Текст книги "Memory Wire"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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He saw the subtle light in Ng’s dark eyes.

“Give him the money,” Ng said.

The white-haired American said, “I don’t see the stone.”

The woman touched the man’s hand: some kind of subtle communication, perhaps a warning. And the tall American watched.

The white-haired man sighed, reached into his pocket, and drew out two slips of paper. One for Ng, one for him. So flimsy! Meirelles thought. It seemed for a moment a stupid exchange—the oneirolith, a solid thing, for this note.

He unfolded it and looked at it long enough to establish that it at least seemed legitimate: a Bradesco bank certificate, the amount in cruzeiros so large that it made his head swim. “All right,” he heard himself say, “yes.”

Ng pocketed his own money and smiled.

Meirelles brought out the oneirolith in its wrapping of dirty oilcloth. The white-haired American eyed it suspiciously. “How do we know it’s what we want?”

But the woman touched his hand again. “It’s what we want.”

She feels it, Meirelles thought. She’s sensitive to it. He watched as she reached for the stone, and he felt the hesitation in her, her respect for it. “Take it,” he said. “Touch it. It won’t affect you through the cloth.” She didn’t understand his Portuguese but seemed to take solace from the tone of his voice.

Ng took Meirelles’s hand and shook it across the table, the bargain completed.

Now, Meirelles thought. If he meant to tell them about the military police, he must say something now. If they left in ignorance, they might walk back to Ng’s home and into the hands of the police.

And if Ng knows, Meirelles thought… will he want the money back?

He felt the bank certificate in his pocket, a warm presence. A ticket back to his wife and child. A ticket out of Pau Seco and a ticket out of Cubatao. A piece of paper containing a better life.

He drew back his hand as Ng stood up. The Americans hovered above him.

“Wait,” he said.

Ng narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”

Meirelles felt the sweat beading on his forehead. He looked into the face of the Vietnamese. It was not the sort of face he was accustomed to. He didn’t know how to read it.

“The police,” he said faintly. “You’ve been betrayed.”

Ng regarded him gravely for a long beat. He bent down with his knuckles on the small wooden table and his gaze was terrible, riveting. Meirelles could not look away. Spare me, he thought inanely.

But Ng only shook his hand a second time.

“Thank you, Roberto,” he said. “Thank you for telling me.”

The three Americans followed him out.

CHAPTER 11

1. Ng described a place down the road and told them to wait there. A truck would come, he said.

“It could be a trap,” Byron said. “He could be selling us out.”

Keller anticipated an angry reaction from the Vietnamese. But Ng only shook his head. “I have my own kind of virtue,” he said. “I stay bought.”

So they hiked down the road that ran from the mines through the old town, sheltered by their clothes and the night and the press of human bodies around them. They avoided the trash fires and walked with their shoulders bent, purposefully but not too fast, alert for police patrols. Beyond the limits of the town they kept to the shadow of the forest wall. A barrel-ribbed dog paced them for a quarter of a mile, loping on three legs; Byron threw a stone to drive it away.

In time they came to the place Ng had described, an opening in the road where a logging trail joined it from the west. Midnight had come and gone and there was very little traffic. Twice, big antique diesel semis roared by on their way to Pau Seco. Once, ominously, a military transport. But mostly the road was empty, the night noises of the forest ringing in the darkness.

Keller had fallen into a standing doze when a van pulled up at the verge of the road, waking him. The sky was faintly brighter now, and he was able to read the word Eletronorte in faint white letters along the rust-scabbed body of the van. The driver waited, his engine idling.

Keller showed himself first, then Byron, and then Teresa. The driver, an Indio with large unblinking eyes, waved them into the back. Keller latched the door behind him and the van jolted forward.

They sat on the empty metal floor with their backs against the bulkhead. Teresa said wearily, “Where’s he taking us?”

Byron shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t go back through Rio. We should stay away from the big cities altogether.”

Teresa held the wrapped oneirolith in her hands, steepled delicately between her fingers. “At least,” she said, “we got what we came for.”

“You did,” Byron said. “And I guess Ray did. Pretty good footage, right, Ray? Damn nice footage.”

Keller said nothing. Teresa was leaning against him now, her eyes closing. Keller put his arm out to steady her, and the truck carried them down the night roads, away from Pau Seco.

