The Chronoliths (22 page)

I hoped the girl would be safe, unlikely as that seemed.

Sleep, after that, was out of the question. I joined Ashlee up front and we sat together, vigilant and pumped with adrenaline. Ash put a cigarette between her lips and ignited the tip with a tiny propane lighter. We didn’t talk about the assault we had both witnessed, but a short time later, when the eastern sky began to show a faint blue, Ashlee said this:

“You have to not ask her. Kaitlin, I mean.”

“Ask her what?”

But it was a stupid question.

“Probably you don’t need this advice. It’s not like I’m a model parent or anything. But when you get Kaitlin back, don’t interrogate her. Maybe she’ll talk to you or maybe she won’t, but let her make that decision for herself.”

I said, “If she needs help—”

“If she needs help, she’ll ask for it.”

I left that alone. I didn’t want to speculate about what might or might not have happened to Kait. Ashlee had said what she meant to say and she turned back to the window, leaving me to wonder what had prompted her advice, what she herself might once have endured and refused to confess.

We dozed while the sun began to make the world warm. Hitch tapped on the window glass a little later, startling us out of sleep. Ashlee reached for the pistol but I caught her wrist.

I rolled the window down.

“Impressive guarding,” Hitch said. “I could have killed both of you.”

“Did you find them?”

“Kaitlin’s there. Adam, too. You want to feed me? We have a good deal of work ahead of us.”

We entered the village of Portillo slowly, crawling the van through foot traffic, down a single lane between parked or abandoned hajist vehicles. By morning light the main road was as crowded as a carnival midway and resembled one, though the crowds were subdued in the aftermath of the night. Pilgrims walked dazedly and aimlessly or slept on bedrolls under the town’s tattered awnings, safer in the daylight than in the dark. Water-sellers trawled the crowd with plastic gallon jugs slung over their shoulders. Kuinist flags and symbols had been draped from the upper windows of buildings. Local sanitary facilities had been overwhelmed and the smell of the trench latrines was pervasive and awful. Most of these people had arrived within the last three days, but there were already cases of dysentery, Hitch said, showing up at the relief tents.

Adam and company were camped west of the main drag. During the night Hitch had spoken briefly to Adam and not at all to Kait, though he had confirmed her presence. Adam had agreed to speak to Ashlee but had been reluctant to grant permission for Kait to see me. Adam was clearly in charge and speaking on behalf of the others, this information made Ashlee hang her head and mutter to herself.

Also present, at least on the outskirts of Portillo, were members of the press, riding bullet-resistant uplinked recording trucks with polarized windows. I had mixed feelings about that. In Sue’s interpretation of the Chronoliths and their metacausality, the press acted as an important amplifier in the feedback loop. It was precisely the globally broadcast image of these objects that served to burn the impression of Kuin’s invincibility into the collective imagination.

But what was the alternative? Repression, denial? That was the genius of Kuin’s monuments: They were grotesquely obvious, impossible to ignore.

“We get there,” Hitch said, “you let me do a little talking, then we’ll see what happens.”

“Not much of a plan,” I said.

“As much of a plan as we’ve got.”

We parked the van as close as possible to the cluster of tents where Adam and his friends had camped alongside dozens of others. The tents were almost ridiculously gaudy in this dry place, blue and red and yellow nylon mushrooming out of the packed earth of a masonry yard parking lot. Ashlee began to crane her head anxiously, looking for Adam. Of Kaitlin there was no sign.

“Stay here,” Hitch said. “I’ll negotiate us in.”

“Negotiate?” Ash asked, faintly indignant.

Hitch gave her a cautionary look and closed the door behind him.

He walked a few paces to an octagonal shelter of photosensitive silver mylar and called out something inaudible. Within moments the flap opened and Adam Mills stepped out. I knew it was Adam by the sound of Ashlee’s indrawn breath.

He was dressed in dust-caked khakis but seemed essentially healthy. He was skinny but tall, almost as tall as Hitch, a black backpack looped over his shoulders. He didn’t even glance at the van, just waited for Hitch to speak his piece. I couldn’t see his face in any great detail at this distance, but he was evidently relaxed, not frightened.

