Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths

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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 world’s. But I don’t 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 shouldn’t have been awake at this hour,

much less cheerful.

I shouldn’t have been awake either.

After a few hours at the bonfire I had gone home to Janice, but we hadn’t 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

nameless and perfect destination.

“So that sound last night,” Hitch said, beginning this conversation the way he

began most, without preamble, as if we had been apart for no significant time,

“like a Navy jet, you heard that?”

I had. I’d heard it about four a.m., shortly after Janice stomped off to bed. Kaitlin

was asleep at last, and I was alone at our burn-scarred linoleum kitchen table with a

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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson

cup of sour coffee. The radio was linked to a U.S. jazz station, turned down to

polite chatter.

The broadcast had turned brittle and strange for about thirty seconds. There was a

crack of thunder and a series of rolling echoes (Hitch’s “Navy jet”), and a little

after that an odd cold breeze rattled Janice’s potted bougainvilleas against the

window. The window blinds lifted and fell in a soft salute; Kaitlin’s bedroom door

opened by itself, and she turned in her netted crib and made a soft unhappy sound

but didn’t wake.

Not quite a Navy jet, but it might have been summer thunder, a newborn or

senescent storm mumbling to itself out over the Bay of Bengal. Not unusual, this

time of year.

“Party of caterers stopped by the Duc this morning and bought all our ice,” Hitch

said. “Heading for some rich man’s dacha. They said there was real action out by

the hill road, like fireworks or artillery. A bunch of trees blew down. Want to go

see, Scotty?”

“As well one thing as another,” I said.

“What?”

“Means yes.”

It was a decision that would change my life beyond repair, but I made it on a

whim. I blame Frank Edwards.

Frank Edwards was a Pittsburgh radio broadcaster of the last century who

compiled a volume of supposedly true miracle lore (Stranger Than Science, 1959),

featuring such durable folktales as the Mystery of Kaspar Hauser and the

“spaceship” that blew up over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1910. The book and its

handful of sequels were big items in our household when I was naive enough to

take such things seriously. My father had given me Stranger Than Science in a

battered library-discard edition and I had finished it—at the age of ten—in three

late-night sessions. I suppose my father considered this the kind of material that

might stimulate a boy’s imagination. If so, he was right. Tunguska was a world

away from the gated Baltimore compound where Charles Carter Warden had

planted his troubled wife and only child.

I outgrew the habit of believing this sort of thing, but the word “strange” had

become a personal talisman. Strange, the shape of my life. Strange, the decision to

stay in Thailand after the contracts evaporated. Strange, these long days and

drugged nights on the beaches at Chumphon, Ko Samui, Phuket; strange as the

coiled geometry of the ancient Wats.

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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson

Maybe Hitch was right. Maybe some dark miracle had landed in the province.

More likely there had been a forest fire or a narcotics shoot-out, but Hitch said the

caterers had told him it was “something from outer space”—and who was I to

argue? I was restless and facing the prospect of another empty day fielding Janice’s

complaints. And not relishing it. So I hopped on the back of Hitch’s Daimler, fuck

the consequences, and we motored away from the coast in a cloud of blue exhaust.

I didn’t stop to tell Janice I was going. I doubted she would be interested; anyway,

I’d be home by nightfall.

Lots of Americans disappeared in Chumphon and Satun in those days, kidnapped

for ransom or murdered for pocket change or recruited as heroin mules. I was

young enough not to care.

We passed the Phat Duc, the shack where Hitch supposedly sold fishing tackle but

in fact did a brisk trade in native marijuana to the party crowd, and turned onto the

new coast road. Traffic wasn’t heavy, just a few eighteen-wheelers out of the C-Pro

fish farms, jitneys and songthaews decorated like carnival wagons, tourist buses.

Hitch drove with the verve and fearlessness of a native, which made the journey an

exercise in bladder control. But the rush of humid air was cooling, especially as we

turned onto the feeder road toward the interior, and the day was young and

pregnant with miracles.

Away from the coast, Chumphon is mountainous. When we turned inland we had

the road very nearly to ourselves, until a phalanx of border police roared past us in

a hail of gravel. So something was definitely up. We stopped long enough for

Hitch to relieve himself in a gas station hawng nam while I tuned my portable radio

to the English-language radio station out of Bangkok. Lots of U.S. and U.K. top

forty, no word of Martians. But just as Hitch came ambling back from the urinal

trough a brigade of Royal Thai soldiers roared past us, three troop carriers and a

handful of rattletrap humvees, going the same direction the local police had been

headed. Hitch looked at me, I looked at him. “Get the camera out of the

saddlebag,” he said, not smiling this time. He wiped his hand on his shorts.

Up ahead, a bright column of fog or smoke spiked the tumbled hills.

What I did not know was that my daughter Kaitlin, five years old, had awakened

from her morning nap with a raging fever, and that Janice had wasted a good

twenty minutes trying to locate me before she gave up and took Kait to the charity

clinic.

The clinic doctor was a Canadian who had been in Chumphon since 2002 and had

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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson

established a fairly modern surgery with funds donated by some department of the

World Health Organization. Doctor Dexter, the beach people called him. The man

to see for syphilis or intestinal parasites. By the time he examined Kaitlin, her fever

had peaked at 105 degrees and she was only intermittently lucid.

Janice, of course, was frantic. She must have feared the worst: the Japanese

encephalitis we all read about in the papers that year, or the dengue that had killed

so many people in Myanmar. Doctor Dexter diagnosed a common influenza (it

had been going around the Phuket and Ko Samui crowd since March) and pumped

her full of antivirals.

Janice settled down in the clinic waiting room, still trying periodically to phone me.

But I had left my phone in a backpack on a shelf in the rental. She would have

tried Hitch, maybe, but Hitch didn’t believe in unencrypted communication; he

carried a GPS locator and a compass and figured that was more than enough for

any truly rugged male.

When I first glimpsed the pillar through a scrim of forest I took it to be the chedi of

a distant Wat, one of the Buddhist temples scattered throughout Southeast Asia.

You can find a photograph of Angkor Wat, for instance, in any encyclopedia.

You’d recognize it if you saw it: stone reliquary towers that look weirdly organic, as

if some enormous troll had left its bones to fossilize in the jungle.

But this chedi—and I saw more of it as we followed the switchback road up a long

ridge—was the wrong shape, the wrong color.

We crested the ridge into a roadblock of Royal Thai Police, border patrol cars, and

assorted armed men in rust-pocked SUVs. They were turning away all traffic. Four

of the soldiers had trained their weapons on an ancient Hyundai songthaew packed

with squawking chickens. The border police looked both very young and very

hostile, wearing khakis and aviator glasses and holding their rifles at a nervous

angle. I didn’t want to challenge them and I told Hitch so.

I don’t know if he heard me. His attention was on the monument—I’ll use that

word for now—in the distance.

We could see it more clearly now. It sat astride a higher terrace of the hill, partially

obscured by a ring of mist. Without any visible reference the size of it was difficult

to judge, but I guessed it must have been at least three hundred feet tall.

In our ignorance we might have mistaken it for a spaceship or a weapon, but the

truth is that I recognized it as a kind of monument as soon as I could see it clearly.

Imagine a truncated Washington Monument made of sky-blue glass and gently

rounded at all corners. I couldn’t guess who had made it or how it had got here—

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Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths

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