The Chronoliths

“Not really, Scott. The ear thing was never your fault.”

“I want to help make it better.”

“Well… Whit would probably let you chip in, if you insist.”

It had been a frugal five years for me. I “chipped in” half the cost of the operation.

“So, Scotty,” Sue Chopra said, “are you rigged for travel?”

I had already told her about Kaitlin’s operation. I said I wanted to be with Kait when she was in recovery — that was no

“That’s half a year off,” Sue said. “We won’t be gone nearly that long.”

Cryptic. But she seemed prepared, finally, to explain what she had lately been hinting about.

We sat in the spacious but largely empty cafeteria, four of us at a table by the only window, which overlooked the thruway. Me, Sue, Morris Torrance, and a young man by the name of Raymond Mosely.

Ray Mosely was a physics post-grad from MIT who worked with Sue on the hard-science inventories. He was twenty-five, pot-bellied, badly-groomed, and bright as a fresh dime. He was also absurdly timid. He had avoided me for weeks, apparently because I was an unfamiliar face, but gradually accepted me once he decided I wasn’t a rival for Sue Chopra’s affections.

Sue, of course, was at least a dozen years his senior, and her sexual tastes didn’t incline to men of any sort, much less bashful young physicists who thought a lengthy chat on the subject of mu-meson interactions was an invitation to physical intimacy. Sue had explained all this to him a couple of times. Ray, supposedly, had accepted the explanation. But he still gave her mooncalf glances across the sticky cafeteria table and deferred to her opinion with a lover’s loyalty.

“What’s amazing,” Sue began, “is how much we haven’t learned about the Chronoliths in the years since Chumphon. All we can do is characterize them a little bit. We know, for instance, that you can’t topple a Kuin stone even if you dig out its foundations, because it maintains a fixed distance from the Earth’s center of gravity and a fixed orientation — even if that means hovering in midair. We know it’s spectacularly inert, we know it has a certain index of refraction, we know from inspection that the objects are more likely molded than sculpted, and so on and so forth. But none of this is genuine understanding. We understand the Chronoliths the way a medieval theologian might understand an automobile. It’s heavy, the upholstery gets hot in direct sunlight, parts of it are sharp, parts of it are smooth. Some of these details might be important, most are probably not; but you can’t sort them out without an encompassing theory. Which is precisely what we lack.”

The rest of us nodded sagely, as we usually did when Sue began to expound a thesis.

“But some details are more interesting than others,” she continued. “For instance. We have some evidence that there’s a gradual, stepwise increase in local background radiation in the weeks before a Chronolith manifests itself. Not dangerous but definitely measurable. The Chinese did some work on this before they stopped sharing their research with us. And the Japanese had a lucky hit, too. They have a grid of radiation monitors routinely in use around their Sapporo/Technics fusion reactor. Tokyo was trying to pin down the source of all this stray radiation days before the Chronolith appeared. Readings peaked with the arrival of the monument, then fell very rapidly to normal ambient levels.”

“Which means,” Ray Mosely said as if interpreting for the stupid, “although we can’t stop the appearance of a Chronolith, we have a limited ability to predict it.”

“Give people some warning,” Sue said.

“Sounds promising,” I said. “If you know where to look.”

“Aye,” Sue admitted, “there’s the rub. But lots of places monitor for airborne radiation. And Washington has arranged with a number of friendly foreign governments to set up detectors around major urban sites. From the civil-defense point of view, it means we can get people out of the way.”

“Whereas we,” Ray added, “have an interest in being there.”

Sue gave him a sharp look, as if he had stepped on her punch line. I said, “A little dangerous, wouldn’t that be?”

“But to be able to record the event, get accurate measurements of the arrival burst, see the process as it happens… that could be priceless.”

“A view from a distance,” Morris Torrance put in. “I hope.”

“We can minimize any physical danger.”

I said, “This is happening soon?”

“We leave in a couple of days, Scotty, and that may be pushing it a little. I know it’s short notice. Our outposts are already set up and we have specialists in place. Evidence suggests a big manifestation in just about fifteen days. News of the evacuation should hit the papers this evening.”

“So where are we going?”

“Jerusalem,” Sue said.

She gave me a day to pack and get my business in order.

Instead, I went for a drive.

Seven

When I was ten years old, I came home one day from school and found my mother scrubbing the kitchen — which seemed normal enough, until I watched her for a while. (I had already learned to watch her carefully.)

My mother was not a beautiful woman, and I think I knew that, even then, in the distant way children are aware of such things. She had a hard, narrow face and she seldom smiled, which made her smiles a memorable event. If she laughed, I would lie in bed at night reliving the moment. She was, at the time, just thirty-five years old. She never wore makeup and some days didn’t even bother to brush her hair; she could get away with it because her hair was dark and naturally lustrous.

She hated buying clothes. She wore every item in her wardrobe until it was explicitly unwearable. Sometimes, when she took me shopping, I was embarrassed by her blue sweater, which had a cigarette burn on the side, through which I could see the strap of her brassiere; or her yellow blouse, with a bleach stain like a map of California ru

If I mentioned these things to her she would gaze at me wordlessly, go back into the house, change into something vaguely more presentable. But I hated saying anything because it made me feel priggish and effeminate, the kind of little boy who Cares About Clothing, and that wasn’t it at all. I just didn’t want people looking sideways at her in the aisle of the Food Mart.

She was wearing bluejeans and one of my father’s oversized shirts when I came home that day. Yellow rubber gloves covered her arms up to the elbows — disguising, I failed to notice, a number of deep and freely bleeding scratches. This was her cleaning outfit, and she had cleaned with a vengeance. The kitchen reeked of Lysol and ammonia and the half-dozen other cleansers and disinfectants she kept in the cupboard under the sink. She had tied her hair back under a red bandana, and her attention was focused on the tiled floor. She didn’t see me until I rattled my lunch box down on the counter.

“Keep out of the kitchen,” she said tonelessly. “This is your fault.”

“My fault?”

“He’s your dog, isn’t he?”

She was talking about Chuffy, our Springer Spaniel, and I began to be afraid… not because of what she said, exactly, but because of the way she said it.

It was like the way she said goodnight. Every night she would come into my room and lean over my bed, straighten the cotton sheet and quilted blanket, kiss her fingertips and brush them against my forehead. And 90 percent of the time that was exactly as comforting as it sounds. But some nights… some nights she might have been drinking a little, and then she would loom over me with the feral stink of sweat and alcohol radiating from her like heat from a coal stove, and although she said the same words, the same “Goodnight, Scotty, sleep well,” it sounded like an impersonation, and her fingers against my skin were cold and abrasive. Those nights, I pulled the covers over my head and counted the seconds (one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand) until her footsteps faded down the hall.