“Almost home now,” the girl said faintly. “Almost home.”
CHAPTER 6
1. Keller was ten years old when the discovery of the oneiroliths in the Amazon Basin made international headlines. He remembered leaning out the window of the single-bedroom apartment above his father’s garage, aiming a polystyrene thread-rifle at a line of dung-brown hills while the TV droned on about “artifacts of extraterrestrial origin.” It was a Sunday afternoon and the Public Works had turned on the water supply; his father was down on the tarmac soaping fiberglass car bodies. Keller paid only intermittent attention to the video screen because he knew the whole thing was a lie.
His father had told him so last night. His father sat in the big easy chair which dominated the shabby room and said, “It’s bullshit, Ray. Mark my words.” Keller thought his father looked disturbingly small in this oversized chair: it emphasized his leanness, the arthritic bulge of his finger joints and elbows, the sparseness of his hair. “Stones from outer space.” His adult voice was rich with scorn and authority. He had migrated here from Colorado before Keller was born, had achieved what Keller understood, even then, was an unhappy and marginal life. “Christ almighty, what a crock.” Who could doubt it?
His skepticism was short-lived. It was replaced very soon by boredom, and that was pretty much the reaction of the entire country. Interesting things came out of the oneiroliths over the next few years but they were all more or less abstruse: new mathematics, a subtler cosmology. Important but, in the raw, unspectacular. The profounder questions—where had the stones come from, who had left them, why?-—went unanswered. In time, no one asked. Speculation was abandoned to cultists, science-fiction writers, and the tabloid newspapers. Out in the real world there were more important things to worry about. The Russians, for instance, smuggling wire missiles and military software to disenfranchised posseiros down in the Basin: where might all that lead?
“Grade-A bullshit,” Keller’s father had ruminated from the depths of his chair. Keller nodded to himself and fired “his toy rifle thoughtfully at the bole of a palmetto. Zing, the rifle said.
Ten years later he had learned to fire a real rifle in a real jungle. Crudely grown crystal ’liths circulated freely among the combat troops in the Basin, and Keller was impressed the first time he saw one: a device, he thought, a kind of machine from another world. But when he held it in his hand, he was suddenly back in that dusty apartment with the smell of gasoline and ancient auto upholstery rivering through the window and the grating echo of his father’s voice: mark my words. Except that Keller’s father was three years in his grave now, a cancer statistic, and the memory was scaldingly vivid—a kind of resurrection. He dropped the stone as if it had moved in his hand, and backed away, gasping.
It had surprised him, that a memory could be so frightening.
The road to Cuiaba was littered with relics of the war. Teresa saw the broken shapes of war machines in the green valleys beside the road, and felt some echo of the violence that must have raged through here.
It was a relatively new road, Keller told her, only a little older than the war. The road was a ribbon of macadam that cut like a geographer’s line through the province of Goias, swept on a spidery suspension bridge across the boiling water of the Araguaia and then into the deep Mato Grosso.
The world beyond the bus window startled and impressed her. Strange, she thought, to have come so far so quickly. The horizon was endlessly green as far as she could see, which, when the road wound up a hillside, was very far indeed. A wilderness, she thought. The idea had become stunningly real to her. A wilderness, a place where no cities were, an anarchy of nature. The landscape was as profoundly alien as anything she had seen in a stone trance. The few visible traces of human work—a blackened Army troop carrier showing its chitin through the riotous green, tanagers roosting on its gutted turrets—only reinforced the feeling.
Somewhere out here was the place where Keller had met Byron. Buried history. Somewhere out here, too, was the oneirolith mine. Cruz Wexler’s gnosis, the alien, the Other (she had told Keller). And something more personal.
They traveled into the sunset and beyond it. The sky darkened; reading lamps blinked on overhead. Byron pulled his wool cap down over his eyes and slept. Keller was lost in a magazine he had brought from Brasilia. The bus was mostly empty; the other passengers were unhappy businessmen in wrinkled suits, a few Koreans with drugged expressions, snoring posseiros in the cheap rear seats. A few tourists… like us, she thought, and then, but we’re not. She considered sleep but guessed it was impractical; she felt the pressure of the wilderness too acutely.
A little before midnight Keller reclined his seat and dozed off. Smiling faintly, she found herself watching him: watching the way his face relaxed into sleep. He looked different, she thought, with all the daylight tension drained out of him.
She thought, He’s an Angel.
Odd, how easy it was to forget that. Talk to him, she thought, and you could be talking to a million people. Everything he saw was spooling down into his mechanical memory, buried somewhere inside him: Remembering for the masses.
She wondered if he could turn it off… whether he would if he could.
