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deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more. For that reason, the name was treated with gravitas in respectable circles. For the same reason, it became popular with comedians and T-shirt designers. “Kuinist” imagery was banned from certain schools, until the ACLU intervened. Because he stood for nothing discernible except destruction and conquest, Kuin became a slate on which the disaffected scrawled their manifestos. None of this was taken terribly seriously in North America. Elsewhere, the seismic rumbling was more ominous.
    I followed it all closely.
    For two years I worked at the Campion-Miller research facility outside of St. Paul, writing patches into self-evolved commercial-interface code. Then I was transferred to the downtown offices, where I joined a team doing much the same work on much more secure material, Campion-Miller’s own tightly-held source code, the beating heart of our major products. Mostly I drove in from my one-bedroom apartment, but on the worst winter days I rode the new elevated train, an aluminum chamber into which too many commuters shed their heat and moisture, mingled body odors and aftershave, the city a pale scrim on steaming white windows.
    (It was on one of those trips that I saw a young woman sitting halfway down the car, wearing a hat with the words “TWENTY AND THREE” printed on it—twenty years and three months, the nominal interval between the appearance of a Chronolith and its predicted conquest. She was reading a tattered copy of
Stranger Than Science
, which must have been out of print for at least sixty years. I wanted to approach her, to ask her what events had equipped her with these totems, these echoes of my own past, but I was too bashful, and how could I have phrased such a question, anyway? I never saw her again.)
    I dated a few times. For most of a year I went out with a woman from the quality-control division of Campion-Miller, Annali Kincaid, who loved turquoise and New Drama and took a lively interest in current events. She dragged me to lectures and readings I would otherwise have ignored. We broke up, finally, because she possessed deep and complex political convictions, and I did not; I was a Kuin-watcher, otherwise politically agnostic.
    But I was able to impress her on at least one occasion. She had used someone’s credentials at Campion-Miller to wangle us admission to an academic conference at the university—“The Chronoliths: Scientific and Cultural Issues.” (My idea as much as hers this time. Well, mostly mine. Annali had already voiced her objection to the aerial and orbital photographs of Chronoliths with which I had decorated my bedroom, the Kuinist downloads that littered the apartment.) We sat through the presentation of three papers and most of a pleasant Saturday afternoon, at which point Annali decided the discourse was a little too abstract for her taste. But on our way through the lobby I was hailed by an older woman in loose jeans and an oversized pea-green sweater, beaming at me through monstrous eyeglasses.
    Her name was Sulamith Chopra. I had known her at Cornell. Her career had taken her deep into the fundamental-physics end of the Chronolith research.
    I introduced Sue to Annali.
    Annali was floored. “Ms. Chopra, I know who you are. I mean, they always quote your name in the news stories.”
    “Well, I’ve done some work.”
    “I’m pleased to meet you.”
    “Likewise.” But Sue hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “Strange I should run into
you
here, Scotty.”
    “Is it?”
    “Unexpected.
Significant
, maybe. Or maybe not. We need to catch up on our lives sometime.”
    I was flattered. I wanted very much to talk to her. Pathetically, I offered her my business card.
    “No need,” she said. “I can find you when I need you, Scotty. Never fear.”
    “You can?”
    But she was gone in the crowd.
    “You’re well connected,” Annali told me on the ride home.
    But that wasn’t right. (Sue didn’t call me—not