The Chronoliths

Sue closed her eyes and we dragged her out of the cold and Morris spoke intently into his pocket phone as I pressed my palm against her bloody leg.

By this time the ambulances from Hadassah Mt. Sinai were already on their way, skidding over the crusts of ice still clinging to Lehi Street.

The paramedics set up triage in the lobby of the hotel, where they covered broken windows with thermal blankets and ran heaters from the hotel’s generator. One of them put a pressure bandage on Sue’s injury and directed arriving aid to the more critically injured, some of whom had been carried to the lobby, some of whom remained immobilized upstairs. IDF and civilian police cordoned the building while sirens wailed from all points of the compass.

“She died,” Sue said bleakly.

Cassie, of course.

“She died… Scotty, you saw her. Twenty years old. MIT diploma program. A sweet, nice child. She thanked me, and then she was killed. What does that mean? Does that mean something?”

Outside, ice fell from the cornices and rooftops of the hotel and shattered on the sidewalks. Moonlight penetrated the glassy white ruins and limned the emerging contours of the Kuin of Jerusalem.

The Kuin of Jerusalem: a four-sided pillar rising to form a throne on which the figure of Kuin is seated.

Kuin gazes placidly past the fractured Dome of the Rock, scrutinizing the Judean desert. He is clothed in peasant trousers and shirt. On his head is a band which might be a modest crown, worked with images of half-moons and laurel leaves. His face is formal and regal, the features unspecific.

The immense base of the monument meets the earth deep in the rains of Zion Square. The peak achieves an altitude of fourteen hundred feet.

PART TWO

LOST CHILDREN

Ten

What strikes me now — if you can forgive an old man second-guessing the text of his own memoirs — is how strange the advent of the Chronoliths must have seemed to the generation that came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union… my father’s generation, though he didn’t live to see the worst of it.

They were a generation that had looked on third-world dictatorships less with outrage than with impatience, a generation to whom grandiose palaces and monuments were the embarrassments of an earlier age, haunted houses ready to topple in the stiff winds blowing from the Nikkei and the NASDAQ.

The rise of Kuin caught them utterly off guard. They were serious about the threat but deaf to its appeal. They could imagine a million underfed Asians paying fealty to the name of Kuin. That was at least distantly plausible. But when they were scorned by their own children and grandchildren, their confidence evaporated.

They escaped, by and large, into the shelter of arms. Kuin’s monuments might seem magical but they predicted and were ultimately derived from military conquests, and a well-defended nation could not be conquered. Or so the reasoning went. The Jerusalem arrival provoked a second surge of federal investment: in research, detector satellite arrays, a new generation of missile-hunting drones, smart mines, battlefield and supply robots. The draft was reintroduced in 2029 and the standing army increased by half a million inductees. (Which helped to disguise the decline in the civilian economy that followed the aquifer crisis, the battered condition of Asian trade, and the begi

We would have bombed Kuin in his infancy if anyone had been able to find him. But southern China and most of Southeast Asia were in a state of ungoverned barbarism, a place where warlords in armored ATVs terrorized starving peasants. Any or all of these petty tyrants might have been Kuin. Most of them claimed to be. Probably none of them was. It was far from certain that Kuin was even Chinese. He could have been anywhere.

What seems obvious now (but wasn’t then) is that Kuin was dangerous precisely because he hadn’t declared himself. He possessed no platform but conquest, no ideology but ultimate victory. Promising nothing, he promised everything. The dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and the merely unhappy were all drawn toward an identification with Kuin. Kuin, who would level the mountains and make the valleys high. Kuin, who must speak with their voice, since no one else did.

For the generation that followed mine Kuin represented the radically new, the overthrow of antiquated structures of authority and the ascension of powers as cold and ruthlessly modern as the Chronoliths themselves.

In brief, he took our children from us.

When I got the call about Kait (from Janice, her video window blanked to hide her tears) I understood that I would have to leave Baltimore and that I would have to do so without Morris Torrance tailing me across seven states.

Which wouldn’t be easy, but might be easier than it would have been before Jerusalem. Before Jerusalem, Sue Chopra had been overseeing Chronolith research under a generous federal dispensation. That preeminence had been compromised by her devotion to the purely theoretical aspects of Chronolith theory — her obsession with the mathematics of tau turbulence, as opposed to practical questions of detection and defense — and by her disastrous congressional appearance in June of ‘28. In public questioning she had refused to accommodate Senator Lazar’s theory that the Jerusalem Chronolith might be a signal of the End Times. (She called the senator “poorly educated” and the notion of impending apocalypse “an absurd mythology that abets the very process we’re struggling to contain.” Lazar, a former Republican turned Federal Party hatchetman, called Sue “an ivory-tower atheist” who needed to be “weaned from the public teat.”)

She was, of course, too valuable to cut loose entirely. But she ceased to be the central figure in the effort to coordinate Chronolith research. She was, instead, kept away from public scrutiny. She remained the nation’s foremost expert on the esoterica of tau turbulence but had ceased to be its poster child.

The upside of this was that the FBI took a less direct interest in such small fish as myself, even if my files still languished in the digital catacombs of the Hoover Building.

Morris Torrance had resigned from the Bureau rather than accept reassignment. Morris was a believer. He believed in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the goodness of Sulamith Chopra, and the veracity of his own dreams. The age of the Chronoliths had made such conversions possible. I think, too, he was a little in love with Sue, though (unlike Ray Mosely) he had never harbored any illusions about her sexuality. He remained as her bodyguard and chief of security, drawing a salary that could only have been a fraction of his government income.

Both Sue and Morris wanted to keep me close to the project — Sue because I figured into her evolving pattern of meaningful coincidence; Morris because he believed I was important to Sue. Whether they could use legal leverage to keep me there had become debatable. Morris was a civilian now. But I didn’t doubt he would pursue me if I a

Sue was meanwhile trying to reconstruct her fragmented Chronolith project as an Internet circle, sharing any data the Defense Department left unclassified, deepening and expanding the mathematics of tau turbulence. In February of 2031 she lost her Department of Energy bursary and was reduced to another round of fundraising, while money flowed copiously into the glamor projects: the gamma-ray laser collider at Stanford; the Exotic Matter Group working out of Chicago.