Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “I don’t understand,” Byron said.

  “Well…” Wexler paused to catch his breath. “First there are the stories around the fire. Neolithic data storage. The past is recorded, but it’s not very efficient. Errors creep in. Then the written word. The beginning of real history—

  a better grip on the past. Compared to oral history it’s a fairly dense medium, fairly incorruptible. Then the printed word, the book. Better yet. Photography, audiotape, videotape… and suddenly the past is very much with us. We have digital technology, we have molecular memory. We have people like you.” He looked a moment at Byron’s faded Angel tattoo. “Walking data storage. The Exotics were like us in this respect, but more focused… you might say obsessed. The idea of the loss of the past terrified them. They had a profound, ontological fear of forgetting. Without memory, no meaning; without meaning—chaos.” He sat back. “The oneiroliths are the logical product of that obsession: complexly folded in spacetime, linked somehow directly into sapient consciousness. You could say that they contain a sort of recording of experience itself, an archive of every human life since they arrived on this planet. Better perhaps to say that they allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.”

  Well, Byron thought. He had seen Teresa do her trick with the old people who visited her float: pulling the past out of a stone. Strange but not world-shaking. He told Wexler so.

  “But it begs the question,” Wexler said. “Our best estimate now is that the Exotics encountered our planet some thousand years before the birth of Christ. It fascinated them. It must have. They would have asked themselves the questions we’ve been asking about them: how are these creatures like us? How are they not?”

  He sipped his coffee, momentarily breathless. Byron waited.

  “My guess,” Wexler said, “is that they considered us defective. Suppose we traveled to another world and encountered a race of myopics. That’s how it must have seemed to them. Here we are, obviously sapient, tool-using, clever individuals. Our bodies are not unlike theirs; we have opposable thumbs, as they do. The distinguishing feature is …” He tapped his forehead. “Memory.” He smiled faintly. “The best evidence now suggests that the Exotics possessed what we would call eidetic memory. A human mind can’t do this; the few cases of human mnemonism on record have been deeply disturbed individuals. It’s the way we’re wired. We have to assume the Exotics could forget, in the sense that the past was not always vividly in their mind—no living creature could cope with that. But there was no fully experienced moment that could not be recalled at will… or could be willfully or permanently suppressed. Presumably, this is what fueled their obsession with information technology. For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.”

  Byron walked with Wexler out along the seawall for a distance.

  It was more private out here. The ocean seemed to lend a credibility to all this talk of time, immortality, memory.

  Byron believed most of it. The talk had ignited an old enthusiasm in Wexler’s lined face, too immediate to be faked. None of this addressed the problem of betrayal, money, Teresa. But he was content, for now, to let the man talk.

  “I wanted one of these new stones, of course. It seemed to me we could do so much with it. They used human subjects in Virginia, but usually the criminally insane, and they were reacting badly to the experience—hypermnesia, specifically of repressed material. Whereas in Carmel the response was almost always positive … at least with the traditional ’liths. Why not these new ones? It would be bigger, stronger, better. Real contact this time. Contact with an alien sapience: I cannot communicate how intoxicating that idea was. Not the exchange of mathematics, but real contact—spiritual contact.”

  Byron said coolly, “Spiritual?”

  The faint smile again. “I used to be freer with words like that. But yes, spiritual. It was what we wanted. The authentic touch. Across that chasm.” He waved his hand at the sky. “But of course everything was locked up very tight. The Agencies were scared of this whole thing. For the last thirty years national governments have been presiding over some fairly tumultuous social changes. A direct product of the oneiroliths. Fortunes made and unmade. That kind of instability is frightening. The idea of accelerated change—well, it made them nervous.”

  “So you set up the buy at Pau Seco.”

  “I really believed it would be safe. I spent a considerable amount of money on it. I bought cooperation at the highest levels of the SUDAM bureaucracy. There was a risk involved, of course. I told Teresa so when she volunteered. But even if there had been legal trouble, I might have bought you out of that too … the Valverde regime is extremely pliable.”

  “It was worse than that,” Byron said.

  Wexler averted his eyes. “So I understand. My contact in Virginia was compromised. And then the estate at Carmel was compromised. And so the house of cards came tumbling down. I have no influence over the Agencies … I didn’t know they would be involved.” He looked at Byron. “You managed to get away with the stone?”

  “Yes.” No point in hiding it now.

  “You have it still?”

  He nodded.

  “Has Teresa used it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her reaction was not positive?”

  “No,” Byron said.

  Wexler nodded, registering the information. He looked back at the sea. The sea was wide and deep, Byron thought, and it went on forever. Like the sky. Like the stars.

  “I don’t think they wholly understood us,” Wexler said. “The Exotics, I mean. They gave us the stones, and they were a gift, hidden until we could usefully decode and reproduce them. Binary code propagating across axes of symmetry. Micro voltages trickling down folded spacetime. But with this other aspect…” He smiled again—sadly now, Byron thought. “ ‘Spiritual.’ I think they simply wanted to make us whole … to cure what they saw as our tragic failure. Failure of memory. Which is failure of conscience. They were surprised, I would guess, by our capacity for aggression. For ruthlessness, for inflicting pain. Conscience is memory… and the stones would restore it.”

