“It wasn’t a question,” he said coolly. “And I guess it’s none of my business. But you can’t look at him and not know it.”
Traffic flooded down the wet streets—electric carts, scooters, big Japanese cars. Keller hunkered down under the umbrella; he put his hand around her waist. She said carefully, “I love Byron. I do. I love him for what he’s done. I’m not callous.”
“There are all kinds of love.”
“We were together a while. It didn’t work out.”
“He hasn’t stopped caring.”
“I’m grateful for that too. There are times when I’ve needed him. Maybe that’s selfish—I don’t know.” She frowned, wondering at Keller’s curiosity.
He said, “It just took me by surprise. I didn’t know he could be so …” He groped for the word. “Single-minded.”
“Obsessed, you mean. But we all are.” They had reached the church now, candles burning behind dust-caked windows. “Obsessed,” she said. “All three of us.” She put her finger out, touched the painted icon of the dream-stone. She felt Keller’s sympathy fade abruptly.
He took her hand and pulled it back. “You follow that thing,” he said, “you could follow it a long way down.”
“You know all about it, right?” He looked startled. But it was not an insult. She meant it. “Being an Angel must be like that. Byron talks about it sometimes. Seeing without feeling.” She looked at him cautiously. “Seems like you followed it a long way down already.”
A curtain came down over his face. “It’s not the same.”
She shrugged and opened the door.
The interior of the church was dark and empty. Long ago it must have been a Catholic church, buried here between the taller and newer buildings. Behind the altar there was a soot-dark stained-glass intaglio of the Virgin Mary with her hand upraised. The glass was illuminated faintly from below; no exterior light entered here.
An old woman stepped out from a back room. She regarded them with a crabbed expression and spoke in sibilant Portuguese. Keller translated: “She says tourists aren’t permitted.” Igreja, the old woman said. “It’s a church.”
“Tell her we want to use a stone.”
Keller spoke haltingly. The old woman sighed and went into the back. Teresa sat down at one of the candlelit tables that had been installed where the pews might once have been. The woman returned with a tin lock-box clamped under her arm. She held the box protectively and extended her open hand, palm up. Keller gave her a hundred-cruzeiro note.
The old woman took up a station by the door as Teresa opened the box.
The stone inside was an nth generation copy, dark with contaminants; the angles were muted, the colors pale. It could not have been worth much more than Keller had paid for the privilege of touching it. Still…
So close now, Teresa thought.
She took the oneirolith in her hand.
It was always the same for her, this sense of an opening up, a clambering out of the shell of her body. With her eyes closed she felt suspended in an indefinite space. The room had fallen away on every side; her body felt numb and distant.
The phenomenon was mysterious; copious research had shed no real light. The current theory, Teresa understood, was that the oneiroliths acted somehow directly on the mind—the ghost in the crystal touching the ghost in her own architecture of blood and tissue. Maybe the Exotics had used the stones this way; maybe the visions they created were some skewed diffraction of that function, the human mind laboring over inhuman code.
It hardly mattered. What mattered were these persistent half dreams, the delicate blue-winged people in their impossible plenitude… their deserts and forests and farms and cities… and the human scenarios, too, almost as strange, a parade of ancestors. She felt their potency even through the medium of this crudely copied stone. Giddy with it, she reached for Keller’s hand.
He pulled back.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, the sound of her own voice vague and distant. “It’s just … I would like not to be alone.” And opened her eyes a moment to see him.
Slowly, he nodded. Watching her—his eyes on hers with the intense scrutiny of a frightened animal—he reached his big hand across the table.
The contact was electric.
Old, powerful memories.
She saw Keller in Cuiaba a decade ago.
Keller the draftee. Keller riding in on a mottled green military transport from Rio. Keller and a couple of other recruits dispersed to a combat unit in this dusty meat town, dazed, an Army-issue thread-rifle slung over one shoulder and his duffel over the other.
His face was indistinct—an image glimpsed and ignored in mirrors—but cruelly young. He was stick thin, clean-shaven, made naive by a childhood in the simmering conduit suburbs. “The blessed innocence of failed comprehension”—Meg had said that.
Megan Lindsey was one of the women in his platoon. A Pfc like Keller, but she had some combat experience; she had been on patrol down the dangerous corridor of BR-364. “California-born,” Byron said, “like you. Doesn’t talk much. Attitude problem, some people say. I think she’s just scared—and scared to show it.”
Byron Ostler was the platoon Angel. Keller was fascinated by him, this white-haired gnome drafted out of an industrial-chemistry course at some midwestern agricultural campus, a year younger than Keller. Byron showed him the scar at the back of his neck. “Angel scar,” he said. “Look for it.” He regarded Keller through his protective lenses. “You should stay away from me, you know. If you run with the freaks, you are a freak. Plus, who knows what might get downloaded?” He flashed his tattoo. “The eyes of the Personnel Branch are upon you.”
“They look at all these recordings?”
“Combat mainly. Running them in realtime is what you might call problematic. But you never know.”
It didn’t bother Keller. He was fascinated by Byron, and more fascinated by Meg. He maneuvered himself next to her in the mess hall, talked to her a little. She seemed grateful for the attention. Her family ran a bacteria farm up in the San Fernando Valley ; she had been burned brown walking the enclosures every summer since she was ten, reading out fermentation gauges into a pocket recorder. She was lithe and small and her face was mobile, but Keller thought Byron was probably right: there was fear there, too, not far below the surface.
He watched her move in esoteric katas on the parade ground one tropical noon. Sheened with sweat, she achieved grace. Her khaki T-shirt dangled limply from her shoulders; the huge pockets of the fatigue pants blossomed at her hips. Her hair, cut into a military pageboy, gave back the vertical sunlight. Keller had never seen anything like her. He watched from the shade of a storage shed, letting the memory burn into him, admitting for the first time that he might have fallen in love with her. She moved like a scythe, and did not seem to see him until, moments later, sitting zazen in the damp heat, storm clouds rising up behind her from the Mato Grosso a horizon away, she looked at him… locked eyes with him, shocked him with a smile.
Because the compound at Cuiaba was overcrowded, Keller slept in a tent staked out between the halide lights and the barbed perimeter fence. She came from the women’s bunker after lights-out that night, whispering his name in the dark, and although they had not planned it, neither was he surprised: the promise had been in her look. They made love inexpertly but passionately, traded childhood reminiscences in the hours before reveille.
When he asked her about her patrols out BR-364, she sat up abruptly, shivering in the dark. “You’ll find out soon enough.”