Текст книги "Memory Wire"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

And closed his eyes. And took deep, painful breaths.

Oberg turned to Andreazza. “Kill him,” he said tightly “Kill the slant-eyed son of a bitch.”

“In time,” Andreazza said.

3. The evening before he left Pau Seco, Oberg walked to the gallows hill where the body of Ng had been left to hang overlooking the old town, an object lesson to the illiterate formigas.

The day was windy and overcast, and the body turned restlessly on its pivot of rope. The corpse was bloated with death, and Oberg felt only the faintest connection now between this carcass and the man who had faced him in Andreazza’s office. Hence only a murmur of satisfaction… a shiver of triumph.

The Vietnamese man had lived three more days before he confessed, and the confession he made was useless. Oberg learned the name of the formiga who had bartered away the stone—Morelles or Meirelles—but Meirelles had vanished with the money and was beyond punishment now, lost in some smoky industrial barrio. Such men were untraceable. Raymond Keller and Byron Ostler and the American woman Teresa Rafael had ridden an Eletronorte truck as far as Sinop, Ng had said, and presumably then vanished. Toward the east, Oberg suspected; but there was no way to confirm the suspicion unless they attempted to use credit or buy passage out of the country.

Until then it was a question of laborious pursuit, proceeding first to Sinop and then following their trail wherever it led. Tedious and thankless work, but he was braced for it.

The desolate gallows hilltop made him uneasy. He regarded Ng’s dead, petulant face, and was possessed by a sudden fear that the eyes might spring open, the mouth unlock; that Ng might tumble free and croak out some new and loathsome accusation.

It was crazy, of course. What the dead know, they do not speak. Someone had said that. Someone he did not care to remember.

But the body moved in a river of wind from the Mato Grosso, and Oberg shuddered and turned his back. It was disgusting, he thought. Primitive. They should bury the dead. They should have the decency.

CHAPTER 13

1. Keller went with Byron to a cafe overlooking the docks along the Amazon, where they had agreed to meet an American who could arrange their passage out of Brazil.

The Amazon here was so broad it might have been the sea. The water was brown and turgid; the ships moored at the dock were ocean ships. Keller ordered tucupi and watched an Israeli trawler inch forward from the horizon, its radars and solar panels silhouetted against the margin of the sky. By the time the trawler made port, Byron’s contact had arrived: a stubble-haired combat vet with bright, feverish eyes. He shook hands with Keller but flinched when Byron introduced him by name. Denny.

“This was supposed to be private,” Denny said.

Byron looked at Keller; Keller nodded, put down money for the tucupi, and wandered out along the dock road a little.

He stood against an embankment watching Brazilian stevedores unload a corporate fishing boat, Esperance stenciled in white letters across the gleaming stack flues. Esperance, he thought: hope. A commodity they had just about run out of. Teresa had elected to stay at the hotel, pleading a need for privacy; Keller wondered now if they should have left her.

She was tempted by the dreamstone. They had been in Belem a week, and he had watched the dance she did with it, a nervous pirouette of attraction and fear. Better, of course, to leave it alone until they reached some safer venue. But she was drawn to it. She said so. Fear and hunger…Fear and esperance.

Too, he was worried about the time they were wasting. They were fugitives, and it was too easy to forget or ignore that. The longer they stayed in one place, the more vulnerable they became. Worse, their prospects were not improving. Twice now Byron had attempted to buy them onto a clandestine flight out of the country. Twice the deal had fallen through. Denny was a long shot, friend of a friend, reputedly a smuggler of some kind… but in Belem that was hardly a distinction. The port city was swarming with transients and foreigners, and Keller consoled himself that it was probably the best place to be, under the circumstances. Here, anyway, three indigent Americans were not conspicuous.

But he was aware of the forces that had been mustered against them, and he was far enough now from the consolations of wu-nien that he worried especially about Teresa.

He looked at the cafe and saw Byron waving him back. Denny had left. The negotiations had been brief.

Keller hiked wearily up the cobbled street. “Did he deal?”

Byron shook his head. “He’ll call us.”

They walked in silence back to the hotel off the Ver-o-Peso. Byron knocked at the door—there was no answer —then plugged his key into the lock. The mechanism clattered, the door eased open. Byron hesitated in the doorway. Keller, anxious now, pushed past him.

