Free The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

thirty seconds.”
    “It’s kind of a race,” I said. “See who hangs up first. Goddammit, Sue, those are
private
calls.”
    “He’s sick, Scotty.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “No, really. You know about the emphysema, I guess. But he’s been seeing an oncologist. Liver cancer, nonresponsive, metastatic.”
    I put down my fork.
    “Oh, Scotty,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
    “You realize, I don’t know you.”
    “Of course you know me.”
    “I knew you a long time ago. Not intimately. I knew a junior academic, not a woman who gets me fired—and bugs my fucking phone.”
    “There’s no such thing as privacy anymore, not really.”
    “He’s, what, dying?”
    “Probably.” Her face fell when she realized what she’d said. “Oh, God—forgive me, Scott. I speak before I think. It’s like I’m some kind of borderline autistic or something.”
    That, at least, I did know about her. I’m sure Sue’s defect has been named and genetically mapped, some mild inability to read or predict the feelings of others. And she loved to talk—at least in those days.
    “None of my business,” she said. “You’re right.”
    “I don’t need a surrogate parent. I’m not even sure I need this job.”
    “Scotty, I’m not the one who started logging your calls. You can take this job or not, but walking away won’t give you a normal life. You surrendered that in Chumphon, whether you knew it or not.”
    I thought,
My father is dying
.
    I wondered whether I cared.
    Back in the car, Sue remained apologetic. “Is it wrong of me to point out that we’re both in a bind? That both our lives have been shaped by the Chronoliths in ways we can’t control? But I’m trying to do the best thing, Scotty. I need you here, and I think the work would be more satisfying than what you were doing at Campion-Miller.” She drove through a yellow light, blinking at the reprimand that flashed on her heads-up. “Am I wrong to suspect that you
want
to get involved with what we’re doing?”
    No, but I didn’t give her the satisfaction of saying so.
    “Also—” Was she blushing? “Frankly, I’d enjoy your company.”
    “You must have lots of company.”
    “I have
colleagues
, not company. Nobody real. Besides, you
know
it’s not a bad offer. Not in the kind of world we’re living in.” She added, almost coyly, “And you get to travel. See foreign lands. Witness miracles.”
    Stranger than science.
     
     
     

Chapter Six
     
     
    In the grand tradition of federal employment, I waited three weeks while nothing happened. Sulamith Chopra’s employers put me up in a motel room and left me there. My calls to Sue were routed through a functionary named Morris Torrance, who advised me to be patient. Room service was free, but man was not meant to live by room service alone. I didn’t want to give up my Minneapolis apartment until I had signed something permanent, and every day I spent in Maryland represented a net fiscal loss.
    The motel terminal was almost certainly tapped, and I presumed the FBI had found a way to read my portable panel even before its signal reached a satellite. Nevertheless I did what they probably expected me to do: I continued to collect Kuin data, and looked a little more closely at some of Sue’s publications.
    She had published two important papers in the
Nature
nexus and one on the
Science
site. All three were concerned with matters I wasn’t competent to judge and which seemed only distantly related to the question of the Chronoliths: “A Hypothetical Tauon Unification Energy,” “Non-Hadronic Material Structures,” “Gravitation and Temporal Binding Forces.” All I could discern from the text was that Sue had been breeding some interesting solutions to fundamental physical problems. The papers were focused and, to me, opaque, not unlike Sue herself.
    I spent some of that time thinking about Sue. She had been, of course, more than a teacher to those of us who came to know her. But she had