlee said in a flat tone, “We can’t sleep all these people, Scott. Not even for a night.”

The catch in her voice reflected a little fear, a lot of resentment.

“No need for that,” Hitch said hastily. “I just rented a couple of rooms at the Marriott. Good to see you, Ashlee.”

“You, too, I guess,” she said.

“And thank you for accommodating us in the meantime,” Sue Chopra put in. “I know it’s been an inconvenience.”

Ashlee nodded, mollified perhaps by the sight of Sue with her duffel packed. “The Marriott?”

“Our fortunes,” Sue said, “have changed.”

I walked out to the van with Hitch while Sue and Ray finished packing. Hitch tucked Sue’s duffel into the cargo bin. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “I could use some help tomorrow, Scotty, if you think you can make the time.”

“Help with what?”

“Spending money on heavy machinery. Diesel generators and like that.”

“I don’t know much about machinery, Hitch.”

“Mainly I want your company.”

“Tomorrow’s a working day.”

“Running that flea market table? Take the day off.”

“I can’t afford to.”

“Yeah, you can. We’re budgeted for that.”

He named an hourly wage for an eight-hour day. A princely sum for the simple act of riding shotgun with him, particularly from a man whose friends had been begging me for sofa space just a few days ago. Hitch had obviously come into town with money, and the offer was tempting. But I was reluctant to accept it.

“Figure it out,” he said. “We have a Department of Defense charge account, at least for the time being. The cash is available and I know you can’t afford to take time off on short notice. And we really need to discuss a few things.”

“Hitch—”

“And what can it hurt?”

That was the pertinent question. “I’m sensing there’s more here than meets the eye.”

“Well, yeah. There is. We can talk about it tomorrow. I’ll call from the hotel, we’ll make plans.”

I said, “Why me?”

“Because there’s an arrow pointed at you, my friend.” He hoisted himself into the driver’s seat, grimacing as he pulled his lame leg after him. “Or at least that’s what Sue thinks.”

And so, in the sunny morning light, I drove with Hitch Paley into the shabby industrial parks west of the river. The van’s air conditioning was broken. (Which was only to be expected: Spare parts were at a premium, most of them going to the military.) The air outside was dry and climbing toward oven heat and Hitch drove with the tinted windows up but the vents wide open. By the time we reached our destination the interior reeked of hot vinyl and motor oil and sweat.

Hitch had made an appointment with the sales manager of a machine and machine-parts distributor called Tyson Brothers. I followed Hitch through reception and sat in the man’s office examining his wilted ficus and his generic wall art while Hitch negotiated the outright purchase of two small earthmovers and enough portable generators to power a small town, plus copious spare parts. The sales guy was obviously curious — he asked twice whether we were independent contractors and seemed vexed when Hitch deflected the question. But he was just as obviously delighted to write up the order. For all I know, Hitch may have saved Tyson Brothers from bankruptcy, or at least postponed that inevitable hour.

In any case, he debited more money in a couple of hours than I had earned over the course of the last year. He left a contact number with the distributor and told him someone would be in touch to arrange delivery, waved his good right hand at the receptionist, and sauntered back out into the heat. In the van I said, “You’re doing what, exactly — digging a hole and lighting it up?”

“We’re a little more ambitious than that, Scotty. We’re going to bring down one of those Kuin stones.”

“With a handful of earthmovers?”

“That’s just filling in the shortfall. We’ve got very nearly a battalion of military engineers and gear ready to roll when Sue says the word.”

“You seriously mean to demolish a Chronolith?”

“Sue says we can. She thinks.”

“Which one were you planning to take down?”

“The one in Wyoming.”

“There is no Chronolith in Wyoming.”

“Not yet there isn’t.”

Hitch explained all this as he understood it. Sue filled in the details later.

It had been a busy few years for Sulamith Chopra.

“You dropped out of it,” Hitch said, “made a little life for yourself with Ashlee, and more power to you, Scotty, but the rest of us didn’t exactly stand still just because you stopped breeding our code.”

I did not then and do not now understand the physics of the Chronoliths, except in the pop-science sense. I know the technology involves the manipulation of Calabi-Yau spaces, which are the smallest constituent parts of both matter and energy, and that it uses a technique called slow fermionic decohesion to do this at practical energy levels. As to what really happens down there in the tangled origami of spacetime, I remain as ignorant as a newborn infant. They say nine-dimensional geometry is a language unto itself. I don’t happen to speak it.

But Sue did, and I think the depth of her understanding was unappreciated. The federal government had both cultivated her as an ally and pursued her as a liability, but they had also consistently underestimated her. She was so completely at ease with Calabi-Yau geometry that I came to believe a part of her lived in that world — she had inhabited these abstractions the way an astronaut might inhabit a strange and distant planet. There is no such thing as a paradox, Sue once said to me. A paradox, she said, is just the illusion created when you look at an n-dimensional problem through a three-dimensional window. “All the parts connect, Scotty, even if we can’t see the loops and knots. Past and future, good and evil, here and there. It’s all one thing.”

In more particular terms, Sue’s collaborators had already succeeded in producing tau-turbulent events on a small scale. Grains of sand to Kuin’s Chronoliths, of course, but in principle the same. Now Sue believed she could disrupt the arrival of a Chronolith by performing this same manipulation in the physical space where the Chronolith was about to manifest.

She had been urging this action for most of a year, but the global systems that monitored and predicted arrivals were either highly classified or in disarray, or both, and it had taken time for the military bureaucracy to examine her proposals and approve them. Wyoming was the first real opportunity, Hitch said — and maybe the last. And even Wyoming wasn’t without its dangers; it had become a mecca for Copperhead militias of various (often incompatible) political stripes. The good news was a generous three-week arrival-warning window, plus full military support. The effort was not being publicized, for fear of attracting yet more Kuinists; it would be stealthy, but it would not be halfhearted.

That was all well and good, I told Hitch, but it didn’t explain why I was sitting in his truck listening to what sounded increasingly like a sales pitch.

Hitch became solemn. “Scotty,” he said, “this isn’t anything like a pitch. At least not from me. I like you as a person but I’m not convinced you’d be an asset to this particular expedition. I respect all that you achieved here, and God knows it’s hard enough keeping a family together in this day and age, but what we need are technicians and engineers and guys who can handle heavy equipment, not somebody who sells secondhand crap at a flea market.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No offense. I mean, am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong.”

“It’s Sue who wants you with us, for reasons she just sort of hints at.”

“You mentioned an arrow.”

“Well, it’s more like a game of connect-the-dots. Can I tell you a story?”

“If you keep your eyes on the road.” Half the streets in Minneapolis had reverted to their unmonitored status, nothing to prevent a collision but a vehicle’s own built-ins. Hitch had come close enough to a peddler’s cart to set the proximity alarms shrilling.

“I hate traffic,” he said.

He had been in El Paso six months ago, doing his thing on Sue’s behalf, tracking down death threats she had been receiving at her home terminal, an address no one but a few close associates should have had.

Morris Torrance was theoretically in charge of Sue’s security, but it was always Hitch who did the legwork. He was well-connected in Kuinist circles and he possessed enough street credibility to impress any number of thugs. He was good in a fight and no doubt handy with weapons of all kinds, though I didn’t ask.

Morris had traced the threats to one of the big Kuinist cells operating out of Texas, and Hitch went to El Paso to ingratiate himself with the local street armies. “But I made the obvious mistake,” he told me. “I asked too many questions too soon. You can get away with that if the mood is right. But those Texans are fucking paranoid. Somewhere down the road, somebody decided I was a bad risk.”

In the end, five Kuinist shock troops had dragged him into the back lot of an auto-repair shop and questioned him with the aid of a saw-toothed machete.

Hitch held up his left hand and showed me the stumps of his first and second fingers. Both had been severed below the knuckle. Both had been carefully sutured, but the cut had obviously been rough. I thought about that. I thought about the pain.

“Don’t flinch,” he said. “It could have been worse. I managed to get away.”

“You acquired that limp at the same time?”

“A small-caliber bullet in the muscle tissue. As I was leaving the scene. They had this ancient pistol, some twentieth-century junk piece with the stock half rusted off. But the thing is, Scotty, I recognized the one who shot me.”

“You recognized him?”

“And I think he knew me, too, or at least knew I seemed familiar. If he hadn’t been a little shook up he might have been a better shot. It was Adam Mills.”

I scooted away from him almost instinctively, pushed myself up against the passenger door, feeling cold despite the summer heat.

“Can’t be,” I said.

“Fuck me if it wasn’t. He didn’t die in Portillo — he must have got out with the refugees.”

“And you ran into him in El Paso? Just like that?”

“It’s not a coincidence, Sue says. It’s tau turbulence. It’s a meaningful synchronicity. And we connect to Adam right through you, Scotty. Adam Mills is the arrow, and he’s pointed straight at you.”

“I don’t accept that.”

“You don’t have to, far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to accept that bullet in my leg, either. If it matters, I had to kill a couple of people to get this information to Sue. What she makes of it, what you make of it, that’s not my business.”

“You killed a couple of people?”

“What exactly do you think I do, Scotty? Travel around the country using moral suasion? I’ve killed people, yeah.” He shook his head. “This is exactly what makes me nervous. You look at me and you see this big colorful friend you used to hang out with in Chumphon. But I had killed a man before I ever met you, Scotty. Sue knows that. I was dealing drugs back there, you know, not retailing swimwear. You get in situations sometimes. Then and since. I don’t have your kind of conscience. I know you think you’re some kind of moral leper because you fucked up with Janice and Kait, but deep down, Scotty, you’re a family man. That’s all.”

“So what does Sue want with me?”

“I wish I knew.”

Twenty-one

The Marriott didn’t attract many guests in these diminished days. Sue was alone in the pool and sauna room, though Morris Torrance stood watch outside the entrance.

She looked up at me from the roiling waters of the whirlpool bath. She wore a fire-engine-red single-piece bathing suit and a yellow elastic hair cap, neither item flattering to her, but Sue had always been indifferent to fashion. Even in the whirlpool she wore her huge archaic eyeglasses, framed in what looked like scuffed black Bakelite. She said, “You should try this, Scotty; it’s very relaxing.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Hitch has been talking to you, I gather?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “Well, give me a minute.”