Teresa lay curled on the floor, the dreamstone clutched in both hands.

2. She was embedded in the dream now.

It was all around her and more vivid than it had ever been. It surrounded her like an ocean, and at the same time she contained it: an embrace of knowledge. She knew more than she had ever known.

A surfeit of questions. An excess of answers.

She was curious about the blue-winged people. In so many ways they seemed so familiar—so human. She was able to take in their history at a glance now, to remember it, and the similarities, she thought, were awesome. Like human beings, they had evolved from arboreal creatures sometime in the ancient past. They possessed opposable thumbs, a large cranial capacity, a vast array of cultures and languages. They had mastered human technologies: flint knives, fire, agriculture, iron. She knew all this instantly and without effort.

So human, she thought. And yet…

Their history was curiously placid. There were wars, but fewer and briefer than human wars had been. Their religions were more often ecstatic than militant. They were pantheists and nature worshippers. They were quick to develop written language, and quickly fostered an almost universal literacy. They had been using crude printing presses as early as their Bronze Age.

They possessed a genius for information technology which had led them from books to binary circuits to molecular memories and beyond that into storage-retrieval mechanisms so subtle and immediate she could not begin to comprehend them. She understood that the oneiroliths were the end product of this process, its final and most absolute incarnation.

The stones were more than they seemed. They existed in a complex hidden topology, each linked to each, each in some sense a reflection of each, each with a special affinity for the geometry of sapient awareness… and their function was almost ludicrously simple. They remembered.

They contained the past, or were a kind of passport to it: the distinction had been lost. They were both history book and time machine, limited only by a kind of proximity effect. The Pau Seco stone contained most of the history of the Exotics and much of the modern history of the Earth. Beyond those margins—as if that weren’t enough—she was unable to see.

The oldest memories were dim. She saw the blue people most vividly as they had been at their apex: a world made so strange that it defied her understanding. They had expanded to the limits of their planetary system, colonized the cold ring of dust and stone that marked its farthest outpost, constructed there the fragile, huge interstellar vehicles that went winging out like butterflies between the stars. The pilots of these vessels were immortal, binary intelligences undisturbed by the passage of vast spans of time but recognizably modeled after the winged people, and in some sense descended from them. The butterfly ships in their diaspora mapped more barren worlds than Teresa cared to think about. One of them had angled past the Earth when the Chou Dynasty was succeeding the Shang and the Assyrians were marching into Babylon. (A few neolithic American tribes actually saw the craft in its looping polar orbit: a star of many colors. The observant Babylonians were preoccupied; the Chinese were in the wrong place.) It was a divided and primitive world—still is, Teresa thought distantly—but the winged people had deemed it at least potentially worthy of their gift (it was a gift), which they directed, perhaps wisely, into the then-uninhabited and unnamed depths of the Mato Grosso. A garden for the tree of knowledge.

And winged away once more, and passed out of Teresa’s knowing.

She had seen much of this before, but scrambled and chaotic; it had never made sense to her except as visionary flashes, the fractured output of the cruder dreamstones. She was astonished now at the scope of it. The stones, she understood, were magnets of consciousness. They absorbed and recorded the flickering traces of experience … at a distance, without contact, automatically, through some mechanism beyond her grasp. Lives, she thought: they stored and recorded the passing of lives.

And so the human past was here too. A Babel of languages and customs and battles, sanguinary births and premature deaths. She could have descended at will into any part of it (the thought was dizzying), lived a moment with Hammurabi or Aristotle or any of the peasant millions who had marched into nameless oblivion. But not now, she thought. Later. Enough to know that they were preserved here, that in some important sense they had not died. She preferred for the moment to hover above it all, to take in the shape of it entirely and at once, humanity like one creature, a single voice, a river.

She contemplated it for what seemed an endless time; and would have gone on, enraptured, but for the voice that called her away.

I’m here, it said… faint and faraway, but terribly persistent. I’ve always been here.

It drew her down. She gasped, frightened now.

She gasped. Keller bent over her, worried.

“Don’t touch her,” Byron warned.

