Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Ng spoke in spite of himself. A flood of truth into the vacuum of Oberg’s lies. “I know who you are.” He closed his eyes and hoped the guard wouldn’t strike him again. “We marched through Rio Branco,” he said breathlessly. “The villages west of Rio Branco. This was in the spring of ’37, a little after the April offensive. You were famous. Did you know that? Among the Vietnamese, you were notorious.” And Oberg touched him then; Oberg took Ng’s long hair in his hand and jerked his head back against the spine of the chair to make him stop. But Ng kept talking. It was as if he had lost the power to control himself. “We did terrible things. We killed people. Posseiros. Soldiers mostly. Ragged men, but at least they were armed. It would have been so easy to feel guilt. We were machines, you understand, machines made to kill, but it was possible to feel guilt… some of us felt it.”

  Oberg cracked Ng’s head against the back of the chair, and Ng was certain he would pass out. Which made him unhappy, because he was enjoying this in some curious way: it was the only act of revenge available to him. But then Andreazza said in his careful English, “We.don’t want to kill him quite yet, Mr. Oberg.” And the American relaxed his grip slightly.

  Ng opened his eyes and looked into Oberg’s eyes and understood that the American hated him for what he knew. “We marched out from Rio Branco,” he said, “to clean up after you. Clean up the guerillas, they meant. But you had left another kind of mess.” The memory was vivid, and Ng, lost in it now, became more solemn. “The bodies were everywhere. Women and children. It disgusted us. Even us. It disgusted even us. And in a strange way it made us feel better. We were machines but we weren’t monsters. You proved that to us. You were our consolation. Whatever we had become, there was something worse.” He looked at Oberg and, from the depths of his chair, he smiled. “You made us feel human.”

  Oberg whispered between his teeth; the words were inaudible. Ng felt a brief, untethered burst of happiness. It was a kind of victory. “They’ve been gone a long time,” he said. The Americans, he meant. He felt himself drifting out of awareness, but that was all right now. He had said what he wanted to say. “You won’t find them. It’s too late to find them.”

  And closed his eyes. And took deep, painful breaths.

  Oberg turned to Andreazza. “Kill him,” he said tightly “Kill the slant-eyed son of a bitch.”

  “In time,” Andreazza said.

  3. The evening before he left Pau Seco, Oberg walked to the gallows hill where the body of Ng had been left to hang overlooking the old town, an object lesson to the illiterate formigas.

  The day was windy and overcast, and the body turned restlessly on its pivot of rope. The corpse was bloated with death, and Oberg felt only the faintest connection now between this carcass and the man who had faced him in Andreazza’s office. Hence only a murmur of satisfaction… a shiver of triumph.

  The Vietnamese man had lived three more days before he confessed, and the confession he made was useless. Oberg learned the name of the formiga who had bartered away the stone—Morelles or Meirelles—but Meirelles had vanished with the money and was beyond punishment now, lost in some smoky industrial barrio. Such men were untraceable. Raymond Keller and Byron Ostler and the American woman Teresa Rafael had ridden an Eletronorte truck as far as Sinop, Ng had said, and presumably then vanished. Toward the east, Oberg suspected; but there was no way to confirm the suspicion unless they attempted to use credit or buy passage out of the country.

  Until then it was a question of laborious pursuit, proceeding first to Sinop and then following their trail wherever it led. Tedious and thankless work, but he was braced for it.

  The desolate gallows hilltop made him uneasy. He regarded Ng’s dead, petulant face, and was possessed by a sudden fear that the eyes might spring open, the mouth unlock; that Ng might tumble free and croak out some new and loathsome accusation.

  It was crazy, of course. What the dead know, they do not speak. Someone had said that. Someone he did not care to remember.

  But the body moved in a river of wind from the Mato Grosso, and Oberg shuddered and turned his back. It was disgusting, he thought. Primitive. They should bury the dead. They should have the decency.

  CHAPTER 13

  1. Keller went with Byron to a cafe overlooking the docks along the Amazon, where they had agreed to meet an American who could arrange their passage out of Brazil.

