In the grand tradition of federal employment, I waited three weeks while nothing happened. Sulamith Chopra’s employers put me up in a motel room and left me there. My calls to Sue were routed through a functionary named Morris Torrance, who advised me to be patient. Room service was free, but man was not meant to live by room service alone. I didn’t want to give up my Minneapolis apartment until I had signed something permanent, and every day I spent in Maryland represented a net fiscal loss.
The motel terminal was almost certainly tapped, and I presumed the FBI had found a way to read my portable panel even before its signal reached a satellite. Nevertheless I did what they probably expected me to do: I continued to collect Kuin data, and looked a little more closely at some of Sue’s publications.
She had published two important papers in the Nature nexus and one on the Science site. All three were concerned with matters I wasn’t competent to judge and which seemed only distantly related to the question of the Chronoliths: “A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy,” “Non-Hadronic Material Structures,” “Gravitation and Temporal Binding Forces.” All I could discern from the text was that Sue had been breeding some interesting solutions to fundamental physical problems. The papers were focused and, to me, opaque, not unlike Sue herself.
I spent some of that time thinking about Sue. She had been, of course, more than a teacher to those of us who came to know her. But she had never been very forthcoming about her own life. Born in Madras, she had immigrated with her parents at the age of three. Her childhood had been hermetic, her attention divided between schoolwork and her burgeoning intellectual interests. She was gay, of course, but seldom spoke about her partners, who never seemed to stick around for long, and she hadn’t discussed what her coming out might have meant to her parents, whom she described as “fairly conservative, somewhat religious.” She gave the impression that these were trivial issues, unworthy of attention. If she harbored old pain, it was well concealed.
There was joy in her life, but she expressed it in her work—she worked with an enthusiasm that was unmistakably authentic. Her work, or her capacity to do her work, was the prize life had handed her, and she considered it adequate compensation for whatever else she might lack. Her pleasures were deep but monkish.
Surely there was more to Sue than this. But this was what she had been willing to share.
“A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy.” What did that mean?
It meant she had looked closely at the clockwork of the universe. It meant she felt at home with fundamental things.
I was lonely but too unsettled to do anything about it and bored enough that I had begun to scan the cars in the motel parking lot to see if I could spot the one with my FBI surveillance crew inside, should there be such a vehicle.
But when I finally did interact with the FBI there was nothing subtle about the encounter. Morris Torrance called to tell me I had an appointment at the Federal Building downtown and that I should expect to provide a blood sample and submit to a polygraph examination. That it should be necessary to hurdle these obstacles in order to obtain gainful employment as Sue Chopra’s code herder was an indication of how seriously the government took her research, or at least the congressional investment in it.
Even so, Morris had underestimated what would be required of me at the Federal Building. I submitted not only to the drawing of blood but to a chest X-ray and a cranial laser scan. I was relieved of urine, stool, and hair samples. I was fingerprinted, I signed a release for chromosomal sequencing, and I was escorted to the polygraph chamber.
In the hours since Morris Torrance mentioned the word “polygraph” on the telephone I had entertained but a single thought: Hitch Paley.
The problem was that I knew things about Hitch that could put him in prison, assuming he wasn’t there already. Hitch had never been my closest friend and I wasn’t sure what degree of loyalty I owed him, these many years later. But I had decided over the course of a sleepless night that I would turn down Sue’s job offer sooner than I would endanger his freedom. Yes, Hitch was a criminal, and putting him in jail may have been what the letter of the law required; but I didn’t see the justice in caging a man for selling marijuana to affluent dilettantes who would otherwise have invested their cash in vodka coolers, coke, or methamphetamines.
Not that Hitch was particularly scrupulous about what he sold. But I was scrupulous about who I sold.
The polygraph examiner looked more like a bouncer than a doctor, despite his white coat, and the unavoidable Morris Torrance joined us in the bare clinic room to oversee the test. Morris was plainly a federal employee, maybe thirty pounds above his ideal weight and ten years past his prime. His hair had receded in the way that makes some middle-aged men look tonsured. But his . handshake was firm, his manner relaxed, and he didn’t seem actively hostile.
