His eyes lingered a second on Byron Ostler, the platoon Angel, who was down and whole and scanning the scene methodically. Watching, Keller felt a microsecond of envy. He was deep in it, Keller thought: lost in some neurological subroutine, miles beyond fear. Angel Zen. The thinking part of him had closed up like a nut. It must be sweet.
All this in an eyeblink.
And then he found Meg. She had been walking to his left and a couple of yards to his rear. He had to crane his head to find her. When he did, he wished he hadn’t.
She had been hit.
The horror of it was giddy, skull-cracking. Keller blanked on it—was not sure for a second what he was looking at.
She had taken a wire in the legs, and her legs below the knees were a hideous red confetti. She couldn’t walk. She couldn’t stand. She was exposed, out there on the furrowed blankness of the manioc field. And she was alive.
She was gesturing to him. Her hand was out. Ray, she seemed to be saying. She wanted him to pull her into the crater with him, somewhere where she might be safe— might live until a medevac unit arrived. He blinked, watching. She stretched her bloody hand toward him, and the look in her eyes now was fervent, terrifying. He scuffled forward and reached for her. When someone hurts, he thought, you help. It was as simple as that.
But then a second barrage began, the eerie high keening of the wire weapons followed seconds later by the concussion of cluster bombs, and Keller froze. The terror that overtook him was a new thing. He imagined it was a mirror of the fear in Meg’s own eyes. He heard screams above the din of the barrage and knew immediately that this was how his own screams would sound, imagined the terror liberated from his throat in one of those long animal howlings, the last constraints of sanity unbuckled in the onrush of pain and death. He felt the burr of shrapnel in the air above him, and pulled back his hand.
I’ll die, he thought. There was a cool and relentless logic in it. If I lift myself up there and grab hold of her, I’ll die. All of this was calculable: impact, detonation, velocity, speed, weight; God, he guessed, was a kind of mathematician, handing down these neat calculations.
It might have been only a moment’s doubt. Later he would tell himself he had meant to help her, that he was only shocked by the concussions, trapped in a second’s indecision…
But she died while he hesitated. A wire barrage found her, the monofilaments flaying into her midriff. The impact took her, and she moved in the familiar ballistic, lifted and carried back. He saw her dogtags whirl in an arc through the boiling air, severed from their chain. She tumbled into the high weeds limply.
The motion was simple but profound. It meant, Keller thought, that she had entered into the mathematics of inanimate things.
He understood about death. People die all the time. People die especially in combat: it’s the nature of the thing. It’s bad, he thought, but it happens.
But he had loved her.
But the people you love die too. The comprehension of death had come early to him. He had seen his mother stretched out in a mortuary box when he was only seven years old, and understood that—although she appeared to be lost in some especially deep and troubled sleep—the fact was that she would not wake up. The breath would not sigh in and out again, the eyes would not blink open ever. That was death, substantial, right in front of him.
When his father died some years later, Keller was old enough to take a job, keep up the apartment over the bodywork shop. He preserved everything meticulously in its place. Hanging onto the illusion of normalcy. It was another way of hiding the eyes, subverting this juggernaut of grief; it was a habit, and he had acquired it early.
And so after Meg’s death and his own mute complicity in it, he came to understand Byron, the Angel, the Eye. “You saw,” Keller accused him in a drunken moment days later.
But Byron shook his head. “The machine sees, Ray. I don’t see a fucking thing.”
My God, Keller thought. It must be heaven.
He thought later of trying to get access to the recordings, assess his own guilt, look at the thing—somehow— objectively. He put through two formal written requests, but both were denied; the recordings had passed into the archival limbo of Intelligence Evaluation, far beyond the grasp of mortals like himself.
He volunteered for Angel basic. He learned wu-nien. He was earnest about it; he took his wires seriously. In the end he was assigned to a patrol boat policing the quiescent waters of the Rio Negro, and he served out his time without seeing another shot fired.
It didn’t matter. He was a good and thorough Angel now. What was once a habit had become a way of life.
All this with great clarity, compressed into a moment. Her hand opened.
The dreamstone dropped to the carpet of the hotel room in Belem.
Keller rolled away from her, blinking and gasping.
But he had come here for this. It was clear to him now. This resurrection: it had been in his mind since the day Byron said the word ” Brazil.” He had been thinking of Megan Lindsey. He had never stopped thinking of her.
Teresa sat up now, pained and terrified. Byron swiveled his chair away from the phone.
I came here for Meg, Keller thought. As if there were answers here. (There were not.) As if the placid mud out along BR-364 might yield some epiphany after all these years. As if she could come out of the ground and forgive him.
Stupid, inarticulate, idiot thoughts.
Teresa was looking at him now. She mouthed the words: I’m sorry!
Keller looked away.
“That was Denny,” Byron said.
They stared at him.
“On the phone,” Byron said. “He made the arrangements. He found us a flight out of here. He says—Jesus Christ, what happened to you people?”
CHAPTER 15
They had been here, Oberg thought.
The hotel room in Belem was empty now. The windows were open, the yellowed curtains thrown back. Oberg had intimidated the local police, who had intimidated the American expatriate community, and the process had led him here: to an empty room. But not long empty.
Time had been his only real enemy. It was a long journey along the bus lanes from Pau Seco to this noisy Amazon fish town. But they had been here. He could tell.
He made himself silent, concentrated his awareness.
It was something more subtle than a scent. It existed under the reek of the Ver-o-Peso and the ancient dusts of the hotel. It was the trace, Oberg thought, of the oneirolith itself, an alienness lingering in the air. Spoor of other worlds.
He knew, too, where they had gone.
A loose cannon, the Brazilian Chief of Station had called him. Maybe, Oberg thought. Maybe that’s what I am: a loose cannon. But not entirely without direction.
Chief of Station in the American embassy in Brasilia was a ponderously fat Harvard poli-sci graduate named Wyskopf. Oberg had contacted him on his first day in Belem, by phone, more than a week over schedule. It made Wyskopf angry; Wyskopf ordered him in.