She lifted her pear-shaped body out of the Jacuzzi and peeled off the headgear, her hair springing out like a caged animal. “I like the deck chairs by the window,” she said, “if you’re not too warm in those clothes.”

“I’m all right,” I said, though the air was tropical and reeked of chlorine. The discomfort seemed somehow appropriate.

She stretched out a bath towel and seated herself regally. “Hitch told you about Adam Mills?”

“Yes, he did. I haven’t told Ashlee yet.”

“Don’t, Scotty.”

“Don’t tell Ashlee? Why, are you planning to tell her yourself?”

“Certainly not, and I hope you won’t, either.”

“She thinks he may be dead. She has a right to know if that’s not true.”

“Adam is alive, no doubt about it. But you have to ask yourself: What purpose would it serve to tell Ashlee? Is it really better for Ash to know that Adam is alive and that he’s a murderer?”

“A murderer? Is he?”

“Yes. We established that fact beyond any doubt. Adam Mills is a devoted hard-core Kuinist and a multiple murderer, a hatchetman for one of the most vicious P-K gangs in the country. Do you think Ashlee needs to know that? Do you want to tell her her son is leading the kind of life that will likely get him killed or imprisoned in the very near future? And if that happens, do you want to watch her grieve all over again?”

I hesitated. I had been putting myself in Ashlee’s position: If I had been wondering for seven years whether Kait had survived Portillo, any information would have been welcome.

But Adam was not Kaitlin.

“Look at what she’s gained since Portillo. A job, a family, a real life — equilibrium, Scotty, in a world where that’s a rare commodity. Obviously you know her better than I do. But think about it before you take all that away from her again.”

I decided to shelve the question. It wasn’t what had brought me here, not primarily. “I’d be taking all that away from her just as surely if I went out west with you — which is what Hitch claims you want.”

“Yes, but only for a little while. Scotty, will you please sit down? I hate talking up. It makes me nervous.”

I pulled a second deck chair in front of hers. Beyond the steam-hazed window, the city baked in afternoon sunlight. Sunlight glittered off windows, rooftop arrays, mica-studded sidewalks.

“Now listen to me,” she said. “This is important, and I want you to keep an open mind, hard as that may be under the circumstances. I know there are a lot of things we’ve kept from you, but please understand, we had to be careful. We had to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind about Kuin — no, don’t act insulted, stranger things have happened — or that you weren’t caught up in Copperhead circles like Janice’s husband, whatsisname, Whitman. Morris keeps insisting we can’t trust anyone, though I told him you’d be all right. Because I know you, Scotty. You’ve been in the tau turbulence almost from the beginning. Both of us have.”

“We have a sacred kinship. Bullshit, Sue.”

“It’s not bullshit. It’s not just conjectural, either. Admittedly, I’m interpreting, but the math suggests—”

“I really don’t care what the math suggests.”

“Then just listen to me, and I’ll tell you what I think is the truth.”

She looked away, her eyes distantly focused. I didn’t like the expression on her face. It was earnest and aloof, almost inhuman.

“Scotty,” she said, “I don’t believe in destiny. It’s an archaic concept. People’s lives are an incredibly complex phenomenon, far less predictable than the lives of stars. But I also know that tau turbulence splashes causality up and down the timeline. Is it really a coincidence that you and Hitch both ended up working for me, or that Adam Mills shared the turbulence with us in Portillo? In either case you can construct a logical sequence of events that’s almost but not quite satisfying as an explanation. I connected with Hitch Paley through the events at Chumphon, not quite at random; you met Ashlee because both of you had children caught up in the same haj, fine. But, Scotty, step back and take a longer look. It knits together way too neatly. The antecedent causes are insufficient. There has to be a postcedent cause.”

Hitch tangling with Adam, for that matter. More than coincidence. But also uninterpretable. “That’s an item of faith,” I said softly.

“Then look at me, Scotty! Look at the power I hold in these two hands!” She turned her pale palms up. “The power to bring down a fucking Chronolith! That makes me important. It makes me a player in the resolution of these events. Scotty, I am a postcedent cause!”

“There is such a thing,” I said, “as megalomania.”

“Except I didn’t make this up, any of this! It’s not a fantasy that I happen to understand Chronolith physics as well as anyone on the planet — and I’m not being vain, either. It’s not a fantasy that you and Hitch were at Chumphon and Portillo or that you and I were at Jerusalem. Those are facts, Scotty, and they demand an interpretation that goes beyond happenstance and blind chance.”

“Why do you want me in Wyoming?”

She blinked. “But I don’t. I don’t want you there. You’re probably safer here. But I can’t ignore the facts, either. I believe — and yes, this is intuition, probably unscientific, but I don’t care — I believe you have a role to play in the endgame of the Chronoliths. For good or ill, I don’t really know, though I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me or to further the interests of Kuin. I think it would be better if you came with us because you carry something special with you. The fact of Adam Mills is like a billboard. Chumphon, Jerusalem, Portillo, Wyoming. You. You may not like it, Scotty, but you matter.” She shrugged. “That’s what I believe, and I believe it very fervently. But if I can’t convince you to come, you won’t come, and maybe that’s what our destiny is, maybe that’s how we’re tied together, by your refusal.”

“You can’t put that weight on me.”

“No, Scotty, I can’t.” She blinked sadly. “But I can’t take it away, either.”

None of this sounded quite sane to me. No doubt because of my mother, I had developed a sensitive ear for the irrational. Even as a child I had known at once when my mother began to veer into madness. I recognized the grandiose assertions, the inflated self-importance, the hints of imminent threat. And it always provoked the same reaction in me, a withdrawal verging on disgust, a rapid emotional deep-freeze.

“Do you remember Jerusalem?” Sue asked. “Remember those young people, the ones who were killed? I think of them often, Scotty. I think of that young girl who came to me just when the Chronolith was arriving, when the tau turbulence was peaking. Her name was Cassie. Do you remember what Cassie said?”

“She thanked you.”

“She thanked me for something I hadn’t done, and then she died. I think it’s possible she was as deep in the tau turbulence as anyone can be, that the fact of her death had spilled over into the last minutes of her life. I don’t know exactly why she thanked me, Scotty, and I’m not sure she knew, either. But she must have sensed something… momentous.”

Sue turned her eyes away from me almost sheepishly, an expression that returned us to the scale of the merely human. “I need to live up to that,” she said. “At least, I need to try.”

Every two people who have ever fallen in love have a special place. A beach, a back yard, a park bench by a library. For Ashlee and me it was a landscaped park a few blocks east of our apartment, an ordinary suburban park with a concrete-rimmed duck pond and a playground and a cut-grass softball field. We had come here often in the days after Portillo, when Ash was recovering from the loss of Adam and after I had severed my contacts with Sue and company.

I had proposed marriage to her here. We had brought food for a picnic, but storm clouds came careening over the horizon and rain began to fall suddenly and copiously. We ran as far as the softball field and sheltered on the roofed bleachers. The air grew colder and the wet wind prompted Ashlee to curl against my shoulder. The park’s huge elms reared back from the storm, branches laced like fingers together, and I chose that moment to ask Ashlee whether she would consent to be my wife, and she kissed me and said yes. It was as simple and as perfect as that.

I took her there again.

The city had created perhaps too many of these parks in the urban-upgrade mania of the early century. Several had been rezoned for poverty housing or had deteriorated beyond all utility. This one was an exception, still stubbornly claimed by local families, defended by a host of local ordinances, patrolled after dark by community volunteers. We arrived in the late afternoon of a day cooler than the scorching day before, the kind of summer day so fine you want to fold it up and put it in your pocket. There were picnickers by the pond, toddlers swarming over the recently repainted swing sets and climbing gear.

We sat down on the untenanted softball bleachers. We had bought takeout food on the way to the park, stringy little chicken pieces fried in batter. Ashlee picked at hers listlessly. Her unease was obvious in every gesture. I suppose mine was, too.

I had originally planned (at least, perhaps) to tell her about Adam today. Lately I had understood that I wouldn’t. It was a decision by default, arguably a failure of courage. I still believed Ash deserved to know Adam was alive. But Sue was right, too. The news would hurt more than it would heal.

I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Ash that badly, much as my conscience protested.

It’s out of decisions like this, I suppose, that fate is constructed, board and nails, like a gallows.

“You remember the boy?” Ashlee asked, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “The little boy in the ball game?”

We had come here one Saturday not long after our wedding. There had been a Little League practice game in progress, two coaches and a few parents sharing the bleachers with us. The batter was a kid who looked like he’d been raised on steak and steroids, the kind of eleven-year-old who has to shave before school. The pitcher, contrarily, was a fair-haired waif with a talent for sinker balls. Unfortunately he left one up and over the plate. The ball came off the bat and back to the mound before the elfin pitcher had time to get a glove up — something off toward first base had distracted him — and as he turned his head he was struck squarely in the temple.

Silence, then gasps and a couple of screams. The pitcher blinked at the ground and fell, fell loose-limbed and suddenly, and lay motionless on the bare dirt patch that served as a mound.

Here’s the odd part. We weren’t parents or participants, just casual observers on a lazy day off, but I was on the phone to Emergency Services before anyone else in the bleachers had thought to reach into his pocket; and Ashlee, who had some RN training, reached the mound before the coach.

The injury wasn’t serious. Ash kept the boy still and calmed the terrified mother until the paramedics arrived. Nothing unusual about the incident except that Ash and I had both been so quick off the mark.

“I remember,” I told her.

“I learned something that day,” Ashlee said. “I learned we’re both ready for the worst. Always. Maybe, on some level, expecting it. Me, I guess it’s because of my dad.” Ashlee’s father had been an alcoholic, which often enough forces a child into premature adulthood, and he had died of liver cancer when Ashlee was just fifteen. “You because of your mom.” Expecting the worst: Well, yes, of course. (And her voice rang briefly in my head: Scotty, stop looking at me like that!)

“What that tells me,” Ashlee said, choosing her words carefully, not meeting my eyes, “is that we’re pretty strong people. We’ve faced up to some difficult things.”

