Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I’ve been hidden too long,” the girl said.

  Teresa said desperately, “It wasn’t your fault. I know that now. I—”

  But the girl shook her head. “It’s not enough!”

  A swirl of panic. “What, then?”

  “Take me back.” The girl advanced. “Touch me.” She held out her small hands. “Be me.”

  Teresa struggled to frame an answer, but could not: she was lifted roughly, shocked by a sudden and terrible light, surrounded at once by gunfire and smoke and the plangent stink of fear.

  CHAPTER 14

  Keller put his hands on her shoulders. Her eyes blinked suddenly and unseeingly open; the dreamstone was still clasped tight in her hands.

  The contact between them was electric and strange, vastly more powerful than it had been that moment in the church in Cuiaba. He was lost in it.

  He smelled the hot, granular earth of a manioc field in Rondonia, and knew the memory would be a bad one.

  Until the moment of the ambush, Keller had every reason to believe this patrol would turn out okay.

  Everybody said so. Meg said so. Their CO said the posseiros were hanging fire against the possibility of a dry-season offensive in the populated west. Covert sensors along guerilla supply trails had registered diminished activity for more than a month. Keller’s platoon had walked patrol into five government-held strategic villages in this ravaged farm country, and the only sign of enemy action had been a single undetonated flail trap loaded with monomolecular wire: the trigger had rusted open. They disarmed it and marched on.

  Keller felt the obvious sense of relief, but also, curiously, a muted disappointment. Not that he was anxious to see combat. He wasn’t naive and he wasn’t stupid. He had seen the wounded ferried in to the base hospital at Cuiaba ; he understood about pain and death. Nor was he, in the cute Psych Corps phrase, “hypermotivated”—he was here strictly because his lottery number had come up.

  But he could not help thinking of what Megan had told him that night in his bunk. “Out there, Ray, it’s easy-to do things you’re not proud of.”

  It was more than anyone else had said to him. “Out there,” she had said. Like it was the name of a place. Out there. A mystery. No one talked about it, but it was at the center of all their lives. They were trained for it, they dreamed about it; Keller was reminded a dozen times daily that he was, by this final criterion, a virgin. And so he asked himself all the dumb and obvious and impermissible questions. Will I be brave? Will it hurt? Will I die?

  But the end of the patrol had almost come, and Keller had begun to believe the questions would not be answered this time out. And he was occupied with this curious mixture of gratitude and disappointment when the dread thing actually became real—when the ambush came down around him.

  They were crossing a manioc field toward the margin of the contested highway, BR-364. They were in loose formation. A nineteen-year-old named Hooper was walking point. Hooper was weighed down with sensory extenders and a heads-up helmet display that made him look like a cockroach (Byron had said this) on its hind legs. Hooper should have warned them. But Hooper was goofing off. In the glare of the first explosion Keller saw Hooper diddling his arm controls—maybe trying to focus in on some suspicious image but more likely just playing with the display, turning the sky purple or some shit like that. They warned you about that in basic. Don’t play games. It was elementary. Keller’s first reaction to the attack therefore was this burst of petulance toward Hooper. Hooper! he thought. Hooper, you asshole!

  The shock wave knocked him down.

  The next moments were timeless. By dint of luck he had fallen into a bomb crater as wide as his body. It afforded a little protection against the wire barrage flailing out from tree cover. Keller rolled on his belly in time to see Logan, a black Spec/4, take a wire. Keller was shocked into dis-passion. It was as if Logan had walked into a hail of razor blades. He was blood all over, toppling like a tree. He was too cut up to make any noise. He just fell.

  My Christ, Keller thought.

  His rifle was compressed in the mud beneath him. He drew it out now, trying not to panic, wanting the protection of it, but there was nothing obvious to shoot at: only the stand of distant trees, the empty ribbon of highway, the still air edging toward dusk. In this momentary lull Keller was able to hear the CO shouting incoherent orders somewhere off to the left, this escalating into a scream. He belly-crawled forward until he was able to scan a section of the field. Everybody down, whole or cut. Hooper down. The CO down and bleeding. Yards away, in the meager cover of a stump, the radioman made a staccato call for aid and air cover. With a dizzying combination of reluctance and urgency, Keller forced himself to look for Meg.

