"What will you exchange them for?"
"Gold. Do you want to come with me, and exchange your money, too?"
"I would advise it, Senora," said the man behind the desk. His nameplate said "Sr. Aguirrez." He added to Oliveras, "The Banco Nacional is on the Avenida Cabildo Abierto, five streets north of here."
"Thank you. You'll take care of the bags?"
"Certainly, sir."
They got back in the taxi. "I never thought of exchanging money," she said. "How stupid."
"Well, this morning the rate would have been better," he said cheerfully, "but tomorrow it will be worse, so it's equal."
There were long lines in the bank, but people motioned them forward, smiling, when they saw Lavalle's cast and her American clothes. The rate posted over the window was three thousand australes to the gram. "Would you like this in Krugerrands, Mexican reales, or in a certificate of deposit?" the teller asked.
"Take the coins," Oliveras said in her ear. "If the bank closes, what good is a certificate?"
"All right."
The coins tinkled into a counting machine and came out neatly wrapped. Lavalle put them in her purse; they felt very heavy. Now she understood why Oliveras had charged so much: the value of the austral had fallen by almost half.
Oliveras insisted on buying her dinner at a restaurant, where he was pleasant and charming; then he took her back to the motel. He picked up the key at the desk, found the room, opened it and followed her in.
"Senora," he said, "it is now too late to start back to Buenos Aires. Will you do me the favor of letting me sleep in the other bed?"
"Yes, but I'm very tired. I'm going to bed now."
When she came out of the bathroom in her nightgown, he was already in the other bed, but his eyes followed her.
"Good night," she said, and turned off the lamp.
"Good night, Senora."
After a long time she heard him say, "Are you sleeping?"
"No."
"Do you want to tell me about your trouble?"
She could see him in the dim light. He got up and sat on the edge of her bed. He was young, good-looking, friendly, and he smelled clean. "Sometimes, you know," he said, "it helps to tell somebody."
"I can't go back because somebody might kill me," she said.
"The same one who tried to kill the other one, the man in the parade?"
"I don't know. I don't think so. A lot of people want to kill him.''
"Well, but you could go somewhere else with your friend."
"I can't do that either, and he's not my friend anymore." Her head was buzzing with the drinks she had had, and she felt she was not explaining very well. "I saw something ugly-I can't tell you about it."
"No, of course not, if it is ugly." He was stroking her shoulders.
"If you don't mind, I'd just like to be held," she said.
"Of course," he said in Spanish, "of course, little dove."
CHAPTER 36
What I think we should do now," Federigo said after breakfast, "is go back to Buenos Aires and get my money. Then I have to give some to my wife, and then we can go out in the pampa and buy horses. It is better to live there than in the city."
"I don't want to live in the pampa."
"All right," he said cheerfully, "then we will live in Buenos Aires, but in a different part of town. And I will buy horses somewhere, it doesn't matter. "
"No, I'm going to stay here. We'd better say good-bye now, Federigo."
"Well, are you really sure? Last night was so beautiful."
"I'm really sure."
He shrugged and smiled. "Good-bye, then."
She watched him get into the taxi. "Good luck with your horses," she said.
He waved. "I will call you!" he said.
She shook her head with a faint smile. He waved again cheerfully and drove away.
She turned on the holo and punched in a phone window. The queue read:
Geoffrey Nero
Sylvia Englander
Federigo Oliveras
Ed Stone
His face was tired and anxious. "Hello, Linda?"
"Yes."
"Is there something wrong with the video?"
"No, I've got it turned off."
"Well, anyway, where are you?"
"Nowhere special."
"What's that supposed to mean? Linda, what happened? What's the matter?"
"I had a dream that you were either an alien, or else you made this whole thing up."
"You had a dream ? Is that what this whole thing is about?"
"Well, what if it is a dream? I mean, whose dream is it?"
"You're not making any sense."
"I know that. So what? Good-bye."
"Wait a-" She punched off; his image dwindled and disappeared.
That night the ceiling bulged and opened. A blade came down, as long as the room; it descended and split everything in half, walls, furniture, carpet, and the halves fell away into darkness.
From her balcony she could see the lines of cars coming into town from the north, streaming away westward toward Rosario. It made her dizzy to think of these rivers of people flowing from the mountains to the coast; the whole southeastern part of the continent was emptying itself out into Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Buenos Aires.
At the market she met a family from Chile-father, mother, and five girls. They had driven over the Uspallata Pass, then across the breadth of Argentina, sight-seeing. It had been a wonderful trip, they said. It was wonderful to see so many happy people, all going to the City of God.
"Do you think that's what it is?" Lavalle asked. "Do you mean that the Cube is the City of God?"
"Oh, certainly," said the mother, wide-eyed. "You are not a Catholic?"
"I was, but no longer. "
"Your faith will return," said the mother positively. She searched in her handbag and gave Lavalle a St. Christopher medal. "Please take this. If you wear it, it will surely help you."
In two days the stream of travelers had thinned to a trickle, and by the end of the week it had stopped altogether. Prices, which had soared to ridiculous levels, fell again; the store owners were taking whatever they could get. Then almost every shop in town was closed; the littered streets were empty.
The same names turned up in her phone queue day after day, but she never returned the calls, and after a while they stopped.
On Monday Senor Aguirrez said, "Senora, I am going to close the motel now and go to Buenos Aires before the boats leave. But if you would like to stay here, I'll give you the keys, you can do whatever you like."
"That's very kind of you, Senor Aguirrez. I'll probably stay a few days longer, maybe a week. How long do you think it will be before everybody leaves Buenos Aires?"
"They say nine or ten days to evacuate the Atlantic side of South America, Senora."
"Then let me pay you for another week. How much will that be in gold?"
"Whatever you like, Senora. Three hundred reales would be sufficient."
She got the money out of her purse and handed it to him.
"Thank you, Senora, you are very kind. Good-bye." She watched him drive away with his wife in a Volvo packed with belongings.
On holovision, day after day, cameras reported the exodus. The people were streaming out of the mountains and the high pampas down the roads that followed watercourses to the coastal plain. In satellite pictures they were grains slowly flowing, like corpuscles in the veins of a bleeding cadaver.
In Shanghai, early arrivals by air from all over the world were already being processed, and she watched that too. The entry points were gay with paper streamers, balloons, flowers, bells. As each family stepped out, dressed in its best, with bundles, sacks, and pets in cages, smiling young women greeted them, led them to the waiting capsules. There were tearful good-byes, embraces. Then the attendants helped them into the capsules, packed their belongings around them. "Smile!" they said in one of five hundred languages, and an overhead camera snapped their pictures. The lids were lowered; metal arms came down and attached the photographs to the lids. The capsules moved on through one junction after another, accelerating each time. When they entered the eight hundred twenty-six lanes of the final stage, they were moving at more than a hundred miles an hour. Under the gaily colored canopies, they zoomed up the scaffolding, crossed the grid and were locked into place. Twenty-three every second, two million a day.