Memory Wire

CHAPTER 16

1. It would not have been safe to take her back to the studio by the tidal dams, so Byron located a tiny balsa deep in the Floats and put the last of his Brazilian money on the rent.

He liked the location. There was only the distant rise of the San Gabriels to remind him that the continent existed, salt breezes and morning fog to remind him of the sea. Otherwise it might have been some indefinite confluence of wood and water, paper houses rising on pontoon foundations, bobbing walkways, Chinese lanterns, eggbeater windmills ticking against the sky. A market canal ran in from the east, so there were fresh eggs and vegetables. A mixed — population, with maybe a plurality of Latinos and East Indians. Some decent jobs available at the wharves beyond the tidal dam, not too much violence. A good place, Byron thought.

He liked it more than he should have. It soothed him, and that was dangerous. He had to think about the future now … for Teresa’s sake as much as his own.

She wasn’t safe here. The terrifying thing was, she might not be safe anywhere.

Thinking of her, he followed the boardwalk along the margins of this canal, a right-of-way between the old float shanties standing like stilted birds above the water. He thought about Teresa.

She betrayed very little. It was wounding, the way she hid herself from him. Since her stone trance in Belem, she had been withdrawn, subtly lifeless, would turn away when he touched her. Her eyes were often on Keller, but Keller was equally distant: as if some weird electricity had put an opposite spin on the two of them. Something had passed between them, he thought, that time in the hotel room on the Ver-o-Peso. Some intimacy too awful to sustain.

The pain of it was obvious.

And yet she clung to the oneirolith. She had smuggled it back in her hand luggage, and she kept it concealed now in a Salvation Army dresser at the back of the balsa. Token of something. Her past, her future.

He had grown to hate it.

He hated it for the sadness it had created in her, and he hated it as a token of his own past. There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking. Drafted out of a career college in the midwest, he had volunteered for Angel duty. The Psych Corps said he had “an aptitude for the work.” And maybe that was true, maybe he did. Maybe that was why, when his duty tour ended, he chose to have his socket pulled. A feeling that it was in some way too easy, that he could have continued to stumble through life in a pleasant fog of wu-nien—like Keller—or worse, ended up with a joychip plugged into his socket. He and a couple of war buddies had come to the Floats under the tutelage of a former CO named Trujillo, who wanted help setting up a drug lab. Byron pulled out at the last minute: he could not picture himself synthesizing enkephalins and rogue adenosines for a population of degraded addicts. He was attracted to the dream-stones, however, because they seemed comparatively wholesome, and because they were popular with the artists beginning to make their presence felt in the Floats. He contacted Cruz Wexler, who set him up in business. It was simple and lucrative work but in time it began to press his conscience. He acquired a respect for the strangeness of the ’liths. They possessed a healing power, possibly a darker power as well. He came to question the wisdom of selling them as one more feelgood drug to the moneyed mainlanders who came down to the tamer Float clubs every Saturday night. Buy a dreamstone from the Angel vet: it was daring, it was fashionable. He overheard his name in conversations. “Probably had his balls shot off in the war,” one of his clients said. And the dreadful thing, he realized, was that it might be true, his life in the Floats might be one more variation on the theme of wu-nien, a kind of castration. In some important way he had been neutered.

Teresa was his road back into the world.

He had not consciously chosen her for the role, nor was it entirely coincidence. Some mingling of the two. She showed up at his door, because she needed him; he fell in love with her, because he needed to fall in love.

There had never been any question of indifference. Some telegraphy in the shape of her face or the color of her eyes had communicated her necessity to him. She was emaciated and ill; he was a demobbed Angel, a parody of a combat vet. It should have been comical. But he cared for her.

But she was dying.

The stone saved her life, and that was good; it did not occur to him until much later to wonder whether he had merely postponed the inevitable. She really did want to die. He learned that about her. She was punishing herself for some sin she could not even consciously remember, some buried enormity lost in the trauma of the fire. But there were other forces in her, too, and he was certain he had kindled one of them: a spark of resistance, her rebellious desire to live. It was as if there were two Teresas woven between and around each other, each working to deceive and subvert the other: death tricked into life, life into death.

In all this the oneirolith remained a mystery, a conduit between these fractions of herself, necessary but dangerous. He had been afraid of the deep-core stone because it threatened to upset a delicate balance, and that was what it had seemed to do: the spark in her was all but extinguished now.

And so there was nothing to do but find this place for her to hide, a pontoon shack in the Floats where she would be safe, at least, from the Agencies. She might pull out of it. He told himself so.

But what angered him—and it was a deep and profound anger he wasn’t certain he could control any longer—was Keller’s coolness toward her.

Keller, whom she loved. Keller, who could have saved her.

Keller wanted to go back to the mainland.

He met Keller at a market stall and they walked out along the tidal dam in an awkward silence. “I’m finished here,” Keller said at last. “That must be obvious now.”

“She needs you,” Byron said simply.

He followed Keller’s gaze out beyond the boardwalk, past the featureless wall of the dam. Out there on the clean horizon a Thai tanker seemed to sit motionless. Gulls whirled overhead. “There’s nothing I can do for her.”

“You owe it to her to try.”

He shook his head. “I don’t owe her anything.”

There was some secret knowledge moving behind his eyes. Byron felt angry, excluded, helpless. He recognized Keller’s aloofness for what it was: the Ice Palace, Angel instincts, a cold and willful vacancy of the soul. Keller said, “I have a job to do.”

“Fuck your job.” They walked a few paces with this envelope of anger around them, not speaking. “You go back there,” he said finally, “it could be dangerous. The Agencies could find you.”

“I download, I put everything through an image processes I destroy the original memory trace. Even if they find me, there’s nothing that constitutes evidence. Nothing they can use against her.”

“You care about her that much?”

The question seemed to trouble Keller; he didn’t answer.

“If you cared,” Byron said, “you would stay.”

“I can’t.”

“So what then? A new name? Another job somewhere?”

He shrugged.

“You tell her,” Byron said wearily. “Leave me out of it. You tell her you’re leaving.” Keller said, “I will.”

2. She was at the back of the float shack watching TV.

Keller looked over her shoulder. It was some Scandinavian love serial, satellite programming syndicated through Network. But she wasn’t really watching. Her eyes were averted. She glanced up at him and they were alone for a moment in the silence of the small room, the floor lifting and falling in the swell. “You’re leaving,” she said.

It startled him. But she would have guessed. It was hardly surprising. The evidence of small silences, looks avoided, hands untouched. He made himself aloof: an act of will. “I have work to do,” he said.

She smiled faintly. “Downloading memories?”

He nodded.

“And then,” she said, “they’re video. Right? You don’t have to live with them anymore.” She stood up, ran a hand through her hair. “Will you come back?”

He was torn by the question. The odds were that he would not. A part of him wanted desperately never to come back, never to see her again. But he was not entirely free from adhyasa, powerful and traitorous impulses. “I don’t know.”

She- nodded, as if to say: all right, yes, thank you at least for being honest. She held out her hand and he took it. But when he moved to turn away, she held him there. Her gaze was intense and her hand tightened painfully. “It doesn’t matter,” she said fiercely. “Anything that happened, it doesn’t matter to me. What happened with Meg —it doesn’t matter.”

He pulled away. For a moment he wanted to believe her, accept what she was offering him. But it was not in her power to forgive.

She knew. And that was unbearable.

“It doesn’t matter.” She followed him to the door. “Remember that, Ray. Do that for me, please. Please just remember.”

3. He rode a boat taxi down the market canal to the big chain-link fences that marked the mainland, and by the time he had located his car—parked this last month in a security garage—night had fallen. The urban access routes were crowded; the car audio pumped out dizzying rondos of pulse music, muscular and grim. The city was a river of light and concrete rolling from the Mexican border up into the dry conduit suburbs, from the ocean to the desert; and after Brazil, he thought, it should have been daunting. But it was not. It intoxicated him.

In these night canyons he was one among many, finally anonymous; here he might lose his guilt, his memories, his history, himself.

CHAPTER 17

1. A Thai taxiboat driver led Oberg to the empty studio by the tidal dam.

It was an impressive balsa. Oberg looked up at it from the tiny canal dock abutting the pontoon walkway and said, “She lives here?”

“Did,” the driver said laconically. “Maybe still does. Though I haven’t seen her lately.” He waited, pointedly. Oberg pressed a few faded cash notes into his hand; he nodded and sent his boat whirring away.

Alone, Oberg climbed a mossy concrete stairway to the boardwalk and casually forced the door.

There was dust inside.

He had expected as much. They would not have come back here. They were wiser than that. It had been too easy tracing her: she had dozens of contacts among mainland art dealers and in the galleries up the coastal highway. She had been, by every account, a woman of predictable habits.

So she had not come back here, and he had anticipated that, but he remained convinced of two things: that she had gone to ground somewhere in the Floats, and that—it was pretty much inevitable—he would find her.

What he wanted here, in this closed green bamboo retreat she had once inhabited, was as much mystical as practical: a sense of her presence, a token of her life.

The still air stirred around him. Quietly now, he moved up the stairs.

He had taught himself about the Floats.

It was not a single community. The plural noun was necessary. Years ago, in a decade-long infusion of state and federal funding, the tidal dams had been erected off the California coast. It was a feat of engineering as ambitious as the building of the Great Wall, and it represented the pressing need for energy resources rolling over a host of practical and ecological objections. After years of cost overruns and the extinction of a half-dozen minor marine species, the project went successfully on-line; even today it supplied most of the electrical power soaked up by the urban sprawl. Inevitably, not enough; but there were the Baja and Sonora photic generators shouldering the overload, technologies the Exotic stones had made practical.

More important from Oberg’s perspective was the demimonde that had grown up in the shadow of the dam. The becalmed and enclosed coastal waters were initially a kind of industrial free zone. There were massive landfill projects off Long Beach, deepwater shipping bays abutting the Harbor Dam. Inevitably, a population moved in to feed the market for semiskilled labor. Just as inevitably, many of these were semilegals with dubious documentation. The first crude boat slums were erected in the lee of the factories, but the population grew even when the new industries faltered in the face of competing Exotic technologies. Squatters occupied the shells of abandoned warehouses.

The unemployment riots of the ’30s had established for the first time a perimeter of autonomy, a border beyond which the civic and harbor police refused to venture. The County of Los Angeles withdrew its official jurisdiction in a series of negotiated settlements with strike leaders. It was a precedent. Even after the fire that swept the floating ghettos in the late ’30s, the only government agency with real power in the Floats was the Public Works Department.

And so the Floats had grown into a refuge for anyone who fell through the cracks of the mainland world: artists, criminals, addicts, the black market; undocumented immigrants and the chronically poor. Within its vast acreage of pontoon bridges, balsas, and canals, there were a dozen autonomous communities. Slums spilled out from the urban mainland, dangerous places in which, Oberg understood, any life was negotiable. Elsewhere, and particularly here in the more spacious north, real communities had been created. There was money, employment, a limited commerce with the outside world. People moved back and forth. A place to live, Oberg thought. Especially, he thought, a place to hide.

But no place could hide her for long. He understood, climbing the stairs, that his separation from the Agencies had been both necessary and inevitable. He was no longer bound by Agency protocols. He could move in this twilight place, away from the mainland. He was a loose cannon. He could roll where he liked.

The thought made him smile. See me roll.

He moved lightly over the wooden floor of the room that had been her studio.

It was a spacious room set around with windows. Parallel angles of sunlight divided the floor. He opened drawers, peered behind mirrors. He did all this methodically and in a state of finely tuned concentration. He was not sure what he was looking for: only that he would know it when he saw it.

He saw it, at last, nestled at the back of a dresser drawer behind a pastel cotton shirt. It was a tiny plastic vial about the size of a film canister, unlabeled. In the opaque hollow of it, something rattled.

He pried up the lid with his thumbnail.

The odor was faint, pungent, attractive. He rolled out a tiny black pill onto his palm. The pill was resinous with age; there was only one.

It was something she had saved, he thought. A kind of insurance; or a proof of something, an object lesson.

He touched his finger to the oil at the bottom of the vial and raised it to his tongue.

Bitter, astringent taste. But the faintest sense of well-being swept through his body.

