Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He opened it cautiously.

  Cruz Wexler stood outside. In the dusk he might have been a thousand years old. He labored at the salt air as if he could not draw nourishment from it. “I want to talk to her,” he said.

  2. Teresa found him waiting when she came in from the boardwalk. Her reaction was an instinctive and immediate happiness: he was a link to a better time in her life.

  She hugged him and sat down across from him, and only then realized how much these past weeks had aged him. He had been fading for years up in Carmel, of course, gone from celebrity to local eccentric, and she understood that the part of him that was showman and con-artist— maybe a large part of him—had resented this decline. But she had always believed he was sincere about the oneiroliths, sincere in the conviction that they belonged to the world, not just a coterie of government scientists. He was always talking about what he called the gnosis, the Mystery, a kind of conquering wisdom: his optimism had been as vast as it was naive. These last days must have shocked him.

  They talked into the night. She had taken a pill while she was out walking, but only one, and the effect was a mild buoyancy which disguised her fatigue. (But she wouldn’t think about that.) Byron excused himself and took his bedroll into the back room. Then Wexler asked her about Brazil, and she found herself telling him about it—the story spilling out of her. She told him about Ray. Maybe because of the pill, she was able to say things that surprised her. She talked about the new oneirolith, its potency, the terrible memories it had provoked in her and in Ray. The wedge of knowing it had driven between them. She expressed her pain and surprise, was astonished when a tear trailed down her cheek: strange. She wasn’t sad. She felt all right.

  Wexler nodded thoughtfully. His beard had grown out into gray stubble and his breathing was noisy and forceful, as if breathing were not automatic but a task he had to consider and perform. His eyes were full of gentle concern.

  He talked about the Exotics.

  He had spent his life in this kind of speculation. She understood that it was his nature, that he asked the questions no one else wanted to ask. Everybody was deriving technical data from the ’liths but nobody asked the profounder questions: maybe, he said, because they were afraid to. But Wexler had seen the trance landscapes, had glimpsed the whirlpool of history.

  “If someone asked me now,” he said, “my guess would be that it was planned. All of it. There’s one kind of stone, very common, with its binary microvoltages: basically, it talks to machines. It says something altogether different to people like us. There are visions, a sense of significance, a sense of imminence. And then this rarer stone. It has even more to say. But at a price.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. Truly. But I can guess. It depends, doesn’t it, on what the Exotics thought of us—the kind of creatures they took us to be. And I think, to them, we were broken things. Fractured. Divided.” He paused for breath. “Divided against ourselves. Not only collectively but individually. The mind against itself. I think it surprised them.”

  She said, “They were different?”

  “Whole, in some important way, where we’re broken. But you must have felt it.”

  She had. The memory was warm but somehow chastening, a kind of rebuke. The,pill wearing off, she thought. She felt the gritty flush of sobriety.

  “They anticipated us,” Wexler was saying. “They understood that we were good with tools. They guessed, I think, what we might do with our technology.”

  She shook her head, confused still.

  “Well,” he said, “what have we done? We can manipulate the mind itself. But we don’t heal it. We don’t make it whole. Instead we fracture it. We divide it. We have creche soldiers, we have battalions of neurotics. We train our psychoses as if they were dogs, to do tricks for us. We make ourselves over to suit our function.”

  “Like Ray,” Teresa said.

  “Like Ray. Like everybody else. And it’s bad, it’s dangerous. It makes us conscienceless; in some important way I think it makes us soulless.”

  But he had said much of this before. She remembered him at his estate in Carmel, a rambling Spanish-style ranch house he had bought with the money from his early successes, maintained—but shabbily—with the money funneled back through ’lith chemists like Byron, lecturing to a crowd of equally shabby Float artists. He had talked as grandly about the traditions of Paracelsus, the Gnostics, cryptic wisdom. Grandiose nonsense. And it had come down to this: a sick old man in a decaying float shack. It depressed her.

  He must have seen her skepticism. He ducked his head; he put his hands on the table. Old hands. The skin was pale and papery, the nails gnawed short. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I get carried away.”

  “I couldn’t bear it,” she confessed. “The stone. The Pau Seco stone. It was what I wanted. It really was. The memory. Myself. But … I couldn’t bear it.”

  “I wonder if that’s true.”

  She glared. “You weren’t there.”

  “Obviously. But I think it’s what they demand of us.” He said gently, “It makes sense.”

  She felt offended, obscurely threatened.

  “It’s the part of themselves they withheld,” he said. “The part of themselves they wouldn’t give to the machines. A wealth of real knowledge. Time and history. But only between mind and mind, you understand? A whole mind.”

  “I don’t want it that badly.”

  “Maybe,” he said softly, “you need it.”

  She stood up. Her head had begun to ache. He had come here and confused her, and that was bad. “You do it,” she said petulantly. “You be the one.”

  His voice was faint. “It frightens me,” he said. A confession. “Distressing. After all this time. The gnosis. The real thing. But it frightens me.” He smiled hollowly. “Not only that. I think it demands a kind of innocence. Which I do not possess.”

