The Chronoliths

“As what, a prisoner?”

“Hardly. I’m serious about your work, Scotty. In terms of code husbandry, it’s absolutely fine. And very, very pertinent. Maybe it doesn’t seem so, but a great deal of what I’ve been looking at lately is modeling the effect of anticipation on mass behavior. Applying feedback and recursion theory to both physical events and human behavior.”

“I’m a keyboard hack, Sue. I’ve grown algorithms I don’t pretend to understand.”

“You’re too modest. This is key work. And it would be much nicer, frankly, if you were doing it for us.”

“I don’t understand. Is it my work you’re interested in, or the fact that I was at Chumphon?”

“Both. I suspect it’s not coincidental.”

“But it is.”

“Yes, in the conventional sense, but — oh, Scotty, this is too much to talk about over the phone. You need to come see me.”

“Sue—”

“You’re going to tell me you feel like I put your head in a blender. You’re going to tell me you can’t make a decision like this while you’re standing in your PJs drinking bottled beer and feeling sorry for yourself.”

I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Otherwise, she was on the mark.

“So don’t decide,” she said. “But do come see me. Come to Baltimore. My expense. We can talk about it then. I’ll make arrangements.”

One of the salient facts about Sulamith Chopra is that when she says she means to do a thing, she does it.

The recession had hit Baltimore harder than it had hit Mi

Sue parked at the back of a small Mexican restaurant and escorted me inside. The restaurant staff recognized her and greeted her by name. Our waitress was dressed as if she had stepped out of a 17th-century mission but recited the daily specials in a clipped New England accent. She smiled at Sue the way a tenant farmer might smile at a benevolent landlord — I gathered Sue was a generous tipper.

We talked for a while about nothing in particular — current events, the Oglalla crisis, the Pemberton trial. This was Sue’s attempt to re-establish the tone of the relationship between us, the familial intimacy she had established with all her students at Cornell. She had never liked being treated as a figure of authority. She deferred to no one and hated being deferred to. Sue was old-fashioned enough to envision working scientists as equal plaintiffs before the absolute bar of truth.

Since Cornell, she said, the Chronolith project had taken up more and more of her time; had become, in effect, her career. She had published important theoretical papers during this time, but only after they had been vetted by national security. “And the most important work we’ve done can’t be published at all, for fear that we’d be putting the weapon into Kuin’s hands.”

“So you know more than you can say.”

“Yes, lots… but not enough.” The waitress brought rice and beans. Sue tucked into her lunch, frowning. “I know about you, too, Scotty. You divorced Janice, or vice versa. Your daughter lives with her mom now. Janice remarried. You did five years of good but extremely circumscribed work at Campion-Miller, which is a shame, because you’re one of the brightest people I know. Not genius-in-a-wheelchair smart, but bright. You could do better.”

“That’s what they always used to write on my report cards — ‘could do better.’”

“Did you ever get over Janice?”

Sue asked intimate questions with the brusqueness of a census taker. I don’t think it even occurred to her that she might be giving offense.

Hence no offense taken.

“Mostly,” I said.

“And the girl? Kaitlin, is it? God, I remember when Janice was pregnant. That big belly of hers. Like she was trying to shoplift a Volkswagen.”

“Kait and I get on all right.”

“You still love your daughter?”

“Yes, Sue, I still love my daughter.”

“Of course you do. How Scotty of you.” She seemed genuinely pleased.

“Well, how about you? You have anything going?”

“Well,” she said. “I live alone. There’s somebody I see once in a while, but it’s not a relationship.” Sue lowered her eyes and added, “She’s a poet. The kind of poet who works retail by daylight. I can’t bring myself to tell her the FBI already looked into her background. She’d go ballistic. Anyway, she sees other people too. We’re nonmonogamous. Polyamorous. Mostly we’re barely even together.”

I raised a glass. “Strange days.”

“Strange days. Skol. By the way, I hear you’re not speaking to your father.”

I almost choked.

“Saw your phone records,” she explained. “He makes the calls. They don’t last more than thirty seconds.”

“It’s kind of a race,” I said. “See who hangs up first. Goddammit, Sue, those are private calls.”

“He’s sick, Scotty.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No, really. You know about the emphysema, I guess. But he’s been seeing an oncologist. Liver cancer, nonresponsive, metastatic.”

I put down my fork.

“Oh, Scotty,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“You realize, I don’t know you.”

“Of course you know me.”

“I knew you a long time ago. Not intimately. I knew a junior academic, not a woman who gets me fired — and bugs my fucking phone.”

“There’s no such thing as privacy anymore, not really.”

“He’s, what, dying?”

“Probably.” Her face fell when she realized what she’d said. “Oh, God — forgive me, Scott. I speak before I think. It’s like I’m some kind of borderline autistic or something.”

That, at least, I did know about her. I’m sure Sue’s defect has been named and genetically mapped, some mild inability to read or predict the feelings of others. And she loved to talk — at least in those days.

“None of my business,” she said. “You’re right.”

“I don’t need a surrogate parent. I’m not even sure I need this job.”

“Scotty, I’m not the one who started logging your calls. You can take this job or not, but walking away won’t give you a normal life. You surrendered that in Chumphon, whether you knew it or not.”

I thought, My father is dying.

I wondered whether I cared.

Back in the car, Sue remained apologetic. “Is it wrong of me to point out that we’re both in a bind? That both our lives have been shaped by the Chronoliths in ways we can’t control? But I’m trying to do the best thing, Scotty. I need you here, and I think the work would be more satisfying than what you were doing at Campion-Miller.” She drove through a yellow light, blinking at the reprimand that flashed on her heads-up. “Am I wrong to suspect that you want to get involved with what we’re doing?”

No, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of saying so.

“Also—” Was she blushing? “Frankly, I’d enjoy your company.”

“You must have lots of company.”

“I have colleagues, not company. Nobody real. Besides, you know it’s not a bad offer. Not in the kind of world we’re living in.” She added, almost coyly, “And you get to travel. See foreign lands. Witness miracles.”

Stranger than science.