Enkephalins, he thought. In potent concentration.

He tumbled the pill back into its container, snapped shut the lid.

For the second time, he smiled to himself.

2. Her dreams were worse after Keller left.

The little girl again, of course. But the tone of the dream had changed. She had learned too much from the Pau Seco stone. The little girl appeared against a terrifying montage of the fire: flame, smoke, and frightened faces. Her eyes were wide and soot-streaked, and she was alone, cut off from the mainland, afraid for her life.

“I need you,” the girl said. “I saved you once! It’s only fair! You can’t let me die here!”

But in the dreams she could only turn away.

The dreams left her sweating. She woke up alone at the back of this new balsa deep in the Floats, lost a moment in the darkness, the unfamiliar spaces. Byron slept in the front room, which doubled as kitchen; she slept in the back. Stirring, she felt as hollow as a bottle tossed up from the sea. The floor rose in a momentary swell, as if a hand had lifted the boat. She closed her eyes resolutely and prayed that she would not dream again.

Morning came hours later, a lightening at the room’s single high window.

She sat up, wrapped a robe around herself, drew a deep breath. Since Belem she had felt mostly numb. Numb and rootless and empty. The way Keller felt, maybe. Angel fugue. Except she was not an Angel. Only herself, moving through this fog. Periodically she would ask herself how she felt, how she really felt, but it was like tonguing an abscessed tooth: the pain overwhelmed the curiosity.

She moved to the kitchen and fried an egg for Byron over the old electric grill. It was the last of their food.

Byron was wearing khaki fatigue pants and his moth-eaten combat jacket. She looked at him but could find nothing to say. She had not talked to him much—really talked—since Belem. Some barrier of guilt or shame had come down between them. She hadn’t even hinted at what she had seen in her ’lith trance, the complexities of time and history, the world’s or hers. When he finished eating, he stood up and hooked his eyeglasses back of his ears. He was going out, he said.

“Where to?”

“Making contacts,” he said vaguely. “We need cash if we’re going to stay here. There are people who owe me.”

“You have to go?” He nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Be careful.”

He shrugged.

Being alone was the worst thing.

It surprised her, how much she hated it. Better to have things to do. Keeping busy helped.

Byron had left her grocery money. So she would shop, she thought, wander out along the market canal to the big stalls by the tidal dam. That would be good. She tucked the cash into her shirt pocket and buttoned it. Check the cooler, she thought. Cheap rental cooler, came with this cheap pontoon shack. There was a bottle of fresh water, a loaf of stale bread. They needed, let’s see, fruit, vegetables, maybe even a little meat. Something to keep body and soul together.

She had skipped her own breakfast.

The market canal, then. But first she stepped back into the small room she had made her own, regarded the tousled bed and, more carefully, the antique Salvation Army dresser. Idly, she pulled open the top drawer.

The Brazilian stone was inside.

It looked small and unprepossessing in a nest of her clothes. Ordinary… until you looked closely at it, allowed its angles to seduce the eye, stared until you couldn’t stop staring. A part of her was tempted to pick it up.

A part was not. She slammed shut the drawer.

She had regained a sense of its alienness. It was the stone, she thought, that had driven Keller away. In that moment in the hotel room in Belem, she had seen into the heart of him, the terrible guilt he had hoarded all these years. The dying woman in Rondonia: Meg, her name was. His hesitation. Worse, the caustic sense of his own cowardice.

She understood, of course. It was not a difficult sin to forgive.

But he could not bear that she had seen.

And there was the rest of it. The little girl, the fire, the terrible man Carlos. She had lost so much: not just Ray but a sense of purpose, her intimacy with the stones, the idea of a future…

She put it out of her mind. She would think about it later. She left the float, double-locked the door, joined the crowds on the pontoon walkway beside the big canal. The sun was bright and she held up her face to it, eyes squeezed shut. She wished she could see the ocean.

Walking felt so good that she forgot about the shopping. She walked past the big stalls with their colorful awnings, past the market boats moored against the boardwalk, turning instinctively toward the sea.

The walkway looped north and parallel to the seawall. She climbed a set of chain-link risers until she was level with the broad concrete lip of the dam. Public Works property, isolated in its churning moat of floodwater, huge turbines down there somewhere. To the south she could see a line of abandoned factories and warehouses, waste stacks starkly black against the cloudless sky. To the east, across the tangle of the Floats, a hint of the mainland; the razorback San Gabriels. North, more boat shanties … the tidal dam tapering landward. And to the west there was the sea.

Gulls circled overhead and dive-bombed a refuse boat.

The wind smelled of salt and sea wrack. She should have brought a sweater.

Keller was gone, of course. The scary thing was that she both knew it and understood it. Because of what she had seen, he could not bear her presence. It was logical and inevitable.

But she felt the loss more deeply than she could have anticipated.

Funny how things changed. For a while she had known what she wanted. She had wanted the mystery of the dream-stone; she had wanted a door into her past. But it was like that proverb about answered prayers. She understood more about the Exotics, probably, than anyone outside the federal research programs: their origins, their history. They were vivid in her mind even yet. But there was still something fundamentally alien about them, some profound dissonance between their world and hers. She felt it, a stab of poignancy inside her, a silence where there might have been voices.

The mystery of her own past was just as obdurate. She was the little girl, of course: the little girl was Teresa. Teresa before the fire. She knew that now. But knowing was not enough. Memory was the memory of old pain. What she wanted, she realized, was healing. But the ’lith couldn’t do that. The stone only remembered. Healing, it seemed to imply, was up to her: some act of reconciliation she could not begin to imagine.

Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe the past was always and only the past. Taunting, fixed, unassailable. You couldn’t talk to the past.

She walked north through unfamiliar floats. She was not sure where she was going. She just walked—“following her feet,” Rosita used to say. Her feet carried her down pontoon bridges, past crowded market stalls. She paid no attention to the Spanish and English voices swirling around her. She thought a little about wanting and getting. The paradox of it. Wanting the dreamstone, she had found Keller. Now she wanted Keller… but the stone had driven him away.

The past had driven him away. “I’m sorry, Ray.”

She was embarrassed to realize she had said it out loud. But only the gulls overheard.

But now she had come to a place that triggered her memory. She suppressed the sense of familiarity, but her heart beat harder. She had come here for some reason. This was the place her feet had led her. Wise feet. But it was best not to think too hard about it.

The float shack had not changed much. The same dangerous-seeming list, the same bilge pump gushing oily water into a waste canal. She descended an ancient flight of chain-link stairs to the door and knocked, breathless.

The old, hollow man was older, hollower. She was surprised that he recognized her. His eyes narrowed in stale amusement from the dark frame of his doorway. “You,” he said.

He still kept the pills at the back.

CHAPTER 18

1. There was still the possibility of selling the stone. Byron was in no position to grow copies; he dared not risk even a visit to his basement lab in the Floats. They had only the single ’lith, and he was not sure how Teresa would feel about him selling it… but that was a problem he could deal with later. Right now they needed money.

He hired a canalboat and cruised until he found a functioning Public Works phone booth. The call code he thumbed in was private, but he was not surprised when it failed to enter. There was an ominous pause, then a Bell/Calstate symbol in crude pixels and the scrolling message: The number you have entered is out of service. Please hold and your call will be rerouted.

To the Agencies, Byron thought grimly. He hammered the Escape key and climbed back into his rented barque. Within minutes he was lost in traffic.

At a second booth deep in the factory district, he placed another call, strictly inside the Floats exchange: a friend, a local artist named Montoya. Cruz Wexler’s estate in Carmel was off the optic lines, Byron said, and did Montoya have any idea why?

Montoya became wide-eyed. “It was maybe a stupid idea to call him. You just back in town? The Agencies raided Wexler weeks ago. The building is closed up and his files are in custody.”

Byron considered. It must have happened shortly after they left for Brazil. Not, he thought, coincidence.

“They even raided some places in the Floats,” Montoya said. “Very rough time. Some good people were up in Carmel when the hammer came down.” He shook his head.

“They took Wexler?”

Montoya’s eyes narrowed; he licked his lips. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, right? But could be somebody asked you to ask.”

Byron took hold of the camera lens, forced it left and right on its rusted pivot. “Do you see anybody?”

“Ask Cat,” Montoya said, and cleared the monitor.

“Cat” Katsuma was a petite second-generation Floater who did crystal paintings for the mainland galleries. She had known Byron and Teresa for years; she expressed her pleasure at seeing him again. “I heard bad rumors,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Reasonably okay,” Byron said. “Tell me about Wexler.”

“You really need to talk to him?”

“It would clear some things up.” Though the prospect of money had retreated.

“Well. Meet me this afternoon, then,” and she named a cafe by the sea wall south of the factories.

He figured Wexler owed him—minimum—an explanation.

Running south in the rental barque, he totaled up everything he knew about Cruz Wexler.

Much of it was public knowledge. Wexler was, or had been, a celebrity. During the war years crystal ’liths had begun to circulate in the drug underground; they enjoyed a kind of vogue during which public curiosity had peaked. Wexler held a Ph.D. in Chaotic Dynamics but had been cashiered when he began publishing articles in which he described the dreamstones as “psychic manna from an older and saner civilization.” He lost his tenure but gained a following. He had been prominent in bohemian circles for a few years, had once owned property in the Floats. But the notoriety subsided and Wexler had pretty much retired to his estate in Carmel these days, fighting a progressive emphysema and playing wise man to the stubbornly faithful. He still had a following among the Float artists who drew their inspiration from the stones. Periodically they would make the migration to Carmel, bask in his presumed enlightenment. Byron figured it was pretty much all bullshit. But it was Wexler who had underwritten his lab, and it was Wexler—if anyone—who could make sense of the Pau Seco debacle.

He moored his boat at a by-the-hour dock behind the ruin of a cracking plant and walked to the cafe Cat had specified. It was a dicey neighborhood. Not terrible, but you got a certain influx from the slums farther south. Inside the chain-link perimeter he recognized Cat sitting at a high table overlooking the canal. A man was with her. The man had a Navy cap pulled down over his ears and a few days growth of beard, but it was Wexler; he was not hard to recognize. Byron, nervous and focused now, ordered a beer and carried it to the table.

“Byron,” Cat said warmly.

But he was staring at Wexler. Wexler said nothing, only returned the look. His eyes were steady and blue. Still a charismatic figure. People didn’t believe he could lie with eyes like that.

His breath rasped in, rasped out.

Cat stood up, sighing. “I’ll talk to you later, then.” She touched Byron’s shoulder, leaned over him. “Go easy on him, all right? I’ve been bunking him in my float. He’s got nowhere to go and his lungs are pretty bad.”

When she was out of earshot, Byron said tonelessly, “I have every reason to believe you fucked us over.”

Wexler nodded. “I can see how you might feel that way.”

“A walk, you said. A vacation.”

“Unforeseen circumstances,” Wexler said. “Is Teresa all right?”

“More or less.” He resented the question. “You have the stone?”

No, Byron thought. You are not entitled to that datum. Not yet. He smiled. “Worry about it,” he said.

Wexler sat back and sipped his coffee. “I’m not here,” he said at last—meaning the Floats, Byron took it—“by choice. You might have noticed.”

“Cat said you got burned.”

“They came in force. I was not expecting it.”

“But you weren’t home? That’s a pretty good coincidence.”

“I didn’t expect any of this. Or I would not have sent you people south. May I explain, or would you prefer to break my nose?”

Byron realized his fists were clenched. More bullshit, he thought bleakly. But he might as well listen. And he realized then that he had come here not for money or satisfaction, but for Teresa’s sake. Her unhappiness was patent and frightening and connected very closely with the stone. If anybody understood it, Wexler might.

A gull circled overhead, screeching. Byron tossed a crumb from the table and watched the bird chase it down to the dark canal water. “I’m listening,” he said.

The Agencies came and closed the estate, Wexler said. It was a radical sweep. They had always ignored him before. The dreamstones were technically contraband, but it was a law not much enforced; the scale of the crime was minuscule, and intensive enforcement would not have been cost-effective. “The new ’liths changed their mind,” Wexler said. “The deep-core ’liths.”

“You knew,” Byron said.

