The Chronoliths

By sunset the core was fixed in place and linked to our electronics through a bundle of lightpipes and conductors jacketed in liquid nitrogen. We still had much to do, but the heavy lifting and digging was essentially finished. The civilians celebrated with grilled flank steaks and generous rations of bottled beer. A bunch of the older engineers gathered by the roadside after di

We suffered our first casualty that night.

Isolated we might have been, but there was still occasional traffic on the two-lane county road that had brought us here. We had men north and south along the roadside, soldiers wearing the orange brassards of a highway work crew. They carried glow torches and waved on anyone who seemed more than casually curious about our trucks and gear. The strategy had worked reasonably well so far.

Not long after moonrise, however, a man in a verdigris-green landau cut his motor and lights at the top of the northern rise and rolled silently into the breakdown lane not fifty feet from our lead truck, in the shadows where the glow of the camp lights began to fade.

He stepped out onto the gravel berm with his back to two approaching security perso

Fortunately the chief of security that night was a bright and well-trained woman named Marybeth Pearlstein, who witnessed the act from a watch station fifty feet up the road. A scant few seconds later she came around the bumper of the nearest truck with her rifle at ready and took down the assailant with one well-placed shot.

The assailant turned out to be a Copperhead crank well known to local police. A County Coroner’s truck pulled up two hours later and took the bodies away; an ambulance carried the survivor into the Modesty County medical center. There might have been an inquest, I suppose, if events had turned out differently.

What I didn’t know—

That is, what I learned later—

Pardon me, but fuck these stupid and impotent words.

Can you hear it, grinding away under the printed page, this outrage disinterred from the soil of too many years?

What I didn’t know was that several of the Texas PK militia — the people Hitch had told me about, the people who had taken two of his fingers — had already followed a trail of clandestine co

Whit, it seemed, had kept his colleagues informed of my comings and goings ever since I had traveled to Portillo in search of Kaitlin. Even then, the PK and Copperhead elites had taken an interest in Sue Chopra: as a potent enemy, or worse, a commodity, a potential resource.

I don’t imagine Whit could have foreseen the consequences of his actions. He was, after all, only sharing some interesting information with his Copperhead buddies (who shared it with their friends, and so on down the line from Whit’s suburban universe all the way to the underground militant cadres). In Whit’s world consequences were always remote; rewards were immediate, else they were not rewards. There was nothing genuinely political about Whit Delahunt’s Copperhead leanings. For Whit the movement was a kind of Rotary or Kiwanis, dues paid in the coin of information. I doubt he ever really believed in a physical, substantial Kuin. Had Kuin appeared before him, Whit would have been as dumbfounded as a Sunday Christian confronted by the Carpenter of Galilee.

Which is not, I hasten to add, an excuse.

But I’m sure Whit never envisioned these Texas militiamen knocking at his door well after midnight, entering his home as if it were their own (because he was one of their own) and extracting from him at gunpoint the address of the apartment where Ashlee and I lived.

Janice was present when this invasion took place. She tried to persuade Whit not to answer the invaders’ questions, and when he ignored her she tried to phone the police. For this unsuccessful effort she received a pistol-whipping that broke her jaw and fractured her collarbone. They both would have been killed, I’m sure, if not for Whit’s promise to keep Janice under control — he had nothing to gain by reporting any of this and I’m sure he told himself he was helpless to stop it — and his potential further utility to the movement.

What neither Whit nor Janice could have known was that one of the militiamen had taken a longtime personal interest in the activities of Sue Chopra and Hitch Paley — this was, of course, Adam Mills. Adam had returned to his hometown in a frenzy of antinostalgia, delighted that the threads of his life had knotted back on themselves in such a strange and satisfying fashion. It gave him a sense of destiny, I suppose; a feeling of profound personal significance.

Had he known the phrase, he might have considered himself “deep in the tau turbulence.” Adam had lost two fingertips to frostbite in the aftermath of Portillo — not coincidentally, the same fingertips he later subtracted by machete from Hitch — and this had left him with a feeling of entitlement, as if he had been anointed by Kuin himself.

Kait, thank God, was asleep in the apartment over the garage during these events. There was noise, but not enough to wake her. She wasn’t involved.

At least, not yet.

Sleepless in the aftermath of the roadside shooting, I walked a little while with Ray Mosely on the cluttered ground between the core tower and the quonsets.

Much of the camp had finally settled down, and apart from the muted hum of the generators there was not much noise. In effect, it was possible at last to hear the silence — to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

I had never been close to Ray, but we had grown a little closer over the duration of this trip. When I first met him he was the kind of book-smart, underconfident overachiever who fears nothing so much as his own vulnerability. It had made him defensive and brittle. He was still that person. But he was also the end result of years of compulsive denial, middle-aged now and a little more cognizant of his own shortcomings.

“You’re worried about Sue,” he said.

I wondered whether I ought to talk about this. But we were alone, out of earshot. Nobody here but me and Ray and the jackrabbits.

I said, “She’s obviously under stress. And she’s not dealing with it particularly well.”

“Would you? In her position?”

“Probably not. But it’s the way she talks. You know what I mean. It starts to sound a little relentless. And you begin to wonder—”

“Whether she’s sane?”

“Whether the logic that brought us here is as airtight as she thinks it is.”

Ray seemed to consider this. He put his hands in his pockets and gave me a rueful smile. “You can trust the math.”

“I’m not worried about the math. We’re not here for the math, Ray. We’re ten or fifteen leaps of faith beyond that.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust her.”

“What does that mean? Do I think she’s honest? Yes. Do I think she means well? Of course she means well. But do I trust her judgment? At this point, I’m not sure.”

“You agreed to come here with us.”

“She can be convincing.”

Ray paused and looked out into the darkness, out past the tau core in its steel framework, to the scrub and the moonlit wildgrass and the stars. “Think about what she’s given up, Scott. Think about the life she could have had. She could have been loved.” He smiled wanly. “I know it’s obvious how I feel about her. And I know how ridiculous that is. How fucking clownlike. How stupid. She’s not even heterosexual. But if not me, it could have been someone else. One of those women she’s always dating and ignoring, splicing in and out of her life like a spare reel of film. But she pushed those people away because her work was important, and the harder she worked the more important her work became, and now she’s given herself to it altogether, she belongs to it. Every step she ever took was a step toward this place. Right now I think even Sue must be wondering whether she’s delusional.”