I let the examiner fix the electrodes to my body and I answered the baseline questions without stammering. Morris then took over the dialogue and began to walk me detail-by-detail through my initial experience with the Chumphon Chronolith, pausing occasionally while the polygraph guru added written notations to a scrolling printout. (The machinery seemed antiquated, and it was, designed to specifications laid down in 20th-century case law.) I told the story truthfully if carefully, and I did not hesitate to mention Hitch Paley’s name if not his occupation, even adding a little fillip about the bait shop, which was after all a legitimate business, at least some of the time.
When I came to the part about the Bangkok prison, Morris asked, “Were you searched for drugs?”
“I was searched more than once. Maybe for drugs, I don’t know.”
“Were any drugs or banned substances found on your person?”
“No.”
“Have you carried banned substances across national or state borders?”
“No.”
“Were you warned of the appearance of the Chronolith before it arrived? Did you have any prior knowledge of the event?”
“No.”
“It came as a surprise to you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know the name Kuin?”
“Only from the news.”
“Have you seen the image carved into the contemporary monuments?”
“Yes.”
“Is the face familiar? Do you recognize the face?”
“No.”
Morris nodded and then conferred privately with the polygraph examiner. After a few minutes of this I was cut loose from the machine.
Morris walked me out of the building. I said, “Did I pass?”
He just smiled. “Not my department. But I wouldn’t worry if I was you.”
Sue called in the morning and told me to report for work.
The federal government, for reasons probably best known to the senior senator from Maryland, operated this branch of its Chronolith investigation out of a nondescript building in a suburban Baltimore industrial park. It was a low-slung suite of offices and a makeshift library, nothing more. The hard end of the research was performed by universities and federal laboratories, Sue explained. What she ran here was more like a think tank, collating results and acting as a consultancy and clearing house for congressional grant money. Essentially, it was Sue’s job to assess current knowledge and identify promising new lines of research. Her immediate superiors were agency people and congressional aides. She represented the highest echelon, in the Chronolith research effort, of what could plausibly be called science.
I wondered how someone as research-driven as Sue Chopra could have ended up with a glorified management job. I stopped wondering when she opened the door of her office and beckoned me in. The large room contained a lacquered secondhand desk and
too many filing cabinets to count. The space around her work terminal was crowded with newspaper clippings, journals, hard copies of e-mail missives. And the walls were papered with photographs.
“Welcome to the sanctum sanctorum,” Sue said brightly.
Photographs of Chronoliths.
They were all here, crisp professional portraits side by side with tourist snapshots and cryptic false-color satellite photos. Here was Chumphon in more detail than I had ever seen it, the letters of its inscription picked out in a raking light. Here was Bangkok, and the first graven image of Kuin himself. (Probably not a true representation, most experts felt. The features were too generic, almost as if a graphics processor had been asked to come up with an image of a “world leader.”)
Here were Pyongyang and Ho Chi Minh City. Here were Taipei and Macao and Sapporo; here was the Kanto Plain Chronolith, towering over a brace of blasted granaries. Here was Yichang, both before and after the futile nuclear strike, the monument itself aloofly unchanged but the Yellow River transformed into a gushing severed artery where the dam had been fractured by the blast.
Here, photographed from orbit, was the brown outflow draining into the China Sea.
Throughout was Kuin’s immaculately calm face, observing all this as if from a throne of clouds.
Sue, watching me inspect the photographs, said, “It’s almost a complete inversion of the idea of a monument, when you think about it. Monuments are supposed to be messages to the future—the dead talking to their heirs.”
“‘Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.’”
“Exactly. But the Chronoliths have it exactly backward. Not, ‘I was here.’ More like, ‘I’m coming. I’m the future, whether you like it or not.’”
“Look upon my works and be afraid.”
“You have to admire the sheer perversity of it.”
“Do you?”
“I have to tell you, Scotty, sometimes it takes my breath away.”
“Me, too.” Not to mention my wife and daughter: It had taken those away, too.
I was disturbed to see my own obsession with the Chronoliths recreated on Sue Chopra’s wall. It was as if I had discovered we shared a common lung. But this was, of course the reason she had been seduced into the work she did here: It gave her the chance to know virtually everything it was possible to know about the Chronoliths. Hands-on research would have confined her to some far narrower angle, counting refraction rings or hunting elusive bosons.
And she was still able to do the deep math—better able, with virtually every piece of highly classified research work crossing her desk on a daily basis.
“This is it, Scotty,” she said.
I said, “Show me where I work.”
