Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

David would have been deferred, of course, had Kaitlin been pregnant, but that was not a possibility. The infection she had picked up in Portillo had scarred her uterus and left her infertile. She and David could still have children but they would have to be conceived in vitro, a process none of us could afford. To my knowledge David had never even raised that subject — the impossibility of a childbirth deferral — with Kait. He loved her, I believe, very genuinely. Deferral marriages were common enough in those days, but it was never an issue for David and Kaitlin.

Ashlee served coffee and made cheerful conversation while I tried not to think about the man outside. I found myself watching Kait as she quietly watched David, and I felt very proud of her. Kait had not led a simple life (none of us had, deep as we were in the Age of the Chronoliths), but she had come to possess an immense personal dignity that at times seemed to shine through her skin like a bright light. It was the miracle of our brief time together that Janice and I had produced, all unaware, this powerfully alive human soul. We had propagated goodness, in spite of ourselves.

Kait and David needed their last few hours together, however. I asked Ashlee to drive them back home. Ash was surprised by the request and gave me a sharp inquisitive look, but agreed.

I shook David’s hand warmly and wished him the best. I gave Kait a long hug. And when the three of them were gone I went into the bedroom and fetched my pistol from the top shelf of the linen cupboard and unlocked and removed the trigger guard.

I already mentioned, I think, that I had grown up in the anti-gun revulsion of the early decades of the century. (This century which hovers, as I write these words, on the brink of its last quarter… but I don’t mean to get ahead of myself.)

Handguns had come back into vogue during the troubles. I did not like owning one — among other things, it made me feel like a hypocrite — but I had become convinced that it was prudent. So I had taken the required courses, filled out all the forms, registered both the weapon and my genome with ATF, and purchased a small-caliber handgun that recognized my fingerprints (and no one else’s) when I picked it up. I had owned this device for some three years now and I had never fired it outside of the training range.

I put it in my pocket and walked down four flights of stairs to the lobby of the building and then across the street toward the parked car.

The bearded man in the driver’s seat showed no sign of alarm. He smiled at me — smirked, in fact — as I approached. When I was close enough to make myself heard I said, “You need to explain to me what you’re doing here.”

His grin widened. “You really don’t recognize me, do you? You don’t have the faintest idea.”

Which was not what I had expected. The voice did sound familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

He stuck his hand out of the car window. “It’s me, Scott — Ray Mosely. I used to be about fifty pounds heavier. The beard is new.”

Ray Mosely. Sue Chopra’s understudy and hopeless courtier.

I hadn’t seen him since before Kait’s adventure in Portillo — since I retired from all that business to make a new life with Ashlee.

“Well, damn,” was all I managed.

“You look about the same,” he said. “That made it easier to find you.”

Without the body fat he looked almost gaunt, even with the beard. Almost a ghost of himself. “You didn’t have to stalk me, Ray. You could have come up to the table and said hello.”

“Well, people change. For all I know you could be a firebreathing Copperhead by now.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“Because it’s important. We kind of need your help.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Sue, for one. She could use a place to stay for a little while.”

I was still trying to cope with that information when the rear window rolled down and Sue herself poked her big ungainly peanut-shaped head out of the darkness.

She grinned. “Hey there, Scotty,” she said. “We meet again.”

In the past seven years I had told Ashlee a great deal about Sue Chopra and her friends. That didn’t mean Ash was pleased to come home and find two of these worthies occupying her living-room sofa.

It had seemed obvious to me, after Portillo, that I would have to choose between my life with Ashlee and my work for Sue. Sue persisted in her belief that the advance of the Chronoliths could be turned back, given the right technology or even the appropriate degree of understanding. Privately, I doubted it. Consider the word itself, “Chronolith” — an ugly portmanteau word coined by some tone-deaf journalist shortly after Chumphon, a word I had never liked but which I had come to appreciate for its aptness. Chronos , time, and lithos , stone, and wasn’t that the heart of the matter? Time made solid as rock. A zone of absolute determinacy, surrounded by a froth of ephemera (human lives, for instance) which deformed to fit its contours.

I did not wish to be deformed. The life I wanted with Ashlee was the life the Chronoliths had stolen from me. We had come back from Tucson, Ash and I, to lick our wounds and to take from each other what strength we were able to give. I could not have given Ashlee much if I had gone on working for Sulamith Chopra, if I had continued to dip into the tau turbulence, if I persisted in making myself an instrument of fate.

Not that we had lost contact entirely. Sue still called on me occasionally for consultation, though there was little I could do professionally without access to her mil-spec code incubators. More often, she called to keep me up to date, share her optimistic or pessimistic moods, gossip. She took, I think, a vicarious pleasure in the life I had made for myself — as if it were somehow exotic; as if there weren’t a million families like mine, making do in hard times. Certainly I had not expected her to arrive at my doorstep in this cloak-and-dagger fashion.

Ash had exchanged a few words with Sue on the phone but they had never been formally introduced, and Ray was a stranger to her. I made the introductions with a gusto that was perhaps too obviously insincere. Ashlee nodded and shook hands and retreated to the kitchen “to make coffee,” i.e., to work out her concerns about their presence here.

It was only a visit, Ray insisted. Sue still maintained her network of connections with the remaining Chronolith researchers, and she had been doing some connecting during this trip west. The vascular ebb and flow of federal funding had turned her way once again, though she still had detractors in Congress. These days, she said, all her work was stealthy, half-hidden, concealed by one agency from another, embedded in bureaucratic rivalries she barely understood. Yes, she was in Minneapolis on business, but basically she just wanted a friendly place to stay for a couple of evenings.

“You could have called ahead.”

“I suppose so, Scotty, but you never know who’s listening. Between the closet Copperheads in Congress and the crazies on the street…” She shrugged. “If it’s inconvenient, we’ll take a hotel room.”

“You’ll stay here,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

Plainly there was more to this than a friendly reunion. But neither she nor Ray would volunteer details, and I guessed that was all right with me, at least for tonight. Sue and all her furor and obsession seemed a long time gone. Many things had changed since Portillo.

Oh, I still watched the news of Kuin’s advances, when the bandwidth allowed, and I still occasionally wondered what “tau turbulence” might mean and how it might have affected me. But these were night fears, the kind of thing you think about when you can’t sleep and rain taps on the window like an unwelcome visitor. I had given up attempting to understand any of this in Sue’s terms — her conversations with Ray always veered too quickly into C-Y geometry and dark quarks and such esoteric matters. And as for the Chronoliths themselves… should I be ashamed to admit that I had achieved a private, separate peace with them? That I was resigned to my own inability to influence these vast and mysterious events? Maybe it was a small treason. But it felt like sanity.