He drifted on the edge of sleep for a time, conscious of her warmth and of the weight of her against him as the Eletronorte van rattled into the dawn. The driver glanced back occasionally but did not speak, the expression on his face faintly puzzled, as if he were trying to make sense of this new and mysterious cargo. At last, when the light filtering back from the cab woke him, Keller managed a smile. “Thank you for the ride,” he said hoarsely.

The driver shook his head. “Ela e muito gentil.” He gestured at Teresa. “Pretty girl.”

Very pretty, Keller thought innocently.

“Your girl? Your wife?”

“No.” Not quite that. But he closed his arm around her protectively, and she moved against him in her sleep.

“Your girl,” the driver said toothily, and turned his attention back to the road.

And Keller recognized—a moment of insight as penetrating as the sunlight—that it was true, he was falling in love with her… maybe had already fallen in love with her.

It put him in a bad position.

Adhyasa, Keller thought. He was supposed to be a machine, and machines are supposed to be indifferent: you can’t suborn a machine. A machine in love might be tempted to look away.

And yet… He sat in the back of the jolting truck with her body pressed against him and wanted her more than he had wanted anything for years. The wanting itself was a new thing, and it ran through him like a tide. A part of him welcomed it: this thawing of ancient tundra. But he knew the risks. Stray too far from the Ice Palace and he would be stripped, vulnerable. Outside the Palace, all manner of things waited.

Old pain. Memories. Things seen.

And yet…

“Here,” the driver said suddenly. The truck slowed. Keller bounced back against the metalwork; Teresa moaned and stirred. “Avie-se! Please hurry now.”

And then they were alone again, blinking at the sunlight in a dry junction town called Sinop.

They had bank certificates and cruzeiro notes; enough, Byron said, to get them out of the country. They should find a room and in the morning strike out along the eastern highway to Barreira or maybe Campo Alegre. He knew people in Belem ; from Belem he could arrange a flight out of the country.

They found a cheap room by nightfall. Byron went out with a fistful of coins: he wanted to make some calls, he said, “but not from here.” And maybe get drunk. He looked at Keller, at Teresa. Maybe definitely get drunk.

The door sighed closed after him.

Teresa pulled the drapes and switched off the lights. The room was dark as a cavern now, the roar of traffic from the main street loud in the darkness. She climbed onto the cheap sprung mattress where Keller was lying and curled against him. She was wearing the clothes she had worn from Pau Seco, and he could smell the oil from the truck and the pungency of her sweat. After a moment he realized she was shaking.

“Scared?” he said.

She rolled over and nodded into his chest. “We’re in over our heads, aren’t we? That’s what all this means. We’re in way over our heads.”

It was true, of course. Wexler had promised her an easy trip—“a vacation.” But the huge military presence at Pau Seco and the palpable fear in the eyes of Meirelles demonstrated that the project had gone a long way beyond that. Someone had taken an interest in them. The federal agencies, Keller guessed. Wexler must have been harboring an informant at his estate in Carmel. Or Wexler was the informant, or had confessed under interrogation. It didn’t matter which. What mattered was that someone had taken an interest in them—someone powerful.

Because he could not think of anything reassuring to say, he soothed her with his hands.

“You’re an Angel,” she said sleepily.

He nodded in the dark.

“Everything goes into memory?”

“What I see. What I hear.”

“Even this?”

He admitted, “Even this.”

“Who sees it?”

“Maybe nobody.”

“Who turns it into video?”

“I do,” Keller said. “I do my own downloading at the Network shops.”

“Would you download this?”

This conversation, he thought she meant; or more broadly, what had begun to happen between them. He hesitated. “No,” he said finally.

She traced the contour of his skull with her fingers. “You have wires in there.”

He nodded.

“They say it affects you.”

“It can.”

“Does it?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Memory plays tricks.” He looked into the darkness. “Just before they installed the harness, back in the military hospital at Santarem, I lifted a text out of the medical library. There was a list of side effects, what could happen if things went wrong. Blindness, amnesia, disturbance of affect—”

“Affect?”

“Emotional affect.” He smiled, although of course in the darkness she could not see. “Love, hate.”

“You have that?”

“I don’t know.” The question made him uncomfortable. “Sometimes I wonder.”

There was no way to tell her what this really meant. No way to condense the experience. He had emerged from the military hospital into a world of complex uncertainties. It was not the brain the wires had invaded; it was the essence, the self. Every perception became suspect, every emotion a potential symptom. So you learn,, Keller thought: you practise wu-nien very carefully… you become, in some fundamental way, a machine.