“I was warned,” he admitted. “I have my own contacts. Obviously.”

“Some good people were there.”

“There was no time to get them out. They’ve been in custody, but my understanding is that they’ll be released soon.” He sipped his coffee, labored for breath. “You have to understand about the stones.”

Wexler had a contact in the government research facility in Virginia, a highly-placed member of the research team who had been feeding him news about the deep-core oneiroliths. “And it was heady information. You have to understand that. It was everything we wanted. Everything that came before, impressive as it was, was blurred or obscure by comparison. For years we’d been decoding data in which every third bit had been erased by time. Reconstructing it, really. Even so, we learned a great deal. But never anything substantial about the Exotics themselves. As if they were holding themselves aloof, standing out of reach.”

But now, Wexler said, the data came in torrents. Too, the Virginia team had begun serious work with what they called “the human interface”—mostly convicts recruited out of Vacaville. This was not hard data; it was “of dubious provenance” and sometimes contradictory. But much of it correlated with the new translations from the big mainframes. A preliminary understanding of the Exotics began to emerge.

“The question had always been, why do we have these artifacts? Why were they buried in the Mato Grosso? Were they a gift, an accident? The great mystery.”

Byron said, “Is there an answer?”

“Hints,” Wexler said. He leaned forward now. His own fascination was obvious and undimmed. “We deciphered a little of their history. The history, especially, of their information technology.”

“I don’t understand,” Byron said.

“Well…” Wexler paused to catch his breath. “First there are the stories around the fire. Neolithic data storage. The past is recorded, but it’s not very efficient. Errors creep in. Then the written word. The beginning of real history—

a better grip on the past. Compared to oral history it’s a fairly dense medium, fairly incorruptible. Then the printed word, the book. Better yet. Photography, audiotape, videotape… and suddenly the past is very much with us. We have digital technology, we have molecular memory. We have people like you.” He looked a moment at Byron’s faded Angel tattoo. “Walking data storage. The Exotics were like us in this respect, but more focused… you might say obsessed. The idea of the loss of the past terrified them. They had a profound, ontological fear of forgetting. Without memory, no meaning; without meaning—chaos.” He sat back. “The oneiroliths are the logical product of that obsession: complexly folded in spacetime, linked somehow directly into sapient consciousness. You could say that they contain a sort of recording of experience itself, an archive of every human life since they arrived on this planet. Better perhaps to say that they allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.”

Well, Byron thought. He had seen Teresa do her trick with the old people who visited her float: pulling the past out of a stone. Strange but not world-shaking. He told Wexler so.

“But it begs the question,” Wexler said. “Our best estimate now is that the Exotics encountered our planet some thousand years before the birth of Christ. It fascinated them. It must have. They would have asked themselves the questions we’ve been asking about them: how are these creatures like us? How are they not?”

He sipped his coffee, momentarily breathless. Byron waited.

“My guess,” Wexler said, “is that they considered us defective. Suppose we traveled to another world and encountered a race of myopics. That’s how it must have seemed to them. Here we are, obviously sapient, tool-using, clever individuals. Our bodies are not unlike theirs; we have opposable thumbs, as they do. The distinguishing feature is …” He tapped his forehead. “Memory.” He smiled faintly. “The best evidence now suggests that the Exotics possessed what we would call eidetic memory. A human mind can’t do this; the few cases of human mnemonism on record have been deeply disturbed individuals. It’s the way we’re wired. We have to assume the Exotics could forget, in the sense that the past was not always vividly in their mind—no living creature could cope with that. But there was no fully experienced moment that could not be recalled at will… or could be willfully or permanently suppressed. Presumably, this is what fueled their obsession with information technology. For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.”

Byron walked with Wexler out along the seawall for a distance.

It was more private out here. The ocean seemed to lend a credibility to all this talk of time, immortality, memory.

Byron believed most of it. The talk had ignited an old enthusiasm in Wexler’s lined face, too immediate to be faked. None of this addressed the problem of betrayal, money, Teresa. But he was content, for now, to let the man talk.

“I wanted one of these new stones, of course. It seemed to me we could do so much with it. They used human subjects in Virginia, but usually the criminally insane, and they were reacting badly to the experience—hypermnesia, specifically of repressed material. Whereas in Carmel the response was almost always positive … at least with the traditional ’liths. Why not these new ones? It would be bigger, stronger, better. Real contact this time. Contact with an alien sapience: I cannot communicate how intoxicating that idea was. Not the exchange of mathematics, but real contact—spiritual contact.”

Byron said coolly, “Spiritual?”

The faint smile again. “I used to be freer with words like that. But yes, spiritual. It was what we wanted. The authentic touch. Across that chasm.” He waved his hand at the sky. “But of course everything was locked up very tight. The Agencies were scared of this whole thing. For the last thirty years national governments have been presiding over some fairly tumultuous social changes. A direct product of the oneiroliths. Fortunes made and unmade. That kind of instability is frightening. The idea of accelerated change—well, it made them nervous.”

“So you set up the buy at Pau Seco.”

“I really believed it would be safe. I spent a considerable amount of money on it. I bought cooperation at the highest levels of the SUDAM bureaucracy. There was a risk involved, of course. I told Teresa so when she volunteered. But even if there had been legal trouble, I might have bought you out of that too … the Valverde regime is extremely pliable.”

“It was worse than that,” Byron said.

Wexler averted his eyes. “So I understand. My contact in Virginia was compromised. And then the estate at Carmel was compromised. And so the house of cards came tumbling down. I have no influence over the Agencies … I didn’t know they would be involved.” He looked at Byron. “You managed to get away with the stone?”

“Yes.” No point in hiding it now.

“You have it still?”

He nodded.

“Has Teresa used it?”

“Yes.”

“Her reaction was not positive?”

“No,” Byron said.

Wexler nodded, registering the information. He looked back at the sea. The sea was wide and deep, Byron thought, and it went on forever. Like the sky. Like the stars.

“I don’t think they wholly understood us,” Wexler said. “The Exotics, I mean. They gave us the stones, and they were a gift, hidden until we could usefully decode and reproduce them. Binary code propagating across axes of symmetry. Micro voltages trickling down folded spacetime. But with this other aspect…” He smiled again—sadly now, Byron thought. “ ‘Spiritual.’ I think they simply wanted to make us whole … to cure what they saw as our tragic failure. Failure of memory. Which is failure of conscience. They were surprised, I would guess, by our capacity for aggression. For ruthlessness, for inflicting pain. Conscience is memory… and the stones would restore it.”

“But it doesn’t work that way.”

“I think because we are divided against ourselves in a way they could not imagine. We suppress memories; the memories lead a life of their own. We create images of ourselves and the images spring to life. We have names for them. The conscious and unconscious mind. Id and ego. And so on. Always, the crucial act is the act of forgetting. To be forced to confront the past, really confront it…” He shook his head. “It would take a great strength.”

“I’m worried about her,” Byron said.

Wexler said quietly, “I can’t help you.”

The sun was low in the sky when they turned away from the ocean.

“If you had the stone,” Byron said, “if you had it now, what would you do with it?”

Wexler moved like an old man. In this light, he was not inspiring. He walked with his legs bowed, his head down. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Would you touch it?”

“I don’t know … I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

He was a long time answering. His lips were pursed, his gaze abstracted. “Maybe,” he said, “there are things I would like not to remember.”

“Like what?”

Silence.

Byron said, “You were the only one who knew. You were the one who sent us to Pau Seco, and you were the one who made the arrangements. Nobody else knew.”

His voice was faint now, tremulous. He said, “Suppose I lied. Suppose I was arrested in the sweep. Suppose I was interrogated by the Agencies.” He closed his eyes. “Suppose I was afraid, and suppose that—because I was afraid—I confessed, I told them about the arrangements I’d made in Brazil. And suppose, because I told them, they let me go.” His smile now was bleak and humorless. “Wouldn’t that be something I might like to forget?”

By the time they reached the cafe, night had fallen, the air was cool, and most of the tables were empty. Wexler ordered a drink; Byron said he had to get going.

“I can tell you one thing that might be useful,” Wexler said.

Byron waited. The beaten look on Wexler’s face had begun to make him nervous.

“I still talk to people at the Virginia facility,” he said. “There are a few untapped bit streams, if you know where to find them. The news now is that the Agencies have cooled off a good deal. The stone left Pau Seco, and they are not interested in tracing it. They decided it doesn’t have a big future on the black market-^-and from what you say, that is probably true. The issue is dead, except that they’ll install a military force at Pau Seco to oversee the Brazilians.

“But you may have a problem yet. There was a man at the Virginia facility, an Agency man, a latent sociopath from the war years. His name is Stephen Oberg. He was in charge of the Pau Seco interdiction. Word is that he has an obsessive personal fear of the oneiroliths… and that he went rogue after the stone left Brazil.” Wexler peered at him, wheezing faintly. “He may still be on your case.”

“Oberg,” Byron said. The name was faintly familiar. It called up some sinister echo.

Wexler sat down among the shadows. He pulled his collar up, as if against a chill only he could feel. “Rumor has it,” Wexler said, “the man is quite insane.”

2. Byron navigated his rental barque home through the night canals now, past neon-lit dance shacks and constellations of paper lanterns.

He was mindful of the Angel tattoo on his arm: Wexler had mentioned it. He had spent so much time, he thought, trying to erase it. Not the symbol but the thing, the fact, what he had become in the war.

What he had told Keller back in Belem was true. He did not want to be a machine; he understood that he had become a machine; he understood that the road back into the world was treacherous and painful. Teresa was his road. All he had ever wanted was a life with her. That would be enough. But if not that, then at least the scars of humanity: the pain of a commitment he could not revoke.

The question he entertained now, for the first time, was: when is it enough?

How much pain is proof? How much is too much?

I could disappear, he thought. I could buy documents and disappear into the mainland. Leave the Floats, leave the dream trade, leave no trail for this Oberg to follow. Make some new life and disappear into it, maybe find a woman who might love me, he thought, and make babies with her. The old tattoo had pretty much faded. A sleeve was enough to cover it.

It was an intoxicating thought, but also dangerous. He forced it away as he docked the boat. Too much unfinished business. She needed him yet. There was still the possibility he could do something for her.

The balsa was dark inside. Pushing through the door, he heard a moan from the back bedroom.

He flicked a wall switch; an antique incandescent bulb radiated sterile and sudden light. “Teresa?” But she only moaned again. The sound might have signified pain or pleasure.

He pushed through a rag curtain into the back room.

She was alone on the bed, blinking at the light. Her pupils were massively dilated.

Byron picked up the small wide-necked bottle from the floor beside the bed. It was three-quarters full of tiny black pills. Enkephalins, he thought. Concentrated, potent. “My Christ,” he whispered.

Her moan was abstracted pleasure. She was obviously ashamed—in some corner of her mind—that he had found her this way. She averted her face. But the shame could not override the flush of chemical well-being. There were pinpricks of sweat on her forehead.

Hardly aware of himself, he sat on the bed and cradled her head against him.

She rolled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was faint, hollow, oceans distant. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

But there was nothing to say. Nothing worth saying.

He held her, and the boat rose in the swell.

CHAPTER 19

Keller contacted Vasquez, the Network producer, and negotiated an infusion of credit into one of his phantom accounts. Vasquez also supplied some temporary documentation and access to the downloading facilities in the Network technical compound. “But make it quick,” Vasquez urged. “I’m under a certain amount of time pressure. Is it good footage?”

Keller recalled Pau Seco, the mine and the old town, the bars and brothels. He nodded.

“Good,” Vasquez told him. “You have an appointment with Leiberman.”

Leiberman, the Network neurosurgeon, plucked out Keller’s memory chip and closed the socket wound with adhesives. In a month there would be no visible scar. “Once again,” Leiberman said loftily, “you are merely human.” He handed Keller the memory in a tiny transparent pillbox, as prosaic in its bed of cotton as a pulled tooth.

Keller went directly to the Network compound, displayed his new ID to the machine at the gate and claimed an editing booth. The technical compound sprawled over a vast expanse of desert west of Barstow, bunkers and Quonsets and a string of satellite bowls solemnly regarding the southern sky. There was a floating staff of Network engineers, but most of the people here were independent contractors—by his ID Keller was one of these—sharing time on the Network mainframes.

