Текст книги "Memory Wire"

Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson

Соавторы: Robert Charles Wilson
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PART 2
WHISPERS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD

CHAPTER 16

1. It would not have been safe to take her back to the studio by the tidal dams, so Byron located a tiny balsa deep in the Floats and put the last of his Brazilian money on the rent.

He liked the location. There was only the distant rise of the San Gabriels to remind him that the continent existed, salt breezes and morning fog to remind him of the sea. Otherwise it might have been some indefinite confluence of wood and water, paper houses rising on pontoon foundations, bobbing walkways, Chinese lanterns, eggbeater windmills ticking against the sky. A market canal ran in from the east, so there were fresh eggs and vegetables. A mixed – population, with maybe a plurality of Latinos and East Indians. Some decent jobs available at the wharves beyond the tidal dam, not too much violence. A good place, Byron thought.

He liked it more than he should have. It soothed him, and that was dangerous. He had to think about the future now … for Teresa’s sake as much as his own.

She wasn’t safe here. The terrifying thing was, she might not be safe anywhere.

Thinking of her, he followed the boardwalk along the margins of this canal, a right-of-way between the old float shanties standing like stilted birds above the water. He thought about Teresa.

She betrayed very little. It was wounding, the way she hid herself from him. Since her stone trance in Belem, she had been withdrawn, subtly lifeless, would turn away when he touched her. Her eyes were often on Keller, but Keller was equally distant: as if some weird electricity had put an opposite spin on the two of them. Something had passed between them, he thought, that time in the hotel room on the Ver-o-Peso. Some intimacy too awful to sustain.

The pain of it was obvious.

And yet she clung to the oneirolith. She had smuggled it back in her hand luggage, and she kept it concealed now in a Salvation Army dresser at the back of the balsa. Token of something. Her past, her future.

He had grown to hate it.

He hated it for the sadness it had created in her, and he hated it as a token of his own past. There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking. Drafted out of a career college in the midwest, he had volunteered for Angel duty. The Psych Corps said he had “an aptitude for the work.” And maybe that was true, maybe he did. Maybe that was why, when his duty tour ended, he chose to have his socket pulled. A feeling that it was in some way too easy, that he could have continued to stumble through life in a pleasant fog of wu-nien—like Keller—or worse, ended up with a joychip plugged into his socket. He and a couple of war buddies had come to the Floats under the tutelage of a former CO named Trujillo, who wanted help setting up a drug lab. Byron pulled out at the last minute: he could not picture himself synthesizing enkephalins and rogue adenosines for a population of degraded addicts. He was attracted to the dream-stones, however, because they seemed comparatively wholesome, and because they were popular with the artists beginning to make their presence felt in the Floats. He contacted Cruz Wexler, who set him up in business. It was simple and lucrative work but in time it began to press his conscience. He acquired a respect for the strangeness of the ’liths. They possessed a healing power, possibly a darker power as well. He came to question the wisdom of selling them as one more feelgood drug to the moneyed mainlanders who came down to the tamer Float clubs every Saturday night. Buy a dreamstone from the Angel vet: it was daring, it was fashionable. He overheard his name in conversations. “Probably had his balls shot off in the war,” one of his clients said. And the dreadful thing, he realized, was that it might be true, his life in the Floats might be one more variation on the theme of wu-nien, a kind of castration. In some important way he had been neutered.

Teresa was his road back into the world.

He had not consciously chosen her for the role, nor was it entirely coincidence. Some mingling of the two. She showed up at his door, because she needed him; he fell in love with her, because he needed to fall in love.

There had never been any question of indifference. Some telegraphy in the shape of her face or the color of her eyes had communicated her necessity to him. She was emaciated and ill; he was a demobbed Angel, a parody of a combat vet. It should have been comical. But he cared for her.

But she was dying.

