The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

waterfalls churning plumes of silt from the river bottom. The dockside vendors covered their stalls with tarpaulins and sheet plastic and retreated beneath them.
    Cut to a shot of a wild monkey on a collapsed Exxon billboard, barking at the sky.
    Clouds parting around the promontory of Kuin’s vast head.
    The sun emerging near the green horizon, the Chronolith shadowing the city like the gnomon of a great bleak sundial.
    There was more, but nothing revelatory. I turned off the monitor and went to bed.
    We—the English-speaking world—had by this time agreed on certain terms to describe the Chronoliths. What a Chronolith did, for instance, was to
appear
or to
arrive…
though some favored
touched down
, as if it were a kind of stalled tornado.
    The newest of the Chronoliths had appeared (arrived, touched down) more than eighteen months ago, leveling the waterfront of Macao. Only half a year earlier a similar monument had destroyed Taipei.
    Both stones marked, as usual, military victories roughly twenty years in the future. Twenty and three: hardly a lifetime, but arguably long enough for Kuin (if he existed, if he was more than a contrived symbol or an abstraction) to mass forces for his putative Asian conquests. Long enough for a young man to become a middle-aged man. Long enough for a young girl to become a young woman.
    But no Chronolith had arrived anywhere in the world for more than a year now, and some of us had chosen to believe that the crisis was, if not exactly finished, at least purely Asian—confined by geography, bound by oceans.
    Our public discourse was aloof, detached. Much of southern China was in a condition of political and military chaos, a no-man’s-land in which Kuin was perhaps already gathering his nucleus of followers. But an editorial in yesterday’s paper had wondered whether Kuin might not, in the long term, turn out to be a
positive
force: a Kuinist empire was hardly likely to be a benevolent dictatorship, but it might restore stability to a dangerously destabilized region. What was left of the tattered Beijing bureaucracy had already detonated a tactical nuclear device in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy last year’s so-called Kuin of Yichang. The result had been a breached dam and a flood that carried radioactive mud all the way to the East China Sea. And if crippled Beijing was capable of that, could a Kuin regime be worse?
    I had no opinion of my own. We were all whistling through the graveyard in those years, even those of us who paid attention, analyzing the Chronoliths (by date, time, size, implied conquest, and such) so that we could pretend to understand them. But I preferred not to play that game. The Chronoliths had shadowed my life since things went bad with Janice. They were emblematic of every malign and unpredictable force in the world. There were times when I was profoundly afraid of them, and as often as not I admitted that fact to myself.
    Is this obsession? Annali had thought so.
    I tried to sleep. Sleep that knits the raveled sleeve, etc. Sleep that kills the awkward downtime between midnight and dawn.
    But I didn’t get even that. An hour before sunrise, my phone buzzed. I should have let the server pick it up. But I groped for the handset and flipped it open, afraid—as always when the phone rings late at night—that something had happened to Kait. “Hello?”
    “Scott,” a coarse male voice said. “Scotty”
    I thought for one panicky moment of Hitch Paley. Hitch, with whom I had not spoken since 2021. Hitch Paley, riding out of the past like a pissed-off ghost.
    But it wasn’t Hitch.
    It was some other ghost.
    I listened to the phlegmy breathing, the compression and expansion of night air in a withered bellows. “Dad?”
    “Scotty…” he said, as if he couldn’t get past the name.
    “Dad, have you been drinking?” I was courteous enough to refrain from adding,
again
.
    “No,” he said angrily. “No, I—ah, well, fuck it, then. This is the kind