What strikes me now—if you can forgive an old man second-guessing the text of his own memoirs—is how strange the advent of the Chronoliths must have seemed to the generation that came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union … my father’s generation, though he didn’t live to see the worst of it.
They were a generation that had looked on third-world dictatorships less with outrage than with impatience, a generation to whom grandiose palaces and monuments were the embarrassments of an earlier age, haunted houses ready to topple in the stiff winds blowing from the Nikkei and the NASDAQ.
The rise of Kuin caught them utterly off guard. They were serious about the threat but deaf to its appeal. They could imagine a million underfed Asians paying fealty to the name of Kuin. That was at
least distantly plausible. But when they were scorned by their own children and grandchildren, their confidence evaporated.
They escaped, by and large, into the shelter of arms. Kuin’s monuments might seem magical but they predicted and were ultimately derived from military conquests, and a well-defended nation could not be conquered. Or so the reasoning went. The Jerusalem arrival provoked a second surge of federal investment: in research, detector satellite arrays, a new generation of missile-hunting drones, smart mines, battlefield and supply robots. The draft was reintroduced in 2029 and the standing army increased by half a million inductees. (Which helped to disguise the decline in the civilian economy that followed the aquifer crisis, the battered condition of Asian trade, and the beginning of the years-long Atchafalaya Basin disaster.)
We would have bombed Kuin in his infancy if anyone had been able to find him. But southern China and most of Southeast Asia were in a state of ungoverned barbarism, a place where warlords in armored ATVs terrorized starving peasants. Any or all of these petty tyrants might have been Kuin. Most of them claimed to be. Probably none of them was. It was far from certain that Kuin was even Chinese. He could have been anywhere.
What seems obvious now (but wasn’t then) is that Kuin was dangerous precisely because he hadn’t declared himself. He possessed no platform but conquest, no ideology but ultimate victory. Promising nothing, he promised everything. The dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and the merely unhappy all were drawn toward an identification with Kuin. Kuin, who would level the mountains and make the valleys high. Kuin, who must speak with their voice, since no one else did.
For the generation that followed mine Kuin represented the radically new, the overthrow of antiquated structures of authority and the ascension of powers as cold and ruthlessly modern as the Chronoliths themselves.
In brief, he took our children from us.
When I got the call about Kait (from Janice, her video window blanked to hide her tears) I understood that I would have to leave Baltimore and that I would have to do so without Morris Torrance tailing me across seven states.
Which wouldn’t be easy, but might be easier than it would have been before Jerusalem. Before Jerusalem, Sue Chopra had been overseeing Chronolith research under a generous federal dispensation. That preeminence had been compromised by her devotion to the purely theoretical aspects of Chronolith theory—her obsession with the mathematics of tau turbulence, as opposed to practical questions of detection and defense—and by her disastrous congressional appearance in June of ’28. In public questioning she had refused to accommodate Senator Lazar’s theory that the Jerusalem Chronolith might be a signal of the End Times. (She called the senator “poorly educated” and the notion of impending apocalypse “an absurd mythology that abets the very process we’re struggling to contain.” Lazar, a former Republican turned Federal Party hatchetman, called Sue “an ivory-tower atheist” who needed to be “weaned from the public teat.”)
She was, of course, too valuable to cut loose entirely. But she ceased to be the central figure in the effort to coordinate Chronolith research. She was, instead, kept away from public scrutiny. She remained the nation’s foremost expert on the esoterica of tau turbulence but had ceased to be its poster child.
The upside of this was that the FBI took a less direct interest in such small fish as myself, even if my files still languished in the digital catacombs of the Hoover Building.
Morris Torrance had resigned from the Bureau rather than accept reassignment. Morris was a believer. He believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the goodness of Sulamith Chopra, and the veracity of his own dreams. The age of the Chronoliths had made such conversions possible. I think, too, he was a little in love with Sue, though (unlike Ray Mosely) he had never harbored any illusions
about her sexuality. He remained as her bodyguard and chief of security, drawing a salary that could only have been a fraction of his government income.
Both Sue and Morris wanted to keep me close to the project—Sue because I figured into her evolving pattern of meaningful coincidence; Morris because he believed I was important to Sue. Whether they could use legal leverage to keep me there had become debatable. Morris was a civilian now. But I didn’t doubt he would pursue me if I announced I was leaving. Maybe even pull a few strings to keep me in my place. Morris liked me, in his cautious style, but his first loyalty was to Sue.
Sue was meanwhile trying to reconstruct her fragmented Chronolith project as an Internet circle, sharing any data the Defense Department left unclassified, deepening and expanding the mathematics of tau turbulence. In February of 2031 she lost her Department of Energy bursary and was reduced to another round of fundraising, while money flowed copiously into the glamor projects: the gamma-ray laser collider at Stanford; the Exotic Matter Group working out of Chicago.
