There was no way to tell her what this really meant. No way to condense the experience. He had emerged from the military hospital into a world of complex uncertainties. It was not the brain the wires had invaded; it was the essence, the self. Every perception became suspect, every emotion a potential symptom. So you learn,, Keller thought: you practise wu-nien very carefully… you become, in some fundamental way, a machine.
It was, he wanted to say, a strange combination of clarity and confusion. Like those nights when the fog comes in so thick you might as well be blind, but sound carries with great intimacy over startling distances. You can’t see your feet, but a buoy clanging out in the bay comes to you with that high, sad tonality all intact. He was able to register the distant bell-ringing of events, commerce, politics. He was good at it. But the fog concealed love. The fog concealed hate.
“It must be strange.” She was calmer now, drifting into sleep, nuzzled against him.
“It is.” But he was not certain she heard him. Her breathing grew deeper until she was limp in his arms. “It is.” He addressed the dark and silent room. “It is.”
They bused into the northern province of Para and stayed a night in Campo Alegre, on the Araguaia River. It was an old cattle town surrounded by corporate ranches; the accommodations were crude, the smell of the slaughterhouse reminded Keller unpleasantly of Cuiaba. They checked into a twentieth-century hotel occupied by the morose agents of foreign meat wholesalers, and surprised the clerk by paying cash. Cash was bad, Byron said, cash was conspicuous; but until they could arrange some black-market credit, cash was also a necessity.
Teresa invested in less obviously American clothes and a canvas bag in which to conceal the oneirolith. Keller had watched the way she carried the stone, the exaggerated care, her obvious desire clashing with her fear. What she wanted from it, he understood, was memory, and that struck him as dangerously naive—the idea that memory would dole out meaning into her life. Memory as buried treasure.
He knew all about memory. Memory, he thought, isn’t the treasure; the treasure is forgetting. But where was the stone, the drug or the pill or the powder, with that magic in it?
Teresa stepped into the room’s tiny shower stall and left Keller alone with Byron. Byron had been staring out the window, a view of the swollen Araguaia. Now, with the hiss of the shower filling the room, he turned suddenly to Keller and said, “I know what’s going on.”
Keller stared at him.
“It’s hardly a secret,” he said. “Christ, Ray. I’m not deaf. I’m not blind.” He straightened his shoulders, and the gesture had a pained and immense dignity in it. “It’s not hard to understand. And I don’t necessarily disapprove. If it’s good for her, all right. If you’re not using her. But the thing is, I don’t want her hurt.” Keller said, “Look, I—”
“You think this is easy for me?” He turned away convulsively. “I was like you. You remember? I know how it is. I had good Angel habits. I was dedicated. I did my job. And then I came back from the war, I had my wires stripped. You make these gestures. You think okay, well, that’s it, I’m back in the world now. But it’s not that easy. You carry a lot around with you. It’s not a physical thing. If you really want to be back in the world, you have to reach out for it, take hold of it. You have to care for something.” He drew in a deep breath. “I cared for her. It wasn’t an infatuation. More than that. More than that. Maybe it was love. Maybe it still is. She was my ticket back into the world, Ray. People find out you were an Angel, you know, they act strange. Like you’re some kind of zombie—the walking dead. Maybe I let people think that, or maybe I even encouraged it a little bit. It’s not so bad sometimes, being on the outside. But I did not want it to be true. You understand? I wouldn’t let it be true. And she was my way of proving it wasn’t true. I cared about her enough to save her life; I cared about her enough to come down here with her. I know how she feels about me. The sentiment is not mutual. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I cared and that I continued to care even when she slept with other men, and that I care now, when she is obviously falling in love with you. Because it’s the caring, the caring is what matters.” His fists were clenched; he faced the window. “Now,” he said, “maybe that’s hard for you to grasp. You’re still wired, you’re still deep in the Ice Palace, even though you probably think you’re not. You can look at her from that safe high place, you can allow yourself the luxury of falling a little bit in love. How fucking brave. But my wires are gone, Ray. It makes a difference. I’m not a machine anymore. I’m a human being or I’m nothing. A broken machine. So I care for her. And if she loves me, that’s good, that’s best of all, but even if she doesn’t, even if it hurts, as long as I care enough to let it hurt, then that’s good, too, because it means I’m really back from the war, that I’m here in the world, still breathing—” He rammed his fist against the arm of his chair. “Still flesh and blood.” Keller could only stare.