It was, he wanted to say, a strange combination of clarity and confusion. Like those nights when the fog comes in so thick you might as well be blind, but sound carries with great intimacy over startling distances. You can’t see your feet, but a buoy clanging out in the bay comes to you with that high, sad tonality all intact. He was able to register the distant bell-ringing of events, commerce, politics. He was good at it. But the fog concealed love. The fog concealed hate.

“It must be strange.” She was calmer now, drifting into sleep, nuzzled against him.

“It is.” But he was not certain she heard him. Her breathing grew deeper until she was limp in his arms. “It is.” He addressed the dark and silent room. “It is.”

They bused into the northern province of Para and stayed a night in Campo Alegre, on the Araguaia River. It was an old cattle town surrounded by corporate ranches; the accommodations were crude, the smell of the slaughterhouse reminded Keller unpleasantly of Cuiaba. They checked into a twentieth-century hotel occupied by the morose agents of foreign meat wholesalers, and surprised the clerk by paying cash. Cash was bad, Byron said, cash was conspicuous; but until they could arrange some black-market credit, cash was also a necessity.

Teresa invested in less obviously American clothes and a canvas bag in which to conceal the oneirolith. Keller had watched the way she carried the stone, the exaggerated care, her obvious desire clashing with her fear. What she wanted from it, he understood, was memory, and that struck him as dangerously naive—the idea that memory would dole out meaning into her life. Memory as buried treasure.

He knew all about memory. Memory, he thought, isn’t the treasure; the treasure is forgetting. But where was the stone, the drug or the pill or the powder, with that magic in it?

Teresa stepped into the room’s tiny shower stall and left Keller alone with Byron. Byron had been staring out the window, a view of the swollen Araguaia. Now, with the hiss of the shower filling the room, he turned suddenly to Keller and said, “I know what’s going on.”

Keller stared at him.

“It’s hardly a secret,” he said. “Christ, Ray. I’m not deaf. I’m not blind.” He straightened his shoulders, and the gesture had a pained and immense dignity in it. “It’s not hard to understand. And I don’t necessarily disapprove. If it’s good for her, all right. If you’re not using her. But the thing is, I don’t want her hurt.” Keller said, “Look, I—”

“You think this is easy for me?” He turned away convulsively. “I was like you. You remember? I know how it is. I had good Angel habits. I was dedicated. I did my job. And then I came back from the war, I had my wires stripped. You make these gestures. You think okay, well, that’s it, I’m back in the world now. But it’s not that easy. You carry a lot around with you. It’s not a physical thing. If you really want to be back in the world, you have to reach out for it, take hold of it. You have to care for something.” He drew in a deep breath. “I cared for her. It wasn’t an infatuation. More than that. More than that. Maybe it was love. Maybe it still is. She was my ticket back into the world, Ray. People find out you were an Angel, you know, they act strange. Like you’re some kind of zombie—the walking dead. Maybe I let people think that, or maybe I even encouraged it a little bit. It’s not so bad sometimes, being on the outside. But I did not want it to be true. You understand? I wouldn’t let it be true. And she was my way of proving it wasn’t true. I cared about her enough to save her life; I cared about her enough to come down here with her. I know how she feels about me. The sentiment is not mutual. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I cared and that I continued to care even when she slept with other men, and that I care now, when she is obviously falling in love with you. Because it’s the caring, the caring is what matters.” His fists were clenched; he faced the window. “Now,” he said, “maybe that’s hard for you to grasp. You’re still wired, you’re still deep in the Ice Palace, even though you probably think you’re not. You can look at her from that safe high place, you can allow yourself the luxury of falling a little bit in love. How fucking brave. But my wires are gone, Ray. It makes a difference. I’m not a machine anymore. I’m a human being or I’m nothing. A broken machine. So I care for her. And if she loves me, that’s good, that’s best of all, but even if she doesn’t, even if it hurts, as long as I care enough to let it hurt, then that’s good, too, because it means I’m really back from the war, that I’m here in the world, still breathing—” He rammed his fist against the arm of his chair. “Still flesh and blood.” Keller could only stare.

Byron shook his head. “It’s hard talking to you sometimes.”

They heard the shower switch off. Water dripped hollowly in the stall. Teresa was humming some tune in a minor key.

