There had never been any question of indifference. Some telegraphy in the shape of her face or the color of her eyes had communicated her necessity to him. She was emaciated and ill; he was a demobbed Angel, a parody of a combat vet. It should have been comical. But he cared for her.
But she was dying.
The stone saved her life, and that was good; it did not occur to him until much later to wonder whether he had merely postponed the inevitable. She really did want to die. He learned that about her. She was punishing herself for some sin she could not even consciously remember, some buried enormity lost in the trauma of the fire. But there were other forces in her, too, and he was certain he had kindled one of them: a spark of resistance, her rebellious desire to live. It was as if there were two Teresas woven between and around each other, each working to deceive and subvert the other: death tricked into life, life into death.
In all this the oneirolith remained a mystery, a conduit between these fractions of herself, necessary but dangerous. He had been afraid of the deep-core stone because it threatened to upset a delicate balance, and that was what it had seemed to do: the spark in her was all but extinguished now.
And so there was nothing to do but find this place for her to hide, a pontoon shack in the Floats where she would be safe, at least, from the Agencies. She might pull out of it. He told himself so.
But what angered him—and it was a deep and profound anger he wasn’t certain he could control any longer—was Keller’s coolness toward her.
Keller, whom she loved. Keller, who could have saved her.
Keller wanted to go back to the mainland.
He met Keller at a market stall and they walked out along the tidal dam in an awkward silence. “I’m finished here,” Keller said at last. “That must be obvious now.”
“She needs you,” Byron said simply.
He followed Keller’s gaze out beyond the boardwalk, past the featureless wall of the dam. Out there on the clean horizon a Thai tanker seemed to sit motionless. Gulls whirled overhead. “There’s nothing I can do for her.”
“You owe it to her to try.”
He shook his head. “I don’t owe her anything.”
There was some secret knowledge moving behind his eyes. Byron felt angry, excluded, helpless. He recognized Keller’s aloofness for what it was: the Ice Palace, Angel instincts, a cold and willful vacancy of the soul. Keller said, “I have a job to do.”
“Fuck your job.” They walked a few paces with this envelope of anger around them, not speaking. “You go back there,” he said finally, “it could be dangerous. The Agencies could find you.”
“I download, I put everything through an image processes I destroy the original memory trace. Even if they find me, there’s nothing that constitutes evidence. Nothing they can use against her.”
“You care about her that much?”
The question seemed to trouble Keller; he didn’t answer.
“If you cared,” Byron said, “you would stay.”
“I can’t.”
“So what then? A new name? Another job somewhere?”
He shrugged.
“You tell her,” Byron said wearily. “Leave me out of it. You tell her you’re leaving.” Keller said, “I will.”
2. She was at the back of the float shack watching TV.
Keller looked over her shoulder. It was some Scandinavian love serial, satellite programming syndicated through Network. But she wasn’t really watching. Her eyes were averted. She glanced up at him and they were alone for a moment in the silence of the small room, the floor lifting and falling in the swell. “You’re leaving,” she said.
It startled him. But she would have guessed. It was hardly surprising. The evidence of small silences, looks avoided, hands untouched. He made himself aloof: an act of will. “I have work to do,” he said.
She smiled faintly. “Downloading memories?”
He nodded.
“And then,” she said, “they’re video. Right? You don’t have to live with them anymore.” She stood up, ran a hand through her hair. “Will you come back?”
He was torn by the question. The odds were that he would not. A part of him wanted desperately never to come back, never to see her again. But he was not entirely free from adhyasa, powerful and traitorous impulses. “I don’t know.”
She- nodded, as if to say: all right, yes, thank you at least for being honest. She held out her hand and he took it. But when he moved to turn away, she held him there. Her gaze was intense and her hand tightened painfully. “It doesn’t matter,” she said fiercely. “Anything that happened, it doesn’t matter to me. What happened with Meg —it doesn’t matter.”
He pulled away. For a moment he wanted to believe her, accept what she was offering him. But it was not in her power to forgive.
She knew. And that was unbearable.
“It doesn’t matter.” She followed him to the door. “Remember that, Ray. Do that for me, please. Please just remember.”
3. He rode a boat taxi down the market canal to the big chain-link fences that marked the mainland, and by the time he had located his car—parked this last month in a security garage—night had fallen. The urban access routes were crowded; the car audio pumped out dizzying rondos of pulse music, muscular and grim. The city was a river of light and concrete rolling from the Mexican border up into the dry conduit suburbs, from the ocean to the desert; and after Brazil, he thought, it should have been daunting. But it was not. It intoxicated him.
In these night canyons he was one among many, finally anonymous; here he might lose his guilt, his memories, his history, himself.
CHAPTER 17
1. A Thai taxiboat driver led Oberg to the empty studio by the tidal dam.
It was an impressive balsa. Oberg looked up at it from the tiny canal dock abutting the pontoon walkway and said, “She lives here?”
“Did,” the driver said laconically. “Maybe still does. Though I haven’t seen her lately.” He waited, pointedly. Oberg pressed a few faded cash notes into his hand; he nodded and sent his boat whirring away.
Alone, Oberg climbed a mossy concrete stairway to the boardwalk and casually forced the door.
There was dust inside.
He had expected as much. They would not have come back here. They were wiser than that. It had been too easy tracing her: she had dozens of contacts among mainland art dealers and in the galleries up the coastal highway. She had been, by every account, a woman of predictable habits.
So she had not come back here, and he had anticipated that, but he remained convinced of two things: that she had gone to ground somewhere in the Floats, and that—it was pretty much inevitable—he would find her.
What he wanted here, in this closed green bamboo retreat she had once inhabited, was as much mystical as practicaclass="underline" a sense of her presence, a token of her life.
The still air stirred around him. Quietly now, he moved up the stairs.
He had taught himself about the Floats.
It was not a single community. The plural noun was necessary. Years ago, in a decade-long infusion of state and federal funding, the tidal dams had been erected off the California coast. It was a feat of engineering as ambitious as the building of the Great Wall, and it represented the pressing need for energy resources rolling over a host of practical and ecological objections. After years of cost overruns and the extinction of a half-dozen minor marine species, the project went successfully on-line; even today it supplied most of the electrical power soaked up by the urban sprawl. Inevitably, not enough; but there were the Baja and Sonora photic generators shouldering the overload, technologies the Exotic stones had made practical.