Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

“You know about Kait,” I said.

“We looked into the situation, yeah.”

“You talked to the police.”

“I know you’re going to do what you have to do, but I want to make sure you don’t feel like a fugitive.” She added, more plaintively, “I would still like to talk to you once in a while. As far as I’m concerned, you still work here. Ray is a good foil for the math work, and Morris tries hard to understand what we’re doing, but I need someone who’s bright enough to pay attention but doesn’t have any preconceived ideas.” She lowered her eyes and added, “Or maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I just need somebody to talk to.”

This was, among other things, her way of apologizing for all the invasive prodding of the last few years. But I had never blamed Sue for that. It might have been her ideas about tau turbulence that put me in a vulnerable position, but she had been careful to build a wall between me and the federal juggernaut. The juggernaut had lately turned its attention elsewhere; Sue still wanted to be my friend.

She said, “I’m so unhappy about what happened with Kaitlin.”

“The only thing I can tell you about Kait is that she hasn’t come home yet. I’d as soon not dwell on it. So distract me. Gossip. Has Ray found a girlfriend? Have you?”

“Are you drinking, Scotty?”

“Yes, but not enough to justify the question.”

She smiled sadly. “All right. Ray is still wandering in the wilderness. Me, I’m seeing this woman I met at a bar. She’s very sweet. She has red hair and collects Dresden china and tropical fish. But it’s not serious.”

Of course not. Sue conducted her love affairs almost at a distance, deferentially and with the expectation of disappointment.

Her real romance was with her work, which was what she preferred to talk about. “The thing is, Scotty, we’ve had a little bit of a breakthrough. That’s what’s obsessing everybody right now. Most of this is classified, but since there are rumors all over the net I can tell you at least a little bit about it.”

She told me probably more than she should have, but much of it went over my head. The gist was that someone at MIT had succeeded in conjuring negative-tau particles out of the vacuum (which is in any case a seething cauldron of what physicists call “virtual” particles) and stabilizing them long enough to demonstrate the effect. These were hadrons with, essentially, negative duration. They carved holes, if you like, into the past — about a millisecond of the past, not Kuin’s ponderous twenty years and three months, but in principle it was the same phenomenon.

“We’re very close,” Sue said, “to understanding exactly what it is Kuin is doing. And even Kuin might not have figured all the angles. Given enough time, we can create whole new technologies. I mean, star travel, Scotty: that’s a real possibility!”

“Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters! We’re talking about a potential new era in the history of the fucking species — yes it matters!”

“Kuin has already put his fingerprints on half the world, Sue. I would hate to see him extend his reach beyond the surface of the planet.”

“Well, but this is the key to that , too. If we can figure out how a Chronolith works, we can interfere with it. With the right application we might be able to make a Chronolith simply go away .”

“And achieve what?” The last few days had pumped up my cynicism. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“No,” she said, “I don’t. Remember, it isn’t Kuin we have to be afraid of. It’s not even the Chronoliths. Feedback , Scotty, that’s the key. The real problem here is the perception of Kuin’s invincibility, which rests on the invincibility of his monuments. Destroy one, and you destroy the myth. Suddenly he’s not a godlike force anymore, he’s just another would-be Hitler or Stalin.”

Still, I suggested, it might be too late for that.

“Not if we can demonstrate his weakness.”

“Can you?”

She paused. Her smile faltered. “Well, maybe. Maybe soon,” she said.

But not soon enough for Kait, who was probably in Mexico, imbued with her own notions of Kuin’s invincibility and promise. I reminded Sue that I had things to do. She said, “I’m sorry if I kept you up, Scotty, but I really do think it’s important for us to keep in touch.”

Because, of course, she had not abandoned her own faux-Jungian idea that our futures were intertwined — that Kuin, among other things, had imposed on us a fate.

“Anyway, that’s the real reason I called,” she said. “I told somebody about your problem. And he wants to help you.”

“Not Morris,” I said. “I like Morris well enough, but even Morris will tell you he’s not an experienced field agent.”

“No, not Morris, although he’d love to help. No, this is someone with a whole different kind of experience.”

I should have seen it coming. It was Sue, after all, who had looked most deeply into my past, particularly the time at Chumphon. But I was blindsided all the same.

“Maybe you remember him,” she said. “His name is Hitch Paley.”

Sometime during that week — before Hitch arrived, before events began to tumble out of control — Ashlee said, in the middle of a phone conversation, “You know the Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol ?”

“What about it?”

“I was thinking about Kuin and the Chronoliths and all that. You know in Dickens where Scrooge goes into the future and sees his own funeral? And he says to the ghost, ‘Are these the shades of things that must be, or things that may be?’ Or something like that?”

“Right,” I said.

“So the Chronoliths, Scott, are they must be or may be?”

I told her no one was certain about that. But if I understood Sue correctly, the events marked by the already existing Chronoliths were must-bes in one form or another. There was no bright alternative future in which we stopped Kuin before his conquests and made the Chronoliths into harmless free-floating paradoxes. Kuin would conquer Chumphon, Thailand, Vietnam, Southeast Asia; time might be fluid, but the monuments themselves were immutable and fundamental.

Then why not despair? I suppose Sue’s answer would be that the battle wasn’t finished. Much of the civilized world was still free of Chronoliths, which suggested that Kuin’s conquests were a steplike process with gains and reversals. There had not yet been a Chronolith on North American soil. Maybe there never would be, if we did the right thing. Whatever the right thing was.

Sue had broached to me the idea of “negative feedback.” If what Kuin was doing with the Chronoliths represented a kind of positive feedback — a signal reinforced and amplified through time and human expectation — then the solution might be the opposite. A Chronolith that appeared and was subsequently destroyed would cast doubt on the process; the cancerous impression of Kuin’s invincibility would be, if not shattered, at least weakened.

He might take half the Earth, but not our half.

That was Sue Chopra’s faith. I hoped she was right I was prepared to act on that assumption.

In all honesty, however, I cannot say that I believed it.

Well, then, here was Hitch Paley, stepping out of a battered Sony compact (which by all rights should have been a motorbike) into the motel parking lot. We had agreed to meet at nine this morning. He was fifteen minutes late. In a sense, ten years late.

He hadn’t changed much. I recognized him immediately, even from a dozen yards away under the shade of the coffee shop awning. I was delighted and I was afraid.