  His eyes lingered a second on Byron Ostler, the platoon Angel, who was down and whole and scanning the scene methodically. Watching, Keller felt a microsecond of envy. He was deep in it, Keller thought: lost in some neurological subroutine, miles beyond fear. Angel Zen. The thinking part of him had closed up like a nut. It must be sweet.

  All this in an eyeblink.

  And then he found Meg. She had been walking to his left and a couple of yards to his rear. He had to crane his head to find her. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.

  She had been hit.

  The horror of it was giddy, skull-cracking. Keller blanked on it—was not sure for a second what he was looking at.

  She had taken a wire in the legs, and her legs below the knees were a hideous red confetti. She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t stand. She was exposed, out there on the furrowed blankness of the manioc field. And she was alive.

  She was gesturing to him. Her hand was out. Ray, she seemed to be saying. She wanted him to pull her into the crater with him, somewhere where she might be safe— might live until a medevac unit arrived. He blinked, watching. She stretched her bloody hand toward him, and the look in her eyes now was fervent, terrifying. He scuffled forward and reached for her. When someone hurts, he thought, you help. It was as simple as that.

  But then a second barrage began, the eerie high keening of the wire weapons followed seconds later by the concussion of cluster bombs, and Keller froze. The terror that overtook him was a new thing. He imagined it was a mirror of the fear in Meg’s own eyes. He heard screams above the din of the barrage and knew immediately that this was how his own screams would sound, imagined the terror liberated from his throat in one of those long animal howlings, the last constraints of sanity unbuckled in the onrush of pain and death. He felt the burr of shrapnel in the air above him, and pulled back his hand.

  I’ll die, he thought. There was a cool and relentless logic in it. If I lift myself up there and grab hold of her, I’ll die. All of this was calculable: impact, detonation, velocity, speed, weight; God, he guessed, was a kind of mathematician, handing down these neat calculations.

  It might have been only a moment’s doubt. Later he would tell himself he had meant to help her, that he was only shocked by the concussions, trapped in a second’s indecision…

  But she died while he hesitated. A wire barrage found her, the monofilaments flaying into her midriff. The impact took her, and she moved in the familiar ballistic, lifted and carried back. He saw her dogtags whirl in an arc through the boiling air, severed from their chain. She tumbled into the high weeds limply.

  The motion was simple but profound. It meant, Keller thought, that she had entered into the mathematics of inanimate things.

  He understood about death. People die all the time. People die especially in combat: it’s the nature of the thing. It’s bad, he thought, but it happens.

  But he had loved her.

  But the people you love die too. The comprehension of death had come early to him. He had seen his mother stretched out in a mortuary box when he was only seven years old, and understood that—although she appeared to be lost in some especially deep and troubled sleep—the fact was that she would not wake up. The
breath would not sigh in and out again, the eyes would not blink open ever. That was death, substantial, right in front of him.

  When his father died some years later, Keller was old enough to take a job, keep up the apartment over the bodywork shop. He preserved everything meticulously in its place. Hanging onto the illusion of normalcy. It was another way of hiding the eyes, subverting this juggernaut of grief; it was a habit, and he had acquired it early.

  And so after Meg’s death and his own mute complicity in it, he came to understand Byron, the Angel, the Eye. “You saw,” Keller accused him in a drunken moment days later.

  But Byron shook his head. “The machine sees, Ray. I don’t see a fucking thing.”

  My God, Keller thought. It must be heaven.

  He thought later of trying to get access to the recordings, assess his own guilt, look at the thing—somehow— objectively. He put through two formal written requests, but both were denied; the recordings had passed into the archival limbo of Intelligence Evaluation, far beyond the grasp of mortals like himself.

  He volunteered for Angel basic. He learned wu-nien. He was earnest about it; he took his wires seriously. In the end he was assigned to a patrol boat policing the quiescent waters of the Rio Negro, and he served out his time without seeing another shot fired.

