Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He watched her move in esoteric katas on the parade ground one tropical noon. Sheened with sweat, she achieved grace. Her khaki T-shirt dangled limply from her shoulders; the huge pockets of the fatigue pants blossomed at her hips. Her hair, cut into a military pageboy, gave back the vertical sunlight. Keller had never seen anything like her. He watched from the shade of a storage shed, letting the memory burn into him, admitting for the first time that he might have fallen in love with her. She moved like a scythe, and did not seem to see him until, moments later, sitting zazen in the damp heat, storm clouds rising up behind her from the Mato Grosso a horizon away, she looked at him… locked eyes with him, shocked him with a smile.

  Because the compound at Cuiaba was overcrowded, Keller slept in a tent staked out between the halide lights and the barbed perimeter fence. She came from the women’s bunker after lights-out that night, whispering his name in the dark, and although they had not planned it, neither was he surprised: the promise had been in her look. They made love inexpertly but passionately, traded childhood reminiscences in the hours before reveille.

  When he asked her about her patrols out BR-364, she sat up abruptly, shivering in the dark. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

  He apologized for asking. She ran her fingers through the stubble on his scalp. “Out there, Ray,” she said, “it’s easy to do things you’re not proud of.”

  The platoon went out a couple of days later. A troop carrier dropped them off in the ragged farm country southeast of Ti Parana. Keller walked point some. Byron went into an Angel fugue, not talking much, looking intensely, gliding—Keller thought—above the deep currents of his fear. Meg walked with a white-knuckled grip on her thread-rifle. The tension was high—there had been guerilla activity all through these pockmarked farm villages—but they did not actually see action until they stumbled into an ambush in a muddy manioc field somewhere in Rondonia. The noise was sudden and astounding. The sky lit up with the antiseptic glare, of burning phosphorus. Keller heard the bang and whistle of cluster bombs on every side of him; without thinking, he went to his knees. The blood—

  “No,” he said, and pulled back his hand. Teresa opened her eyes, shaken. Keller was staring grimly back. Some of this had seeped through to him, she thought, powerful images leaping the gap between them. His own memories. “I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely. She opened her hand and left the oneirolith on the table. The old Brazilian woman scuttled over with her tin box. “Passou a hora.” Their time was up.

  It left her depressed. They walked back to the hotel in the aftermath of the rain, a sour humidity rising from the streets. Down the mouth of an alley Teresa glimpsed a posseiro woman, in transit or homeless, squatting among her possessions and suckling a naked child. The child had a thatch of dark hair, big eyes, Indio features. The woman cradled the child’s head in the crook of her arm and gazed down at him with an expression of unselfconscious affection that made Teresa turn away, suddenly weak. After what Keller had said about Byron, after what she had seen, she felt chastised. We are all down here hunting some grail, she thought, digging for it, scrabbling after it, not out of greed but out of our misplaced sincerity… and here was this illiterate woman crouched in an alley, certainly poor and probably homeless, but whole where they were broken (she felt it like a cold wind through her), healthy where they were crippled. It made her feel small; it made her feel ashamed.

  The hotel lobby was full of stale warmth. In the room, Ng was waiting.

  CHAPTER 7

  When he was certain the Americans had left Brasilia, Stephen Oberg boarded a SUDAM flight directly to Pau Seco.

  He had simply to flash his Agency card. SUDAM and the Brazilian government generally had been eager to cooperate. Technically—according to his documents—Oberg was a civilian employee of the DEA, but since the great amalgamation of the federal agencies in the thirties, the distinction had become obscure—his immediate superior was an NSA bureaucrat on lease to the security branch, and he was answerable to the Embassy.

  The aircraft was crowded with peacekeepers in pea-green uniforms, talking among themselves in laconic Ariguaia Valley accents and oblivious to the dark ocean of forest below. Oberg propped his head on a pillow and pretended to sleep. He was 190 pounds, bulky in a gray suit, a plodding but methodical thinker. He was not given to fits of nerves, but he admitted that Brazil made him nervous.

