Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

What neither Whit nor Janice could have known was that one of the militiamen had taken a longtime personal interest in the activities of Sue Chopra and Hitch Paley — this was, of course, Adam Mills. Adam had returned to his hometown in a frenzy of antinostalgia, delighted that the threads of his life had knotted back on themselves in such a strange and satisfying fashion. It gave him a sense of destiny, I suppose; a feeling of profound personal significance.

Had he known the phrase, he might have considered himself “deep in the tau turbulence.” Adam had lost two fingertips to frostbite in the aftermath of Portillo — not coincidentally, the same fingertips he later subtracted by machete from Hitch — and this had left him with a feeling of entitlement, as if he had been anointed by Kuin himself.

Kait, thank God, was asleep in the apartment over the garage during these events. There was noise, but not enough to wake her. She wasn’t involved.

At least, not yet.

Sleepless in the aftermath of the roadside shooting, I walked a little while with Ray Mosely on the cluttered ground between the core tower and the quonsets.

Much of the camp had finally settled down, and apart from the muted hum of the generators there was not much noise. In effect, it was possible at last to hear the silence — to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

I had never been close to Ray, but we had grown a little closer over the duration of this trip. When I first met him he was the kind of book-smart, underconfident overachiever who fears nothing so much as his own vulnerability. It had made him defensive and brittle. He was still that person. But he was also the end result of years of compulsive denial, middle-aged now and a little more cognizant of his own shortcomings.

“You’re worried about Sue,” he said.

I wondered whether I ought to talk about this. But we were alone, out of earshot. Nobody here but me and Ray and the jackrabbits.

I said, “She’s obviously under stress. And she’s not dealing with it particularly well.”

“Would you? In her position?”

“Probably not. But it’s the way she talks. You know what I mean. It starts to sound a little relentless. And you begin to wonder—”

“Whether she’s sane?”

“Whether the logic that brought us here is as airtight as she thinks it is.”

Ray seemed to consider this. He put his hands in his pockets and gave me a rueful smile. “You can trust the math.”

“I’m not worried about the math. We’re not here for the math , Ray. We’re ten or fifteen leaps of faith beyond that.”

“You’re saying you don’t trust her.”

“What does that mean? Do I think she’s honest? Yes. Do I think she means well? Of course she means well. But do I trust her judgment? At this point, I’m not sure.”

“You agreed to come here with us.”

“She can be convincing.”

Ray paused and looked out into the darkness, out past the tau core in its steel framework, to the scrub and the moonlit wildgrass and the stars. “Think about what she’s given up, Scott. Think about the life she could have had. She could have been loved.” He smiled wanly. “I know it’s obvious how I feel about her. And I know how ridiculous that is. How fucking clownlike. How stupid. She’s not even heterosexual. But if not me, it could have been someone else. One of those women she’s always dating and ignoring, splicing in and out of her life like a spare reel of film. But she pushed those people away because her work was important, and the harder she worked the more important her work became, and now she’s given herself to it altogether, she belongs to it. Every step she ever took was a step toward this place. Right now I think even Sue must be wondering whether she’s delusional.”

“So we owe her the benefit of the doubt?”

“No,” Ray said. “We owe her more than that. We owe her our loyalty.”

Fond as ever of having the last word, he chose that moment to turn and head back for camp.

I stayed behind, standing mute between the moon and the floodlights. From this distance the tau core seemed a small thing. A very small thing with which to lever such a long result.

When I did sleep I slept soundly and long. I woke at noon under the translucent roof of the inflated quonset, alone but for a few off-shift security staff and exhausted night crew.

No one had thought to wake me. Everyone had been too busy.

I stepped out of the shade of the quonset into blistering sunlight. The sky was viciously bright, a thin blue veneer between the prairie and the sun. But it was the noise that struck me more immediately. If you’ve ever been near a sports stadium on the day of a game you know that sound, the rumble of massed human voices.

I found Hitch Paley by the food tent.

“More press than we bargained for, Scotty,” he said. “There’s a whole mob of them blocking the road. We got Highway Patrol trying to clear them off the tarmac. You know we’ve already been denounced in Congress? People covering their asses in case we don’t bring this off.”

“You think we have a chance?”

“Maybe. If they give us time.”

But no one wanted to give us time. The Kuinist militias were arriving by the truckload, and by the following morning the shooting had begun in earnest.

I know what the future smells like.

The future, that is, imposed on the past; past and future mingled like two innocuous substances which when combined produce a toxin. The future smells like alkaline dust and ionized air, like hot metal and glacier ice. And not a little like cordite.

The night had been relatively quiet. Today, the day of the arrival, I woke from a round of exhausted sleep to the sound of sporadic gunfire — not close enough to inspire immediate panic; close enough that I dressed in a hurry.

Hitch was back at the food tent, complacently eating cold baked beans from a paper bowl. “Sit down,” he said. “It’s under control.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

He stretched and yawned. “What you hear is a bunch of Kuinists south along the road having words with security. Some of them are armed but all they want to do is shoot into the air and shake their fists. Basically, they’re spectators. What we also have is an equal number of journalists trying to get closer than the perimeter fences. The Uniforces are sorting them out. Sue wants them close to the arrival but not, you know, too close.”

“So how close is too close?”

“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? The wonks and the engineers are all clustered down by the bunker. The press people are setting up a little farther east.”

The bunker, so-called, was a trench emplacement with a wooden roof, located a mile from the core, where Sue had set up gear to monitor and initiate the tau event. The trench was equipped with heaters to provide at least a little protection against the cold shock, and in a worst-case scenario the bunker was defensible against small-arms fire.

The core itself remained almost preposterously vulnerable, but the Uniforces people had pledged to protect it as long as they could keep our perimeters intact. The good news was that this ragtag crew of Kuinists down the road did not (Hitch said) constitute anything like a superior force.

“We may just pull this off, Scotty,” he said. “Given a little luck.”

“How’s Sue?”

“I haven’t seen her since sunrise, but — how is she? Wound up, is how she is. It wouldn’t surprise me if she blew an artery.” He looked at me oddly. “Tell me something. How well do you know her?”

“I’ve known her since I was a student.”