Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Over the course of the day Meirelles made several journeys up and down the vertiginous walls of the mine. He was carrying bags of tailings away from the dig to the big wooden machines Claudio kept up top, which would sift the clay for Exotic stones and then dump the residue into a clotted ravine. His legs worked until the muscles knotted against him and he had to stop; his breath hissed in and out. He did not have the lungs of some of the younger men. He was not as efficient a formiga as some, and that worried him too: it meant Claudio might decide to get rid of him. Would he simply be fired, or would he be turned over to the military police? He didn’t know. There was no one he could ask. People moved in and out of this place like phantoms. Competitiveness was extreme, friendships rare.

  Meirelles’s only friend in Pau Seco was the man called Ng. If “friend” was the word. Ng was a foreigner and had lived a life very different from Meirelles’s. Meirelles had heard Ng was looking for a deep-core oneirolith, and so he had approached the foreigner in a bar in the old town. They didn’t talk about the stone. Plainly, it was on both their minds; it was the reason they were together. But it was necessary to prepare the ground, Meirelles thought, and Ng seemed to understand this; they talked about the mine, they talked about the past.

  They met several times, and Meirelles came to understand that the small quick-tempered Vietnamese was in some way like himself. Like Meirelles, Ng had cut himself adrift from the familiar world. Ng could have gone home after the war, lived out the life of a career soldier. But he had chosen to stay in Brazil. When Meirelles asked him why, Ng shrugged: it went beyond words. Meirelles understood.

  “You’re a smuggler,” Meirelles said finally.

  Ng blinked his narrow eyes. “Among other things, yes.”

  “They say you want to buy a stone.”

  “The right kind of stone.”

  “They say the money is considerable.”

  “The money,” Ng said, “is considerable.”

  Meirelles lowered his voice so that it could hardly be heard above the rattle of glasses and the roar of conversation. “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “You don’t,” Ng said flatly. “You trust me or you don’t. I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “Ah,” Meirelles said.

  But in the end he made the deal. And now the appointed day had come around at last and he was lashed with a nervousness that threatened to undo him. There were military police everywhere.

  He looked up with dismay when the last whistle sounded. Already the deepest channels of the mine were flooded with shadow. The western wall was dark, the sky an inky blue. Inside the tents of the garimpeiros a few lanterns were burning. Meirelles shook his head: the time had eluded him.

  Soon, he thought, you have to decide.

  He trudged up the switchbacks and narrow ladders and was frisked again at the high link fence outside the compounds. His fear, this time, was no defense. A beefy military guard peered deep into Meirelles’s eyes and then searched him intimately, his hands probing Meirelles’s clothes while the other military men looked on and made ribald comments. “All right,” the guard said at last, contemptuously. “Go on.”

  He went directly to his shack. He walked stiff-legged down the filthy hillside. His hand shook on the sheet of corrugated tin he used for a door.

  The stone was still there, inside the mattress.

  He took it out and stared at it angrily. It was the stone, he thought, that had put him in this impossible position. He had planned to meet Ng in a bar in the old town; and if I go, Meirelles thought, will he be there? Or maybe the military police—waiting for him?

  He would risk his life for Pia’s sake. Gladly. But if the military police took him—what then?

  This damn piece of rock, he thought. But then, holding it, he felt some of its strangeness radiate through him. He was momentarily overcome with a memory of Pia running to him outside the door of their two-room house in Cubatao… and it occurred to him that the dreamstone had helped to keep him honest these three years in Pau Seco; that another man, or a man without a stone, might have allowed the past to float away from him, might have made a new life for himself and indulged in the luxury of forgetting. Meirelles had not had that privilege.

  Abashed, he wrapped the stone in a length of oilcloth and tucked it into his pants.

  It was dark outside now. Fires were burning in oil barrels up and down these ragged hills. From the old town the sound of human voices had begun to rise in pitch and tempo.

  It was time to go meet Ng.

  The bar had no name. None of the bars in the old town of Pau Seco had any names. They were interchangeable, they performed the same function, so there was no reason to call a bar by this name or that. Meirelles recognized the one he wanted because it was at the intersection of the mine road and the dirt path that divided the barrios. He hesitated a final time at the door. His fear now was profound.

  As he was walking here, he had passed the hill where Ng had his shack. As his head was turned in that direction, two burly military police had rushed past him; stunned, he watched a half-dozen more making their way up the slope, their high-pressure arclights drilling into the darkness. There was no question where they were headed. They were looking for Ng. They knew his name and knew where he lived.

  Ng might know about this or he might not. Either way, Meirelles thought, the Vietnamese might still be inside the bar. Waiting. Ready to deal. Meirelles thought of the money and licked his lips.

  But if the police are looking for Ng, he thought, they can’t be far from finding him. There were police all over the streets. They might be inside, waiting for the exchange to happen; they might arrest him too. Or Ng might take the stone and refuse to pay. Meirelles was powerless; the stone itself was his only weapon.

  He closed his eyes and shouldered through the door, sighing.