But she was trembling, wrapped around the dreamstone and clutching it to herself. She was in some kind of pain, he thought. Or dreaming some unbearable dream.

“Let her work it out,” Byron said. “There’s nothing you can do for her.”

“It’s hurting her.”

“She’ll come out of it.”

“How do you know?” He recognized that he was close to panic. Wu-nien, he thought. But the instinct had deserted him. “It’s not the same. It’s a new kind of stone.”

“It’s her decision.”

She shuddered against the floor, eyes squeezed shut. She looked lost, Keller thought: fallen into some chasm of herself. He wanted to shake her.

Byron put a hand on him, restraining him. But the phone rang suddenly. “Let it happen,” Byron said, and turned away. The phone’s CRT had burned out years ago; Byron gazed into a carbonized blankness.

Keller turned back to Teresa, took a blanket from the bed and spread it over her. She opened her mouth and made a brief, anguished cry.

Memory, Keller thought helplessly.

He knew what it meant. He could have told her.

She saw the little girl.

She saw the little girl living in a float shack somewhere out by the far margins of the tidal dams, out of sight of the mainland. She knew a few things about the little girl now. Things she had not known before.

The little girl was a good little girl. The little girl was obedient. The little girl lived with her mother and spoke good and careful English, not the Hispanic patois of her playmates. The little girl had learned to read at a Public Works school operating out of an abandoned grain storehouse which stood on concrete stilts above the floating ghetto. The little girl was cheerful and blithely unaware of her condition of poverty, except when the government checks failed to clear, or the time when the bank machines closed down after the riots. Then she was hungry. And frightened, and irritable. But food came eventually, and she learned in time to endure even these brief bouts of hunger: she was confident that they would end.

She took pride in her goodness in a way that sometimes offended her friends, and she grew increasingly circumspect. But she knew, without actually thinking the words, that this was not a priggish or gloating kind of goodness; that the skills her mother encouraged in her were in fact survival skills, and survival was by no means assured. She had witnessed the attrition among her friends. Many of her friends had died of diseases or had been remanded to orphanages or had simply moved away, a fate she associated with death because she could not comprehend the notion of a larger world. She accepted these truths with a resignation accessible only to the very young, and acquiesced to her mother’s regimen of education and careful virtue. She was a good little girl.

For many of the same reasons it did not seem strange that she did not have a father. She had had one once. Her mother told her so. Her father had been a wise and brave man who had died attempting to bring them over the border from the Republic of Mexico when she was just a baby. They had been respectable people in Mexico. Her father had been a lawyer. In the Aguilar purges of the ’30s, any member of the bar was considered an enemy. And so they had to escape, but Aguilar was a staunch friend of the United States and the border had been closed even to respectable lawyers and their families. They made a border run with thirty other ragged men and women, running a gauntlet of desert and barbed wire and infrared detectors and satellite surveillance and the broad concrete no-man’s-land that separated the sovereign nations. The little girl had no memory of this, but the story had been told to her many times: it was a kind of legend, a brave and daunting mythology. Many of the refugees had been cut down by automated gunfire. Her father had been one of these. Her mother took up the child and pressed on, too frightened even for grief. (The grief, it was implied, had come later.) Many more of their group had been arrested and deported; a few had escaped into the Hispanic ghetto sprawls that crowded against the border fences. The little girl and her mother had been among this lucky minority.

They were not wealthy enough to start a new life as Americans—they could not afford permanent black-market documentation—but there was enough money to buy passage into the Floats, where the rules were suspended and they could have, at least, this compromised shadow existence; never legal, but no longer vulnerable to the caprices of the Aguilar regime.

She could not remember her father except through these stories, and so his absence never seemed strange to her, until the day her mother brought a new man home.

She was ten, and she was outraged. She saw the guilt in her mother’s eyes and was both angry and frightened by it. She was too young to understand the adult clash of loyalties, the fear of age and the fear of death. She was only old enough to feel betrayed. She did not deserve this. She was a good girl.

She hated the man instantly. His name was Carlos and he worked at the loading dock where the girl’s mother did occasional day labor. Meeting her, Carlos bent down, put his immense hand on her shoulder, and told her he had met her mother at work. “She’s a good worker,” Carlos said. He straightened, grinned obscenely, swatted the girl’s mother across the bottom. “Eh? She does what she’s told.”