  The Amazon here was so broad it might have been the sea. The water was brown and turgid; the ships moored at the dock were ocean ships. Keller ordered tucupi and watched an Israeli trawler inch forward from the horizon, its radars and solar panels silhouetted against the margin of the sky. By the time the trawler made port, Byron’s contact had arrived: a stubble-haired combat vet with bright, feverish eyes. He shook hands with Keller but flinched when Byron introduced him by name. Denny.

  “This was supposed to be private,” Denny said.

  Byron looked at Keller; Keller nodded, put down money for the tucupi, and wandered out along the dock road a little.

  He stood against an embankment watching Brazilian stevedores unload a corporate fishing boat, Esperance stenciled in white letters across the gleaming stack flues. Esperance, he thought: hope. A commodity they had just about run out of. Teresa had elected to stay at the hotel, pleading a need for privacy; Keller wondered now if they should have left her.

  She was tempted by the dreamstone. They had been in Belem a week, and he had watched the dance she did with it, a nervous pirouette of attraction and fear. Better, of course, to leave it alone until they reached some safer venue. But she was drawn to it. She said so. Fear and hunger…Fear and esperance.

  Too, he was worried about the time they were wasting. They were fugitives, and it was too easy to forget or ignore that. The longer they stayed in one place, the more vulnerable they became. Worse, their prospects were not improving. Twice now Byron had attempted to buy them onto a clandestine flight out of the country. Twice the deal had fallen through. Denny was a long shot, friend of a friend, reputedly a smuggler of some kind… but in Belem that was hardly a distinction. The port city was swarming with transients and foreigners, and Keller consoled himself that it was probably the best place to be, under the circumstances. Here, anyway, three indigent Americans were not conspicuous.

  But he was aware of the forces that had been mustered against them, and he was far enough now from the consolations of wu-nien that he worried especially about Teresa.

  He looked at the cafe and saw Byron waving him back. Denny had left. The negotiations had been brief.

  Keller hiked wearily up the cobbled street. “Did he deal?”

  Byron shook his head. “He’ll call us.”

  They walked in silence back to the hotel off the Ver-o-Peso. Byron knocked at the door—there was no answer —then plugged his key into the lock. The mechanism clattered, the door eased open. Byron hesitated in the doorway. Keller, anxious now, pushed past him.

  Teresa lay curled on the floor, the dreamstone clutched in both hands.

  2. She was embedded in the dream now.

  It was all around her and more vivid than it had ever been. It surrounded her like an ocean, and at the same time she contained it: an embrace of knowledge. She knew more than she had ever known.

  A surfeit of questions. An excess of answers.

  She was curious about the blue-winged people. In so many ways they seemed so familiar—so human. She was able to take in their history at a glance now, to remember it, and the similarities, she thought, were awesome. Like human beings, they had evolved from arboreal creatures sometime in the ancient past. They possessed opposable thumbs, a large cranial capacity, a vast array of cultures and languages. They had mastered human technologies: flint knives, fire, agriculture, iron. She knew all this instantly and without effort.

  So human, she thought. And yet…

  Their history was curiously placid. There were wars, but fewer and briefer than human
wars had been. Their religions were more often ecstatic than militant. They were pantheists and nature worshippers. They were quick to develop written language, and quickly fostered an almost universal literacy. They had been using crude printing presses as early as their Bronze Age.

  They possessed a genius for information technology which had led them from books to binary circuits to molecular memories and beyond that into storage-retrieval mechanisms so subtle and immediate she could not begin to comprehend them. She understood that the oneiroliths were the end product of this process, its final and most absolute incarnation.

  The stones were more than they seemed. They existed in a complex hidden topology, each linked to each, each in some sense a reflection of each, each with a special affinity for the geometry of sapient awareness… and their function was almost ludicrously simple. They remembered.

  They contained the past, or were a kind of passport to it: the distinction had been lost. They were both history book and time machine, limited only by a kind of proximity effect. The Pau Seco stone contained most of the history of the Exotics and much of the modern history of the Earth. Beyond those margins—as if that weren’t enough—she was unable to see.

