He pushed through a rag curtain into the back room.
She was alone on the bed, blinking at the light. Her pupils were massively dilated.
Byron picked up the small wide-necked bottle from the floor beside the bed. It was three-quarters full of tiny black pills. Enkephalins, he thought. Concentrated, potent. “My Christ,” he whispered.
Her moan was abstracted pleasure. She was obviously ashamed—in some corner of her mind—that he had found her this way. She averted her face. But the shame could not override the flush of chemical well-being. There were pinpricks of sweat on her forehead.
Hardly aware of himself, he sat on the bed and cradled her head against him.
She rolled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was faint, hollow, oceans distant. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
But there was nothing to say. Nothing worth saying.
He held her, and the boat rose in the swell.
CHAPTER 19
Keller contacted Vasquez, the Network producer, and negotiated an infusion of credit into one of his phantom accounts. Vasquez also supplied some temporary documentation and access to the downloading facilities in the Network technical compound. “But make it quick,” Vasquez urged. “I’m under a certain amount of time pressure. Is it good footage?”
Keller recalled Pau Seco, the mine and the old town, the bars and brothels. He nodded.
“Good,” Vasquez told him. “You have an appointment with Leiberman.”
Leiberman, the Network neurosurgeon, plucked out Keller’s memory chip and closed the socket wound with adhesives. In a month there would be no visible scar. “Once again,” Leiberman said loftily, “you are merely human.” He handed Keller the memory in a tiny transparent pillbox, as prosaic in its bed of cotton as a pulled tooth.
Keller went directly to the Network compound, displayed his new ID to the machine at the gate and claimed an editing booth. The technical compound sprawled over a vast expanse of desert west of Barstow, bunkers and Quonsets and a string of satellite bowls solemnly regarding the southern sky. There was a floating staff of Network engineers, but most of the people here were independent contractors—by his ID Keller was one of these—sharing time on the Network mainframes.
The booth was private, a small room crowded with monitors and mixers. Keller plugged his memory into a machine socket, named it and gave it an access code. He pulled the keyboard into his lap and put his feet up on the mixer.
Time, he tapped.
Forty-one days, the monitor said, twenty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds since the memory was activated. He registered a faint surprise: it had seemed like more.
He instructed the edit program to install index marks at every twenty-four hour point—day marks—and then divide them into hours. “Laying ordinance,” it was called. He installed special index points at Day Seven (Arrival, Rio), Day Fifteen (Arrival, Pau Seco), and Day Twenty-five (Arrival, Belem). Further index points could be installed as necessary; these were the basics, a kind of crude map. Now he could call up a day or an hour and retrieve it at once, enter it into the mainframe memory as part of the ROM package he would eventually hand Vasquez.
Protection first, however. He called up the Identity Protect subroutine, then scanned through Day Two until he arrived at a full-body image of Byron Ostler.
The central thirty-inch monitor showed Byron in front of his huge, ramshackle balsa deep in the Floats. Keller stilled the image, zoomed on the face, keyed Alter. The face was replaced abruptly with its own ghost image in topographic lines against limbo, glowing amber.
Keller used a light pencil to push the lines around.
Cheekbones up, a narrower chin. He rotated the image and similarly altered the profile. He called up flesh again and there was Byron standing by his float once more, but it was not Byron any longer; the face was not even faintly familiar. It was some older, heavyset, hawkish man. A generic face, neither good nor evil, Retain, Keller typed. The authentic image would never appear in the finished edits. Next he called up Teresa.
This was more painful. The sight of her stirred old feelings in him, a longing he labored to suppress. She moved across the monitor, regarding him.
I can’t see making this trip with somebody I don’t trust… intuition is all I have right now, you understand?
Her voice filled the booth. A sixteen-bit recreation of the trace he had laid down on this chip. She peered out from the monitor into, it seemed, his eyes. Convulsively, he called up Alter.
She became a matrix of lines, an artifact of geography.
Better that way.
Sweating now, he changed the lines with his light pencil. Moving with professional instinct, he flattened the mouth, rounded the nose, shortened the hair. He worked by rote, eyes narrowed. Wu-nien. It was a question of not caring.
He performed similar alterations on Ng and Meireilles, who might still be vulnerable—he was conscientious about protecting his sources—then paged ahead to the most significant footage, the footage Vasquez wanted, the Pau Seco footage.
Day Sixteen. The frame shook as he stepped out of Ng’s Truck, Hold Frame Pan, he typed, and played it back. Now the motion was smooth, effortless. The image flickered as he blinked away dust. Keller keyed out Hold Correct; the dropouts vanished. Beginning to look like video now. The perspective moved up to the lip of the mine, peered into its depths, began a slow pan. Audio, he typed.
The sound came up instantly. Clatter of ancient tools. Human voices ringing off distant cliffs. Abyss of time. Formigas moving in insect lines up those clay steppes and rope ladders: it might have been yesterday or today or tomorrow. Keller reached for a fader, but his hand struck the volume slide instead. The clangor of voices and tools was suddenly deafening, a roaring in the booth. He blinked at the monitor and for one giddy instant believed he had actually entered the past, transported himself somehow back to Pau Seco, that he might turn and find Teresa beside him. He slapped the Enter key.
The playback ceased. The booth filled up with silence.
When he could not bear the work any longer, he signed out and drove west. He had used a portion of the advance from Vasquez to rent a hotel room, but he didn’t head directly back. He drove west along a high, fast traffic artery until he hit the coastline, and then he turned north. On his left the Floats sprawled out to the distant gray line of the tidal dam. He drove through colonies and outposts of the cityplex, malltowns and industrial parks. He had gone miles before he understood where he was going.
Bad idea, he thought. It was a bad impulse that had brought him here: Angel sin. But he pulled off the highway when he spotted the sign.
Arts by the Sea. She had mentioned the name once, long ago.
It was not the newest or the best of these businesses. Bamboo walls sunk in a cracked concrete foundation, roof of chalky-red Spanish tile. The door rang a bell when he opened it. Inside, a buckled wooden floor supported shelves and display cases of thick protective glass gone gray with time.
The items on display were, in Keller’s judgment, fairly prosaic Float work. Soapstone carvings, junk collages, a few high-priced crystal paintings under glass. He gazed a while at a stylized trance landscape, bread-loaf hills rolling under an azure sky, treehouses like pagodas clustered in the foreground. Some real place, Keller thought, some Exotic venue wrenched out of time. He was staring at it when the proprietor pushed through a curtain from the rear of the store.