Tavitch was clearly insane. His eyes rolled, spittle flew from his open mouth. He stared back at the open door, ahead at Oberg. A pair of orderlies tumbled through behind him. They stood on two sides of Tavitch, panting; neither seemed to want to move. “You were supposed to lock the goddamned door!” one said. The other remained silent, eyes on Tavitch.
Tavitch, the murderer. Tavitch, who claimed to see into the past. Oberg felt his hackles rise. He was trapped in this tableau.
Tavitch stared at him. Their eyes met, and Oberg was appalled by the look of recognition Tavitch gave him. “Christ,” he said quietly.
Tavitch’s fist was clenched.
“Take him,” the second orderly said, but Tavitch ran forward then, directly at Oberg. Oberg’s instinct was to flinch away, but he was conscious of the orderlies watching him, and he threw a body check into Tavitch instead. They toppled onto the cold tile floor together.
The contact was momentary. A second, maybe less. But it was enough.
Horrified, Oberg felt the strangeness of the dreamstone pulsing through him.
He opened his eyes and saw a village deep in the hinterland. Some Indio village. Men in bowl haircuts and ragged T-shirts, women with their pendulous breasts exposed. Some deep river village, he thought dazedly, maybe refuge for a few sertao revolutionaries or an East Bloc weapons cache, more likely not: but there was a thread-rifle in his hand and the assault was on, he was in the midst of it, firing into their bodies, into their eyes like the startled eyes of deer caught in headlights, and he was getting into it, rolling with it; it was singing in him, the high eroticism of this mass kill. God’s Own. But suddenly it was not good at all. By some terrible miracle he was sharing their terror and their pain, these Indios he was killing, scything wire into his own body somehow, burning his own village. The pain and outrage boiled up in him unstoppably, and it was more than wounding: it opened a hole in him through which any horror might at any minute rush.
He gasped as the orderlies pulled Tavitch away and the corridor fell into focus around him. A nightmare, he thought desperately. But Tavitch stared down at him with a terrible, knowing leer.
“You and I,” Tavitch said. “You and I.”
Oberg threw up in the hallway.
He was methodical about his divorce from the Agencies. He drew a large sum of money from an Agency account in Belem before they cancelled his credit. And he had money of his own riding in hidden accounts Stateside.
He didn’t hold a grudge against Wyskopf or the people Wyskopf represented. Their naivete was inevitable; he associated it with their “bump of sympathy.” They took his concern with the oneirolith for an obsession, but it was not that. The connection was more subtle. Oberg was a Latent Aggressive, God’s Own, less than entirely human. Like the stone itself, he was a step outside nature. His understanding was therefore more subtle, more complete.
He knew a little about these people now. Teresa Rafael, Byron Ostler, Raymond Keller. He knew what they looked like. He knew where they had been. Most important, he knew where they were going.
He caught a morning flight. It was pleasant to see the Amazon falling behind him, the angles of it hidden by cloud, to rise effortlessly into the sunlight, spiraling east and then north, cut loose from history, cut loose from the Agencies, a loose cannon, purified in his purpose, aimed, he thought, and fired.
PART 2
WHISPERS FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD
CHAPTER 16
1. It would not have been safe to take her back to the studio by the tidal dams, so Byron located a tiny balsa deep in the Floats and put the last of his Brazilian money on the rent.
He liked the location. There was only the distant rise of the San Gabriels to remind him that the continent existed, salt breezes and morning fog to remind him of the sea. Otherwise it might have been some indefinite confluence of wood and water, paper houses rising on pontoon foundations, bobbing walkways, Chinese lanterns, eggbeater windmills ticking against the sky. A market canal ran in from the east, so there were fresh eggs and vegetables. A mixed — population, with maybe a plurality of Latinos and East Indians. Some decent jobs available at the wharves beyond the tidal dam, not too much violence. A good place, Byron thought.
He liked it more than he should have. It soothed him, and that was dangerous. He had to think about the future now … for Teresa’s sake as much as his own.
She wasn’t safe here. The terrifying thing was, she might not be safe anywhere.
Thinking of her, he followed the boardwalk along the margins of this canal, a right-of-way between the old float shanties standing like stilted birds above the water. He thought about Teresa.
She betrayed very little. It was wounding, the way she hid herself from him. Since her stone trance in Belem, she had been withdrawn, subtly lifeless, would turn away when he touched her. Her eyes were often on Keller, but Keller was equally distant: as if some weird electricity had put an opposite spin on the two of them. Something had passed between them, he thought, that time in the hotel room on the Ver-o-Peso. Some intimacy too awful to sustain.
The pain of it was obvious.
And yet she clung to the oneirolith. She had smuggled it back in her hand luggage, and she kept it concealed now in a Salvation Army dresser at the back of the balsa. Token of something. Her past, her future.
He had grown to hate it.
He hated it for the sadness it had created in her, and he hated it as a token of his own past. There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking. Drafted out of a career college in the midwest, he had volunteered for Angel duty. The Psych Corps said he had “an aptitude for the work.” And maybe that was true, maybe he did. Maybe that was why, when his duty tour ended, he chose to have his socket pulled. A feeling that it was in some way too easy, that he could have continued to stumble through life in a pleasant fog of wu-nien—like Keller—or worse, ended up with a joychip plugged into his socket. He and a couple of war buddies had come to the Floats under the tutelage of a former CO named Trujillo, who wanted help setting up a drug lab. Byron pulled out at the last minute: he could not picture himself synthesizing enkephalins and rogue adenosines for a population of degraded addicts. He was attracted to the dream-stones, however, because they seemed comparatively wholesome, and because they were popular with the artists beginning to make their presence felt in the Floats. He contacted Cruz Wexler, who set him up in business. It was simple and lucrative work but in time it began to press his conscience. He acquired a respect for the strangeness of the ’liths. They possessed a healing power, possibly a darker power as well. He came to question the wisdom of selling them as one more feelgood drug to the moneyed mainlanders who came down to the tamer Float clubs every Saturday night. Buy a dreamstone from the Angel vet: it was daring, it was fashionable. He overheard his name in conversations. “Probably had his balls shot off in the war,” one of his clients said. And the dreadful thing, he realized, was that it might be true, his life in the Floats might be one more variation on the theme of wu-nien, a kind of castration. In some important way he had been neutered.
Teresa was his road back into the world.
He had not consciously chosen her for the role, nor was it entirely coincidence. Some mingling of the two. She showed up at his door, because she needed him; he fell in love with her, because he needed to fall in love.