Free The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

machinery seemed antiquated, and it was, designed to specifications laid down in 20th-century case law.) I told the story truthfully if carefully, and I did not hesitate to mention Hitch Paley’s name if not his occupation, even adding a little fillip about the bait shop, which was after all a legitimate business, at least some of the time.
    When I came to the part about the Bangkok prison, Morris asked, “Were you searched for drugs?”
    “I was searched more than once. Maybe for drugs, I don’t know.”
    “Were any drugs or banned substances found on your person?”
    “No.”
    “Have you carried banned substances across national or state borders?”
    “No.”
    “Were you warned of the appearance of the Chronolith before it arrived? Did you have any prior knowledge of the event?”
    “No.”
    “It came as a surprise to you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know the name Kuin?”
    “Only from the news.”
    “Have you seen the image carved into the contemporary monuments?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is the face familiar? Do you recognize the face?”
    “No.”
    Morris nodded and then conferred privately with the polygraph examiner. After a few minutes of this I was cut loose from the machine.
    Morris walked me out of the building. I said, “Did I pass?”
    He just smiled. “Not my department. But I wouldn’t worry if I was you.”
    Sue called in the morning and told me to report for work.
    The federal government, for reasons probably best known to the senior senator from Maryland, operated this branch of its Chronolith investigation out of a nondescript building in a suburban Baltimore industrial park. It was a low-slung suite of offices and a makeshift library, nothing more. The hard end of the research was performed by universities and federal laboratories, Sue explained. What she ran here was more like a think tank, collating results and acting as a consultancy and clearing house for congressional grant money. Essentially, it was Sue’s job to assess current knowledge and identify promising new lines of research. Her immediate superiors were agency people and congressional aides. She represented the highest echelon, in the Chronolith research effort, of what could plausibly be called science.
    I wondered how someone as research-driven as Sue Chopra could have ended up with a glorified management job. I stopped wondering when she opened the door of her office and beckoned me in. The large room contained a lacquered secondhand desk and too many filing cabinets to count. The space around her work terminal was crowded with newspaper clippings, journals, hard copies of e-mail missives. And the walls were papered with photographs.
    “Welcome to the
sanctum sanctorum
,” Sue said brightly.
    Photographs of Chronoliths.
    They were all here, crisp professional portraits side by side with tourist snapshots and cryptic false-color satellite photos. Here was Chumphon in more detail than I had ever seen it, the letters of its inscription picked out in a raking light. Here was Bangkok, and the first graven image of Kuin himself. (Probably not a true representation, most experts felt. The features were too generic, almost as if a graphics processor had been asked to come up with an image of a “world leader.”)
    Here were Pyongyang and Ho Chi Minh City. Here were Taipei and Macao and Sapporo; here was the Kanto Plain Chronolith, towering over a brace of blasted granaries. Here was Yichang, both before and after the futile nuclear strike, the monument itself aloofly unchanged but the Yellow River transformed into a gushing severed artery where the dam had been fractured by the blast.
    Here, photographed from orbit, was the brown outflow draining into the China Sea.
    Throughout was Kuin’s immaculately calm face, observing all this as if from a throne of clouds.
    Sue, watching me inspect the photographs, said, “It’s almost a complete inversion of the idea of a monument, when you think about it. Monuments are supposed to be messages