Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

“She’s better,” I said. “Janice is flying in tomorrow to take her home.”

“Has she talked about the haj?”

“Very little.”

“She’s been through a lot.”

“There was some scarring,” I said.

“I’ll bet.”

“No. I mean, I talked to her doctor, too. There was a secondary infection, a uterine infection. Something she picked up in Portillo. It’s cured, but there was scarring. Kait can’t have children, not naturally, not without hiring a host. She’s infertile.”

Ashlee pulled away from me and stared out at the darkness and the highway. She groped at the side table for a cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” she said. There was a strained note in her voice.

“She’s alive. That’s what matters.”

(In fact Kait had been silent while the doctor gave me the bad news. She had watched me from her bed, unblinking, no doubt trying to divine my reaction from my face, wanting to know whether I would withdraw my sympathy and leave her stranded under those blank white hospital sheets.)

“I know how she feels,” Ashlee said.

“You’re trembling.”

“I know how she feels, Scott, because they told me the same thing after Adam was born. There were complications. I can’t have any more babies.”

More traffic came down the highway, rolling bars of light over the textured ceiling of the room. We sat in shadow, looking at each other like lost children, and then we came into each other’s arms again.

In the morning we packed for the trip back to Minneapolis. Ashlee left the room briefly while I was shaving.

She didn’t think I saw her when she stepped out the door.

I watched from the window as she crossed the parking lot, dodged the rear bumper of a floral delivery van, fished a folded handkerchief out of her purse, kissed the crumpled package and then tossed it into an open Dumpster.

I returned the favor later that day: I called Sue Chopra and told her I didn’t work for her anymore.

Time has an arrow, Sue Chopra once told me. It flies in one direction. Combine fire and firewood, you get ashes. Combine fire and ashes, you don’t get firewood.

Morality has an arrow, too. For example: Run a film of the Second World War backward and you invert its moral logic. The Allies sign a peace agreement with Japan and promptly bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazis extract bullets from the heads of emaciated Jews and nurse them back to health.

The problem with tau turbulence, Sue said, is that it mingles these paradoxes into daily experience.

In the vicinity of a Chronolith, a saint might be a very dangerous man. A sinner is probably more useful.

Seven years after Portillo, with the military monopolizing the output of the communication and computation industries, a secondhand processor substrate of decent consumer quality would draw as much as two hundred dollars on the open market. A Marquis Instruments strat board of 2025 vintage outperformed its modern consumer equivalents in both speed and reliability; ounce for ounce, it was worth more than gold bullion. I had five of them in the trunk of my car.

I drove myself and my strat boards and my collection of surplus connectors, screens, dishes, codems, and outboard accessories to the open market at Nicollet Mall. It was a bright and pleasant summer morning, and even the empty windows of the Halprin Tower — abandoned in mid-construction when its financial backing collapsed last January — seemed cheerful, up there in the relatively clean air.

A homeless man had unrolled his blanket in the spot by the fountain that was my customary location, but he didn’t object when I asked him to move along. He understood the drill. Market niches were jealously guarded, vendor seniority scrupulously respected. Many of the Nicollet vendors had been here since the beginning of the economic contraction, when local police had been known to enforce the anti-peddling laws at gunpoint. That kind of hardship breeds solidarity. We all knew one another, and though conflicts were hardly unusual, vendors as a rule honored and would protect one another’s spaces. Veterans of long standing held the best spots; newcomers took the dregs and often had to wait months or years for a vacancy to come up.

I was somewhere between the veterans and the newbies. The fountain spot was away from the prime aisles but spacious enough that I could park the car and unload my folding table and stock without having to use a handcart… as long as I got there early and set up before the crowds began to gather.

This morning I was a little late. The vendor next to me, a man named Duplessy who sold and tailored used clothing, had already set up shop. He strolled over as I was unpacking my goods.

He eyed the fresh merchandise. “Whoa, strat boards,” he said. “Are they authentic?”

“Yup.”

“Looks like quality. Are you hooked up with a supplier?”

“Just got lucky.” In fact I had bought the boards from an amateur office-furniture and lighting-fixture liquidator who had no idea of their resale value. It was a one-shot deal, alas.

“You want to trade something for one of those? I could put you in a nice formal suit.”

“What would I want with a suit, Dupe?”

He shrugged. “Just asking. Hope we get some customers today. In spite of the parade.”

I frowned. “Another parade?” I should have paid attention to the news.

“Another A P parade. All flags and assholes, no confetti. No clowns… in the narrow sense of the word.”

Adapt and Prosper was a hard-core Kuinist faction, despite their occasional conciliatory rhetoric, and every time they carried their blue-and-red banner through the Twin Cities there were bound to be counter-demonstrations and some photogenic head-knocking. On parade days, noncombatants tended to stay out of the streets. I guessed the Copperheads still had a right to voice their opinions. Nobody had repealed the Constitution. But it was a pity they had to pick a day like this — blue sky and a cool breeze, perfect shopping weather.

I watched Dupe’s goods for him while he ran off to grab breakfast from a cart. By the time he got back I had sold one of my boards to another vendor, and by lunch, though crowds were light, two more had gone, all at premium prices. I had made a decent profit on the day and as the streets emptied around one o’clock I packed up again. “Afraid of a little old street fight?” Dupe called out from his heaped mounds of cotton and denim.

“Afraid of the traffic.” Police roadblocks were sure to be going up all over the urban core. Already, as the crowds thinned, I had seen grim young men with A P armbands or K+ tattoos gathering on the sidewalks.

What worried me, though, was not the traffic or the threat of violence so much as the lean and bearded man who had twice cruised past my table and was still hovering nearby, looking away with patently fake indifference whenever I glanced in his direction. I had met my share of shy or undecided customers, but this gentleman had given the goods a cursory and superficial look and seemed more interested in repeatedly checking his watch. He was probably an innocent twitch, but he made me nervous.

I had learned to trust these instincts.

I managed to get out of the downtown core before any serious trouble started. Pro-K and anti-K scuffles had become almost routine lately and the police had learned how to manage them. But the residue of the pacification gas (which smells like a combination of moist cat litter and fermented garlic) would linger for days, and it cost the city a small fortune to scrape the oxidizing lumps of barrier foam off the streets.

A lot of things had changed in the seven years since the arrival of the Portillo Chronolith.