The Chronoliths

“More or less.”

“So what you get is a kind of turbulence, marked not so much by cause and effect or even paradox as by a froth of correlation and coincidence. You can’t look for the cause of the Bangkok manifestation, because it doesn’t exist yet, but you can look for clues in the turbulence, in the unexpected correlatives.”

“Like what?”

“When I wrote the paper I didn’t offer examples. But somebody took me seriously enough to work out the implications. The FBI went back and looked at all the people who had been interviewed after Chumphon, which was the smallest and most complete statistical sample at hand. Then they compiled a database with the names and histories of anyone who had ever expressed a public opinion about the Chronoliths, at least in the early days; everyone who did science at the Chumphon site, including the guys who ran the tractors and installed the johns; everybody they interrogated after the touchdown. Then they looked for co

“And found some, I presume?”

“Some strange ones. But one of the strangest was you and I.”

“What, because of Cornell?”

“Partly; but put it all together, Scotty. Here’s a woman who’s been talking about tau anomalies and exotic matter since well before Chumphon. Who has since become a highly-regarded expert on the Chronoliths. And here’s an ex-student of hers, an old friend who just happened to be on the beach at Chumphon and who was arrested a mile or so from the first recorded Chronolith, a few hours after it appeared.”

“Sue,” I said, “it doesn’t mean anything. You know that.”

“It has no causal significance, you’re right, but that’s not the point. The point is, it marks us. Trying to figure out the genesis of a Chronolith is like trying to unravel a sweater before it’s been knitted. You can’t. At best, you can find certain threads that are the appropriate length or similarly colored and make certain guesses about how they might be looped together.”

“That’s why the FBI investigated my father?”

“They’re looking at absolutely everything. Because we don’t know what might be significant.”

“That’s the logic of paranoia.”

“Well, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re dealing with, the logic of paranoia. That’s why we’re both under surveillance. We’re not suspected of anything criminal, certainly not in the conventional sense. But they’re worried about what we might become.”

“Maybe we’re the bad guys, is that what you mean?”

She peered out the airliner’s window at the intermittent cumulus cloud, at the ocean down below us like a burnished blue mirror.

“Remember, Scotty. Whatever Kuin is, he probably didn’t originate this technology. Conquerors and kings tend not to be physics majors. They use what they can take. Kuin could be anyone, anywhere, but in all likelihood he’ll steal this technology, and who’s to say he won’t steal it from us? Or maybe we’re the good guys. Maybe we’re the ones who solve the puzzle. That’s possible, too — a different kind of co

I checked the aisle to see if anyone was listening, but Morris was up front chatting with a flight attendant and Ray had lost himself in a book. “I can go along with this up to a point,” I said. “I’m reasonably well paid when a lot of people aren’t getting paid at all and I’m seeing things I never thought I’d see.” Feeding my own obsession with the Chronoliths, I did not add. “But only up to a point. I can’t promise—”

To stick with it indefinitely, I meant to say. To become an acolyte, like Ray Mosely. Not when the world was going to hell and I had a daughter to protect.

Sue interrupted with a pensive smile. “Don’t worry, Scotty. Nobody’s promising anything, not anymore. Because nobody’s sure of anything. Certainty is one of the luxuries we’ll have to learn to live without.”

I had learned to do without certainty a long time ago. One of the rules of living with a schizophrenic parent is that weirdness is tolerable. You can endure it. At least — as I had told Sue — up to a point.

Past that point, madness spills all over everything. It gets inside you and makes itself at home, until there’s no one you can trust, not even yourself.

The first Highway One checkpoint was the hardest to get through. This was where the IDF turned away would-be pilgrims attracted, perversely, by the evacuation.

“Jerusalem Syndrome” had been named as a psychiatric condition decades ago. Visitors are occasionally overwhelmed by the city’s cultural and mythological significance. They identify too deeply, dress in bedsheets and sandals, proclaim sermons from the Mount of Olives, attempt to sacrifice animals on the Temple Mount. The phenomenon has kept the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital in business since well before the turn of the century.

The wave of global uncertainty generated by the Chronoliths had already triggered a new wave of pilgrimages, and the evacuation had turned it up to a fever pitch. Jerusalem was being evacuated for the safety of its inhabitants, but when had that ever mattered to a fanatic? We wormed our way through a line of vehicles, some abandoned at the checkpoint when the drivers refused to turn away. There was a steady transit of police cars, ambulances, tow trucks.

We cleared this obstacle at dusk and arrived at a major hotel on Mt. Scopus just as the last light was fading from the sky.

Observation posts had been established all over the city: not just ours, but military stations, a U.N. post, delegations from a couple of Israeli universities, and a site for the international press on the Haas Promenade. Mt. Scopus (Har HaTsofim, in Hebrew, which also happens to mean “looking over”) was something of a choice spot, however. This was where the Romans had camped in 70 A.D., shortly before they moved to crush the Jewish rebellion. The Crusaders had been here, too, for similar reasons. The view of the Old City was spectacular but dismaying. The evacuation, especially of the Palestinian zones, hadn’t gone easily. The fires were still burning.

I followed Sue through the vacant hotel lobby to a suite of adjoining rooms on the top floor. This was the heart of the operation. The curtains had been taken down and a crew of technicians had set up photographic and monitoring devices and, more ominously, a bank of powerful heaters. Most of these people were part of Sue’s research project, but only a few of them had met her personally. A number of them hurried to shake her hand. Sue was gracious about it but obviously tired.

Morris showed us our private rooms, then suggested we meet in the lobby restaurant once we’d had a chance to shower and change.

Sue wondered aloud how the restaurant had managed to stay open for business during the evacuation. “The hotel’s outside the primary exclusion zone,” Morris said. “There’s a skeleton staff to look after us, all volunteers, and a heated bunker for them in back of the kitchen.”

I took a few minutes in my room just to look at the city folded like a stony blanket across the Judean hills. The nearby streets were empty except for security patrols and occasional ambulances out of Hadassah Mt. Sinai a few streets away. Stoplights twitched in the wind like palsied angels.

The IDF man in the car had said something interesting as we passed the checkpoint. In the old days, he said, the fanatics who came to Jerusalem usually imagined they were Jesus, come again, or John the Baptist, or the first and only true, original Messiah.

Lately, he said, they tended to claim to be Kuin.

A city that had seen far too much history was about to see some more.

I found Sue, Morris, and Ray waiting for me in the hotel’s immense atrium. Morris gestured at the five stories of hanging plants and said, “Check it out, Scotty, it’s the Garden of Babylon.”