“Don’t hurt her,” Byron said softly. “That’s all I ask.”

2. And so they came to Belem, an international port at the broad mouth of the Amazon, where Byron knew an expatriate American who might be able to find them passage out of Brazil, and where Keller made love to Teresa for the first time.

They booked a room much like the rooms they had booked at Sinop or Campo Alegre, this one in a corniced brick building overlooking a fish market called the Ver-o-Peso. Byron spent a lot of time at the docks trying to contact his Army buddy, and for several afternoons Keller was alone with her in the room.

They made love with the curtains drawn. A rainfall began and the traffic along the Ver-o-Peso made soft rushing noises. He moved against her silently; she cried out once in the dimness of the room, as if the act had shaken loose some shard of memory inside her.

It was a long time since Keller had made love to a woman he cared about, and he was distantly aware of bonds loosening inside him, a sense of derelict synapses lighting up. He imagined the Angel wiring in his head as a road map, abandoned neural jungles shot through suddenly with ghostly glowing. It was a kind of sin, he thought, but he gave himself over to it helplessly, to loving her and making love to her. He knew that he would not download any of this from his AV memory, and because of that it seemed as if the act had only the most nebulous kind of existence: it existed between them, in his memory and in hers; flesh memory, he thought, volatile and untrustworthy. But he would cherish it. Adhyasa, Angel sin, but he would hold it tight inside him.

Afterward they were together in the silence.

The rain had raised the humidity, and her skin felt feverish against him. Her eyes were squeezed shut now. The pressure of the last few days, he thought, the trip from Pau Seco. But not just that. He said, “It’s not only the Agencies you’re afraid of.”

She shook her head.

“The stone?”

“It’s strange,” she said. “You want something so much for such a long time, and then… you’re holding it in your hands, and you-think, what is this? What does it have to do with me?” She sat up amidst the tangled sheets.

“Maybe,” he said, “you don’t need it.”

Her hair spilled over her shoulders and across Keller’s face. “I do, though. I have dreams…” The thought trailed away.

Rain rattled against the casements of the ancient windows. She stood and looked across the room at the bag where the oneirolith was concealed. Keller was suddenly frightened for her. No telling what the stone might contain. “Give it time,” he said. “If we get back to the Floats, if everything calms down—”

“No,” she said, resolute now in the darkness. “No, Ray. I don’t want to wait.”

CHAPTER 12

1. The Brazilians held Ng in custody three days before Oberg was informed. He heard about it in an offhand remark from one of Major Andreazza’s junior peacekeepers and stormed off to confront Andreazza in his office. “You should have told me,” he said.

Andreazza allowed his gaze to wander about the room until it came to rest, laconically, on Oberg. He registered a mild surprise. “Told you about what?”

“About Ng.” My Christ, Oberg thought.

“The Vietnamese,” Andreazza said, “has been detained.”

“I know. I know he’s been detained. I want to interrogate him.”

“He’s being interrogated now, Mr. Oberg.”

“Being butchered, you mean? What’s the matter, have you beaten him to death already?”

There was a barely perceptible hardening about Andreazza’s features; he regarded Oberg icily. “I don’t think you’re in a position to criticize.”

“The thing is,” Oberg said, returning the look, “I am.”

“I’ve spoken to SUDAM. And I’ve spoken to my superiors. As far as any of us are concerned, your role here is strictly advisory. And I would advise you to keep that in mind when you address me… assuming you want any cooperation at all.”

Oberg fought down a response. What this means, he thought grimly, is that they’ve fucked up. The stone is gone, the Americans are gone. They had Ng. But Ng was a consolation prize at best.

He experienced a brief flurry of contempt for Andreazza and his soldiers, for the swarming anarchy of Pau Seco. It had astonished him at first, the primitiveness of this place. It was an accident of history, of course, the consequence of a series of diplomatic compromises that had concluded the shooting war in Brazil. But, he thought with some desperation, they don’t know. They didn’t know how important all this had become. SUDAM didn’t know and the civilian government didn’t know or care, and he wondered whether even the Agencies really understood what their own research had uncovered.

But Oberg knew. He had experienced it. He understood.

The burden of this interdiction had fallen to him. And it was not finished yet. Maybe Andreazza had screwed up. But there was still time.

“I’m sorry,” he said carefully. “If I offended you, then I apologize for that. It’s just that I would very much like to see this man Ng.”

