Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Well. A road, she thought. A destination.

  She wondered if Raymond Keller was capable of understanding that.

  She said, “I can’t see making this trip with somebody I don’t trust. Byron says you’re a good guy, Ray. But I can’t know that. Right? I can only guess. Intuition is all I have right now, you understand?”

  He nodded.

  She said, “So show me your picture.”

  He looked down at it as if it had slipped his mind. Picture? But his hands had been busily at work. That was what she wanted.

  She took the sketchpad and held it in her lap. Surprisingly, the drawing displayed a certain amount of talent. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait, ragged but complete. It was also, she thought, immensely revealing. Keller had done the outline in hard angular strokes; the eyebrows were single slashes, the mouth an emotionless compaction of pencil carbon. Soulless, she thought. But the eyes redeemed him. Around the eyes Keller’s pencil lines had softened; the pupils were deep and dimensional, the expression pained.

  She thought, He is not what he believes himself to be. Hard, oh yes. But she looked at the eyes and thought, Redeemable.

  It was enough.

  “We leave in a couple of days,” she said.

  CHAPTER 3

  The oneiroliths, the Exotic stones, had shaped Keller’s past and created his history. What he had told Teresa was more or less true—he had never held one in his hand for more than a moment. But he dreamed of them persistently.

  His dreams were jungle panoramas, condensed video scenarios in which he, Keller, was simultaneously narrator and protagonist. In some he was that anonymous forao who had stumbled out of the Brazilian hinterland clutching a strange gemstone, afraid of the visions it produced but anxious to sell it, frustrated when he could not, fearful when the stone was at last impounded by the Valverde government. In the dream he was tortured by FUNAI officials (though there was no real evidence of this) who demanded to know the precise location of the discovery. A nation, they explained, cannot be sustained indefinitely by gold and bauxite. Tell us, they said calmly, and plied him with electrodes.

  Dissolve to aerial shot. The Amazon: jungle, farms, ranches, dams, wilderness mostly—the languid snake of the eponymous river brown and sunlit in it. He dreamed history in sepia tones: four times the Amazon Basin had repulsed the invasion of civilized men. It cast out, chastened and scythed by dysentery, the Portuguese bandeirantes who came in search of El Dorado. It allowed the Jesuits only a little more grace before it reclaimed their missions, lost to crumbling government support and the unassailable hugeness of the wilderness. Briefly, there had been the rubber boom, the jungle had been invaded for its latex groves— but the Malaysians grew better trees on more accessible plantations. And in the closing years of the twentieth century there had been a more prolonged effort to settle the interior: highways had been built, villages founded, oil wells and mines created; all fueled, however, by an international debt so enormous it could not be sustained. And so these small oases had come crashing down. Villages had gone to ghost towns, vines had crept across the roads.

  Now a fifth invasion.

  Montage shot. The tin-and-paper slums around Rio and Sao Paulo, reservoirs struck by lightning, pour out human rivers to the west. Machines penetrate the jungle or streak through the air above it.

  The dreamstones, dubbed “oneiroliths” by a bemused Federal University geologist, were more valuable than even a greedy forao could have imagined. There was talk— hushed, then skeptical, finally awed—of their extraterrestrial origin. Carbon tests were of course meaningless; but the small stones must have lain a considerable time in the shallow soil of the Basin, relics of some astronomical impact vastly older than the bandeirantes. Moreover, the oneiroliths were not merely passive. They were encoded, deeply layered with information, every molecule a dictionary of atoms, a syntax of electrons. Their language was binary and universal. They contained a new physics, a new cybernetics; they hinted at wholly new technologies.

  The implication was obvious. Control of the oneiroliths was control of the planet’s economic and political future. In a century that had begun without fanfare twenty years earlier, the discovery was interpreted as a token, at last, of real change: the New Reconstruction, the industrial reshaping of a global economy. For the first time since the ecological debates, the great powers focused their attention on the Brazilian hinterland. A new kind of forao began to invade the wilderness. The impact site—a deposit of fragmentary stones miles broad and indefinitely deep—was staked and claimed according to ancient Brazilian mineral-rights laws.