The stone saved her life, and that was good; it did not occur to him until much later to wonder whether he had merely postponed the inevitable. She really did want to die. He learned that about her. She was punishing herself for some sin she could not even consciously remember, some buried enormity lost in the trauma of the fire. But there were other forces in her, too, and he was certain he had kindled one of them: a spark of resistance, her rebellious desire to live. It was as if there were two Teresas woven between and around each other, each working to deceive and subvert the other: death tricked into life, life into death.

In all this the oneirolith remained a mystery, a conduit between these fractions of herself, necessary but dangerous. He had been afraid of the deep-core stone because it threatened to upset a delicate balance, and that was what it had seemed to do: the spark in her was all but extinguished now.

And so there was nothing to do but find this place for her to hide, a pontoon shack in the Floats where she would be safe, at least, from the Agencies. She might pull out of it. He told himself so.

But what angered him—and it was a deep and profound anger he wasn’t certain he could control any longer—was Keller’s coolness toward her.

Keller, whom she loved. Keller, who could have saved her.

Keller wanted to go back to the mainland.

He met Keller at a market stall and they walked out along the tidal dam in an awkward silence. “I’m finished here,” Keller said at last. “That must be obvious now.”

“She needs you,” Byron said simply.

He followed Keller’s gaze out beyond the boardwalk, past the featureless wall of the dam. Out there on the clean horizon a Thai tanker seemed to sit motionless. Gulls whirled overhead. “There’s nothing I can do for her.”

“You owe it to her to try.”

He shook his head. “I don’t owe her anything.”

There was some secret knowledge moving behind his eyes. Byron felt angry, excluded, helpless. He recognized Keller’s aloofness for what it was: the Ice Palace, Angel instincts, a cold and willful vacancy of the soul. Keller said, “I have a job to do.”

“Fuck your job.” They walked a few paces with this envelope of anger around them, not speaking. “You go back there,” he said finally, “it could be dangerous. The Agencies could find you.”

“I download, I put everything through an image processes I destroy the original memory trace. Even if they find me, there’s nothing that constitutes evidence. Nothing they can use against her.”

“You care about her that much?”

The question seemed to trouble Keller; he didn’t answer.

“If you cared,” Byron said, “you would stay.”

“I can’t.”

“So what then? A new name? Another job somewhere?”

He shrugged.

“You tell her,” Byron said wearily. “Leave me out of it. You tell her you’re leaving.” Keller said, “I will.”

2. She was at the back of the float shack watching TV.

Keller looked over her shoulder. It was some Scandinavian love serial, satellite programming syndicated through Network. But she wasn’t really watching. Her eyes were averted. She glanced up at him and they were alone for a moment in the silence of the small room, the floor lifting and falling in the swell. “You’re leaving,” she said.

It startled him. But she would have guessed. It was hardly surprising. The evidence of small silences, looks avoided, hands untouched. He made himself aloof: an act of will. “I have work to do,” he said.

She smiled faintly. “Downloading memories?”

He nodded.

“And then,” she said, “they’re video. Right? You don’t have to live with them anymore.” She stood up, ran a hand through her hair. “Will you come back?”

He was torn by the question. The odds were that he would not. A part of him wanted desperately never to come back, never to see her again. But he was not entirely free from adhyasa, powerful and traitorous impulses. “I don’t know.”

She– nodded, as if to say: all right, yes, thank you at least for being honest. She held out her hand and he took it. But when he moved to turn away, she held him there. Her gaze was intense and her hand tightened painfully. “It doesn’t matter,” she said fiercely. “Anything that happened, it doesn’t matter to me. What happened with Meg —it doesn’t matter.”

He pulled away. For a moment he wanted to believe her, accept what she was offering him. But it was not in her power to forgive.

She knew. And that was unbearable.

“It doesn’t matter.” She followed him to the door. “Remember that, Ray. Do that for me, please. Please just remember.”

