Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She appeared on the telephone monitor as immaculately groomed as ever. How she managed this daily perfection in response to an impromptu phone call was a mystery to him: some kind of digital enhancement, maybe. She was beautiful in a manner that was rigorously contemporary, her cheekbones suppressed, her face heart-shaped, her eyes blue inside bright orange rays of mascara. She smiled… pleased to see him, or professionally seeming to be.

  “I’m going away,” Keller said, already uncomfortable with the Grossman persona, wearing it this last time.

  “For how long?”

  “Long time,” Keller said. “I have to cancel the contract.”

  She was silent a beat. “You should have told me.”

  “I’m sorry. There wasn’t time.”

  “Well.” She shrugged and smiled. “I wish we could have gone on. It was a good time. The best.”

  It was a lie, but so professional that Keller felt a sudden pang of regret. There had been nothing between them but commerce and gestures, but for one terrible moment Keller felt the overwhelming urge to confess, to pull out of his commitment to Vasquez, to tell her how unbearably lonely he had been these past ten years. Worse: he wanted to put his fist through the video screen, touch her somehow through this insect tangle of optics and wire.

  The image left him shaking. He forced a smile, registered his regrets, and signed off with his fists clenched at his side.

  Wu-nien, Keller thought as he burned the last of the cards.

  His Angel basic had comprised a kind of roughshod Zen instruction. Selflessness, fearlessness, focus. His master sergeant had been a Roshi of the Rinzai School. There was talk of the Three Pillars: great faith, great doubt, great perseverance. They were setting aside the mind. Everyone was very solemn. They believed—Keller believed—that it just might be true, that satori might lurk, mysterious enlightenment, among the oxbow lakes and green heron islands of the Amazon.

  Wu-nien. He was an Angel. He was Keller once more. It was the ultimate objectivity they had all striven for: wu-nien, wu-hsin, no-mind, no-thought; only seeing, vision apart from judgment, vision without desire. The perfect mirror.

  It was like a place, Keller thought; a place without love or loneliness or fear. A calm and brightly illuminated place in which the only memory was AV memory, clean and mutable.

  He called it the Ice Palace.

  He had come to that place again.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. From the balcony of her floating balsa, moored deep in the tangle of tidal industries and boat barrios that had grown up where the coast jogs eastward from Santa Barbara, Teresa Rafael watched an old woman approaching across a pontoon foot bridge from the east. She set aside her pencil and thought, A customer.

  She switched off the pencil and listened as its insect hum faded to stillness. She was an artist. A decade ago she had begun selling junk sculptures to the seaside galleries up Highway One—pinwheels oxyacetylene-welded to antique crankshafts, pachinko boards of rivets and sheet aluminum. Later, after Byron Ostler introduced her to the dreamstones, she took up softer media. Currently she was working on a crystal painting, a translucent plate less than an inch thick, shaping and shading its laminar depths with a homemade interference pencil. The piece, a landscape, was nearly complete. Green paddies stretched to a hazy horizon. The sky was a chalky shade of blue, and from it a flock of frail gossamer-winged people—a slightly darker blue than the sky—sailed down to a wooden pagoda by an irrigation canal.

  It was something she had seen in a stone trance.

  She looked up from her work as the door bell—an old cowbell on a twine pulley—sounded. Sighing again, she padded down and opened the door.

  The old woman’s face was familiar. “Mrs. Gupta,” Teresa said. She encountered Mrs. Gupta periodically at the fruit and vegetable stalls out along the market canal. The suggestion of familiarity destroyed any hope she’d had of turning the woman away; she said resignedly, “Come in.”

  Mrs. Gupta shuffled inside, frail in a faded yellow sari. “I don’t mean to disturb you.” Her voice was faint, her accent bleached by years in the Floats. “It’s just I heard… somebody said you do memories.”

  “I do, yes. Sometimes.”

  “Would you try? For me?” She peered up at Teresa through magnifying lenses set in wire. “I have money.”

