Текст книги "Memory Wire"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

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Memory Wire
by Robert Charles Wilson

PART 1
BURIED HISTORY

CHAPTER 1

1. Because of the monomolecular wires twined deep into his cerebral cortex, Raymond Keller’s memories often announced themselves as scents. He would smell dust and concrete and think, seconds later, of the water-rationed conduit suburb in which he had spent his childhood. Gasoline, he would think, and be back in his father’s oily garage, chain-lifting an antique internal combustion engine.

Tonight—standing in the kitchen of his Los Angeles apartment with a glass of water in his hand—he smelled the hot granular earth of a manioc field in Brazil, and knew the memory would be a bad one.

He put aside the glass with a deliberate motion and moved to the translucent outer wall of the living room. The sky beyond it was dark and starless; across the long bow of the harbor, the scattered lights of the boat barrios flickered.

The memory trick was one side effect of his Angel wiring. There were others, mostly minor. He had grown accustomed to it, or so he told himself. The biosynthetic wires grown under his skull were microscopic and immunosuppressive; in terms of tissue displacement or body weight, they hardly existed. But, Keller thought moodily, the body knows. Leiberman, the Network M.D., had told him so. “The imperial flesh,” Leiberman had said. “Poke it, it responds.”

He closed his eyes and sighed.

In the flickering retinal darkness, bright lines of tracer fire stitched out.

Helpless, he watched Megan Lindsey die one more time.

Keller was periodically employed as a Recording Angel by the news and documentary arm of the largest satellite video network operating out of the western United States. In the course of his work he had sold burned-out krytrons in the Oslo weapons market, he had endured the terrors of the joychip underground. But he knew what he guessed most Angels knew: the real terrors are internal.

Wu-nien, he told himself. No-thought. In the silence of his apartment, the memory fading—after midnight now —he practiced the lonely rigors of Angel discipline.

When he had achieved a measure of calm, he emptied the card windows of his wallet and placed the plastic rectangles side by side on the slab of smoked glass that was the surface of his coffee table.

Pacific Credit Exchange, the Military Registrar, California DMV. A handful more. Some of them featured his photo in two or three dimensions: a man in his mid-thirties frowning out from the photographs with an expression Megan had once described as “the blessed innocence of failed comprehension.” He wore nonprescription eyeglasses and his hair was cut back to stubble. The name embossed or printed on each card was Grossman, William Francis.

The cards were insubstantial, Keller thought: soap bubbles. A year ago they had meant a good deal to him. They had represented a new life, a new identity, yet another chance to outrun the juggernaut of his past. When the Network issued him the ID, part payment for his dangerous and prolonged penetration of the joychip covens, Keller had in effect invented William Grossman: a mild, inoffensive man with modest pleasures and no ambitions. He had created a past for him—parents, a school, lovers. He had coached himself in this artificial history until he was convinced he could in some sense become William Francis Grossman, and for months it seemed to work. He told the Network he didn’t work for them anymore.

For a time it seemed as if he had found a way back into the world.

But lately, gazing out the walls of Grossman’s luxury apartment at the coastline stretching north to the Santa Monicas, he had felt the old fears creeping back. And now—terrible memories still flickering in the lights of the tidal barrios—he knew it was the end of Grossman.

He stacked the cards carefully, picked them up, fanned them out. They were artificial and a cheat.

Tomorrow, he thought, I will burn them.

He would go back to the Network. He would light up the wires in his head. He would be an Angel again.

2. In the morning Keller traveled to the Network building in the city core and met his contact there, an independent producer named Vasquez. Vasquez sat in a large private office with polarized windows and vertical blinds, and the angle of vision the windows allowed was intentionally oblique, so that one saw only the blueness of the ocean and not the shabby patchwork of the Floats.

Vasquez regarded him with a mild curiosity and said, “I thought you didn’t do this anymore.”

The work Keller did was sublegal, his contacts with the Network strictly sub rosa. He worked without contract, and so he was, to a degree, at the mercy of Vasquez. But he was also good at his work; he knew it; Vasquez knew it. “I changed my mind,” he said.

Keller outlined the proposition his friend Byron Ostler had made him a couple of weeks ago.

The Network executive nodded. At first, as Keller spoke, Vasquez seemed excited; then a patina of concern came across his face. “What you’re proposing,” he said, “would be dangerous.”

Keller admitted it would be.