I spent the morning cleaning up some code I had grown for her, a little routine that would go out into the world and search media nodes for relevant synchronicities, according to a nounsorting algorithm Sue herself had cooked up. Morris passed in and out of the office a couple of times, looking leaner than he used to. Older, too. But still obstinately cheerful.
Sue was in her own office, and I stopped and knocked to tell her I was leaving. For lunch, I meant, but she must have heard something in my voice. “Long lunch? How far are you planning to go, Scotty?”
“Not far.”
“We’re not done, you know.”
She might have been talking about the code we’d been evolving, but I doubted it.
Sue’s leg wound had healed years ago, but the Jerusalem experience
had left other scars. Jerusalem, she told me once, had made clear to her how dangerous her work was—that by placing herself near the center of the tau turbulence she had put at risk not only herself but the people around her.
“But I suppose it’s inevitable,” she had said sadly, “that’s the worst of it. You stand on the train tracks long enough, sooner or later you meet a train.”
I told her I’d finish the debugging that afternoon. She gave me a long, skeptical glare. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
“Not at the moment.”
“We’ll talk again,” she said.
Like most of her prophecies, this one would come true, too.
Morris offered to join me for lunch but I told him no, I had some errands to do and I’d probably just grab a sandwich on the run. If he found this suspicious, he didn’t show it.
I closed out my account at Zurich American, transferred most of the funds to a transit card and took the rest in old-fashioned folding green. I drove around a while longer to make sure Morris wasn’t tailing me, unlikely as that was. More probably he had tapped the locator in my car. So I traded in the Chrysler at a downtown dealership, told the salesperson there was nothing I liked on the lot and would she mind if I shopped the other franchises? No, she said, and she’d be happy to walk me through the virtual inventory in the back room. I tentatively selected a snub-nosed Volks Edison in dusty blue, possibly the most anonymous-looking automobile ever manufactured; left my Chrysler at the lot and accepted a courtesy ride halfway across the city. Up close, the Volks looked a little more battered than it had in the virts, but its power plant was sturdy and clean, as near as I could judge.
All of this amateur espionage bullshit left an e-trail as wide as the Missouri, of course. But while Morris Torrance could surely make a few connections and hunt me down, he couldn’t do it fast
enough to keep me in Baltimore. I was two hundred miles west by nightfall, driving into a warm June evening with the windows open, popping antacids to calm the churning in my stomach.
There was a big ration camp where the highway crossed the Ohio, maybe a thousand threadbare canvas tents flapping in the spring breeze, dozens of barrel fires burning fitfully. Most of these people would have been refugees from the Louisiana bottomlands, unemployed refinery and petrochemical workers, farmers flooded out of their property. The consolidating clay of the Atchafalaya Basin had at last begun to draw the Mississippi River out of its own silted birdfoot deltas, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. More than a million families had been displaced by this spring’s floods, not to mention the chaos that resulted from collapsed bridges and navigational locks and mud-choked roads.
Men lined the breakdown lane begging rides in both directions. Hitchhiking had been illegal here for fifty years and rides were scarce. But these men (almost all men) had ceased caring. They stood stiff as scarecrows, blinking into the glare of the headlights.
I hoped Kait had found a safe place to sleep tonight.
When I reached the outskirts of Minneapolis I registered at a motel. The desk clerk, an ancient turtle of a man, opened his eyes wide when I took cash out of my wallet. “I’ll have to go to the bank with that,” he said. So I added fifty dollars for his trouble and he was kind enough not to process my ID. The room he gave me was a cubicle containing a bed and a courtesy terminal and a window that overlooked the parking lot.
I desperately needed sleep, but before that I needed to talk to Janice.
It was Whit who answered the phone. “Scott,” he said, cordially but not happily. He looked like he needed some sleep himself. “I assume you’re calling about Kaitlin. I’m sorry to say there’s been no further information. The police seem to think she’s still in the
city, so we’re cautiously optimistic. Obviously, we’re doing all we can.
“Thank you, Whit, but I need to talk to Janice right now.”
“It’s late. I hate to disturb her.”
“I’ll be quick.”
“Well,” Whit said, and wandered away from the terminal. Janice showed up a few moments later, wearing her nightgown but obviously wide awake.
“Scotty,” she said. “I tried to call you but there was nobody home.”
“That’s all right. I’m in town. Can we get together tomorrow and talk this over?”
“You’re in town? You didn’t have to come all this way.”
“I think I did. Janice? Can you make an hour for me? I can drop by the house, or—”
“No,” she said, “I’ll meet you. Where are you staying?”
“I’d as soon not meet here. What about that little steak house on Dukane, you know the one?”
“I think it’s still in business.”
“Meet you at noon?”
“Make it one.”
“Try to get some sleep,” I said.
“You, too.” She hesitated. “It’s been four days now, Scotty. Four nights. I think about her all the time.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” I said.