The Chronoliths

She had died of complications of pneumonia the year before I graduated. “You could have called me when she got sick.”

“Why? So you could carry away the memory of your own mother cursing you from her deathbed? What’s the point?”

“I loved her, too.”

“It was easy for you. Maybe I loved her and maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember anymore. But I was with her, Scotty. All the time. I wasn’t necessarily nice to her. But I was with her.”

I went to the door. He followed a few paces, then stopped, breathless.

“Remember that about me,” he said.

Eight

When we came into Ben Gurion the airport was chaotic, crowded with fleeing tourists. The inbound El Al flight — delayed for four hours by weather, after a three-day “diplomatic” delay Sue refused to talk about — had been nearly empty. It would be filled to capacity on the way out, however. The evacuation of Jerusalem continued.

I left the aircraft in a core group with Sue Chopra, Ray Mosley, and Morris Torrance, surrounded by a cordon of FBI agents with enhanced-vision eyetacts and concealed weapons, escorted in turn by five Israeli Defense Force conscripts in jeans and white T-shirts, Uzis slung over their shoulders, who met us at the foot of the ramp. We were conducted quickly through Israeli Customs and out of Ben Gurion to what looked like a sheruti, a private taxi van, commandeered for the emergency. Sue scooted into the seat beside me, still dazed by travel. Morris and Ray climbed in behind us, and the power plant hummed softly as the van pulled away.

A monotonous rain slicked Highway One. The long line of cars crawling toward Tel Aviv glistened dully under a rack of clouds, but the Jerusalem-bound lanes were utterly empty. Ahead of us, vast public-service roadside screens a

“Makes you a little nervous,” Sue said, “going someplace everybody else is leaving.”

The DDF man — he looked like a teenager — in the seat behind us snickered.

Morris said, “There’s a lot of skepticism about this. A lot of resentment, too. The Likkud could lose the next election.”

“But only if nothing happens,” Sue said.

“Is there a chance of that?”

“Slim to none.”

The IDF man snorted again.

A gust of rain rattled down on the sheruti. January and February are the rainy season in Israel. I turned my head to the window and watched a grove of olive trees bend to the wind. I was still thinking about what Sue had told me on the plane.

She had been inaccessible for days after I drove back from my father’s house, smoothing over whatever diplomatic difficulty it was that had kept us in Baltimore until very nearly the last minute.

I spent the week revising code and wasted a couple of evenings at a local bar with Morris and Ray.

They were more pleasant company than I would have guessed. I was angry with Morris for tracking me down to my father’s house… but Morris Torrance was one of those men who make an art of affability. An art, or maybe a tool. He rebuffed anger like Superman bouncing bullets off his chest. He wasn’t dogmatic about the Chronoliths, nursed no particular convictions about the significance of Kuin, but his interest obviously ran deep. What this meant was that we could bullshit with him: float ideas, some wild, without fear of tripping over a religious or political fixation. Was this genuine? He did, after all, represent the FBI. Likely as not, everything we said to him found its way into a file folder. But Morris’s genius was that he made it seem not to matter.

Even Ray Mosely opened up in Morris’s company. I had pegged Ray as one of those bright but socially-challenged types, his sexual radar locked hopelessly and inappropriately on Sue. There was some truth in this. But when he relaxed he revealed a passion for American League baseball that gave us some common ground. Ray liked the expansion team from his native Tucson and managed to piss off a guy at the neighboring table with some remarks about the Orioles. From which he did not back down when challenged. Ray was not a coward. He was lonely, but much of this was sheer intellectual loneliness. His conversation tended to trail off when he realized he had progressed to a level we couldn’t follow. He wasn’t condescending about it — at least, not very often — only visibly sad that he couldn’t share his thoughts.

It was this loneliness, I think, that Sue satisfied for him. No matter that she reserved her physical affection for brief contacts carefully segregated from her work. I think, in some sense, when Ray talked physics with her, he was making love.

Of Sue we saw very little. “This is what it was like at Cornell,” I told Morris and Ray. “For her students, I mean. She brought us together, but we did some of our best talking after class, without her.”

“Must have been kind of like a dress rehearsal,” Morris mused.

“For what? For this? The Chronoliths?”

“Oh, she couldn’t have known anything about that, of course. But don’t you once in a while get that feeling, that your life has been one big rehearsal for some critical event?”

“Maybe. Sometimes.”

“Like she had the wrong cast back there at Cornell,” Morris said, “and the script still needed work. But you must have been good, Scott.” He smiled. “You made the final cut.”

“So what’s the event?” I asked. “This thing in Jerusalem?”

“This thing in Jerusalem… or whatever comes after.”

Sue and I didn’t have a chance to talk privately until we were well over the Atlantic, when she beckoned me to the back of the deserted economy section and said, “I’m sorry about keeping you in the dark, Scotty. And I’m sorry about the thing with your dad. I thought we could make this a day job for you, not…”

“House arrest,” I offered.

“Right, house arrest. Because I guess that’s what it is, in a sense. But not just for you. I’m in the same situation. They want to keep us together and under observation.”

Sue had a head cold and was bulling through it with her usual determination. She sat with her hands in her lap, twisting a handkerchief in a beam of sunlight, as apparently contrite and as fundamentally immovable as Mahatma Gandhi. Up front, an El Al steward was delivering scrambled eggs and toast in plastic trays. I said, “Why me, Sue? That’s the question no one wants to answer. You could have hired a better code herder. I was at Chumphon, but that doesn’t explain anything.”

“Don’t underestimate your talent,” she said. “But I know what you’re asking. The FBI surveillance, the agents at your father’s house. Scotty, I made the mistake a few years ago of attempting to publish a paper about a phenomenon I called ‘tau turbulence.’ Some influential people read it.”

An answer that veered into abstract theory promised to be no answer at all. I waited, frowning, while she blew her nose, loudly.

“Excuse me,” she said. “The paper was about causality, I suppose you could say, with regard to questions of temporal symmetry and the Chronoliths. Mostly math, and most of that dealing with some contentious aspects of quantum behavior. But I also speculated about how the Chronoliths might reconfigure our conventional understanding of macroscopic cause and effect. Basically, I said that in a localized tau event — the creation of a Chronolith, hypothetically — effect naturally precedes cause, but it also creates a kind of fractal space in which the most significant co

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Think of a Chronolith as a local event in spacetime. There’s an interface, a border, between the conventional flow of time and the negative-tau anomaly. It’s not just the future talking to the present. There are ripples, eddies, currents. The future transforms the past, which in turn transforms the future. You follow?”