  It didn’t matter. He was a good and thorough Angel now. What was once a habit had become a way of life.

  All this with great clarity, compressed into a moment. Her hand opened.

  The dreamstone dropped to the carpet of the hotel room in Belem.

  Keller rolled away from her, blinking and gasping.

  But he had come here for this. It was clear to him now. This resurrection: it had been in his mind since the day Byron said the word ” Brazil.” He had been thinking of Megan Lindsey. He had never stopped thinking of her.

  Teresa sat up now, pained and terrified. Byron swiveled his chair away from the phone.

  I came here for Meg, Keller thought. As if there were answers here. (There were not.) As if the placid mud out along BR-364 might yield some epiphany after all these years. As if she could come out of the ground and forgive him.

  Stupid, inarticulate, idiot thoughts.

  Teresa was looking at him now. She mouthed the words: I’m sorry!

  Keller looked away.

  “That was Denny,” Byron said.

  They stared at him.

  “On the phone,” Byron said. “He made the arrangements. He found us a flight out of here. He says—Jesus Christ, what happened to you people?”

  CHAPTER 15

  They had been here, Oberg thought.

  The hotel room in Belem was empty now. The windows were open, the yellowed curtains thrown back. Oberg had intimidated the local police, who had intimidated the American expatriate community, and the process had led him here: to an empty room. But not long empty.

  Time had been his only real enemy. It was a long journey along the bus lanes from Pau Seco to this noisy Amazon fish town. But they had been here. He could tell.

  He made himself silent, concentrated his awareness.

  It was something more subtle than a scent. It existed under the reek of the Ver-o-Peso and the ancient dusts of the hotel. It was the trace, Oberg thought, of the oneirolith itself, an alienness lingering in the air. Spoor of other worlds.

  He knew, too, where they had gone.

  A loose cannon, the Brazilian Chief of Station had called him. Maybe, Oberg thought. Maybe that’s what I am: a loose cannon. But not entirely without direction.

  Chief of Station in the American embassy in Brasilia was a ponderously fat Harvard poli-sci graduate named Wyskopf. Oberg had contacted him on his first day in Belem, by phone, more than a week over schedule. It made Wyskopf angry; Wyskopf ordered him in.

  “I’m not finished here,” Oberg had said into the eye of the telephone. “I’m very close.”

  He could have said something placating, but he had come a long way from Pau Seco and he was too weary to deal with Wyskopf diplomatically. The point of a job, he thought, is to do it. It should have been elementary.

  Wyskopf had sighed. He communicated his immense patience down a thousand miles of optical wire. “We work for the same people,” he said. “I’m on your side, all right? But look at it from a broader point of view. We can’t devote an infinite amount of resources to this effort.”

  “You want to abandon it?”

  “Not that exactly,” Wyskopf said, and Oberg understood suddenly—it startled him—that they did want to abandon it, that Wyskopf was looking for some painless way to tell him so. My God, he thought, they still don’t understand!

  “You’re making a mistake,” Oberg said.

  “You don’t tell me that. You don’t tell me my job.” Silence for a beat, the sigh again. “It isn’t up to me. I got a call. You’re ordered in. That’s it.”

  Oberg squeezed his eyes shut. Three days on the road and he had not slept much. He felt a kind of dizzy aloofness. All of this was talk; none of it mattered. Wyskopf s ignorance offended him, and he told Wyskopf so.

  “I have your psych profile,” Wyskopf said. “I could have predicted this. You’re obsessive and you have an avoidance complex you could drive a truck through. I have a raft of complaints on my desk: SUDAM and the military and a half-dozen civil officials. It was a bad decision to send you down here, and anybody asks me, that’s what I’ll tell them. The last thing this office needs is some fucking loose cannon rolling around.” He leaned into the camera. “Refuse my direct order to come in. Do me that favor.”