  “But it doesn’t work that way.”

  “I think because we are divided against ourselves in a way they could not imagine. We suppress memories; the memories lead a life of their own. We create images of ourselves and the images spring to life. We have names for them. The conscious and unconscious mind. Id and ego. And so on. Always, the crucial act is the act of forgetting. To be forced to confront the past, really confront it…” He shook his head. “It would take a great strength.”

  “I’m worried about her,” Byron said.

  Wexler said quietly, “I can’t help you.”

  The sun was low in the sky when they turned away from the ocean.

  “If you had the stone,” Byron said, “if you had it now, what would you do with it?”

  Wexler moved like an old man. In this light, he was not inspiring. He walked with his legs bowed, his head down. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Would you touch it?”

  “I don’t know … I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  He was a long time answering. His lips were pursed, his gaze abstracted. “Maybe,” he said, “there are things I would like not to remember.”

  “Like what?”

  Silence.

  Byron said, “You were the only one who knew. You were the one who sent us to Pau Seco, and you were the one who made the arrangements. Nobody else knew.”

  His voice was faint now, tremulous. He said, “Suppose I lied. Suppose I was arrested in the sweep. Suppose I was interrogated by the Agencies.” He closed his eyes. “Suppose I was afraid, and suppose that—because I was afraid—I confessed, I told them about the arrangements I’d m
ade in Brazil. And suppose, because I told them, they let me go.” His smile now was bleak and humorless. “Wouldn’t that be something I might like to forget?”

  By the time they reached the cafe, night had fallen, the air was cool, and most of the tables were empty. Wexler ordered a drink; Byron said he had to get going.

  “I can tell you one thing that might be useful,” Wexler said.

  Byron waited. The beaten look on Wexler’s face had begun to make him nervous.

  “I still talk to people at the Virginia facility,” he said. “There are a few untapped bit streams, if you know where to find them. The news now is that the Agencies have cooled off a good deal. The stone left Pau Seco, and they are not interested in tracing it. They decided it doesn’t have a big future on the black market-^-and from what you say, that is probably true. The issue is dead, except that they’ll install a military force at Pau Seco to oversee the Brazilians.

  “But you may have a problem yet. There was a man at the Virginia facility, an Agency man, a latent sociopath from the war years. His name is Stephen Oberg. He was in charge of the Pau Seco interdiction. Word is that he has an obsessive personal fear of the oneiroliths… and that he went rogue after the stone left Brazil.” Wexler peered at him, wheezing faintly. “He may still be on your case.”

  “Oberg,” Byron said. The name was faintly familiar. It called up some sinister echo.

  Wexler sat down among the shadows. He pulled his collar up, as if against a chill only he could feel. “Rumor has it,” Wexler said, “the man is quite insane.”

  2. Byron navigated his rental barque home through the night canals now, past neon-lit dance shacks and constellations of paper lanterns.

  He was mindful of the Angel tattoo on his arm: Wexler had mentioned it. He had spent so much time, he thought, trying to erase it. Not the symbol but the thing, the fact, what he had become in the war.

  What he had told Keller back in Belem was true. He did not want to be a machine; he understood that he had become a machine; he understood that the road back into the world was treacherous and painful. Teresa was his road. All he had ever wanted was a life with her. That would be enough. But if not that, then at least the scars of humanity: the pain of a commitment he could not revoke.

  The question he entertained now, for the first time, was: when is it enough?

  How much pain is proof? How much is too much?

  I could disappear, he thought. I could buy documents and disappear into the mainland. Leave the Floats, leave the dream trade, leave no trail for this Oberg to follow. Make some new life and disappear into it, maybe find a woman who might love me, he thought, and make babies with her. The old tattoo had pretty much faded. A sleeve was enough to cover it.

  It was an intoxicating thought, but also dangerous. He forced it away as he docked the boat. Too much unfinished business. She needed him yet. There was still the possibility he could do something for her.

  The balsa was dark inside. Pushing through the door, he heard a moan from the back bedroom.

  He flicked a wall switch; an antique incandescent bulb radiated sterile and sudden light. “Teresa?” But she only moaned again. The sound might have signified pain or pleasure.

  He pushed through a rag curtain into the back room.

  She was alone on the bed, blinking at the light. Her pupils were massively dilated.

  Byron picked up the small wide-necked bottle from the floor beside the bed. It was three-quarters full of tiny black pills. Enkephalins, he thought. Concentrated, potent. “My Christ,” he whispered.

  Her moan was abstracted pleasure. She was obviously ashamed—in some corner of her mind—that he had found her this way. She averted her face. But the shame could not override the flush of chemical well-being. There were pinpricks of sweat on her forehead.

  Hardly aware of himself, he sat on the bed and cradled her head against him.

  She rolled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was faint, hollow, oceans distant. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  But there was nothing to say. Nothing worth saying.

  He held her, and the boat rose in the swell.

