Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  She was aware, too, that Byron had fallen in love with her… aware that she did not love him.

  For a time she tried. She moved in with him; they made love with dedication if not passion. But it was a failed experiment and they both knew it. He wanted her, he said, but he didn’t want her as payment.

  It made her feel cold. She tried to reassure herself— and maybe stake out some independence—by taking other lovers among the artists she knew, but the effort was finally unsatisfying. Maybe, she thought, she had lost the capacity for love; maybe it had been burned out in her addiction.

  Her obsession with the oneiroliths deepened. Byron introduced her to Cruz Wexler, the academic who had written two books about the ’liths and who ran a kind of outlaw academy on his threadbare estate in Carmel. Wexler, a middle-aged man with guileless features and a progressive and untreatable emphysema, was enthusiastic about her artwork; he had agented some of it to his wealthy friends. So she had money again. She refurbished her studio in the Floats; she invested in tools she had never been able to afford.

  And when a new unease began to overtake her—a sense that she had gone as far into the ’liths as she could go, and was still lost here, incomplete, on the margin of her own life—it was Cruz Wexler who hinted at the existence of a new kind of ’lith, a deep core ’lith, a ’lith that might answer her questions.

  The eagerness she felt was almost physical. “Can I get one?”

  He smiled. “None of us can get one. I’ve talked to people in the research compounds. The lid is down very tight.”

  It was a huge disappointment. The stones Byron grew, for all their strange access to the past, had not resolved the mystery of her early childhood. She had occasionally glimpsed the fire—a chaos of smoke and flame—but nothing of herself; she did not know where she was born or when or who her parents were. The memories, Wexler said, were too deeply suppressed. And she had come increasingly to believe that the thing she wanted was hidden in that darkness: a well from which she might draw out a shining key and unlock herself, become a new thing altogether.

  A month later Wexler told her he had set up a purchase, not here or in the Orient but in Brazil, Pau Seco, the mine itself. It was an unorthodox and expensive move but it would be worth it, he said: the new stone would yield up answers, secret wisdom—she felt a little of his own flagging enthusiasm—the final gnosis. All he needed was a courier, someone without a criminal record, someone not too closely connected with him.

  Byron was appalled when she volunteered. “You don’t know anything about it… Christ, what were you thinking of?”

  “You don’t understand. I need to go.” They were walking down a market canal after hours, the boat stalls locked under their awnings, salt glittering along the boardwalk under a string of sodium vapor lights. She took his hands, knowing in that moment that he was authentically frightened for her; that his curious, lopsided love was as alive as it had ever been. “It matters that much. It’s not something I can let alone.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  She agreed, because he knew the country, because his intuition might have been correct: it might not be as easy as Wexler had promised. And she consented when he chose to bring along the Network Angel, Raymond Keller, also a veteran. But that was all the concession she would make. And so they had come here.

  She was a window away from Pau Seco. She could smell it. She could feel it—the nearness of that ancient artifact, star-stone; its scattered fragments. But the mine was a vast and ugly place, and it had shattered all her certainties. She had risked her life, she thought grimly— and Byron’s, and Keller’s—because of a voice in her head. Because of a dream.

  Because she was lost. Because she had been lost for years… lost for most of her life.

  She was afraid to go to sleep. Thinking about the tiny black pills, the synthetic enkephalins, had stirred an old longing in her. If I had one now, she thought—it was a dangerous, traitorous thought—I would take it.

  She stared through the window at the starless sky, willing the dawn to come.

  CHAPTER 9

  Stephen Oberg was dismayed when he met the man in charge of the military presence at Pau Seco: a huge back-country Brazilian with dark eyes and an obviously strong sense of territoriality. The man introduced himself as Major Andreazza and offered Oberg a painfully narrow cane-backed chair. His office overlooked the broad canyon of the mine; Andreazza himself occupied a plush swivel chair behind a sumptuous desk. “Thank you,” Oberg said.