Difficult as a murderous child, resurrected from the dead?

“So it’s all right,” Ashlee said. “I trust you, Scott. To do what you think is right. You don’t have to break it to me gently. You’re going away with them, aren’t you?”

“Just for a little while,” I said.

Twenty-two

We crossed the state border into Wyoming on the day the governor abdicated.

One of the so-called Omega militias had occupied the legislature for most of a week, holding Governor Atherton among the sixty hostages. The National Guard finally cleared the building but Atherton resigned as soon as he was released, citing health reasons. (Good ones: He had been shot through the groin and the wound had been allowed to grow septic.)

Emotions ran high, in other words, out here in big sky country, but all that political ferment was invisible from the road. Where we crossed into the state, the highway was potholed and the vast ranchlands on either side had gone feral and dry in the wake of the retreating Oglalla Aquifer. Flocks of starlings populated the rusted ribs of irrigation piping.

“Part of the problem,” Sue was saying, “is that people see the Chronoliths as a kind of magic — but they’re not, they’re technology, and they act like technology.”

She had been talking about the Chronoliths for at least five hours, though not exclusively to me. Sue insisted on driving the last van in the convoy, which contained our personal effects and her notes and plans. We — Hitch or Ray or I — tended to rotate through the passenger seat. Sue had added a kind of nervous loquaciousness to her customary obsessive behavior. She had to be reminded to eat.

“Magic is unlimited,” she said, “or limited only by, allegedly, the skill of the practitioner or the whims of the supernatural world. But the limits on the Chronoliths are imposed by nature, and they’re very strict and perfectly calculable. Kuin broadcasts his monuments roughly twenty years into the past because that’s the point at which the practical barriers become insurmountable — any farther back and the energy requirements go logarithmic, shoot up toward infinity for even a very tiny mass.”

Our convoy consisted of eight large enclosed military cargo trucks and twice that number of vans and personnel carriers. Sue had put together, over the years, a small army of like-minded individuals — in particular the academics and grad students who had assembled the tau-intervention gear — and they were bookended, in this expedition, by the military posse. All these vehicles had been painted Uniforces blue so that we would resemble any number of other military convoys, a common-enough sight even on these underpopulated western highways.

Some miles past the border we pulled over to the margin of the road on a cue from the lead truck, lining up for gas at a lonely little Sunshine Volatiles station. Sue switched off the forced-air cooler and I rolled down a side window. The sky was boundless blue, marked here and there with wisps of high cloud. The sun was near zenith. Across a brown meadow, more sparrows swirled over an ancient rust-brown oil derrick. The air smelled of heat and dust.

“There are all kinds of limits on the Chronoliths,” Sue went on, her voice a sleepy drone. “Mass, for instance, or more precisely mass-equivalency, given that the stuff they’re made of isn’t conventional matter. You know there’s never been a Chronolith with a mass-equivalency greater than roughly two hundred metric tonnes? Not for lack of ambition on Kuin’s part, I’m sure. He’d build them to the moon if he thought he could. But again, past a certain point, the energy bill shoots up exponentially. Stability suffers, too. Secondary effects become more prominent. Do you know what would happen to a Chronolith, Scotty, if it was even a fraction over the theoretical mass limit?”

I said I did not.

“It would become unstable and destroy itself. Probably in a spectacular fashion. Its Calabi-Yau geometry would just sort of unfold. In practical terms, that would be catastrophic.”

But Kuin had not been so unwise as to allow that to happen. Kuin, I reflected, had been pretty savvy all along. And this did not bode well for our quixotic little voyage into the sun-ridden western lands.

“I could use a Coke,” Sue said abruptly. “I’m dry as a bone. Would you fetch me a Coke from the gas station, if they have any to sell?”

I nodded and climbed out of the van onto the pebbly margin of the road and walked up past the row of idling trucks toward the Sunshine depot. The fuel station was a lonely outpost, an old geodesic half dome shading a convenience store and a row of rust-spackled holding tanks. The tarmac was lined with miniature windrows of loose dirt. An old man stood in the doorway, shading his eyes with his hand and looking down the long row of vehicles. This was probably more custom than he had seen in the last two weeks. But he didn’t look particularly happy about it.

Automated service modules groped under the carriage of the lead truck, refueling and cleaning it. Charges were displayed on a big overhead panel, its lens gone opaque in the wash of sun and grit.

“Hey,” I said. “Looks like it hasn’t rained around here for a while.”

The gas-station attendant lowered his hand from his eyes and gazed at me obliquely. “Not since May,” he said.

“You got any cold drinks in there?”

He shrugged. “Soda pop. Some.”

“Can I have a look?”

He moved out of the doorway. “It’s your money.”

The interior shade seemed almost frigid after the raw heat of the day. There wasn’t much stock on the store’s shelves. The cooler held a few Cokes, root beers, orange pop. I selected three cans at random.

The attendant rang up the sale, peering at my forehead so intently that I began to feel branded. “Something wrong?” I asked him.

“Just checking for the Number.”

“Number?”

“Of the Beast,” he said, and pointed to a bumper sticker he had attached to the front of the checkout desk: I’M READY FOR THE RAPTURE! HOW ABOUT YOU?

“I guess all I’m ready for,” I said, “is a cold drink.”

“What I figured.”

He followed me out of the store and squinted down the line of trucks. “Looks like the circus came to town.” He spat absentmindedly into the dust.

“Is there a key to the toilet?”

“On the hook around the side.” He hooked a thumb to the left. “Show some mercy and flush when you’re done.”

The location of the arrival — identified by satellite surveillance and refined by on-the-spot measurement of ambient radiation — was as enigmatic and as unenlightening as so many other Chronolith sites.

Rural, small-town, or otherwise relatively undestructive Chronoliths were generally labeled “strategic,” whereas city-busters like the Bangkok or Jerusalem stones were “tactical.” Whether this was a meaningful distinction or just happenstance was subject to debate.

The Wyoming stone, however, clearly fell into the “strategic” category. Wyoming is essentially a high, barren mesa interrupted by mountains — “the land of high altitudes and low multitudes,” a twentieth-century governor had called it. Its oil reserves and its cattle business were hardly vulnerable to a Kuin stone, and in any case the projected arrival site featured neither of those resources — featured nothing at all, in fact, apart from a few crumbling farm structures and prairie-dog nests. The nearest town was a post-office village called Modesty Creek, fifteen miles up a two-lane tarmac road that ran through brown meadowland and basalt outcroppings and sparse stands of cottonwood. We traversed this secondary road at a cautious speed, and Sue took time off from her monologue to admire the waves of sage and wild nettles as we approached our destination.

What purpose, I asked her, could a Chronolith serve in a place like this?

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s a good and reasonable question to ask. It must mean something. It’s like playing a game of chess and suddenly your opponent moves his bishop off to the rim for no apparent reason. Either it’s an implausibly stupid mistake, or it’s a gambit.”

A gambit, then: a distraction, false threat, provocation, lure. But it didn’t matter, Sue insisted. Whatever purpose the Chronolith was meant to serve, we would nevertheless prevent its arrival. “But the causality is extremely tangled,” she admitted. “Very densely knotted and recomplicated. Kuin has the advantage of hindsight. He can work against us in ways we can’t anticipate. We know very little about him, but he might know a great deal about us.”

By nightfall we had pulled all our vehicles off the road. An advance party had already scouted the site and marked its rough perimeter with survey stakes and yellow tape. There was enough light left in the sky for Sue to lead some of us up a rise, and from there we looked out across a meadow as prosaic as the surveyed ground of a shopping-mall project.

This was wild country, originally part of a privately-owned land parcel, never cultivated and seldom visited. At dusk it was a solemn place, rolling prairie edged on its eastern extremity by a steep bluff. The soil was stony, the sagebrush gray at the end of a dry summer. It would have been utterly quiet if not for the sound of the engineering crew pumping compressed air into the frames of a dozen inflatable quonsets.

Atop the bluff, an antelope stood in silhouette against the fading blue of the sky. It raised its head, scented us, trotted out of view.

Ray Mosely stepped up behind Sue and took her arm. “You can sort of feel it,” he said, “can’t you?”

The tau turbulence, he meant. If so, I was immune to it. There might have been a faint scent of ozone in the air, but all I could feel for certain was the cooling wind at my back.

“It’s a pretty place,” Sue said. “But stark.”

In the morning we filled it with earthmovers and graders and razored all its prettiness away.

The civilian telecom network, like so many other public works, had lately fallen into disrepair. Satellites dropped out of their orbits and were not replaced; lightpipes aged and cracked; the old copper wires were vulnerable to weather. Despite all that I was lucky enough, the following night, to get a voice line through to Ashlee.

Our first day at the dig had been enormously busy but surprisingly productive. Sue’s technical people had triangulated the center of the arrival site, where the military engineers graded a level space and poured a concrete slab to serve as a foundation for the tau-variable device, called “the core” for short. It wasn’t, of course, a nuclear core in the conventional sense, but the fragment of exotic matter it was designed to produce required similar shielding, both thermal and magnetic.

Smaller foundations were poured for the several redundant diesel generators that would power it and for the smaller generators that ran our string of lights and our electronics. By the second sunset we had turned our isolated highland into an industrial barrens of almost Victorian bleakness and had frightened away an astonishing number of jackrabbits, prairie dogs, and snakes. Our lamps glowed in the darkness like the ancient sentinel fires of the Crow or the Blackfoot, the Sioux or the Cheyenne; the air stank of volatiles and plastic.

Sue had assigned me lookout duty, but that was so obviously a piece of make-work that I had traded it for the less glamorous but infinitely more useful work of digging pit latrines and hauling lime. Just before sunset, numb with exhaustion, I carried my pocket terminal to the rising ground below the bluff and established the link with Ashlee. There was bandwidth enough for voice, not images, but that was all right. It was her voice I needed to hear.

Everything was fine, she said. The money Hitch had advanced us was paying some bills we had long needed to pay, and she had even taken Kaitlin out to a couple of movies. She didn’t understand, she said, why it had been necessary to leave Morris Torrance there to keep an eye on her — he was sitting in his car on the street outside the apartment. He wasn’t a nuisance, she said, but he made her feel like she was under surveillance.