  “You think I do? You think I do?” Mysteriously, she was shouting. The words erupted from her, sourceless. “I’m not innocent!” She was panicking. She needed a pill. Quiescence. Peace. Her body cried out for it. “I’m not good!”

  She ran for the door.

  Byron had been listening from the other room. Wexler stood up when the chemist emerged. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I thought—”

  “It’s the way she’s been,” Byron said. “I meant to help.”

  “I understand.”

  “Well … I should leave.”

  Byron said, “You meant all that? What you told her?”

  Wexler nodded.

  “We can’t help her.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “But Ray could?”

  The old man shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Wexler allowed Byron to roll out a mattress for him in the corner of the float. Too late to go back to Cat’s; his breath was troubling him. So he accepted the offer. Three people in this two-room shack.

  He was awake when Teresa came home. She moved through the darkened room with the elevated grace of her enkephalin high. She had been an addict, and she was spiraling back into her addiction now with terrifying speed.

  He had sent her perhaps blithely to Pau Seco. But in fact he had anticipated none of this… suspected, at least, that if a crisis came it would be a domestic crisis and she would be safer out of it. The arrangements had been meticulous, and he had put a vast amount of money into it, confident that he was guaranteeing her safety.

  What he had not counted on was his own weakness.

  So he owed her whatever help he could give. And so he had come here.

  But the help she needed—as Byron had pointed out— was not within his power.

  He slept and dreamed of a terrible and oppressive future, half men like Oberg riding out to the stars in warships, chitinous bodies of metal welded to flesh, protein circuits spiked into their nervous systems. It was
not so much dream as prophecy, and he woke from it with a sense of imminence, a sense that this conflict—between Oberg and Teresa, between Teresa and her fears—would one day be played out on a much larger stage. That what they did here prefigured an enormity.

  It was an oppressive idea. It was more than he wanted to believe.

  He woke with morning light harsh in his eyes.

  Terrible, he thought, to be so old and so frightened.

  Teresa was cooking up breakfast; he resolved not to mention their conversation of the night before. He moved around her cautiously. Her attention was focused on the food.

  It was for him, she said. She wasn’t hungry. He said, “Byron’s gone?”

  “Gone to the mainland.” She regarded him across the table. “I think he’s gone to look for Ray.”

  CHAPTER 22

  1. Keller was alone in the booth when Byron found him.

  The lights were dim and the monitors running, images cascading across the tiny enclosed space: the Mato Grosso from the window of a bus, Pau Seco, the Ver-o-Peso. The audio was faintly audible on all these sources—ghost whispers from an ancient world. Keller said, “I’m surprised you found me.”

  “I talked to Vasquez. He gave me a Network pass.”

  Keller worked while Byron talked. His fingers moved deftly over the mixing board. He felt quite firmly embedded in his Angel training now, gliding over this memory landscape around him, an archeologist among the ruins of his own experience. On a dozen monitors the altered Teresa gazed palely across the docks at Belem, at a Japanese tanker moving with silent grace toward its harbor. All events converging, Keller thought; all of us moving toward harbor. He had been drinking a little.

  Byron talked in a soft, persuasive voice about the Floats, about the shack he had rented there, about Cruz Wexler (who was impoverished and alone now)—finally, about Teresa. “You know,” Byron said, “she’s not really here. You edited her and you ran your programs on her and you filed her and now you think that’s her—this picture you made. But it’s not. I know how that works. It’s easy, and it feels good. But she’s not here.” He waved dismissively at the monitors. “She’s out in the Floats, Ray. She’s flesh and blood out there. And I think she would like to see you again.” He hesitated, then—firmly—“She needs to see you again.”

  Keller turned away from the board. “You don’t understand.”

  “No. I don’t. Definitely not. But I will tell you what I do understand. I understand that she is in a desperate situation, and that I can’t help her, and that she is wanting you so bad it hurts.”

  “I can’t help her either.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong.”

  Keller said faintly—it made him unhappy to admit it —“We were together. Back in that hotel room with the stone. Together in a way you can’t imagine. She saw things—”

  “You think …” Pure outrage in his voice. “You think that matters?”

  There was silence for a moment. On the walls luminescent numbers counted down seconds to the minute, minutes to the hour. Past time, Keller thought, spooling away.

  He had been awake last night, staring at the sculpture he’d bought at the gallery up the coast, the twin faces of it, woman and child verso. It fascinated him and it made him uneasy. She needed help. Well, obviously she needed help. Maybe she had always needed help.

  I would go, Keller thought bleakly, but there are things I cannot face. Her fears and his had been connected somehow. The stone had connected them. She could not face the child in the sculpture; he could not face her.

  He could not imagine this changing.

  But… if someone is hurting, you help.

  Wu-nien, he thought desperately. The Ice Palace. He longed for it; lately it had been elusive.

  Byron said slowly, as if the words had been drawn from some kiln inside him, “She’s on the pills again. She’s doing enkephalins, Ray. It’s a bad downhill road, and it will end with her dying unless we do something.” He looked at Keller; Keller was startled by the fierce, obvious pain in his expression. “Unless you do something.”

  But that was impossible.

