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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson




THE
CHRONOLITHS
Robert Charles Wilson




PART ONE

THE COMING OF THE
CHRONOLITHS
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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson




One

It was Hitch Paley, rolling his beat-up Daimler motorbike across the packed sand
of the beach behind the Haat Thai Dance Pavilion, who invited me to witness the
end of an age. Mine, and the worldтАЩs. But I donтАЩt blame Hitch.
Nothing is coincidental. I know that now.
He was grinning as he approached, generally a bad omen with Hitch. He wore the
American-in-Thailand uniform of that last good summer, army shorts and John the
Baptist sandals, oversized khaki T-shirt and a flowered spandex headband. He was
a big man, an ex-Marine gone native, bearded and developing a paunch. He looked
formidable despite his clothes, and worse, he looked mischievous.
I knew for a fact that Hitch had spent the night in the party tent, eating the hash-
laced spice cookies a German diplomatic-corps functionary had given him and
feeding the same to her, until she went out with him at high tide to better
appreciate the moonlight on the water. He shouldnтАЩt have been awake at this hour,
much less cheerful.
I shouldnтАЩt have been awake either.
After a few hours at the bonfire I had gone home to Janice, but we hadnтАЩt slept.
Kaitlin had come down with a head cold, and Janice had spent the evening
alternately soothing our daughter and battling an infestation of thumb-sized
cockroaches that had colonized the warm and greasy passages of the gas stove.
Given that, and the hot night, and the tension that already existed between us, it
was probably inevitable that we had argued almost until dawn.
So neither Hitch nor I was fresh or perhaps even thinking clearly, though the
morning sunlight coaxed a false alertness out of me, the conviction that a world so
brightly lit must also be safe and enduring. Sunlight glossed the heavy water of the
bay, picked out fishing sloops like dots on radar, promised another cloudless
afternoon. The beach was as broad and flat as a highway, a road toward some