Byron shook his head. “It’s hard talking to you sometimes.”
They heard the shower switch off. Water dripped hollowly in the stall. Teresa was humming some tune in a minor key.
“Don’t hurt her,” Byron said softly. “That’s all I ask.”
2. And so they came to Belem, an international port at the broad mouth of the Amazon, where Byron knew an expatriate American who might be able to find them passage out of Brazil, and where Keller made love to Teresa for the first time.
They booked a room much like the rooms they had booked at Sinop or Campo Alegre, this one in a corniced brick building overlooking a fish market called the Ver-o-Peso. Byron spent a lot of time at the docks trying to contact his Army buddy, and for several afternoons Keller was alone with her in the room.
They made love with the curtains drawn. A rainfall began and the traffic along the Ver-o-Peso made soft rushing noises. He moved against her silently; she cried out once in the dimness of the room, as if the act had shaken loose some shard of memory inside her.
It was a long time since Keller had made love to a woman he cared about, and he was distantly aware of bonds loosening inside him, a sense of derelict synapses lighting up. He imagined the Angel wiring in his head as a road map, abandoned neural jungles shot through suddenly with ghostly glowing. It was a kind of sin, he thought, but he gave himself over to it helplessly, to loving her and making love to her. He knew that he would not download any of this from his AV memory, and because of that it seemed as if the act had only the most nebulous kind of existence: it existed between them, in his memory and in hers; flesh memory, he thought, volatile and untrustworthy. But he would cherish it. Adhyasa, Angel sin, but he would hold it tight inside him.
Afterward they were together in the silence.
The rain had raised the humidity, and her skin felt feverish against him. Her eyes were squeezed shut now. The pressure of the last few days, he thought, the trip from Pau Seco. But not just that. He said, “It’s not only the Agencies you’re afraid of.”
She shook her head.
“The stone?”
“It’s strange,” she said. “You want something so much for such a long time, and then… you’re holding it in your hands, and you-think, what is this? What does it have to do with me?” She sat up amidst the tangled sheets.
“Maybe,” he said, “you don’t need it.”
Her hair spilled over her shoulders and across Keller’s face. “I do, though. I have dreams…” The thought trailed away.
Rain rattled against the casements of the ancient windows. She stood and looked across the room at the bag where the oneirolith was concealed. Keller was suddenly frightened for her. No telling what the stone might contain. “Give it time,” he said. “If we get back to the Floats, if everything calms down—”
“No,” she said, resolute now in the darkness. “No, Ray. I don’t want to wait.”
CHAPTER 12
1. The Brazilians held Ng in custody three days befo
re Oberg was informed. He heard about it in an offhand remark from one of Major Andreazza’s junior peacekeepers and stormed off to confront Andreazza in his office. “You should have told me,” he said.
Andreazza allowed his gaze to wander about the room until it came to rest, laconically, on Oberg. He registered a mild surprise. “Told you about what?”
“About Ng.” My Christ, Oberg thought.
“The Vietnamese,” Andreazza said, “has been detained.”
“I know. I know he’s been detained. I want to interrogate him.”
“He’s being interrogated now, Mr. Oberg.”
“Being butchered, you mean? What’s the matter, have you beaten him to death already?”
There was a barely perceptible hardening about Andreazza’s features; he regarded Oberg icily. “I don’t think you’re in a position to criticize.”
“The thing is,” Oberg said, returning the look, “I am.”