  There were of course obstacles to this millennium. The Valverde regime was in political trouble. Insurgents had captured a provincial capital; there was the possibility that vital roads might be endangered.

  Intervention was called for. A methodical war was undertaken.

  Here, Keller’s nightmares became more personal.

  His second night in the Floats a storm came up, sheets of tepid rain off the ocean, and Keller sat drinking with Byron Ostler under the tin eaves of Byron’s bamboo patio. The water here was dense with balsas and boat shanties, twining among the open waterways the locals called canals. It was an artists’ neighborhood, boat shacks lit up with Chinese lanterns, silhouettes of windwheels churning against the watery glow of the urban mainland; there was only the faint rocking of the floorboards to remind him that they were balanced a half mile out over the continental shelf, precarious on a foundation of pontoons and anchors.

  Byron talked about Teresa, drinking Mexican beer from a squat bottle and plugging memory cards into a music generator. Keller, listening, gazed out across a canal of dark water.

  “She’s not in danger,” Byron said. “I believe that. We’re not in danger. Wexler has it all set up.” He pulled at his beer. “Any sign of danger, Ray, I would bring her back. No question. But it was her project from the beginning. She was with Wexler in Carmel when he set up the trip—she may have helped talk him into it.”

  Maybe, Keller thought. But she had impressed him mainly with her fragility. Something in the broad set of her mouth, the curious downturn of her eyes. If Byron claimed to care for her, Keller thought, then maybe he should have found a way out of this. He said, “Still—”

  “I know.” The ’lith chemist stood up and tossed his empty bottle into the dark canal beyond the railing of his float shack. “Whatever you mean to say, Ray, I thought of it, all right? It matters to me what happens to her. It really does. But she needs to go. She has this thing about the stones. She needs to go farther… deeper…”

  Keller said, “You sold it to her.”

  There was a silence, and Keller was briefly afraid he might have overstepped the bounds of this old, awkward friendship. But then Byron said quietly, “I didn’t sell it to her. I gave it to her.”

  Keller gazed patiently across the water.

  “Three years ago,” the chemist said. “You didn’t see her, Ray. She was making money hawking scrap metal to the galleries and spending it all on lab opiates. Synthetic enkephalins. Very, very bad. She came to me with a wad of cash in her hand, and her hand was, you know, like a claw, anorexic. ‘You sell ’liths,’ she said. I said yeah. I got to know her a little. She showed me where she lived— a comer of an old bulk-oil terminal in the harbor slums, stick furniture and a Mason jar full of pills. I brought in a doctor to look at her. He said her neuropeptides were seriously unbalanced. She was courting death. I mean that. Dancing with it. I said, ‘You’ll die.’ She didn’t even answer; she just nodded—it was true, so what. But the stone was a new thing for her. One more drug, I guess she thought, but it didn’t tum out that way. She took it in her hand—”

  “Visions,” Keller said.

  “It doesn’t work for everybody. For her it was all there. New worlds. She wanted to get it down somehow. I bought her the tools for these crystal paintings she’s been doing, trance landscapes. We
weaned her off the enkephalins until her neurochemistry settled down, and she’s been clean ever since.” He held up a bony hand. “Three years.”

  “The stones did that?”

  “I guess they did. Sometimes …” Byron smiled hollowly. “Sometimes I like to think I did it.”

  “But she’s going to Pau Seco,” Keller said.

  The chemist peered out across the float shacks, the canal of dark seawater.

  “It was a deal she made,” he said softly. “I think that’s all it ever was. I tried to check out her history, found out she doesn’t have one. She came out of the big fire back in ’37; she was only a kid, third-degree burns and no parents and traumatic memory loss. A refugee family took her in, named her—she didn’t even have a name. And then she started on the pills. Killing herself, you know, but slowly. And the stones didn’t change that. They touched something inside her, woke her up a little bit, but it was only ever a trace.” He regarded Keller bleakly. “A little detente between Teresa and death. But the stones we have aren’t whole, Ray. They’re like pictures torn out of a magazine. Whatever she sees in there, she needs to see it more clearly.”