The booth was private, a small room crowded with monitors and mixers. Keller plugged his memory into a machine socket, named it and gave it an access code. He pulled the keyboard into his lap and put his feet up on the mixer.

Time, he tapped.

Forty-one days, the monitor said, twenty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds since the memory was activated. He registered a faint surprise: it had seemed like more.

He instructed the edit program to install index marks at every twenty-four hour point—day marks—and then divide them into hours. “Laying ordinance,” it was called. He installed special index points at Day Seven (Arrival, Rio), Day Fifteen (Arrival, Pau Seco), and Day Twenty-five (Arrival, Belem). Further index points could be installed as necessary; these were the basics, a kind of crude map. Now he could call up a day or an hour and retrieve it at once, enter it into the mainframe memory as part of the ROM package he would eventually hand Vasquez.

Protection first, however. He called up the Identity Protect subroutine, then scanned through Day Two until he arrived at a full-body image of Byron Ostler.

The central thirty-inch monitor showed Byron in front of his huge, ramshackle balsa deep in the Floats. Keller stilled the image, zoomed on the face, keyed Alter. The face was replaced abruptly with its own ghost image in topographic lines against limbo, glowing amber.

Keller used a light pencil to push the lines around.

Cheekbones up, a narrower chin. He rotated the image and similarly altered the profile. He called up flesh again and there was Byron standing by his float once more, but it was not Byron any longer; the face was not even faintly familiar. It was some older, heavyset, hawkish man. A generic face, neither good nor evil, Retain, Keller typed. The authentic image would never appear in the finished edits. Next he called up Teresa.

This was more painful. The sight of her stirred old feelings in him, a longing he labored to suppress. She moved across the monitor, regarding him.

I can’t see making this trip with somebody I don’t trust… intuition is all I have right now, you understand?

Her voice filled the booth. A sixteen-bit recreation of the trace he had laid down on this chip. She peered out from the monitor into, it seemed, his eyes. Convulsively, he called up Alter.

She became a matrix of lines, an artifact of geography.

Better that way.

Sweating now, he changed the lines with his light pencil. Moving with professional instinct, he flattened the mouth, rounded the nose, shortened the hair. He worked by rote, eyes narrowed. Wu-nien. It was a question of not caring.

He performed similar alterations on Ng and Meireilles, who might still be vulnerable—he was conscientious about protecting his sources—then paged ahead to the most significant footage, the footage Vasquez wanted, the Pau Seco footage.

Day Sixteen. The frame shook as he stepped out of Ng’s Truck, Hold Frame Pan, he typed, and played it back. Now the motion was smooth, effortless. The image flickered as he blinked away dust. Keller keyed out Hold Correct; the dropouts vanished. Beginning to look like video now. The perspective moved up to the lip of the mine, peered into its depths, began a slow pan. Audio, he typed.

The sound came up instantly. Clatter of ancient tools. Human voices ringing off distant cliffs. Abyss of time. Formigas moving in insect lines up those clay steppes and rope ladders: it might have been yesterday or today or tomorrow. Keller reached for a fader, but his hand struck the volume slide instead. The clangor of voices and tools was suddenly deafening, a roaring in the booth. He blinked at the monitor and for one giddy instant believed he had actually entered the past, transported himself somehow back to Pau Seco, that he might turn and find Teresa beside him. He slapped the Enter key.

The playback ceased. The booth filled up with silence.

When he could not bear the work any longer, he signed out and drove west. He had used a portion of the advance from Vasquez to rent a hotel room, but he didn’t head directly back. He drove west along a high, fast traffic artery until he hit the coastline, and then he turned north. On his left the Floats sprawled out to the distant gray line of the tidal dam. He drove through colonies and outposts of the cityplex, malltowns and industrial parks. He had gone miles before he understood where he was going.

Bad idea, he thought. It was a bad impulse that had brought him here: Angel sin. But he pulled off the highway when he spotted the sign.

Arts by the Sea. She had mentioned the name once, long ago.

It was not the newest or the best of these businesses. Bamboo walls sunk in a cracked concrete foundation, roof of chalky-red Spanish tile. The door rang a bell when he opened it. Inside, a buckled wooden floor supported shelves and display cases of thick protective glass gone gray with time.

The items on display were, in Keller’s judgment, fairly prosaic Float work. Soapstone carvings, junk collages, a few high-priced crystal paintings under glass. He gazed a while at a stylized trance landscape, bread-loaf hills rolling under an azure sky, treehouses like pagodas clustered in the foreground. Some real place, Keller thought, some Exotic venue wrenched out of time. He was staring at it when the proprietor pushed through a curtain from the rear of the store.

She was a chunky gray-haired woman in layered pastel skirts, and she regarded Keller across a chasm of suspicion. “Is there something you were especially interested in?”

“A certain artist,” he said. “I understand you sold some of her work. Her name is Teresa… Teresa Rafael.”

She looked at him more carefully now, his face and his clothes. “No,” she said finally. “We have nothing.”

Keller extracted the Pacific Credit gold card Vasquez had obtained for him. In fact his account was strictly limited, but the card itself was impressive. He slid it across the counter; the woman ran her finger over the embedded microchip. “She hasn’t displayed here for years. Her work has appreciated in value. You understand? She has a reputation now. A following.”

“I understand.”

The woman licked her lips. “In the back,” she said.

Keller followed her through the curtain. There were a dozen pieces in this smaller room—all “appreciated,” Keller assumed: it was a commonplace practice for street dealers to hold back the work of a promising newcomer. But he recognized instantly which of it was Teresa’s. “These,” the woman said loftily, “are early pieces.”

She must have been a girl when she did this, Keller thought. He was impressed. Some of the work was awkward; none of it was naive. A few pieces displayed the obvious skill and muted passion that had made her successful. Mostly they were junk sculptures, assembled out of pipe and copper wire and mechanical oddments scavenged from the old Float factories gutted in the fire; but she had polished and shaped the material until it seemed nearly alive, more liquid than solid.

“You’re familiar with the work?”

“No… not really.”

Under the woman’s alarmed stare he picked up a small piece of sculpture and examined it. The metallic tangle resolved into the image of a face. No—two faces. He rotated the piece in his hand.

A woman’s face, gaunt but curiously childlike in its sadness.

. And a child’s face, with an adult’s expression of fierce resolve.

The proprietor took it from him. Keller was startled; he restrained an impulse to take it back. She named a sum, and it was approximately the money Vasquez had entered into Keller’s account, minus living expenses. A huge amount. But he agreed without haggling.

He drove home with the piece beside him in the car, confused and faintly shocked at himself. He was like a sleepwalker, acting out some dream. He knew only that he wanted something from this knot of metal, something tangible; a piece of her, he thought, a relic, or that forbidden and finally dangerous thing—a memory.

In the morning he went back to the Network technical compound and called up yesterday’s work on the monitor.

The sight of it shocked him. He sat back in the cloistered silence of the editing booth and stared.

He had altered Teresa’s features to protect her anonymity. Standard procedure, and he had worked by rote. Successfully. It didn’t look like Teresa anymore.

But the face he had given her was Megan Lindsey’s.

CHAPTER 20

Stephen Oberg had stepped outside the bounds of propriety -often since the debacle at Pau Seco, but he did not feel authentically like an outlaw until the day he rented a cheap balsa in the Floats.

It was an outlaw place; he was an outlaw in it. The faces he saw along the market canals were furtive, obscure, hidden. He imagined he looked the same. A shadow-thing now, outside the bright thoroughfares of law and custom. The only light here was the beacon of his own intense desire; the abyss of the ocean was unnervingly close.

It worried him a little. The night he moved into the balsa, he rolled out his mattress over the stained wooden floor and wondered whether he might have gone too far. He had always depended on an external structure for discipline, for rules. The Army, in an important way, had made him what he was. They had named him. Potent magic. He was a Latent Aggressive. And it was not a pathology but a talent, a useful quirk of character. He. could be depended upon for certain acts. He was conscienceless but loyal: it was a loyalty that had never faltered.

Until now. Now he was an outlaw, a loose cannon. He had assumed a task and made it his own, and he could not see beyond it. Without him, the deep-core stone from the Pau Seco mine might be casually reproduced, might spread—and surely that was what its unknowable creators had intended—among the furtive and marginal people of the Floats. And he could not allow that.

Because he understood, and he was persuaded that he was the only one who understood. He understood the nature of the stone: its alienness, its powers of memory. He had touched Tavitch, and through Tavitch, the stone. And the stone had touched him.

It was a bad and dangerous thing, a kind of weapon. It eroded the marrow of the soul. It must not be allowed to exist.

He believed this as fiercely as he had believed anything in his life.

The force of his belief was its own justification. It comforted him.

It was a fire to warm him, out here in this wilderness.

In the morning he placed a call to an Agency bureaucrat back east, a man named Tate. Tate, seeing Oberg’s face in the monitor, did an elaborate double-take. “You!” he said.

Oberg smiled. “Me.”

“One minute.”

Oberg waited while Tate called up a security program, shunting his terminal out of the routine record-and-monitor loops. Tate, a pockmarked man of Oberg’s age, looked harried when he reappeared. “That was a stupid thing to do!”

“I need your help.”

“You’re hardly entitled to it. Everybody knows you went rogue back in Brazil. Fucking bad form, Steve.”

“This isn’t an official call.”

“We’re not friends.”

“We’re old friends,” Oberg said. “The hell we are.”

But it was true. If not friends, then at least something like it: comrades, colleagues. Tate had been a point man for Oberg’s platoon.

It was not something that drew them together; they had seen each other only a handful of times since the war. But they had parallel careers; and there was that unspoken bond, Oberg thought, the tug of old loyalties. He said, “I want whatever you have on the three Americans. I assume you processed the files from SUDAM. There must have been something.”

“That has nothing to do with me.”

“You have clearances.”

“I’m not your dog. I don’t fetch when you say fetch.” He looked pained. “This is not your business anymore.”

“As a favor,” Oberg said.

“As far as I know,” Tate said, “there’s nothing substantive. A couple of Floaters, no extant ID except what they bought. You know all this.”

“There’s the third man.”

“Keller. Well, we have the name. But this all went into limbo when you turned up AWOL. Are you listening? Steve: nobody cares.”

“Check it out for me,” Oberg said. “Please.”

“Give me a number where you are. I’ll call you back.”

“I’ll call you,” Oberg said, and cleared the monitor.

For a couple of days he explored the neighborhood.

It was a seedy area south of the factory district, close to the urban mainland. Most of the people here worked mainland jobs during the day. At night the boardwalks lit up with paper lanterns; the bars and dance shacks opened for business. Commerce came the opposite way after dark —venturesome mainlanders shopping for the illicit pleasures of the Floats. These were more legendary than real, Oberg understood. But there were certain things for sale.

Drugs, for instance. Well, drugs were everywhere. It was a truism that the economy could not function—or at least compete—without the vast array of stimulants, IQ enhancers, and complex neuropeptides for sale on the street or by prescription. Oberg had done time with the DEA and understood that it was a traffic no one really cared to interdict. Most of the field agents he knew were either neurochemically enhanced or skimming money from the trade. Or both. It was called free enterprise.

But the Floats made dealing a little looser. No government functionaries to take a percentage, although he understood the Filipino and East Indian mobs would sometimes muscle in. Generally, though, it was a loose friends-of-friends distribution network… and that worked in his favor.

For three nights he frequented a bar called Neptune’s, which catered almost exclusively to mainlanders. He watched the canal traffic, the waitresses, the tidal flow of alcohol over the bar. In particular he watched a lanky, pale teenager who occupied a rear booth—same booth all three nights— and who would periodically step out with one or two customers, through a back door onto a catwalk overlooking a waste canal. The boy was not a hooker; there were others, more sophisticated, handling that trade. But he fit the mainlander’s image of a drug pusher, and Oberg guessed that was an advantage here; it was like a sign, an advertisement. The teenager kept his hands in his oversized jacket, and when he brought them out, Oberg imagined, they would be holding pills, powders, blotters.

His fourth night in the Floats he approached the boy.

