Byron said coolly, “Spiritual?”
The faint smile again. “I used to be freer with words like that. But yes, spiritual. It was what we wanted. The authentic touch. Across that chasm.” He waved his hand at the sky. “But of course everything was locked up very tight. The Agencies were scared of this whole thing. For the last thirty years national governments have been presiding over some fairly tumultuous social changes. A direct product of the oneiroliths. Fortunes made and unmade. That kind of instability is frightening. The idea of accelerated change—well, it made them nervous.”
“So you set up the buy at Pau Seco.”
“I really believed it would be safe. I spent a considerable amount of money on it. I bought cooperation at the highest levels of the SUDAM bureaucracy. There was a risk involved, of course. I told Teresa so when she volunteered. But even if there had been legal trouble, I might have bought you out of that too … the Valverde regime is extremely pliable.”
“It was worse than that,” Byron said.
Wexler averted his eyes. “So I understand. My contact in Virginia was compromised. And then the estate at Carmel was compromised. And so the house of cards came tumbling down. I have no influence over the Agencies … I didn’t know they would be involved.” He looked at Byron. “You managed to get away with the stone?”
“Yes.” No point in hiding it now.
“You have it still?”
He nodded.
“Has Teresa used it?”
“Yes.”
“Her reaction was not positive?”
“No,” Byron said.
Wexler nodded, registering the information. He looked back at the sea. The sea was wide and deep, Byron thought, and it went on forever. Like the sky. Like the stars.
“I don’t think they wholly understood us,” Wexler said. “The Exotics, I mean. They gave us the stones, and they were a gift, hidden until we could usefully decode and reproduce them. Binary code propagating across axes of symmetry. Micro voltages trickling down folded spacetime. But with this other aspect…” He smiled again—sadly now, Byron thought. “ ‘Spiritual.’ I think they simply wanted to make us whole … to cure what they saw as our tragic failure. Failure of memory. Which is failure of conscience. They were surprised, I would guess, by our capacity for aggression. For ruthlessness, for inflicting pain. Conscience is memory… and the stones would restore it.”
“But it doesn’t work that way.”
“I think because we are divided against ourselves in a way they could not imagine. We suppress memories; the memories lead a life of their own. We create images of ourselves and the images spring to life. We have names for them. The conscious and unconscious mind. Id and ego. And so on. Always, the crucial act is the act of forgetting. To be forced to confront the past, really confront it…” He shook his head. “It would take a great strength.”
“I’m worried about her,” Byron said.
Wexler said quietly, “I can’t help you.”
The sun was low in the sky when they turned away from the ocean.
“If you had the stone,” Byron said, “if you had it now, what would you do with it?”
Wexler moved like an old man. In this light, he was not inspiring. He walked with his legs bowed, his head down. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Would you touch it?”
“I don’t know … I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
He was a long time answering. His lips were pursed, his gaze abstracted. “Maybe,” he said, “there are things I would like not to remember.”
“Like what?”
Silence.
Byron said, “You were the only one who knew. You were the one who sent us to Pau Seco, and you were the one who made the arrangements. Nobody else knew.”
His voice was faint now, tremulous. He said, “Suppose I lied. Suppose I was arrested in the sweep. Suppose I was interrogated by the Agencies.” He closed his eyes. “Suppose I was afraid, and suppose that—because I was afraid—I confessed, I told them about the arrangements I’d made in Brazil. And suppose, because I told them, they let me go.” His smile now was bleak and humorless. “Wouldn’t that be something I might like to forget?”
By the time they reached the cafe, night had fallen, the air was cool, and most of the tables were empty. Wexler ordered a drink; Byron said he had to get going.
“I can tell you one thing that might be useful,” Wexler said.
Byron waited. The beaten look on Wexler’s face had begun to make him nervous.
“I still talk to people at the Virginia facility,” he said. “There are a few untapped bit streams, if you know where to find them. The news now is that the Agencies have cooled off a good deal. The stone left Pau Seco, and they are not interested in tracing it. They decided it doesn’t have a big future on the black market-^-and from what you say, that is probably true. The issue is dead, except that they’ll install a military force at Pau Seco to oversee the Brazilians.
“But you may have a problem yet. There was a man at the Virginia facility, an Agency man, a latent sociopath from the war years. His name is Stephen Oberg. He was in charge of the Pau Seco interdiction. Word is that he has an obsessive personal fear of the oneiroliths… and that he went rogue after the stone left Brazil.” Wexler peered at him, wheezing faintly. “He may still be on your case.”
“Oberg,” Byron said. The name was faintly familiar. It called up some sinister echo.
Wexler sat down among the shadows. He pulled his collar up, as if against a chill only he could feel. “Rumor has it,” Wexler said, “the man is quite insane.”
2. Byron navigated his rental barque home through the night canals now, past neon-lit dance shacks and constellations of paper lanterns.
He was mindful of the Angel tattoo on his arm: Wexler had mentioned it. He had spent so much time, he thought, trying to erase it. Not the symbol but the thing, the fact, what he had become in the war.
What he had told Keller back in Belem was true. He did not want to be a machine; he understood that he had become a machine; he understood that the road back into the world was treacherous and painful. Teresa was his road. All he had ever wanted was a life with her. That would be enough. But if not that, then at least the scars of humanity: the pain of a commitment he could not revoke.
The question he entertained now, for the first time, was: when is it enough?
How much pain is proof? How much is too much?
I could disappear, he thought. I could buy documents and disappear into the mainland. Leave the Floats, leave the dream trade, leave no trail for this Oberg to follow. Make some new life and disappear into it, maybe find a woman who might love me, he thought, and make babies with her. The old tattoo had pretty much faded. A sleeve was enough to cover it.
It was an intoxicating thought, but also dangerous. He forced it away as he docked the boat. Too much unfinished business. She needed him yet. There was still the possibility he could do something for her.
The balsa was dark inside. Pushing through the door, he heard a moan from the back bedroom.
He flicked a wall switch; an antique incandescent bulb radiated sterile and sudden light. “Teresa?” But she only moaned again. The sound might have signified pain or pleasure.