The Chronoliths
Robert Charles Wilson
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0765325284
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
One day in Thailand, 21st-century slacker Scott Warden witnesses an impossible event: the violent appearance of a 200-foot stone pillar. Its arrival collapses trees for a quarter mile around its base. It appears to be composed of an exotic form of matter. And the inscription chiseled into it commemorates a military victory…sixteen years hence.
As more pillars arrive all over the world, all apparently from our own near future, a strange loop of causality keeps drawing Scott into the central mystery―and a final battle with the future.
The Chronoliths is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel and the winner of the 2002 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
checkpoint, waved at the soldiers as they spotted his stickers. “You know, Scotty, I really don’t take any pleasure in dogging you and Sue.” “Am I supposed to be reassured by that?” “I’m just making conversation. The thing is, though, you have to admit it makes sense. There’s a logic to it.” “Is there?” “You’ve had the lecture.” “The thing about coincidence? What Sue calls ‘tau turbulence’? I’m not sure how much of that to believe.” “That,” Morris said, “but also how it looks to Congress
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
already buttoning a pair of torn Levis. She looked at me with an expression I could not quite fathom—mostly fear, I think; partly shame. She was young. Her face was smudged and tear-stained. She was so thin she looked almost anorexic, and there was a long clotting scratch across her left breast. I cleared my throat and said, “They’re gone—you’re safe now.” Maybe she didn’t speak English. More likely, she didn’t believe me. She turned and ran into the high weeds parallel to the road, exactly
like a frightened animal. I took a few steps but didn’t follow her. The night was too dark, and I didn’t want to leave Ashlee alone. I hoped the girl would be safe, unlikely as that seemed. Sleep, after that, was out of the question. I joined Ashlee up front and we sat together, vigilant and pumped with adrenaline. Ash put a cigarette between her lips and ignited the tip with a tiny propane lighter. We didn’t talk about the assault we had both witnessed, but a short time later, when the
history, office towers erected over the rubble of a thousand-year autarchy, and this newest of monuments, Kuin ponderous and remote as a pharaoh on his frigid throne. I don’t know why the image came to me so vividly. Perhaps because this dry Sonoran village was about to receive its own throne of ice, and maybe there was already the faintest chill in the air, a shiver of premonition, the bitter smell of the future. “Kaitlin?” I said. A vagrant wind lifted the flap of the tent. I squatted and