  Keller said, “She might not find what she wants. She might be going down there to die.”

  “Or live,” Byron replied. His fists were clenched. He said firmly, “I believe that.”

  A little unsteadily, half drunk now, Byron led Keller back into the houseboat, to a lower level, sealed, underwater maybe—it was claustrophobic—through a dim stucco anteroom in which a single red light burned.

  “Here,” he said quietly, opening a second door. “You wanted to see it? Here.”

  It took a while for Keller’s eyes to adjust.

  There were vats and vats of dark fluid moving in the swell. The room was swelteringly hot. Must have a generator down here somewhere, Keller thought. Christ! It was almost spooky … a thousand ongoing gestations in those photophobic jars, silent and quite alien.

  This was where Byron grew his dreamstones.

  Keller recorded it all meticulously. He was an Angel; it was his job. Everything he saw, everything he’d seen since the moment Leiberman installed his memory, was spooling down indelibly into his AV memory. Ultimately, the chip behind his spine would contain thousands of hours of raw experience, footage (it was still called “footage”) no camera could ever capture.

  Byron displayed his work with a flourish of drunken pride Keller could not assay for sincerity. “It’s the same technology they use in the government labs. Just scaled down a little. The fluid in the vats is a supersaturated solution, only a little more complex than seawater. Given the medium, the rest is simple. The ’liths reproduce. ‘Reproduce’ is maybe not the correct word—they aren’t technically living things—but I don’t know what else you’d call it. The stone releases a transcriptaselike substance, which acts as a kind of seed crystal. New stones grow around it. Identical copies. You can’t tell the new from the old. The technology for growing stones was among the first data downloaded from the first significant samples, which means whoever made these things devoted a lot of redundancy to it. The Exotics—whoever they are or were—wanted us to spread these things around.”

  He could hear the fascination in Byron’s voice. Byron had come into the military a college draftee, and when he was excited, curiously, it was the working-class patois that dropped away—he began to use words like “redundancy.”

  In the fogged depths of the Chemware vats, Keller discerned the faint colors and cloudy shapes of new, nascent stones. Mineral life. He felt their strangeness like an aura.

  “They’re indestructible,” Byron said. “They fracture along their axes of symmetry, but they cannot be burned, drilled, or dissolved. Theoretically, if you could collect all the Brazilian stones in one place, you could put them together like a puzzle. Topologically they’re mostly orthorhombic or triclinic—those are the most common shapes. No one can say exactly what they’re made of. The evidence is that they’ve been engineered—the substance of them has been engineered—down beyond the subatomic level. Complex micropotentials propagate along the axes of symmetry, which is how the lab people tap in. Their observable physical properties are very strange, and it has been suggested that they exist in several more than three dimensions.”

  “Serious medicine,” Keller said.

  “Serious indeed.”

  “You used it,” Keller said, “to save her life.” He saw Byron’s expression harden in the dim light. “You could say so.”

  “You care that much?”

  There was a pause. He said, “I’m not drunk enough to have this conversation.”

  Keller persisted, “But you’re worried about her.”

  “I’m worried about Brazil. This new stone. Not just that it’s physically dangerous.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think it’ll be okay. I really believe that. Maybe better than okay. We go down, we come back, she finds what she wants. Maybe we have a life together.” He added faintly, defensively, “She might consider it…”

  “And if she doesn’t find what she wants?”

  “Then she might die. She might let herself die. This time I might not be able to stop her.”

  Keller slept half drunk, riding the swell in a bamboo-frame bed and dreaming of a manioc field in Rondonia. Large words circled like birds inside him. Amnesia, agnosia, dysphasia, aphasia. In the dream he could only see the left sides of things; when he spoke, the words came out skewed and hollow.