“I would like to buy drugs,” he said softly.

The teenager looked at him, amused. “You would like a hat?”

Oberg showed him the vial he had taken from Teresa’s studio. He shook out the resinous black pill into the palm of his hand and held it so the boy could see it.

The boy laughed and looked away. “Shit,” he said.

“I’m serious,” Oberg said.

“I bet you are.” The teenager tapped his hand nervously against the tabletop.

Probably he was doing some CNS stimulant himself, Oberg thought, pumping chemical energy out of his neurons. Crash every morning, up every night. It was pathetic, and he resented the boy’s condescension. “I can pay,” Oberg said.

The boy took a second look. “You prepared to buy in quantity? I don’t sell candy.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Well.”

The boy led him outside.

The walkway was narrow and dark. Presumably, it was useful for dumping trash. It overlooked a waste canal, dark water drawn down open conduits to the sea. There was a single sodium-vapor lamp overhead and nothing beyond the canal but the blank stucco wall of an empty warehouse. The sound of music trickled out from the bar through this single door, closed now. The sound was anemic and far.-seeming.

The boy dug into the deep recesses of his jacket and brought out a sweaty handful of pills. They glistened in the harsh light. They were small and black. “This is all I have,” the boy was saying, bored with the transaction already, “but you come back Tuesday, I might—hey!”

Oberg swept his fist out and knocked the boy’s hand away. The pills flew up in an arc, twinkled a moment, dropped inaudibly into the canal.

The boy stared, a little awed. “Son of a bitch!” No one had ever done this to him, Oberg thought. Oberg could have been anyone, a mob enforcer, a new competitor. But the boy had only dealt with mainlanders. He was surprised and confused.

Oberg waited.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “You can fucking throw them away if you want to,” he said finally, “but you pay for ’em either way. So pony up, asshole.” He took a knife from under his belt.

Oberg had anticipated it. He leaned inside the boy’s reach, bent the arm, extracted the knife. He held it against the boy’s throat.

He felt a pleasure in this that he had not felt for years.

He understood it was something he enjoyed, the rush of it, something he had missed all this time. An old and profound pleasure. But it was not a thought worth dwelling on.

Loose cannon, he thought giddily.

The boy was wide-eyed and pale.

“Tell me where you got them,” Oberg said.

The boy said, faintly, “Fuck you!”

Oberg let the blade draw out a line of blood. The blood was bright and oily in the stark light. He felt the boy twisting against his restraint. “Tell me,” he said.

It took time, but in the end he extracted four names and four approximate canal addresses. It would be useful, an approach to the woman, especially if Tate failed to produce any useful information. The boy relaxed, sensing that Oberg had what he wanted: the ordeal was over.

And it was. But not the way the boy expected. Oberg drew the knife deeply across the boy’s throat and in a single motion levered the body over the railing and down into the waste canal. There was a momentary thrashing, a choking sound, silence immediately after.

It felt good. It was deeply gratifying.

He used a handkerchief to clean the blade of the knife, and threw the handkerchief after the body.

The knife he took home.

The past is dead and gone, he thought. That was the way it should be.

He had trouble sleeping sometimes. Tonight, for instance. In part it was the adrenaline that had rivered through him at the death of the boy. In part, a more obscure stimulation.

In his worst dreams he was back in Brazil, back in the war, running what his orders called “punitive raids” on farms and villages where guerillas had been harbored. In the dreams he killed people but they would not stay safely dead: they rose and pointed accusing fingers at him; they protested their innocence. He killed them once, twice, three times. They rose up sullenly and said his name.

In Virginia he had touched Tavitch when Tavitch was touching the stone; and Tavitch had looked into his eyes and had seen these same dreams. But they were not dreams. That was the terrifying thing. Somehow, through Tavitch, through the Pau Seco stone, it had actually happened. The dead had risen stubbornly; the dead had pronounced his name.

He lay in the darkness and was haunted by the memory. It was unnatural; it was alien, an alien ruse, a mind trick. The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.

With this new thought he achieved ease and finally a sleep as calm as that vast and silent ocean; he did not dream; he woke strengthened in his resolve.

In the morning he made a second call to Tate.

“Keller is an Angel,” Tate said. “He’s working for an independent producer name of Vasquez. He’s in L.A. now, probably downloading at the Network compounds.” He regarded Oberg guiltily. “I assume this is what you wanted.”

“Yes,” Oberg said.

“You’re crazy, Steve, you know that? You’re fucking nuts.”

It might be true. It didn’t matter. The monitor blanked, and Oberg stared a long moment at his own reflection in it.

CHAPTER 21

1. Byron knew he was losing her. The knowledge was unavoidable.

He didn’t talk about the pills. They didn’t talk much at all. Talk was superfluous; worse, it might have required lies. He was watching when she tossed her pill bottle into a waste canal, and the act kindled a flare of hope in him. Later he found the pills themselves hoarded in a corner of her dresser; it was only the bottle she had discarded. It was a gesture he had been meant to see.

He understood that this was the old Teresa, the Teresa he had found on his doorstep years ago, dying and frightened of dying and wanting to die. The part of her that needed to survive had been silenced—silenced, he guessed, that day in the hotel room off the Ver-o-Peso—and he was helpless to call it back. He could not touch her that way, because she did not love him.

He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.

He ate dinner with her. There was bread in ragged loaves from the bakery stall, a cut of real beef. The meal represented very nearly the last of their money. Teresa ate mechanically; when she was finished she said she was going for a walk. “I’ll go with you,” Byron volunteered. But she shook her head. She wanted to be alone.

Alone with her pills, he thought. Alone to watch the Floats light up, alone to watch the waves roll in. She closed $ the door behind her, and he was left by himself in the float. A shack with the ticking of the bilge pump and the moan of the floorboards moving in the swell.

He thought of Keller.

Keller on the mainland. Keller drifting back into his | Network career, surrendering to the momentum of it.

Keller, whom she loved.

Keller, who might have helped her.

The thought was galling, but he could not resist it.

He used to feel sorry for Keller. Keller was the thing Byron might have been; victim of, Christ, a catalogue of things: his childhood, the army, his own cowardice. Forgivable sins, Teresa said one time. But now Keller had walked out, and that was inexcusable.

And here was the irony. Teresa was hurting… and the only thing I can do for her, Byron thought bitterly, is to call up Keller and beg him to come back. Beg him to take her away from me. It was galling. But he thought about the Angel tattoo on his arm and what it meant, and he was on the verge of doing it—getting a message to Keller through Keller’s Network producer, Vasquez—when there was a knock at the door.

He opened it cautiously.

Cruz Wexler stood outside. In the dusk he might have been a thousand years old. He labored at the salt air as if he could not draw nourishment from it. “I want to talk to her,” he said.

2. Teresa found him waiting when she came in from the boardwalk. Her reaction was an instinctive and immediate happiness: he was a link to a better time in her life.

She hugged him and sat down across from him, and only then realized how much these past weeks had aged him. He had been fading for years up in Carmel, of course, gone from celebrity to local eccentric, and she understood that the part of him that was showman and con-artist— maybe a large part of him—had resented this decline. But she had always believed he was sincere about the oneiroliths, sincere in the conviction that they belonged to the world, not just a coterie of government scientists. He was always talking about what he called the gnosis, the Mystery, a kind of conquering wisdom: his optimism had been as vast as it was naive. These last days must have shocked him.

They talked into the night. She had taken a pill while she was out walking, but only one, and the effect was a mild buoyancy which disguised her fatigue. (But she wouldn’t think about that.) Byron excused himself and took his bedroll into the back room. Then Wexler asked her about Brazil, and she found herself telling him about it—the story spilling out of her. She told him about Ray. Maybe because of the pill, she was able to say things that surprised her. She talked about the new oneirolith, its potency, the terrible memories it had provoked in her and in Ray. The wedge of knowing it had driven between them. She expressed her pain and surprise, was astonished when a tear trailed down her cheek: strange. She wasn’t sad. She felt all right.

Wexler nodded thoughtfully. His beard had grown out into gray stubble and his breathing was noisy and forceful, as if breathing were not automatic but a task he had to consider and perform. His eyes were full of gentle concern.

He talked about the Exotics.

He had spent his life in this kind of speculation. She understood that it was his nature, that he asked the questions no one else wanted to ask. Everybody was deriving technical data from the ’liths but nobody asked the profounder questions: maybe, he said, because they were afraid to. But Wexler had seen the trance landscapes, had glimpsed the whirlpool of history.

“If someone asked me now,” he said, “my guess would be that it was planned. All of it. There’s one kind of stone, very common, with its binary microvoltages: basically, it talks to machines. It says something altogether different to people like us. There are visions, a sense of significance, a sense of imminence. And then this rarer stone. It has even more to say. But at a price.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Truly. But I can guess. It depends, doesn’t it, on what the Exotics thought of us—the kind of creatures they took us to be. And I think, to them, we were broken things. Fractured. Divided.” He paused for breath. “Divided against ourselves. Not only collectively but individually. The mind against itself. I think it surprised them.”

She said, “They were different?”

“Whole, in some important way, where we’re broken. But you must have felt it.”

She had. The memory was warm but somehow chastening, a kind of rebuke. The,pill wearing off, she thought. She felt the gritty flush of sobriety.

“They anticipated us,” Wexler was saying. “They understood that we were good with tools. They guessed, I think, what we might do with our technology.”

She shook her head, confused still.

“Well,” he said, “what have we done? We can manipulate the mind itself. But we don’t heal it. We don’t make it whole. Instead we fracture it. We divide it. We have creche soldiers, we have battalions of neurotics. We train our psychoses as if they were dogs, to do tricks for us. We make ourselves over to suit our function.”

“Like Ray,” Teresa said.

“Like Ray. Like everybody else. And it’s bad, it’s dangerous. It makes us conscienceless; in some important way I think it makes us soulless.”

But he had said much of this before. She remembered him at his estate in Carmel, a rambling Spanish-style ranch house he had bought with the money from his early successes, maintained—but shabbily—with the money funneled back through ’lith chemists like Byron, lecturing to a crowd of equally shabby Float artists. He had talked as grandly about the traditions of Paracelsus, the Gnostics, cryptic wisdom. Grandiose nonsense. And it had come down to this: a sick old man in a decaying float shack. It depressed her.

He must have seen her skepticism. He ducked his head; he put his hands on the table. Old hands. The skin was pale and papery, the nails gnawed short. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I get carried away.”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she confessed. “The stone. The Pau Seco stone. It was what I wanted. It really was. The memory. Myself. But … I couldn’t bear it.”

“I wonder if that’s true.”

She glared. “You weren’t there.”

“Obviously. But I think it’s what they demand of us.” He said gently, “It makes sense.”

She felt offended, obscurely threatened.

“It’s the part of themselves they withheld,” he said. “The part of themselves they wouldn’t give to the machines. A wealth of real knowledge. Time and history. But only between mind and mind, you understand? A whole mind.”

“I don’t want it that badly.”

“Maybe,” he said softly, “you need it.”

She stood up. Her head had begun to ache. He had come here and confused her, and that was bad. “You do it,” she said petulantly. “You be the one.”

His voice was faint. “It frightens me,” he said. A confession. “Distressing. After all this time. The gnosis. The real thing. But it frightens me.” He smiled hollowly. “Not only that. I think it demands a kind of innocence. Which I do not possess.”

“You think I do? You think I do?” Mysteriously, she was shouting. The words erupted from her, sourceless. “I’m not innocent!” She was panicking. She needed a pill. Quiescence. Peace. Her body cried out for it. “I’m not good!”

She ran for the door.

Byron had been listening from the other room. Wexler stood up when the chemist emerged. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I thought—”

“It’s the way she’s been,” Byron said. “I meant to help.”

“I understand.”

“Well … I should leave.”

Byron said, “You meant all that? What you told her?”

Wexler nodded.

“We can’t help her.”

“Apparently not.”

“But Ray could?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe.”

Wexler allowed Byron to roll out a mattress for him in the corner of the float. Too late to go back to Cat’s; his breath was troubling him. So he accepted the offer. Three people in this two-room shack.

He was awake when Teresa came home. She moved through the darkened room with the elevated grace of her enkephalin high. She had been an addict, and she was spiraling back into her addiction now with terrifying speed.

