The Chronoliths

She kissed me, wounded as she was, and I held her gently, despite my damaged arm.

She began to apologize in return. She had been worried that I wouldn’t forgive her for having finally broken and told Adam Mills where to find me. God knows I wanted to apologize for having left her to this.

But I put my finger, delicately, delicately, against her swollen lips. Why dignify the horror with recrimination? We had survived. We were together. That was enough.

What I had not known — what I learned after I finally contacted Ashlee — was that Morris Torrance hadn’t abandoned his post outside the apartment.

Adam Mills had identified Morris as a guard and had taken his men into the building through a rear entrance to avoid alerting him. Morris called Ash shortly before Adam arrived, placing her in the apartment, and he had seen no suspicious activity since then. He logged off after midnight and drove back to the Marriott for a few hours of sleep. He wore a tag alert in case Ashlee needed him in the interim. He received no such alarm. In the morning he called Ash again but couldn’t get past her screen routine. He promptly drove to the apartment, not long after Kaitlin had arrived there, and unsuccessfully attempted another call. Deeply concerned now, Morris buzzed Ashlee from the lobby.

She answered the buzzer belatedly and her voice was slurred. Morris told Ashlee he was from a package delivery service and he needed her to sign his slate.

Ash, who must have recognized his voice, told him she couldn’t come to the door right now and asked whether it would be all right if he came back another time.

He told her could come back but that the package was labeled “perishable.”

Didn’t matter, Ashlee said.

Morris then stepped out of camera range, phoned the local police and reported an assault in progress, and let himself into the lobby with the key I had given him. He identified himself (incorrectly and illegally) as a federal agent to the superintendent of the building and obtained a master key to the apartment.

He knew how long it might take for a police response and he elected not to wait. He rode the elevator to our floor, placed another call to the apartment so that the ringing of the phone would mask the sound of the key in the lock, and entered the apartment with his gun drawn. He was, as he had so often told me, a retired agent without field experience. But he had been trained and he had not forgotten his training.

Kaitlin, at this point, was locked in a bedroom closet and Ashlee was sprawled on the sofa where she had been left after a beating.

Without hesitation Morris shot the man who was standing over Ash, then turned his gun on the second Kuinist who had just stepped out of the kitchen.

The second man dropped a bottle of beer at the sound of the shot and drew his own gun. He took Morris off his feet with one shot but Morris was able to return fire after he had fallen. The dining-room table gave him a little cover. He placed two bullets in the assailant’s head and neck.

Wounded in the leg — the bullet had carved a divot in his thigh, just like the bullet Sue Chopra took in Jerusalem — Morris was nevertheless able to comfort Ashlee and to release Kaitlin from the locked closet before he fainted.

Kait — who was mobile but had been beaten and raped — put a pressure bandage on the wound before the police arrived. Ashlee rose from the sofa and loped to the bathroom.

She soaked a cloth in water and daubed the blood from Morris’s face, and then Kaitlin’s, and then her own.

“It was foolhardy,” Morris said when I went to the hospital to thank him.

“It was the right thing to do.”

He shrugged. “Well, yeah, I think so too.” He was in a wheelchair, his damaged leg suspended in front of him, swathed in regenerative gels and wrapped in a cast. “They ought to hang a red flag on this,” he said.

“I owe you more than I can ever repay.”

“Don’t get sentimental, Scotty.” But he seemed a little teary himself. “Ashlee’s all right?”

“Improving,” I said.

“Kaitlin?”

“It’s hard to say. They’re bringing David home from Little Rock.”

He nodded. We sat silently for a time.

Then he said, “I saw it on the news. The Wyoming stone coming down. Took a while, but Sue got what she wanted, right?”

“She got what she wanted.”

“Shame about Hitch and Ray.”

I agreed.

“And Sue.” He gave me a meaningful look. “Hard to believe she’s really gone.”

“Believe it,” I said.

Because a secret isn’t a secret if you share it.

“You know I’m an old-fashioned Christian, Scotty. I’m not sure exactly what Sue believed in, unless it was that Hindu Shiva bullshit. But she was a good person, wasn’t she?”

“The best.”

“Right. Well. I couldn’t figure out why she asked me to stay here and took you to Wyoming with her. No offense, but that really bothered me. But I guess I served a purpose here.”

“That you did, my friend.”

“You think she had that in mind all along? I mean, she did have a thing for the future.”

“I think she knew us both pretty well.”

She took me, I thought, because Morris wouldn’t have served in my place. He would never have let her walk into the jaws of the wolf. He would certainly not have killed Hitch Paley.

Morris was a good man.

Twenty-eight

Lately I have visited two significant places.

Traveling isn’t easy for me these days. Medication keeps my various geriatric complaints under control — I’m healthier at seventy than my father was at fifty — but age breeds its own weariness. We are buckets of grief, I think, and eventually we fill to brimming.

I went alone to Wyoming.

The Wyoming Crater today is a minor, if unique, war memorial. For most Americans Wyoming was only the begi

No one much.

The crater is fenced and managed as a national monument now. Tourists can climb to a platform at the summit of the bluff and gaze down on the ruins from a distance. But I wanted to get closer than that. I felt entitled.

The Parks Service guard at the main entrance told me that would be impossible, until I explained that I’d been here in 2039 and showed him the scar that runs up from my left ear to my receding hairline. The guard was a veteran — armored cav, Canton, the bloody winter of 2050. He told me to stick around until the visitors’ center closed at five; then he’d see what he could do.

What he did was allow me to ride with him on the evening security inspection. We took a golf-cart-sized vehicle down a steep path and parked at the rim of the crater. The guard scrolled a newspaper and pretended not to keep an eye on me while I wandered a few minutes in the long shadows.

There had been almost an inch of rain this May. The shallow crater cupped a tiny brown pond at the bottom of it, and sagebrush bloomed along the rilled, eroded walls.

Some few fragments of the Kuin stone remained intact.

These had also eroded. Tau instability, the unraveling of complex Calabi-Yau knots, had rendered the final substance of the Chronolith as a simple fused silicate: gritty blue glass, nearly as fragile as sandstone.

There had been airstrikes here during the Western Secession, when American Kuinists had controlled these parts. The militias had claimed the state during the darkest hours of the War, had presumably (though there were no surviving witnesses) attempted to revise history by rebuilding and rebroadcasting the enormous Kuin of Wyoming. But they had been ill-advised. By someone. Someone who had convinced them to push the stability envelope past its limit.