Andreazza allowed himself a narrow smile. “Maybe I can arrange it. If you’d like to wait?”

And so the seconds ticked by. Seconds, Oberg thought, minutes, hours… days. While the contagion threatened to spread.

2. Ng was in a dazed condition when they took him to see the Agency man, Stephen Oberg.

He was dazed because the military interrogators had been at him. They had intercepted him when he tried to run a blockade down one of the logging roads east of Pau Seco, and they had brought him back here, to the cinderblock building that served as a jail. They put him in a cell that was too hot in the daylight and too cold at night, and for two consecutive afternoons they tortured him.

The torture was pedestrian. It was not what they did that frightened him so much as their clumsiness at it. There was a plastic bag they put over his head to suffocate him, and he was worried that they might be too stupid or inexperienced to know when to take it off. Altogether, it was archaic. They played good-guy bad-guy with him. There was a tall sertao Indian in a disheveled military uniform who spoke sympathetically to him between torture sessions and promised him leniency—“I won’t let these bastards touch you”—but only, of course, if Ng would detail his involvement in the theft of the oneirolith. Ng was careful to seem tempted by this offer, in order to prolong the respite from the pain. But he never confessed.

The next day they tied his wrists and ankles to a two-by-four which they hauled up on a rope to the ceiling beams, and then they struck him with broom handles until he was spinning sickeningly and in great pain. He vomited once, and they beat him harder for it. After a time he passed out. Still he did not confess.

During the coldest passage of the night, when he could not sleep for the pain of his injuries, he wondered why this was. Why not confess? It was hardly a matter of principle. It was theft, he thought, not revolution. He was not a partisan, nor was he a martyr. He had no desire to be a martyr.

Still he resisted. In part it was his constitution—literally, the way he was made. He was a creche soldier. His body was good at the chemistry of aggression and not very good at the chemistry of fear. So he was not afraid, and the pain, although it was terrible, was endurable in the absence of fear. Death frightened him—he was at least that human—but he knew he would be killed whether he confessed or not, and so confession was only useful as a way of abbreviating the pain. He would reach that point, certainly. But not yet.

Too, there was a part of him that didn’t belong to the military creches at Danang, a willfulness for which he had often been chastened. It’s the risk you take, a Khmer geneticist once told him, with this kind of chemical tampering. Aggression bordered on rebellion. He was headstrong. They had told him so at Danang. They had beaten him for it.

He had performed loyally in the Pacific Rim offensives, and he had killed a lot of posseiros, and he could not honestly say it was a moral revulsion that had drawn him away from the military after the war. Maybe that, too, in part. But he guessed his moral sensibilities were as poorly developed as his capacity for fear. What he felt was more personal. Brazil had astonished him. It was huge in every dimension. He had never guessed a single nation could contain so much variety of wealth, poverty, landscape. He sensed a world beyond the narrow margins he had been raised to recognize. He wondered, finally, if there might not be a life for him here, some destiny more subtle than career soldiering in Thailand or the Philippines or in occupied Manchuria. He disappeared during a recreational leave in Sao Paulo a week after the peace was declared. He became an illegal.

As an illegal he had no rights and was constantly vulnerable to arrest, but he had been able to secure a series of lumbering jobs that led him increasingly closer to the frontier and finally, a few years ago, to Pau Seco. The oneirolith mine fascinated him. The scope of the effort fascinated him, the strangeness of it, the wild contrasts of poverty and fortune. If there was a role for him to play, he thought, it was here.

Well. It was a faulty intuition. Unless, of course, this was his role, the unintended role of victim and martyr, and the cautionary role he would play, hanging by the neck on the gallows hill above the old town.

But he did not blame himself and he did not blame the Americans. He had been offered—and briefly possessed—a startling sum of money. From his new perspective it seemed trivial, but that was death-cell thinking: the money might have bought him a new life, and given the decision to make again, he might make it the same way. He had gambled and lost.

Bad calculation, then. But was that all? No.

Something else.

In the years since the war he had developed a loathing for the sort of men who controlled Pau Seco, for Andreazza and his brutal soldiers and for the garimpeiros like Claudio who exploited their laborers. And in the brief time he knew her, he had developed a guarded sympathy for the American woman, Teresa, who was so startlingly guileless she seemed to exist in another universe. It was a moral sensibility as primitive as his fears but, Ng thought, at least as strong. And maybe, at the base of it, that was why he had frustrated his torturers. He had learned how to hate them.