He had sent her perhaps blithely to Pau Seco. But in fact he had anticipated none of this… suspected, at least, that if a crisis came it would be a domestic crisis and she would be safer out of it. The arrangements had been meticulous, and he had put a vast amount of money into it, confident that he was guaranteeing her safety.

What he had not counted on was his own weakness.

So he owed her whatever help he could give. And so he had come here.

But the help she needed—as Byron had pointed out— was not within his power.

He slept and dreamed of a terrible and oppressive future, half men like Oberg riding out to the stars in warships, chitinous bodies of metal welded to flesh, protein circuits spiked into their nervous systems. It was not so much dream as prophecy, and he woke from it with a sense of imminence, a sense that this conflict—between Oberg and Teresa, between Teresa and her fears—would one day be played out on a much larger stage. That what they did here prefigured an enormity.

It was an oppressive idea. It was more than he wanted to believe.

He woke with morning light harsh in his eyes.

Terrible, he thought, to be so old and so frightened.

Teresa was cooking up breakfast; he resolved not to mention their conversation of the night before. He moved around her cautiously. Her attention was focused on the food.

It was for him, she said. She wasn’t hungry. He said, “Byron’s gone?”

“Gone to the mainland.” She regarded him across the table. “I think he’s gone to look for Ray.”

CHAPTER 22

1. Keller was alone in the booth when Byron found him.

The lights were dim and the monitors running, images cascading across the tiny enclosed space: the Mato Grosso from the window of a bus, Pau Seco, the Ver-o-Peso. The audio was faintly audible on all these sources—ghost whispers from an ancient world. Keller said, “I’m surprised you found me.”

“I talked to Vasquez. He gave me a Network pass.”

Keller worked while Byron talked. His fingers moved deftly over the mixing board. He felt quite firmly embedded in his Angel training now, gliding over this memory landscape around him, an archeologist among the ruins of his own experience. On a dozen monitors the altered Teresa gazed palely across the docks at Belem, at a Japanese tanker moving with silent grace toward its harbor. All events converging, Keller thought; all of us moving toward harbor. He had been drinking a little.

Byron talked in a soft, persuasive voice about the Floats, about the shack he had rented there, about Cruz Wexler (who was impoverished and alone now)—finally, about Teresa. “You know,” Byron said, “she’s not really here. You edited her and you ran your programs on her and you filed her and now you think that’s her—this picture you made. But it’s not. I know how that works. It’s easy, and it feels good. But she’s not here.” He waved dismissively at the monitors. “She’s out in the Floats, Ray. She’s flesh and blood out there. And I think she would like to see you again.” He hesitated, then—firmly—“She needs to see you again.”

Keller turned away from the board. “You don’t understand.”

“No. I don’t. Definitely not. But I will tell you what I do understand. I understand that she is in a desperate situation, and that I can’t help her, and that she is wanting you so bad it hurts.”

“I can’t help her either.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

Keller said faintly—it made him unhappy to admit it —“We were together. Back in that hotel room with the stone. Together in a way you can’t imagine. She saw things—”

“You think …” Pure outrage in his voice. “You think that matter\s?”

There was silence for a moment. On the walls luminescent numbers counted down seconds to the minute, minutes to the hour. Past time, Keller thought, spooling away.

He had been awake last night, staring at the sculpture he’d bought at the gallery up the coast, the twin faces of it, woman and child verso. It fascinated him and it made him uneasy. She needed help. Well, obviously she needed help. Maybe she had always needed help.

I would go, Keller thought bleakly, but there are things I cannot face. Her fears and his had been connected somehow. The stone had connected them. She could not face the child in the sculpture; he could not face her.

He could not imagine this changing.

But… if someone is hurting, you help.

Wu-nien, he thought desperately. The Ice Palace. He longed for it; lately it had been elusive.

Byron said slowly, as if the words had been drawn from some kiln inside him, “She’s on the pills again. She’s doing enkephalins, Ray. It’s a bad downhill road, and it will end with her dying unless we do something.” He looked at Keller; Keller was startled by the fierce, obvious pain in his expression. “Unless you do something.”

But that was impossible.

She couldn’t die.

She was here. She was all around him. She was video now. She was substantial.

She had only begun to exist.

Byron stood up.

He disliked this place where Keller was. It was a bad place, an Angel place, and it reminded him too much of the socket he used to wear. He had spent the war years in the same kind of wire daze Keller had entered now, the gauzy and pleasant territory of not-caring, which people like Keller rendered as “objectivity.” He understood the attraction, but it was the same attraction Teresa must feel for the pills: a surrender. He hated it especially because he wanted it. After all these years, he still had the taste for it.

But he had proved something today. It was maybe a hollow consolation, but he felt as if he had erased the Angel tattoo on his arm: if he looked for it, it would be gone. He had pleaded with Keller—who had become Teresa’s lover —to go back to her, and surely that was the last labor that was required of him… this pain, surely, was sufficient. He had done that for her, and there was no more he could do. He had earned his way into the world.

But she would die anyway, and that was the terrible thing, the irreducible thing, maybe the thing he wanted so desperately to hide from: you do everything you can, and sometimes the bad thing still happens.

“Listen,” Keller said suddenly, “you don’t have to leave. You—”

But it was pointless. They didn’t connect. Byron felt an abstracted pity for Keller, gaunt in his plush chair, hands poised over the faders. “It’s okay,” he said wearily. “Do what you need to do.”

Out in the world, the sun was terribly bright.

2. Keller was alone then.

Memories cascaded around him in cool crystalline light. Voices whispered.

One time, talking about Byron, Teresa had said, “He is the best of us.” Keller hadn’t understood. Now he felt a flicker of comprehension. But it was the kind of goodness he did not wholly understand, troubling and absolute. The old phrase echoed through him: When someone is hurting, you help. If it had been a video memory, he could have excised it, looped it out of existence; but it persisted, and it frightened him.

After a time he left the editing booth.

His hotel room faced one of the old suburban arteries, traffic noises all night and running water between ten and ten. He poured a drink, took a long shower, regarded himself in the mirror. His reflection—he considered it objectively —looked strung-out and haggard. His cheeks were sunken, his stubble unshaven. Who was this man? He looked like some wirehead. Some faded combat veteran dying in the Floats.

He closed his eyes.

In the night, drinking again, he called up Lee Anne, with whom he had once had a contract for affection: he recalled, with some fondness, the scent of her perfume. She appeared in the monitor as perfect as ever, stark in white makeup and her lips a piquant red. She peered at him coolly from the crystal display. Keller forced a smile. “We had a contract once,” he said. “You remember? We—”

But she shook her head. “I don’t know you,” she said.

The monitor went blank.

In the morning he was back in the booth.

It was almost unbearable. He winced away from the image of Pau Seco, the open oneirolith mine like a wound in the earth. It was all too vivid. He could smell the squalor of the old town, the dust, the stale heat. It was terrifying: it seemed about to rise from the monitors and surround him.

If someone is hurting, you help.

She was hurting, Byron had said. Keller circled the knowledge but dared not approach it. She was hurting. She was wounded. But the resonance was too terrible to acknowledge.

He hurried through the last of the editing. The print he delivered to Vasquez would be coldly objective, panoramic, a glimpse into the mechanics of the dreamstone trade, Pau Seco, SUDAM, the garimpeiros and the formigas, this last and strangest frontier. The rest—the merely personal —would be erased. Erased, it would in some important sense cease to exist. Erased, it would become bearable.

His hand was poised over an Edit command when the door opened.

He swiveled on his chair, thinking it might be Byron again. He saw instead a carefully dressed man with receding hair and a generic smile. Some Network executive maybe. But the man stepped closer, and suddenly Keller could smell his mint-scented breath and feel a hint of his terrible and enormous hostility. The man was smiling even as his hands balled into fists. “My name is Oberg,” he said.

CHAPTER 23

Killing Keller would have been redundant, though in some fashion satisfying, and Oberg was practicing his best professional manners. A death in the Network compound would have alarmed too many people. So he had come prepared.

He struck Keller once; Keller fell to the floor, dazed. Quickly, Oberg bound Keller’s hands with tape and ran a strip of the same metallic tape across his mouth. Keller’s eyes were closed. The Angel blinded, he thought; the Angel silenced. He worked methodically now. He rolled Keller over and put a foot across the small part of his back, to immobilize him. From his hip pocket Oberg withdrew a miniature scalpel and a tiny pronged microchip.

He had purchased these things from a black-market neurotechnician working out of the Floats. The chip was a joywire chip, slightly modified. Attached to the socket behind Keller’s neck, it would pulse a voltage down Keller’s neural wiring, stimulating the reward centers in Keller’s brain. But Oberg had instructed the neurotechnician to substitute a more powerful voltage source.

“It’s insane,” the neurotech had told him. “You’d burn a man out. It would not be pleasure, it would be pain—immeasurable! And disorientation. And the victim —I can only say victim—would bum out in a matter of hours. Days, at most. He would proceed almost instantly to the last stages of wire psychosis. It would be murder.”

So of course Oberg had to pay extra.

He used the scalpel to pare away flesh from Keller’s socket. The socket had been opened recently, so this was relatively simple. He used a handkerchief to sponge away the blood. The socket gleamed beneath the derma, an oily coppery color. Keller had flinched from the pain of the cutting but was not yet fully awake. Oberg installed the joywire chip hastily but did not activate it.

He left Keller bound and turned to the memory editor.

It took him a few minutes to sort out Keller’s ordinances, isolate a moment of time. He hoped that what he wanted had not been erased. But it was the most recent layer of memory, intact, unedited. He accelerated the sampling rate and watched the monitor in front of him.

Time ran like water. Days flickered past. He would still the motion periodically, recognizing the docks at Belem, the air terminal, a flight to some tiny landing strip in Costa Rica; an ancient American jetliner arriving at the L. A. Harbor terminal. Faces and somatypes had been altered throughout, but he was able to identify Byron Ostler and Teresa Rafael by their repeated appearance in the trace. This was critical now: a shack in the Floats somewhere, cheap furniture and grimy windows; the place, Oberg assumed, where they had gone to ground. He followed the recording back to the mainland and then forward again, slowly, establishing the route. Somewhere in the North Floats. No real addresses amidst this twining of boat shanties and canals, but the route was simple enough to memorize. He did so.

He looked back at Keller.

Keller was awake now, watching him with wide, frightened eyes.

Oberg turned to the keyboard and called up a global delete. The machine paused and then inquired whether he was certain he wanted to empty all the contents of this file. He tapped an affirmation and watched as the monitors cycled through a kind of apocalypse: Cuiaba vanished, the Amazon lost in dead pixels, Pau Seco gone, Belem gone, all disappeared into chaos, signals become noise, Keller’s memory trace evaporating into the air as if it had never existed.

Oberg smiled.

Keller was pale, blinking.

Oberg had parked his car directly outside the editing booth, and it was simple to maneuver Keller to his feet and outside without being seen. There was a guard on the road at the entrance gate but he did not glance up as Oberg passed. And they were away free.

He drove a mile down a firebreak: road into the hills. When he could safely do so, Oberg pulled up on the shoulder and opened the door on Keller’s side. They had reached a wasteland of rusting oil derricks; the road beside the car was littered with bottle glass and aluminum cans glistening in the sunlight. Keller was staring at him now, waiting, strangely calm.

Oberg reached behind Keller’s head in a gesture that was almost tender and used the pressure of his thumbnail to activate the joychip.

Keller’s face contorted with sudden pain.

Oberg used his feet to shove Keller out of the car.

Keller fell among the weeds and high grass, hidden, dying.

Oberg closed the door, wiped his bloody thumb against his handkerchief, and began the long drive toward the sea.

CHAPTER 24

Teresa was watching the sun go down when she resorted to the pills again.

She had climbed to the top of this raggedy float shack with the pills in her pocket, not intending to swallow any —the desire was never that explicit—but just holding them in reserve, savoring their reassuring closeness. She wore a sweater. Coming on winter now. The nights were early and cool. She sprawled across the tin roof with her back against a heat exchanger, feeling the thrum of the bilge pumps and watching the western sky fade to red.

