Memory Wire

by Robert Charles Wilson

  It was not the newest or the best of these businesses. Bamboo walls sunk in a cracked concrete foundation, roof of chalky-red Spanish tile. The door rang a bell when he opened it. Inside, a buckled wooden floor supported shelves and display cases of thick protective glass gone gray with time.

  The items on display were, in Keller’s judgment, fairly prosaic Float work. Soapstone carvings, junk collages, a few high-priced crystal paintings under glass. He gazed a while at a stylized trance landscape, bread-loaf hills rolling under an azure sky, treehouses like pagodas clustered in the foreground. Some real place, Keller thought, some Exotic venue wrenched out of time. He was staring at it when the proprietor pushed through a curtain from the rear of the store.

  She was a chunky gray-haired woman in layered pastel skirts, and she regarded Keller across a chasm of suspicion. “Is there something you were especially interested in?”

  “A certain artist,” he said. “I understand you sold some of her work. Her name is Teresa… Teresa Rafael.”

  She looked at him more carefully now, his face and his clothes. “No,” she said finally. “We have nothing.”

  Keller extracted the Pacific Credit gold card Vasquez had obtained for him. In fact his account was strictly limited, but the card itself was impressive. He slid it across the counter; the woman ran her finger over the embedded microchip. “She hasn’t displayed here for years. Her work has appreciated in value. You understand? She has a reputation now. A following.”

  “I understand.”

  The woman licked her lips. “In the back,” she said.

  Keller followed her through the curtain. There were a dozen pieces in this smaller room—all “appreciated,” Keller assumed: it was a commonplace practice for street dealers to hold back the work of a promising newcomer. But he recognized instantly which of it was Teresa’s. “These,” the woman said loftily, “are early pieces.”

  She must have been a girl when she did this, Keller thought. He was impressed. Some of the work was awkward; none of it was naive. A few pieces displayed the obvious skill and muted passion that had made her successful. Mostly they were junk sculptures, assembled out of pipe and copper wire and mechanical oddments scavenged from the old Float factories gutted in the fire; but she had polished and shaped the material until it seemed nearly alive, more liquid than solid.

  “You’re familiar with the work?”

  “No… not really.”

  Under the woman’s alarmed stare he picked up a small piece of sculpture and examined it. The metallic tangle resolved into the image of a face. No—two faces. He rotated the piece in his hand.

  A woman’s face, gaunt but curiously childlike in its sadness.

  . And a child’s face, with an adult’s expression of fierce resolve.

  The proprietor took it from him. Keller was startled; he restrained an impulse to take it back. She named a sum, and it was approximately the money Vasquez had entered into Keller’s account, minus living expenses. A huge amount. But he agreed without haggling.

  He drove home with the piece beside him in the car, confused and faintly shocked at himself. He was like a sleepwalker, acting out some dream. He knew only that he wanted something from this knot of metal, something tangible; a piece of her, he thought, a relic, or that forbidden and finally dangerous thing—a memory.

  In the morning he went back to the Network technical compound and called up yesterday’s work on the monitor.

  The sight of it shocked him. He sat back in the cloistered silence of the editing booth and stared.

  He had altered Teresa’s features to protect her anonymity. Standard procedure, and he had worked by rote. Successfully. It didn’t look like Teresa anymore.

  But the face he had given her was Megan Lindsey’s.

  CHAPTER 20

  Stephen Oberg had stepped outside the bounds of propriety -often since the debacle at Pau Seco, but he did not feel authentically like an outlaw until the day he rented a cheap balsa in the Floats.

  It was an outlaw place; he was an outlaw in it. The faces he saw along the market canals were furtive, obscure, hidden. He imagined he looked the same. A shadow-thing now, outside the bright thoroughfares of law and custom. The only light here was the beacon of his own intense desire; the abyss of the ocean was unnervingly close.

  It worried him a little. The night he moved into the balsa, he rolled out his mattress over the stained wooden floor and wondered whether he might have gone too far. He had always depended on an external structure for discipline, for rules. The Army, in an important way, had made him what he was. They had named him. Potent magic. He was a Latent Aggressive. And it was not a pathology but a talent, a useful quirk of character. He. could be depended upon for certain acts. He was conscienceless but loyal: it was a loyalty that had never faltered.

  Until now. Now he was an outlaw, a loose cannon. He had assumed a task and made it his own, and he could not see beyond it. Without him, the deep-core stone from the Pau Seco mine might be casually reproduced, might spread—and surely that was what its unknowable creators had intended—among the furtive and marginal people of the Floats. And he could not allow that.

  Because he understood, and he was persuaded that he was the only one who understood. He understood the nature of the stone: its alienness, its powers of memory. He had touched Tavitch, and through Tavitch, the stone. And the stone had touched him.

  It was a bad and dangerous thing, a kind of weapon. It eroded the marrow of the soul. It must not be allowed to exist.

  He believed this as fiercely as he had believed anything in his life.

  The force of his belief was its own justification. It comforted him.

  It was a fire to warm him, out here in this wilderness.

