Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

“I have to say goodbye, Scotty.”

There was a little catch in her voice, almost a hiccup.

“Okay, Janice. Give Whit my best wishes.”

“Call when you find work.”

“Right.”

“Kait still needs to hear from you, whatever she may think. Times like this, you know, the world being what it is…”

“I understand.”

“And be careful on the way to the airport. The roads are slippery since that last big snow.”

I came into the Baltimore airport expecting a hired driver with a name card, but it was Sulamith Chopra herself who met me.

There was no mistaking her, even after all these years. She towered above the crowd. Even her head was tall, a gawky brown peanut topped with black frazzle. She wore balloon-sized khaki pants and a blouse that might once have been white but appeared to have shared laundry rounds with a few non-colorfast items. Her look was so completely Salvation Army Thrift Shop that I wondered whether she was really in a position to offer anyone a job… but then I thought academia and the sciences .

She grinned. I grinned, less energetically.

I put out my hand, but Sue was having none of it; she grabbed me and bear-hugged me, breaking away about a tenth of a second before the grip became painful. “Same old Scotty,” she said.

“Same old Sue,” I managed.

“I’ve got my car here. Have you had lunch yet?”

“I haven’t had breakfast.”

“Then it’s my treat.”

She had called me two weeks ago, waking me out of a dreamless afternoon sleep. Her first words were, “Hi, Scotty? I hear you lost your job.”

Note, this was a woman I hadn’t spoken with since our chance meeting in Minneapolis. A woman who hadn’t returned any of my calls since. It took me a few groggy seconds just to place the voice.

“Sorry I haven’t got back to you till now,” she went on. “There were reasons for that. But I kept track of you.”

“You kept track of me?”

“It’s a long story.” I waited for her to tell it. Instead, she reminisced for a while about Cornell and gave me the highlights of her career since then — her academic work with the Chronoliths, which interested me enormously. And distracted me, as I’m sure Sue knew it would.

She talked about the physics in greater detail than I was able to follow: Calabi-Yau spaces, something she called “tau turbulence.”

Until at last I asked her, “So, yeah, I lost my job — how did you know?”

“Well, that’s part of why I’m calling. I feel a certain amount of responsibility for that.”

I recalled what Arnie Kunderson had said about “enemies in management.” What Annali had told me about “men in suits.” I said, “Whatever you need to tell me, tell me.”

“Okay, but you have to be patient. I assume you don’t have anywhere to go? No urgent bathroom calls?”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Okay. Well. Where to begin? Did you ever notice, Scotty, how hard it is to sort out cause and effect? Things get tangled up.”

Sue had published a number of papers on the subject of exotic forms of matter and C-Y transformations (“nonbaryonic matter and how to untie knots in string”) by the time the Chumphon Chronolith appeared. Many of these dealt with problems in temporal symmetry — a concept she seemed determined to explain to me, until I cut her short. After Chumphon, when Congress began to take seriously the potential threat of the Chronoliths, she had been invited to join an investigatory effort sponsored by a handful of security agencies and funded under an ongoing federal appropriation. The work, they told her, would be basic research, would be part-time, would involve the collaboration of the Cornell faculty and various elder colleagues, and would look impressive on her curriculum vitae . She said it was “Like Los Alamos, you understand, but a little more relaxed.”

“Relaxed?”

“At least at first. So I accepted. It was in those first few months I came across your name. It was all pretty wide-open back then. I saw all kinds of security shit. There was a master list of eyewitnesses, people they had debriefed in Thailand…”

“Ah.”

“And of course your name was on it. We were thinking of bringing all those people in, anybody we could find, for blood testing and whatever, but we decided against it — too much work, too invasive, not likely to produce any substantive results. Plus there were civil-liberties problems. But I remembered your name on that list. I knew it was you because they had practically your entire life history down there, including Cornell, including a hypertext link to me .”

And again I thought of Hitch Paley. His name would have been on that list, too. Maybe they had looked a little more deeply into his business activities since then. Maybe Hitch was in jail. Maybe that was why there had been no pickup that day at Easy’s Packages and no word from him since.

But of course I didn’t say any of this to Sue.

She went on, “Well, I made a kind of mental note of it, but that was that, at least until recently. What you have to understand, Scotty, is that the evolution of this crisis has made everyone a lot more paranoid. Maybe justifiably paranoid. Especially since Yichang; Yichang just drove everybody completely bugfuck. You know how many people were killed by floodwater alone ? Not to mention that it was the first nuclear device detonated in a kind-of-sort-of war since before the turn of the century.”

She didn’t have to tell me. I’d been paying attention. It was not even slightly surprising to learn that the NSA or CIA or FBI was profoundly involved with Sue’s research. The Chronoliths had become, at bottom, a defense issue. The image lurking at the back of everyone’s mind — seldom spoken, seldom explicit — was of a Chronolith on American soil: Kuin towering over Houston or New York or Washington.

“So when I saw your name again… well, it was on a different kind of list. The FBI is looking into witnesses again. I mean, they’ve been sort of keeping an eye on you since the word go. Not exactly surveillance , but if you moved out of state or something like that, it would be noted, it would go in your file…”

“Christ, Sue!”

“But all that was harmless busywork. Until lately. Your work at Campion-Miller came up on the radar.”

“I write business software. I don’t see—”

“That’s way too coy, Scotty. You’ve done some really sensitive work with marketing heuristics and collective anticipation. I’ve looked at your code—”

“You’ve seen Campion-Miller source code?”

“Campion-Miller elected to share it with the authorities.”

I began to put this together. An interrogatory FBI visit at Campion-Miller could easily have alarmed management, especially if it was core code that had come under scrutiny. And it would explain Arnie Kunderson’s strange intransigence, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell atmosphere that had surrounded the firing.

“You’re telling me you got me fired?”

“It was nobody’s intention for you to lose your job. As it happens, though, that’s kind of handy.”

Handy was about the last word I would have used.

“See, Scotty, how this hooks together? You’re on the spot when the Chumphon Chronolith arrives, which marks you for life all by itself. Now, five years later, it turns out you’re evolving algorithms that are deeply pertinent to the research we’re doing here.”

“Are they?”

“Trust me. It flagged your file. I put in a good word for you, and that kept them off your tail a little bit, but I have to be frank with you, some very powerful people are getting way too excited. It’s not just Yichang, it’s the economy, the riots, all that trouble during the last election… the level of nervousness is indescribable. So when I heard you got fired I had the brilliant idea of getting you placed here .”