The Chronoliths

Sleep, after that, was out of the question. I joined Ashlee up front and we sat together, vigilant and pumped with adrenaline. Ash put a cigarette between her lips and ignited the tip with a tiny propane lighter. We didn’t talk about the assault we had both witnessed, but a short time later, when the eastern sky began to show a faint blue, Ashlee said this:

“You have to not ask her. Kaitlin, I mean.”

“Ask her what?”

But it was a stupid question.

“Probably you don’t need this advice. It’s not like I’m a model parent or anything. But when you get Kaitlin back, don’t interrogate her. Maybe she’ll talk to you or maybe she won’t, but let her make that decision for herself.”

I said, “If she needs help—”

“If she needs help, she’ll ask for it.”

I left that alone. I didn’t want to speculate about what might or might not have happened to Kait. Ashlee had said what she meant to say and she turned back to the window, leaving me to wonder what had prompted her advice, what she herself might once have endured and refused to confess.

We dozed while the sun began to make the world warm. Hitch tapped on the window glass a little later, startling us out of sleep. Ashlee reached for the pistol but I caught her wrist.

I rolled the window down.

“Impressive guarding,” Hitch said. “I could have killed both of you.”

“Did you find them?”

“Kaitlin’s there. Adam, too. You want to feed me? We have a good deal of work ahead of us.”

Sixteen

We entered the village of Portillo slowly, crawling the van through foot traffic, down a single lane between parked or abandoned hajist vehicles. By morning light the main road was as crowded as a carnival midway and resembled one, though the crowds were subdued in the aftermath of the night. Pilgrims walked dazedly and aimlessly or slept on bedrolls under the town’s tattered awnings, safer in the daylight than in the dark. Water-sellers trawled the crowd with plastic gallon jugs slung over their shoulders. Kuinist flags and symbols had been draped from the upper windows of buildings. Local sanitary facilities had been overwhelmed and the smell of the trench latrines was pervasive and awful. Most of these people had arrived within the last three days, but there were already cases of dysentery, Hitch said, showing up at the relief tents.

Adam and company were camped west of the main drag. During the night Hitch had spoken briefly to Adam and not at all to Kait, though he had confirmed her presence. Adam had agreed to speak to Ashlee but had been reluctant to grant permission for Kait to see me. Adam was clearly in charge and speaking on behalf of the others, this information made Ashlee hang her head and mutter to herself.

Also present, at least on the outskirts of Portillo, were members of the press, riding bullet-resistant uplinked recording trucks with polarized windows. I had mixed feelings about that. In Sue’s interpretation of the Chronoliths and their metacausality, the press acted as an important amplifier in the feedback loop. It was precisely the globally broadcast image of these objects that served to burn the impression of Kuin’s invincibility into the collective imagination.

But what was the alternative? Repression, denial? That was the genius of Kuin’s monuments: They were grotesquely obvious, impossible to ignore.

“We get there,” Hitch said, “you let me do a little talking, then we’ll see what happens.”

“Not much of a plan,” I said.

“As much of a plan as we’ve got.”

We parked the van as close as possible to the cluster of tents where Adam and his friends had camped alongside dozens of others. The tents were almost ridiculously gaudy in this dry place, blue and red and yellow nylon mushrooming out of the packed earth of a masonry yard parking lot. Ashlee began to crane her head anxiously, looking for Adam. Of Kaitlin there was no sign.

“Stay here,” Hitch said. “I’ll negotiate us in.”

“Negotiate?” Ash asked, faintly indignant.

Hitch gave her a cautionary look and closed the door behind him.

He walked a few paces to an octagonal shelter of photosensitive silver mylar and called out something inaudible. Within moments the flap opened and Adam Mills stepped out. I knew it was Adam by the sound of Ashlee’s indrawn breath.

He was dressed in dust-caked khakis but seemed essentially healthy. He was ski

Ashlee reached for the door but I pulled her hand away. “Give it a minute.”

Hitch talked. Adam talked. Finally Hitch pulled a roll of bills out of his back pocket and counted them into Adam’s palm.

Ashlee said, “What’s that, a bribe? He’s bribing Adam?”

I said it looked that way.

“For what? For you to see Kait? Me to see him?”

“I don’t know, Ash.”

“God, that’s so—” She lacked a word for her contempt.

“It’s strange times,” I said. “Strange things happen.”

She slumped back in her seat, humiliated, and was silent until Hitch beckoned us out. I set the van’s security protocols, unlikely as that was to afford us any real protection. Outside, the air was dry and the stench was overwhelming. A few yards away a young man in once-white trousers was shoveling loose earth into a ditch latrine.

Ashlee approached Adam tentatively. I don’t know, but I suspect, that she was reluctant to face him now that the longed-for moment had finally arrived… reluctant to face the futility of the meeting, the fact of his resistance. She put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. Adam gazed back impassively. He was young, but he wasn’t a child. He gave no ground, only waited for Ashlee to speak, which I suppose was what he had been paid to do.

The two of them walked a few paces away down a trail between the tents. Hitch said to me, “It’s a fucking lost cause. She just doesn’t know it.”

“What about Kait?”

He gestured at a small sun-yellow tent.

I found myself thinking of the Cairo arrival of three years ago. Sue Chopra had obtained video recordings of the event from a dozen different angles, in all its phases — the calm before the manifestation, the cold shock and the thermal winds, a column of ice and dust boiling into a dry blue sky, and finally the Chronolith itself, glaringly bright, embedded in the sprawl of suburban Cairo like a sword driven into a rock.

(And who will pull this sword from the stone? The pure of heart, perhaps. Absent parents and failed husbands need not apply.)

I suppose it was the incongruity I had found so striking about Cairo: the tremulous waves of desert heat; the ice. The layers of mismatched history, office towers erected over the rubble of a thousand-year autarchy, and this newest of monuments, Kuin ponderous and remote as a pharaoh on his frigid throne.

I don’t know why the image came to me so vividly. Perhaps because this dry Sonoran village was about to receive its own throne of ice, and maybe there was already the faintest chill in the air, a shiver of premonition, the bitter smell of the future.

“Kaitlin?” I said.

A vagrant wind lifted the flap of the tent. I squatted and put my head inside.

Kait was alone, uncurling from a nest of dirty blankets. She blinked in the yellow nimbus of sun through nylon. Her face was thin. Her eyes were banded with fatigue.

She looked older than I remembered her, and I told myself that was because of what she must have endured on this haj, the hunger and the anxiety, but the fact was that she had slipped away from me, grown out of my mental image of her well before she left Mi