She took out a handful of pills and regarded them.

They were small, black, unmarked, faintly resinous. Faintly sordid. They had been cooked, she thought, in some Float laboratory, formed in a primitive pill press, sold furtively to addicts … to her.

But she needed them. It was not a question of self-indulgence. It was as if her traumatic ’lith trance in the Ver-o-Peso had opened old wounds: she needed the anesthesia. She had dreamed about the little girl, increasingly felt her as a tangible presence, scolding and demanding. Now, for instance. Now the little girl wanted her to throw the pills away. Her voice was a real voice, faint but distinct.

I saved your life.

But that was crazy.

In the fire. You would have died. You wanted to die. I saved your life.

Mysteriously, she had become two people.

I saved your life. You took the pills, t made the sculptures. You sold them…

No, Teresa thought.

She took several of the pills into her mouth and swallowed them dry, choking a little. Too many, maybe. But they made the voice fade away.

The euphoria began as a sense of lightness spreading from her stomach. It was inside her, until it reached her head, and then she was inside it; the euphoria contained her perfectly. The sky was dark now, the wind from the tidal dam chilling, but she didn’t care. She wrapped the sweater over her shoulders and leaned back, breathing in a deep, steady rhythm. All over the Floats lanterns were flickering on. A fog rolled down the canals.

She was oblivious when she heard Byron’s voice as he entered the float, arid Cruz Wexler’s following, their conversation—they must not have known she was up here—like a tired duet between broken instruments. It was funny, she thought, how sad they sounded. How hopeless and resigned. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of their voices, the last night cries of nesting gulls. There were high lunar tides out beyond the dams, fresh water from the spillways creating a gentle, pulsing swell. The shack rocked under her. She sighed, alone in this luminous darkness. All voices stilled, she thought. What a blessing silence was.

But then—moved by some muted note of alarm deep within her—she sat up and saw the lone man approaching down a boardwalk from the east.

It was later than she had realized, most of these balsas dark now, only a dim glow from the dance shacks out along the seawall. The man walked methodically and with an air of intense, frightening vigilance. He came alongside the shanty float. He stopped. Teresa, on the flat tin roof, ducked out of his line of vision.

Death at the door, she thought.

It was a strange idea but she considered it calmly. Death had always been at the door. Since the fire, so many years ago. She had been courting him. Seducing him. What was remarkable was that he had taken so long to get here.

She listened to him knock.

CHAPTER 25

Keller lay for a time on the verge of the road by the ancient oilfield.

The sun raked over his closed eyes; he saw starbursts. The gravel under him felt as acute as knives and razors. When an airliner passed overhead, the roar was a demented music.

He wanted to move but could not.

He was lucid for moments at a time, but even his lucidity was painful: an acute, exaggerated sobriety in which the world invaded his senses.

He understood what was happening to him. Oberg had plugged something into his socket, something like a joychip but more intense, something that was sending him rapidly into burn-out. It was clever. A clever kind of murder. If no one found him, he would die; dead, he would look like any other burn-out case. If he were discovered here before he died, he would be mistaken for terminal and remanded to a death ward. No culpability, no obvious crime.

The prospect was so daunting that it overwhelmed him. The voltage pulsing down his wires acted as an amplifier, stimulating the flow of acetylcholenes, flooding him with dopamine. Everything was painful. Breathing was painful. He felt the air searing in and out of him like fire. The slightest motion, a twitch, was agonizing. He opened his eyes once, and the sun was like a lance; he screamed.

He moved in and out of delirium. Delirious, he believed he was back in Brazil, in the war, in the manioc field in Rondonia. The voltage down his wires sluiced out these buried memories. He convulsed, and in one of his convulsions broke the metallic tape Oberg had used to bind his hands. Blood ringed his wrists. It was painful, but no more painful than any other sensation. He rolled away from the margin of the road and felt himself tumbling downward.

When he opened his eyes again, the sky was dark. A ghastly yellow illumination flooded out from the sodium vapor lamps planted along the firebreak. He had rolled down an embankment into a stand of weeds; his wrists were gashed, his face abraded.

The pain was agonizing but briefly—for the moment —bearable. Moaning, he sat up.

He knew this interlude of sanity would not last long. He reached behind his head and touched the raw wound Oberg had left there, felt the spindly angle of the joychip. But not a joychip. It was eroding him, he thought, eating him from the inside. The idea frightened him and threatened to draw him back down into a blind panic. The joychip was slippery with blood and he could not grasp it or withdraw it; it was embedded too deeply in the socket. Just touching it sent spears of pain through him.

He closed his eyes, opened them. Gritty rasp of eyelids over cornea. The hammering of his own heart was deafening. He was in the midst of a wasteland: the insect shapes of oil derricks stilled for decades, their corrosion like scrollwork in the bleak light. He tried to stand up and fell back, shrieking. The earth spun dizzyingly beneath him.

He was not sure how much time he had. There was no knowing how potent Oberg’s burn-out chip might be. It would kill him, he thought, but even before it killed him it would begin to destroy neural tissue. He had seen joy wire addicts rescued too late from their addiction, left in a state of hopeless dementia. It could be beginning already. Might already have begun. He was trembling…

But that was a bad thought and he suppressed it. Oberg had seen the memory trace; Oberg knew the way to Teresa. Cling to that, he thought. Oberg would kill her. It was a fact. Oberg might be there already.

He was the only one who knew. He was the only one who could help.

When someone is hurting, you help.

But he felt himself slipping down into delirium again.

Frantically, he scrabbled in the dirt and weeds around him. He knew what-he wanted. There were shards of glass here, broken bottles, but they were all rounded and sun-faded. They wouldn’t do. Sobbing, he groped through the dark. Surely, he thought, surely somewhere in all this trash—

—and he touched something then, his hand encountered a brittle edge—

—but the pain and the delirium carried him back into darkness. He rolled on the ground, stricken.

It might have lasted forever.

He was back in Rondonia forever, and Megan Lindsey was extending her hand to him forever, calling out to him, fear and pain and a terrible grieving disappointment etched on her features … an eternity, until he understood that it was not Megan’s face but Teresa’s.

But that was impossible. He had edited Megan out of his memory: she could not touch him. And he had edited Teresa. Angel training. Wu-nien. They were looped out, excised, extinct.

But then, he thought giddily, it would happen again. That was the curse. As Megan had died, Teresa would die.

Teresa was not Megan but she was like Megan; he was in love with her, and he was letting her die. Dying here, he was allowing Oberg to kill her. And that was a fact, and he could not erase or edit it; it was written on some larger, indelible scroll.

She could be dying now.

The thought shocked him back to awareness.

He couldn’t tell how much time had passed. There were a few dim stars; there was a trail of light, miles across this wasteland, a traffic artery. His limbs jerked spasmodically and he knew that he might not have another lucid moment: Oberg’s joychip might already have damaged him beyond repair. But it didn’t matter. Teresa mattered.

He understood that, suddenly and with a bright, calm clarity. Strange, he thought: burned into innocence. It had all fallen away, his Angel training, wu-nien, all the architecture of his life, all seared away, and yet this luminous thing was left: his love for her. Burning, tie understood and admitted it.

He groped in the weeds for the blade he had located moments or hours before. He found it when it sliced into the flesh of his thumb: an agonizing, amplified pain. Moaning, he picked it up and regarded it. It was an aluminum lid peeled off somebody’s lunch months or years ago, foggy with oxides but not hopelessly rusted. It flashed in the bitter sodium-vapor light. He was not certain he could do what he needed to do with it. The pain…

But there was no avoiding it.

He lifted the wedge of aluminum behind him and sliced it down spastically against the socket at the base of his neck.

The pain rang through him like a bell. His hand shook, which complicated things. After the second attempt he came close to passing out. His head was like a dry gourd, drained of everything but pain. He thought of flesh severed and bleeding, neural wires severed where they joined the spine, pain distilled and purified down screaming basal ganglia. It was impossible, he thought; even for her, even for Teresa, whom he loved; even for her, it was impossible … but the third gouging attempt succeeded and he felt the socket fall away like an abscessed tooth.

He felt a shuddering sense of relief. Relief and a huge, encompassing weariness. He wanted to sleep. He was exhausted. Had to sleep.

But he couldn’t sleep. Not yet.

Sighing, unsteady, trembling and bloody, he moved up the embankment toward the road.

CHAPTER 26

Dazed, obeying some impulse, Teresa moved down from the roof of the float shack into the back room, through the door into the kitchen.

The man in the kitchen had a gun.

Byron and Wexler sat at the table, motionless. Wexler was staring at the gunman, his eyes wide, skin pale, lungs laboring at the still air. Byron turned slowly to look at her. He was warning her with his eyes—don’t do anything, don’t move—but there was a limpness, a hopelessness in the motion which made her feel afraid.

The enkephalins were powerful, but she had taken them hours ago; her heart was beating hard now, her fingertips tingled. Stress hormones rivered down her bloodstream.

She had become, she thought distantly, a kind of chemical battlefield.

She looked at the man with the gun. He stood in the doorway with the door ajar behind him. He was a man of maybe Byron’s age, receding hairline and a pursed, narrow mouth. His eyes were fixed, unblinking, remote. He was calm in a situation that should have made any normal person anxious, and that was worrisome: there was no judging what this man might do.

Death, she thought. Death in these drab clothes on her doorstep.

The man looked at her and said, “I want the oneirolith.”

She answered without thinking. “I don’t have it. It’s gone.” A lie.

Strange, that she should lie.

The man—who could only be the rogue Agency man, Oberg, the one Wexler had talked about—moved the gun fractionally so that it was pointed now at Byron. “Bring the stone or I’ll kill both these men.”

“It’s in the back room.” No hesitation this time, because she understood he was telling the truth.

“Get it,” he said. “Leave the door open.”

She stumbled once against the doorframe, then moved in dreamy, slow steps to the old Salvation Army dresser.

Watching from his chair at the table, Cruz Wexler gasped for breath.

He could only stare at Oberg. Oberg with the gun, Oberg who had found them somehow. The gun was aimed only a degree away from him, and it was too easy to imagine a bullet erupting from the muzzle, tearing into him, the damage it would do.

But he was dying in any case. His emphysema was advanced and he impoverished; his money was tied up in Agency liens and he could not afford new lungs or long-term treatment. Why should it matter how he died, if the dying was inevitable?

But of course it did matter. It mattered very much.

He had spent the last decades of his life pursuing mysteries. Wisdom, gnosis, the Philosopher’s Stone. It had been a game and a profitable business, but he had been sincere too. The oneiroliths had always inspired this feeling in him, of trembling on the brink of a revelation.

But death—this final mystery and most absolute gnosis—it frightened him terribly.

He watched Oberg watching Teresa. “Now bring it here,” Oberg said. The stone, he meant. That mystery abandoned too: Oberg feared it and would destroy it.

But there was a motion in the darkness, in the doorway beyond Oberg, a flicker of movement… seeing it, Wexler felt his heart hammer suddenly against his ribs.

Pick it up.

Teresa stared down at the Pau Seco artifact in its oilcloth binding, shadowed in the depths of the wooden drawer. Pick it up. Touch it.

It was the old and new voice inside her, the voice the enkephalins should have quieted. The voice of the little girl who had died in the fire fourteen years ago, unaccountably alive inside her. Almost dead now for real, Teresa thought, but drawn out once more by this crisis: Pick it up, hold it, touch it.

The dreamstone. This well of memories.

She glanced back at the gunman, Oberg. He made an impatient hurry-up gesture.

She reached into the drawer. For one timeless moment she envisioned a scenario in which she would give the stone to Oberg, Oberg would take it, would leave them alive, and she would be better without it, after all, free from the yoke of remembering, free to inhabit the opaque but comfortable womb of her enkephalin addiction: she dreamed it would happen, that Oberg would allow them to live.

Knowing at the same time it was impossible. Oberg was Death; he looked like Death and he smelled like Death. He would kill the three of them. It was inevitable.

Pick it up. The voice was more insistent now, a clamoring.

Well, Teresa thought. It was the girl who wanted to live. Who cared. Not me. Never me.

Picking it up, she held it at first by its binding; but the ancient oilcloth unraveled and the naked stone fell back into the drawer. She reached for it instinctively.