  In the morning he placed a call to an Agency bureaucrat back east, a man named Tate. Tate, seeing Oberg’s face in the monitor, did an elaborate double-take. “You!” he said.

  Oberg smiled. “Me.”

  “One minute.”

  Oberg waited while Tate called up a security program, shunting his terminal out of the routine record-and-monitor loops. Tate, a pockmarked man of Oberg’s age, looked harried when he reappeared. “That was a stupid thing to do!”

  “I need your help.”

  “You’re hardly entitled to it. Everybody knows you went rogue back in Brazil. Fucking bad form, Steve.”

  “This isn’t an official call.”

  “We’re not friends.”

  “We’re old friends,” Oberg said. “The hell we are.”

  But it was true. If not friends, then at least something like it: comrades, colleagues. Tate had been a point man for Oberg’s platoon.

  It was not something that drew them together; they had seen each other only a handful of times since the war. But they had parallel careers; and there was that unspoken bond, Oberg thought, the tug of old loyalties. He said, “I want whatever you have on the three Americans. I assume you processed the files from SUDAM. There must have been something.”

  “That has nothing to do with me.”

  “You have clearances.”

  “I’m not your dog. I don’t fetch when you say fetch.” He looked pained. “This is not your business anymore.”

  “As a favor,” Oberg said.

  “As far as I know,” Tate said, “there’s nothing substantive. A couple of Floaters, no extant ID except what they bought. You know all this.”

  “There’s the third man.”

  “Keller. Well, we have the name. But this all went into limbo when you turned up AWOL. Are you listening? Steve: nobody cares.”

  “Check it out for me,” Oberg said. “Please.”

  “Give me a number where you are. I’ll call you back.”

  “I’ll call you,” Oberg said, and cleared the monitor.

  For a couple of days he explored the neighborhood.

  It was a seedy area south of the fac
tory district, close to the urban mainland. Most of the people here worked mainland jobs during the day. At night the boardwalks lit up with paper lanterns; the bars and dance shacks opened for business. Commerce came the opposite way after dark —venturesome mainlanders shopping for the illicit pleasures of the Floats. These were more legendary than real, Oberg understood. But there were certain things for sale.

  Drugs, for instance. Well, drugs were everywhere. It was a truism that the economy could not function—or at least compete—without the vast array of stimulants, IQ enhancers, and complex neuropeptides for sale on the street or by prescription. Oberg had done time with the DEA and understood that it was a traffic no one really cared to interdict. Most of the field agents he knew were either neurochemically enhanced or skimming money from the trade. Or both. It was called free enterprise.

  But the Floats made dealing a little looser. No government functionaries to take a percentage, although he understood the Filipino and East Indian mobs would sometimes muscle in. Generally, though, it was a loose friends-of-friends distribution network… and that worked in his favor.

  For three nights he frequented a bar called Neptune’s, which catered almost exclusively to mainlanders. He watched the canal traffic, the waitresses, the tidal flow of alcohol over the bar. In particular he watched a lanky, pale teenager who occupied a rear booth—same booth all three nights— and who would periodically step out with one or two customers, through a back door onto a catwalk overlooking a waste canal. The boy was not a hooker; there were others, more sophisticated, handling that trade. But he fit the mainlander’s image of a drug pusher, and Oberg guessed that was an advantage here; it was like a sign, an advertisement. The teenager kept his hands in his oversized jacket, and when he brought them out, Oberg imagined, they would be holding pills, powders, blotters.

  His fourth night in the Floats he approached the boy.

  “I would like to buy drugs,” he said softly.

  The teenager looked at him, amused. “You would like a hat?”

  Oberg showed him the vial he had taken from Teresa’s studio. He shook out the resinous black pill into the palm of his hand and held it so the boy could see it.

  The boy laughed and looked away. “Shit,” he said.

  “I’m serious,” Oberg said.

  “I bet you are.” The teenager tapped his hand nervously against the tabletop.

  Probably he was doing some CNS stimulant himself, Oberg thought, pumping chemical energy out of his neurons. Crash every morning, up every night. It was pathetic, and he resented the boy’s condescension. “I can pay,” Oberg said.

  The boy took a second look. “You prepared to buy in quantity? I don’t sell candy.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Well.”

  The boy led him outside.

  The walkway was narrow and dark. Presumably, it was useful for dumping trash. It overlooked a waste canal, dark water drawn down open conduits to the sea. There was a single sodium-vapor lamp overhead and nothing beyond the canal but the blank stucco wall of an empty warehouse. The sound of music trickled out from the bar through this single door, closed now. The sound was anemic and far.-seeming.

  The boy dug into the deep recesses of his jacket and brought out a sweaty handful of pills. They glistened in the harsh light. They were small and black. “This is all I have,” the boy was saying, bored with the transaction already, “but you come back Tuesday, I might—hey!”

  Oberg swept his fist out and knocked the boy’s hand away. The pills flew up in an arc, twinkled a moment, dropped inaudibly into the canal.

  The boy stared, a little awed. “Son of a bitch!” No one had ever done this to him, Oberg thought. Oberg could have been anyone, a mob enforcer, a new competitor. But the boy had only dealt with mainlanders. He was surprised and confused.

