Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

The catch in her voice reflected a little fear, a lot of resentment.

“No need for that,” Hitch said hastily. “I just rented a couple of rooms at the Marriott. Good to see you, Ashlee.”

“You, too, I guess,” she said.

“And thank you for accommodating us in the meantime,” Sue Chopra put in. “I know it’s been an inconvenience.”

Ashlee nodded, mollified perhaps by the sight of Sue with her duffel packed. “The Marriott?”

“Our fortunes,” Sue said, “have changed.”

I walked out to the van with Hitch while Sue and Ray finished packing. Hitch tucked Sue’s duffel into the cargo bin. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. “I could use some help tomorrow, Scotty, if you think you can make the time.”

“Help with what?”

“Spending money on heavy machinery. Diesel generators and like that.”

“I don’t know much about machinery, Hitch.”

“Mainly I want your company.”

“Tomorrow’s a working day.”

“Running that flea market table? Take the day off.”

“I can’t afford to.”

“Yeah, you can. We’re budgeted for that.”

He named an hourly wage for an eight-hour day. A princely sum for the simple act of riding shotgun with him, particularly from a man whose friends had been begging me for sofa space just a few days ago. Hitch had obviously come into town with money, and the offer was tempting. But I was reluctant to accept it.

“Figure it out,” he said. “We have a Department of Defense charge account, at least for the time being. The cash is available and I know you can’t afford to take time off on short notice. And we really need to discuss a few things.”

“Hitch—”

“And what can it hurt?”

That was the pertinent question. “I’m sensing there’s more here than meets the eye.”

“Well, yeah. There is. We can talk about it tomorrow. I’ll call from the hotel, we’ll make plans.”

I said, “Why me?”

“Because there’s an arrow pointed at you, my friend.” He hoisted himself into the driver’s seat, grimacing as he pulled his lame leg after him. “Or at least that’s what Sue thinks.”

And so, in the sunny morning light, I drove with Hitch Paley into the shabby industrial parks west of the river. The van’s air conditioning was broken. (Which was only to be expected: Spare parts were at a premium, most of them going to the military.) The air outside was dry and climbing toward oven heat and Hitch drove with the tinted windows up but the vents wide open. By the time we reached our destination the interior reeked of hot vinyl and motor oil and sweat.

Hitch had made an appointment with the sales manager of a machine and machine-parts distributor called Tyson Brothers. I followed Hitch through reception and sat in the man’s office examining his wilted ficus and his generic wall art while Hitch negotiated the outright purchase of two small earthmovers and enough portable generators to power a small town, plus copious spare parts. The sales guy was obviously curious — he asked twice whether we were independent contractors and seemed vexed when Hitch deflected the question. But he was just as obviously delighted to write up the order. For all I know, Hitch may have saved Tyson Brothers from bankruptcy, or at least postponed that inevitable hour.

In any case, he debited more money in a couple of hours than I had earned over the course of the last year. He left a contact number with the distributor and told him someone would be in touch to arrange delivery, waved his good right hand at the receptionist, and sauntered back out into the heat. In the van I said, “You’re doing what, exactly — digging a hole and lighting it up?”

“We’re a little more ambitious than that, Scotty. We’re going to bring down one of those Kuin stones.”

“With a handful of earthmovers?”

“That’s just filling in the shortfall. We’ve got very nearly a battalion of military engineers and gear ready to roll when Sue says the word.”

“You seriously mean to demolish a Chronolith?”

“Sue says we can. She thinks.”

“Which one were you planning to take down?”

“The one in Wyoming.”

“There is no Chronolith in Wyoming.”

“Not yet there isn’t.”

Hitch explained all this as he understood it. Sue filled in the details later.

It had been a busy few years for Sulamith Chopra.

“You dropped out of it,” Hitch said, “made a little life for yourself with Ashlee, and more power to you, Scotty, but the rest of us didn’t exactly stand still just because you stopped breeding our code.”

I did not then and do not now understand the physics of the Chronoliths, except in the pop-science sense. I know the technology involves the manipulation of Calabi-Yau spaces, which are the smallest constituent parts of both matter and energy, and that it uses a technique called slow fermionic decohesion to do this at practical energy levels. As to what really happens down there in the tangled origami of spacetime, I remain as ignorant as a newborn infant. They say nine-dimensional geometry is a language unto itself. I don’t happen to speak it.

But Sue did, and I think the depth of her understanding was unappreciated. The federal government had both cultivated her as an ally and pursued her as a liability, but they had also consistently underestimated her. She was so completely at ease with Calabi-Yau geometry that I came to believe a part of her lived in that world — she had inhabited these abstractions the way an astronaut might inhabit a strange and distant planet. There is no such thing as a paradox, Sue once said to me. A paradox, she said, is just the illusion created when you look at an n -dimensional problem through a three-dimensional window. “All the parts connect, Scotty, even if we can’t see the loops and knots. Past and future, good and evil, here and there. It’s all one thing.”

In more particular terms, Sue’s collaborators had already succeeded in producing tau-turbulent events on a small scale. Grains of sand to Kuin’s Chronoliths, of course, but in principle the same. Now Sue believed she could disrupt the arrival of a Chronolith by performing this same manipulation in the physical space where the Chronolith was about to manifest.

She had been urging this action for most of a year, but the global systems that monitored and predicted arrivals were either highly classified or in disarray, or both, and it had taken time for the military bureaucracy to examine her proposals and approve them. Wyoming was the first real opportunity, Hitch said — and maybe the last. And even Wyoming wasn’t without its dangers; it had become a mecca for Copperhead militias of various (often incompatible) political stripes. The good news was a generous three-week arrival-warning window, plus full military support. The effort was not being publicized, for fear of attracting yet more Kuinists; it would be stealthy, but it would not be halfhearted.

That was all well and good, I told Hitch, but it didn’t explain why I was sitting in his truck listening to what sounded increasingly like a sales pitch.

Hitch became solemn. “Scotty,” he said, “this isn’t anything like a pitch. At least not from me. I like you as a person but I’m not convinced you’d be an asset to this particular expedition. I respect all that you achieved here, and God knows it’s hard enough keeping a family together in this day and age, but what we need are technicians and engineers and guys who can handle heavy equipment, not somebody who sells secondhand crap at a flea market.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No offense. I mean, am I wrong?”

“No, you’re not wrong.”

“It’s Sue who wants you with us, for reasons she just sort of hints at.”