  Andreazza regarded Oberg at great length and said, “You must tell me why you came here.”

  And so, laboriously, he explained it again. The Pacific Rim powers were very anxious, he said, that the deep-core oneiroliths should not fall into unauthorized hands. To this end security had been tightened up at the research facilities in Virginia, in Kyoto, and in Seoul. However, an informant close to the American cultist Cruz Wexler had tipped off the Agencies to a purchase that had been arranged here, at Pau Seco. Oberg had come to interdict it.

  Andreazza turned his chair to face the window. “We put a considerable effort into security ourselves,” he said.

  “I know.” With guns, Oberg thought, intimidation, the making of public examples. There had been hangings at Pau Seco as recently as last year. “I understand,” he said. “Still”—treading carefully—“the process isn’t airtight.”

  Andreazza shrugged. “The formigas are frisked every night as they leave. We have informants in the labor compounds. I fail to see what more we can do.”

  “I’m not here to criticize your efforts, Major. I’m sure” they’re exemplary. All I want to do is to locate three Americans.” He opened his briefcase, withdrew the photographs he had obtained from the SUDAM official, and passed them across Andreazza’s desk.

  Andreazza gave them a cursory glance. “If they’re here,” he said, “I don’t suppose they look so clean anymore.”

  “We know they have a contact in the old town,” Oberg persisted. “A man who may be sheltering them.”

  “The mine we control,” Andreazza said. “The compounds, yes. But don’t overestimate us, Mr. Oberg. There are a quarter of a million peasants who live outside the fence. The old town is an anarchy. Without at least a name, there is a limit to what we can accomplish.”

  “We have a name,” Oberg said.

  “Oh?”

  “The name is Ng.”

  “I see,” Andreazza said, nodding.

  They shared lunch at the military commissary. Oberg was anxious to get on with his work—prickling now with the urgency of it—but Andreazza forced him through the protocols of delay. And the food, of course, was dreadful.

  “Oberg,” Andreazza said suddenly, “Stephen Oberg… did you know there was an Oberg here during the war?

  Special Forces, I think. Razed some villages out west of Rio Branco. It was a scandal. Killed a lot of women and children:” He smiled. “So they say.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that,” Oberg said coolly.

  “Ah,” Andreazza said thoughtfully. “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Roberto Meirelles woke before sunrise on the day of the deal and knew there would be trouble. The question for him had become: to go through with it or not?

  He slept on a platform bed in a shack in a valley below the old town of Pau Seco. It was a bad location. Most of the town’s sewage flowed past Meirelles’s shack in a muddy brown streamlet, down past the ugliest tin habitations and finally into the bush, which the waste matter had made verdant and lush. Everything Meirelles owned was in this shack. He owned two faded khaki T-shirts, two pairs of denim pants, a mattress, a photograph of his wife and child.

  And the stone.

  This morning—already nervous, but carefully not thinking of the day ahead—he took the oneirolith out from the place he had made for it, a slit in the mattress where he had removed some of the ticking, and regarded i
t gravely in the dim light of a battery lamp.

  You, he thought. You could be my fortune or you could be my death.

  He held the oneirolith carefully. Over time he had learned the nuances of the stone. Held gently in the open palm of his hand—as now—it created only the faintest tingle of strangeness, a gentle electricity that seemed to focus a physical sensation behind his eyes. If he clasped it tightly, it would begin to work in earnest. It would make visions; visions of places so impossibly distant Meirelles could not begin to make sense of them; or more often these days, visions of his home.

  Meirelles understood that the oneirolith had come from another world, traveled somehow across an unimaginable gulf. And although he had marveled at that once, it no longer seemed strange or remarkable to him. It was a fact, and facts grow smooth with handling. What made the stone remarkable—and precious—to Meirelles was the way it unlocked these memories of his wife and child in Cubatao. With luck, he thought, it could carry him back there—a wealthy man.

  He shook his head. Such dreams were premature. Worse, dangerous. He tucked the oneirolith back into the mattress and deferred his decision. As far as it was possible, he worked to make his mind blank.

  Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten. Pots- and pans rattled, cocks crowed, bony scavenger dogs howled away the night. It was a morning, he told himself sternly, like any other.

  He was what the others called a formiga, an ant, though he loathed the word himself. Meirelles was a proud man and resented being compared to an insect. Still—joining the surge of humanity down into the overheated canyon of the oneirolith mine, the sun like a blade against the back of his neck—he supposed the comparison was inevitable.

  He wore huge canvas bags strapped to his shoulders and waist. The work and the diet of protein stews served in the labor compounds had made him thin but strong. Meirelles was thirty-five years old, and not a young thirty-five, but he had become proud of his body. He had survived the outbreak of Oropouche Virus that had swept Pau Seco a year ago. His body was wiry now—and far healthier, he knew, than it would have been had he stayed in Cubatao.

  But the thought was not a pleasant one, and he suppressed it. (His wife and child were still in Cubatao.)

  He climbed down the wooden ladders and followed a switchback trail steeply downhill; then rope ladders and another narrow trail to the bottom of this vast open pit. The temperature here was a good ten degrees warmer than at the top, and he had tied a rag around his head to soak up the sweat. Here men were already laboring, garimpeiros watching with clipboards from canvas tents or joining in with shovels and picks. The primitiveness of it did not impress him: the factories of the Mogi River Valley had been primitive too.

  He set about his work as he did every day. It was impossible to ignore, however, the obvious fact that this was not a day like every day. The military police stood in stern phalanxes at the high wire fences that surrounded the mine. Everyone who passed in or out was being frisked. And there were soldiers down here, too, for the first time in Meirelles’s memory, moving among the garimpeiros and asking questions.

  If I had any sense, Meirelles scolded himself, I would leave the stone in the mattress and forget about it, just forget about it. If I had any sense.

  Meirelles worked for a man named Claudio, a city man reputed to be a nephew of the Valverde family, a rich man who had taken many valuable stones out of the soil already. Claudio enhanced his profit by hiring workers out of the hopeful masses who thronged the old town, giving them false certification cards and then threatening to expose them to the military police. Meirelles himself was such a person. He earned very little at his work, and what he did earn he sent immediately back to his family in Cubatao; he could eat for free—with his false certification card—in the workers’ compounds, and he did not pay rent on his shack.

  It was a stem but equitable enough arrangement, Meirelles thought at first: and if Claudio uncovered a valuable oneirolith from the mud, then Meirelles would take his small share and move himself and his family out of the toxic Mogi River Valley. All he wanted was money enough to make a new life.

  Time passed, however, and many stones were uncovered, and Meirelles never saw more money than his weekly pittance. One time he screwed up his courage and confronted Claudio in his big tent above the mine, and Claudio appeased him and promised that things would be different in the future. The next day one of Claudio’s hired men, a thug, blackened Meirelles’s right eye and told him to be grateful for what he had. He had a work permit, didn’t he? Well, it could be taken away. He could be turned over to the military police. He should remember that.

  He did. He remembered it one day when he drove his shovel into the elastic clay and felt it rebound from something solid there.

  The day had nearly ended. Already long shadows were gathering here in the deepest part of the mine. Workers were collecting their tools and readying themselves for the long trek up to the compounds, warm food, a dash through the shower stalls. Feeling suddenly feverish, Meirelles put his hand down into the wet clay and grasped the object he had uncovered. Still bending low, scrubbing the dirt from it, he saw the deep azure glint of the oneirolith’s surface. It was a large and perfect stone, undeniably very valuable. He trembled, holding it.