  Oberg waited.

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “You can fucking throw them away if you want to,” he said finally, “but you pay for ’em either way. So pony up, asshole.” He took a knife from under his belt.

  Oberg had anticipated it. He leaned inside the boy’s reach, bent the arm, extracted the knife. He held it against the boy’s throat.

  He felt a pleasure in this that he had not felt for years.

  He understood it was something he enjoyed, the rush of it, something he had missed all this time. An old and profound pleasure. But it was not a thought worth dwelling on.

  Loose cannon, he thought giddily.

  The boy was wide-eyed and pale.

  “Tell me where you got them,” Oberg said.

  The boy said, faintly, “Fuck you!”

  Oberg let the blade draw out a line of blood. The blood was bright and oily in the stark light. He felt the boy twisting against his restraint. “Tell me,” he said.

  It took time, but in the end he extracted four names and four approximate canal addresses. It would be useful, an approach to the woman, especially if Tate failed to produce any useful information. The boy relaxed, sensing that Oberg had what he wanted: the ordeal was over.

  And it was. But not the way the boy expected. Oberg drew the knife deeply across the boy’s throat and in a single motion levered the body over the railing and down into the waste canal. There was a momentary thrashing, a choking sound, silence immediately after.

  It felt good. It was deeply gratifying.

  He used a handkerchief to clean the blade of the knife, and threw the handkerchief after the body.

  The knife he took home.

  The past is dead and gone, he thought. That was the way it should be.

  He had trouble sleeping sometimes. Tonight, for instance. In part it was the adrenaline that had rivered through him at the death of the boy. In part, a more obscure stimulation.

  In his worst dreams he was back in Brazil, back in the war, running what his orders called “punitive raids” on farms and villages where guerillas had been harbored. In the dreams he killed people but they would not stay safely dead: they rose and pointed accusing fingers at him; they protested their innocence. He killed them once, twice, three times. They rose up sullenly and said his name.

  In Virginia he had touched Tavitch when Tavitch was touching the stone; and Tavitch had looked into his eyes and had seen these same dreams. But they were not dreams. That was the terrifying thing. Somehow, through Tavitch, through the Pau Seco stone, it had actually happened. The dead had risen stubbornly; the dead had pronounced his name.

  He lay in the darkness and was haunted by the memory. It was unnatural; it was alien, an alien ruse, a mind trick. The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with.

  With this new thought he achieved ease and finally a sleep as calm as that vast and silent ocean; he did not dream; he woke strengthened in his resolve.

  In the morning he made a second call to Tate.

  “Keller is an Angel,” Tate said. “He’s working for an independent producer name of Vasquez. He’s in L.A. now, probably downloading at the Network compounds.” He regarded Oberg guiltily. “I assume this is what you wanted.”

  “Yes,” Oberg said.

  “You’re crazy, Steve, you know that? You’re fucking nuts.”

  It might be true. It didn’t matter. The monitor blanked, and Oberg stared a long moment at his own reflection in it.

  CHAPTER 21

  1. Byron knew he was losing her. The knowledge was unavoidable.

  He didn’t talk about the pills. They didn’t talk much at all. Talk was superfluous; worse, it might have required lies. He was watching when she tossed her pill bottle into a waste canal, and the act kindled a flare of hope in him. Later he found the pills themselves hoarded in a corner of her dresser; it was only the bottle she had discarded. It was
a gesture he had been meant to see.

  He understood that this was the old Teresa, the Teresa he had found on his doorstep years ago, dying and frightened of dying and wanting to die. The part of her that needed to survive had been silenced—silenced, he guessed, that day in the hotel room off the Ver-o-Peso—and he was helpless to call it back. He could not touch her that way, because she did not love him.

  He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful.

  He ate dinner with her. There was bread in ragged loaves from the bakery stall, a cut of real beef. The meal represented very nearly the last of their money. Teresa ate mechanically; when she was finished she said she was going for a walk. “I’ll go with you,” Byron volunteered. But she shook her head. She wanted to be alone.

  Alone with her pills, he thought. Alone to watch the Floats light up, alone to watch the waves roll in. She closed $ the door behind her, and he was left by himself in the float. A shack with the ticking of the bilge pump and the moan of the floorboards moving in the swell.

  He thought of Keller.

  Keller on the mainland. Keller drifting back into his | Network career, surrendering to the momentum of it.

  Keller, whom she loved.

  Keller, who might have helped her.

  The thought was galling, but he could not resist it.

  He used to feel sorry for Keller. Keller was the thing Byron might have been; victim of, Christ, a catalogue of things: his childhood, the army, his own cowardice. Forgivable sins, Teresa said one time. But now Keller had walked out, and that was inexcusable.

  And here was the irony. Teresa was hurting… and the only thing I can do for her, Byron thought bitterly, is to call up Keller and beg him to come back. Beg him to take her away from me. It was galling. But he thought about the Angel tattoo on his arm and what it meant, and he was on the verge of doing it—getting a message to Keller through Keller’s Network producer, Vasquez—when there was a knock at the door.