She slept in spite of herself. When she woke in the heat of the morning, the wilderness was gone; the bus moved through a steaming box barrio, tin shacks riding up dirty little hills—the outskirts of Cuiaba, Keller said. “It’s an ugly town. A meat town. The abattoir is the only real business.” He wrinkled his nose. “You can smell it already.”
“You were here before?”
“In the war,” he said wearily. “It was a staging base. From here we rode carriers out along BR-364. Lots of guerilla activity in the farm towns out that way.”
So it had been an Army town. That explained all the signs she had seen in English and in cursive Japanese: Bar Grill, Live Sex Acts, manga outlets. The bus station itself was a cavernous concrete structure crowded with humanity. Old diesel buses filled it with their stinking fumes, and the names written on cardboard signs over the ticket windows were all strange to her: Ouro Preto, one said; Ariquemes, another. She shouldered her bag and they left the terminal, Byron leading them to some hotel Wexler had told him about; a man would meet them there, Wexler had promised. She felt lost, walking among these ancient colonial buildings. It was a bad neighborhood, more bars, ragged men sleeping on the fractured sidewalks. Down one alley near the hotel she saw a sign that intrigued her: Church of the Vale do Amenhecar, it said, and in the dusty window beneath it there was the painted image of an upraised hand, a dreamstone radiating from the palm.
We are close now, she thought, and the pronoun came so naturally to her that she did not notice its strangeness: we.
2. From here, as Keller understood the plan, they would cease to be tourists. They would pass, for a day or maybe two, into the sertao hinterland. They would be taken to Pau Seco by a truck driver, an expatriate Vietnamese named Ng.
But Ng wasn’t at the hotel. No problem, Byron said. They were booked for three days. Ng would be here tomorrow, guaranteed. Day after at the latest.
Keller shrugged, spreading out his bedroll on the floor of the hotel room.
“Hotel” was a generous word. Cuiaba was not in any sense a tourist town. The building was a box of ancient stucco and rotting wood. Byron and Teresa each occupied one of the room’s two tiny beds. Keller lay in the dark for a time, aware of the night noises; meat trucks moaning down the narrow streets, the empty distances between the old buildings. Aware, too, of the distance between himself and Teresa, between Byron and Teresa: distances that had become electric with implication.
He understood now—it had taken a few days—how profoundly Byron was in love with her.
Understood, too, that the feeling was not mutual.
It surprised him a little. A decade ago Byron had been the model Angel—slick, aloof, obscure behind protective lenses. It was the image h
e still projected, dealing dream-stones in the Floats. But with Teresa (Keller saw all this ruthlessly) he was another thing altogether: nervous, gazing at her when he thought she wouldn’t see, almost fawning.
Strange, but maybe predictable. Byron had rescued her from a slow suicide: some sense of responsibility had to follow on that. Too, there was this aura of unfinishedness about her. She was drawn by strange tides. She had imbibed often and deeply at the well of the oneiroliths. Keller recognized that there was an allure in all this—night territory, dangerous and exotic. He understood the attraction.
Understood it, he thought, maybe too well.
His eyes strayed to the bed where she slept.
In spite of his doubts, in spite of his lapses, he had learned in the years since the war to practice scrupulously the art of wu-nien. And he had learned to recognize the threats to that condition. The threats were named Compassion, and Hate, and Desire, and Love. In Angel basic he had been taught to set these things aside as earnestly as a Buddhist monk sets aside the temptations of the flesh. But like the temptations of the flesh, they were difficult to suppress. Suppressed, they were prone to erupt—randomly, unexpectedly.
He lay in the cloistered darkness with his pulse whispering in his ears. In the dim city light through the curtains, he could make out the shape of her body under the blankets—the delicate geography of her.
You know better than to think what you’re thinking.
He closed his eyes and worked to make his mind empty. A mirror bright, he thought, echoing the Shen-shiu poem they had all memorized in Angel basic: Carefully we wipe it clean / And let no dust alight.
But the dust had alighted, Keller realized. Feelings welled up in him that he had thought long cauterized.
Adhyasa, he thought bleakly. Angel sin.
He woke up wearily; Byron handed him a cup of coffee from the wall dispenser. By midmorning their truck driver still hadn’t arrived. Teresa moved restlessly around the room in fatigue pants and a khaki shirt, hands in her pockets, brooding. “I want to go out,” she said at last.
“We have to wait here,” Byron said. “We have to be here when Ng shows up.”
“We don’t all have to stay.”
Byron drew his head back, drummed his fingers thoughtfully. “Where do you want to go?”
“The church we passed. The dreamstone church.”