Which she was. Sue had been worried that Kuinist elements might have traced her to Minneapolis, and I had insisted on protection for Ash — which took the form of the venerable but well-trained Morris Torrance doing reluctant guard duty. I had refused to leave Ashlee without protection if there was even a vague threat to her safety; Sue had chosen Morris.

“He’s a nice enough guy,” Ash said, “but it’s a little unnerving, being shadowed by him.”

“Just until I get back,” I told her.

“Too long.”

“Think of it as a way to preserve my peace of mind.”

“Think of it as a reason to come back soon.”

“Soon as I can, Ash.”

“So what’s it like… Wyoming?”

I lost a syllable or two of that to dropout but took the gist. “Wish you could see it. The sun’s just gone down. The air smells like sagebrush.” The air smelled like creosote and lime and hot metal, but I preferred the lie. “The sky’s almost as pretty as you are.”

“…Bullshit.”

“I spent the day digging a latrine.”

“That’s more like it.”

“I miss you, Ash.”

“You, too.” She paused, and there was a sound that might have been the security bell back home; then she said, “I think there’s somebody at the door.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

“…Tomorrow,” she echoed, and then the line shut down completely.

But I couldn’t reach her the next day. We couldn’t get a line through anywhere east of the Dakotas, despite all the multiple redundancies still embedded in the networks. A bunch of nodal servers must have gone down, Ray Mosely told me, possibly due to yet another act of Kuinist sabotage.

It was because of the communications problem that the DOD media guru decided to alert the press a day earlier than we had planned. There were lots of network video stringers still covering the unrest in Cheyenne, but it would take them at least another twenty-four hours to get to Modesty Creek — where they were needed.

That next night the engineers erected a circle of achingly bright sulfur-dot lamps. We worked while the air was cool and the moon was up, carving a blockhouse out of the dry earth a mile from the touchdown site, burying cables and unrolling enormous lengths of link fence. The fencing would keep out both sightseers and Kuinists, should any of them get wind of the effort. Hitch opined that it would keep out antelopes but not any number of larger mammals, not without an armed guard. But we had that, too.

I crawled into my cot at sunrise bleeding from both my hands.

The siege was about to begin.

Twenty-three

Until now we’d had the site to ourselves. Shortly, the world would be with us.

And everything that implied. Not just press people, but Kuinists of all stripes… though we hoped the isolated location and short notice would preclude a massive haj. (“This is our haj,” Sue had said more than once. “This one belongs to us.”)

So our Uniforces troops arrayed themselves around our fenced perimeter and up along the bluff, and we notified the Highway Patrol and state officials, who were deeply unhappy with us for making our work public but lacked the authority to shut us down. Ray Mosely figured we had at most twelve hours before the first outsiders began to arrive. We had already managed to erect a cranelike superstructure above the poured foundation that would support the tau core, and to rig and test all our ancillary equipment. But we weren’t finished.

Sue hovered around the large flatbed truck which contained the core itself, second-guessing the engineers, until Ray and I distracted her with lunch. We choked down mil-surplus meals under a canvas tent while Ray walked us through a checklist. The work was ahead of schedule, which served to calm some of Sue’s fears.

At least briefly. Sue was what the doctors call “agitated.” In fact she gave every indication that she was on the brink of nervous collapse. She moved restlessly and aimlessly, drummed her fingers, blinked, confessed she hadn’t been able to sleep. Even when she was engaged in conversation, her eyes tended to stray toward the concrete core emplacement and the glittering steel tubing of the support structure.

She continued to talk relentlessly about the project. Her immediate fear was that the press might be delayed or the Chronolith arrive prematurely. “It’s not so much what we do here,” she said, “as what we’re seen to do here. We don’t succeed unless the world sees us succeed.”

(And I considered what a slender reed that really was. We had only Sue’s assurance that destroying a Chronolith at the moment of its arrival might tip the balance of this shadow war — might destabilize the feedback loop on which Kuin allegedly depended. But how much of that was calculation, how much wishful thinking? By virtue of her position and her fervent advocacy Sue had been able to carry us all along with her, invested as she was with the authority of her mathematics and her profound understanding of tau turbulence. But that didn’t mean she was necessarily right. Or even, necessarily, sane.)

After lunch we watched as a crew of stevedores and a crane operator lifted the tau core from its crate and hauled it as delicately as if it were compressed dynamite to its resting place. The core was a sphere three meters in diameter, anodized black and studded with electronic ports and cable bays. I gathered from what Sue had told me that it was essentially a magnetic bottle in which some exotic form of cold plasma was already contained. When the core was activated, an array of internal high-energy devices would initiate fermionic decohesion and a few nearly massless particles of tau-indeterminate matter would be created.

This material, Sue claimed, would be sufficient to destabilize the arriving Chronolith attempting to occupy its space. What that meant was still unclear, at least to me. Sue said the interaction of the competing tau spaces would be violent but not “unduly energetic,” i.e., it would probably not wipe out all of Modesty County and us along with it. Probably.

By sunset the core was fixed in place and linked to our electronics through a bundle of lightpipes and conductors jacketed in liquid nitrogen. We still had much to do, but the heavy lifting and digging was essentially finished. The civilians celebrated with grilled flank steaks and generous rations of bottled beer. A bunch of the older engineers gathered by the roadside after dinner, talked about better days and sang old Lux Ebone songs (much to the chagrin of the young Uniforces troops). I joined in on the choruses.

We suffered our first casualty that night.

Isolated we might have been, but there was still occasional traffic on the two-lane county road that had brought us here. We had men north and south along the roadside, soldiers wearing the orange brassards of a highway work crew. They carried glow torches and waved on anyone who seemed more than casually curious about our trucks and gear. The strategy had worked reasonably well so far.

Not long after moonrise, however, a man in a verdigris-green landau cut his motor and lights at the top of the northern rise and rolled silently into the breakdown lane not fifty feet from our lead truck, in the shadows where the glow of the camp lights began to fade.

He stepped out onto the gravel berm with his back to two approaching security personnel, and when he turned he revealed a heavy indeterminate shape that proved to be a pump-action shotgun of ancient provenance. He turned and fired it at the Uniforces men, killing one and permanently blinding the other.

Fortunately the chief of security that night was a bright and well-trained woman named Marybeth Pearlstein, who witnessed the act from a watch station fifty feet up the road. A scant few seconds later she came around the bumper of the nearest truck with her rifle at ready and took down the assailant with one well-placed shot.

The assailant turned out to be a Copperhead crank well known to local police. A County Coroner’s truck pulled up two hours later and took the bodies away; an ambulance carried the survivor into the Modesty County medical center. There might have been an inquest, I suppose, if events had turned out differently.

What I didn’t know—

That is, what I learned later—

Pardon me, but fuck these stupid and impotent words.

Can you hear it, grinding away under the printed page, this outrage disinterred from the soil of too many years?

What I didn’t know was that several of the Texas PK militia — the people Hitch had told me about, the people who had taken two of his fingers — had already followed a trail of clandestine connections as far as the home of Whitman Delahunt.

Whit, it seemed, had kept his colleagues informed of my comings and goings ever since I had traveled to Portillo in search of Kaitlin. Even then, the PK and Copperhead elites had taken an interest in Sue Chopra: as a potent enemy, or worse, a commodity, a potential resource.

I don’t imagine Whit could have foreseen the consequences of his actions. He was, after all, only sharing some interesting information with his Copperhead buddies (who shared it with their friends, and so on down the line from Whit’s suburban universe all the way to the underground militant cadres). In Whit’s world consequences were always remote; rewards were immediate, else they were not rewards. There was nothing genuinely political about Whit Delahunt’s Copperhead leanings. For Whit the movement was a kind of Rotary or Kiwanis, dues paid in the coin of information. I doubt he ever really believed in a physical, substantial Kuin. Had Kuin appeared before him, Whit would have been as dumbfounded as a Sunday Christian confronted by the Carpenter of Galilee.

Which is not, I hasten to add, an excuse.

But I’m sure Whit never envisioned these Texas militiamen knocking at his door well after midnight, entering his home as if it were their own (because he was one of their own) and extracting from him at gunpoint the address of the apartment where Ashlee and I lived.

Janice was present when this invasion took place. She tried to persuade Whit not to answer the invaders’ questions, and when he ignored her she tried to phone the police. For this unsuccessful effort she received a pistol-whipping that broke her jaw and fractured her collarbone. They both would have been killed, I’m sure, if not for Whit’s promise to keep Janice under control — he had nothing to gain by reporting any of this and I’m sure he told himself he was helpless to stop it — and his potential further utility to the movement.

What neither Whit nor Janice could have known was that one of the militiamen had taken a longtime personal interest in the activities of Sue Chopra and Hitch Paley — this was, of course, Adam Mills. Adam had returned to his hometown in a frenzy of antinostalgia, delighted that the threads of his life had knotted back on themselves in such a strange and satisfying fashion. It gave him a sense of destiny, I suppose; a feeling of profound personal significance.

Had he known the phrase, he might have considered himself “deep in the tau turbulence.” Adam had lost two fingertips to frostbite in the aftermath of Portillo — not coincidentally, the same fingertips he later subtracted by machete from Hitch — and this had left him with a feeling of entitlement, as if he had been anointed by Kuin himself.

Kait, thank God, was asleep in the apartment over the garage during these events. There was noise, but not enough to wake her. She wasn’t involved.

At least, not yet.

Sleepless in the aftermath of the roadside shooting, I walked a little while with Ray Mosely on the cluttered ground between the core tower and the quonsets.

Much of the camp had finally settled down, and apart from the muted hum of the generators there was not much noise. In effect, it was possible at last to hear the silence — to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

I had never been close to Ray, but we had grown a little closer over the duration of this trip. When I first met him he was the kind of book-smart, underconfident overachiever who fears nothing so much as his own vulnerability. It had made him defensive and brittle. He was still that person. But he was also the end result of years of compulsive denial, middle-aged now and a little more cognizant of his own shortcomings.

“You’re worried about Sue,” he said.

I wondered whether I ought to talk about this. But we were alone, out of earshot. Nobody here but me and Ray and the jackrabbits.

