"The Chronoliths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Nine

Looking back at these pages, it seems to me I’ve said too much about myself and not enough about Sue Chopra. But I can only tell my own story as I experienced it. Sue, I thought, was preoccupied with her work and blind to the forces that had infantilized her, made her a ward of the state. Her acceptance of her condition bothered me, probably because I was chafing under the same restraints and reaping the same rewards. I had access to the best and newest processor platforms, the sleekest code incubators. But I was at the same time an object of scrutiny, paid to donate DNA and urine samples to the infant science of tau turbulence.

I had promised myself that I would endure this until I had financed at least the lion’s share of Kaitlin’s surgery. Then all bets were off. If the march of the Chronoliths continued, I wanted to be home and near Kaitlin as the crisis worsened.

As for Kait… the most I could be for Kait right now was emotional backup, a refuge if things went bad with Whit, a second-string parent. But I had a feeling, maybe as powerful and specific as Morris’s dream, that sooner or later she would need me.

We were in Jerusalem because the Chronolith had announced itself with murmurs of ambient radioactivity, like the premonitory rumbling of a volcano. Was there also, I wondered, a premonitory tau turbulence, whatever that might mean? A trace of strangeness in the air, a fractal cascade of coincidence? And if so, was it perceptible? Meaningful?

We were less than fifteen hours from the estimated time of touchdown when I woke Thursday morning. Today the entire floor was in lockdown, nobody allowed in or out except for technicians transiting between the indoor monitors and the antenna array on the roof. There had been threats, apparently, from unnamed radical cadres. Meals were delivered from the hotel kitchen on a strict schedule.

The city itself was still and calm under a dusty turquoise sky.

The Israeli Minister of Defense arrived for his photo-op that afternoon. Two press-pool photographers, three junior military advisors, and a couple of cabinet ministers followed him into the tech suite. The press guys wore cameras clamped to their shoulders on gymbal mounts. The Minister of Defense, a bald man in khaki, listened to Sue’s description of the reconnaissance equipment and paid dutiful attention to Ray Mosley’s stumbling account of “Minkowski ice” — a clumsy metaphor, in my opinion.

Minkowski was a twentieth-century physicist who asserted that the universe could be understood as a four-dimensional cube. Any event can be described as a point in four-space; the sum of these points is the universe, past, present, and future.

Try to imagine that Minkowski cube, Ray said, as a block of liquid water freezing (as contrary as this seems) from the bottom up. The progression of the freeze represents at least our human experience of the march of time. What is frozen is past, immutable, changeless. What is liquid is future, indeterminate, uncertain. We live on the crystallizing boundary. To travel into the past, you would have to uncreate (or, I suppose, thaw) an entire universe. Clearly absurd: what power could rewind the planets, wake dead stars, dissolve babies into the womb? But that wasn’t what Kuin had done, though what he had done was marvelous enough. A Chronolith, Ray said, was like a hot needle driven into Minkowski ice. The effects were striking but strictly local. In Chumphon, in Thailand, in Asia, perhaps ultimately in all the world, the consequences were strange and paradoxical; but the moon didn’t care; the comets were unmoved in their orbits; the stars looked blindly on. The Minkowski ice crystallizes once more around the cooling needle and time flows as before, subtly wounded, perhaps, but substantially unchanged.

The Defense Minister accepted this with the obvious private skepticism of a Moslem cleric touring the Vatican. He asked a few questions. He admired the blast-proof glass that had replaced the hotel windows and commented approvingly on the dedication of the men and women operating the machinery. He hoped we would all learn something useful in the next several hours if, God forbid, the predicted tragedy actually took place. Then he was escorted upstairs for a look at the antenna arrays, the photographers trailing after, gulping coffee from paper cups.

All this, of course, would be edited for public consumption, a display of governmental calm in the face of crisis.

Invisibly, inevitably, the Minkowski ice was melting. The hotel’s links were overwhelmed by our extremely broad-band data-sharing, but I took one call that day: Janice, letting me know my father had died in his sleep.

It had snowed over most of Maryland that day — about six inches of fine powder. My father wore a medical tag which had issued an alert when he entered cardiac distress, but by the time the ambulance arrived he was beyond resuscitation.

Janice offered to make the necessary arrangements while I was overseas (there was no other surviving family). I agreed and thanked her.

“I’m sorry, Scott,” she said. “I know he was a difficult man. But I’m sorry.”

I tried to feel the loss in a meaningful way.

Nevertheless I caught myself wondering how much trauma he had avoided by ducking out of history at this juncture, what tithes he would not be obliged to pay.

Morris knocked at my door as dusk was falling and escorted me back to the tech suite, monitors radiating blue light into the room. As observers, Morris and I were relegated to the line of chairs along the rear wall where we wouldn’t be underfoot. The room was hot and dry, ranks of portable heaters already glowing ferociously. The techs seemed overdressed and were sweating at their consoles.

