The Chronoliths

Nine

Looking back at these pages, it seems to me I’ve said too much about myself and not enough about Sue Chopra. But I can only tell my own story as I experienced it. Sue, I thought, was preoccupied with her work and blind to the forces that had infantilized her, made her a ward of the state. Her acceptance of her condition bothered me, probably because I was chafing under the same restraints and reaping the same rewards. I had access to the best and newest processor platforms, the sleekest code incubators. But I was at the same time an object of scrutiny, paid to donate DNA and urine samples to the infant science of tau turbulence.

I had promised myself that I would endure this until I had financed at least the lion’s share of Kaitlin’s surgery. Then all bets were off. If the march of the Chronoliths continued, I wanted to be home and near Kaitlin as the crisis worsened.

As for Kait… the most I could be for Kait right now was emotional backup, a refuge if things went bad with Whit, a second-string parent. But I had a feeling, maybe as powerful and specific as Morris’s dream, that sooner or later she would need me.

We were in Jerusalem because the Chronolith had a

We were less than fifteen hours from the estimated time of touchdown when I woke Thursday morning. Today the entire floor was in lockdown, nobody allowed in or out except for technicians transiting between the indoor monitors and the ante

The city itself was still and calm under a dusty turquoise sky.

The Israeli Minister of Defense arrived for his photo-op that afternoon. Two press-pool photographers, three junior military advisors, and a couple of cabinet ministers followed him into the tech suite. The press guys wore cameras clamped to their shoulders on gymbal mounts. The Minister of Defense, a bald man in khaki, listened to Sue’s description of the reco

Minkowski was a twentieth-century physicist who asserted that the universe could be understood as a four-dimensional cube. Any event can be described as a point in four-space; the sum of these points is the universe, past, present, and future.

Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary. To travel into the past, you would have to uncreate (or, I suppose, thaw) an entire universe. Clearly absurd: what power could rewind the planets, wake dead stars, dissolve babies into the womb? But that wasn’t what Kuin had done, though what he had done was marvelous enough. A Chronolith, Ray said, was like a hot needle driven into Minkowski ice. The effects were striking but strictly local. In Chumphon, in Thailand, in Asia, perhaps ultimately in all the world, the consequences were strange and paradoxical; but the moon didn’t care; the comets were unmoved in their orbits; the stars looked blindly on. The Minkowski ice crystallizes once more around the cooling needle and time flows as before, subtly wounded, perhaps, but substantially unchanged.

The Defense Minister accepted this with the obvious private skepticism of a Moslem cleric touring the Vatican. He asked a few questions. He admired the blast-proof glass that had replaced the hotel windows and commented approvingly on the dedication of the men and women operating the machinery. He hoped we would all learn something useful in the next several hours if, God forbid, the predicted tragedy actually took place. Then he was escorted upstairs for a look at the ante

All this, of course, would be edited for public consumption, a display of governmental calm in the face of crisis.

Invisibly, inevitably, the Minkowski ice was melting. The hotel’s links were overwhelmed by our extremely broad-band data-sharing, but I took one call that day: Janice, letting me know my father had died in his sleep.

It had snowed over most of Maryland that day — about six inches of fine powder. My father wore a medical tag which had issued an alert when he entered cardiac distress, but by the time the ambulance arrived he was beyond resuscitation.

Janice offered to make the necessary arrangements while I was overseas (there was no other surviving family). I agreed and thanked her.

“I’m sorry, Scott,” she said. “I know he was a difficult man. But I’m sorry.”

I tried to feel the loss in a meaningful way.

Nevertheless I caught myself wondering how much trauma he had avoided by ducking out of history at this juncture, what tithes he would not be obliged to pay.

Morris knocked at my door as dusk was falling and escorted me back to the tech suite, monitors radiating blue light into the room. As observers, Morris and I were relegated to the line of chairs along the rear wall where we wouldn’t be underfoot. The room was hot and dry, ranks of portable heaters already glowing ferociously. The techs seemed overdressed and were sweating at their consoles.

Outside, the cloudless sky faded to ink. The city was preternaturally still. “Not long now,” Morris whispered. This was the first time the arrival of a Chronolith had been predicted with any accuracy, but the calculations were still approximate, the countdown tentative. Sue, passing, said, “Keep your eyes open.”

Morris said, “What if nothing happens?”

“Then the Likkud loses the election. And we lose our credibility.”

The minutes drained away. Quilted jackets were handed out to those of us who hadn’t do

“Kuin as Caesar,” I said. “Worship whatever gods you like, as long as you bow to the conqueror.”

“Not the first time for Jerusalem.”

But maybe the last. The Chronoliths had re-ignited all the apocalyptic fears the 20th Century had focused on nuclear weapons: the sense that a new technology had raised the stakes of conflict, that the long parade of empires rising and empires falling might have reached its final cycle. Which was, just now, all too easy to believe. The valley of Megiddo, after all, was only a few miles from here.

We were reminded to keep our jackets zipped despite the heat. Sue wanted the room as hot as we could tolerate, a buffer against thermal shock.

Intense analysis of previous arrivals had given us an idea of what to expect. A Chronolith doesn’t displace the air and bedrock where it appears; it transforms these materials and incorporates them into its own structure. The shockwave is a result of what Sue had dubbed “radiant cooling.” Within a few yards of the Kuin stone the air itself would condense, solidify, and fall to the ground; for some part of a second, air rushing to replace it would be acted upon similarly. Within a slightly broader area the atmosphere would freeze in fractions of its constituent gases — oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Water vapor is precipitated over a much wider perimeter.