I said, “She’s obviously under stress. And she’s not dealing with it particularly well.”

“Would you? In her position?”

“Probably not. But it’s the way she talks. You know what I mean. It starts to sound a little relentless. And you begin to wonder—”

“Whether she’s sane?”

“Whether the logic that brought us here is as airtight as she thinks it is.”

Ray seemed to consider this. He put his hands in his pockets and gave me a rueful smile. “You can trust the math.”

“I’m not worried about the math. We’re not here for the math, Ray. We’re ten or fifteen leaps of faith beyond that.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust her.”

“What does that mean? Do I think she’s honest? Yes. Do I think she means well? Of course she means well. But do I trust her judgment? At this point, I’m not sure.”

“You agreed to come here with us.”

“She can be convincing.”

Ray paused and looked out into the darkness, out past the tau core in its steel framework, to the scrub and the moonlit wildgrass and the stars. “Think about what she’s given up, Scott. Think about the life she could have had. She could have been loved.” He smiled wanly. “I know it’s obvious how I feel about her. And I know how ridiculous that is. How fucking clownlike. How stupid. She’s not even heterosexual. But if not me, it could have been someone else. One of those women she’s always dating and ignoring, splicing in and out of her life like a spare reel of film. But she pushed those people away because her work was important, and the harder she worked the more important her work became, and now she’s given herself to it altogether, she belongs to it. Every step she ever took was a step toward this place. Right now I think even Sue must be wondering whether she’s delusional.”

“So we owe her the benefit of the doubt?”

“No,” Ray said. “We owe her more than that. We owe her our loyalty.”

Fond as ever of having the last word, he chose that moment to turn and head back for camp.

I stayed behind, standing mute between the moon and the floodlights. From this distance the tau core seemed a small thing. A very small thing with which to lever such a long result.

When I did sleep I slept soundly and long. I woke at noon under the translucent roof of the inflated quonset, alone but for a few off-shift security staff and exhausted night crew.

No one had thought to wake me. Everyone had been too busy.

I stepped out of the shade of the quonset into blistering sunlight. The sky was viciously bright, a thin blue veneer between the prairie and the sun. But it was the noise that struck me more immediately. If you’ve ever been near a sports stadium on the day of a game you know that sound, the rumble of massed human voices.

I found Hitch Paley by the food tent.

“More press than we bargained for, Scotty,” he said. “There’s a whole mob of them blocking the road. We got Highway Patrol trying to clear them off the tarmac. You know we’ve already been denounced in Congress? People covering their asses in case we don’t bring this off.”

“You think we have a chance?”

“Maybe. If they give us time.”

But no one wanted to give us time. The Kuinist militias were arriving by the truckload, and by the following morning the shooting had begun in earnest.

Twenty-four

I know what the future smells like.

The future, that is, imposed on the past; past and future mingled like two innocuous substances which when combined produce a toxin. The future smells like alkaline dust and ionized air, like hot metal and glacier ice. And not a little like cordite.

The night had been relatively quiet. Today, the day of the arrival, I woke from a round of exhausted sleep to the sound of sporadic gunfire — not close enough to inspire immediate panic; close enough that I dressed in a hurry.

Hitch was back at the food tent, complacently eating cold baked beans from a paper bowl. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s under control.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

He stretched and yawned. “What you hear is a bunch of Kuinists south along the road having words with security. Some of them are armed but all they want to do is shoot into the air and shake their fists. Basically, they’re spectators. What we also have is an equal number of journalists trying to get closer than the perimeter fences. The Uniforces are sorting them out. Sue wants them close to the arrival but not, you know, too close.”

“So how close is too close?”

“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? The wonks and the engineers are all clustered down by the bunker. The press people are setting up a little farther east.”

The bunker, so-called, was a trench emplacement with a wooden roof, located a mile from the core, where Sue had set up gear to monitor and initiate the tau event. The trench was equipped with heaters to provide at least a little protection against the cold shock, and in a worst-case scenario the bunker was defensible against small-arms fire.

The core itself remained almost preposterously vulnerable, but the Uniforces people had pledged to protect it as long as they could keep our perimeters intact. The good news was that this ragtag crew of Kuinists down the road did not (Hitch said) constitute anything like a superior force.

“We may just pull this off, Scotty,” he said. “Given a little luck.”

“How’s Sue?”

“I haven’t seen her since sunrise, but — how is she? Wound up, is how she is. It wouldn’t surprise me if she blew an artery.” He looked at me oddly. “Tell me something. How well do you know her?”

“I’ve known her since I was a student.”

“Yeah, but how well? I’ve worked for her a long time, too, but I can’t honestly say I know her. She talks about her work — and that’s all she talks about, at least to me. Is she ever lonely, afraid, angry?”

This was an incongruous conversation to be having, it seemed to me, with the sound of rifle fire still popping down the road. “What’s your point?”

“We don’t know anything about her, but here we are, doing what she tells us. Which strikes me as peculiar, when I think about it.”

It struck me as peculiar, too, at least at that moment. What was I doing here? Nothing but risking my life, certainly nothing useful. But that wasn’t what Sue would say. You’re waiting for your time, she would say. Waiting for the turbulence.

I thought of what Hitch had told me in Minneapolis, his flat declaration that he had killed people. “How well do any of us know each other?”

“It’s cooler this morning,” Hitch said. “Even in the sun. You notice that?”

It was some days before this that Adam Mills had arrived at his mother’s door along with five thuggish friends and an assortment of concealed weapons.

I won’t dwell on this.

Adam, of course, was psychotic. Clinically psychotic, I mean. All the markers were there. He was antisocial, a bully and, in a certain perverse way, a natural leader. His mental universe was a cluttered attic of secondhand ideology and blatant fantasy, all centered on Kuin or whatever it was he imagined Kuin to be. He had never formed the natural human attachment to family or friends. He was by all evidence absent a conscience.

Ashlee, in her darker moods, would blame herself for what Adam had become; but Adam was a product of his brain chemistry, not his upbringing. A genome profile and some simple blood tests would have flagged his problem at an early age. He might even have been treatable, to some limited extent. But Ash had never had the money for that kind of up-market medical intervention.

I cannot imagine, and I do not wish to imagine, what Ashlee endured in her few hours with Adam. At the end of it she had revealed the location of the arrival site in Wyoming and the fact that I was there along with Hitch Paley and Sue Chopra — and the key fact, which was that we expected to disable a Chronolith.

She is not to be blamed for this.

The result was that Adam had reliable information about the Kuin stone and our efforts to destroy it a good forty-eight hours before the news reached the press.

Adam promptly headed west, but he left two of his followers behind to prevent Ashlee from making any inconvenient calls. He could have simply killed her, but he elected instead to keep her in reserve, possibly as a hostage.

Bad as this was, it was not the worst of it.

The worst of it was that Kaitlin came to the apartment not long after Adam left, still ignorant of what had happened to Janice and expecting to join Ashlee for a leisurely lunch and maybe a movie in the evening.

The statistical measurement of low-level ambient radiation had been refined since Jerusalem and Portillo. Sue’s people were able to establish a much more accurate countdown for this arrival. But we didn’t need a countdown to feel it in the air.

Here’s how it stood when I climbed out of the bunker for a last breath of fresh air, some twenty minutes before the core was due to be activated.

There had been more gunfire south along the highway and sporadically at various points along the perimeter fence. So far, local and state police had managed to contain the Kuinists — there was a lot of anti-Kuinist sentiment in Wyoming since the storming of the State House, not least among civil servants and police. One Uniforces soldier had been injured by an Omega militiaman attempting to run the fence in an ATV, and four armed Kuinists of unknown affiliation had been shot to death in an effort to storm the northern checkpoint earlier this afternoon. Since then there had been only gestures and scattered arrests… although the crowd was still growing.

Sue had allowed a body of journalists to set up recording equipment well behind the bunker, and I was able to see them from where I stood, a line of trucks and tripods about a football field’s length to the east. There were dozens of these people, most diverted here from Cheyenne, and they represented all the major news providers and not a few of the more respectable independents. As many of them as there were, they seemed lost in the brown vastness of the land. A second contingent of independent journalists had set up their gear on the bluff above the site, a little closer than Sue would have liked, but our media liaison called these folks “very dedicated and insistent” — that is, stubborn and stupid. I could see their cameras, too, bristling above the rim rock.

Many of our machine operators and manual laborers had already left the site. The remaining civilian engineers and scientific crew were either crowded into the bunker now or watching from behind the line of journalists.

The tau core was suspended in its steel frame over the concrete pad like a fat black egg. A plume of dust in the near distance was Hitch Paley, bringing the last van of our original convoy up the graded access road from the highway to park it near the bunker. All these vehicles had been cold-proofed against the arrival.

Also obvious was the tau chill, the premonitory coolness of the air — and not just of the air but of everything, earth and flesh, blood and bone. We had lost only a fraction of a centigrade degree at this stage. The cold shock was just beginning to ramp up, but it was already perceptible, a delicate prickling of the skin.

I took out my phone and made yet another attempt to reach Ashlee. The call failed to go through, just as all my calls had failed to go through for most of a week now. Sometimes there was a general failure message from the system, sometimes (as now) only a blank screen and a whisper of distorted audio. I put the phone away.

I was surprised when Sue Chopra opened the steel bunker door and stepped out behind me. Her face was wan and she was visibly trembling. She shaded her eyes against the sun.

I said, “Shouldn’t you be down below?”

“It’s all clockwork now,” she said. “It runs itself.”

She stumbled over a mesquite root and I took her arm. Her arm was cold.

“Scotty,” she said, as if recognizing me for the first time.

“Take a deep breath,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Just tired. And I didn’t eat.” She shook her head quizzically. “The question that keeps coming to mind… did something bring me here? Or did I bring myself? That’s the strange thing about tau turbulence. It gives us a destiny. But it’s a destiny without a god. Destiny with no one in charge.”

“Unless it’s Kuin.”

She frowned. “Oh, no, Scotty. Don’t say that.”

“Not long now. How’s it look downstairs?”

“Like I said. Clockwork. Good, solid numbers. You’re right, I need to go back… but will you come with me?”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

Wispy smoke issued from the Uniforces observation point there.