  “It’s all right… you don’t have to pay.”

  “That’s nice,” Mrs. Gupta said placidly.

  They went up to the workshop. Mrs. Gupta gazed enviously at the broad wooden floor, at the tall leaded windows Byron had liberated from a grain terminal out in the old city harbor. A balcony surrounded the second floor, and Teresa had hung spider ferns along the western wing of it; the ferns cooled and filtered the afternoon light. For the Floats her studio represented a luxury of space and air. She had subsidized it with cash from private sales; her artwork had been fashionable these last few seasons.

  She could guess a great deal about Mrs. Gupta just by looking at her. A refugee, probably; probably one of the wave of displacees airlifted in from the Madras reactor accident decades ago. Since the unemployment riots of the twenties, the Floats had been in effect a borderless state, haven for refugees of all kinds, a collecting basin for the marginal people who could not survive in the crowded boom cities of the coast. People like Mrs. Gupta, Teresa thought. People like me.

  The old woman said, “May I see the stone?”

  Teresa brought it out from the drawer of an ancient wicker desk. It was not an original stone but a copy, grown in Byron’s overheated laboratory. Technically, her possession of it was a violation of federal and state law. But in the Floats such laws were seldom observed and almost never enforced.

  Mrs. Gupta held it a moment in one arthritic brown hand. The stone had been polished but not faceted; it was an irregular octahedron the size of a grape. The peculiar latticing of its molecules drew the eye inward; the old woman stared. “People say they come from far away.”

  “ Brazil,” Teresa said.

  “The sky,” Mrs. Gupta said.

  “Well, yes. It’s true. The sky.”

  The old woman nodded and handed it back. “What should I do?”

  “Nothing yet.” Teresa pulled up a chair opposite her. “You want to remember?”

  The old woman nodded. Her turtle eyes regarded Teresa gravely. “It’s been a long time. I was married. Before Madras. His name was Jawarhalal. He died in the Event. I do remember—I spend a lot of time remembering. But time passes.” She shrugged. “It gets dim.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” Teresa said. “But I can’t promise. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Teresa closed the stone in her fist.

  She did not do this often. It was too much like a parlor trick, too much like something a charlatan might do for money. Word had spread through the Floats that she had the skill, and so once or twice a week, people like Mrs. Gupta would show up at her door. Old people. Help me remember. And so she would rescue some fraction of their lives from the rolling surf of oblivion. Their pleas were heartfelt and often heartbreaking, and Teresa could not bring herself to resist them.

  Though of course there was a terrible irony in it. She closed the gem in her left hand and with her right clasped Mrs. Gupta’s dry, ancient fingers. She closed her eyes.

  The images erupted at once. They were distinct and colorful, and if it were not for the necessity of describing them to Mrs. Gupta, she might have allowed them to become more real: sights and sounds and odors. “A stony beach.” She envisioned it from a position up the littoral. “There are people in the waves. Children. The stones go up into a sort of wall. Old stone buildings behind it—a temple of some kind.”

  She heard the rasp of the old woman’s indrawn breath. “The beach at Mahabalipuram.” Faintly: “We went there, yes…”

  She did not see Mrs. Gupta but felt her presence, a hovering sense of self.
“You’re there,” she said. “You’re wearing a blue sari. It feels like real silk. Very fine. Your hair is tied back. Wire glasses. And the mark on the forehead, the, uh—”

  “Tika.” It was a whisper.

  “The wind is off the ocean,” Teresa said. “The sky is clean and clear. It’s not hot. The children are laughing. You have a shawl…”

  She could not say where they came from or how she derived them, but she paged through the memories for almost an hour, the beach at Mahabalipuram, the family char-poy, a holiday in New Delhi. It faded at last into a single stark vision of the fractured, blackened dome of the Madras reactor, a soldier wielding the butt of his rifle; she kept the image to herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s all.”

  Mrs. Gupta nodded and stood up. She was not visibly moved, but Teresa sensed the old woman’s gratitude.

