The Chronoliths

He took me to the executive cafeteria. The steam tables were empty, the food service finished for the day. The room was deserted. We sat at a lacquered wooden table like civilized people.

Whit loosened his tie. “Janice told me this might happen. That you’d come into town and complicate everything. You really should talk to the police, Scott, because I sure as hell intend to let them know what you’re up to.”

“You mentioned the Copperhead club.”

“No, you mentioned it, and will you please stop using that obscene word? It’s no such thing. It’s a citizen’s committee, for Christ’s sake. Yes, we talk about disarmament from time to time, but we talk about civil defense, too. We’re just average, churchgoing people. Don’t judge us by the fringe element you read about in the papers.”

“What should I call it, then?”

“We’re—” He had the grace to look embarrassed. “We’re the Twin Cities Peace with Honor Committee. You have to understand, there’s a lot at stake here. The kids have a point, Scott — the military buildup is distorting the economy, and there’s no evidence at all that guns and bombs are useful against Kuin, assuming he constitutes a threat to the United States, which is far from proven. We’re challenging the widespread belief that—”

“I don’t need the manifesto, Whit. What kind of people belong to this committee?”

“Prominent people.”

“How many?”

He blushed again. “Roughly thirty.”

“And you initiated Kait into the children’s auxiliary?”

“Far from it. The young people take these issues more seriously than we do. Than our generation, I mean. They’re not cynical about it. Kaitlin is a perfect example. She’d come home from youth group talking about all the things a leader like Kuin could do, if we weren’t fighting him at every turn. As if you could fight a man who controls time itself! Instead of finding a way to make the future a functional place.”

“You ever discuss this with her?”

“I didn’t indoctrinate her, if mat’s what you’re insinuating. I respect Kaitlin’s ideas.”

“But she fell in with radicals, is that right?”

Whit shifted in his seat. “I wouldn’t necessarily categorize them as radicals. I know some of those kids. They can be a little over the top, but it’s enthusiasm, not fanaticism.”

“None of them has been seen since Saturday.”

“My feeling is that they’re all right. Things like this happen sometimes. Kids dump their GPS tags, take an automobile and go off somewhere for a few days. It’s not good, but it’s hardly unique. I’m sorry if Kaitlin was misled by a few bad apples, Scott, but adolescence is never an easy time.”

“Did they ever talk about a haj?”

“Pardon me?”

“A haj. Janice used the word.”

“She shouldn’t have. We discourage that word, too. A haj is a pilgrimage to Mecca. But that’s not how the kids use it. They mean a trip to see a Kuin stone, or a place where one is supposed to arrive.”

“You think that’s what they had in mind?”

“I don’t know what they might have had in mind, but I doubt it was a haj. You can’t drive a Daimler to Madras or Tokyo.”

“So you’re not worried.”

He drew back and looked like he wanted to spit. “That’s a vicious thing to say. Of course I’m worried. The world is a dangerous place — more dangerous than it’s ever been, in my opinion. I dread what might happen to Kaitlin. That’s why I intend to let the police do their work without interference. I would suggest you do the same.”

“Thank you, Whit,” I said.

“Don’t make it worse for Janice than it already is.”

“I don’t see how I could do that.”

“Talk to the police. I mean it. Or I’ll talk to them on your behalf.”

He had recovered his poise. I stood up: I didn’t want to hear any more homilies about Kait, not from this man. He sat in his chair like a wounded princeling and watched me leave.

I called Janice again from the car — I wanted to speak to her once more before Whitman did.

Hard times had changed the city. I drove past barred or boarded windows, discount retailers where decent shops used to be, storefront churches of obscure denomination. The trash collectors’ strike had filled the sidewalks with garbage.

I told Janice over the phone that I’d talked to Whit.

“You had to do that, didn’t you? Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse.”

There was a note in her voice I didn’t like. “Janice — are you afraid of him?”

“Of course not, not physically, but what if he loses his job? What then? You don’t understand, Scotty. A lot of what Whit does is just… he has to go along to get along, you know what I mean?”

“My concern is with Kaitlin right now.”

“I’m not sure you’re doing Kait any good, either.” She sighed. “There’s a parents’ group the police told me about, you might want to look into it.”

“Parents’ group?”

“Parents whose kids ran off, usually kids with Kuinist ideas. Haj parents, if you know what I mean.”

“The last thing I’m looking for is a support group.”

“You could compare notes, see what other people are doing.”

I doubted it. But she zipped me the address and I copied it into my directory.

“Meanwhile,” she said, “I’ll apologize to Whit for you.”

“Has he apologized for letting Kait get mixed up in this?”

“That’s none of your business, Scott.”

Twelve

A month or so after the Jerusalem arrival I had taken myself to a doctor and had a long talk about genetics and madness.

It had occurred to me that Sue’s logic of correlation might have a personal side to it. She was saying, in effect, that our expectations shape the future, and that those of us exposed to extreme tau turbulence might influence it more than most.

And if what was happening to the world was madness, could I have factored in some of it from my own deepest psychic vaults? Had I inherited from my mother a faulty genetic sequence, and was it my own latent insanity that had filled a hotel suite on Mt. Scopus with bullets and glass?

The physician I talked to drew a blood sample and agreed to look at my genes for any markers that might suggest late-onset schizophrenia. But it wasn’t as simple as that, he said. Schizophrenia isn’t a purely heritable disorder, although susceptibility has a genetic aspect. That’s why they don’t gene-patch for it. There are complex environmental triggers. The most he could tell me was whether I might have inherited a tendency toward adult-onset schizophrenia — an almost meaningless factoid and utterly without predictive value.

I thought of it again when I used the motel terminal to call up a map of the world marked with Chronolith sites. If this was madness, here were its tangible symptoms. Asia was a red zone, dissolving into feverish anarchy, though fragile national governments continued to exist in Japan, where the ruling coalition had survived a plebiscite (barely), and in Beijing, though not in the Chinese countryside or far from the coast. The Indian subcontinent was pockmarked with arrivals and so was the Middle East, not only Jerusalem and Damascus but Baghdad, Tehran, Istanbul. Europe was free of the physical manifestation of Kuinism, which had so far stalled at the Bosporus, but not its political counterpart; there had been massive street riots in both Paris and Brussels staged by rival “Kuinist” factions. Northern Africa had endured five disastrous arrivals. A small Chronolith had cored the equatorial city of Kinshasa just last month. The planet was sick, sick unto death.

I dumped the map window and called one of the numbers Janice had given me, a police lieutenant by the name of Ramone Dudley. His interface told me he was unavailable but that my call had been logged for return.

While I waited I entered the other number Janice had pressed on me, the “support group,” which turned out to be the home terminal of a middle-aged woman named Regina Lee Sadler. She wore a bathrobe when she answered, and her hair was dripping. I apologized for calling her out of the shower.