The power of it throbbed in her arm as she turned.

CHAPTER 27

Keller had tied a handkerchief around his throat to conceal the bleeding, but by the time he reached the Floats the handkerchief itself was sodden with blood.

He was conscious of the time that had passed. He had walked for what seemed like miles along the verge of the road, across the oil barrens to a tiny Hispanic neighborhood, an all-night bodega from which he could phone for a taxi. He was filthy, his clothes were torn, he was bleeding: he had to offer up credit and ID before the cabbie agreed to open his door. Climbing out, he left bloodstains on the seat.

In the Floats he had lost himself twice—wandering too far down a darkened canal, past the yellow lights of empty cafes and market boats creaking in the midnight swell— crazed with fatigue and with this unrelenting sense of urgency. A cold salt wind sluiced through his clothes. Lost, he had to retrace his steps until he recognized a pontoon walkway or canal intersection and could correct himself, march on, while the stars wheeled overhead like the advancing hands of a clock. Time, he thought. But maybe time enough still to save her.

Then, at last, he identified the feeder canal that ran past the float shack Byron had rented. It was an old, narrow commercial right-of-way; fenced water, shanties pressing up against it, defined with chain-link and barbed wire fences and salt-emblazoned concrete risers. A boardwalk followed the canal along the mainland side, giving access to a row of shanties of which Byron’s was one: one of the few still showing lights at this hour. Everything dark, everything quiet. Rooftop windmills moaned in the fitful breeze from the tidal dam.

Fatigued beyond words, but careful now, Keller moved silently down the boardwalk.

The door was ajar.

He worked to steady his breathing. He was no longer in the state of heightened sensitivity Oberg’s counterfeit joychip had created, but he was in great pain. The wound he had hacked into his neck and shoulders was deep and had bled profusely. It was possible he could pass out at any moment… but only a little longer now, he told himself. Only a little longer.

Oberg was inside the door.

He shuddered, recognizing the angle of Oberg’s body, seeing the gun in Oberg’s hand. Here—from this edge of the boardwalk, a low wire fence behind him and the bulk of a concrete pillar—he was able to see Oberg and, beyond Oberg, the small table at which Byron and Cruz Wexler sat motionless. He couldn’t see Teresa. But, he thought dizzily, that doesn’t mean she’s dead. She might still be alive.

It was necessary to believe that.

He realized with a dawning incredulity that he had no weapon, no means of threatening Oberg. Not even a pocket knife. He was helpless here. He had come all this way, but too late. It was almost funny. He was tempted to laugh.

Instead he calculated the angle of that half-open door, the chance that he might manage to throw himself into it, topple Oberg, make it possible for Byron or Wexler to do something. Small, pathetic hope. But, hoping, he drew a deep breath and stepped forward.

But a dew had condensed on the mossy, ancient wood of the boardwalk, and he was massively fatigued; his foot slipped forward, his knee buckled.

He caught himself crouching, eyes on the doorway, but the slap of his palms on the wet wood was explosive in the night, and he watched helplessly as Oberg turned, the gun pivoting in his hand.

Wexler stood up as Oberg wheeled around.

He surprised himself. He had not contemplated this. There was no heroism in him, only this crippling fear. And yet here he was in motion. His body rebelling against his helplessness.

Standing, he did not hesitate. He upturned the flimsy wooden table and was aware of it tumbling forward. Byron looked at him, agape. A pain stabbed through his chest; his body screamed out for air. But he was able, for the moment, to ignore it.

He moved toward Oberg.

Oberg recoiled from the door. His impassiveness had failed him; he seemed startled and, briefly, frightened. The angle of the gun dropped. He blinked as the table thundered against the floor.

Wexler was moving now with some speed. His momentum carried him toward Oberg. He had forgotten everything but this mad rush forward, arms open in embrace. He was dimly aware of Byron coming to his feet, of Teresa’s movement in the back room, but these were distractions: his attention was devoted entirely to Oberg.

Oberg backed against the wall. Something changed in his face then: a settling, a hardening. He brought up the pistol in a swift motion.

Too late, Wexler thought. One of us is too late.

The gunshot was explosive in this tiny space.

The pain and the impact pushed him backward.

Keller burst through the door—if someone is hurting, you help—but was brought up short by the sight of Wexler bloody on the floor. He looked at Oberg, and Oberg was smiling absentmindedly; the gun was aimed at Keller.

“Christ,” Byron said. “Oh, Christ.”

Keller slumped against the wall. The world had come down to this man, this gun, and there was no way around it now, no exit from it. He closed his eyes briefly.

When he opened them again he saw Teresa: she was moving toward Oberg, and the stone was in her hand.

CHAPTER 28

Lost between worlds, between the drone of the enkephalins and the electricity of the dreamstone, Teresa opened her eyes.

She saw Byron’s float shack. She recalled a similar shack, a long time ago. The man in the next room was named Oberg. The man in the next room might have been named Carlos.

She held the stone in her hand.

And if I look in the mirror, she thought giddily, I’ll see the shoes bound with dirty twine, the old denim open at the knees. It was the thing she had resisted, the thing she had feared, the vision that had haunted her since that day in the hotel room off the Ver-o-Peso.

She would fall into the mirror, tumble into history, turn back into herself.

The voice of the girl was inside her now, louder and more insistent than it had ever been. The voice was warning her that she would die, that the man with the gun would kill her, that she had to do something, do something now.

It was the voice that had sustained her through the fire, buoyed her up when she wanted to die, when she knew she deserved to die.

But death was not so tractable. Death had finally come to finish what he had begun. It was only an appointment she had missed a long time ago. She had been expecting it and maybe even—it was possible to admit this now—maybe even wanting it, wanting it for years. Searching for it in pill bottles, the peace of it, an end at last to this quarreling with herself…

No, the voice said.

And for a moment the memory overtook her. She felt the smoke stealing her breath, the heat of the fire behind her. Carlos was dead and Mama was dead and she should have died too: because she was not a good girl and never would be. It was the bedrock on which she had built herself, this guilt.

Be me, the voice insisted. Take me back. No, Teresa thought…

But then there was the splintering of wood in the kitchen, the table split and broken, Cruz Wexler throwing himself forward… and then the gunshot, Wexler bleeding on the floor… and the door opened, and it was Ray, he had come back, some miracle had brought him back, and her heart hammered, seeing him… but he was bloody and exhausted and Oberg had turned the gun on him now…

And so she relented: all right, yes, she thought, and in a motion that was not physical she embraced the little girl, gave herself wholeheartedly to the stone, felt time run back until she was young and whole and wanting desperately to live, for Ray to live, running toward Oberg (or Carlos) now, twine-bound sneakers on her feet and denim out at the knee, allowed at last to hate him, hating him with everything that was in her, screaming out to him this ancient, buried truth, that she was not bad, she was not bad, she was not.

CHAPTER 29

1. Seeing Teresa running from the back room—knowing that Oberg would kill her if he managed to swivel the gun—Keller summoned the last of his strength and leaped sideways.

He heard the crack of gunfire following him. He fell against the wall in an awkward crouch, unhurt but briefly helpless. Surely the next bullet would come soon. He lifted his face toward Oberg, exhausted beyond fear.

He saw Teresa stumble into the Agency man.

She moved oddly. Her eyes were wide; her face seemed curiously transformed. Like a child’s face, Keller thought.

The Pau Seco stone was in her left hand. With her right she touched Oberg.

She fell against him.

Oberg’s eyes were fixed on Keller, and in that moment Keller felt some of the horror that erupted from him. It was wounding, awesome…

“The gun,” Byron said, stumbling out of his chair. “Christ’s sake, Ray, get the gun!”

2. Oberg was taken by surprise.

He was leveling his weapon at Keller—who had hacked away his neural socket somehow, somehow tracked him here—when the woman rushed him from the back room.

He had sensed her approach and his arm was cocked to shove her away. It should not have been a problem. But the stone—

She touched him with the stone.

He felt it like a current through him.

It was like the time Tavitch had touched him. No, it was worse. He felt himself tumbling into memory, seconds stretching into minutes, everything slowed but his erupting guilt, a village in Brazil, bodies all around him but not dead: their pain and rage had survived them somehow, leaped at him now from this woman’s hand.

Blinking, he saw Keller stand up. Keller, a bloody apparition who should have died… and maybe had died: who might be another ghost, another stubborn corpse come to make its accusation.

Gap-jawed, Oberg stood helpless in a river of ancient hate.

He felt the gun slipping from his hand.

Teresa’s body pressed him against the wall of the shack. Her face hovered before him, transfigured with a kind of innocence he could hardly credit. In the world he inhabited, nothing like this existed. And it was another rebuke, luminous and terrible; he contorted away from her in a spasm of self-loathing.

Without warning, he understood the thing he was.

Monster, Ng had said.

The voice echoed down a twisted geometry from the gallows at Pau Seco. Monster. But it was true. He felt it in Teresa. She was unimpeachable, childlike, beyond lies. He withered in the fierce light of her hatred.

Screaming, he pushed her away.

The gun … but Keller had twisted the gun from his hand before he could raise it.

Oberg bolted through the open door.

3. Keller raised the gun to follow, but there wasn’t time to fire.

Panicked in the darkness, Oberg took two long strides toward the low chain-link fence and tumbled over it.

Keller ran out after him, blinking in the darkness. Dogs were barking; a few lamps had flickered on in the neighboring balsas.

He peered over the fence, down into the canal. Not yet dawn, but there was light enough to see Oberg’s body spread-eagled at the base of a concrete riser … to see the dark canal water rise up and claim him, to see the stain of Oberg’s blood washed into the slow swell, the rising and falling of the saltwater on this cold night.

A wind came off the tidal dam from the ocean. He turned to look for Teresa, and suddenly she was in his arms, the warmth of her against him, weeping.

CHAPTER 30

Later, after Wexler’s quiet funeral in the Floats, Byron figured it was time to leave.

He had talked it over with Teresa days earlier. They said private good-byes, he held her briefly. She said, “You don’t have to go.” But he did. Time to get back into the world.

She gave him the stone.

“I don’t need it,” she said, and the new look was on her face: a smile that was almost childlike. “I’ve been there.”

He walked with Keller a distance along the canal. It was a bright, clear day; the sky arched down to meet the hard angle of the sea. Byron shifted his duffel up his shoulder. Keller offered his hand.

Byron took it, though he saw Keller wince with the motion. “You all right?”

“Getting better.” Keller essayed a smile. “You have the stone?”

He nodded. It was in his bag.

He was not certain why he’d taken it. Only this feeling—an instinct—that it might be useful.

Strange, he thought. Wexler had spent his life searching among these stones for something alien, some higher wisdom, a way out of the world. But finally it wasn’t that. Byron had watched the change in Teresa since that night with Oberg in the float shack, some old brokenness healed. It was subtle, a lightness, the way she moved her eyes, but it was profound too; he had discovered he wasn’t afraid for her anymore. So it was not a way out of the world but a way into it.

All debts paid. “She’s doing all right.” He added, impulsively—a little wistfully—“Watch out for her, Ray, all right? Do that for me.”

Keller nodded.

He faced the mainland resolutely, but turned back a step later to take in Keller—Keller with his eyes full of old pain, Keller braced against a chain-link fence with one knee bent and the Floats rolling away behind him. He said, “You live here now.”

And maybe it was true.

Keller walked back along the margin of the canal. He felt again this curious lightness. His Angel wires, he thought, severed from their socket, withering and dying inside him. But more than that.

You live here now.

He climbed a chain-link riser and saw the ocean out beyond the tidal dam. The ocean was implacable, dark, vaster than he could compass; and memory was like that, he thought, not video memory but his own memory, of Meg, of Teresa, of Byron, of his life: wide and deep and mysterious beyond saying. It contained him more than he contained it, and it would not brook betrayal; but there were days, he thought, like this one, when the ocean stood calm and seemed to augur in its tides some bright millennium.

He went down the boardwalk to the ancient float shanty, Teresa in the doorway waiting for him, calm in the sunlight. A breeze from the seawall made him shiver; she held the door wider. “Better come in,” she said. “It’s cold out there.”