“What?”
Byron hesitated. “Fear,” he said at last. “Cowardice”.
No, Keller thought.
You cope, he thought, that’s what matters. Some things were simply too terrible to bear. You have to look away, that’s the truth of it… and if you cannot look away, you have to learn how to look for the sake of looking.
Vision without desire. The perfect mirror.
They rode an elevator up to their room, Byron pressed his thumb against the lock, and through the window Keller once more confronted the Christ of Corvocado Mountain across the blue angle of the bay.
This country made you, the statue seemed to say. This country is your mother and your father.
Teresa moved to the window, obscuring the view. “We’re wasting time here,” she said. “We should have gone straight on to the capital.”
“We’re tourists,” Byron said. “What does it matter? A day or two—”
“I can feel it,” she said. Her eyes were distant. “Sounds crazy, right? But I know it’s out there. Pau Seco. The place the stones come from. Buried out in the Basin all those centuries.” She gave a small, involuntary shiver. “I want to go there.”
“Soon enough,” Byron said.
Keller nodded, uneasy now in spite of himself: soon enough.
2. They rode a domestic flight into Brasilia.
It was the interior at last, the old white chess-piece city scoured by the winds of the planalto, set like an island in this sea of poverty and forest. For two decades hard currency had been rivering into the capital, and while it had done nothing to alleviate the squalor in the barrios and the box cities, it had in part paid for the scaling and renovation of this antique landmark, the last century’s stern vision of the future. The chief industry of Brasilia was government; all these buildings were government buildings.
For a few days they lived like tourists in another big hotel, breakfast in the Continental Lounge, sunlight in the rooftop gardens. Keller, idle, found himself watching Teresa. She spent a lot of time in the pool—as if it reminded her of home, of the Floats or the distant ocean—moving through the water with an absentminded grace. And yet there was this alertness about her, somber and intent. He thought of the time she must have spent with the oneiroliths, artifacts from some unknowably distant world: as if some of that strangeness had rubbed off on her.
He watched her. He was aware of Byron watching her.
On the third day they caught a bus into the city and rode an elevator up the white glass tower of the SUDAM building, the monolithic Superintendency of the Amazon, the agency that controlled the development of the vast Brazilian hinterland. Byron had obtained from Cruz Wexler the name of a friendly SUDAM bureaucrat, Augusto Oliveira. Oliveira’s receptionist downloaded their ID into her desktop I processor and told them in unaccented English to wait, please, Mr. Oliveira was in conference. They waited through most of the morning in the plush, relentlessly bright office. Keller had picked up some rough Portuguese during the war, and he spent a little time deciphering the legend on Oliveira’s door; far as he could tell, it was Department of Mines, Maps, and Documents.
Oliveira himself appeared shortly before noon. His inner office was a sanctuary of wall windows and broad, flat filing cabinets. Outside, a rack of cumulus clouds cruised above the microwave dishes that crowned the old white buildings.
Oliveira waved them into chairs and gazed at them aloofly. Byron cleared his throat and said, “We’re from Cruz Wexler. He said you could get us—”
Oliveira’s look became aggrieved. “Please,” he said. “Don’t mention that name here. I have no connection with Cruz Wexler.” He added, “I know who you are.”
“We want to get into Pau Seco,” Byron said. “The rest of it doesn’t matter.”
“Everybody wants to get into Pau Seco. Obviously. Pau Seco.”
“Is it possible?”
“It may be.” Oliveira hooked his hands behind his back. “You want to own a plot, is that it? Dig in the dirt? Become garimpeiros?”
“Just visit,” Byron said stiffly.
“Pau Seco is seldom visited. Journalists are forbidden. Foreigners of any kind are very unusual. Really, you’re ;asking a lot.”
“Wexler said—” Byron caught himself, glowered. “We were told it would be possible.”
“Possible but dangerous.”
Oliveira moved behind his desk, thumbed his intercom, and said something in Portuguese to his secretary. A cavernous silence fell over the room. Byron crossed his arms and leaned back, scowling. Oliveira watched calmly. Keller understood that the bureaucrat was savoring their discomfort now. In return he watched Oliveira closely: he did not doubt this footage would find its way on to the Network, set amidst some stern dicta regarding the corruption of government officials.
Oliveira gazed at them silently until his secretary arrived with a cafezinho: dense, fragrant coffee in a thimble-sized cup. He drank it back convulsively and said, “How much do you know about Pau Seco?”
“It’s the mine,” Teresa said, “where the oneiroliths come from.”
“It’s a hole in the jungle,” Oliveira said, “where thirty thousand men are attempting to become wealthy. It’s also a national security area. The military is in charge. Anarchy and martial law—both, you understand? Here, look.”
He tapped a keyboard. Keller sat forward: the surface of Oliveira’s desk had become a topological map, black contour lines on a field of gently glowing blue.
“The Pau Seco mine,” Oliveira said.
The scale was immense.