  There would have to be changes made. He had tried to impress that on the Agencies and on the government functionaries he had been introduced to in his brief time here. For years the mining of the Pau Seco artifact had been a relatively casual affair; smuggling happened mostly at the research facilities in America and the Asian states, where the oneiroliths were temptingly easy to duplicate. Smuggling from Pau Seco itself was problematic, and for years there had been no good reason to attempt it. The Eastern -Bloc had periodically made its presence felt, but that was to be expected… tolerated, even, within limits. The exigencies of the balance of power. But times had changed.

  Oberg had been at the government labs in Virginia when the first of the new stones came in late last year. Technically, the research team leader told him, these new stones were more “addressable”—they interfaced more successfully with the cryptanalytical programs running out of the building’s big mainframes. “We’re downloading all kinds of material,” he said. “Ask for it, it’s there. It’s like an encyclopedia. A bottomless encyclopedia. But the effect on human volunteers …”

  Oberg said, “It’s different?”

  “Very idiosyncratic. Very strange. You should see.”

  And so Oberg, who was the Agencies’ liaison-in-place, had followed the voluble team leader down a hallway to the small pastel rooms where the human volunteers were kept. This was essential research, too, Oberg had been told, though it made him queasy to think of it. Perversely, there were data the computers could not evince from the stones, data accessible to the living mind alone. Everything that was known about the Exotics had come through this route. A blue-skinned people who inhabited, or had inhabited, a small planet of a distant star. Through human volunteers some little knowledge of their language and anthropology had been eked out. But it was sporadic work, and much of it was contradictory, overlaid with dreams and wishes, the excrescences of the human mind.

  The volunteer was a man named Tavitch. Like most of their volunteers, he came from the federal prison at Vacaville. Tavitch was a soft-spoken middle-aged man who had murdered his wife and two children a week after he lost his job as a data-base manager, and who chose the Virginia facility as an alternative to amygdalectomy. His eyes were large and moist, his expression faintly petulant. He held one of the new deep-core oneiroliths in his hand.

  “First time he touched it, he was practically comatose,” the team leader burbled. “Oculogyric trance. Some kind of traumatic hypermnesia. But he’s relatively lucid now.”

  Oberg folded his arms patiently. “Mr. Tavitch? Can you hear me?”

  Tavitch looked up, though his expression was preoccupied.

  “What do you see, Mr. Tavitch?” There was a long pause. “Time,” Tavitch said finally. “History.”

  It was eerie, unpleasant. Oberg looked at the team leader. The team leader shrugged and waved his hands: go on.

  Oberg sighed inwardly. “History,” he said. “Our history?”

  “Our history,” Tavitch said, “their history. Ours is newer. Oh, it shines! You should see it. It’s like a river. A golden river of lives. Millions and millions, fading away back as many years.” His eyes were glazed and patient. “They’re ail in there…”

  “Who?”

  “Everybody,” Tavitch said. “Everybody?”

  “The dead,” Tavitch said calmly. “Lives tangled up like strings. The living too—more like fuses. Burning.”

  Oberg had shuddered. It was the instinctive revulsion he inevitably felt in that room. A sense of contamination. People assumed the oneiroliths had
been tamed, that their familiarity had taken the edge off their strangeness. For Oberg, at least, it wasn’t even remotely true. They were the product of an intelligence that was profoundly and dissonantly inhuman. You could tell by looking at them—the oily shine of them, the illusion of depth. Stone mechanism, he thought. Mineral life. It made him uneasy.

  “They’re in here too,” Tavitch said, and his voice descended now into a minor key.

  “Who, Mr. Tavitch?”

  “ Alma. Peter. Angela.” The convict’s face seemed to collapse into itself. Oberg was stunned. He thought the man might cry—Tavitch, the murderer, who had never demonstrated any sign of remorse. “They want to understand,” Tavitch said, “but they don’t… they can’t…”

  Oberg left the room, repelled.

  Alma, Peter, Angela.