The girl was appalled by this sudden vision of her mother as a separate entity, a grown-up woman with a hidden life of her own. She did not say anything, only stood with her face carefully blank and one hand bracing herself against the kitchen table. Inside, she was writhing. Everything seemed suddenly tawdry. She was conscious of the peeling tile under her feet, the shabbiness of the float shanty they inhabited. Beans were cooking on the stovetop; a smoky, foul aroma filled the tiny room. And Carlos continued to grin down at her, the broad pores of his face radiating sweat and insincerity. His teeth were chipped and vulpine; his breath smelled like spoiled food.

He was not a lawyer.

He moved in. She was not consulted about it. He moved in and filled the shack with his noxious presence. He took up more space, the little girl thought, than any ordinary man. He bumped into things. He drank—though not, at first, excessively. His huge hands moved over the girl’s mother with an aggressive intimacy which was received without resistance or encouragement. The walls dividing the two rooms were thin enough that there was no mystery about what happened during the night: it was sex, the little girl thought, a messiness of grunting and moaning, unspeakable. When it happened, she would hide her face and cover her ears. In the mornings Carlos would grin at her and whisper: “How did you sleep, little one? Too noisy for you?” And laugh a secret, terrible laugh at the back of his throat.

One day when Carlos was at work, the little girl dared to ask her mother why she had allowed him to move in.

The contempt in her voice was impossible to conceal, and her mother slapped her for it. The girl gaped and raised one hand to her wounded face. Her cheek was on fire.

The girl’s mother flushed. “We’re not in a position to choose,” she said fiercely. “Look at me! Am I young? Am I pretty? Look! Am I rich?”

And the girl observed for the first time that her mother was none of these things.

“He brings money in. Maybe you don’t know what that means. You don’t look at your plate when you eat. Maybe you should. There’s meat there. Meat! And green vegetables. You have clothes. You don’t go hungry.”

So we are poor, the girl thought. Carlos was the curse of their poverty.

These things astonished and frightened her.

She might have adjusted, even so. Except that now Carlos himself began to change. Bad as he was to begin with, he grew worse. His drinking intensified. The girl’s mother confided that Carlos was having trouble on the job, fighting with the foreman. Some nights the grunting and moaning in the next room would end in muffled curses. Carlos would not make jokes the next morning, merely glower at his breakfast. His casual intimacy with the girl’s mother became more aggressive; he tossed her back and forth in his arms in a way that made the girl think of a woman being mauled by a bear. Increasingly that was what Carlos seemed to her to be: a large and powerful animal fuming in a cage. But the cage was insubstantial; the cage, its restraint, could vanish at any moment. She didn’t like to think about that.

He began to touch her more often.

She accepted this at first the way her mother accepted it, with passive resignation. She was aware of her mother watching closely when Carlos coaxed her into his lap. Carlos had hands like hairless animals, hands like moles. They moved with a blind volition of their own. They touched and stroked her. Usually when she had endured this for a time, Carlos would stand up abruptly, scowl at her as if she had done something wrong, take the girl’s mother off into the bedroom.

Her mother apologized one day. They were alone. The float shack rose in a gentle swell; rain beat against the roof and the bilge pumps rattled under the floor. “I’m sorry,” her mother said. “What’s happening … I didn’t expect it.”

The girl felt an anger well up in her, huge and unexpected. “Then make him leave!” She astonished herself with tears. “Tell him to go away!”

Her mother hugged and soothed her. “It’s not that easy. I wish it were. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s hard to be alone. You don’t understand that. It’s been difficult. Difficult to be alone. I thought he would help, you know. I really thought he would.” She stroked the girl’s hair. “I thought he might learn to love us.”

That night, when Carlos began to touch her, her mother told the little girl to go to her room. She listened through the door as the two adults spoke and then shouted. There was a scuffling, the girl’s mother cried out, a door slammed. The little girl waited but there was no more sound. She was afraid to go out. She slept finally, trembling in her sleep.

