He recalled what Byron had told him: Teresa in a shack in the Floats, trading artwork for lab enkephalins. “I’m not fragile,” she had said, but it seemed to Keller that she was: fragile and brittle as glass… except for this energy that came welling up from inside her, this restlessness.
He felt a twinge of fear for her, and that was bad: adhyasa, he thought, Angel sin. He stood up-hastily. “Tomorrow we bus to Cuiaba,” he said. “Best get some sleep.”
The stars had come out above the dark margins of the planalto.
3. But she didn’t sleep. Too much coffee, she thought, too much to think about. Instead she walked with Byron down the avenue outside the hotel, hoping to tire herself out.
Brasilia was quiet at night. She could hear the flickering buzz of the ancient potassium streetlights, the periodic rumble of a distant truck. Nobody in the streets but a few stray tourists, a few hookers poised at a public fountain. It was unreal, Teresa thought, empty, these antique white towers.
She asked Byron why he brought Keller along.
“We’ve talked about it. He knows the hinterland. A little protection …”
She said, “He’s reliable? You trust him?”
“Yes.” But his voice was more cautious.
“He’s an Angel.”
“So? I was an Angel.”
“But you changed.”
He took her arm. Overhead, in the faint light of the city, she could see the low clouds moving. Byron said, “I could have been like him. I know what it’s like for him.”
“What is it like?”
“You care?”
She shrugged.
He said, “It’s like walking in a cloud. You’re above everything. Above fear, above your body. Your body’s a machine, you move it along, take it where it’s supposed to go. Everything is very clear, very lucid, because there’s no good or evil, no better or worse. You just look. Everything is what it is. No more, no less.”
It stirred a memory in her. “I can see how that might be attractive.”
“It is. But it wears you out. It’s cold. It’s like standing out on some mountain. You get scared to be so far above it all, scared you’ll never get down again. And some don’t.”
“Like Ray?”
“Maybe like Ray.”
“But you said you trusted him.”
He shrugged. “I think it’s always been a hard choice for him. He has some bad memories out of the war, so there’s this incentive … the need to stay above it. But I think the truth is that he’s not comfortable there. Some part of him wants to climb back down. Even after all this time.” He looked at her. “This matters to you?”
“I was curious.”
They turned back toward the hotel. “It would not be a good idea,” Byron said, “to care too much about Ray Keller.”
Teresa shrugged.
That night she dreamed again of the nameless girl in rags and twine shoes.
The girl looked at her from the depths of her huge brown eyes. As ever, Teresa was caught up in the urgency of that gaze. Darkness like smoke swirled around her; anxiety filled the turbulent air.
“Almost home now,” the girl said faintly. “Almost home.”
CHAPTER 6
1. Keller was ten years old when the discovery of the oneiroliths in the Amazon Basin made international headlines. He remembered leaning out the window of the single-bedroom apartment above his father’s garage, aiming a polystyrene thread-rifle at a line of dung-brown hills while the TV droned on about “artifacts of extraterrestrial origin.” It was a Sunday afternoon and the Public Works had turned on the water supply; his father was down on the tarmac soaping fiberglass car bodies. Keller paid only intermittent attention to the video screen because he knew the whole thing was a lie.
His father had told him so last night. His father sat in the big easy chair which dominated the shabby room and said, “It’s bullshit, Ray. Mark my words.” Keller thought his father looked disturbingly small in this oversized chair: it emphasized his leanness, the arthritic bulge of his finger joints and elbows, the sparseness of his hair. “Stones from outer space.” His adult voice was rich with scorn and authority. He had migrated here from Colorado before Keller was born, had achieved what Keller understood, even then, was an unhappy and marginal life. “Christ almighty, what a crock.” Who could doubt it?
His skepticism was short-lived. It was replaced very soon by boredom, and that was pretty much the reaction of the entire country. Interesting things came out of the oneiroliths over the next few years but they were all more or less abstruse: new mathematics, a subtler cosmology. Important but, in the raw, unspectacular. The profounder questions—where had the stones come from, who had left them, why?-—went unanswered. In time, no one asked. Speculation was abandoned to cultists, science-fiction writers, and the tabloid newspapers. Out in the real world there were more important things to worry about. The Russians, for instance, smuggling wire missiles and military software to disenfranchised posseiros down in the Basin: where might all that lead?
“Grade-A bullshit,” Keller’s father had ruminated from the depths of his chair. Keller nodded to himself and fired “his toy rifle thoughtfully at the bole of a palmetto. Zing, the rifle said.
Ten years later he had learned to fire a real rifle in a real jungle. Crudely grown crystal ’liths circulated freely among the combat troops in the Basin, and Keller was impressed the first time he saw one: a device, he thought, a kind of machine from another world. But when he held it in his hand, he was suddenly back in that dusty apartment with the smell of gasoline and ancient auto upholstery rivering through the window and the grating echo of his father’s voice: mark my words. Except that Keller’s father was three years in his grave now, a cancer statistic, and the memory was scaldingly vivid—a kind of resurrection. He dropped the stone as if it had moved in his hand, and backed away, gasping.
It had surprised him, that a memory could be so frightening.
The road to Cuiaba was littered with relics of the war. Teresa saw the broken shapes of war machines in the green valleys beside the road, and felt some echo of the violence that must have raged through here.
It was a relatively new road, Keller told her, only a little older than the war. The road was a ribbon of macadam that cut like a geographer’s line through the province of Goias, swept on a spidery suspension bridge across the boiling water of the Araguaia and then into the deep Mato Grosso.
The world beyond the bus window startled and impressed her. Strange, she thought, to have come so far so quickly. The horizon was endlessly green as far as she could see, which, when the road wound up a hillside, was very far indeed. A wilderness, she thought. The idea had become stunningly real to her. A wilderness, a place where no cities were, an anarchy of nature. The landscape was as profoundly alien as anything she had seen in a stone trance. The few visible traces of human work—a blackened Army troop carrier showing its chitin through the riotous green, tanagers roosting on its gutted turrets—only reinforced the feeling.
Somewhere out here was the place where Keller had met Byron. Buried history. Somewhere out here, too, was the oneirolith mine. Cruz Wexler’s gnosis, the alien, the Other (she had told Keller). And something more personal.
They traveled into the sunset and beyond it. The sky darkened; reading lamps blinked on overhead. Byron pulled his wool cap down over his eyes and slept. Keller was lost in a magazine he had brought from Brasilia. The bus was mostly empty; the other passengers were unhappy businessmen in wrinkled suits, a few Koreans with drugged expressions, snoring posseiros in the cheap rear seats. A few tourists… like us, she thought, and then, but we’re not. She considered sleep but guessed it was impractical; she felt the pressure of the wilderness too acutely.