The Chronoliths Read Online Free PDF

Daddy today,” Janice said. “Do you need to go to the bathroom before you leave?”
    Kaitlin was scandalized by this indelicacy. “
No
!”
    “All right, then.” Janice straightened and looked at me. “Eight o’clock, Scott?”
    “Eight,” I promised.
    We hummed along in my secondhand car, neatly laced into heavy Saturday traffic by proximity protocols. I had promised Kaitlin a trip to an amusement mall, and she was already cycling through waves of elation and exhaustion, jabbering for long stretches of the ride, then lapsing against the upholstery with a forlorn
are-we-there-yet
? expression on her face.
    During her silences I examined my conscience… cautiously, the way you might handle a sedated but venomous snake. I peeked at myself through Janice’s eyes and saw (yet again) the man who had taken her and her daughter to a third-world country; who had nearly stranded them there; who had exposed them to an expatriate beach culture which, though no doubt colorful and interesting, was also drug-raddled, dangerous, and hopelessly unproductive.
    The kind word for that sort of behavior is “thoughtless.” Synonyms include “selfish” and “reckless.”
    Had I changed? Well, maybe. But I still owed Hitch Paley several thousand dollars (though I hadn’t heard from him in half a year and had begun to harbor hopes that I wouldn’t, ever)—and a life that includes such accessories as Hitch Paley is not, by definition, stable.
    Still, here was Kaitlin, unharmed, periodically bouncing against the upholstery like a harnessed capuchin monkey. I had taught her to tie her shoes. I had shown her the Southern Cross, one cloudless night in Chumphon. I was her father, and she suffered my presence gladly.
    We spent three hours at the mall, enough to tire her out. Kait was fascinated, if a little intimidated, by the clowns in their morphologically adaptive character suits and makeup. She packed away an astonishing amount of mall food, sat through two half-hour Surround Adventures, and slept sitting up on the way back to my apartment.
    Home, I turned up the lights and shut out the prairie-winter dusk. For dinner I heated frozen chicken and string beans, prole food but good-smelling in the narrow kitchen; we watched downloads while we ate. Kaitlin didn’t say much, but the atmosphere was cozy.
    And when she looked to the right, I was able to see her deaf ear cosseted in a nest of golden hair. The ear was not grossly deformed, merely puckered where the bacteria had chewed away notches of flesh, pinkly scarred.
    In her other ear she wore a hearing aid like a tiny polished seashell.
    After dinner I washed the dishes, then coaxed Kaitlin away from cartoons and switched to a news broadcast.
    The news was from Bangkok.
    “
That
,” Kaitlin said sourly as she emerged from the bathroom, “is what Mr.
Levy
wanted to see.”
    This was, as you will have guessed, the first of the city-busting Chronoliths—in effect, first notice that something more significant than a
Stranger Than Science
anecdote was taking place in Southeast Asia.
    I sat down next to Kaitlin and let her curl up against my ribs while I watched.
    Kait was immediately bored. Children Kaitlin’s age possess no context; one video event is much like another. And they’re ruthless with their attention. She was impressed, if confused, by the helicopter shots of the riverfront neighborhoods destroyed and ice-coated, steaming in the sunlight. But there were only a few of these segments available, and the news networks ran them repeatedly over an aural haze of casualty estimates and meaningless “interpretation.” The palpable atmosphere of confusion, fear, and denial evinced by the commentators kept her frowning a few minutes more, but before long she closed her eyes and her breathing steadied into petite, phlegmatic snores.
    We were there, Kait, you and I, I thought.
    Ruined Bangkok from the air looked like a misprinted road map. I recognized the Chao Phrya bending