Outside, the cloudless sky faded to ink. The city was preternaturally still. “Not long now,” Morris whispered. This was the first time the arrival of a Chronolith had been predicted with any accuracy, but the calculations were still approximate, the countdown tentative. Sue, passing, said, “Keep your eyes open.”

Morris said, “What if nothing happens?”

“Then the Likkud loses the election. And we lose our credibility.”

The minutes drained away. Quilted jackets were handed out to those of us who hadn’t donned protective clothing. Morris leaned out of the shadows again, sweating and obviously restless. “Best guess for touchdown point is in the business district. It’s an interesting choice. Avoids the Old City, the Temple Mount.”

“Kuin as Caesar,” I said. “Worship whatever gods you like, as long as you bow to the conqueror.”

“Not the first time for Jerusalem.”

But maybe the last. The Chronoliths had re-ignited all the apocalyptic fears the 20th Century had focused on nuclear weapons: the sense that a new technology had raised the stakes of conflict, that the long parade of empires rising and empires falling might have reached its final cycle. Which was, just now, all too easy to believe. The valley of Megiddo, after all, was only a few miles from here.

We were reminded to keep our jackets zipped despite the heat. Sue wanted the room as hot as we could tolerate, a buffer against thermal shock.

Intense analysis of previous arrivals had given us an idea of what to expect. A Chronolith doesn’t displace the air and bedrock where it appears; it transforms these materials and incorporates them into its own structure. The shockwave is a result of what Sue had dubbed “radiant cooling.” Within a few yards of the Kuin stone the air itself would condense, solidify, and fall to the ground; for some part of a second, air rushing to replace it would be acted upon similarly. Within a slightly broader area the atmosphere would freeze in fractions of its constituent gases — oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Water vapor is precipitated over a much wider perimeter.

The presence of groundwater causes a similar phenomenon in soil and bedrock, cracking stone and radiating a ground-borne shockwave.

All this cooled and moving air creates convection cells, thus severe wind at ground zero and unpredictable and pervasive fogs for miles around.

Which was why no one objected to the dry heat, the sealed room.

The white-garbed technicians, most of them graduate students out on loan, manned the row of terminals facing the windows. Their telemetry came from the roof arrays or from remote sensors placed closer to the touchdown zone. Periodically they sang out numbers, none of which meant anything to me. But the level of tension was clearly rising. Sue paced among these eager young people like a fretful parent.

She paused before us, crisp in fresh blue jeans and a white blouse. “Background counts are way up,” she said, “on extremely steep curves. That’s like a two-minute warning, guys.”

Morris said, “Should we have goggles or something?”

“It’s not an H-bomb, Morris. It won’t blind you.”

And then she turned away.

One of the monitoring technicians, a young blond woman who looked not much older than Kaitlin, had risen from her chair and approached Sue with a supplicating smile. The IDF security contingent looked sharply at her. So did Morris.

The girl seemed dazed, maybe a little out of control. She hesitated. Then, in a gesture almost touchingly childlike, she reached for Sue’s hand and took it in her own.

Sue said, “Cassie? What is it?”

“I wanted to say… thank you.” Cassie’s voice was timid but fervent.

Sue frowned. “You’re welcome, but — for what?”

But Cassie just ducked her head and backed away as if the thought had gone out of her head as quickly as it had entered. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh! I’m sorry. I just — I guess I just felt like I should say it. I don’t know what I was thinking…” She blushed.

“Best stay in your chair,” Sue said gently.

We were deep in the tau turbulence now. The room smelled hot and electric. Beyond the window, the city core quivered under a sudden auroral glow.

It all happened in a matter of seconds, but time was elastic; we inhabited seconds as if they were minutes. I will admit that I was afraid.

The incidental light created by the arrival was a curtain of quickly shifting color, blue-green deepening to red and violet, hovering over the city and filling the room in which we sat with eerie shadow.

“Nineteen hundred and seven minutes,” Sue said, checking her watch. “Mark.”

“It’s already cold,” Morris said to me. “You notice?”

It felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped by several degrees. I nodded.

One of the IDF men stood up nervously, fingering his weapon. As quickly as it had come, the light began to fade; and then—

Then the Chronolith was simply and suddenly present.

It flashed into existence beyond the Dome of the Rock, taller than the hills, grotesquely large, white with ice under a brittle moon.

“Touchdown!” someone at the consoles announced. “Ambient radiation dropping. External temps way, way down—”

“Hold on,” Sue said.

The shockwave flexed the window glass and roared like thunder. Almost immediately the Chronolith vanished in a white whirlwind, moisture gigged out of the atmosphere by thermal shock. A few miles away, temperature differentials cracked concrete, split timbers, and surely destroyed the living tissue of any creature unfortunate enough to have strayed into the exclusion zone. (There were a few: cats, dogs, pilgrims, skeptics.)

A wave of whiteness rayed out from the central storm, frost climbing the Judean hills like fire, and a host of urban lights dimmed as power-grid transformers shorted in fountains of sparks. Cloud engulfed the hotel; a hard, fast wind rattled the windows. Suddenly the room was dark, console lights quivering like stars reflected in a pond.