  They were Tavitch’s family … the ones he had killed.

  Later, over lunch in the sterile staff cafeteria, the team leader had tried to talk away the event. “You understand, we’re working here with selected subjects. Criminals. Murderers, like Tavitch. So the work has a certain bias built into it. Conventional research hasn’t given us everything we’re looking for. We’re very little closer to understanding who the so-called Exotics are, or how an oneirolith interacts with the mind—or why—than we were fifteen years ago.”

  “It’s unnatural,” Oberg had-said. “It’s ugly.”

  The team leader blinked. “I follow your concerns, Mr. Oberg. All I’m suggesting is moderation. Patience. Look at it from our point of view. Communication is what we’re all concerned with here. And communication—of one kind or another—is what happened in that room with Tavitch. There’s this prejudice against what’s called ‘the human interface,’ the effect of the oneiroliths on the human mind. Well, obviously it’s a difficult study. The effect is subjective. You can’t measure it or calibrate it. So we do a limited kind of research, and we have to compete for funding with people who are downloading much harder data. You see what I’m driving at? I know you had a negative reaction to what happened today, but I wouldn’t want that to affect the course of our work.”

  So it comes down to this, Oberg had thought: this man’s, career. “I don’t control funding.”

  “You have influence.”

  “Only a little.”

  “Still, I’m convinced we’re doing important work, vital work, with these new stones. No one wants to consider it, Mr. Oberg, but maybe the real message the Exotics left us isn’t strictly linguistic. Maybe it’s preverbal. Maybe it operates on the level of intuition … or emotion … or memory.”

  Memory. What was it Tavitch had said? Something about history. And the team leader had talked about hypermnesia, an involuntary upwelling of the past. To Oberg all of this seemed obviously, patently sinister. The past was the past, a burial place, the tomb of events, and better that way. Nobody cared about the past but priests and poets. You did a thing and you left it behind you. Hypermnesia, he thought, Tavitch’s “history,” was a light cast into places that by all rights should have been dark, hidden, buried.

  Briefly, Oberg felt a wave of what the Army psych officers had called “depersonalization”—a sense of standing apart from himself, a disconnection. For one crystalline moment he understood that his horror of the alien stones might be purely personal, a pathology, a self-disgust as profound as he had seen in Tavitch this afternoon. A phobia of memory. He gazed at the bland, pale face of the man across the table and thought: if you’d seen what I’ve seen —if you’d done what I’ve done—

  But it was a progression of logic he could not allow, and he thrust it from his mind. The oneiroliths were evil; there was no other possibility.

  “Just trying to clarify our position,” the team leader said.

  “I understand,” Oberg told him.

  He woke from the reminiscence as if it had been a bad dream.

  The aircraft was circling now, the sky lightening with dawn. The uniformed peacekeepers were mostly asleep. Oberg imagined he could feel it coming nearer—the source of the virus, the center of the infection. He did not think the analogy was unfair. It bred like a virus; it insinuated itself into the body—or at least the mind—like a virus. Like a virus, it had purposes of its own. Not human purposes.

  He peered out the window and saw the dust of Pau Seco, pale in the morning light, rising from a canyon in the jungle.

  CHAPTER 8

  1. “It looks like hell,” Keller said.

  “It is hell,” Ng said blithely. “But this isn’t the worst of it.”

  They had come in along the broad highway from Cuiaba. Ng drove a battered Korean semi full of refrigerated meat —it was his day job, he said. He ran supplies to the box cities full of hopeful foraos and unlucky formigas. It paid okay, he said. He did not say what his night job was.

  It was a long run from Cuiaba. Teresa and Byron napped in the rear of the huge cab; Keller sat up with Ng. Ng didn’t talk much but Keller was able to confirm his suspicion that the man had been a soldier, one of the Vietnamese commandos who had fought in the Pacific Rim offensive. Keller had always been just a little scared of the Vietnamese. They were culled soldiers, tagged at birth and raised in the big military creches outside Danang. Their bodies produced chronically high levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, chronically low levels of monoamine oxidase. They were, in other words, aggressive, domineering, and desperate for excitement. It was there in the way Ng drove his rig: too fast, but with a tight, rapt smile. And when he turned a corner and the sleeve rode up his arm, Keller recognized the faint blue double-X etched under the skin—the Danang tattoo.