“Maybe more dangerous than you think,” Vasquez persisted. “Not everybody can be bought off. There are too many competing interests. The military, the government, the Brazilians—”

“I appreciate that. I can handle it.” Keller sat forward in his chair. “No one has footage like this. You know how valuable it would be.”

They talked a while longer. As Vasquez relented, his excitement crept back. Keller had known it would: Vasquez was already embarked on an investigation of the oneirolith trade and the deal was too tempting to refuse. Keller held out for a little more money than he ordinarily received; Vasquez agreed easily.

He was committed now. No pulling out. The idea was faintly but suddenly disturbing.

Vasquez withdrew a notepad from his desk, scribbled on it, lifted the sheet of paper and handed it across the desk. “Give this to Leiberman. Go this afternoon. He’ll make time for you. I’ll arrange it.”

Keller nodded.

The appointment with Leiberman was for three. At lunch Keller met Byron Ostler at a waterfront cafe down the coast highway, a high patio overlooking the boat barrios, barcos viviendas in Gypsy colors sprawling between the mainland and the distant tidal dam. Byron was alone, waiting. But he would have been impossible to miss even in a crowded room. His thick archaic eyeglasses, round as coins, sat on his pinched face like a challenge or a rebuke. His hair fell down over his shoulders in white cascades. He wore an old khaki jacket threadbare at the collar and loose around his narrow throat. He looked, Keller thought with some amusement, like a painting by El Greco of a consumptive jockey.

“Ray,” Byron said, and the smile widened fractionally.

“I’m still Grossman,” Keller said. “Oh?”

“For a few hours.” He pulled up a chair. “So it’s on? You’re making the trip?”

“Looks that way,” Keller said. Byron chuckled softly.

Keller ordered a sandwich from the bored day waitress. “Something’s funny?”

“You,” Byron said. “Me. That there’s two of us crazy enough to go back.”

“You said it was arranged. You said—”

“I know. It is. Safe passage guaranteed. Still… there’s this irony in it.”

Byron had a right to talk. Byron had been there. Byron had been Keller’s platoon Angel all those years ago; he would show you—if he was in the mood—the pale blue Eye tattoo on his skinny forearm, washed over with blond hair now, fading but intact.

Keller, after the war, had had his own tattoo removed. Leiberman had performed the skin graft. It was a good job: only a rigorous microscan would reveal the seams. Byron was a ’lith chemist long since gone underground out in the Floats; he could afford to keep his Eye insignia. Keller, a private Angel, could not.

Both of us outlaws, Keller thought. But so different.

“It’s only a place,” Keller said.

“The Basin,” Byron said. “The River—Rio Mar, the River Sea. The Amazon, Ray. Heart of Weirdness.”

Keller smiled steadily. “Bullshit.”

“You plugged in yet?”

“Not for a couple of hours.”

“So… your last meal as a human being.”

The waitress brought his sandwich, and Keller looked at it without enthusiasm. “Is that how you think of it?”

“I did your job once.”

“Yours is better?” He shrugged.

“Drug pusher,” Keller said. “Not exactly.”

Keller ate, and Byron continued to grin until Keller began to find the grin an irritation, a kind of insult. It is bullshit, he thought suddenly—the grin, the swagger, the faded khaki; all of it, all hype.

“Don’t repress,” Byron said. “Tell me what you’re gritting your teeth about.”

Because he was irritated, and because the friendship was old enough and sturdy enough, he did so.

“Maybe,” Byron conceded. “Maybe I’m a fake. You include yourself in that, Ray? The walking eye? The man who had his humanity shot off in the war?”

Keller winced. “I include myself,” he said.

“But of course. Objectivity—yes? How could you not include yourself?”

“At least you don’t deny it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Byron said. “But you’re wrong, you know, if you believe that about Teresa.”

“I haven’t met Teresa.”

“It’s for her sake. All this is for her sake.”

Keller put his card in the table slot and stood up.

“Think about it,” Byron said, lost now in some thought of his own. “Everything moves in circles. The Wheel, Ray. Everything returns.”

3. Leiberman’s office was a shabbily genteel building in the Hollywood Hills, pastel stucco and a discreet sign: it could be mistaken for an abortion clinic. It was, of course, much more than that. Leiberman was the Network’s neurotechnician of last resort: implanting vapid actors with digital prompters to whisper their dialogue to them; boosting their stage presence or neutralizing their stage fright with his pharmacopoeia of narrow-gauge psychochemicals; sometimes installing AV blanks for Angels like Keller… performing any medical work that must not suffer the scrutiny of the legal guard dogs. In Leiberman’s office no real records were kept; no names, no credit lines, no phone numbers.