“Cold as a son of a bitch,” Morris muttered.

I wrapped my arms around myself and saw Sue Chopra do likewise as she turned away from the window.

The IDF man who had stood up moments ago raised his automatic rifle. He shouted something that was incomprehensible in the noise of the storm. Then he began to fire into the darkened room.

The name of the shooter was Aaron Weiszack.

What I know about him is what I read in the next day’s newspapers, and wouldn’t it save a world of grief if we could read tomorrow’s headlines before they happened?

Or maybe not.

Aaron Weiszack had been born in Cleveland, Ohio, and immigrated to Israel with his family in 2011. He spent his teenage years in suburban Tel Aviv and had already flirted with a number of radical political organizations before he was drafted in 2020; Weiszack had been briefly detained, but not charged, during the Temple Mount riots of 2025. His IDF record, however, was impeccable, and he had been careful to conceal from his superiors his ongoing association with a fringe “Kuinist” cell called Embrace the Future.

He was, if not deranged, at least unbalanced. His motives remain unclear. He had not fired more than a couple of rounds before another of the IDF soldiers, a woman named Leah Agnon, cut him down with a brief burst from her own weapon.

Weiszack died almost instantly of his wounds. But he wasn’t the only casualty in the room.

I have often thought Aaron Weiszack’s act was at least as portentous as the arrival of the Kuin of Jerusalem — in its way, a far more precise imaging of the shape of things to come.

Weiszack’s last rifle burst cracked one of the allegedly blast-proof (but apparently not bulletproof) windows, which collapsed in a shower of silvery nuggets. Cold wind and dense fog swept into the room. I stood up, deafened by the gunshots, blinking stupidly. Morris leaped out of his chair toward Sue Chopra, who had fallen to the floor, and covered her with his body. None of us knew whether the attack had finished or had just begun. I couldn’t see Sue under Morris’s bulk, didn’t know whether she was seriously injured, but there was blood everywhere — Weiszack’s blood all over the wallpaper, and the blood of the young technicians speckled across their consoles. I took a breath and began to hear sounds again, the scream of human voices, the scream of the wind. Fine grains of ice flew through the room like shrapnel, propelled by the impossibly steep thermoclines sweeping the city.

The IDF force surrounded the fallen Weiszack, rifles aimed at his inert body. The FBI contingent spread out to secure the scene, and some of Sue’s post-docs hovered over their fallen companions attempting first aid. Voices, and I thought I heard Morris’s among them, shouted for help. We had a paramedic in the room, but he was surely overwhelmed if he hadn’t been injured.

I ducked and crawled across the floor to Morris. He had rolled off Sue and was cradling her head in his arms. She was hurt. There was blood on the carpet here, a smattering of red droplets steaming in the brutal cold. Morris glanced at me. “It’s not serious,” he said, mouthing the words broadly over the roar of the wind. “Help me drag her into the hallway.”

“No!” Sue surged up against him, and I saw the bloody gash where her jeans had been torn by a bullet or shrapnel, a freely-bleeding divot along the fleshy part of her right thigh. But if this was her only wound then Morris was right, she was in no immediate danger.

“Let us take care of it,” Morris told her firmly.

“People are hurt!” Her eyes darted toward the row of terminals where her students and technicians were variously paralyzed with terror or slumped in their chairs. “Oh, God — Cassie!”

Cassie, the winsome postgraduate student, had lost part of her skull to the gunfire.

Sue closed her eyes and we dragged her out of the cold and Morris spoke intently into his pocket phone as I pressed my palm against her bloody leg.

By this time the ambulances from Hadassah Mt. Sinai were already on their way, skidding over the crusts of ice still clinging to Lehi Street.

The paramedics set up triage in the lobby of the hotel, where they covered broken windows with thermal blankets and ran heaters from the hotel’s generator. One of them put a pressure bandage on Sue’s injury and directed arriving aid to the more critically injured, some of whom had been carried to the lobby, some of whom remained immobilized upstairs. IDF and civilian police cordoned the building while sirens wailed from all points of the compass.

“She died,” Sue said bleakly.

Cassie, of course.

“She died… Scotty, you saw her. Twenty years old. MIT diploma program. A sweet, nice child. She thanked me, and then she was killed. What does that mean? Does that mean something?”

Outside, ice fell from the cornices and rooftops of the hotel and shattered on the sidewalks. Moonlight penetrated the glassy white ruins and limned the emerging contours of the Kuin of Jerusalem.

The Kuin of Jerusalem: a four-sided pillar rising to form a throne on which the figure of Kuin is seated.

Kuin gazes placidly past the fractured Dome of the Rock, scrutinizing the Judean desert. He is clothed in peasant trousers and shirt. On his head is a band which might be a modest crown, worked with images of half-moons and laurel leaves. His face is formal and regal, the features unspecific.

The immense base of the monument meets the earth deep in the rains of Zion Square. The peak achieves an altitude of fourteen hundred feet.