  CHAPTER 19

  Keller contacted Vasquez, the Network producer, and negotiated an infusion of credit into one of his phantom accounts. Vasquez also supplied some temporary documentation and access to the downloading facilities in the Network technical compound. “But make it quick,” Vasquez urged. “I’m under a certain amount of time pressure. Is it good footage?”

  Keller recalled Pau Seco, the mine and the old town, the bars and brothels. He nodded.

  “Good,” Vasquez told him. “You have an appointment with Leiberman.”

  Leiberman, the Network neurosurgeon, plucked out Keller’s memory chip and closed the socket wound with adhesives. In a month there would be no visible scar. “Once again,” Leiberman said loftily, “you are merely human.” He handed Keller the memory in a tiny transparent pillbox, as prosaic in its bed of cotton as a pulled tooth.

  Keller went directly to the Network compound, displayed his new ID to the machine at the gate and claimed an editing booth. The technical compound sprawled over a vast expanse of desert west of Barstow, bunkers and Quonsets and a string of satellite bowls solemnly regarding the southern sky. There was a floating staff of Network engineers, but most of the people here were independent contractors—by his ID Keller was one of these—sharing time on the Network mainframes.

  The booth was private, a small room crowded with monitors and mixers. Keller plugged his memory into a machine socket, named it and gave it an access code. He pulled the keyboard into his lap and put his feet up on the mixer.

  Time, he tapped.

  Forty-one days, the monitor said, twenty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds since the memory was activated. He registered a faint surprise: it had seemed like more.

  He instructed the edit program to install index marks at every twenty-four hour point—day marks—and then divide them into hours. “Laying ordinance,” it was called. He installed special index points at Day Seven (Arrival, Rio), Day Fifteen (Arrival, Pau Seco), and Day Twenty-five (Arrival, Belem). Further index points could be installed as necessary; these were the basics, a kind of crude map. Now he could call up a day or an hour and retrieve it at once, enter it into the mainframe memory as part of the ROM package he would eventually hand Vasquez.

  Protection first, however. He called up the Identity Protect subroutine, then scanned through Day Two until he arrived at a full-body image of Byron Ostler.

  The central thirty-inch monitor showed Byron in front of his huge, ramshackle balsa deep in the Floats. Keller stilled the image, zoomed on the face, keyed Alter. The face was replaced abruptly with its own ghost image in topographic lines against limbo, glowing amber.

  Keller used a light pencil to push the lines around.

  Cheekbones up, a narrower chin. He rotated the image and similarly altered the profile. He called up flesh again and there was Byron standing by his float once more, but it was not Byron any longer; the face was not even faintly familiar. It was some older, heavyset, hawkish man. A generic face, neither good nor evil, Retain, Keller typed. The authentic image would never appear in the finished edits. Next he called up Teresa.

  This was more painful. The sight of her stirred old feelings in him, a longing he labored to suppress. She moved across the monitor, regarding him.

  I can’t see making this trip with somebody I don’t trust… intuition is all I have right now, you understand?

  Her voice filled the booth. A sixteen-bit recreation of the trace he had laid down on this chip. She peered out from the monitor into, it seemed, his eyes. Convulsively, he called up Alter.

  She became a matrix of lines, an artifact of geography.

  Better that way.

  Sweating now, he changed the lines with his light pencil. Moving with professional instinct, he flattened the mouth, rounded th
e nose, shortened the hair. He worked by rote, eyes narrowed. Wu-nien. It was a question of not caring.

  He performed similar alterations on Ng and Meireilles, who might still be vulnerable—he was conscientious about protecting his sources—then paged ahead to the most significant footage, the footage Vasquez wanted, the Pau Seco footage.

  Day Sixteen. The frame shook as he stepped out of Ng’s Truck, Hold Frame Pan, he typed, and played it back. Now the motion was smooth, effortless. The image flickered as he blinked away dust. Keller keyed out Hold Correct; the dropouts vanished. Beginning to look like video now. The perspective moved up to the lip of the mine, peered into its depths, began a slow pan. Audio, he typed.

  The sound came up instantly. Clatter of ancient tools. Human voices ringing off distant cliffs. Abyss of time. Formigas moving in insect lines up those clay steppes and rope ladders: it might have been yesterday or today or tomorrow. Keller reached for a fader, but his hand struck the volume slide instead. The clangor of voices and tools was suddenly deafening, a roaring in the booth. He blinked at the monitor and for one giddy instant believed he had actually entered the past, transported himself somehow back to Pau Seco, that he might turn and find Teresa beside him. He slapped the Enter key.

  The playback ceased. The booth filled up with silence.

  When he could not bear the work any longer, he signed out and drove west. He had used a portion of the advance from Vasquez to rent a hotel room, but he didn’t head directly back. He drove west along a high, fast traffic artery until he hit the coastline, and then he turned north. On his left the Floats sprawled out to the distant gray line of the tidal dam. He drove through colonies and outposts of the cityplex, malltowns and industrial parks. He had gone miles before he understood where he was going.

  Bad idea, he thought. It was a bad impulse that had brought him here: Angel sin. But he pulled off the highway when he spotted the sign.

  Arts by the Sea. She had mentioned the name once, long ago.