She took me to an outer office furnished with a desk, a terminal. The terminal, in turn, was connected to serried ranks of Quantum Organics workstations—more and more sophisticated crunching power than Campion-Miller had ever been able to afford.
Morris Torrance was perched in one corner on a wooden chair tilted against the wall, reading the print edition of Golf.
“Is he part of the package?” I asked.
“You can share space for a while. Morris needs to be close to me, physically.”
“Morris is a good friend?”
“Morris is my bodyguard, among other things.”
Morris smiled and dropped his magazine. He scratched his head, an awkward gesture probably meant to reveal the pistol he wore under his jacket. “I’m mostly harmless,” he said.
I shook hands with him again … more cordially this time, since he wasn’t nagging me for a urine sample.
“For now,” Sue said, “you just want to acquaint yourself with the work I’m doing. I’m not a code herder of your class, so take notes. End of the week, we’ll discuss how to proceed.”
I spent the day doing that. I was looking, not at Sue’s input or results, but at the procedural layers, the protocols by which problems were translated into limiting systems and solutions allowed to reproduce and die. She had installed the best commercial genetic apps, but these were frankly inappropriate (or at least absurdly cumbersome) for some of what she was attempting—“sliderule apps,” we used to call them, good to a first approximation, but primitive.
Morris finished looking at Golf and brought in lunch from the deli down the road, along with a copy of Fly Fisherman to while away the shank of the afternoon. Sue emerged periodically to give us a happy glance: We were her buffer zone, a layer of insulation between the world and the mysteries of Kuin.
It dawned on me, driving home to another nearly-empty apartment after my first week with the project, exactly how suddenly and irrevocably my life had changed.
Maybe it was the tedium of the drive; maybe it was the sight of the roadside tent colonies and abandoned, rust-ribbed automobiles; maybe it was just the prospect of a lonely weekend. “Denial” has a bad reputation, but stoicism is supposed to be a virtue, and the key act of stoicism is denial, the firm refusal to capitulate to an awful truth. Lately I had been very stoic indeed. But I changed lanes to pass a tanker truck, and a yellow Leica utility van crowded me from behind, and then the truck began edging out of his lane and into mine. The driver must have had his proximity overrides pulled, a highly illegal act not uncommon among gypsy truckers. And I was in his blind spot, and the Leica refused to brake, and for a good five seconds all I could see was a premonitory vision of myself pancaked behind the steering column.
Then the trucker caught sight of me in his side mirror, careened right and let me pass.
The Leica zoomed on by as if nothing had happened.
And I was left in a cold sweat at the wheel—untethered, essentially lost, hurrying down a gray road between oblivion and oblivion.
There was good news a week later: Janice called to tell me Kait was getting a new ear.
“It’s a complete fix, Scott, or at least it ought to be, given that she was born with normal hearing and probably retains all the neural pathways. It’s called a mastoid-cochlear prosthesis.”
“They can do that?”
“It’s a relatively new procedure, but the success rate has been almost one hundred percent on patients with Kait’s kind of history.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not especially. But it is a major surgery. She’ll be hospitalized for at least a week.”
“When?”
“Scheduled for six months from now.”
“How are you paying for it?”
“Whit has good coverage. His insurance cooperative is willing to take on at least a percentage of the cost. I can get some help through my plan, too, and Whit’s prepared to cover the remainder out of his own pocket. It might mean a second mortgage on the house. But it also means Kaitlin can have a normal childhood.”
“Let me help.”
“I know you’re not exactly wealthy right now, Scott.”
“I have money in the bank.”
“And I thank you for that offer. But … frankly, Whit would be more comfortable taking care of it himself.”
Kait had adjusted well to her hearing loss. Unless you noticed the way she cocked her head, the way she frowned when conversations grew quiet, you might not know she was impaired. But she was inevitably marked as different: condemned to sit at the front of the classroom, where too many teachers had addressed her by exaggerating
their vowels and acting as if her hearing problem was an intellectual deficiency. She was awkward in schoolyard games, too easily surprised from behind. All this, plus her own natural shyness, had left her a little net-focused, self-absorbed, occasionally surly.
But that would change. The damage would be undone, apparently, thanks to some recent advances in biomechanical engineering. And thanks also to Whitman Delahunt. And if his intervention on behalf of my daughter was a little ego-bruising … well, I thought, fuck ego.
Kaitlin would be whole again. That was what mattered.
