Oberg left the room, repelled.
Alma, Peter, Angela.
They were Tavitch’s family … the ones he had killed.
Later, over lunch in the sterile staff cafeteria, the team leader had tried to talk away the event. “You understand, we’re working here with selected subjects. Criminals. Murderers, like Tavitch. So the work has a certain bias built into it. Conventional research hasn’t given us everything we’re looking for. We’re very little closer to understanding who the so-called Exotics are, or how an oneirolith interacts with the mind—or why—than we were fifteen years ago.”
“It’s unnatural,” Oberg had-said. “It’s ugly.”
The team leader blinked. “I follow your concerns, Mr. Oberg. All I’m suggesting is moderation. Patience. Look at it from our point of view. Communication is what we’re all concerned with here. And communication—of one kind or another—is what happened in that room with Tavitch. There’s this prejudice against what’s called ‘the human interface,’ the effect of the oneiroliths on the human mind. Well, obviously it’s a difficult study. The effect is subjective. You can’t measure it or calibrate it. So we do a limited kind of research, and we have to compete for funding with people who are downloading much harder data. You see what I’m driving at? I know you had a negative reaction to what happened today, but I wouldn’t want that to affect the course of our work.”
So it comes down to this, Oberg had thought: this man’s, career. “I don’t control funding.”
“You have influence.”
“Only a little.”
“Still, I’m convinced we’re doing important work, vital work, with these new stones. No one wants to consider it, Mr. Oberg, but maybe the real message the Exotics left us isn’t strictly linguistic. Maybe it’s preverbal. Maybe it operates on the level of intuition … or emotion … or memory.”
Memory. What was it Tavitch had said? Something about history. And the team leader had talked about hypermnesia, an involuntary upwelling of the past. To Oberg all of this seemed obviously, patently sinister. The past was the past, a burial place, the tomb of events, and better that way. Nobody cared about the past but priests and poets. You did a thing and you left it behind you. Hypermnesia, he thought, Tavitch’s “history,” was a light cast into places that by all rights should have been dark, hidden, buried.
Briefly, Oberg felt a wave of what the Army psych officers had called “depersonalization”—a sense of standing apart from himself, a disconnection. For one crystalline moment he understood that his horror of the alien stones might be purely personal, a pathology, a self-disgust as profound as he had seen in Tavitch this afternoon. A phobia of memory. He gazed at the bland, pale face of the man across the table and thought: if you’d seen what I’ve seen —if you’d done what I’ve done—
But it was a progression of logic he could not allow, and he thrust it from his mind. The oneiroliths were evil; there was no other possibility.
“Just trying to clarify our position,” the team leader said.
“I understand,” Oberg told him.
He woke from the reminiscence as if it had been a bad dream.
The aircraft was circling now, the sky lightening with dawn. The uniformed peacekeepers were mostly asleep. Oberg imagined he could feel it coming nearer—the source of the virus, the center of the infection. He did not think the analogy was unfair. It bred like a virus; it insinuated itself into the body—or at least the mind—like a virus. Like a virus, it had purposes of its own. Not human purposes.
He peered out the window and saw the dust of Pau Seco, pale in the morning light, rising from a canyon in the jungle.
CHAPTER 8
1. “It looks like hell,” Keller said.
“It is hell,” Ng said blithely. “But this isn’t the worst of it.”
They had come in along the broad highway from Cuiaba. Ng drove a battered Korean semi full of refrigerated meat —it was his day job, he said. He ran supplies to the box cities full of hopeful foraos and unlucky formigas. It paid okay, he said. He did not say what his night job was.
It was a long run from Cuiaba. Teresa and Byron napped in the rear of the huge cab; Keller sat up with Ng. Ng didn’t talk much but Keller was able to confirm his suspicion that the man had been a soldier, one of the Vietnamese commandos who had fought in the Pacific Rim offensive. Keller had always been just a little scared of the Vietnamese. They were culled soldiers, tagged at birth and raised in the big military creches outside Danang. Their bodies produced chronically high levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, chronically low levels of monoamine oxidase. They were, in other words, aggressive, domineering, and desperate for excitement. It was there in the way Ng drove his rig: too fast, but with a tight, rapt smile. And when he turned a corner and the sleeve rode up his arm, Keller recognized the faint blue double-X etched under the skin—the Danang tattoo.
They approached Pau Seco a little after dawn. Keller saw the plume of dust on the horizon feathering toward the south. “Pau Seco?” he said, and Ng nodded. Within an hour they had reached the outskirts of the old town, the endemic poverty of Brazil but on a grander scale. Shacks rolled up and down these bread-loaf hills, all nearly identical, random configurations of corrugated tin, tarpaper, cardboard. Keller gazed at the emaciated men gathered by the road, who returned his gaze without curiosity as the big rig rumbled past.
“Formigas,” Ng said. “Unlicensed miners. Most of them are not even that, actually. They come in the hope that they’ll be hired into the mine. The garimpeiros are the men who own the land. They hire the formigas to do their work for them. For wages, or more likely a share of the income. If there is ever any income. But there are more of these people than there is work for them. Most of them spend their days in the laborers’ compound hoping someone else dies. It’s the best way to get work.”
And then they topped a rise and Keller saw the mine itself.
Pau Seco, he thought. The ugly center of the world.
Ng pulled the truck into the bay back of a cinderblock building and climbed out, dusting his shorts with his small hands. He led Keller to the crest of a hill and gestured almost proudly at the pit of the mine. “Hell,” he said.
It might have been hell. It was an open canyon of red mud and white clay so immense that the trees on the far rim were gray with distance. Keller did a professional pan, sweeping the mine east to west so that this vista could be reclaimed from his AV memory. There was so awesomely much of it.
“This was a plain once,” Ng said. “A plain covered with jungle. Then the garimpeiros came, and the foreigners, and the government to take their twenty-five percent. When they burned off the trees, the ashes fell for miles around.”
It was a vista from another century, formigas creeping up the inclines like the ants they were named for, deafening with the clangor of hand tools and human voices. This was how the Aztecs must have mined their gold, Keller thought, and he felt a moment of giddy vertigo: an abyss here, too, of time.
Ng occupied a shack in the old town of Pau Seco with a view commanding the mine and the sprawl of the workers’ compound. After nightfall the old town came alive. The town of Pau Seco, Ng explained, was a concentration of whorehouses, banks, and bars. Every day one or two of these thousands of garimpeiros would come into money; the town existed to extract it from them. Periodically there was the sound of gunfire.