  But there was only the usual dimness and clangor inside. The stink of cachaca and cheap beer made him blink; the pressure of warm bodies forced him up against the wall. He was acutely aware of the oneirolith against his body. In a moment his eyes had adjusted to the flickering lamplight, and he looked for Ng at the corner table where they had met a month ago. Ng was there.

  He was there with three others. Ng wore his usual torn T-shirt and ragged denims. The others were dressed similarly, but with dust caps pulled down over their eyes in the style favored by the younger formigas who migrated in from the cities. A kind of disguise, Meirelles thought, though not very effective, and in this heat it must be excruciating. Because he saw no sign of the military police, Meirelles worked his way toward the table, wedged his body into a chair and waited for Ng to speak.

  “You have it?” Ng said softly.

  And Meirelles felt his heart sink. It was obvious from the Vietnamese man’s attitude—cavalier, almost amused— that he knew nothing about the police raid on his shack, probably had not guessed that the police were looking especially for him.

  Meirelles thought: and if I tell him?

  He peered at Ng’s companions. Three of them. Two men and a woman. The man on the left was tall, an American probably, with a careful expression and eyes that lingered a heartbeat too long on Meirelles’s own. The man on the right was smaller and more obviously nervous, his hair long and dirty white. The woman between them was in a subdued way beautiful, but very distracted: her hands wrestled with themselves, her brow knotted into a frown.

  Ng thought, She’s the one who wants the stone.

  “It’s here,” he said hoarsely, in English. “It’s here… I have it.”

  He saw the subtle light in Ng’s dark eyes.

  “Give him the money,” Ng said.

  The white-haired American said, “I don’t see the stone.”

  The woman touched the man’s hand: some kind of subtle communication, perhaps a warning. And the tall American watched.

  The white-haired man sighed, reached into his pocket, and dre
w out two slips of paper. One for Ng, one for him. So flimsy! Meirelles thought. It seemed for a moment a stupid exchange—the oneirolith, a solid thing, for this note.

  He unfolded it and looked at it long enough to establish that it at least seemed legitimate: a Bradesco bank certificate, the amount in cruzeiros so large that it made his head swim. “All right,” he heard himself say, “yes.”

  Ng pocketed his own money and smiled.

  Meirelles brought out the oneirolith in its wrapping of dirty oilcloth. The white-haired American eyed it suspiciously. “How do we know it’s what we want?”

  But the woman touched his hand again. “It’s what we want.”

  She feels it, Meirelles thought. She’s sensitive to it. He watched as she reached for the stone, and he felt the hesitation in her, her respect for it. “Take it,” he said. “Touch it. It won’t affect you through the cloth.” She didn’t understand his Portuguese but seemed to take solace from the tone of his voice.

  Ng took Meirelles’s hand and shook it across the table, the bargain completed.

  Now, Meirelles thought. If he meant to tell them about the military police, he must say something now. If they left in ignorance, they might walk back to Ng’s home and into the hands of the police.

  And if Ng knows, Meirelles thought… will he want the money back?

  He felt the bank certificate in his pocket, a warm presence. A ticket back to his wife and child. A ticket out of Pau Seco and a ticket out of Cubatao. A piece of paper containing a better life.

  He drew back his hand as Ng stood up. The Americans hovered above him.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Ng narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”

  Meirelles felt the sweat beading on his forehead. He looked into the face of the Vietnamese. It was not the sort of face he was accustomed to. He didn’t know how to read it.

  “The police,” he said faintly. “You’ve been betrayed.”

  Ng regarded him gravely for a long beat. He bent down with his knuckles on the small wooden table and his gaze was terrible, riveting. Meirelles could not look away. Spare me, he thought inanely.

  But Ng only shook his hand a second time.

  “Thank you, Roberto,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

  The three Americans followed him out.

  CHAPTER 11

  1. Ng described a place down the road and told them to wait there. A truck would come, he said.

  “It could be a trap,” Byron said. “He could be selling us out.”

  Keller anticipated an angry reaction from the Vietnamese. But Ng only shook his head. “I have my own kind of virtue,” he said. “I stay bought.”

  So they hiked down the road that ran from the mines through the old town, sheltered by their clothes and the night and the press of human bodies around them. They avoided the trash fires and walked with their shoulders bent, purposefully but not too fast, alert for police patrols. Beyond the limits of the town they kept to the shadow of the forest wall. A barrel-ribbed dog paced them for a quarter of a mile, loping on three legs; Byron threw a stone to drive it away.

  In time they came to the place Ng had described, an opening in the road where a logging trail joined it from the west. Midnight had come and gone and there was very little traffic. Twice, big antique diesel semis roared by on their way to Pau Seco. Once, ominously, a military transport. But mostly the road was empty, the night noises of the forest ringing in the darkness.

  Keller had fallen into a standing doze when a van pulled up at the verge of the road, waking him. The sky was faintly brighter now, and he was able to read the word Eletronorte in faint white letters along the rust-scabbed body of the van. The driver waited, his engine idling.