“But I want to contribute to this, Janice. This is something I’ve owed Kaitlin for a long time.”
“Not really, Scott. The ear thing was never your fault.”
“I want to help make it better.”
“Well … Whit would probably let you chip in, if you insist.”
It had been a frugal five years for me. I “chipped in” half the cost of the operation.
“So, Scotty,” Sue Chopra said, “are you rigged for travel?”
I had already told her about Kaitlin’s operation. I said I wanted to be with Kait when she was in recovery—that was nonnegotiable.
“That’s half a year off,” Sue said. “We won’t be gone nearly that long.”
Cryptic. But she seemed prepared, finally, to explain what she had lately been hinting about.
We sat in the spacious but largely empty cafeteria, four of us at a table by the only window, which overlooked the thruway. Me, Sue, Morris Torrance, and a young man by the name of Raymond Mosely.
Ray Mosely was a physics post-grad from MIT who worked with Sue on the hard-science inventories. He was twenty-five, pot-bellied, badly-groomed, and bright as a fresh dime. He was also absurdly timid. He had avoided me for weeks, apparently because I was an
unfamiliar face, but gradually accepted me once he decided I wasn’t a rival for Sue Chopra’s affections.
Sue, of course, was at least a dozen years his senior, and her sexual tastes didn’t incline to men of any sort, much less bashful young physicists who thought a lengthy chat on the subject of mumeson interactions was an invitation to physical intimacy. Sue had explained all this to him a couple of times. Ray, supposedly, had accepted the explanation. But he still gave her mooncalf glances across the sticky cafeteria table and deferred to her opinion with a lover’s loyalty.
“What’s amazing,” Sue began, “is how much we haven’t learned about the Chronoliths in the years since Chumphon. All we can do is characterize them a little bit. We know, for instance, that you can’t topple a Kuin stone even if you dig out its foundations, because it maintains a fixed distance from the Earth’s center of gravity and a fixed orientation—even if that means hovering in midair. We know it’s spectacularly inert, we know it has a certain index of refraction, we know from inspection that the objects are more likely molded than sculpted, and so on and so forth. But none of this is genuine understanding. We understand the Chronoliths the way a medieval theologian might understand an automobile. It’s heavy, the upholstery gets hot in direct sunlight, parts of it are sharp, parts of it are smooth. Some of these details might be important, most are probably not; but you can’t sort them out without an encompassing theory. Which is precisely what we lack.”
The rest of us nodded sagely, as we usually did when Sue began to expound a thesis.
“But some details are more interesting than others,” she continued. “For instance. We have some evidence that there’s a gradual, stepwise increase in local background radiation in the weeks before a Chronolith manifests itself. Not dangerous but definitely measurable. The Chinese did some work on this before they stopped sharing their research with us. And the Japanese had a lucky hit, too. They have a grid of radiation monitors routinely in use around their
Sapporo/Technics fusion reactor. Tokyo was trying to pin down the source of all this stray radiation days before the Chronolith appeared. Readings peaked with the arrival of the monument, then fell very rapidly to normal ambient levels.”
“Which means,” Ray Mosely said as if interpreting for the stupid, “although we can’t stop the appearance of a Chronolith, we have a limited ability to predict it.”
“Give people some warning,” Sue said.
“Sounds promising,” I said. “If you know where to look.”
“Aye,” Sue admitted, “there’s the rub. But lots of places monitor for airborne radiation. And Washington has arranged with a number of friendly foreign governments to set up detectors around major urban sites. From the civil-defense point of view, it means we can get people out of the way.”
“Whereas we,” Ray added, “have an interest in being there.”
Sue gave him a sharp look, as if he had stepped on her punch line. I said, “A little dangerous, wouldn’t that be?”
“But to be able to record the event, get accurate measurements of the arrival burst, see the process as it happens … that could be priceless.”
“A view from a distance,” Morris Torrance put in. “I hope.”
“We can minimize any physical danger.”
I said, “This is happening soon?”
“We leave in a couple of days, Scotty, and that may be pushing it a little. I know it’s short notice. Our outposts are already set up and we have specialists in place. Evidence suggests a big manifestation in just about fifteen days. News of the evacuation should hit the papers this evening.”
“So where are we going?”
“Jerusalem,” Sue said.
She gave me a day to pack and get my business in order.
Instead, I went for a drive.