“I’ve spoken to SUDAM. And I’ve spoken to my superiors. As far as any of us are concerned, your role here is strictly advisory. And I would advise you to keep that in mind when you address me… assuming you want any cooperation at all.”
Oberg fought down a response. What this means, he thought grimly, is that they’ve fucked up. The stone is gone, the Americans are gone. They had Ng. But Ng was a consolation prize at best.
He experienced a brief flurry of contempt for Andreazza and his soldiers, for the swarming anarchy of Pau Seco. It had astonished him at first, the primitiveness of this place. It was an accident of history, of course, the consequence of a series of diplomatic compromises that had concluded the shooting war in Brazil. But, he thought with some desperation, they don’t know. They didn’t know how important all this had become. SUDAM didn’t know and the civilian government didn’t know or care, and he wondered whether even the Agencies really understood what their own research had uncovered.
But Oberg knew. He had experienced it. He understood.
The burden of this interdiction had fallen to him. And it was not finished yet. Maybe Andreazza had screwed up. But there was still time.
“I’m sorry,” he said carefully. “If I offended you, then I apologize for that. It’s just that I would very much like to see this man Ng.”
Andreazza allowed himself a narrow smile. “Maybe I can arrange it. If you’d like to wait?”
And so the seconds ticked by. Seconds, Oberg thought, minutes, hours… days. While the contagion threatened to spread.
2. Ng was in a dazed condition when they took him to see the Agency man, Stephen Oberg.
He was dazed because the military interrogators had been at him. They had intercepted him when he tried to run a blockade down one of the logging roads east of Pau Seco, and they had brought him back here, to the cinderblock building that served as a jail. They put him in a cell that was too hot in the daylight and too cold at night, and for two consecutive afternoons they tortured him.
The torture was pedestrian. It was not what they did that frightened him so much as their clumsiness at it. There was a plastic bag they put over his head to suffocate him, and he was worried that they might be too stupid or inexperienced to know when to take it off. Altogether, it was archaic. They played good-guy bad-guy with him. There was a tall sertao Indian in a disheveled military uniform who spoke sympathetically to him between torture sessions and promised him leniency—“I won’t let these bastards touch you”—but only, of course, if Ng would detail his involvement in the theft of the oneirolith. Ng was careful to seem tempted by this offer, in order to prolong the respite from the pain. But he never confessed.
The next day they tied his wrists and ankles to a two-by-four which they hauled up on a rope to the ceiling beams, and then they struck him with broom handles until he was spinning sickeningly and in great pain. He vomited once, and they beat him harder for it. After a time he passed out. Still he did not confess.
During the coldest passage of the night, when he could not sleep for the pain of his injuries, he wondered why this was. Why not confess? It was hardly a matter of principle. It was theft, he thought, not revolution. He was not a partisan, nor was he a martyr. He had no desire to be a martyr.
Still he resisted. In part it was his constitution—literally, the way he was made. He was a creche soldier. His body was good at the chemistry of aggression and not very good at the chemistry of fear. So he was not afraid, and the pain, although it was terrible, was endurable in the absence of fear. Death frightened him—he was at least that human—but he knew he would be killed whether he confessed or not, and so confession was only useful as a way of abbreviating the pain. He would reach that point, certainly. But not yet.
Too, there was a part of him that didn’t belong to the military creches at Danang, a willfulness for which he had often been chastened. It’s the risk you take, a Khmer geneticist once told him, with this kind of chemical tampering. Aggression bordered on rebellion. He was headstrong. They had told him so at Danang. They had beaten him for it.
He had performed loyally in the Pacific Rim offensives, and he had killed a lot of posseiros, and he could not honestly say it was a moral revulsion that had drawn him away from the military after the war. Maybe that, too, in part. But he guessed his moral sensibilities were as poorly developed as his capacity for fear. What he felt was more personal. Brazil had astonished him. It was huge in every dimension. He had never guessed a single nation could contain so much variety of wealth, poverty, landscape. He sensed a world beyond the narrow margins he had been raised to recognize. He wondered, finally, if there might not be a life for him here, some destiny more subtle than career soldiering in Thailand or the Philippines or in occupied Manchuria. He disappeared during a recreational leave in Sao Paulo a week after the peace was declared. He became an illegal.