In the morning Carlos scowled at her and left the shack wordlessly. The girl’s mother had a blackened bruise across her cheek. She touched it periodically and with an expression of wonder, as if it had appeared there by magic. Her face, with the bruise, looked terribly old. The girl gazed at it in confusion. When had those lines grown out from her mother’s eyes? That webbing of brittle skin beneath her jaw?

Now it was the girl who wanted to apologize. But the room was full of awesome silences, and she was not sure how to begin. When she did, it was a disaster.

“Mama,” she said, “I’m sorry if—”

“Sorry!” Her mother turned on her. Grease spilled from the stove in a sizzling puddle. “You’re sorry! My God! If it weren’t for you—”

Her hand leapt to her mouth. But of course it was too late. The words had escaped. The girl held them in her mind. The words were like hot coals: impossible to touch, but intensely interesting. She was both stricken and curiously pleased. Pleased, because she understood things at last. How simple it was! It explained everything. It explained the foul looks Carlos had given her. It explained the bruise on her mother’s cheek. She had caused it. She was at the center of this tempest. She had tempted Carlos somehow—seduced him. She had not been conscious of it. It was not something she had set out to do. But she had tempted him, and Carlos had enacted his anger and frustration the only way he could—with the girl’s mother. In bed. And with his fists.

She told herself that this was an adult thought and that she should be proud of herself: she was not being childish anymore.

The good little girl understood that she was not such a good little girl after all.

Byron leaned into the camera angle of the telephone, absorbed. Keller could only stare at Teresa. He had never seen her like this. Her eyes were moving wildly under the lids; tears streaked her face.

It was obscene. He couldn’t let it go on. He must not let this happen to her.

You see somebody hurting, Keller thought wildly, the thing to do is help. He had learned that. A long time ago.

Byron turned away from the phone and said, “Hey, no—Ray—”

But he was already reaching for her.

The fire began at an oil terminal by the sea wall.

Later, people would say it had been inevitable. The Floats possessed only the most rudimentary public facilities. There had been no zoning laws, no building codes, no safety commissions. It was a community made of wood and paper. Some places, oil runoff had filled the water beneath the factories and the balsas. The fire began as a trivial industrial accident involving an acetylene torch; it quickly became something else.

The little girl was home that day. Carlos was at work; her mother was patching the kitchen wall with plaster. The little girl climbed out onto the flat tin roof of the shanty float—it was a sunny morning—and was surprised to see a line of smoke rising from somewhere north along the sea wall, punctuating the seamless blue arc of the sky. The smoke seemed to be drifting straight up; in fact the wind was carrying it almost directly toward her. She was fascinated by this.

Humming to herself, lulled by the wash of the sunlight, she watched for a time. The line of smoke slowly broadened and became a kind of wall, a clouded turmoil sheeting the sky, and when she stood on tiptoes she imagined she could see the flames at the base of it, still far away, licking up from the float shacks miles down the placid canal.

Shortly before noon a fine rain of ashes began to fall.

The girl’s mother called and, when she didn’t answer, came up the ladder to the roof. “My God,, girl! I thought you were lost! I thought—”

“Look.” The little girl pointed. “Fire.”

Her mother stood for a moment with her mottled housedress billowing in a wind that had grown stronger and tindery dry. Then she crossed herself wordlessly and clasped her broad brown hand on the girl’s arm. Her voice when she spoke was toneless. “Come help me.”

As they were descending, a County of Los Angeles helicopter clattered overhead toward the fire, then veered and hovered a moment.

The girl felt her own first tingle of fear.

Her mother was muttering to herself. She began moving in large purposeful strides across the peeling tile, stacking things on a bedsheet in the middle of the room: clothes, welfare documents, canned food. Dazed now, the girl peered out the shack’s single window. The snow of ash had grown much denser. There were people on the pontoon walkways in knots, and they gazed up apprehensively at the pall of smoke. The sky had grown dark with it.

Her mother pulled her away. “We can’t wait any longer.” Her voice was distracted and she swiveled her head nervously. The girl understood—another adult intuition—that this was how her mother must have looked crossing the border from Mexico : this animal fear in her. “I would wait for him, you understand? For Carlos. But there isn’t time.”