  At the door Mrs. Gupta turned and said, “Is it true what they say about you?”

  She stood warily in the foyer. “What do they say about me?”

  “That you came out of the fire a dozen years ago. That you don’t remember your childhood.” She nodded slowly. “Yes. It’s true.”

  “You can’t do what you did for me—use the stone to remember?”

  “No,” Teresa said.

  Mrs. Gupta bobbed her head, accepting this strange intelligence. “May I come back? There are other things,” she said, “other times—”

  “Come back if you like,” Teresa said. “But I should warn you. I’ll be away for a while.”

  She closed the door.

  That night she was full of anxiety.

  By choice she lived alone. By choice she lived in the Floats. Since her gallery successes, she could have bought ID and moved to the coast, lived fashionably there for a while. But the pontoon city soothed her. It was a barrio bajo—a slum, but it was also el otro barrio—a separate world. In spite of or maybe because of this poverty, the Floats preserved a certain low-rent gentility she inevitably missed when she visited the mainland. The mainland world -changed rapidly and often, and the most successful of its denizens were too often the most voracious—the predators. Here, the presumption of failure served as a great equalizer.

  Too, she liked the nearness of the ocean. All this water had been locked in by the huge federal tidal dams, sheltered from the excesses of the sea but exposed to its gentler moods. On rainy days she would walk out along the concrete margins of the seawall and watch the clouds angle in from the western horizon. The ocean talked to her; sometimes— not tonight—it soothed her to sleep.

  So why are you leaving?

  She lay in bed and groped for an answer.

  The journey she was contemplating might be dangerous. She knew that. It would be a vacation, Wexler had told her, much deserved, and only incidentally a courier run. But Byron was more skeptical. They would be entering a realm, he said, in which nations and criminals had long since grown indistinguishable. “Hard money,” Byron had said, “and hard people.” For years the Exotic stones had been the pivot of progress, the world’s single most valuable resource. They had capsized the sovereignty of nations and the supremacy of corporate empires; a protracted war had been waged over them. In this environment, smuggling— even the sort Cruz Wexler had planned—was more than a risky business.

  But I have to go, she thought. She felt the pressure. She could not continue doing for people like Mrs. Gupta what she could not do for herself. She had unearthed, these last three years, a nugget of herself, and that was good; but it was insufficient and incomplete.

  She was insane to go. In the Floats, because of her artwork and her affinity for the dreamstones, people sometimes called her crazy. “Crazy Teresa,” they said.

  They thought it was a joke. But tonight, lying sleepless in her bed, faint moonlight etching out the silhouettes of the spider plants across the floorboards, she wondered if it was.

  When she did sleep, she dreamed of the child again.

  The child was no older than ten. She was undernourished and ragged, she wore old denims gone at the knees, cheap athletic shoes tied with twine, a bowl haircut. She stood in limbo, somehow spotlit. Her arms and legs were thin. But it was her eyes Teresa would remember.

  They were very wide, very old, terribly knowing.

  Teresa, in her dream, was trapped by the pressure of those eyes. She wanted to turn away; she could not.

  “Find me,” the girl said. “Help me. Find me.”

  She woke up sweating. The darkness was expansive. She pulled her angular knees up to her breasts and hugged herself. It was at times like this that she felt most profoundly alone.

  “All right,” she said into the darkness.

  The balsa rocked silently in the swell. The wind from the sea lifted gauze curtains like wings.

  “All right.” It was a whisper. “I’ll do what you want. Just leave me alone.”

  2. In the morning Byron came in a motor launch down a crowded market canal with the stranger, the man from the mainland. The stranger’s name was Raymond Keller.

  Teresa had agreed to accept a third person on their journey. She had, however, retained veto power over Byron’s choice. It seemed now like a wise decision. Looking at Raymond Keller, she was not certain she wanted to spend much time with him.

