“I’m not finished here,” Oberg had said into the eye of the telephone. “I’m very close.”
He could have said something placating, but he had come a long way from Pau Seco and he was too weary to deal with Wyskopf diplomatically. The point of a job, he thought, is to do it. It should have been elementary.
Wyskopf had sighed. He communicated his immense patience down a thousand miles of optical wire. “We work for the same people,” he said. “I’m on your side, all right? But look at it from a broader point of view. We can’t devote an infinite amount of resources to this effort.”
“You want to abandon it?”
“Not that exactly,” Wyskopf said, and Oberg understood suddenly—it startled him—that they did want to abandon it, that Wyskopf was looking for some painless way to tell him so. My God, he thought, they still don’t understand!
“You’re making a mistake,” Oberg said.
“You don’t tell me that. You don’t tell me my job.” Silence for a beat, the sigh again. “It isn’t up to me. I got a call. You’re ordered in. That’s it.”
Oberg squeezed his eyes shut. Three days on the road and he had not slept much. He felt a kind of dizzy aloofness. All of this was talk; none of it mattered. Wyskopf s ignorance offended him, and he told Wyskopf so.
“I have your psych profile,” Wyskopf said. “I could have predicted this. You’re obsessive and you have an avoidance complex you could drive a truck through. I have a raft of complaints on my desk: SUDAM and the military and a half-dozen civil officials. It was a bad decision to send you down here, and anybody asks me, that’s what I’ll tell them. The last thing this office needs is some fucking loose cannon rolling around.” He leaned into the camera. “Refuse my direct order to come in. Do me that favor.”
“You don’t understand. The stone—”
“The stone is gone! It’s time to admit that, don’t you think? The consensus is that nobody on the black market will want it anyway: as a drug, it’s terrible. It’s a horror drug. Leave it alone. Leave it alone and there’s a good chance it’ll disappear out in the Floats somewhere. Meantime we tighten security at Pau Seco and the research facilities’. Sooner or later there’s a leak, it’s inevitable, but by then we have the advantage in basic research.”
“It’s not just that. It—”
“I don’t want to discuss it. This is policy. You understand, Mr. Oberg? You are ordered in from the field. I want you in this office tomorrow morning, and I want you contrite.”
He was stunned. “I can’t do that.”
“You’re refusing?” A certain relish now in Wyskopf’s voice.
“Yes,” Oberg said, “all right, fuck it, I’m refusing. But you don’t understand. You—”
“Shit on that,” Wyskopf said. The screen went blank.
None of them understood.
He went to a bar, sated himself with a meal of feijoada, drank and played wordless pool with three grinning fishermen. He made money and then, still drinking, lost it. Walking down a narrow night street, alone, he thought: I am a soldier and a veteran and a patriot, and I have been closer to this thing than any careerist in any of the federal agencies.
He had been touched by it. Literally.
He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things … but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing. It was what they told him in basic. Oberg had been part of a segregated battalion of what the psych people called Latent Aggressives, highly motivated men inured to violence. He hadn’t volunteered for it. His EEG had volunteered him; his genetic map had volunteered him. He had all the earmarks, they said: spike discharge in the cerebellum, periodic episodes of depersonalization, a stunted endorphin system, a history of petty violence. His CO, a rural Georgian named Toller, explained that they were unique because they had all been born without their “bump of sympathy.” And grinned, saying it. God made us what we are. And it was true, wasn’t it? Trite but undeniable.
They called themselves God’s Own. The baseline troops called them Baby killers.
They were terror troops. They penetrated the guerilla-held outlands in a series of punitive raids against posseiro villages, destroying crops, burning buildings, racking down the guerillas’ political and economic base. It was bloody and vile work. They all agreed about that. But it was uniquely their work. God made us what we are.
He rose in the ranks. He acquired a certain notoriety.
He did not care to remember much of what happened during those years. What really mattered was that the war had given him an identity, a sense of self. He had been drafted out of a foster home in rural southern Texas, where his life had been a haze of fast violence and routine indignities. He was incredulous when a Juvenile Offenses worker told him he would love the Army. But he did. It was a fact. The Army had groomed and educated and disciplined him. The Army had analyzed and decoded him; the Army made him useful. And if the Army required him to practice his vices in the hinterland of this terrible country, then that was the least of what he owed them.
He assumed, when he was discharged, that the violent part of his life had also ended. He took civilian work with the Agencies on the recommendation of an Army buddy. He was a good field man, despite what Wyskopf had said. His life was stable—had been stable. And if he had not acquired a wife or family or the accouterments of a statistically normal existence, perhaps it was because he could not shake the image of himself as a Latent Aggressive, God’s Own, one of the blank-eyed minority born without a bump of sympathy. But he did not think about it often.
He had harbored a deep suspicion of the oneiroliths even before he was assigned to the Virginia facility. In part it was his instinctive fear and hostility for the foreign, the Other. But it was also a deeper revulsion. He disliked occupying a room where one of the stones had been. He was sensitive to the aura of them. It made his hair prickle, his stomach chum. He was conscious of the tremendous value of the oneiroliths, of the data being downloaded from them: but it represented a gift of unknown provenance, and gifts made him wonder about motives. Lots of abstract knowledge, but nothing about the Exotics themselves, who they were, where they had come from or why. And this strange interaction with the subjects from Vacaville. It was like all those antique movies. Body snatchers from outer space. Oberg took the idea seriously, though he knew the research people would laugh at him; the research people had no perspective. It was his business to be suspicious. He represented the federal agencies; he represented the less overt but no less solemn suspicions of his employers. For twenty years the world had been lulled into a blithe familiarity with these artifacts, while Oberg cultivated a professional paranoia.
But he had only been convinced of the essential evil of the stones with the arrival of the more potent deep-core oneiroliths from Brazil. He had seen their influence on hardened criminals like Tavitch… and he had felt it himself.
The contact was brief but unavoidable. He lived in the research compound and several times a day shuttled from his cell-like room to the communal toilets one locked door away from the inmates’ wing. He was making this pilgrimage one winter day, a cold front out of Canada seeping through the inadequate insulation and into the hallway of the cheap concrete buildings, when the wire-mesh security door burst open and the convict Tavitch came bulling through.