“That kind of proposition worries me,” I said.
“A little worry is a healthy thing.”
That evening, the English-language papers printed the text of the writing that had been discovered on the base of the monument — an open secret here in Chumphon.
The inscription, carved an inch deep into the substance of the pillar and written in a kind of pidgin Mandarin and basic English, was a simple declarative statement commemorating a battle. In other words, the pillar was a victory monument.
It celebrated the surrender of southern Thailand and Malaysia to the massed forces of someone (or something) called “Kuin,” and beneath the text was the date of this historic battle.
December 21, 2041.
Twenty years in the future.
Two
I flew into the United States on a start-up air carrier with legal berths at Beijing, Dusseldorf, Gander, and Boston — the long way around the planet, with numbing layovers — and arrived at Logan Airport with a set of knockoff designer luggage in the best Bangkok tradition, a five-thousand-dollar grubstake, and an unwelcome obligation, all thanks to Hitch Paley. I was home, for better or for worse.
It was amazing how effortlessly wealthy Boston seemed after a season on the beaches, even before I left the terminal, as if all these gleaming cafés and newsstands had sprung up after a hard rain, bright Disney mushrooms. Nothing here was older than five years, not the terminal annex itself nor the Atlantic landfill that supported it, a facility younger than the great majority of its patrons. I submitted to a noninvasive Customs scan, then crossed the cavernous Arrivals complex to a taxi bay.
The mystery of the Chumphon Chronolith — it had been given that name by a pop-science journalist just last month — had already faded from public attention.