Inside, Leiberman’s secretary smiled at him. He handed her the note, his passport. Her eyes glittered icily. “Go on in,” she said.

The inner office was Leiberman’s workroom, a glass-and-chromium chamber, surgical instruments dangling on coiled wires from the ceiling. Leiberman greeted him and ushered him to a chair. Leiberman was plump, bald, grossly physical; his surgical smock was tight across his belly. “This shouldn’t take long,” he said. “Remove your shirt. Sit.”

The access socket was embedded between Keller’s shoulders next to the spine, a couple of millimeters under the derma. “Army workmanship,” Leiberman clucked, exposing and sponging that bit of metal; but it was only professional rhetoric: the socket did its job. On his first visit, Leiberman had run a deep neurological scan and admitted that the actual wirework was excellent: biosynthetic tendrils much thinner than hairs sampling Keller’s visual cortex, his auditory ganglia. He had never needed upgrading or repair. Leiberman’s job was to seal and unseal the skin, keep the socket sterile, and install a passive AV memory to store Keller’s data.

“Fine new ones these days,” Leiberman said. He removed the AV memory from a sterile perspex pack. It was smaller than Keller remembered, a snowflake between the prongs of Leiberman’s tweezers. “You can get up to two years continuous realtime on one of these—audio and video. And it’s sturdier into the bargain. New materials. Well, you know.”

Keller sat with his head immobilized in a skull clamp while Leiberman worked. Installing the memory, the testing of it, sent little back-EMF blips surging into Keller’s brain. His visual cortex lit up: impossible mandalas blossomed and flared on his eyelids. The subdued anger that had been riding him since lunch began abruptly to fade. Surrendering to the process, he thought, that was what it was all about. It was surrender that had saved him. In this cool ice envelope, Camera Eye, Recording Angel, he was preserved from the ravages of real memory.

He relaxed and watched the misfiring of his visual ganglia, cascades of blue electric fire. The vision consumed all of Keller’s attention until Leiberman withdrew his tools and the surgical studio snapped back into focus.

“You’re fixed,” Leiberman said.

He was. He felt it. Nothing specific, simply an aura of heightened awareness that was not even physiological: only the knowledge that he was an Angel again, that everything he saw and heard was being quietly recorded on the molecular memory Leiberman had installed.

He turned to look at the neurosurgeon, and it was a different motion now, a pan-and-sweep, coolly professional.

Leiberman frowned. “Don’t stare,” he said. “It’s impolite.”

4. Keller’s neural harness had been installed at an Army staging base in Santarem during the long Brazilian conflict. Keller had been shipped in from frontline action along the contested highway BR-364 in Rondonia, in a condition the military doctors called “emotional dysfunction.” He had surprised them by asking for Angel duty.

Every combat unit had an Angel. It was Army policy. The Angel performed essentially the same role in an infantry platoon that the black box, the flight recorder, performed in the cockpit of a passenger airliner—“box” was one of the politer epithets for a Recording Angel. Byron Ostler, Keller’s own platoon Angel, had explained it to him one time. Because an Angel was in effect the ultimate intelligence unit, carrying an unimpeachable record of combat action, Angels were entitled to certain benefits. They were not obliged to do heavy physical work. In combat they were scrupulously defended by their fellow soldiers. They wore special protective clothing, and other people humped their supplies for them.

They were shunned, of course, socially. But they were also exempt from the hard equations of triage: it was Med Corps policy that Recording Angels received priority medical attention.

If they died, their bodies were recovered.

In all these customs and regulations there was no concern for the individual Angel, only for his neural harness, his AV memory, his ultimate debrief ability… but that was okay, Keller thought. That was just Army.

The hospital at Santarem was a very loose unit. The nurses were civilians, the doctors volunteers. The building was makeshift, an ambling single-story structure electronically sealed against insect traffic. Keller lay in a ward with twenty strangers united by their fear of the impending surgery. They read American paperbacks or looked at the Portuguese sex comics that arrived in box loads from Sao Paulo every Tuesday. They listened to the drone of troop carriers and the white hiss of the air-conditioning; they played cards. One by one they were wheeled away and came back wired.

