The Chronoliths by Wilson Robert Charles

Author:Wilson, Robert Charles [Wilson, Robert Charles]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2014-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Sometime during that week—before Hitch arrived, before events began to tumble out of control—Ashlee said, in the middle of a phone conversation, “You know the Charles Dickens story, A Christmas Carol?”

“What about it?”

“I was thinking about Kuin and the Chronoliths and all that. You know in Dickens where Scrooge goes into the future and sees his own funeral? And he says to the ghost, ‘Are these the shades of things that must be, or things that may be?’ Or something like that?”

“Right,” I said.

“So the Chronoliths, Scott, are they must be or may be?”

I told her no one was certain about that. But if I understood Sue correctly, the events marked by the already existing Chronoliths were must-bes in one form or another. There was no bright alternative future in which we stopped Kuin before his conquests and made the Chronoliths into harmless free-floating paradoxes. Kuin would conquer Chumphon, Thailand, Vietnam, Southeast Asia; time might be fluid, but the monuments themselves were immutable and fundamental.

Then why not despair? I suppose Sue’s answer would be that the battle wasn’t finished. Much of the civilized world was still free of Chronoliths, which suggested that Kuin’s conquests were a step-like process with gains and reversals. There had not yet been a Chronolith on North American soil. Maybe there never would be, if we did the right thing. Whatever the right thing was.

Sue had broached to me the idea of “negative feedback.” If what Kuin was doing with the Chronoliths represented a kind of positive feedback—a signal reinforced and amplified through time and human expectation—then the solution might be the opposite. A Chronolith that appeared and was subsequently destroyed would cast doubt on the process; the cancerous impression of Kuin’s invincibility would be, if not shattered, at least weakened.

He might take half the Earth, but not our half.

That was Sue Chopra’s faith. I hoped she was right. I was prepared to act on that assumption.

In all honesty, however, I cannot say that I believed it.

* * *

Well, then, here was Hitch Paley, stepping out of a battered Sony compact (which by all rights should have been a motorbike) into the motel parking lot. We had agreed to meet at nine this morning. He was fifteen minutes late. In a sense, ten years late.

He hadn’t changed much. I recognized him immediately, even from a dozen yards away under the shade of the coffee shop awning. I was delighted and I was afraid.

He wore a full beard and a dung-green leather jacket. He had put on a little weight, which only served to emphasize his broad nose, his high cheekbones, the Neanderthal slope of his skull. He spotted me, walked bandy-legged across the sunny space between us, and put out his huge right hand.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You got that package I asked you to pick up?”

* * *

I muttered something about the package; he grinned and slapped me on the back and said, “I’m just shitting you, Scotty; we’ll talk about that later.” We went into the coffee shop and occupied a booth.

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