Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But no place could hide her for long. He understood, climbing the stairs, that his separation from the Agencies had been both necessary and inevitable. He was no longer bound by Agency protocols. He could move in this twilight place, away from the mainland. He was a loose cannon. He could roll where he liked.

  The thought made him smile. See me roll.

  He moved lightly over the wooden floor of the room that had been her studio.

  It was a spacious room set around with windows. Parallel angles of sunlight divided the floor. He opened drawers, peered behind mirrors. He did all this methodically and in a state of finely tuned concentration. He was not sure what he was looking for: only that he would know it when he saw it.

  He saw it, at last, nestled at the back of a dresser drawer behind a pastel cotton shirt. It was a tiny plastic vial about the size of a film canister, unlabeled. In the opaque hollow of it, something rattled.

  He pried up the lid with his thumbnail.

  The odor was faint, pungent, attractive. He rolled out a tiny black pill onto his palm. The pill was resinous with age; there was only one.

  It was something she had saved, he thought. A kind of insurance; or a proof of something, an object lesson.

  He touched his finger to the oil at the bottom of the vial and raised it to his tongue.

  Bitter, astringent taste. But the faintest sense of well-being swept through his body.

  Enkephalins, he thought. In potent concentration.

  He tumbled the pill back into its container, snapped shut the lid.

  For the second time, he smiled to himself.

  2. Her dreams were worse after Keller left.

  The little girl again, of course. But the tone of the dream had changed. She had learned too much from the Pau Seco stone. The little girl appeared against a terrifying montage of the fire: flame, smoke, and frightened faces. Her eyes were wide and soot-streaked, and she was alone, cut off from the mainland, afraid for her life.

  “I need you,” the girl said. “I saved you once! It’s only fair! You can’t let me die here!”

  But in the dreams she could only turn away.

  The dreams left her sweating. She woke up alone at the back of this new balsa deep in the Floats, lost a moment in the darkness, the unfamiliar spaces. Byron slept in the front room, which doubled as kitchen; she slept in the back. Stirring, she felt as hollow as a bottle tossed up from the sea. The floor rose in a momentary swell, as if a hand had lifted the boat. She closed her eyes resolutely and prayed that she would not dream again.

  Morning came hours later, a lightening at the room’s single high window.

  She sat up, wrapped a robe around herself, drew a deep breath. Since Belem she had felt mostly numb. Numb and rootless and empty. The way Keller felt, maybe. Angel fugue. Except she was not an Angel. Only herself, moving through this fog. Periodically she would ask herself how she felt, how she really felt, but it was like tonguing an abscessed tooth: the pain overwhelmed the curiosity.

  She moved to the kitchen and fried an egg for Byron over the old electric grill. It was the last of their food.

  Byron was wearing khaki fatigue pants and his moth-eaten combat jacket. She looked at him but could find nothing to say. She had not talked to him much—really talked—since Belem. Some barrier of guilt or shame had come down between them. She hadn’t even hinted at what she had seen in her ’lith trance, the complexities of time and history, the world’s or hers. When he finished eating, he stood up and hooked his eyeglasses back of his ears. He was going out, he said.

  “Where to?”

  “Making contacts,” he said vaguely. “We need cash if we’re going to stay here. There are people who owe me.”

  “You have to go?” He nodded.

  “Well,” she said. “Be careful.”

  He shrugged.

  Being alone was the worst thing.

  It surprised her, how much she hated it. Better to have things to do. Keeping busy helped.

  Byron had left her grocery money. So she would shop, she thought, wander out along the market canal to the big stalls by the tidal dam. That would be good. She tucked the cash into her shirt pocket and buttoned it. Check the cooler, she thought. Cheap rental cooler, came with this cheap pontoon shack. There was a bottle of fresh water, a loaf of stale bread. They needed, let’s see, fruit, vegetables, maybe even a little meat. Something to keep body and soul together.

  She had skipped her own breakfast.

  The market canal, then. But first she stepped back into the small room she had made her own, regarded the tousled bed and, more carefully, the antique Salvation Army dresser. Idly, she pulled open the top drawer.

  The Brazilian stone was inside.

  It looked small and unprepossessing in a nest of her clothes. Ordinary… until you looked closely at it, allowed its angles to seduce the eye, stared until you couldn’t stop staring. A part of her was tempted to pick it up.

  A part was not. She slammed shut the drawer.

  She had regained a sense of its alienness. It was the stone, she thought, that had driven Keller away. In that moment in the hotel room in Belem, she had seen into the heart of him, the terrible guilt he had hoarded all these years. The dying woman in Rondonia: Meg, her name was. His hesitation. Worse, the caustic sense of his own cowardice.

  She understood, of course. It was not a difficult sin to forgive.

  But he could not bear that she had seen.

  And there was the rest of it. The little girl, the fire, the terrible man Carlos. She had lost so much: not just Ray but a sense of purpose, her intimacy with the stones, the idea of a future…

  She put it out of her mind. She would think about it later. She left the float, double-locked the door, joined the crowds on the pontoon walkway beside the big canal. The sun was bright and she held up her face to it, eyes squeezed shut. She wished she could see the ocean.