Keller had known it was dangerous surgery. They all knew. The army did it a dozen times daily in installations like this, but still it was dangerous. It could not be otherwise, messing with your brain like that. The brain, Keller thought, was delicate, fragile. Thread it with those wires and you could lose something. Before he volunteered for Angel duty, Keller had purloined a medical text and checked it out. Theoretically it was simple: the “wires” were living bio-synthetic tissue, designed to grow unobtrusively into the brain, built with tropisms that would carry them deep into the visual cortex. An automatic process. But the book referred also to the symptomology of implant failure, a long and daunting list. Partial or total loss of the visual field; dysphasia, aphasia; disorientation, memory loss; impairment of limbic function; flattening or disturbance of emotional affect. His palms dampened at the thought. Still, he had been deemed suitable for this work and had—it was elective—volunteered.

“It’s hard work,” the medics warned him. “It’s not a free ride. Don’t even think it. If you’re an Angel, there’s an attitude you have to cultivate. Wu-nien. You know what that means, Mr. Keller? It means you’re a machine. You don’t think, you look. You don’t look where you want, you look where it matters. You are a camera, right? You’re not there to do the work. You are the work.”

Keller had understood perfectly. Byron had already taught him a little Angel Zen. To see without desire. The perfect mirror.

“You won’t be Raymond Keller anymore. What you want, what you care about, you have to learn to leave it all behind. You’re a pair of eyes, a pair of ears. That’s all.”

He thought it sounded pretty good.

That night, for the first time in a month, he slept without dreaming. In the morning they wheeled him into surgery.

5. Back in Grossman’s apartment Keller fixed himself a light meal. He needed to drop a few pounds, make himself lean, shed Grossman like a skin. When he had eaten, he gathered up the contents of the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, put them all into two shopping bags, sealed the bags, and carried them down the hallway to the building’s communal annihilator. They vanished into the metal chute in a puff of actinic light. Good-bye, Grossman.

He thought about burning his cards, decided to postpone the ritual. First he would call Lee Anne.

A sex agency had supplied him with Lee Anne. Buying sex on credit had been a novelty for him, but it seemed like something Grossman might do. He had hired Lee Anne on a short-term contract and expanded it to long.

She appeared on the telephone monitor as immaculately groomed as ever. How she managed this daily perfection in response to an impromptu phone call was a mystery to him: some kind of digital enhancement, maybe. She was beautiful in a manner that was rigorously contemporary, her cheekbones suppressed, her face heart-shaped, her eyes blue inside bright orange rays of mascara. She smiled… pleased to see him, or professionally seeming to be.

“I’m going away,” Keller said, already uncomfortable with the Grossman persona, wearing it this last time.

“For how long?”

“Long time,” Keller said. “I have to cancel the contract.”

She was silent a beat. “You should have told me.”

“I’m sorry. There wasn’t time.”

“Well.” She shrugged and smiled. “I wish we could have gone on. It was a good time. The best.”

It was a lie, but so professional that Keller felt a sudden pang of regret. There had been nothing between them but commerce and gestures, but for one terrible moment Keller felt the overwhelming urge to confess, to pull out of his commitment to Vasquez, to tell her how unbearably lonely he had been these past ten years. Worse: he wanted to put his fist through the video screen, touch her somehow through this insect tangle of optics and wire.

The image left him shaking. He forced a smile, registered his regrets, and signed off with his fists clenched at his side.

Wu-nien, Keller thought as he burned the last of the cards.

His Angel basic had comprised a kind of roughshod Zen instruction. Selflessness, fearlessness, focus. His master sergeant had been a Roshi of the Rinzai School. There was talk of the Three Pillars: great faith, great doubt, great perseverance. They were setting aside the mind. Everyone was very solemn. They believed—Keller believed—that it just might be true, that satori might lurk, mysterious enlightenment, among the oxbow lakes and green heron islands of the Amazon.

Wu-nien. He was an Angel. He was Keller once more. It was the ultimate objectivity they had all striven for: wu-nien, wu-hsin, no-mind, no-thought; only seeing, vision apart from judgment, vision without desire. The perfect mirror.

It was like a place, Keller thought; a place without love or loneliness or fear. A calm and brightly illuminated place in which the only memory was AV memory, clean and mutable.

He called it the Ice Palace.

He had come to that place again.

CHAPTER 2

1. From the balcony of her floating balsa, moored deep in the tangle of tidal industries and boat barrios that had grown up where the coast jogs eastward from Santa Barbara, Teresa Rafael watched an old woman approaching across a pontoon foot bridge from the east. She set aside her pencil and thought, A customer.