As an illegal he had no rights and was constantly vulnerable to arrest, but he had been able to secure a series of lumbering jobs that led him increasingly closer to the frontier and finally, a few years ago, to Pau Seco. The oneirolith mine fascinated him. The scope of the effort fascinated him, the strangeness of it, the wild contrasts of poverty and fortune. If there was a role for him to play, he thought, it was here.
Well. It was a faulty intuition. Unless, of course, this was his role, the unintended role of victim and martyr, and the cautionary role he would play, hanging by the neck on the gallows hill above the old town.
But he did not blame himself and he did not blame the Americans. He had been offered—and briefly possessed—a startling sum of money. From his new perspective it seemed trivial, but that was death-cell thinking: the money might have bought him a new life, and given the decision to make again, he might make it the same way. He had gambled and lost.
Bad calculation, then. But was that all? No.
Something else.
In the years since the war he had developed a loathing for the sort of men who controlled Pau Seco, for Andreazza and his brutal soldiers and for the garimpeiros like Claudio who exploited their laborers. And in the brief time he knew her, he had developed a guarded sympathy for the American woman, Teresa, who was so startlingly guileless she seemed to exist in another universe. It was a moral sensibility as primitive as his fears but, Ng thought, at least as strong. And maybe, at the base of it, that was why he had frustrated his torturers. He had learned how to hate them.
Oberg was a different case. He already hated Oberg. He had hated him for years.
Ng was aware of the pressure of Oberg’s eyes as the guards hustled him into the tiny interrogation room. There were two gray-uniformed peacekeepers in the room as well as the military man Andreazza, but the tension was obvious and direct: it passed between Oberg and Ng.
But I have the advantage, Ng thought. He doesn’t know who I am. But I know all about him.
The guards dropped him into a cruelly straight-backed wooden chair. Ng gasped and almost fainted with the pain. There had been bloo
d in his urine this morning, and he was worried that his injuries might be more serious than he had thought.
Maybe these people had already killed him. Maybe he was only waiting to die.
He took deep, ratcheting breaths until his heart was steady and he was able to hold up his head. A swimming blackness obscured his vision. He looked at Oberg and Oberg seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel now, distant and strange.
Now Oberg was talking.
Oberg said the predictable things. He said he knew all about Ng’s connection with Cruz Wexler and the conspiracy to sell the oneirolith. Witnesses, he said, had confirmed the exchange at the bar in the old town. He said he knew the Americans had left Pau Seco and that he wanted Ng to tell him how they had escaped and where they might have gone.
He said all this in a restrained, sweetly reasonable voice that reminded Ng of the whine of the hydraulic pumps deep in the mine. He closed his eyes and envisioned Oberg himself as a machine, a whistling construction of pipes and levers and barbed wire and scalding steam. A machine with claws, he thought giddily; iron claws and searchlight eyes.
A guard butted him awake with his rifle.
Oberg was closer now. Oberg was peering into Ng’s face. He was close enough that Ng could smell the American’s sanitized breath, hot and perfumed with mint. And Ng understood suddenly—scrutinizing Oberg from the chair, but aloofly, as if from some higher and cleaner place—that Oberg was a lie. His starched collar was a lie; his slick, receding hair was a lie; the restrained tension ticking at the corner of his mouth betrayed a multitude of lies. Oberg was a lie made of flesh.
“I won’t hurt you,” the American said calmly. “You understand? I’m not here to hurt you.”
And that was a lie too.
“I know you,” Ng whispered.
“I’m sorry,” Oberg said. “I can’t hear you.”
“I know you.”
Oberg frowned.
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