  “You don’t understand. The stone—”

  “The stone is gone! It’s time to admit that, don’t you think? The consensus is that nobody on the black market will want it anyway: as a drug, it’s terrible. It’s a horror drug. Leave it alone. Leave it alone and there’s a good chance it’ll disappear out in the Floats somewhere. Meantime we tighten security at Pau Seco and the research facilities’. Sooner or later there’s a leak, it’s inevitable, but by then we have the advantage in basic research.”

  “It’s not just that. It—”

  “I don’t want to discuss it. This is policy. You understand, Mr. Oberg? You are ordered in from the field. I want you in this office tomorrow morning, and I want you contrite.”

  He was stunned. “I can’t do that.”

  “You’re refusing?” A certain relish now in Wyskopf’s voice.

  “Yes,” Oberg said, “all right, fuck it, I’m refusing. But you don’t understand. You—”

  “Shit on that,” Wyskopf said. The screen went blank.

  None of them understood.

  He went to a bar, sated himself with a meal of feijoada, drank and played wordless pool with three grinning fishermen. He made money and then, still drinking, lost it. Walking down a narrow night street, alone, he thought: I am a soldier and a veteran and a patriot, and I have been closer to this thing than any careerist in any of the federal agencies.

  He had been touched by it. Literally.

  He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things … but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing. It was what they told him in basic. Oberg had been part of a segregated battalion of what the psych people called Latent Aggressives, highly motivated men inured to violence. He hadn’t volunteered for it. His EEG had volunteered him; his genetic map had volunteered him. He had all the earmarks, they said: spike discharge in the cerebellum, periodic episodes of depersonalization, a stunted endorphin system, a history of petty violence. His CO, a rural Georgian named Toller, explained that they were unique because they had all been born without their “bump of sympathy.” And grinned, saying it. God made us what we are. And it was true, wasn’t it? Trite but undeniable.

&
nbsp; They called themselves God’s Own. The baseline troops called them Baby killers.

  They were terror troops. They penetrated the guerilla-held outlands in a series of punitive raids against posseiro villages, destroying crops, burning buildings, racking down the guerillas’ political and economic base. It was bloody and vile work. They all agreed about that. But it was uniquely their work. God made us what we are.

  He rose in the ranks. He acquired a certain notoriety.

  He did not care to remember much of what happened during those years. What really mattered was that the war had given him an identity, a sense of self. He had been drafted out of a foster home in rural southern Texas, where his life had been a haze of fast violence and routine indignities. He was incredulous when a Juvenile Offenses worker told him he would love the Army. But he did. It was a fact. The Army had groomed and educated and disciplined him. The Army had analyzed and decoded him; the Army made him useful. And if the Army required him to practice his vices in the hinterland of this terrible country, then that was the least of what he owed them.

  He assumed, when he was discharged, that the violent part of his life had also ended. He took civilian work with the Agencies on the recommendation of an Army buddy. He was a good field man, despite what Wyskopf had said. His life was stable—had been stable. And if he had not acquired a wife or family or the accouterments of a statistically normal existence, perhaps it was because he could not shake the image of himself as a Latent Aggressive, God’s Own, one of the blank-eyed minority born without a bump of sympathy. But he did not think about it often.

  He had harbored a deep suspicion of the oneiroliths even before he was assigned to the Virginia facility. In part it was his instinctive fear and hostility for the foreign, the Other. But it was also a deeper revulsion. He disliked occupying a room where one of the stones had been. He was sensitive to the aura of them. It made his hair prickle, his stomach chum. He was conscious of the tremendous value of the oneiroliths, of the data being downloaded from them: but it represented a gift of unknown provenance, and gifts made him wonder about motives. Lots of abstract knowledge, but nothing about the Exotics themselves, who they were, where they had come from or why. And this strange interaction with the subjects from Vacaville. It was like all those antique movies. Body snatchers from outer space. Oberg took the idea seriously, though he knew the research people would laugh at him; the research people had no perspective. It was his business to be suspicious. He represented the federal agencies; he represented the less overt but no less solemn suspicions of his employers. For twenty years the world had been lulled into a blithe familiarity with these artifacts, while Oberg cultivated a professional paranoia.