He apologized for asking. She ran her fingers through the stubble on his scalp. “Out there, Ray,” she said, “it’s easy to do things you’re not proud of.”
The platoon went out a couple of days later. A troop carrier dropped them off in the ragged farm country southeast of Ti Parana. Keller walked point some. Byron went into an Angel fugue, not talking much, looking intensely, gliding—Keller thought—above the deep currents of his fear. Meg walked with a white-knuckled grip on her thread-rifle. The tension was high—there had been guerilla activity all through these pockmarked farm villages—but they did not actually see action until they stumbled into an ambush in a muddy manioc field somewhere in Rondonia. The noise was sudden and astounding. The sky lit up with the antiseptic glare, of burning phosphorus. Keller heard the bang and whistle of cluster bombs on every side of him; without thinking, he went to his knees. The blood—
“No,” he said, and pulled back his hand. Teresa opened her eyes, shaken. Keller was staring grimly back. Some of this had seeped through to him, she thought, powerful images leaping the gap between them. His own memories. “I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely. She opened her hand and left the oneirolith on the table. The old Brazilian woman scuttled over with her tin box. “Passou a hora.” Their time was up.
It left her depressed. They walked back to the hotel in the aftermath of the rain, a sour humidity rising from the streets. Down the mouth of an alley Teresa glimpsed a posseiro woman, in transit or homeless, squatting among her possessions and suckling a naked child. The child had a thatch of dark hair, big eyes, Indio features. The woman cradled the child’s head in the crook of her arm and gazed down at him with an expression of unselfconscious affection that made Teresa turn away, suddenly weak. After what Keller had said about Byron, after what she had seen, she felt chastised. We are all down here hunting some grail, she thought, digging for it, scrabbling after it, not out of greed but out of our misplaced sincerity… and here was this illiterate woman crouched in an alley, certainly poor and probably homeless, but whole where they were broken (she felt it like a cold wind through her), healthy where they were crippled. It made her feel small; it made her feel ashamed.
The hotel lobby was full of stale warmth. In the room, Ng was waiting.
CHAPTER 7
When he was certain the Americans had left Brasilia, Stephen Oberg boarded a SUDAM flight directly to Pau Seco.
He had simply to flash his Agency card. SUDAM and the Brazilian government generally had been eager to cooperate. Technically—according to his documents—Oberg was a civilian employee of the DEA, but since the great amalgamation of the federal agencies in the thirties, the distinction had become obscure—his immediate superior was an NSA bureaucrat on lease to the security branch, and he was answerable to the Embassy.
The aircraft was crowded with peacekeepers in pea-green uniforms, talking among themselves in laconic Ariguaia Valley accents and oblivious to the dark ocean of forest below. Oberg propped his head on a pillow and pretended to sleep. He was 190 pounds, bulky in a gray suit, a plodding but methodical thinker. He was not given to fits of nerves, but he admitted that Brazil made him nervous.
There would have to be changes made. He had tried to impress that on the Agencies and on the government functionaries he had been introduced to in his brief time here. For years the mining of the Pau Seco artifact had been a relatively casual affair; smuggling happened mostly at the research facilities in America and the Asian states, where the oneiroliths were temptingly easy to duplicate. Smuggling from Pau Seco itself was problematic, and for years there had been no good reason to attempt it. The Eastern -Bloc had periodically made its presence felt, but that was to be expected… tolerated, even, within limits. The exigencies of the balance of power. But times had changed.
Oberg had been at the government labs in Virginia when the first of the new stones came in late last year. Technically, the research team leader told him, these new stones were more “addressable”—they interfaced more successfully with the cryptanalytical programs running out of the building’s big mainframes. “We’re downloading all kinds of material,” he said. “Ask for it, it’s there. It’s like an encyclopedia. A bottomless encyclopedia. But the effect on human volunteers …”
Oberg said, “It’s different?”
“Very idiosyncratic. Very strange. You should see.”
And so Oberg, who was the Agencies’ liaison-in-place, had followed the voluble team leader down a hallway to the small pastel rooms where the human volunteers were kept. This was essential research, too, Oberg had been told, though it made him queasy to think of it. Perversely, there were data the computers could not evince from the stones, data accessible to the living mind alone. Everything that was known about the Exotics had come through this route. A blue-skinned people who inhabited, or had inhabited, a small planet of a distant star. Through human volunteers some little knowledge of their language and anthropology had been eked out. But it was sporadic work, and much of it was contradictory, overlaid with dreams and wishes, the excrescences of the human mind.
The volunteer was a man named Tavitch. Like most of their volunteers, he came from the federal prison at Vacaville. Tavitch was a soft-spoken middle-aged man who had murdered his wife and two children a week after he lost his job as a data-base manager, and who chose the Virginia facility as an alternative to amygdalectomy. His eyes were large and moist, his expression faintly petulant. He held one of the new deep-core oneiroliths in his hand.
“First time he touched it, he was practically comatose,” the team leader burbled. “Oculogyric trance. Some kind of traumatic hypermnesia. But he’s relatively lucid now.”
Oberg folded his arms patiently. “Mr. Tavitch? Can you hear me?”
Tavitch looked up, though his expression was preoccupied.
“What do you see, Mr. Tavitch?” There was a long pause. “Time,” Tavitch said finally. “History.”
It was eerie, unpleasant. Oberg looked at the team leader. The team leader shrugged and waved his hands: go on.
Oberg sighed inwardly. “History,” he said. “Our history?”
“Our history,” Tavitch said, “their history. Ours is newer. Oh, it shines! You should see it. It’s like a river. A golden river of lives. Millions and millions, fading away back as many years.” His eyes were glazed and patient. “They’re ail in there…”
“Who?”
“Everybody,” Tavitch said. “Everybody?”
“The dead,” Tavitch said calmly. “Lives tangled up like strings. The living too—more like fuses. Burning.”
Oberg had shuddered. It was the instinctive revulsion he inevitably felt in that room. A sense of contamination. People assumed the oneiroliths had been tamed, that their familiarity had taken the edge off their strangeness. For Oberg, at least, it wasn’t even remotely true. They were the product of an intelligence that was profoundly and dissonantly inhuman. You could tell by looking at them—the oily shine of them, the illusion of depth. Stone mechanism, he thought. Mineral life. It made him uneasy.
“They’re in here too,” Tavitch said, and his voice descended now into a minor key.
“Who, Mr. Tavitch?”
“ Alma. Peter. Angela.” The convict’s face seemed to collapse into itself. Oberg was stunned. He thought the man might cry—Tavitch, the murderer, who had never demonstrated any sign of remorse. “They want to understand,” Tavitch said, “but they don’t… they can’t…”