Read Online The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Charles Wilson
Ads: Link
shared laundry rounds with a few non-colorfast items. Her look was so completely Salvation Army Thrift Shop that I wondered whether she was really in a position to offer anyone a job… but then I thought
academia
and
the sciences
.
She grinned. I grinned, less energetically.
I put out my hand, but Sue was having none of it; she grabbed me and bear-hugged me, breaking away about a tenth of a second before the grip became painful. “Same old Scotty,” she said.
“Same old Sue,” I managed.
“I’ve got my car here. Have you had lunch yet?”
“I haven’t had breakfast.”
“Then it’s my treat.”
She had called me two weeks ago, waking me out of a dreamless afternoon sleep. Her first words were, “Hi, Scotty? I hear you lost your job.”
Note, this was a woman I hadn’t spoken with since our chance meeting in Minneapolis. A woman who hadn’t returned any of my calls since. It took me a few groggy seconds just to place the voice.
“Sorry I haven’t got back to you till now,” she went on. “There were reasons for that. But I kept track of you.”
“You kept
track
of me?”
“It’s a long story.” I waited for her to tell it. Instead, she reminisced for a while about Cornell and gave me the highlights of her career since then—her academic work with the Chronoliths, which interested me enormously. And distracted me, as I’m sure Sue knew it would.
She talked about the physics in greater detail than I was able to follow: Calabi-Yau spaces, something she called “tau turbulence.”
Until at last I asked her, “So, yeah, I lost my job—how did you know?”
“Well, that’s part of why I’m calling. I feel a certain amount of responsibility for that.”
I recalled what Arnie Kunderson had said about “enemies in management.” What Annali had told me about “men in suits.” I said, “Whatever you need to tell me, tell me.”
“Okay, but you have to be patient. I assume you don’t have anywhere to go? No urgent bathroom calls?”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
“Okay. Well. Where to begin? Did you ever notice, Scotty, how hard it is to sort out cause and effect? Things get tangled up.”
Sue had published a number of papers on the subject of exotic forms of matter and C-Y transformations (“nonbaryonic matter and how to untie knots in string”) by the time the Chumphon Chronolith appeared. Many of these dealt with problems in temporal symmetry—a concept she seemed determined to explain to me, until I cut her short. After Chumphon, when Congress began to take seriously the potential threat of the Chronoliths, she had been invited to join an investigatory effort sponsored by a handful of security agencies and funded under an ongoing federal appropriation. The work, they told her, would be basic research, would be part-time, would involve the collaboration of the Cornell faculty and various elder colleagues, and would look impressive on her
curriculum vitae
. She said it was “Like Los Alamos, you understand, but a little more relaxed.”
“Relaxed?”
“At least at first. So I accepted. It was in those first few months I came across your name. It was all pretty wide-open back then. I saw all kinds of security shit. There was a master list of eyewitnesses, people they had debriefed in Thailand…”
“Ah.”
“And of course your name was on it. We were thinking of bringing all those people in, anybody we could find, for blood testing and whatever, but we decided against it—too much work, too invasive, not likely to produce any substantive results. Plus there were civil-liberties problems. But I remembered your name on that list. I knew it was you because they had practically your entire life history down there, including Cornell, including a hypertext link to
me
.”
And again I thought of Hitch Paley. His name would have been on that list, too. Maybe they had looked a little more deeply into his business activities since then. Maybe Hitch was in jail. Maybe that was
academia
and
the sciences
.
She grinned. I grinned, less energetically.
I put out my hand, but Sue was having none of it; she grabbed me and bear-hugged me, breaking away about a tenth of a second before the grip became painful. “Same old Scotty,” she said.
“Same old Sue,” I managed.
“I’ve got my car here. Have you had lunch yet?”
“I haven’t had breakfast.”
“Then it’s my treat.”
She had called me two weeks ago, waking me out of a dreamless afternoon sleep. Her first words were, “Hi, Scotty? I hear you lost your job.”
Note, this was a woman I hadn’t spoken with since our chance meeting in Minneapolis. A woman who hadn’t returned any of my calls since. It took me a few groggy seconds just to place the voice.
“Sorry I haven’t got back to you till now,” she went on. “There were reasons for that. But I kept track of you.”
“You kept
track
of me?”
“It’s a long story.” I waited for her to tell it. Instead, she reminisced for a while about Cornell and gave me the highlights of her career since then—her academic work with the Chronoliths, which interested me enormously. And distracted me, as I’m sure Sue knew it would.
She talked about the physics in greater detail than I was able to follow: Calabi-Yau spaces, something she called “tau turbulence.”
Until at last I asked her, “So, yeah, I lost my job—how did you know?”
“Well, that’s part of why I’m calling. I feel a certain amount of responsibility for that.”
I recalled what Arnie Kunderson had said about “enemies in management.” What Annali had told me about “men in suits.” I said, “Whatever you need to tell me, tell me.”
“Okay, but you have to be patient. I assume you don’t have anywhere to go? No urgent bathroom calls?”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
“Okay. Well. Where to begin? Did you ever notice, Scotty, how hard it is to sort out cause and effect? Things get tangled up.”
Sue had published a number of papers on the subject of exotic forms of matter and C-Y transformations (“nonbaryonic matter and how to untie knots in string”) by the time the Chumphon Chronolith appeared. Many of these dealt with problems in temporal symmetry—a concept she seemed determined to explain to me, until I cut her short. After Chumphon, when Congress began to take seriously the potential threat of the Chronoliths, she had been invited to join an investigatory effort sponsored by a handful of security agencies and funded under an ongoing federal appropriation. The work, they told her, would be basic research, would be part-time, would involve the collaboration of the Cornell faculty and various elder colleagues, and would look impressive on her
curriculum vitae
. She said it was “Like Los Alamos, you understand, but a little more relaxed.”
“Relaxed?”
“At least at first. So I accepted. It was in those first few months I came across your name. It was all pretty wide-open back then. I saw all kinds of security shit. There was a master list of eyewitnesses, people they had debriefed in Thailand…”
“Ah.”
“And of course your name was on it. We were thinking of bringing all those people in, anybody we could find, for blood testing and whatever, but we decided against it—too much work, too invasive, not likely to produce any substantive results. Plus there were civil-liberties problems. But I remembered your name on that list. I knew it was you because they had practically your entire life history down there, including Cornell, including a hypertext link to
me
.”
And again I thought of Hitch Paley. His name would have been on that list, too. Maybe they had looked a little more deeply into his business activities since then. Maybe Hitch was in jail. Maybe that was
Similar Books