She switched off the pencil and listened as its insect hum faded to stillness. She was an artist. A decade ago she had begun selling junk sculptures to the seaside galleries up Highway One—pinwheels oxyacetylene-welded to antique crankshafts, pachinko boards of rivets and sheet aluminum. Later, after Byron Ostler introduced her to the dreamstones, she took up softer media. Currently she was working on a crystal painting, a translucent plate less than an inch thick, shaping and shading its laminar depths with a homemade interference pencil. The piece, a landscape, was nearly complete. Green paddies stretched to a hazy horizon. The sky was a chalky shade of blue, and from it a flock of frail gossamer-winged people—a slightly darker blue than the sky—sailed down to a wooden pagoda by an irrigation canal.

It was something she had seen in a stone trance.

She looked up from her work as the door bell—an old cowbell on a twine pulley—sounded. Sighing again, she padded down and opened the door.

The old woman’s face was familiar. “Mrs. Gupta,” Teresa said. She encountered Mrs. Gupta periodically at the fruit and vegetable stalls out along the market canal. The suggestion of familiarity destroyed any hope she’d had of turning the woman away; she said resignedly, “Come in.”

Mrs. Gupta shuffled inside, frail in a faded yellow sari. “I don’t mean to disturb you.” Her voice was faint, her accent bleached by years in the Floats. “It’s just I heard… somebody said you do memories.”

“I do, yes. Sometimes.”

“Would you try? For me?” She peered up at Teresa through magnifying lenses set in wire. “I have money.”

“It’s all right… you don’t have to pay.”

“That’s nice,” Mrs. Gupta said placidly.

They went up to the workshop. Mrs. Gupta gazed enviously at the broad wooden floor, at the tall leaded windows Byron had liberated from a grain terminal out in the old city harbor. A balcony surrounded the second floor, and Teresa had hung spider ferns along the western wing of it; the ferns cooled and filtered the afternoon light. For the Floats her studio represented a luxury of space and air. She had subsidized it with cash from private sales; her artwork had been fashionable these last few seasons.

She could guess a great deal about Mrs. Gupta just by looking at her. A refugee, probably; probably one of the wave of displacees airlifted in from the Madras reactor accident decades ago. Since the unemployment riots of the twenties, the Floats had been in effect a borderless state, haven for refugees of all kinds, a collecting basin for the marginal people who could not survive in the crowded boom cities of the coast. People like Mrs. Gupta, Teresa thought. People like me.

The old woman said, “May I see the stone?”

Teresa brought it out from the drawer of an ancient wicker desk. It was not an original stone but a copy, grown in Byron’s overheated laboratory. Technically, her possession of it was a violation of federal and state law. But in the Floats such laws were seldom observed and almost never enforced.

Mrs. Gupta held it a moment in one arthritic brown hand. The stone had been polished but not faceted; it was an irregular octahedron the size of a grape. The peculiar latticing of its molecules drew the eye inward; the old woman stared. “People say they come from far away.”

“ Brazil,” Teresa said.

“The sky,” Mrs. Gupta said.

“Well, yes. It’s true. The sky.”

The old woman nodded and handed it back. “What should I do?”

“Nothing yet.” Teresa pulled up a chair opposite her. “You want to remember?”

The old woman nodded. Her turtle eyes regarded Teresa gravely. “It’s been a long time. I was married. Before Madras. His name was Jawarhalal. He died in the Event. I do remember—I spend a lot of time remembering. But time passes.” She shrugged. “It gets dim.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Teresa said. “But I can’t promise. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

Teresa closed the stone in her fist.

She did not do this often. It was too much like a parlor trick, too much like something a charlatan might do for money. Word had spread through the Floats that she had the skill, and so once or twice a week, people like Mrs. Gupta would show up at her door. Old people. Help me remember. And so she would rescue some fraction of their lives from the rolling surf of oblivion. Their pleas were heartfelt and often heartbreaking, and Teresa could not bring herself to resist them.

Though of course there was a terrible irony in it. She closed the gem in her left hand and with her right clasped Mrs. Gupta’s dry, ancient fingers. She closed her eyes.

The images erupted at once. They were distinct and colorful, and if it were not for the necessity of describing them to Mrs. Gupta, she might have allowed them to become more real: sights and sounds and odors. “A stony beach.” She envisioned it from a position up the littoral. “There are people in the waves. Children. The stones go up into a sort of wall. Old stone buildings behind it—a temple of some kind.”