  The oldest memories were dim. She saw the blue people most vividly as they had been at their apex: a world made so strange that it defied her understanding. They had expanded to the limits of their planetary system, colonized the cold ring of dust and stone that marked its farthest outpost, constructed there the fragile, huge interstellar vehicles that went winging out like butterflies between the stars. The pilots of these vessels were immortal, binary intelligences undisturbed by the passage of vast spans of time but recognizably modeled after the winged people, and in some sense descended from them. The butterfly ships in their diaspora mapped more barren worlds than Teresa cared to think about. One of them had angled past the Earth when the Chou Dynasty was succeeding the Shang and the Assyrians were marching into Babylon. (A few neolithic American tribes actually saw the craft in its looping polar orbit: a star of many colors. The observant Babylonians were preoccupied; the Chinese were in the wrong place.) It was a divided and primitive world—still is, Teresa thought distantly—but the winged people had deemed it at least potentially worthy of their gift (it was a gift), which they directed, perhaps wisely, into the then-uninhabited and unnamed depths of the Mato Grosso. A garden for the tree of knowledge.

  And winged away once more, and passed out of Teresa’s knowing.

  She had seen much of this before, but scrambled and chaotic; it had never made sense to her except as visionary flashes, the fractured output of the cruder dreamstones. She was astonished now at the scope of it. The stones, she understood, were magnets of consciousness. They absorbed and recorded the flickering traces of experience … at a distance, without contact, automatically, through some mechanism beyond her grasp. Lives, she thought: they stored and recorded the passing of lives.

  And so the human past was here too. A Babel of languages and customs and battles, sanguinary births and premature deaths. She could have descended at will into any part of it (the thought was dizzying), lived a moment with Hammurabi or Aristotle or any of the peasant millions who had marched into nameless oblivion. But not now, she thought. Later. Enough to know that they were preserved here, that in some important sense they had not died. She preferred for the moment to hover above it all, to take in the shape of it entirely and at once, humanity like one creature, a single voice, a river.

  She contemplated it for what seemed an endless time; and would have gone on, enraptured, but for the voice that called her away.

  I’m here, it said… faint and faraway, but terribly persistent. I’ve always been here.

  It drew her down. She gasped, frightened now.

  She gasped. Keller bent over her, worried.

  “Don’t touch her,” Byron warned.

  But she was trembling, wrapped around the dreamstone and clutching it to herself. She was in some kind of pain, he thought. Or dreaming some unbearable dream.

  “Let her work it out,” Byron said. “There’s nothing you can do for her.”

  “It’s hurting her.”

  “She’ll come out of it.”

  “How do you know?” He recognized that he was close to panic. Wu-nien, he thought. But the instinct had deserted him. “It’s not the same. It’s a new kind of stone.”

  “It’s her decision.”

  She shuddered against the floor, eyes squeezed shut. She looked lost, Keller thought: fallen into some chasm of herself. He wanted to shake her.

  Byron put a hand on him, restraining him. But the phone rang suddenly. “Let it happen,” Byron said, and turned away. The phone’s CRT had burned out years ago; Byron gazed into a carbonized blankness.

  Keller turned back to Teresa, took a blanket from the bed and spread it over her. She opened her mouth and made a brief, anguished cry.

  Memory, Keller thought helplessly.

  He knew what it meant. He could have told her.

  She saw the little girl.

  She saw the little girl living in a float shack somewhere out by the far margins of the tidal dams, out of sight of the mainland. She knew a few things about the little girl now. Things she had not known before.

  The little girl was a good little girl. The little girl was obedient. The little girl lived with her mother and spoke good and careful English, not the Hispanic patois of her playmates. The little girl had learned to read at a Public Works school operating out of an abandoned grain storehouse which stood on concrete stilts above the floating ghetto. The little girl was cheerful and blithely unaware of her condition of poverty, except when the government checks failed to clear, or the time when the bank machines closed down after the riots. Then she was hungry. And frightened, and irritable. But food came eventually, and she learned in time to endure even these brief bouts of hunger: she was confident that they would end.