“The journalists,” she whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the militiamen had brought more than rifles.

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

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

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

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

And then — the arrival.

The Chronolith reached deep into the bedrock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sue put her head on my shoulder.

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

“We’ll think about that later.”

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

“Hush.”

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

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

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

Twenty-five

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You, too,” Hitch said.

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

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

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

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

The Kuin was — well, it beggars description.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitch turned back.

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

“The fuck?” Hitch said.

“A sextant!”

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

“What?”

“Taking measurements.”

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

I picked her notebook out of the icy mud.

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

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

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

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

And with nothing left to do, the sun setting beyond the now-distant but still dominating figure of Kuin and a brisk wind combing the wild grass, we huddled in the vehicle and tried to sleep. We didn’t have to try very hard. We were all exhausted. Even Sue slept, though she had revived quickly from her faint and had been alert enough on the drive east.

She slept through the night and was up at dawn.

Come morning, Hitch opened the van’s engine compartment and ran the resident diagnostics. Ray Mosely blinked at the noise but then rolled back to sleep.

I woke hungry, remained hungry (we had only emergency rations), and walked past the paint-scabbed wall of the shed to the place on the grassland where Sue had once again unfolded our tripod and sextant.

The surveyor’s tool was aimed at the distant Chronolith. Sue had opened a top map and laid it at her feet, the corners weighted with rocks. A brisk wind tousled her coiled hair. Her clothes were dirty and her enormous eyeglasses smudged; but, incredibly, she managed to smile when she noticed me.

“Morning, Scotty,” she said.

The Chronolith was an icy pillar silhouetted against the haze-blue horizon. It drew the eye the way any incongruous or shocking thing does. The Kuin of Wyoming gazed eastward from his pedestal, almost directly at us.

Aimed at us, I thought, like an arrow.

I said, trying to restrain the irony, “Are you learning anything?”

“A lot.” She faced me. Her smile was peculiar. Happy-sad. Her eyes were wide and wet. “Too much. Way too much.”

“Sue—”

“No, don’t say anything practical. May I ask you a question?”

I shrugged.

“If you were packing for a trip to the future, Scotty, what would you take?”

“What would I take? I don’t know. What would you take?”

“I would take… a secret. Can you keep a secret?”

It was an unsettling question. It was something my mother used to ask me when she began to bend into insanity. She would hover over me like a malign shadow and say, “Can you keep a secret, Scotty?”

The secret was inevitably some paranoid assertion: that cats could read her mind; that my father was an impostor; that the government was trying to poison her.

“Come on, Scotty,” Sue said, “don’t look at me like that.”

“If you tell me,” I said, “it’s not a secret anymore.”

“Well, that’s true. But I have to tell someone. I can’t tell Ray, because Ray is in love with me. And I can’t tell Hitch, because Hitch doesn’t love anyone at all.”

“That’s cryptic.”

“Yes. I can’t help it.” She glanced at the far blue pillar of the Kuin. “We may not have much time.”

“Time for what?”

“I mean, it won’t last. The Chronolith. It isn’t stable. It’s too massive. Look at it, Scotty. See the way it’s sort of quivering?”

“That’s heat coming off the prairie. It’s an optical illusion.”

“In part. Not entirely. I’ve run the numbers over and over. The numbers that pegged back at the bunker. These numbers.” Her notebook. “I triangulated its height and its radius, at least roughly. And no matter how stingy I am with the estimates, it comes up past the limit.”

“The limit?”

“Remember? If a Chronolith is too massive, it’s unstable — if I could have published the work they might have called it the Chopra Limit.” Her peculiar smile faded and she looked away. “I may be too vain for the work I have to do. I can’t let that happen. I have to be humble, Scotty. Because I will, God knows, be humbled.”

“You’re saying you think the Chronolith will destroy itself.”

“Yes. Within the day.”

“That would hardly be a secret.”

“No, of course, but the cause of it will be. The Chopra Limit is my work. I haven’t shared it with anyone, and I doubt anyone else is doing triangulation. The Kuin won’t last long enough for accurate measurement.”

This was making me nervous. “Sue, even if this is all true, people will know—”

“Know what? All anyone will know is that the Chronolith was destroyed and that we were here trying to destroy it. They’ll draw the obvious conclusion. That we succeeded, if a little belatedly. The truth will be our secret.”

“Why a secret?”

“Because I mustn’t tell, Scotty, and neither must you. We have to carry this secret at least twenty years and three months into the future or else it won’t work.”

“Dammit, Sue — what won’t work?”

She blinked. “Poor Scotty. You’re confused. Let me explain.”

I couldn’t follow every detail of her explanation, but this is what I came away with.

We had not been defeated.

Plenty of press folks were doubtless still reporting the arrival, and they would also witness — in a matter of hours if not minutes — the spectacular collapse of the Chronolith. That broadcast image would (Sue claimed) interrupt the feedback loop and shatter Kuin’s aura of invincibility. Win or lose, Kuin would no longer be destiny. He would be reduced to the status of an enemy.

And the world must think we had succeeded; the Chopra Limit must remain a closely-held secret…

Because, Sue believed, it was not a coincidence that this Chronolith had surpassed the physical limit of stability.

It was, she declared, quite obviously an act of sabotage.

Contemplate that: the sabotage of a Chronolith, by design. Who would commit such an act? Clearly, an insider. Clearly, someone who understood not only the crude physics of the Chronoliths but their finest nuances. Someone who understood the physical limits and knew how to push them.

“That arrow,” Sue said almost sheepishly, shocked at the temerity of her words and not a little frightened: “That arrow is pointing at me.”

Of course it was madness.

It was megalomania, self-aggrandizing and self-abnegating, both at once. Sue had elevated herself to the rank of Shiva. Creator, destroyer.

But a part of me wanted it to be true.

I think I wanted an end to the long and disruptive drama of the Chronoliths — not just for my sake but for Ashlee’s, for Kaitlin’s.

And I wanted to trust Sue. After a lifetime of doubt, I think I needed to trust her.

I needed her madness to be, miraculously, divine.

Hitch was still working on the van when the twelve motorcycles came down the access road in a billow of gray dust. They came from the direction of the Chronolith.

Sue and I scurried back to the shed as soon as we spotted them. By that time Ray had alerted Hitch. Hitch had come out from under the engine block and was loading and passing out our four handguns.

I took one of these gratefully, but just as quickly disliked the way it felt in my hand — cold and faintly greasy. More than the sight of the approaching strangers, who were almost certainly Kuinists but could have been anyone, it was the pistol that made me feel afraid. A weapon is supposed to boost your confidence, but in my case it only served to emphasize how vulnerable we were, how desperately alone.

Ray Mosely tucked his gun under his belt and began frantically thumbing his pocket phone. But we hadn’t been able to get a call out for days and he wasn’t having any better luck now. The attempt seemed almost reflexive and somehow pitiable.

Hitch held out a gun for Sue, but she pressed her hands to her sides. “No, thank you,” she said.

“Don’t be stupid.”

I was able to hear the motorcycle engines now, the sound of locusts, a plague descending.

“Keep it,” she said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d probably shoot the wrong person.”

She looked at me when she said this, and I was inexplicably reminded of the young girl in Jerusalem who had thanked Sue just before she died. Her eyes, her voice, had conveyed this same cryptic urgency.

“We don’t have time to argue.”

Hitch had taken charge. He was alert and focused, frowning like a chess player facing a skilled opponent. The concrete-block shed possessed a single door and three narrow windows — an easy space to defend but a potential death trap if we were overwhelmed. But the van wouldn’t have been any safer.

“Maybe they don’t know we’re here,” Ray volunteered. “Maybe they’ll ride on past.”

“Maybe,” Hitch said, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”

Ray put a hand on the butt of his pistol. He looked at the door, at Hitch, at the door, as if trying to work out some perplexing mathematical question.

“Scotty,” Sue said, “I’m depending on you.”

But I didn’t know what she meant.

“They’re slowing down,” Hitch said.

“Maybe they’re not Kuinists,” Ray said.

“Maybe they’re nuns on a day trip. But don’t count on it.”

Their disadvantage was, they had no cover.

The land here was flat and grown over with sage-grass. Clearly aware of their vulnerability, the bikers came to an idling stop a distance from the shed, out of easy range.

Watching through the gap in the cinderblocks that passed as a west-facing window, what struck me was the incongruity of all this. The day was fine and cool, the sky as cloudless as crystal. Even the perhaps unstable Chronolith seemed fixed and placid on the horizon. The small sound of sparrows and crickets hung in the air. And yet here were a dozen armed men straddling the road and no help for many miles.

One of the bikers put his helmet in his hand, shook out a flourish of dirty blond hair, and began walking almost lazily down the dirt track toward us.

And:

“I’ll be flicked,” Hitch said, “if that isn’t Adam Mills.”

We were deep in the tau turbulence, I guess Sue might have said; in that place where the arrow of time turns on itself and turns again, that place where there are no coincidences.

“We just want the lady,” Adam Mills called from a short distance down the road.

His voice was harsh and high-pitched. It was in some ways almost a parody of Ashlee’s voice. Bereft, that is, of all warmth and subtlety.

(“We have some strange history behind us,” Ash had once said. “Your crazy mother. My crazy son.”)

“What lady would that be?” Hitch called back.

“Sulamith Chopra.”

“I’m the only one here.”

“I believe I recognize that voice. Mr. Paley, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve heard that voice. Last time, I think you were screaming.”

Hitch declined to answer, but I saw him clench the fingers — what remained of them — of his left hand.

“Just send her out and we’ll be away from here. Can you hear me, Ms. Chopra? We don’t mean to harm you.”

“Shoot him,” Ray whispered, “just shoot the fucker.”

“Ray, if I shoot him, they’ll just put a rocket in this window. Of course, they might do that anyhow.”

“It’s all right,” Sue said suddenly and calmly. “None of this is necessary. I’ll go.”

Which surprised Hitch and Ray, if not me. Some sense of her intention had begun to dawn.

