The Chronoliths

“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 co

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. 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.”