Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

Kait took my arm — I need a little help on long walks. We talked some, but not about the large issues of our lives. This was a vacation.

So many things had changed. Foremost, of course, I had lost Ashlee. Ash had died of an unsuspected aneurysm late last year, and I was a widower now. But we had enjoyed many good years together despite the wartime privation and the financial crises. I miss her constantly, but I did not discuss this with Kaitlin. Nor did we discuss Kait’s mother, retired and living relatively comfortably in Washington State; or Whit Delahunt, who was spending his declining years in a federal project outside St. Paul, serving a twenty-year home incarceration and community service sentence for sedition. All this was past.

Today we believed in the possibility of a future.

The observation deck was crowded with children, a school field trip come to witness the latest unmanned launch. The probe stood in its launch cradle a half mile away like a blue jewel, a sculpted glacier. “Time is space,” the tour guide was saying. “If we can control one, we can control the other.”

Sue might have quibbled with the word “control.” But the kids didn’t care about that. They had come for a spectacle, not a lecture. They talked and shifted restlessly from foot to foot; they pressed their hands (and some their noses) against the glass.

“They’re not afraid,” Kaitlin marveled.

Nor were they startled — at least not much — when the Tau Ceti probe rose as if by slow magic from its bay and glided noiselessly upward. They were impressed, I think, to see so massive an object lofted like a balloon into the cloudless Florida sky. A perceptive few might have been awed. But no, they were not afraid.

They know so little of the past.

I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable.

Which is as it should he. You can’t stop time. Sue taught me that (and Ashlee, in her own way). You can give yourself to time. Or be taken by it.

It’s not as hard a truth as it sounds — not on a clean bright day like this.

“Are you all right?” Kaitlin asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little breathless.” We had walked a long way, and the day was warm.