Memory Wire

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 spi

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.