“It’s operated the way the gold mines at Serra Pelada were operated. Foreign powers came in very quickly back in the twenties, you understand? The land was surveyed, there were sophisticated interferographs made of the soil beneath. But in the end it was Brazil that prevailed. Our antique mineral-rights laws.” Light from the liquid-crystal display played up the soft angles of Oliveira’s face. Absorbed now, he swept his hand over the desktop. “This is where the Exotic deposits appear. All this territory. Ten square miles of mud and clay, progressively less rich from the core deposit, here. The government allots the land in units of four square meters. For a brief time, years ago, the plots were sold cheaply. Now they’re auctioned. No one may own more than one, and it must be worked for the owner to retain title. Any given plot may produce nothing… but understand that even a small stone, a small oneirolith, is worth at least three hundred million cruzeiros.” He shrugged loftily. “Someday this may end. We may decipher all there is to be deciphered from these artifacts. The secrets of the universe, hm? And then Pau Seco will go back to jungle and all the garimpeiros can go home. Maybe that day is coming. But not yet. Every stone we unearth sheds new light, reveals a little more of the puzzle. Once its data have been abstracted, of course, the stone loses its enormous value … it might be duplicated, it might even find its way into the black market as a sort of drug.” He looked at Byron and smiled. “But I wouldn’t know about that. At Pau Seco the government buys the stones directly from the garimpeiros and takes a commission against their value on the international market. They may not be sold or traded privately. The price we offer is competitive… and there is the military to prevent smuggling.”
Teresa’s eyes were fixed on the top map. She said contritely, “We’ll need a permit to get in—”
“Get in! If you go to Pau Seco, you’ll need a permit to eat, a permit to sleep, a permit to piss—”
“Can you get us these permits?”
Oliveira became haughty. “It’s been arranged.” He waved his hand: it was trivial, a non-issue “But I want you to be prepared. There are no hotels in Pau Seco, you understand? There is only mud and shit and disease. Are those familiar words? You might get dirty.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Byron said.
Oliveira switched off the top map. The blue glow faded. “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine
it would.”
His secretary gave them their documents on the way out: thick sheafs of buff-colored paper with the SUDAM stamp embossed on every leaf.
“Thank you for your patience,” she said politely.
CHAPTER 5
1. The irony, Oliveira thought later, was that because Brazil had become essential to the world, it had been lost to the Brazilians.
It was inevitable from the moment the Valverde regime called on the Pacific Rim nations for military aid. They had come more than willingly. The Japanese, the Koreans, the Americans. They had come, and in an important way they had never left. Brazil controlled the resource that controlled the world… but the world controlled Brazil.
He felt no loyalty to the man who had approached him through the American embassy. Oberg was his name. A man with thinning hair and a faint, obscured Texas accent; a man who looked like a schoolteacher and who was, beyond doubt, something far less pleasant. Oberg worked for the Agencies, the integrated complex of intelligence-gathering and enforcement bureaus that constituted a second and largely covert American government. Things being what they were, Oliveira owed the man a certain deference. But not loyalty.
But he felt no loyalty either to Cruz Wexler—a bourgeois cultist with highly-placed contacts in Brazil and an American’s faith in the corruptibility of foreign governments. And certainly Oliveira owed nothing to the three innocents who had appeared in his office today.
And without loyalty, Oliveira thought as he punched up Oberg’s telephone code—without loyalty there is no such thing as betrayal.
Oberg answered personally. His face was flat and oblique across the plane of Oliveira’s video screen. In the room behind him Oliveira saw a stone window, a stand of mimosa. Oberg looked at Oliveira and said simply—a soft, suppressed twang in his voice—“They’ve come, then?”
“They were here. I gave them the documents.”
“You’re certain it was them? The man and the woman?”
“They fit the description. And one other.”
Oberg seemed taken aback. “An American?”
Oliveira nodded casually and sketched out a description of Keller. Oberg scribbled notes. “I’ll want a photograph,” the Agency man said finally, “plus any information the man gave you.”
The voice commanded obedience. Oliveira was a professional subaltern, and he understood the mechanism of command. It came naturally from men like Oberg. Oberg had the look of command: even over the telephone he seemed tensed, poised to spring. If we were dogs, Oliveira thought, I would have to offer my throat to him. “Surely,” Oliveira said, performing the obeisance but resenting it, the necessity of it.
But Oberg had been surprised to hear about the third man, Keller. You are not so omniscient after all, he thought, watching as Oberg’s image faded from the CRT. You have something to learn yet.
The thought produced a flicker of satisfaction. He rang his secretary and asked for a second cafezinho.
2. Keller sat out on the walled portico of their hotel room, the evening of their last day in Brasilia, and watched the daytime traffic streaming out of the city, bureaucrats in boxlike Chinese automobiles and secretaries in crowded buses as the sun angled down toward the planalto.
After a time Teresa pushed through the beaded curtains and joined him. She had the documents in her hand, the papers they had brought back from Oliveira’s office. The name on her documents was Teresa Maria Rafael, the name they had downloaded from her black-market ID: the name her adoptive family had given her, Byron had said, in the months after the fire.
She pulled up a chair next to him. Her expression was thoughtful—had been, Keller thought, since their encounter with Oliveira. “It’s strange,” she said finally. “When you think about it. I mean, that ordinary people do this.”
Keller made a questioning noise.
