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 rustspackled 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 tauvariable 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.