Memory Wire

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, ru

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, gri

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.