  He woke at dawn with a halo of sweat on his pillowcase.

  He bought lunch at a stall near the tidal dam. Byron arrived after noon, smiling blankly, and handed him an envelope containing his black-market ID, a passport, and a plane ticket to Brazil.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. They arched up beyond the curvature of the Earth in an AeroBrazil jumpflight, briefly spaceborne; but the journey was not so much outward, Keller thought, as inward —into the Basin, into the strip mine of Pau Seco, into the past. Gliding down the arc of the trajectory, he wondered whether there was not some hidden momentum that had carried him here, his mind’s own traitorous clambering into the abyss of memory.

  The wheel, Byron had said. It was a bad and persistent thought.

  The plane banked toward the floating runways of Guanabara Bay, past the statue of Christ the Savior threadbare and alone up windy Corvocado Mountain. Last time he came here, Keller had been a nineteen-year-old draftee riding a military transport, and the statue dominating the mountain-top had been his first signal that he was entering strange territory: this weatherbeaten Christ, granite eyes unfocused, hands raised in mute blessing over a city as big as the horizon. Seeing it again, Keller felt his fingers tighten against the armrests. He had vowed once that if he were allowed to leave this country, he would never come back … an old but fervent promise, and it echoed with painful irony in the roar of the aircraft cabin.

  “You all right?” Teresa asked, and Keller managed to nod.

  “Be fine,” he said, thinking wu-nien, abstracting himself, retreating down the icy corridors of his cultivated aloofness—taking refuge there.

  They had to wait overnight for their connection to the capital. Byron, extravagant with Wexler’s credit line, had booked them a room in one of the bone-white hotels overlooking the bay. “Only the best,” he said. But Keller had fixed his attention on Teresa, on her profile as she peered ahead through the window of the transit bus.

  The image was spooling down into his memory chip, but most of this was wasted footage, trivial and hardly dramatic. Too, by the final edit she would have become a stranger, her features systematically altered beyond recognition: protecting his sources. Keller was, in his own wordless way, a journalist, and he understood the necessity of editing, of extracting significance from the raw ore of experience. Still, the finished product never failed to surprise him. He had felt that way about the last Network project he had worked on, an expose of the joywire underg
round. He had spent three months in hospitals, in lean-tos, in the grimmest recesses of the Floats. He had grown to know some of these men (almost always men, mostly combat veterans) who had accessed the deep reward centers of their brains and who burned out slowly, like wax candles, in the neglected corners of the urban nuclei. He thought sometimes that what he saw, the tertiary stages of their terrible addiction, must surely cauterize the wires in his own head, overload the circuits, defy memory. It had tested the limits of his wu-nien, his old Army training. He had cared perhaps too much about these people whose deaths had become inevitable.

  The documentary aired in prime time and drew a respectable market share through the urban Pacific Rim. Keller’s footage was embedded among statistics and interviews and a pious commentary. The documentary was not exploitative, and he was not ashamed of his work; still, he thought, it was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat glaze of a video screen. Even the deaths he had witnessed—digital traces of his immediate experience, enhanced and polished for the final cut—had become squalid but somehow inevitable, a logical consequence of the schematic flow of events.

  It tested his faith. Faith, he thought, was not too strong a word. He believed in what he was doing; he was not cynical about his work. The joy wire documentary had fueled the demand for publicly-funded rehab clinics; some lives had been saved. He believed in his objectivity, in his ability to become a dispassionate witness; he believed it was important.

  And yet … in the face of such horror, wasn’t “objectivity” itself a little monstrous?

  He talked it over with Byron after the documentary aired. “You dignify it,” Byron said, “with all these words. All the Angel Zen they taught you back in Santarem. But : maybe that’s not what it is. Maybe it’s a side effect from the neural harness. Flat affect. Maybe you don’t know how to care anymore, maybe you can only piss and moan over whether you care. Or maybe it’s something else.”