The Chronoliths

Our convoy consisted of eight large enclosed military cargo trucks and twice that number of vans and perso

Some miles past the border we pulled over to the margin of the road on a cue from the lead truck, lining up for gas at a lonely little Sunshine Volatiles station. Sue switched off the forced-air cooler and I rolled down a side window. The sky was boundless blue, marked here and there with wisps of high cloud. The sun was near zenith. Across a brown meadow, more sparrows swirled over an ancient rust-brown oil derrick. The air smelled of heat and dust.

“There are all kinds of limits on the Chronoliths,” Sue went on, her voice a sleepy drone. “Mass, for instance, or more precisely mass-equivalency, given that the stuff they’re made of isn’t conventional matter. You know there’s never been a Chronolith with a mass-equivalency greater than roughly two hundred metric to

I said I did not.

“It would become unstable and destroy itself. Probably in a spectacular fashion. Its Calabi-Yau geometry would just sort of unfold. In practical terms, that would be catastrophic.”

But Kuin had not been so unwise as to allow that to happen. Kuin, I reflected, had been pretty savvy all along. And this did not bode well for our quixotic little voyage into the sun-ridden western lands.

“I could use a Coke,” Sue said abruptly. “I’m dry as a bone. Would you fetch me a Coke from the gas station, if they have any to sell?”

I nodded and climbed out of the van onto the pebbly margin of the road and walked up past the row of idling trucks toward the Sunshine depot. The fuel station was a lonely outpost, an old geodesic half dome shading a convenience store and a row of rust-spackled holding tanks. The tarmac was lined with miniature windrows of loose dirt. An old man stood in the doorway, shading his eyes with his hand and looking down the long row of vehicles. This was probably more custom than he had seen in the last two weeks. But he didn’t look particularly happy about it.

Automated service modules groped under the carriage of the lead truck, refueling and cleaning it. Charges were displayed on a big overhead panel, its lens gone opaque in the wash of sun and grit.

“Hey,” I said. “Looks like it hasn’t rained around here for a while.”

The gas-station attendant lowered his hand from his eyes and gazed at me obliquely. “Not since May,” he said.

“You got any cold drinks in there?”

He shrugged. “Soda pop. Some.”

“Can I have a look?”

He moved out of the doorway. “It’s your money.”

The interior shade seemed almost frigid after the raw heat of the day. There wasn’t much stock on the store’s shelves. The cooler held a few Cokes, root beers, orange pop. I selected three cans at random.

The attendant rang up the sale, peering at my forehead so intently that I began to feel branded. “Something wrong?” I asked him.

“Just checking for the Number.”

“Number?”

“Of the Beast,” he said, and pointed to a bumper sticker he had attached to the front of the checkout desk: I’M READY FOR THE RAPTURE! HOW ABOUT YOU?

“I guess all I’m ready for,” I said, “is a cold drink.”

“What I figured.”

He followed me out of the store and squinted down the line of trucks. “Looks like the circus came to town.” He spat absentmindedly into the dust.

“Is there a key to the toilet?”

“On the hook around the side.” He hooked a thumb to the left. “Show some mercy and flush when you’re done.”

The location of the arrival — identified by satellite surveillance and refined by on-the-spot measurement of ambient radiation — was as enigmatic and as unenlightening as so many other Chronolith sites.

Rural, small-town, or otherwise relatively undestructive Chronoliths were generally labeled “strategic,” whereas city-busters like the Bangkok or Jerusalem stones were “tactical.” Whether this was a meaningful distinction or just happenstance was subject to debate.

The Wyoming stone, however, clearly fell into the “strategic” category. Wyoming is essentially a high, barren mesa interrupted by mountains — “the land of high altitudes and low multitudes,” a twentieth-century governor had called it. Its oil reserves and its cattle business were hardly vulnerable to a Kuin stone, and in any case the projected arrival site featured neither of those resources — featured nothing at all, in fact, apart from a few crumbling farm structures and prairie-dog nests. The nearest town was a post-office village called Modesty Creek, fifteen miles up a two-lane tarmac road that ran through brown meadowland and basalt outcroppings and sparse stands of cottonwood. We traversed this secondary road at a cautious speed, and Sue took time off from her monologue to admire the waves of sage and wild nettles as we approached our destination.

What purpose, I asked her, could a Chronolith serve in a place like this?

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s a good and reasonable question to ask. It must mean something. It’s like playing a game of chess and suddenly your opponent moves his bishop off to the rim for no apparent reason. Either it’s an implausibly stupid mistake, or it’s a gambit.”

A gambit, then: a distraction, false threat, provocation, lure. But it didn’t matter, Sue insisted. Whatever purpose the Chronolith was meant to serve, we would nevertheless prevent its arrival. “But the causality is extremely tangled,” she admitted. “Very densely knotted and recomplicated. Kuin has the advantage of hindsight. He can work against us in ways we can’t anticipate. We know very little about him, but he might know a great deal about us.”

By nightfall we had pulled all our vehicles off the road. An advance party had already scouted the site and marked its rough perimeter with survey stakes and yellow tape. There was enough light left in the sky for Sue to lead some of us up a rise, and from there we looked out across a meadow as prosaic as the surveyed ground of a shopping-mall project.

This was wild country, originally part of a privately-owned land parcel, never cultivated and seldom visited. At dusk it was a solemn place, rolling prairie edged on its eastern extremity by a steep bluff. The soil was stony, the sagebrush gray at the end of a dry summer. It would have been utterly quiet if not for the sound of the engineering crew pumping compressed air into the frames of a dozen inflatable quonsets.

Atop the bluff, an antelope stood in silhouette against the fading blue of the sky. It raised its head, scented us, trotted out of view.

Ray Mosely stepped up behind Sue and took her arm. “You can sort of feel it,” he said, “can’t you?”

The tau turbulence, he meant. If so, I was immune to it. There might have been a faint scent of ozone in the air, but all I could feel for certain was the cooling wind at my back.

“It’s a pretty place,” Sue said. “But stark.”

In the morning we filled it with earthmovers and graders and razored all its prettiness away.

The civilian telecom network, like so many other public works, had lately fallen into disrepair. Satellites dropped out of their orbits and were not replaced; lightpipes aged and cracked; the old copper wires were vulnerable to weather. Despite all that I was lucky enough, the following night, to get a voice line through to Ashlee.