“Byron,” Cat said warmly.
But he was staring at Wexler. Wexler said nothing, only returned the look. His eyes were steady and blue. Still a charismatic figure. People didn’t believe he could lie with eyes like that.
His breath rasped in, rasped out.
Cat stood up, sighing. “I’ll talk to you later, then.” She touched Byron’s shoulder, leaned over him. “Go easy on him, all right? I’ve been bunking him in my float. He’s got nowhere to go and his lungs are pretty bad.”
When she was out of earshot, Byron said tonelessly, “I have every reason to believe you fucked us over.”
Wexler nodded. “I can see how you might feel that way.”
“A walk, you said. A vacation.”
“Unforeseen circumstances,” Wexler said. “Is Teresa all right?”
“More or less.” He resented the question. “You have the stone?”
No, Byron thought. You are not entitled to that datum. Not yet. He smiled. “Worry about it,” he said.
Wexler sat back and sipped his coffee. “I’m not here,” he said at last—meaning the Floats, Byron took it—“by choice. You might have noticed.”
“Cat said you got burned.”
“They came in force. I was not expecting it.”
“But you weren’t home? That’s a pretty good coincidence.”
“I didn’t expect any of this. Or I would not have sent you people south. May I explain, or would you prefer to break my nose?”
Byron realized his fists were clenched. More bullshit, he thought bleakly. But he might as well listen. And he realized then that he had come here not for money or satisfaction, but for Teresa’s sake. Her unhappiness was patent and frightening and connected very closely with the stone. If anybody understood it, Wexler might.
A gull circled overhead, screeching. Byron tossed a crumb from the table and watched the bird chase it down to the dark canal water. “I’m listening,” he said.
The Agencies came and closed the estate, Wexler said. It was a radical sweep. They had always ignored him before. The dreamstones were technically contraband, but it was a law not much enforced; the scale of the crime was minuscule, and intensive enforcement would not have been cost-effective. “The new ’liths changed their mind,” Wexler said. “The deep-core ’liths.”
“You knew,” Byron said.
“I was warned,” he admitted. “I have my own contacts. Obviously.”
“Some good people were there.”
“There was no time to get them out. They’ve been in custody, but my understanding is that they’ll be released soon.” He sipped his coffee, labored for breath. “You have to understand about the stones.”
Wexler had a contact in the government research facility in Virginia, a highly-placed member of the research team who had been feeding him news about the deep-core oneiroliths. “And it was heady information. You have to understand that. It was everything we wanted. Everything that came before, impressive as it was, was blurred or obscure by comparison. For years we’d been decoding data in which every third bit had been erased by time. Reconstructing it, really. Even so, we learned a great deal. But never anything substantial about the Exotics themselves. As if they were holding themselves aloof, standing out of reach.”
But now, Wexler said, the data came in torrents. Too, the Virginia team had begun serious work with what they called “the human interface”—mostly convicts recruited out of Vacaville. This was not hard data; it was “of dubious provenance” and sometimes contradictory. But much of it correlated with the new translations from the big mainframes. A preliminary understanding of the Exotics began to emerge.
“The question had always been, why do we have these artifacts? Why were they buried in the Mato Grosso? Were they a gift, an accident? The great mystery.”
Byron said, “Is there an answer?”
“Hints,” Wexler said. He leaned forward now. His own fascination was obvious and undimmed. “We deciphered a little of their history. The history, especially, of their information technology.”
“I don’t understand,” Byron said.
“Well…” Wexler paused to catch his breath. “First there are the stories around the fire. Neolithic data storage. The past is recorded, but it’s not very efficient. Errors creep in. Then the written word. The beginning of real history—
a better grip on the past. Compared to oral history it’s a fairly dense medium, fairly incorruptible. Then the printed word, the book. Better yet. Photography, audiotape, videotape… and suddenly the past is very much with us. We have digital technology, we have molecular memory. We have people like you.” He looked a moment at Byron’s faded Angel tattoo. “Walking data storage. The Exotics were like us in this respect, but more focused… you might say obsessed. The idea of the loss of the past terrified them. They had a profound, ontological fear of forgetting. Without memory, no meaning; without meaning—chaos.” He sat back. “The oneiroliths are the logical product of that obsession: complexly folded in spacetime, linked somehow directly into sapient consciousness. You could say that they contain a sort of recording of experience itself, an archive of every human life since they arrived on this planet. Better perhaps to say that they allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have.”
Well, Byron thought. He had seen Teresa do her trick with the old people who visited her float: pulling the past out of a stone. Strange but not world-shaking. He told Wexler so.
“But it begs the question,” Wexler said. “Our best estimate now is that the Exotics encountered our planet some thousand years before the birth of Christ. It fascinated them. It must have. They would have asked themselves the questions we’ve been asking about them: how are these creatures like us? How are they not?”
He sipped his coffee, momentarily breathless. Byron waited.
“My guess,” Wexler said, “is that they considered us defective. Suppose we traveled to another world and encountered a race of myopics. That’s how it must have seemed to them. Here we are, obviously sapient, tool-using, clever individuals. Our bodies are not unlike theirs; we have opposable thumbs, as they do. The distinguishing feature is …” He tapped his forehead. “Memory.” He smiled faintly. “The best evidence now suggests that the Exotics possessed what we would call eidetic memory. A human mind can’t do this; the few cases of human mnemonism on record have been deeply disturbed individuals. It’s the way we’re wired. We have to assume the Exotics could forget, in the sense that the past was not always vividly in their mind—no living creature could cope with that. But there was no fully experienced moment that could not be recalled at will… or could be willfully or permanently suppressed. Presumably, this is what fueled their obsession with information technology. For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality.”
Byron walked with Wexler out along the seawall for a distance.
It was more private out here. The ocean seemed to lend a credibility to all this talk of time, immortality, memory.
Byron believed most of it. The talk had ignited an old enthusiasm in Wexler’s lined face, too immediate to be faked. None of this addressed the problem of betrayal, money, Teresa. But he was content, for now, to let the man talk.
“I wanted one of these new stones, of course. It seemed to me we could do so much with it. They used human subjects in Virginia, but usually the criminally insane, and they were reacting badly to the experience—hypermnesia, specifically of repressed material. Whereas in Carmel the response was almost always positive … at least with the traditional ’liths. Why not these new ones? It would be bigger, stronger, better. Real contact this time. Contact with an alien sapience: I cannot communicate how intoxicating that idea was. Not the exchange of mathematics, but real contact—spiritual contact.”