3. He rode a boat taxi down the market canal to the big chain-link fences that marked the mainland, and by the time he had located his car—parked this last month in a security garage—night had fallen. The urban access routes were crowded; the car audio pumped out dizzying rondos of pulse music, muscular and grim. The city was a river of light and concrete rolling from the Mexican border up into the dry conduit suburbs, from the ocean to the desert; and after Brazil, he thought, it should have been daunting. But it was not. It intoxicated him.

In these night canyons he was one among many, finally anonymous; here he might lose his guilt, his memories, his history, himself.

CHAPTER 17

1. A Thai taxiboat driver led Oberg to the empty studio by the tidal dam.

It was an impressive balsa. Oberg looked up at it from the tiny canal dock abutting the pontoon walkway and said, “She lives here?”

“Did,” the driver said laconically. “Maybe still does. Though I haven’t seen her lately.” He waited, pointedly. Oberg pressed a few faded cash notes into his hand; he nodded and sent his boat whirring away.

Alone, Oberg climbed a mossy concrete stairway to the boardwalk and casually forced the door.

There was dust inside.

He had expected as much. They would not have come back here. They were wiser than that. It had been too easy tracing her: she had dozens of contacts among mainland art dealers and in the galleries up the coastal highway. She had been, by every account, a woman of predictable habits.

So she had not come back here, and he had anticipated that, but he remained convinced of two things: that she had gone to ground somewhere in the Floats, and that—it was pretty much inevitable—he would find her.

What he wanted here, in this closed green bamboo retreat she had once inhabited, was as much mystical as practical: a sense of her presence, a token of her life.

The still air stirred around him. Quietly now, he moved up the stairs.

He had taught himself about the Floats.

It was not a single community. The plural noun was necessary. Years ago, in a decade-long infusion of state and federal funding, the tidal dams had been erected off the California coast. It was a feat of engineering as ambitious as the building of the Great Wall, and it represented the pressing need for energy resources rolling over a host of practical and ecological objections. After years of cost overruns and the extinction of a half-dozen minor marine species, the project went successfully on-line; even today it supplied most of the electrical power soaked up by the urban sprawl. Inevitably, not enough; but there were the Baja and Sonora photic generators shouldering the overload, technologies the Exotic stones had made practical.

More important from Oberg’s perspective was the demimonde that had grown up in the shadow of the dam. The becalmed and enclosed coastal waters were initially a kind of industrial free zone. There were massive landfill projects off Long Beach, deepwater shipping bays abutting the Harbor Dam. Inevitably, a population moved in to feed the market for semiskilled labor. Just as inevitably, many of these were semilegals with dubious documentation. The first crude boat slums were erected in the lee of the factories, but the population grew even when the new industries faltered in the face of competing Exotic technologies. Squatters occupied the shells of abandoned warehouses.

The unemployment riots of the ’30s had established for the first time a perimeter of autonomy, a border beyond which the civic and harbor police refused to venture. The County of Los Angeles withdrew its official jurisdiction in a series of negotiated settlements with strike leaders. It was a precedent. Even after the fire that swept the floating ghettos in the late ’30s, the only government agency with real power in the Floats was the Public Works Department.

And so the Floats had grown into a refuge for anyone who fell through the cracks of the mainland world: artists, criminals, addicts, the black market; undocumented immigrants and the chronically poor. Within its vast acreage of pontoon bridges, balsas, and canals, there were a dozen autonomous communities. Slums spilled out from the urban mainland, dangerous places in which, Oberg understood, any life was negotiable. Elsewhere, and particularly here in the more spacious north, real communities had been created. There was money, employment, a limited commerce with the outside world. People moved back and forth. A place to live, Oberg thought. Especially, he thought, a place to hide.

But no place could hide her for long. He understood, climbing the stairs, that his separation from the Agencies had been both necessary and inevitable. He was no longer bound by Agency protocols. He could move in this twilight place, away from the mainland. He was a loose cannon. He could roll where he liked.