“Well, it just struck me. You hear words like ‘smuggler’ and ‘criminal.’ It’s like something out of the Network nightlies. But that’s what we are, isn’t it? Smugglers and criminals.”
“In somebody’s eyes,” Keller agreed. “Does it scare you?”
“I think it does. Now that we’re here. Back in the Floats it was Wexler’s project. Wexler set it up, Wexler paid money, we were doing him a favor. Down here… it’s just us, isn’t it?” She looked away. “Oliveira scares me,” she said. “There’s something ugly about him. I don’t trust him.”
Keller waved at the sheaf of papers in her hand: “If he were trustworthy, he wouldn’t have given us these.”
“But not just him. There must be others like him. People who want to stop us.”
“The enforcement agencies,” Keller said. “The Brazilian government, at least potentially.”
She said distantly, “It’s the real world.”
“Too real.” He added, on impulse, “You can pull out, you know. It’s not too late to buy a ticket home.” He shrugged. “Maybe it would be wise.”
She stood up and leaned out from the balcony with her elbows on the railing. The last light of the day seemed to surround and contain her. She shook her head. “I’m here for a reason. And I’m not fragile.”
“You trust Wexler that much?”
She considered the question. “You don’t know him,” she said.
“Only what I’ve heard.”
“He was at Harvard for years. Did you know that? He did serious work in cryptology. He did a little contract research before the security people cut him off, so he had access to some of the first Pau Seco stones. Everybody else was plugging them into microchips, you know, downloading data. They all thought it would be this tremendous revelation… wisdom from the stars. He thought so too. But he was more fascinated with the human interface. You touch it, it makes visions. Nobody could figure out how it worked, so nobody much cared: it was ‘soft data.’ But for him it was the only thing.”
“Mysticism,” Keller said.
“He got into that,” she said, “yeah. This idea of ^wisdom. He says there’s nothing on earth we can feel or touch that’s truly alien, except the stones. The ultimate Other.”
“He made a lot of money.”
“He kept all his contacts in the government labs. The academic old-boy circuit. It’s easy for him to get stones, or copies of stones, once they’ve been downloaded. So he controls a large part of the black market up the coast. So yes, he’s made money… but I believe he’s sincere.”
Keller said, carefully neutral, “You believe what he says?”
“About the stones?” She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You’ve had the experience.”
“For me,” she said quietly, “it has always been more personal.” The sun was down now; the sky above the city was a darkly radiant blue. She asked, “Is that possible, Ray? That you can look into something as alien as a dreamstone—look as far and hard as you can—and find yourself looking back?”
He recalled what Byron had told him: Teresa in a shack in the Floats, trading artwork for lab enkephalins. “I’m not fragile,” she had said, but it seemed to Keller that she was: fragile and brittle as glass… except for this energy that came welling up from inside her, this restlessness.
He felt a twinge of fear for her, and that was bad: adhyasa, he thought, Angel sin. He stood up-hastily. “Tomorrow we bus to Cuiaba,” he said. “Best get some sleep.”
The stars had come out above the dark margins of the planalto.
3. But she didn’t sleep. Too much coffee, she thought, too much to think about. Instead she walked with Byron down the avenue outside the hotel, hoping to tire herself out.
Brasilia was quiet at night. She could hear the flickering buzz of the ancient potassium streetlights, the periodic rumble of a distant truck. Nobody in the streets but a few stray tourists, a few hookers poised at a public fountain. It was unreal, Teresa thought, empty, these antique white towers.
She asked Byron why he brought
Keller along.
“We’ve talked about it. He knows the hinterland. A little protection …”
She said, “He’s reliable? You trust him?”
“Yes.” But his voice was more cautious.
“He’s an Angel.”
“So? I was an Angel.”
“But you changed.”
He took her arm. Overhead, in the faint light of the city, she could see the low clouds moving. Byron said, “I could have been like him. I know what it’s like for him.”
“What is it like?”
“You care?”
She shrugged.
He said, “It’s like walking in a cloud. You’re above everything. Above fear, above your body. Your body’s a machine, you move it along, take it where it’s supposed to go. Everything is very clear, very lucid, because there’s no good or evil, no better or worse. You just look. Everything is what it is. No more, no less.”
It stirred a memory in her. “I can see how that might be attractive.”
“It is. But it wears you out. It’s cold. It’s like standing out on some mountain. You get scared to be so far above it all, scared you’ll never get down again. And some don’t.”
“Like Ray?”
“Maybe like Ray.”
“But you said you trusted him.”
He shrugged. “I think it’s always been a hard choice for him. He has some bad memories out of the war, so there’s this incentive … the need to stay above it. But I think the truth is that he’s not comfortable there. Some part of him wants to climb back down. Even after all this time.” He looked at her. “This matters to you?”
“I was curious.”
They turned back toward the hotel. “It would not be a good idea,” Byron said, “to care too much about Ray Keller.”
Teresa shrugged.
That night she dreamed again of the nameless girl in rags and twine shoes.
The girl looked at her from the depths of her huge brown eyes. As ever, Teresa was caught up in the urgency of that gaze. Darkness like smoke swirled around her; anxiety filled the turbulent air.
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