The Chronoliths (34 page)

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.

History does not record the name of this benefactor.

A secret is a secret.

But, as Sue was also fond of saying, there is no such thing as a coincidence.

I stood for a time by a fragment of the Kuin’s head, a weathered piece of his brow and one intact eye. The pupil of the eye was a concave depression as wide as a truck tire. Dust and rain had accumulated in the bowl of it and a wild thistle had sprouted there.

The Chronoliths have proven as impervious to history as they are to logic. The act of creating such a device is so fraught with tau turbulence and outright paradox—cause and effect so tightly entangled—that no single narrative has emerged. The past (Ray’s “Minkowski ice,” I suppose) is immutable but its structure has been finely fractured, layers compressed and upturned, in places rendered chaotic and uninterpretable.

The stone was cold to the touch.

I cannot truthfully say that I prayed. I don’t know how to pray. But I pronounced a few names in the privacy of my mind, words addressed to the tau turbulence, if anything remains of it. Sue’s name, among others. I thanked her.

Then I begged the dead to forgive me.

The park guard eventually grew impatient. He escorted me back to the cart as the sun touched the horizon. “Guess you have some stories to tell,” he said.

A few. And a few I haven’t told. Until now.

Was there ever a single, substantial Kuin—a human Kuin, I mean?

If so, he remains an elusive figure, overshadowed by the armies who fought in his name and invented his ideology. There surely must have been an original Kuin, but I suspect he was overthrown by any number of successors. Perhaps, as Sue had speculated, each Chronolith required its own Kuin. “Kuin” became little more than a name for the vacuum at the heart of the whirlwind. The king is unborn; long live the king.

After Ashlee’s death late last year I was obliged to sort through her belongings. Deep in a box of ancient papers (expired ration coupons, tax forms, yellowed past-due notices from utility companies) I found Adam Mills’ birth certificate. The only striking thing about this was that Adam’s middle name happened to be Quinn, and that Ashlee had never mentioned it to me.

But this is, I think, at last, a genuine coincidence. At least, that’s what I prefer to believe. I’m old enough now to believe what I choose. To believe what I can bear to believe.

Kait left David at home and joined me at Boca Raton that summer, an unplanned vacation. We hadn’t seen each other since Ashlee’s funeral in December. I had come to Boca Raton on a whim: I wanted to see the Shipworks while I was still able to travel.

Nowadays everyone talks about the postwar recovery. We’re like terminal patients granted a miracle cure. Sunshine seems sunnier, the world (such as it is) is our oyster, and the future is infinitely bright. Inevitably, we will all be disappointed. But not, I hope, too badly.

And there are some things of which we are quite reasonably proud—the National Shipworks, for instance.

I remember, around the time of the Portillo arrival, Sue Chopra insisting that the technology of Calabi-Yau manipulation would yield a host of more enduring wonders than the Chronoliths. (“I mean, star travel, Scotty: that’s a real possibility!”) And Sue, as usual, had been right. She had an acute sense of the future.

Kait and I walked slowly up a long promenade to the observation level overlooking the launching bays, a vast half-moon-shaped structure walled with reinforced glass.

Kait took my arm—I need a little help on long walks. We talked some, but not about the large issues of our lives. This was a vacation.

So many things had changed. Foremost, of course, I had lost Ashlee. Ash had died of an unsuspected aneurysm late last year, and I was a widower now. But we had enjoyed many good years together despite the wartime privation and the financial crises. I miss her constantly, but I did not discuss this with Kaitlin. Nor did we discuss Kait’s mother, retired and living relatively comfortably in Washington State; or Whit Delahunt, who was spending his declining years in a federal project outside St. Paul, serving a twenty-year home incarceration and community service sentence for sedition. All this was past.

Today we believed in the possibility of a future.

The observation deck was crowded with children, a school field trip come to witness the latest unmanned launch. The probe stood in its launch cradle a half mile away like a blue jewel, a sculpted glacier. “Time
is
space,” the tour guide was saying. “If we can control one, we can control the other.”

Sue might have quibbled with the word “control.” But the kids didn’t care about that. They had come for a spectacle, not a lecture. They talked and shifted restlessly from foot to foot; they pressed their hands (and some their noses) against the glass.

“They’re not afraid,” Kaitlin marveled.

Nor were they startled—at least not much—when the Tau Ceti probe rose as if by slow magic from its bay and glided noiselessly upward. They were impressed, I think, to see so massive an object lofted like a balloon into the cloudless Florida sky. A perceptive few might have been awed. But no, they were not afraid.

They know so little of the past.

I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable.

Which is as it should he. You can’t stop time. Sue taught me that (and Ashlee, in her own way). You can give yourself to time. Or be taken by it.

It’s not as hard a truth as it sounds—not on a clean bright day like this.

“Are you all right?” Kaitlin asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little breathless.” We had walked a long way, and the day was warm.