  Later he could not say why he chose to steal it. Thievery was difficult and dangerous, and there was no ready market a man like Meirelles could count on. It was undoubtedly an irrational act. Still, he thought of Claudio’s bland reassurances and of the man who had blackened his eye. He thought of his wife and child, his daughter Pia coughing in the ugly yellow air of his hometown. A day in the deep angles and convolutes of the oneirolith mine sometimes induced in Meirelles a kind of abstracted dreaminess, as if the alien artifacts beneath the soil were working a subtle influence on him, making the past more real and the present less urgent. And so, with Claudio and his daughter Pia on his mind, dreaming, he thumbed away the excess clay from the oneirolith and used his cotton leggings to wrap the stone and bind it to his ankle. When he stood up, the long hem of his denim pants obscured the bulge.

  He had turned and found Claudio himself watching from a few yards away. Meirelles froze. Panic boiled in his stomach; his testicles drew up toward his body. But it was only the routine suspicion Claudio directed toward everybody. “Hurry it up,” Claudio said, waving at him with disgust. “Get moving.”

  At the wire barricade Meirelles had almost passed out with fear. His head was swimming; a cold sweat broke out on his forehead. His teeth began to chatter. He was certain his fear would give him away.

  Perversely, it may have saved him. This was at the height of the Oropouche Virus epidemic, and the military guards had become squeamish of the formigas, especially if they showed any sign of infection. Meirelles, with his sweaty forehead and his chattering teeth, must have frightened them. He was frisked by a young and pale guard who touched Meirelles’s clothing as if he were touching a hot griddle, and then Meirelles was allowed to walk unmolested down the muddy hillside strewn with offal, to his shack, where he secreted the oneirolith inside his mattress.

  It became a token of his independence from Claudio, a tangible embodiment of his pride, his hope, his future.

  He had been born in the town of Cubatao and was one of the approximately one in five children there who survived to puberty.

  Cubatao was an old industrial town. In the twentieth century it had been one of the most toxic places on the face of the earth, factories spewing out sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and polychlorinated biphenyls into the valley air. The toxins denuded the hillsides and killed the children. In the first decade of the next century the factories had been nationalized… they were antique, but still, with their low overhead and negligible cleanup costs, very profitable. There were other places in the world said to be worse now. But the river valley remained very dangerous. The factories— modified but never modernized—spewed out new poisons: cyanide and arsenic compounds fr
om the semiconductor lines, xylene, a substance called TCA.

  Meirelles had a factory job running solvents in big rust-pocked canisters. He worked with a man named Ribeiro, a patriot who defended the factories whenever Meirelles suggested they might be old-fashioned or dangerous. “The factories,” Ribeiro said sternly, “are necessary for the wealth of Brazil.”

  “No, no,” Meirelles said. “The dreamstones create the wealth of Brazil.”

  “The stones,” Ribeiro said, “are sold to foreigners.”

  “But in exchange for money. And with the money,” Meirelles persisted, “surely we could modernize the factories?”

  “Nonsense! The money services the national debt. There’s nothing left over for the factories.”

  “Then Brazil isn’t wealthy.”

  “Not without the factories!” Ribeiro said proudly. “The factories are necessary to the wealth of Brazil.”

  It was a logic he wished he could share. But Meirelles was married. He had a wife and a daughter. Twice in the last year Pia had fallen sick with bronchial ailments, and he knew she might not see her tenth birthday unless he found some other place to live. Most of the people Meirelles met were as complacent as Ribeiro—the will of God, they said—but he prided himself on his thoughtfulness, and knew it was time to leave.

  There was of course no money. He supposed they could pack up their meager belongings and simply walk away, but he had heard terrifying stories about the camps for the homeless outside Rio and Sao Paulo. No, he thought, they needed money. And there was only one way Meirelles had heard of that a poor man could make the kind of money he needed.

  Pau Seco.

  It was a legend in the slums. Money in the ground, they said. Money from outer space. It was there for the taking. Everyone believed in it, although Meirelles noticed few believed in it strongly enough to attempt the journey, and those who did never seemed to report back. But then he woke one morning to find Pia down with the croup again, gasping, her face a sickly blue, and that afternoon he spent his last money buying medicine for her and then hiked down the road where a truck might pick him up. Under the circumstances he could not bear to stay.