Hitch said, “Now that’s just fucking ridiculous. You have no idea — these people are mercenaries. Worse, they have a pipeline straight to Asia. They’d be happy to sell you into the hands of some would-be Kuin. You’re merchandise, as far as they’re concerned.”

“I know that, Hitch.”

“High-priced merchandise, and for a good reason. You really want to hand over everything you know to some Chinese warlord? I’d shoot you myself if I thought you’d do that.”

Sue was as placid now, at least superficially, as a martyr in a medieval painting. “But that’s exactly what I have to do.”

Hitch looked away. His head was silhouetted in the window. Had it occurred to him to do so, Adam Mills could have taken him out with a well-placed head shot.

Ray, horrified, said, “Sue, no,” and the tableau was sustained for a fragile moment: Hitch gap-jawed, Ray on the brink of panic. Sue gave me a very quick and meaningful look.

Our secret, Scotty. Keep our secret.

Hitch said, “You mean that.”

“Yes, I do.”

He turned his weapon away from the window.

The building in which we were trapped had probably been erected during one or another of the state’s cyclical oil booms, perhaps to keep prospecting gear out of the rain — not that it seemed to rain much here. The concrete floor was adrift with everything that had blown through the open door frame in fifty or seventy-five years: dust, sand, vegetable matter, the desiccated remains of snakes and birds.

Hitch stood at the west wall where the cinderblocks were water-stained and eroded. Sue and Ray were together in the northwest corner, and I stood across from Hitch at the eastern wall.

The light was dim, despite the brightness of the day, and the air a little cooler than the dry air of the prairie, though that would change as sun began to bake the tin roof. Cross drafts stirred up dust and the scent of ancient decay.

I remember all this vividly. And the sagging wooden roof beams, and the angled sunlight through the empty window, and the dry sagebrush clustered just beyond the doorway, and the glint of sweat on Hitch Paley’s forehead as he aimed his pistol — but only tentatively — at Sue.

Sue was pale. A vein pulsed in her throat, but she remained quiet.

“Point that fucking gun away,” Ray said.

Ray, in his tangled beard and sweat-stained T-shirt, looked like a middle-aged academic gone feral. His eyes were just that wild. But there was something admirable in this strained declaration of defiance, a fierce if fragile courage.

“I’m serious,” Hitch said. “She does not go out that door.”

“I have to go,” Sue said. “I’m sorry, Ray, but—”

She had taken a single step when Ray slammed her back into the corner, restraining her with his body. “Nobody’s going anywhere!”

“You going to sit on her till doomsday?” Hitch asked.

“Put your gun down!”

“I can’t do that. Ray, you know I can’t do that.”

And now Ray lifted his own weapon. “Stop threatening her or I’ll—”

But this was beyond the bounds of Hitch Paley’s patience.

Let me say, in defense of Hitch, that he knew Adam Mills. He knew what was waiting for us out there in the relentless sunlight. He was not about to surrender Sue and I think he would have died rather than surrender himself.

He shot Ray in the right shoulder — at this proximity, a killing wound.

I believe I heard the bullet pass through Ray and strike the stone wall behind him, a sound like a hammerblow on granite. Or it might have been the echo of the gunshot itself, deafening in this enclosed space. Dust rose up around us. I was frozen in my own incredulity.

There was a cough of answering shots from outside and a bullet chinked the cinderblocks near the western window. Sue, suddenly pinned behind the weight of Ray’s body, gasped and pushed him aside. She whispered, “Oh, Ray! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

Tears stood in her eyes. There was blood on her tattered yellow blouse and blood on the wall behind her.

Ray wasn’t breathing. The wound or the shock had stopped his heart. A blood-bubble formed on his lips and sat there, inert.

He had loved Sue hopelessly and selflessly for many years. But once she had stepped across his motionless legs Sue didn’t look back.

She walked toward the door — staggered, but didn’t fall.

The air stank of blood and cordite. Outside, Adam Mills was shouting something, but I couldn’t make out the words over the ringing in my ears.

The Kuin of Wyoming watched all this from the western horizon. I could see the monument framed in the window behind Hitch, blue on blue, drowsy in the rising heat.

“Stop,” Hitch said bluntly.

Sue shuddered at the sound of his voice but took another step.

“I won’t warn you again. You know I won’t.”

And I heard myself say, “No, Hitch, let her go.”

Our secret, Sue had said.

And: It isn’t a secret if you tell someone.

So why had she shared it with me?

At that moment, I thought I knew.

The understanding was bitter and awful.

Sue took yet another step toward the door.

In the sunlight beyond her a swallow rose out of the dry grass, suspended in the air like a piano note.

“Keep out of it,” Hitch told me.

But I was more familiar with handguns now than I had been at Portillo.

When Hitch saw my pistol aimed at him, he said, “This is fucking insane.”

“She needs to do this.”

Hitch kept his own gun trained on Sue. Sue nodded and approached the door as if each step drew down a failing reserve of strength and courage. “Thank you, Scotty,” she whispered.

“I will shoot you,” Hitch said, “if you do not stop where you are.”

“No,” I said, “you won’t.”

He growled — it was precisely that sound, like a cornered animal. “Scotty, you cowardly fuck, I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to. Put your weapon down and you, Sue, I said stop right there.”

Sue hunched her shoulders as if against the impact of a bullet, but she was already in the frame of the door. She took another step.

For a moment Hitch’s weapon wavered — toward me, toward Sue. Then, suddenly resolute, he took aim at her back, the arch of her spine, her big bowed head.

He began — and I know how absurd it seems, to claim to have witnessed this, but in the overweening stillness of the moment, in the shadow of this bright benevolent afternoon and all of us balanced on the fulcrum of time, I swear I saw his meaty, dark finger begin to close on the trigger of the gun.

But I was faster.

The recoil threw back my hand.

Did I kill Hitch Paley?

I’m not an objective witness. I’m testifying in my own defense. But I am, finally, here at the end of my life, honest. I have no more secrets to keep.

The gun recoiled. The bullet was in the air, at least, and then—

And then everything was in the air.

Brick, mortar, wood, tin, the dust of ages. My own body, a projectile. Hitch, and the corpse of Ray Mosely. Ray, who had loved Sue far too much to allow her to do what she had to do; and Hitch, who did not love anyone at all.

Did I see (people have asked me) the destruction of the Chronolith? Was I a witness to the fiery collapse of the Kuin of Wyoming? Did I see the bright light and did I feel the heat?

No. But when I opened my eyes again pieces of the Chronolith were falling from the sky, falling all around me. Pieces the size of pebbles, rendered now as conventional matter and fused by the heat of their extinction into glassy blue teardrops.

Twenty-six

In the great release of energy as the Chronolith collapsed, a shockwave swept outward from its perimeter — more wind than heat, but a great deal of heat; more heat than light, but it had been bright enough to blind.

The cinderblock shelter lost its roof and its northern and western walls. I was blown free of it and woke a few yards from the standing fragments.

For some period of time I was not quite coherent or fully conscious. My first thought was for Sue, but Sue was nowhere visible. Gone as well was Adam Mills, and so were his men and their motorcycles, though I did find (later) one overturned Daimler motorbike abandoned in the scrub, its fuel tank cracked, and a single helmet, and a tattered copy of The Fifth Horseman.

Do I believe Sue gave herself up to the Kuinists in the aftermath of the explosion? Yes, I do. The shockwave would likely not have been deadly to anyone in the open. It was the collapse of the stone shed that had caused my concussion and dislocated my shoulder, not the shockwave itself. Sue had been in the doorway, which was still standing.

I found Hitch and Ray partially buried in the nibble, plainly dead.

I spent a few hours trying to dig them out, working with my good hand, until it became obvious that the effort was futile as well as exhausting. Then I rescued some dried rations from the overturned van and ate a little, choking over the food but keeping at least some of it down.

When I tried my phone there was only a clatter of noise, a distorted “no signal” message drifting across the screen as if through an obscuring tide.

The sun went down. The sky turned indigo and then dark. On the western horizon, where the Chronolith had been, brushfires burned brightly.

I turned and walked the other way.

Twenty-seven

Lately I have visited two significant places: the Wyoming Crater and the Shipworks at Boca Raton. One a lake polluted with memory, the other a gateway to a greater sea.

And I thought—

But no, I’ll get to that.

Ashlee had been released from the hospital by the time I made it back to Minneapolis.

I had been in the hospital myself, or at least a little overnight emergency-care clinic in Pine Ridge. Three days wandering with a head injury in the Wyoming backlands had left me sunburned, hungry, and too weak to climb stairs at any speed. My left arm was in a sling.

Ashlee was less fortunate.

She had warned me, of course, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found when I let myself into the apartment and she called my name from the bedroom.

The hurt to her body — the burns, the contusions — were invisible under the snowy white linen of the bed. But I winced at the sight of her face.

I won’t catalog the damage. I reminded myself that it would heal, that the blood pooled in these bruises would fade away, that the broken skin would mend around the sutures and that one day soon she would be able to open her eyes all the way.

She looked at me through purple slits. “That bad?” she said.

Some of her teeth were missing.

“Ashlee,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

She kissed me, wounded as she was, and I held her gently, despite my damaged arm.

She began to apologize in return. She had been worried that I wouldn’t forgive her for having finally broken and told Adam Mills where to find me. God knows I wanted to apologize for having left her to this.

But I put my finger, delicately, delicately, against her swollen lips. Why dignify the horror with recrimination? We had survived. We were together. That was enough.

What I had not known — what I learned after I finally contacted Ashlee — was that Morris Torrance hadn’t abandoned his post outside the apartment.

Adam Mills had identified Morris as a guard and had taken his men into the building through a rear entrance to avoid alerting him. Morris called Ash shortly before Adam arrived, placing her in the apartment, and he had seen no suspicious activity since then. He logged off after midnight and drove back to the Marriott for a few hours of sleep. He wore a tag alert in case Ashlee needed him in the interim. He received no such alarm. In the morning he called Ash again but couldn’t get past her screen routine. He promptly drove to the apartment, not long after Kaitlin had arrived there, and unsuccessfully attempted another call. Deeply concerned now, Morris buzzed Ashlee from the lobby.

