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 nowdistant
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 hazeblue 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 sagegrass. 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 fucked,” 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 waterstained 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.