The Chronoliths

The cold got colder. I felt sensation drain from my fingertips.

It was one of our engineers who panicked and pushed his way to the exit hatch. I supect all he wanted was daylight — wanted it so badly that the need had overcome his reason. I was close enough to see him in the dim light from the console arrays. He found the steps, lunged upward on all fours, touched the door handle. The lever must have been shockingly cold — he screamed even as he put his weight against it. The handle chunked down convulsively and the door sprang outward.

The blue sky was gone, replaced by curtains of screaming dust.

The engineer lurched out. Wind and sand and granules of ice swept in. Had Sue anticipated an arrival as violent as this? Perhaps not — the journalists lined up east of us must have been sprawled in the dirt by now. And I doubted anyone was shooting from the bluff, not anymore.

The thermal shock had peaked but our body temperatures were still dropping. It’s an odd sensation. Cold, yes, indescribably cold, but lazy, deceptive, narcotic. I felt myself shivering inside my overworked protective clothing. The shivering felt like an invitation to sleep.

“Stay in the bunker!” Sue shouted from somewhere deep in the trench behind me. “You’ll all be safer in the bunker! Scotty, close that door!”

But few of the engineers and technicians heeded her advice. They spilled out past me into the screeching wind, ru

Some few even managed to climb inside and start their engines. These vehicles had been proofed against the cold shock, but they roared like wounded animals, pistons grinding against cylinders. Arrival winds had battered down the perimeter fence and the civilian faction of our convoy began to vanish into the teeth of the storm.

West of us, where the Chronolith must have been, I could see nothing but a wall of fog and dust.

I pushed my way up the steps and pulled the hatch shut. The engineer had left some skin on the frigid lever. I left some of my own.

Sue secured some battery lamps and began to switch them on. Maybe a dozen of us remained in the bunker.

As soon we had some light Sue slumped down against one of the inert telemetry devices. I reeled across the room and joined her. Almost fell against her. Our arms touched, and her skin was shockingly cold (as I suppose was my own). Ray was nearby but had closed his eyes and seemed only intermittently conscious. Hitch squatted by the door, stubbornly alert.

Sue put her head on my shoulder.

“It didn’t work, Scotty,” she whispered.

“We’ll think about that later.”

“But it didn’t work. And if it didn’t work—”

“Hush.”

The Chronolith had touched down. The first Chronolith on American soil… and not a small one, judging by the secondary effects. Sue was right. We had failed.

“But Scotty,” she said, her voice infinitely weary and bewildered, “if it didn’t work… what am I doing here? What am I for?”

I thought it was a rhetorical question. But she had never been more serious.

Twenty-five

I suppose, when history allows a degree of objectivity, someone will write an aesthetic appreciation of the Chronoliths.

Obscene as this idea may seem, the monuments are arguably specimens of art, each one individual, no two quite alike.

Some are crude, like the Kuin of Chumphon: relatively small, lacking detail, like sand-cast jewelry; the work of a novice. Others are more finely sculpted (though they remain as bleakly generic as works of Soviet Realism) and more carefully considered. For instance, the Kuins of Islamabad or Capetown: Kuin as gentle giant, benevolently masculine.

But the most recognizable Chronoliths are the monsters, the city-wreckers. The Kuin of Bangkok, straddling the rude brown water of the Chao Phrya; the Robed Kuin of Bombay; the stern and patriarchal Kuin of Jerusalem, seeming to embrace the world’s faiths even as religious relics lie scattered at his feet.

The Kuin of Wyoming surpassed all these. Sue had been right about the significance of this monument. It was the first American Chronolith, a proclamation of victory in the heartland of a major Western power, and if its manifestation in this rural wasteland was an act of deference toward the great American cities, the symbolism remained both brazen and unmistakable.

The cold shock eased at last. We stirred out of our torpor and woke to a dawning awareness of what had happened here and what we had failed to achieve.

Hitch, characteristically, gave first thought to the practical business of staying alive. “Rouse up,” he said hoarsely. “We need to be away from here before the Kuinists come looking for us, which probably won’t be long. We need to avoid the main road, too.”

Sue hesitated, regarding the battery-powered gear lining the wall of the bunker. The instrumentation blinked incoherently, starved for input.

“You, too,” Hitch said.

“This could be important,” she said. “Some of these numbers pegged awfully high.”

“Fuck the numbers.” He ushered us stumbling to the door.

Sue wailed at the sight of the Chronolith dominating the sky.

Ray came up behind her; I followed Hitch. One of our few remaining engineers, a gray-haired man named MacGruder, stepped out and promptly fell to his knees in an act of pure if involuntary worship.

The Kuin was — well, it beggars description.

It was immense and it was frankly beautiful. It towered above the nearest large landmark, the stony bluff where the saboteurs had parked themselves. Of the tau core and its attendant structures there was, of course, no sign. The skin of ice on the Chronolith was already dropping away — there had not been much moisture in the ambient air — and the monument’s details were unobscured save by the mists that sublimated from its surface. Wreathed in its own cloud, it was majestic, immense, tall as a mountain. From this angle the expression on the Kuin’s face was oblique, but it suggested a smug complacency, the untroubled confidence of an assured conqueror.

Ice crystals melted and fell around us as a fine cold mist. The wind shifted erratically, now warm, now cool.

The main body of Kuinists had gathered to the south of the site. Many of them must have been disabled by the thermal shock, but the perimeter fence there veered a good couple of miles from the touchdown site, and judging by the renewed crackle of gunfire they were still lively enough to keep the Uniforces engaged. Soldiers closer to us had survived in their thermal gear but seemed disoriented and uncertain — their communications equipment had shut down and they were rallying to the flattened ruins of the east gate.

Of the militiamen who had disabled the tau core there was no sign.

Ray told the remaining engineers and technicians who shuffled out of the bunker to stick with the Uniforces. The journalists in the lee of the bunker must have had a different thought: They barreled past the fallen fence in their bulletproof vans. They had acquired and were no doubt already broadcasting this stu

Ray said, “Help me get Sue to the van.”

Sue had stopped weeping but was staring fixedly at the Chronolith. Ray stood next to her, supporting her. She whispered, “This isn’t right…”

“Of course it isn’t right. Come on, Sue. We need to get away.”

She shook off Ray’s hand. “No, I mean it’s not right. The numbers pegged high. I need a sextant. And a map. There’s a topographical map in the van, but — Hitch!”

Hitch turned back.

“I need a sextant! Ask one of the engineers!”

“The fuck?” Hitch said.

“A sextant!”