  They approached Pau Seco a little after dawn. Keller saw the plume of dust on the horizon feathering toward the south. “Pau Seco?” he said, and Ng nodded. Within an hour they had reached the outskirts of the old town, the endemic poverty of Brazil but on a grander scale. Shacks rolled up and down these bread-loaf hills, all nearly identical, random configurations of corrugated tin, tarpaper, cardboard. Keller gazed at the emaciated men gathered by the road, who returned his gaze without curiosity as the big rig rumbled past.

  “Formigas,” Ng said. “Unlicensed miners. Most of them are not even that, actually. They come in the hope that they’ll be hired into the mine. The garimpeiros are the men who own the land. They hire the formigas to do their work for them. For wages, or more likely a share of the income. If there is ever any income. But there are more of these people than there is work for them. Most of them spend their days in the laborers’ compound hoping someone else dies. It’s the best way to get work.”

  And then they topped a rise and Keller saw the mine itself.

  Pau Seco, he thought. The ugly center of the world.

  Ng pulled the truck into the bay back of a cinderblock building and climbed out, dusting his shorts with his small hands. He led Keller to the crest of a hill and gestured almost proudly at the pit of the mine. “Hell,” he said.

  It might have been hell. It was an open canyon of red mud and white clay so immense that the trees on the far rim were gray with distance. Keller did a professional pan, sweeping the mine east to west so that this vista could be reclaimed from his AV memory. There was so awesomely much of it.

  “This was a plain once,” Ng said. “A plain covered with jungle. Then the garimpeiros came, and the foreigners, and the government to take their twenty-five percent. When they burned off the trees, the ashes fell for miles around.”

  It was a vista from another century, formigas creeping up the inclines like the ants they were named for, deafening with the clangor of hand tools and human voices. This was how the Aztecs must have mined their gold, Keller thought, and he felt a moment of giddy vertigo: an abyss here, too, of time.

  Ng occupied a shack in the old town of Pau Seco with a view commanding the mine and the sprawl of the workers’ compound. After nightfall the old town came alive. The town of Pau Seco, Ng explained, was a concentration of who
rehouses, banks, and bars. Every day one or two of these thousands of garimpeiros would come into money; the town existed to extract it from them. Periodically there was the sound of gunfire.

  Keller sat out on the wooden vestibule of the shack, drinking cautiously from a bottle of white cachaca and listening as Ng explained the trouble they were in.

  His English was easy, flat, American in inflection. “I don’t know Cruz Wexler.” He shrugged. “Cruz Wexler means nothing to me. Two months ago I was approached by a man, he said he was a surveyor working for SUDAM. A Brazilian. He had SUDAM credentials, he had a nice suit. He said there was a buyer interested in acquiring a deep-core stone and was it possible I could set this up?” He stretched out across the three risers that connected his wooden shack to the mud, plucked at a hole in his T-shirt. “Well, it isn’t easy. Security is very tight. They named a figure, the figure was attractive, I said I would do what I could.”

  “It’s arranged?” Byron asked hopefully.

  “You should have the stone tomorrow. The thing is best done quickly. But you have to understand… you came here as couriers, right?”

  Byron said, “We take the stone, we carry it out of the country…”

  “Nobody told you it might be dangerous?”

  “We have documents—”

  “Paper.” Ng shrugged. “If it was that easy, any forao with brains would be walking out of here wealthy.” He grinned. “There’s not much smuggling because the military is in charge. Mostly, you can do what you want in the old town. But the military is there, and they carry guns and they use them. The official penalty for the crime we’re discussing is death. What it means is summary execution. A trial would be”—and the smile widened—“very unusual.”