  She took pride in her goodness in a way that sometimes offended her friends, and she grew increasingly circumspect. But she knew, without actually thinking the words, that this was not a priggish or gloating kind of goodness; that the skills her mother encouraged in her were in fact survival skills, and survival was by no means assured. She had witnessed the attrition among her friends. Many of her friends had died of diseases or had been remanded to orphanages or had simply moved away, a fate she associated with death because she could not comprehend the notion of a larger world. She accepted these truths with a resignation accessible only to the very young, and acquiesced to her mother’s regimen of education and careful virtue. She was a good little girl.

  For many of the same reasons it did not seem strange that she did not have a father. She had had one once. Her mother told her so. Her father had been a wise and brave man who had died attempting to bring them over the border from the Republic of Mexico when she was just a baby. They had been respectable people in Mexico. Her father had been a lawyer. In the Aguilar purges of the ’30s, any member of the bar was considered an enemy. And so they had to escape, but Aguilar was a staunch friend of the United States and the border had been closed even to respectable lawyers and their families. They made a border run with thirty other ragged men and women, running a gauntlet of desert and barbed wire and infrared detectors and satellite surveillance and the broad concrete no-man’s-land that separated the sovereign nations. The little girl had no memory of this, but the story had been told to her many times: it was a kind of legend, a brave and daunting mythology. Many of the refugees had been cut down by automated gunfire. Her father had been one of these. Her mother took up the child and pressed on, too frightened even for grief. (The grief, it was implied, had come later.) Many more of their group had been arrested and deported; a few had escaped into the Hispanic ghetto sprawls that crowded against the border fences. The little girl and her mother had been among this lucky minority.

  They were not wealthy enough to start a new life a
s Americans—they could not afford permanent black-market documentation—but there was enough money to buy passage into the Floats, where the rules were suspended and they could have, at least, this compromised shadow existence; never legal, but no longer vulnerable to the caprices of the Aguilar regime.

  She could not remember her father except through these stories, and so his absence never seemed strange to her, until the day her mother brought a new man home.

  She was ten, and she was outraged. She saw the guilt in her mother’s eyes and was both angry and frightened by it. She was too young to understand the adult clash of loyalties, the fear of age and the fear of death. She was only old enough to feel betrayed. She did not deserve this. She was a good girl.

  She hated the man instantly. His name was Carlos and he worked at the loading dock where the girl’s mother did occasional day labor. Meeting her, Carlos bent down, put his immense hand on her shoulder, and told her he had met her mother at work. “She’s a good worker,” Carlos said. He straightened, grinned obscenely, swatted the girl’s mother across the bottom. “Eh? She does what she’s told.”

  The girl was appalled by this sudden vision of her mother as a separate entity, a grown-up woman with a hidden life of her own. She did not say anything, only stood with her face carefully blank and one hand bracing herself against the kitchen table. Inside, she was writhing. Everything seemed suddenly tawdry. She was conscious of the peeling tile under her feet, the shabbiness of the float shanty they inhabited. Beans were cooking on the stovetop; a smoky, foul aroma filled the tiny room. And Carlos continued to grin down at her, the broad pores of his face radiating sweat and insincerity. His teeth were chipped and vulpine; his breath smelled like spoiled food.

  He was not a lawyer.

  He moved in. She was not consulted about it. He moved in and filled the shack with his noxious presence. He took up more space, the little girl thought, than any ordinary man. He bumped into things. He drank—though not, at first, excessively. His huge hands moved over the girl’s mother with an aggressive intimacy which was received without resistance or encouragement. The walls dividing the two rooms were thin enough that there was no mystery about what happened during the night: it was sex, the little girl thought, a messiness of grunting and moaning, unspeakable. When it happened, she would hide her face and cover her ears. In the mornings Carlos would grin at her and whisper: “How did you sleep, little one? Too noisy for you?” And laugh a secret, terrible laugh at the back of his throat.