Oberg was a different case. He already hated Oberg. He had hated him for years.

Ng was aware of the pressure of Oberg’s eyes as the guards hustled him into the tiny interrogation room. There were two gray-uniformed peacekeepers in the room as well as the military man Andreazza, but the tension was obvious and direct: it passed between Oberg and Ng.

But I have the advantage, Ng thought. He doesn’t know who I am. But I know all about him.

The guards dropped him into a cruelly straight-backed wooden chair. Ng gasped and almost fainted with the pain. There had been blood in his urine this morning, and he was worried that his injuries might be more serious than he had thought.

Maybe these people had already killed him. Maybe he was only waiting to die.

He took deep, ratcheting breaths until his heart was steady and he was able to hold up his head. A swimming blackness obscured his vision. He looked at Oberg and Oberg seemed to be standing at the end of a tunnel now, distant and strange.

Now Oberg was talking.

Oberg said the predictable things. He said he knew all about Ng’s connection with Cruz Wexler and the conspiracy to sell the oneirolith. Witnesses, he said, had confirmed the exchange at the bar in the old town. He said he knew the Americans had left Pau Seco and that he wanted Ng to tell him how they had escaped and where they might have gone.

He said all this in a restrained, sweetly reasonable voice that reminded Ng of the whine of the hydraulic pumps deep in the mine. He closed his eyes and envisioned Oberg himself as a machine, a whistling construction of pipes and levers and barbed wire and scalding steam. A machine with claws, he thought giddily; iron claws and searchlight eyes.

A guard butted him awake with his rifle.

Oberg was closer now. Oberg was peering into Ng’s face. He was close enough that Ng could smell the American’s sanitized breath, hot and perfumed with mint. And Ng understood suddenly—scrutinizing Oberg from the chair, but aloofly, as if from some higher and cleaner place—that Oberg was a lie. His starched collar was a lie; his slick, receding hair was a lie; the restrained tension ticking at the corner of his mouth betrayed a multitude of lies. Oberg was a lie made of flesh.

“I won’t hurt you,” the American said calmly. “You understand? I’m not here to hurt you.”

And that was a lie too.

“I know you,” Ng whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Oberg said. “I can’t hear you.”

“I know you.”

Oberg frowned.

Ng spoke in spite of himself. A flood of truth into the vacuum of Oberg’s lies. “I know who you are.” He closed his eyes and hoped the guard wouldn’t strike him again. “We marched through Rio Branco,” he said breathlessly. “The villages west of Rio Branco. This was in the spring of ’37, a little after the April offensive. You were famous. Did you know that? Among the Vietnamese, you were notorious.” And Oberg touched him then; Oberg took Ng’s long hair in his hand and jerked his head back against the spine of the chair to make him stop. But Ng kept talking. It was as if he had lost the power to control himself. “We did terrible things. We killed people. Posseiros. Soldiers mostly. Ragged men, but at least they were armed. It would have been so easy to feel guilt. We were machines, you understand, machines made to kill, but it was possible to feel guilt… some of us felt it.”

Oberg cracked Ng’s head against the back of the chair, and Ng was certain he would pass out. Which made him unhappy, because he was enjoying this in some curious way: it was the only act of revenge available to him. But then Andreazza said in his careful English, “We.don’t want to kill him quite yet, Mr. Oberg.” And the American relaxed his grip slightly.

Ng opened his eyes and looked into Oberg’s eyes and understood that the American hated him for what he knew. “We marched out from Rio Branco,” he said, “to clean up after you. Clean up the guerillas, they meant. But you had left another kind of mess.” The memory was vivid, and Ng, lost in it now, became more solemn. “The bodies were everywhere. Women and children. It disgusted us. Even us. It disgusted even us. And in a strange way it made us feel better. We were machines but we weren’t monsters. You proved that to us. You were our consolation. Whatever we had become, there was something worse.” He looked at Oberg and, from the depths of his chair, he smiled. “You made us feel human.”

Oberg whispered between his teeth; the words were inaudible. Ng felt a brief, untethered burst of happiness. It was a kind of victory. “They’ve been gone a long time,” he said. The Americans, he meant. He felt himself drifting out of awareness, but that was all right now. He had said what he wanted to say. “You won’t find them. It’s too late to find them.”