Ashlee reached for the door but I pulled her hand away. “Give it a minute.”

Hitch talked. Adam talked. Finally Hitch pulled a roll of bills out of his back pocket and counted them into Adam’s palm.

Ashlee said, “What’s that, a
bribe
? He’s
bribing
Adam?”

I said it looked that way.

“For what? For you to see Kait? Me to see
him
?”

“I don’t know, Ash.”

“God, that’s so—” She lacked a word for her contempt.

“It’s strange times,” I said. “Strange things happen.”

She slumped back in her seat, humiliated, and was silent until Hitch beckoned us out. I set the van’s security protocols, unlikely as that was to afford us any real protection. Outside, the air was dry and the stench was overwhelming. A few yards away a young man in once-white trousers was shoveling loose earth into a ditch latrine.

Ashlee approached Adam tentatively. I don’t know, but I suspect, that she was reluctant to face him now that the longed-for moment had finally arrived… reluctant to face the futility of the meeting, the fact of his resistance. She put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. Adam gazed back impassively. He was young, but he wasn’t a child. He gave no ground, only waited for Ashlee to speak, which I suppose was what he had been paid to do.

The two of them walked a few paces away down a trail between the tents. Hitch said to me, “It’s a fucking lost cause. She just doesn’t know it.”

“What about Kait?”

He gestured at a small sun-yellow tent.

I found myself thinking of the Cairo arrival of three years ago. Sue Chopra had obtained video recordings of the event from a dozen different angles, in all its phases—the calm before the manifestation, the cold shock and the thermal winds, a column of ice and dust boiling into a dry blue sky, and finally the Chronolith itself, glaringly bright, embedded in the sprawl of suburban Cairo like a sword driven into a rock.

(And who will pull this sword from the stone? The pure of heart, perhaps. Absent parents and failed husbands need not apply.)

I suppose it was the incongruity I had found so striking about Cairo: the tremulous waves of desert heat; the ice. The layers of mismatched history, office towers erected over the rubble of a thousand-year autarchy, and this newest of monuments, Kuin ponderous and remote as a pharaoh on his frigid throne.

I don’t know why the image came to me so vividly. Perhaps because this dry Sonoran village was about to receive its own throne of ice, and maybe there was already the faintest chill in the air, a shiver of premonition, the bitter smell of the future.

“Kaitlin?” I said.

A vagrant wind lifted the flap of the tent. I squatted and put my head inside.

Kait was alone, uncurling from a nest of dirty blankets. She blinked in the yellow nimbus of sun through nylon. Her face was thin. Her eyes were banded with fatigue.

She looked older than I remembered her, and I told myself that was because of what she must have endured on this haj, the hunger and the anxiety, but the fact was that she had slipped away from me, grown out of my mental image of her well before she left Minneapolis.

She looked at me a long time, her expression evolving through incredulity, suspicion, gratitude, relief, guilt. She said, “Daddy?”

It was all I could manage just to say her name. Which was probably for the best. It was all I needed to say.

She came out of the blankets and into my arms. I saw the bruises on her wrists, the deep cut that ran from her shoulder almost to her elbow in a track of clotted brown blood. But I did not ask her about these things, and I understood the wisdom of Ashlee’s advice: I couldn’t un-wound her. I could only hold her.

“I’m here to take you home,” I said.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes but she said, almost inaudibly, “Thank you.”

Another breeze kicked up the flap of the tent, and Kaitlin shivered. I told her to get dressed quick as she could. She pulled on a pair of ragged denims and a cheap serape.

And I shivered myself, and it occurred to me that the air was a little too cold for this sun-hammered morning—unnaturally cold.

Outside, Hitch was calling my name.

“Get her into the van,” he told me, “and you best be quick about it. This wasn’t part of the deal—I bargained for you to talk, not to take her away.” He turned his face into the wind. “I get the feeling things are happening a little faster than we planned.”

Kaitlin tumbled onto one of the van’s back benches and wrapped a loose blanket around herself. I told her to keep her head down, just a little while. Hitch locked the door and went to corral Ashlee.

Kait sniffled, and not just because she was close to tears. She had caught something, she said, a flu or possibly one of the intestinal diseases that were circulating through Portillo as the crowds grew thirstier and the water sellers less scrupulous. Her eyes were filmed and a little vague. She coughed into her fist.