She folded the sheet with their meager possessions in it and carried the bundle out to their tiny single-engine motor launch. It was hardly more than a canoe with an engine bolted to it, and it wallowed under the load. Their shack backed onto a small tributary feeding one of the larger canals, but the ordinarily quiet water was already crowded with boats. In some of them the people were weeping. The girl wondered what catastrophe this was that had overtaken her life. The ashes came down like snow around her.

Her mother led her back into the shack one more time. “You look around,” she said. “Anything you need or can carry, you take it. One minute! Then help me with the rest of the food.”

The girl picked up an old flea-market doll, the first toy she had owned. She didn’t care much about it now. But it seemed like the kind of thing she ought to take. She tucked it under her arm, satisfied.

It was then that Carlos came home.

He pushed through the door laughing a screaming, drunken laugh. Instinctively the girl slipped into the gap between the kitchen door and the wall. The smell of new plaster was suddenly pungent in her nostrils. She squeezed her eyes shut. She covered her ears.

She heard it all anyway.

Carlos had left work early. The whole morning shift had been dismissed because of the fire. They assumed it was a joke at first; they went to a bar by the tidal dams and began to drink. But then the fire spread until most of the industrial buildings were burning, and it was obvious then that something terrible had happened and was continuing to happen. One by one the men joined the growing exodus toward the south. Carlos had battled through the crowds with a bottle in his hand. The bottle was still in his hand now, but empty.

He was very drunk and very frightened. The girl’s mother tried to soothe him but the fear was in her voice, and Carlos must have recognized it. “We’re leaving,” she told him. “We can follow the canals to the mainland. There’s time. There’s still time.”

“The canals are full,” Carlos said. “Nothing’s moving. The canals are fucking burning. Is that what you want?”

“We can walk, then—”

“Walk! Have you seen it out there?” He waved his bottle recklessly. “The fire’s coming too fast. There’s nothing we can do—nothing!”

And he was probably right, the girl thought dizzily. She could hear the screams coming from the pontoon bridges only yards away.

“Then why come back here?” the girl’s mother said. “Why torture us?” Fear and a kind of petulant outrage mingled in her voice. “To hell with you! I’m leaving! We’re leaving!”

But Carlos said they would die together because they were a family and because he was afraid to die alone. Then the fighting began. The girl listened, paralyzed. There was a terrible dull thudding noise, the sound of fists on flesh. She couldn’t help herself: she stepped out from behind the door.

Her mother was moaning; her face was bruised. Carlos had pushed her against the kitchen table and hiked her dress above her thighs. The fire burning so close, and all he could think to do was rape her. It made the girl angry, and for a moment she forgot her fear. “Stop it!” she cried.

Carlos looked around.

The alcohol and the fear had done some terrible thing to him. His face was livid, choked with blood. His eyes were all whites. Seeing him, the girl experienced a kind of awe at what he had become. “You,” he said. And went to her.

His hands mauled her. His hands tore at her clothes. She experienced a sudden lightheadedness that seemed to lift her out of her body; she floated aloof from herself and was able to see Carlos, the window, the ash-laden sky, all with a strange and curious impassivity. His hands were to blame, she thought. It was his hands she hated. Carlos was probably innocent. Her mother had said as much. My fault, she thought. She had seduced him. Worse, somehow she had seduced his hands.

She could not clearly see her mother, who lay stunned across the peeling tiles. She did not see, therefore, when her mother roused from her stupor and blinked at the act that was proceeding before her, stumbled in horror to the wooden cabinets by the sink and drew out a knife from the cutlery drawer. The girl was not aware of anything much until Carlos gasped and stiffened above her and then rolled away. His blood, mysteriously, was on her dress. Carlos lay noisily dying, his hands closing on air. The girl’s mother looked down at her with eyes gone as wide as an animal’s. “God help us,” she whispered. “Come on now.”

They ran to the motor launch, but the press of boats in the tiny canal had beaten it against its moorings until it listed into the water and capsized. They gazed at it only a moment. The fire was close enough to smell. It was a sour, rubbery smell. It was acrid and hurt the girl’s nose. Smoke eddied down the canal among the boats and beneath the pontoon bridges crowded with refugees. People were everywhere, fleeing. They had not yet panicked, but she could tell panic was only moments away. And then they would begin to push and run, the girl thought, and what then? What then?