The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online

like.”
    “What are you telling me, I made an enemy in management?”
    He halfway nodded. “The work we do here is pretty tightly held. People get nervous. I don’t know if you made an enemy, exactly. Maybe you made the wrong friends.”
    But that wasn’t likely. I hadn’t made very many friends.
    People I could share lunch with, catch a Twins game with, sure. But no one I confided in. Somehow, by some process of slow emotional attrition, I had become the kind of guy who works hard and smiles amiably and goes home and spends the evening with the video panel and a couple of beers.
    Which is what I did the day Arnie Kunderson fired me.
    The apartment hadn’t changed much since I moved in. (Barring the one wall of the bedroom I used as a sort of bulletin board. News printouts and photos of Chronolith sites plus my copious notes on the subject.) To the degree that the place had improved, it was mostly Kaitlin’s doing. Kait was ten now, eager to criticize my fashion sense. Probably it made her feel grown up. I had replaced the sofa because I had gotten tired of hearing how “uncontemporary” it was—Kait’s favorite word of derision.
    At any rate, the old sofa had gone; in its place was an austere blue padded bench that looked great until you tried to get comfortable on it.
    I thought about calling Janice but decided not to. Janice didn’t appreciate spontaneous phone calls. She preferred to hear from me on a regular and predictable schedule. And as for Kaitlin… better not to bother her, either. If I did, she might launch into a discourse on what she had done today with Whit, as she was encouraged to call her stepfather. Whit was a great guy, in Kait’s opinion. Whit made her laugh. Maybe I should talk to Whit, I thought. Maybe Whit would make
me
laugh.
    So I did nothing that evening except nurse a few beers and surf the satellites.
    Even the cheap servers carried a number of science-and-nature feeds. One of them was showing fresh video from Thailand, of a genuinely dangerous expedition up the Chao Phrya to the ruins of Bangkok, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and a half-dozen corporate donors whose logos were prominently featured in the start-up credits.
    I turned off the sound, let the pictures speak for themselves.
    Not much of Bangkok’s urban core had been rebuilt in the years since 2021. No one wanted to live or work too close to the Chronolith—rumors of “proximity sickness” frightened people away, though there was no such diagnosis in the legitimate clinical literature. The bandits and the revolutionary militias, however, were quite real and omnipresent. But despite all this there was still a brisk river trade along the Chao Phrya, even in the shadow of Kuin.
    The program began with overflight footage of the city. Crude, canted docks allowed access to rough warehouses, a marketplace, stocks of fresh fruits and vegetables, order emerging from the wreckage, streets reclaimed from the rubble and open to commerce. From a great enough altitude it looked like a story of human perseverance in the face of disaster. The view from the ground was less encouraging.
    As the expedition approached the heart of the city the Chronolith was present in every shot: from a distance, dominating the brown river; or closer, towering into a tropical noon.
    The monument was conspicuously clean. Even birds and insects avoided it. Airborne dust had collected in the few protected crevices of the sculpted face, faintly softening Kuin’s abstracted gaze. But nothing grew even in that protected soil; the sterility of it was absolute. Where the base of the monument touched ground on one bank of the river a few lianas had attempted to scale the immense octagonal base; but the mirror-smooth surface was ungraspable, unwelcoming.
    The expedition anchored mid-river and went ashore for more footage. In one sequence, a storm swirled over the ancient city. Rainwater cascaded from the Chronolith in miniature torrents, small