Outside, tents and canvas shelters clapped in the stiffening wind. Hajists began to crawl out, evicted by the noisy weather, dozens of bewildered pilgrims in Kuinist gear and torn clothing shading their eyes and wondering—beginning to wonder—whether this gale might mark the beginning of a sacred event, a Chronolith announcing itself in the dropping temperature and the peaking breeze.

And maybe it was. The Kuin of Jerusalem had appeared more decisively than this and with less warning, but it was a fact that Chronolith arrivals varied from place to place (and time to time) in their intensity, duration, and destructiveness. Sue Chopra’s calculations were based on somewhat problematic satellite data and could have been skewed by several hours or more.

In other words, we might be in mortal danger.

A gust rocked the van and provoked Kaitlin’s attention. She pressed her face against the side window, gaped at scalloped clouds of Sonoran dust suddenly billowing inward from the desert. “Daddy, is this—?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

I looked for Ash, but she was hidden by the increasingly anxious crowd of hajists. I wondered how far west of central Portillo we were, but that was impossible to estimate… a mile, say, at best. And there was no telling precisely where the Chronolith would appear, no way of calculating the perimeter of the danger zone.

I told Kait to stay under the blanket.

The crowd began to move then, almost as if the hajists had reached an unspoken consensus, out of this dirt-pack lot toward the connecting streets, toward town. I caught sight of Hitch’s coiled black beard, then Hitch himself, and Ashlee, and Adam.

Hitch appeared to be arguing with Ashlee, and Ash was arguing with her son, her hands on Adam’s arms as if she were begging him. Adam stood resolutely still, enduring the embrace, while the wind whipped his blond hair in front of his eyes. If the haj had been hard on him, he didn’t show it. He looked impassively from his mother’s face to the darkening sky. He retrieved what looked like a rolled thermal jacket from his backpack.

I don’t know what Ashlee said to Adam—she has never discussed this with me—but it was obvious even at this distance that Adam wouldn’t be coming back with us. A lifetime of frustration was written into the body language of that encounter. What Ashlee couldn’t admit—tugging at her son, pleading with him—was that Adam simply didn’t care what she wanted; that he hadn’t cared for a long time; that he might have been born unable to care. She was simply a distraction from the deeply interesting event that had apparently begun, the physical manifestation of Kuin, of the idea or the mythology in which he had invested all his loyalty.

Now Hitch was pulling at Ashlee, trying to bring her back to the van, his face screwed up against the abrasive wind but his gestures nearly frantic. Ashlee ignored him as long she could, until Adam broke away from her and only Hitch’s support kept her from falling to her knees.

She looked up at her son and said one more thing. I think it was his name, just as I had called Kaitlin’s name. I’m not sure, since the roar of the wind and the noise of the crowd had grown much louder very quickly, but I believe it was Ashlee’s keening of her son’s name that cut through the thickening air.

I got behind the wheel of the van. Kaitlin moaned into her blanket.

Hitch dragged Ashlee to the vehicle and pushed her inside, then climbed into the shotgun seat. I found I had already started the engine.

“Just fucking drive,” Hitch said.

But it was almost impossible to make rapid progress against the tide of hajists. If Adam had camped any closer to Portillo we would have been locked in. As it was, we were able to crawl toward the margin of the road and make slow but steady progress westward, the press of pilgrims thinning as we retreated.

But the sky had grown very dark, and it was cold now, and dust scored the windshield and cut visibility to a few feet.

I had no idea where this road might lead. This wasn’t the direction we had come. I asked Hitch but he said he didn’t know; the map was stashed in back somewhere, and anyway it didn’t matter; our options had come down to one.

The duststorm glazed the windshield into opacity and was, by the sound of it, also fouling the engine. I closed the windows and cranked up the vehicle’s heater until we were all sweating. Our dirt track dead-ended at a wooden bridge over a shallow, dry creek bed. The bridge was splintered, rocking in the intensifying wind, and would clearly not support the weight of the van. Hitch said, “Drive down that embankment, Scotty. At least put a little dirt between us and Portillo.”