She answered the buzzer belatedly and her voice was slurred. Morris told Ashlee he was from a package delivery service and he needed her to sign his slate.

Ash, who must have recognized his voice, told him she couldn’t come to the door right now and asked whether it would be all right if he came back another time.

He told her could come back but that the package was labeled “perishable.”

Didn’t matter, Ashlee said.

Morris then stepped out of camera range, phoned the local police and reported an assault in progress, and let himself into the lobby with the key I had given him. He identified himself (incorrectly and illegally) as a federal agent to the superintendent of the building and obtained a master key to the apartment.

He knew how long it might take for a police response and he elected not to wait. He rode the elevator to our floor, placed another call to the apartment so that the ringing of the phone would mask the sound of the key in the lock, and entered the apartment with his gun drawn. He was, as he had so often told me, a retired agent without field experience. But he had been trained and he had not forgotten his training.

Kaitlin, at this point, was locked in a bedroom closet and Ashlee was sprawled on the sofa where she had been left after a beating.

Without hesitation Morris shot the man who was standing over Ash, then turned his gun on the second Kuinist who had just stepped out of the kitchen.

The second man dropped a bottle of beer at the sound of the shot and drew his own gun. He took Morris off his feet with one shot but Morris was able to return fire after he had fallen. The dining-room table gave him a little cover. He placed two bullets in the assailant’s head and neck.

Wounded in the leg — the bullet had carved a divot in his thigh, just like the bullet Sue Chopra took in Jerusalem — Morris was nevertheless able to comfort Ashlee and to release Kaitlin from the locked closet before he fainted.

Kait — who was mobile but had been beaten and raped — put a pressure bandage on the wound before the police arrived. Ashlee rose from the sofa and loped to the bathroom.

She soaked a cloth in water and daubed the blood from Morris’s face, and then Kaitlin’s, and then her own.

“It was foolhardy,” Morris said when I went to the hospital to thank him.

“It was the right thing to do.”

He shrugged. “Well, yeah, I think so too.” He was in a wheelchair, his damaged leg suspended in front of him, swathed in regenerative gels and wrapped in a cast. “They ought to hang a red flag on this,” he said.

“I owe you more than I can ever repay.”

“Don’t get sentimental, Scotty.” But he seemed a little teary himself. “Ashlee’s all right?”

“Improving,” I said.

“Kaitlin?”

“It’s hard to say. They’re bringing David home from Little Rock.”

He nodded. We sat silently for a time.

Then he said, “I saw it on the news. The Wyoming stone coming down. Took a while, but Sue got what she wanted, right?”

“She got what she wanted.”

“Shame about Hitch and Ray.”

I agreed.

“And Sue.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Hard to believe she’s really gone.”

“Believe it,” I said.

Because a secret isn’t a secret if you share it.

“You know I’m an old-fashioned Christian, Scotty. I’m not sure exactly what Sue believed in, unless it was that Hindu Shiva bullshit. But she was a good person, wasn’t she?”

“The best.”

“Right. Well. I couldn’t figure out why she asked me to stay here and took you to Wyoming with her. No offense, but that really bothered me. But I guess I served a purpose here.”

“That you did, my friend.”

“You think she had that in mind all along? I mean, she did have a thing for the future.”

“I think she knew us both pretty well.”

She took me, I thought, because Morris wouldn’t have served in my place. He would never have let her walk into the jaws of the wolf. He would certainly not have killed Hitch Paley.

Morris was a good man.

Twenty-eight

Lately I have visited two significant places.

Traveling isn’t easy for me these days. Medication keeps my various geriatric complaints under control — I’m healthier at seventy than my father was at fifty — but age breeds its own weariness. We are buckets of grief, I think, and eventually we fill to brimming.

I went alone to Wyoming.

The Wyoming Crater today is a minor, if unique, war memorial. For most Americans Wyoming was only the beginning of the twenty-year War of the Chronoliths. For that generation, Kait and David’s generation, the memorable battles were the Persian Gulf, Canberra, First Beijing, Canton Province. After all… no one much died at Wyoming.

No one much.

The crater is fenced and managed as a national monument now. Tourists can climb to a platform at the summit of the bluff and gaze down on the ruins from a distance. But I wanted to get closer than that. I felt entitled.

The Parks Service guard at the main entrance told me that would be impossible, until I explained that I’d been here in 2039 and showed him the scar that runs up from my left ear to my receding hairline. The guard was a veteran — armored cav, Canton, the bloody winter of 2050. He told me to stick around until the visitors’ center closed at five; then he’d see what he could do.

What he did was allow me to ride with him on the evening security inspection. We took a golf-cart-sized vehicle down a steep path and parked at the rim of the crater. The guard scrolled a newspaper and pretended not to keep an eye on me while I wandered a few minutes in the long shadows.

There had been almost an inch of rain this May. The shallow crater cupped a tiny brown pond at the bottom of it, and sagebrush bloomed along the rilled, eroded walls.

Some few fragments of the Kuin stone remained intact.

These had also eroded. Tau instability, the unraveling of complex Calabi-Yau knots, had rendered the final substance of the Chronolith as a simple fused silicate: gritty blue glass, nearly as fragile as sandstone.

There had been airstrikes here during the Western Secession, when American Kuinists had controlled these parts. The militias had claimed the state during the darkest hours of the War, had presumably (though there were no surviving witnesses) attempted to revise history by rebuilding and rebroadcasting the enormous Kuin of Wyoming. But they had been ill-advised. By someone. Someone who had convinced them to push the stability envelope past its limit.

History does not record the name of this benefactor.

A secret is a secret.

But, as Sue was also fond of saying, there is no such thing as a coincidence.

I stood for a time by a fragment of the Kuin’s head, a weathered piece of his brow and one intact eye. The pupil of the eye was a concave depression as wide as a truck tire. Dust and rain had accumulated in the bowl of it and a wild thistle had sprouted there.

The Chronoliths have proven as impervious to history as they are to logic. The act of creating such a device is so fraught with tau turbulence and outright paradox — cause and effect so tightly entangled — that no single narrative has emerged. The past (Ray’s “Minkowski ice,” I suppose) is immutable but its structure has been finely fractured, layers compressed and upturned, in places rendered chaotic and uninterpretable.

The stone was cold to the touch.

I cannot truthfully say that I prayed. I don’t know how to pray. But I pronounced a few names in the privacy of my mind, words addressed to the tau turbulence, if anything remains of it. Sue’s name, among others. I thanked her.

Then I begged the dead to forgive me.

The park guard eventually grew impatient. He escorted me back to the cart as the sun touched the horizon. “Guess you have some stories to tell,” he said.

A few. And a few I haven’t told. Until now.

Was there ever a single, substantial Kuin — a human Kuin, I mean?

If so, he remains an elusive figure, overshadowed by the armies who fought in his name and invented his ideology. There surely must have been an original Kuin, but I suspect he was overthrown by any number of successors. Perhaps, as Sue had speculated, each Chronolith required its own Kuin. “Kuin” became little more than a name for the vacuum at the heart of the whirlwind. The king is unborn; long live the king.

After Ashlee’s death late last year I was obliged to sort through her belongings. Deep in a box of ancient papers (expired ration coupons, tax forms, yellowed past-due notices from utility companies) I found Adam Mills’ birth certificate. The only striking thing about this was that Adam’s middle name happened to be Quinn, and that Ashlee had never mentioned it to me.

But this is, I think, at last, a genuine coincidence. At least, that’s what I prefer to believe. I’m old enough now to believe what I choose. To believe what I can bear to believe.

Kait left David at home and joined me at Boca Raton that summer, an unplanned vacation. We hadn’t seen each other since Ashlee’s funeral in December. I had come to Boca Raton on a whim: I wanted to see the Shipworks while I was still able to travel.

Nowadays everyone talks about the postwar recovery. We’re like terminal patients granted a miracle cure. Sunshine seems sunnier, the world (such as it is) is our oyster, and the future is infinitely bright. Inevitably, we will all be disappointed. But not, I hope, too badly.

And there are some things of which we are quite reasonably proud — the National Shipworks, for instance.

I remember, around the time of the Portillo arrival, Sue Chopra insisting that the technology of Calabi-Yau manipulation would yield a host of more enduring wonders than the Chronoliths. (“I mean, star travel, Scotty: that’s a real possibility!”) And Sue, as usual, had been right. She had an acute sense of the future.

Kait and I walked slowly up a long promenade to the observation level overlooking the launching bays, a vast half-moon-shaped structure walled with reinforced glass.

Kait took my arm — I need a little help on long walks. We talked some, but not about the large issues of our lives. This was a vacation.

So many things had changed. Foremost, of course, I had lost Ashlee. Ash had died of an unsuspected aneurysm late last year, and I was a widower now. But we had enjoyed many good years together despite the wartime privation and the financial crises. I miss her constantly, but I did not discuss this with Kaitlin. Nor did we discuss Kait’s mother, retired and living relatively comfortably in Washington State; or Whit Delahunt, who was spending his declining years in a federal project outside St. Paul, serving a twenty-year home incarceration and community service sentence for sedition. All this was past.

Today we believed in the possibility of a future.

The observation deck was crowded with children, a school field trip come to witness the latest unmanned launch. The probe stood in its launch cradle a half mile away like a blue jewel, a sculpted glacier. “Time is space,” the tour guide was saying. “If we can control one, we can control the other.”

Sue might have quibbled with the word “control.” But the kids didn’t care about that. They had come for a spectacle, not a lecture. They talked and shifted restlessly from foot to foot; they pressed their hands (and some their noses) against the glass.

“They’re not afraid,” Kaitlin marveled.

Nor were they startled — at least not much — when the Tau Ceti probe rose as if by slow magic from its bay and glided noiselessly upward. They were impressed, I think, to see so massive an object lofted like a balloon into the cloudless Florida sky. A perceptive few might have been awed. But no, they were not afraid.

They know so little of the past.

I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable.

Which is as it should he. You can’t stop time. Sue taught me that (and Ashlee, in her own way). You can give yourself to time. Or be taken by it.

It’s not as hard a truth as it sounds — not on a clean bright day like this.

“Are you all right?” Kaitlin asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little breathless.” We had walked a long way, and the day was warm.