  Keller showed himself first, then Byron, and then Teresa. The driver, an Indio with large unblinking eyes, waved them into the back. Keller latched the door behind him and the van jolted forward.

  They sat on the empty metal floor with their backs against the bulkhead. Teresa said wearily, “Where’s he taking us?”

  Byron shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t go back through Rio. We should stay away from the big cities altogether.”

  Teresa held the wrapped oneirolith in her hands, steepled delicately between her fingers. “At least,” she said, “we got what we came for.”

  “You did,” Byron said. “And I guess Ray did. Pretty good footage, right, Ray? Damn nice footage.”

  Keller said nothing. Teresa was leaning against him now, her eyes closing. Keller put his arm out to steady her, and the truck carried them down the night roads, away from Pau Seco.

  He drifted on the edge of sleep for a time, conscious of her warmth and of the weight of her against him as the Eletronorte van rattled into the dawn. The driver glanced back occasionally but did not speak, the expression on his face faintly puzzled, as if he were trying to make sense of this new and mysterious cargo. At last, when the light filtering back from the cab woke him, Keller managed a smile. “Thank you for the ride,” he said hoarsely.

  The driver shook his head. “Ela e muito gentil.” He gestured at Teresa. “Pretty girl.”

  Very pretty, Keller thought innocently.

  “Your girl? Your wife?”

  “No.” Not quite that. But he closed his arm around her protectively, and she moved against him in her sleep.

  “Your girl,” the driver said toothily, and turned his attention back to the road.

  And Keller recognized—a moment of insight as penetrating as the sunlight—that it was true, he was falling in love with her… maybe had already fallen in love with her.

  It put him in a bad position.

  Adhyasa, Keller thought. He was supposed to be a machine, and machines are supposed to be indifferent: you can’t suborn a machine. A machine in love might be tempted to look away.

  And yet… He sat in the back of the jolting truck with her body pressed against him and wanted her more than he had wanted anything for years. The wanting itself was a new thing, and it ran through him like a tide. A part of him welcomed it: this thawing of ancient tundra. But he knew the risks. Stray too far from the Ice Palace and he would be stripped, vulnerable. Outside the Palace, all manner of things waited.

  Old pain. Memories. Things seen.

  And yet…

  “Here,” the driver said suddenly. The truck slowed. Keller bounced back against the metalwork; Teresa moaned and stirred. “Avie-se! Please hurry now.”

  And then they were alone again, blinking at the sunlight in a dry junction town called Sinop.

  They had bank certificates and cruzeiro notes; enough, Byron said, to get them out of the country. They should find a room and in the morning strike out along the eastern highway to Barreira or maybe Campo Alegre. He knew people in Belem ; from Belem he could arrange a flight out of the country.

  They found a cheap room by nightfall. Byron went out with a fistful of coins: he wanted to make some calls, he said, “but not from here.” And maybe get drunk. He looked at Keller, at Teresa. Maybe definitely get drunk.

  The door sighed closed after him.

  Teresa pulled the drapes and switched off the lights. The room was dark as a cavern now, the roar of traffic from the main street loud in the darkness. She climbed onto the cheap sprung mattress where Keller was lying and curled against him. She was wearing the clothes she had worn from Pau Seco, and he could smell the oil from the truck and the pungency of her sweat. After a moment he realized she was shaking.

  “Scared?” he said.

  She rolled over and nodded into his chest. “We’re in over our heads, aren’t we? That’s what all this means. We’re in way over our heads.”

  It was true, of course. Wexler had promised her an easy trip—“a vacation.” But the huge military presence at Pau Seco and the palpable fear in the eyes of Meirelles demonstrated that the project had gone a long way beyond that. Someone had taken an int
erest in them. The federal agencies, Keller guessed. Wexler must have been harboring an informant at his estate in Carmel. Or Wexler was the informant, or had confessed under interrogation. It didn’t matter which. What mattered was that someone had taken an interest in them—someone powerful.

  Because he could not think of anything reassuring to say, he soothed her with his hands.

  “You’re an Angel,” she said sleepily.

  He nodded in the dark.

  “Everything goes into memory?”

  “What I see. What I hear.”

  “Even this?”

  He admitted, “Even this.”

  “Who sees it?”

  “Maybe nobody.”

  “Who turns it into video?”

  “I do,” Keller said. “I do my own downloading at the Network shops.”

  “Would you download this?”

  This conversation, he thought she meant; or more broadly, what had begun to happen between them. He hesitated. “No,” he said finally.

  She traced the contour of his skull with her fingers. “You have wires in there.”

  He nodded.

  “They say it affects you.”

  “It can.”

  “Does it?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Memory plays tricks.” He looked into the darkness. “Just before they installed the harness, back in the military hospital at Santarem, I lifted a text out of the medical library. There was a list of side effects, what could happen if things went wrong. Blindness, amnesia, disturbance of affect—”

  “Affect?”

  “Emotional affect.” He smiled, although of course in the darkness she could not see. “Love, hate.”

  “You have that?”

  “I don’t know.” The question made him uncomfortable. “Sometimes I wonder.”