  She couldn’t die.

  She was here. She was all around him. She was video now. She was substantial.

  She had only begun to exist.

  Byron stood up.

  He disliked this place where Keller was. It was a bad place, an Angel place, and it reminded him too much of the socket he used to wear. He had spent the war years in the same kind of wire daze Keller had entered now, the gauzy and pleasant territory of not-caring, which people like Keller rendered as “objectivity.” He understood the attraction, but it was the same attraction Teresa must feel for the pills: a surrender. He hated it especially because he wanted it. After all these years, he still had the taste for it.

  But he had proved something today. It was maybe a hollow consolation, but he felt as if he had erased the Angel tattoo on his arm: if he looked for it, it would be gone. He had pleaded with Keller—who had become Teresa’s lover —to go back to her, and surely that was the last labor that was required of him… this pain, surely, was sufficient. He had done that for her, and there was no more he could do. He had earned his way into the world.

  But she would die anyway, and that was the terrible thing, the irreducible thing, maybe the thing he wanted so desperately to hide from: you do everything you can, and sometimes the bad thing still happens.

  “Listen,” Keller said suddenly, “you don’t have to leave. You—”

  But it was pointless. They didn’t connect. Byron felt an abstracted pity for Keller, gaunt in his plush chair, hands poised over the faders. “It’s okay,” he said wearily. “Do what you need to do.”

  Out in the world, the sun was terribly bright.

  2. Keller was alone then.

  Memories cascaded around him in cool crystalline light. Voices whispered.

  One time, talking about Byron, Teresa had said, “He is the best of us.” Keller hadn’t understood. Now he felt a flicker of comprehension. But it was the kind of goodness he did not wholly understand, troubling and absolute. The old phrase echoed through him: When someone is hurting, you help. If it had been a video memory, he could have excised it, looped it out of existence; but it persisted, and it frightened him.

  After a time he left the editing booth.

  His hotel room faced one of the old suburban arteries, traffic noises all night and running water between ten and ten. He poured a drink, took a long shower, regarded himself in the mirror. His reflection—he considered it objectively —looked strung-out and haggard. His cheeks were sunken, his stubble unshaven. Who was this man? He looked like some wirehead. Some faded combat veteran dying in the Floats.

  He closed his eyes.

  In the night, drinking again, he called up Lee Anne, with whom he had once had a contract for affection: he recalled, with some fondness, the scent of her perfume. She appeared in the monitor as perfect as ever, stark in white makeup and her lips a piquant red. She peered at him coolly from the crystal display. Keller forced a smile. “We had a contract once,” he said. “You remember? We—”

  But she shook her head. “I don’t know you,” she said.

  The monitor went blank.

  In the morning he was back in the booth.

  It was almost unbearable. He winced away from the image of Pau Seco, the open oneirolith mine like a wound in the earth. It was all too vivid. He could smell the squalor of the old town, the dust, the stale heat. It was terrifying: it seemed about to rise from the monitors and surround him.

  If someone is hurting, you help.

  She was hurting, Byron had said. Keller circled the knowledge but dared not approach it. She was hurting. She was wounded. But the resonance was too terrible to acknowledge.

  He hurried through the last of the editing. The print he delivered to Vasquez would be coldly objective, panoramic, a glimpse
into the mechanics of the dreamstone trade, Pau Seco, SUDAM, the garimpeiros and the formigas, this last and strangest frontier. The rest—the merely personal —would be erased. Erased, it would in some important sense cease to exist. Erased, it would become bearable.

  His hand was poised over an Edit command when the door opened.

  He swiveled on his chair, thinking it might be Byron again. He saw instead a carefully dressed man with receding hair and a generic smile. Some Network executive maybe. But the man stepped closer, and suddenly Keller could smell his mint-scented breath and feel a hint of his terrible and enormous hostility. The man was smiling even as his hands balled into fists. “My name is Oberg,” he said.

  CHAPTER 23

  Killing Keller would have been redundant, though in some fashion satisfying, and Oberg was practicing his best professional manners. A death in the Network compound would have alarmed too many people. So he had come prepared.

  He struck Keller once; Keller fell to the floor, dazed. Quickly, Oberg bound Keller’s hands with tape and ran a strip of the same metallic tape across his mouth. Keller’s eyes were closed. The Angel blinded, he thought; the Angel silenced. He worked methodically now. He rolled Keller over and put a foot across the small part of his back, to immobilize him. From his hip pocket Oberg withdrew a miniature scalpel and a tiny pronged microchip.

  He had purchased these things from a black-market neurotechnician working out of the Floats. The chip was a joywire chip, slightly modified. Attached to the socket behind Keller’s neck, it would pulse a voltage down Keller’s neural wiring, stimulating the reward centers in Keller’s brain. But Oberg had instructed the neurotechnician to substitute a more powerful voltage source.

  “It’s insane,” the neurotech had told him. “You’d burn a man out. It would not be pleasure, it would be pain—immeasurable! And disorientation. And the victim —I can only say victim—would bum out in a matter of hours. Days, at most. He would proceed almost instantly to the last stages of wire psychosis. It would be murder.”