Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But he had only been convinced of the essential evil of the stones with the arrival of the more potent deep-core oneiroliths from Brazil. He had seen their influence on hardened criminals like Tavitch… and he had felt it himself.

  The contact was brief but unavoidable. He lived in the research compound and several times a day shuttled from his cell-like room to the communal toilets one locked door away from the inmates’ wing. He was making this pilgrimage one winter day, a cold front out of Canada seeping through the inadequate insulation and into the hallway of the cheap concrete buildings, when the wire-mesh security door burst open and the convict Tavitch came bulling through.

  Tavitch was clearly insane. His eyes rolled, spittle flew from his open mouth. He stared back at the open door, ahead at Oberg. A pair of orderlies tumbled through behind him. They stood on two sides of Tavitch, panting; neither seemed to want to move. “You were supposed to lock the goddamned door!” one said. The other remained silent, eyes on Tavitch.

  Tavitch, the murderer. Tavitch, who claimed to see into the past. Oberg felt his hackles rise. He was trapped in this tableau.

  Tavitch stared at him. Their eyes met, and Oberg was appalled by the look of recognition Tavitch gave him. “Christ,” he said quietly.

  Tavitch’s fist was clenched.

  “Take him,” the second orderly said, but Tavitch ran forward then, directly at Oberg. Oberg’s instinct was to flinch away, but he was conscious of the orderlies watching him, and he threw a body check into Tavitch instead. They toppled onto the cold tile floor together.

  The contact was momentary. A second, maybe less. But it was enough.

  Horrified, Oberg felt the strangeness of the dreamstone pulsing through him.

  He opened his eyes and saw a village deep in the hinterland. Some Indio village. Men in bowl haircuts and ragged T-shirts, women with their pendulous breasts exposed. Some deep river village, he thought dazedly, maybe refuge for a few sertao revolutionaries or an East Bloc weapons cache, more likely not: but there was a thread-rifle in his hand and the assault was on, he was in the midst of it, firing into their bodies, into their eyes like the startled eyes of deer caught in headlights, and he was getting into it, rolling with it; it was singing in him, the high eroticism of this mass kill. God’s Own. But suddenly it was not good at all. By some terrible miracle he was sharing their terror and their pain, these Indios he was killing, scything wire into his own body somehow, burning his own village. The pain and outrage boiled up in him unstoppably, and it was more than wounding: it opened a hole in him through which any horror might at any minute rush.

  He gasped as the orderlies pulled Tavitch away and the corridor fell into focus around him. A nightmare, he thought desperately. But Tavitch stared down at him with a terrible, knowing leer.

  “You and I,” Tavitch said. “You and I.”

  Oberg threw up in the hallway.

  He was methodical about his divorce from the Agencies. He drew a large sum of money from an Agency account in Belem before they cancelled his credit. And he had money of his own riding in hidden accounts Stateside.

  He didn’t hold a grudge against Wyskopf or the people Wyskopf represented. Their naivete was inevitable; he associated it with their “bump of sympathy.” They took his concern with the oneirolith for an obsession, but it was not that. The connection was more subtle. Oberg was a Latent Aggressive, God’s Own, less than entirely human. Like the stone itself, he was a step outside nature. His understanding was therefore more subtle, more complete.

  He knew a little about these people now. Teresa Rafael, Byron Ostler, Raymond Keller. He knew what they looked like. He knew where they had been. Most important, he knew where they were going.

  He caught a morning flight. It was pleasant to see the Amazon falling behind him, the angles of it hidden by cloud, to rise effortlessly into the sunlight, spiraling east and then north, cut loose from history, cut loose from the Agencies, a loose cannon, purified in his purpose, aimed, he thought, and fired.

  PART 2 WHISPERS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

  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 zo
ne. 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.