The Chronoliths

Hitch told Ray to get the van started while he hurried back with a digital sextant and a tripod from the survey vehicle. Sue set up the instrument despite the gusting wind and scribbled numbers into her notebook. Ray said, gently but firmly, “I don’t think it matters anymore.”

“What?”

“Taking measurements.”

“I’m not doing this,” she said briskly, “for fun,” but when she tried to fold up the tripod she fainted into Ray’s arms, and we carried her to the van.

I picked her notebook out of the icy mud.

Hitch drove while Ray and I got a cushion under Sue’s head and a blanket over her body. The Uniforces people tried to flag us down. A guard with a rifle and a nervous expression leaned in the window and glared at Hitch. “Sir, I can’t guarantee your safety—”

“Yeah,” he said, “I know,” and gu

We would be safer — Sue would be safer — well away from here. Hitch cut across the flatlands on one of the local roads. These were dirt trails that dead-ended, most of them, at failed ranches or dry cattle tanks. Not an especially promising escape route. But Hitch had always preferred back roads.

Despite the elaborate coldproofing, our engine had sustained damage in the thermal shock. The van was kicking and dying by nightfall, when we came within sight of a cinderblock shed with a crude tin roof. We stopped here, not because the building was in any way inviting — many seasons of rain had come through the empty windows; generations of field mice had built and abandoned nests inside — but because it would serve to disguise our presence and would shelter the van from easy view. We had at least put a few miles behind us.

And with nothing left to do, the sun setting beyond the now-distant but still dominating figure of Kuin and a brisk wind combing the wild grass, we huddled in the vehicle and tried to sleep. We didn’t have to try very hard. We were all exhausted. Even Sue slept, though she had revived quickly from her faint and had been alert enough on the drive east.

She slept through the night and was up at dawn.

Come morning, Hitch opened the van’s engine compartment and ran the resident diagnostics. Ray Mosely blinked at the noise but then rolled back to sleep.

I woke hungry, remained hungry (we had only emergency rations), and walked past the paint-scabbed wall of the shed to the place on the grassland where Sue had once again unfolded our tripod and sextant.

The surveyor’s tool was aimed at the distant Chronolith. Sue had opened a top map and laid it at her feet, the corners weighted with rocks. A brisk wind tousled her coiled hair. Her clothes were dirty and her enormous eyeglasses smudged; but, incredibly, she managed to smile when she noticed me.

“Morning, Scotty,” she said.

The Chronolith was an icy pillar silhouetted against the haze-blue horizon. It drew the eye the way any incongruous or shocking thing does. The Kuin of Wyoming gazed eastward from his pedestal, almost directly at us.

Aimed at us, I thought, like an arrow.

I said, trying to restrain the irony, “Are you learning anything?”

“A lot.” She faced me. Her smile was peculiar. Happy-sad. Her eyes were wide and wet. “Too much. Way too much.”

“Sue—”

“No, don’t say anything practical. May I ask you a question?”

I shrugged.

“If you were packing for a trip to the future, Scotty, what would you take?”

“What would I take? I don’t know. What would you take?”

“I would take… a secret. Can you keep a secret?”

It was an unsettling question. It was something my mother used to ask me when she began to bend into insanity. She would hover over me like a malign shadow and say, “Can you keep a secret, Scotty?”

The secret was inevitably some paranoid assertion: that cats could read her mind; that my father was an impostor; that the government was trying to poison her.

“Come on, Scotty,” Sue said, “don’t look at me like that.”

“If you tell me,” I said, “it’s not a secret anymore.”

“Well, that’s true. But I have to tell someone. I can’t tell Ray, because Ray is in love with me. And I can’t tell Hitch, because Hitch doesn’t love anyone at all.”

“That’s cryptic.”

“Yes. I can’t help it.” She glanced at the far blue pillar of the Kuin. “We may not have much time.”

“Time for what?”

“I mean, it won’t last. The Chronolith. It isn’t stable. It’s too massive. Look at it, Scotty. See the way it’s sort of quivering?”

“That’s heat coming off the prairie. It’s an optical illusion.”

“In part. Not entirely. I’ve run the numbers over and over. The numbers that pegged back at the bunker. These numbers.” Her notebook. “I triangulated its height and its radius, at least roughly. And no matter how stingy I am with the estimates, it comes up past the limit.”

“The limit?”

“Remember? If a Chronolith is too massive, it’s unstable — if I could have published the work they might have called it the Chopra Limit.” Her peculiar smile faded and she looked away. “I may be too vain for the work I have to do. I can’t let that happen. I have to be humble, Scotty. Because I will, God knows, be humbled.”

“You’re saying you think the Chronolith will destroy itself.”

“Yes. Within the day.”

“That would hardly be a secret.”

“No, of course, but the cause of it will be. The Chopra Limit is my work. I haven’t shared it with anyone, and I doubt anyone else is doing triangulation. The Kuin won’t last long enough for accurate measurement.”

This was making me nervous. “Sue, even if this is all true, people will know—”

“Know what? All anyone will know is that the Chronolith was destroyed and that we were here trying to destroy it. They’ll draw the obvious conclusion. That we succeeded, if a little belatedly. The truth will be our secret.”

“Why a secret?”

“Because I mustn’t tell, Scotty, and neither must you. We have to carry this secret at least twenty years and three months into the future or else it won’t work.”

“Dammit, Sue — what won’t work?”

She blinked. “Poor Scotty. You’re confused. Let me explain.”

I couldn’t follow every detail of her explanation, but this is what I came away with.

We had not been defeated.

Plenty of press folks were doubtless still reporting the arrival, and they would also witness — in a matter of hours if not minutes — the spectacular collapse of the Chronolith. That broadcast image would (Sue claimed) interrupt the feedback loop and shatter Kuin’s aura of invincibility. Win or lose, Kuin would no longer be destiny. He would be reduced to the status of an enemy.

And the world must think we had succeeded; the Chopra Limit must remain a closely-held secret…

Because, Sue believed, it was not a coincidence that this Chronolith had surpassed the physical limit of stability.

It was, she declared, quite obviously an act of sabotage.

Contemplate that: the sabotage of a Chronolith, by design. Who would commit such an act? Clearly, an insider. Clearly, someone who understood not only the crude physics of the Chronoliths but their finest nuances. Someone who understood the physical limits and knew how to push them.

“That arrow,” Sue said almost sheepishly, shocked at the temerity of her words and not a little frightened: “That arrow is pointing at me.”

Of course it was madness.

It was megalomania, self-aggrandizing and self-abnegating, both at once. Sue had elevated herself to the rank of Shiva. Creator, destroyer.

But a part of me wanted it to be true.

I think I wanted an end to the long and disruptive drama of the Chronoliths — not just for my sake but for Ashlee’s, for Kaitlin’s.