The thought made him smile. See me roll.

He moved lightly over the wooden floor of the room that had been her studio.

It was a spacious room set around with windows. Parallel angles of sunlight divided the floor. He opened drawers, peered behind mirrors. He did all this methodically and in a state of finely tuned concentration. He was not sure what he was looking for: only that he would know it when he saw it.

He saw it, at last, nestled at the back of a dresser drawer behind a pastel cotton shirt. It was a tiny plastic vial about the size of a film canister, unlabeled. In the opaque hollow of it, something rattled.

He pried up the lid with his thumbnail.

The odor was faint, pungent, attractive. He rolled out a tiny black pill onto his palm. The pill was resinous with age; there was only one.

It was something she had saved, he thought. A kind of insurance; or a proof of something, an object lesson.

He touched his finger to the oil at the bottom of the vial and raised it to his tongue.

Bitter, astringent taste. But the faintest sense of well-being swept through his body.

Enkephalins, he thought. In potent concentration.

He tumbled the pill back into its container, snapped shut the lid.

For the second time, he smiled to himself.

2. Her dreams were worse after Keller left.

The little girl again, of course. But the tone of the dream had changed. She had learned too much from the Pau Seco stone. The little girl appeared against a terrifying montage of the fire: flame, smoke, and frightened faces. Her eyes were wide and soot-streaked, and she was alone, cut off from the mainland, afraid for her life.

“I need you,” the girl said. “I saved you once! It’s only fair! You can’t let me die here!”

But in the dreams she could only turn away.

The dreams left her sweating. She woke up alone at the back of this new balsa deep in the Floats, lost a moment in the darkness, the unfamiliar spaces. Byron slept in the front room, which doubled as kitchen; she slept in the back. Stirring, she felt as hollow as a bottle tossed up from the sea. The floor rose in a momentary swell, as if a hand had lifted the boat. She closed her eyes resolutely and prayed that she would not dream again.

Morning came hours later, a lightening at the room’s single high window.

She sat up, wrapped a robe around herself, drew a deep breath. Since Belem she had felt mostly numb. Numb and rootless and empty. The way Keller felt, maybe. Angel fugue. Except she was not an Angel. Only herself, moving through this fog. Periodically she would ask herself how she felt, how she really felt, but it was like tonguing an abscessed tooth: the pain overwhelmed the curiosity.

She moved to the kitchen and fried an egg for Byron over the old electric grill. It was the last of their food.

Byron was wearing khaki fatigue pants and his moth-eaten combat jacket. She looked at him but could find nothing to say. She had not talked to him much—really talked—since Belem. Some barrier of guilt or shame had come down between them. She hadn’t even hinted at what she had seen in her ’lith trance, the complexities of time and history, the world’s or hers. When he finished eating, he stood up and hooked his eyeglasses back of his ears. He was going out, he said.

“Where to?”

“Making contacts,” he said vaguely. “We need cash if we’re going to stay here. There are people who owe me.”

“You have to go?” He nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Be careful.”

He shrugged.

Being alone was the worst thing.

It surprised her, how much she hated it. Better to have things to do. Keeping busy helped.

Byron had left her grocery money. So she would shop, she thought, wander out along the market canal to the big stalls by the tidal dam. That would be good. She tucked the cash into her shirt pocket and buttoned it. Check the cooler, she thought. Cheap rental cooler, came with this cheap pontoon shack. There was a bottle of fresh water, a loaf of stale bread. They needed, let’s see, fruit, vegetables, maybe even a little meat. Something to keep body and soul together.

She had skipped her own breakfast.

The market canal, then. But first she stepped back into the small room she had made her own, regarded the tousled bed and, more carefully, the antique Salvation Army dresser. Idly, she pulled open the top drawer.

The Brazilian stone was inside.