  Walking felt so good that she forgot about the shopping. She walked past the big stalls with their colorful awnings, past the market boats moored against the boardwalk, turning instinctively toward the sea.

  The walkway looped north and parallel to the seawall. She climbed a set of chain-link risers until she was level with the broad concrete lip of the dam. Public Works property, isolated in its churning moat of floodwater, huge turbines down there somewhere. To the south she could see a line of abandoned factories and warehouses, waste stacks starkly black against the cloudless sky. To the east, across the tangle of the Floats, a hint of the mainland; the razorback San Gabriels. North, more boat shanties … the tidal dam tapering landward. And to the west there was the sea.

  Gulls circled overhead and dive-bombed a refuse boat.

  The wind smelled of salt and sea wrack. She should have brought a sweater.

  Keller was gone, of course. The scary thing was that she both knew it and understood it. Because of what she had seen, he could not bear her presence. It was logical and inevitable.

  But she felt the loss more deeply than she could have anticipated.

  Funny how things changed. For a while she had known what she wanted. She had wanted the mystery of the dream-stone; she had wanted a door into her past. But it was like that proverb about answered prayers. She understood more about the Exotics, probably, than anyone outside the federal research programs: their origins, their history. They were vivid in her mind even yet. But there was still something fundamentally alien about them, some profound dissonance between their world and hers. She felt it, a stab of poignancy inside her, a silence where there might have been voices.

  The mystery of her own past was just as obdurate. She was the little girl, of course: the little girl was Teresa. Teresa before the fire. She knew that now. But knowing was not enough. Memory was the memory of old pain. What she wanted, she realized, was healing. But the ’lith couldn’t do that. The stone only remembered. Healing, it seemed to imply, was up to her: so
me act of reconciliation she could not begin to imagine.

  Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe the past was always and only the past. Taunting, fixed, unassailable. You couldn’t talk to the past.

  She walked north through unfamiliar floats. She was not sure where she was going. She just walked—“following her feet,” Rosita used to say. Her feet carried her down pontoon bridges, past crowded market stalls. She paid no attention to the Spanish and English voices swirling around her. She thought a little about wanting and getting. The paradox of it. Wanting the dreamstone, she had found Keller. Now she wanted Keller… but the stone had driven him away.

  The past had driven him away. “I’m sorry, Ray.”

  She was embarrassed to realize she had said it out loud. But only the gulls overheard.

  But now she had come to a place that triggered her memory. She suppressed the sense of familiarity, but her heart beat harder. She had come here for some reason. This was the place her feet had led her. Wise feet. But it was best not to think too hard about it.

  The float shack had not changed much. The same dangerous-seeming list, the same bilge pump gushing oily water into a waste canal. She descended an ancient flight of chain-link stairs to the door and knocked, breathless.

  The old, hollow man was older, hollower. She was surprised that he recognized her. His eyes narrowed in stale amusement from the dark frame of his doorway. “You,” he said.

  He still kept the pills at the back.

  CHAPTER 18

  1. There was still the possibility of selling the stone. Byron was in no position to grow copies; he dared not risk even a visit to his basement lab in the Floats. They had only the single ’lith, and he was not sure how Teresa would feel about him selling it… but that was a problem he could deal with later. Right now they needed money.

  He hired a canalboat and cruised until he found a functioning Public Works phone booth. The call code he thumbed in was private, but he was not surprised when it failed to enter. There was an ominous pause, then a Bell/Calstate symbol in crude pixels and the scrolling message: The number you have entered is out of service. Please hold and your call will be rerouted.

  To the Agencies, Byron thought grimly. He hammered the Escape key and climbed back into his rented barque. Within minutes he was lost in traffic.

  At a second booth deep in the factory district, he placed another call, strictly inside the Floats exchange: a friend, a local artist named Montoya. Cruz Wexler’s estate in Carmel was off the optic lines, Byron said, and did Montoya have any idea why?

  Montoya became wide-eyed. “It was maybe a stupid idea to call him. You just back in town? The Agencies raided Wexler weeks ago. The building is closed up and his files are in custody.”

  Byron considered. It must have happened shortly after they left for Brazil. Not, he thought, coincidence.

  “They even raided some places in the Floats,” Montoya said. “Very rough time. Some good people were up in Carmel when the hammer came down.” He shook his head.

  “They took Wexler?”

  Montoya’s eyes narrowed; he licked his lips. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, right? But could be somebody asked you to ask.”

  Byron took hold of the camera lens, forced it left and right on its rusted pivot. “Do you see anybody?”

  “Ask Cat,” Montoya said, and cleared the monitor.

  “Cat” Katsuma was a petite second-generation Floater who did crystal paintings for the mainland galleries. She had known Byron and Teresa for years; she expressed her pleasure at seeing him again. “I heard bad rumors,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Reasonably okay,” Byron said. “Tell me about Wexler.”

  “You really need to talk to him?”

  “It would clear some things up.” Though the prospect of money had retreated.