She heard the rasp of the old woman’s indrawn breath. “The beach at Mahabalipuram.” Faintly: “We went there, yes…”

She did not see Mrs. Gupta but felt her presence, a hovering sense of self. “You’re there,” she said. “You’re wearing a blue sari. It feels like real silk. Very fine. Your hair is tied back. Wire glasses. And the mark on the forehead, the, uh—”

“Tika.” It was a whisper.

“The wind is off the ocean,” Teresa said. “The sky is clean and clear. It’s not hot. The children are laughing. You have a shawl…”

She could not say where they came from or how she derived them, but she paged through the memories for almost an hour, the beach at Mahabalipuram, the family char-poy, a holiday in New Delhi. It faded at last into a single stark vision of the fractured, blackened dome of the Madras reactor, a soldier wielding the butt of his rifle; she kept the image to herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s all.”

Mrs. Gupta nodded and stood up. She was not visibly moved, but Teresa sensed the old woman’s gratitude.

At the door Mrs. Gupta turned and said, “Is it true what they say about you?”

She stood warily in the foyer. “What do they say about me?”

“That you came out of the fire a dozen years ago. That you don’t remember your childhood.” She nodded slowly. “Yes. It’s true.”

“You can’t do what you did for me—use the stone to remember?”

“No,” Teresa said.

Mrs. Gupta bobbed her head, accepting this strange intelligence. “May I come back? There are other things,” she said, “other times—”

“Come back if you like,” Teresa said. “But I should warn you. I’ll be away for a while.”

She closed the door.

That night she was full of anxiety.

By choice she lived alone. By choice she lived in the Floats. Since her gallery successes, she could have bought ID and moved to the coast, lived fashionably there for a while. But the pontoon city soothed her. It was a barrio bajo—a slum, but it was also el otro barrio—a separate world. In spite of or maybe because of this poverty, the Floats preserved a certain low-rent gentility she inevitably missed when she visited the mainland. The mainland world -changed rapidly and often, and the most successful of its denizens were too often the most voracious—the predators. Here, the presumption of failure served as a great equalizer.

Too, she liked the nearness of the ocean. All this water had been locked in by the huge federal tidal dams, sheltered from the excesses of the sea but exposed to its gentler moods. On rainy days she would walk out along the concrete margins of the seawall and watch the clouds angle in from the western horizon. The ocean talked to her; sometimes– not tonight—it soothed her to sleep.

So why are you leaving?

She lay in bed and groped for an answer.

The journey she was contemplating might be dangerous. She knew that. It would be a vacation, Wexler had told her, much deserved, and only incidentally a courier run. But Byron was more skeptical. They would be entering a realm, he said, in which nations and criminals had long since grown indistinguishable. “Hard money,” Byron had said, “and hard people.” For years the Exotic stones had been the pivot of progress, the world’s single most valuable resource. They had capsized the sovereignty of nations and the supremacy of corporate empires; a protracted war had been waged over them. In this environment, smuggling– even the sort Cruz Wexler had planned—was more than a risky business.

But I have to go, she thought. She felt the pressure. She could not continue doing for people like Mrs. Gupta what she could not do for herself. She had unearthed, these last three years, a nugget of herself, and that was good; but it was insufficient and incomplete.

She was insane to go. In the Floats, because of her artwork and her affinity for the dreamstones, people sometimes called her crazy. “Crazy Teresa,” they said.

They thought it was a joke. But tonight, lying sleepless in her bed, faint moonlight etching out the silhouettes of the spider plants across the floorboards, she wondered if it was.

When she did sleep, she dreamed of the child again.

The child was no older than ten. She was undernourished and ragged, she wore old denims gone at the knees, cheap athletic shoes tied with twine, a bowl haircut. She stood in limbo, somehow spotlit. Her arms and legs were thin. But it was her eyes Teresa would remember.

They were very wide, very old, terribly knowing.

Teresa, in her dream, was trapped by the pressure of those eyes. She wanted to turn away; she could not.

“Find me,” the girl said. “Help me. Find me.”

She woke up sweating. The darkness was expansive. She pulled her angular knees up to her breasts and hugged herself. It was at times like this that she felt most profoundly alone.

“All right,” she said into the darkness.

The balsa rocked silently in the swell. The wind from the sea lifted gauze curtains like wings.

“All right.” It was a whisper. “I’ll do what you want. Just leave me alone.”

2. In the morning Byron came in a motor launch down a crowded market canal with the stranger, the man from the mainland. The stranger’s name was Raymond Keller.