It looked small and unprepossessing in a nest of her clothes. Ordinary… until you looked closely at it, allowed its angles to seduce the eye, stared until you couldn’t stop staring. A part of her was tempted to pick it up.

A part was not. She slammed shut the drawer.

She had regained a sense of its alienness. It was the stone, she thought, that had driven Keller away. In that moment in the hotel room in Belem, she had seen into the heart of him, the terrible guilt he had hoarded all these years. The dying woman in Rondonia: Meg, her name was. His hesitation. Worse, the caustic sense of his own cowardice.

She understood, of course. It was not a difficult sin to forgive.

But he could not bear that she had seen.

And there was the rest of it. The little girl, the fire, the terrible man Carlos. She had lost so much: not just Ray but a sense of purpose, her intimacy with the stones, the idea of a future…

She put it out of her mind. She would think about it later. She left the float, double-locked the door, joined the crowds on the pontoon walkway beside the big canal. The sun was bright and she held up her face to it, eyes squeezed shut. She wished she could see the ocean.

Walking felt so good that she forgot about the shopping. She walked past the big stalls with their colorful awnings, past the market boats moored against the boardwalk, turning instinctively toward the sea.

The walkway looped north and parallel to the seawall. She climbed a set of chain-link risers until she was level with the broad concrete lip of the dam. Public Works property, isolated in its churning moat of floodwater, huge turbines down there somewhere. To the south she could see a line of abandoned factories and warehouses, waste stacks starkly black against the cloudless sky. To the east, across the tangle of the Floats, a hint of the mainland; the razorback San Gabriels. North, more boat shanties … the tidal dam tapering landward. And to the west there was the sea.

Gulls circled overhead and dive-bombed a refuse boat.

The wind smelled of salt and sea wrack. She should have brought a sweater.

Keller was gone, of course. The scary thing was that she both knew it and understood it. Because of what she had seen, he could not bear her presence. It was logical and inevitable.

But she felt the loss more deeply than she could have anticipated.

Funny how things changed. For a while she had known what she wanted. She had wanted the mystery of the dream-stone; she had wanted a door into her past. But it was like that proverb about answered prayers. She understood more about the Exotics, probably, than anyone outside the federal research programs: their origins, their history. They were vivid in her mind even yet. But there was still something fundamentally alien about them, some profound dissonance between their world and hers. She felt it, a stab of poignancy inside her, a silence where there might have been voices.

The mystery of her own past was just as obdurate. She was the little girl, of course: the little girl was Teresa. Teresa before the fire. She knew that now. But knowing was not enough. Memory was the memory of old pain. What she wanted, she realized, was healing. But the ’lith couldn’t do that. The stone only remembered. Healing, it seemed to imply, was up to her: some act of reconciliation she could not begin to imagine.

Maybe there was no such thing. Maybe the past was always and only the past. Taunting, fixed, unassailable. You couldn’t talk to the past.

She walked north through unfamiliar floats. She was not sure where she was going. She just walked—“following her feet,” Rosita used to say. Her feet carried her down pontoon bridges, past crowded market stalls. She paid no attention to the Spanish and English voices swirling around her. She thought a little about wanting and getting. The paradox of it. Wanting the dreamstone, she had found Keller. Now she wanted Keller… but the stone had driven him away.

The past had driven him away. “I’m sorry, Ray.”

She was embarrassed to realize she had said it out loud. But only the gulls overheard.

But now she had come to a place that triggered her memory. She suppressed the sense of familiarity, but her heart beat harder. She had come here for some reason. This was the place her feet had led her. Wise feet. But it was best not to think too hard about it.

The float shack had not changed much. The same dangerous-seeming list, the same bilge pump gushing oily water into a waste canal. She descended an ancient flight of chain-link stairs to the door and knocked, breathless.

The old, hollow man was older, hollower. She was surprised that he recognized her. His eyes narrowed in stale amusement from the dark frame of his doorway. “You,” he said.

He still kept the pills at the back.