  “Well. Meet me this afternoon, then,” and she named a cafe by the sea wall south of the factories.

  He figured Wexler owed him—minimum—an explanation.

  Running south in the rental barque, he totaled up everything he knew about Cruz Wexler.

  Much of it was public knowledge. Wexler was, or had been, a celebrity. During the war years crystal ’liths had begun to circulate in the drug underground; they enjoyed a kind of vogue during which public curiosity had peaked. Wexler held a Ph.D. in Chaotic Dynamics but had been cashiered when he began publishing articles in which he described the dreamstones as “psychic manna from an older and saner civilization.” He lost his tenure but gained a following. He had been prominent in bohemian circles for a few years, had once owned property in the Floats. But the notoriety subsided and Wexler had pretty much retired to his estate in Carmel these days, fighting a progressive emphysema and playing wise man to the stubbornly faithful. He still had a following among the Float artists who drew their inspiration from the stones. Periodically they would make the migration to Carmel, bask in his presumed enlightenment. Byron figured it was pretty much all bullshit. But it was Wexler who had underwritten his lab, and it was Wexler—if anyone—who could make sense of the Pau Seco debacle.

  He moored his boat at a by-the-hour dock behind the ruin of a cracking plant and walked to the cafe Cat had specified. It was a dicey neighborhood. Not terrible, but you got a certain influx from the slums farther south. Inside the chain-link perimeter he recognized Cat sitting at a high table overlooking the canal. A man was with her. The man had a Navy cap pulled down over his ears and a few days growth of beard, but it was Wexler; he was not hard to recognize. Byron, nervous and focused now, ordered a beer and carried it to the table.

  “Byron,” Cat said warmly.

  But he was staring at Wexler. Wexler said nothing, only returned the look. His eyes were steady and blue. Still a charismatic figure. People didn’t believe he could lie with eyes like that.

  His breath rasped in, rasped out.

  Cat stood up, sighing. “I’ll talk to you later, then.” She touched Byron’s shoulder, leaned over him. “Go easy on him, all right? I’ve been bunking him in my float. He’s got nowhere to go and his lungs are pretty bad.”

  When she was out of earshot, Byron said tonelessly, “I have every reason to believe you fucked us over.”

  Wexler nodded. “I can see how you might feel that way.”

  “A walk, you said. A vacation.”

  “Unforeseen circumstances,” Wexler said. “Is Teresa all right?”

  “More or less.” He resented the question. “You have the stone?”

  No, Byron thought. You are not entitled to that datum. Not yet. He smiled. “Worry about it,” he said.

  Wexler sat back and sipped his coffee. “I’m not here,” he said at last—meaning the Floats, Byron took it—“by choice. You might have noticed.”

  “Cat said you got burned.”

  “They came in force. I was not expecting it.”

  “But you weren’t home? That’s a pretty good coincidence.”

  “I didn’t expect any of this. Or I would not have sent you people south. May I explain, or would you prefer to break my nose?”

  Byron realized his fists were clenched. More bullshit, he thought bleakly. But he might as well listen. And he realized then that he had come here not for money or satisfaction, but for Teresa’s sake. Her unhappiness was patent and frightening and connected very closely with the stone. If anybody understood it, Wexler might.

  A gull circled overhead, screeching. Byron tossed a crumb from the table and watched the bird chase it down to the dark canal water. “I’m listening,” he said.

  The Agencies came and closed the estate, Wexler said. It was a radical sweep. They had always ignored him before. The dreamstones were technically contraband, but it was a law not much enforced; the scale of the crime was minuscule, and intensive enforcement would not have been cost-effective. “The new ’liths changed their mind,” Wexler said. “The deep-core ’liths.”
/>   “You knew,” Byron said.

  “I was warned,” he admitted. “I have my own contacts. Obviously.”

  “Some good people were there.”

  “There was no time to get them out. They’ve been in custody, but my understanding is that they’ll be released soon.” He sipped his coffee, labored for breath. “You have to understand about the stones.”

  Wexler had a contact in the government research facility in Virginia, a highly-placed member of the research team who had been feeding him news about the deep-core oneiroliths. “And it was heady information. You have to understand that. It was everything we wanted. Everything that came before, impressive as it was, was blurred or obscure by comparison. For years we’d been decoding data in which every third bit had been erased by time. Reconstructing it, really. Even so, we learned a great deal. But never anything substantial about the Exotics themselves. As if they were holding themselves aloof, standing out of reach.”

  But now, Wexler said, the data came in torrents. Too, the Virginia team had begun serious work with what they called “the human interface”—mostly convicts recruited out of Vacaville. This was not hard data; it was “of dubious provenance” and sometimes contradictory. But much of it correlated with the new translations from the big mainframes. A preliminary understanding of the Exotics began to emerge.

  “The question had always been, why do we have these artifacts? Why were they buried in the Mato Grosso? Were they a gift, an accident? The great mystery.”

  Byron said, “Is there an answer?”

  “Hints,” Wexler said. He leaned forward now. His own fascination was obvious and undimmed. “We deciphered a little of their history. The history, especially, of their information technology.”