  She led both men up to the narrow balcony that surrounded her studio, to the wicker chairs there. Byron made introductions; she brought out iced bottles of Mexican beer; the three of them sat. Strange mixture, she thought. Byron, of course, looked displaced in almost any rational setting. He cultivated the look: outlaw ’lith chemist, wild veteran of the Brazilian War, scarred and tattooed and inscrutable behind his moon-shaped lenses.

  This new man (Byron had said) was also a veteran. He wore an old flak jacket, carried a battered duffel—he looked the role. Perhaps too much so. She distrusted the opacity of his pale blue eyes, the way he scrutinized her when he thought she wasn’t looking. She had seen too many of these people in the galleries, urban operators with an eye to the main chance. They came out of the dry conduit suburbs of the Valley as if from an assembly line, slick and soulless.

  They talked in general terms about the war. Byron had been Keller’s platoon Angel, he said, and then Keller had become an Angel himself. Unlike Byron, Keller had kept his wires. Keller worked for the Network and would be recording the journey in its entirety.

  Byron had explained some of this before. “You understand,” he’d said, “Ray does his own editing. Mostly he wants the footage of Pau Seco. If we appear at all in the material he hands over to the Network, names and faces are systematically altered. There’s no threat to us.”

  “I don’t understand,” she had said, “why we need him.”

  “Because he’s been there,” Byron said. “Because he knows the territory. Because—up to a point—I trust him.”

  “You think Wexler is lying?”

  “I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied. And now this man, this Angel, wired, was sitting and regarding her with his distant blue eyes. It was strange to think about.

  She excused herself and brought out a sketchpad and a carbon pencil from her studio. She gave them to Keller. “Ray,” she said, “would you do me a favor?”

  He hesitated, nodded.

  “Draw me a picture,” she said. “While we talk. Will you do that?”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  He frowned at the blank page of the sketchpad. “Picture of what?”

  “Yourself.”

  He gave her a long look but nodded yes. She said, “I guess Byron’s told you what we have planned.”

  “The basics. We all go down into the interior. We bring back a new stone.”

  She nodded. “It’s more complicated, of course. Cruz Wexler i financing the trip. You know Wexler?”

  “He runs some kind of institute up in Carmel.”

  Byr
on said, “He’s been putting money into the ’lith underground for a long time. The news now is that there’s a new kind of ’lith coming out of the Pau Seco mine. The theory is that the Pau Seco astrobleme was a single chunk of data-intensive memory, and that the core samples coming up now have been better preserved, less degraded over the centuries… Wexler’s been trying to buy one through the standard black market—out the back door of the government labs—but the lid is on very tight. So he arranged the Pau Seco purchase direct from source. We are his couriers.”

  “Paid,” Keller said.

  “In my case,” Byron said. “I stand to make money. Professionally speaking.”

  Teresa said, “I volunteered.”

  He turned his eyes on her. “It matters that much to you?”

  She watched Keller’s pencil move absently over the sketch paper. She nodded. “Yes. It does.”

  “Byron says you’re a dreamstone addict.”

  “Addict is maybe the wrong word. For most people, you know, it’s not a very satisfying drug.”

  “It makes visions,” Keller said. “It does more than that. You ever try it, Ray?” He shook his head no.

  She said, “It’s powerful. Direct interaction with the mind. It’s not a chemical, there’s no chemical effect. The lab people can’t explain it. But you touch a stone… worlds open for you. Can you understand that?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  At least it was an honest answer. She had met plenty of ’lith chemists in the Floats and plenty of dealers, and their attitude toward the Exotic stones was too often purely exploitative. For them it was a drug, an item of contraband, a more esoteric variation on the Schedule One neuropeptides that had proven so popular in the coastal cities. That was the odd thing about the stones, she thought: something different for everyone. For the laboratory technicians they were data-intensive Rosetta Stones from the ancient stars, decodable and immensely profitable; for the chemists and their urban customers they were a new drug, a visionary diversion…

  And for me?