“It’s a Valley church,” Byron said. “Jungle cults. You want to sacrifice a chicken? Maybe we can arrange it.”
Keller remembered the Valley from the war. The Vale do Amenhecar was a Brazilian stone cult, one of the junk religions that had prospered since the discovery of the ’liths. It was a peasant’s religion, wildly syncretic; they believed in sacred jaguars, the divinity of Christ, the imminent arrival of fleets of flying saucers.
“I want to see what it’s like,” Teresa said. She added quietly, “I have a right.”
“It’s not safe.”
“None of this is safe.’.’ She turned to Keller. “You want to come along?”
He said yes without thinking about it.
Byron turned stiffly to the window. Over his shoulder Keller saw the rain sheeting down from a leaden sky. The streets were slick and black. “Go ahead,” Byron said coolly. “Pick up some local color.” He looked back at Keller, pained. “Why the hell not.”
3. She bought an umbrella at one of the sidewalk stalls and held it over them. It was hardly more than waxed paper, she thought, the color of a dahlia, but it kept the drizzle off.
Keller said, “He loves you, you know.”
Byron, he meant. It took her by surprise. She peered at Keller—at his blue eyes, studiedly inscrutable. She said, “Is that an Angel question? Or are you really worried about him?”
“It wasn’t a question,” he said coolly. “And I guess it’s none of my business. But you can’t look at him and not know it.”
Traffic flooded down the wet streets—electric carts, scooters, big Japanese cars. Keller hunkered down under the umbrella; he put his hand around her waist. She said carefully, “I love Byron. I do. I love him for what he’s done. I’m not callous.”
“There are all kinds of love.”
“We were together a while. It didn’t work out.”
“He hasn’t stopped caring.”
“I’m grateful for that too. There are times when I’ve needed him. Maybe that’s selfish—I don’t know.” She frowned, wondering at Keller’s curiosity.
He said, “It just took me by surprise. I didn’t know he could be so …” He groped for the word. “Single-minded.”
“Obsessed, you mean. But we all are.” They had reached the church now, candles burning behind dust-caked windows. “Obsessed,” she said. “All three of us.” She put her finger out, touched the painted icon of the dream-stone. She felt Keller’s sympathy fade abruptly.
He took her hand and pulled it back. “You follow that thing,” he said, “you could follow it a long way down.”
“You know all about it, right?” He looked startled. But it was not an insult. She meant it. “Being an Angel must be like that. Byron talks about it sometimes. Seeing without feeling.” She looked at him cautiously. “Seems like you followed it a long way down already.”
A curtain came down over his face. “It’s not the same.”
She shrugged and opened the door.
The interior of the church was dark and empty. Long ago it must have been a Catholic church, buried here between the taller and newer buildings. Behind the altar there was a soot-dark stained-glass intaglio of the Virgin Mary with her hand upraised. The glass was illuminated faintly from below; no exterior light entered here.
An old woman stepped out from a back room. She regarded them with a crabbed expression and spoke in sibilant Portuguese. Keller translated: “She says tourists aren’t permitted.” Igreja, the old woman said. “It’s a church.”
“Tell her we want to use a stone.”
Keller spoke haltingly. The old woman sighed and went into the back. Teresa sat down at one of the candlelit tables that had been installed where the pews might once have been. The woman returned with a tin lock-box clamped under her arm. She held the box protectively and extended her open hand, palm up. Keller gave her a hundred-cruzeiro note.
The old woman took up a station by the door as Teresa opened the box.
The stone inside was an nth generation copy, dark with contaminants; the angles were muted, the colors pale. It could not have been worth much more than Keller had paid for the privilege of touching it. Still…
So close now, Teresa thought.
She took the oneirolith in her hand.
It was always the same for her, this sense of an opening up, a clambering out of the shell of her body. With her eyes closed she felt suspended in an indefinite space. The room had fallen away on every side; her body felt numb and distant.
The phenomenon was mysterious; copious research had shed no real light. The current theory, Teresa understood, was that the oneiroliths acted somehow directly on the mind—the ghost in the crystal touching the ghost in her own architecture of blood and tissue. Maybe the Exotics had used the stones this way; maybe the visions they created were some skewed diffraction of that function, the human mind laboring over inhuman code.
It hardly mattered. What mattered were these persistent half dreams, the delicate blue-winged people in their impossible plenitude… their deserts and forests and farms and cities… and the human scenarios, too, almost as strange, a parade of ancestors. She felt their potency even through the medium of this crudely copied stone. Giddy with it, she reached for Keller’s hand.
He pulled back.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, the sound of her own voice vague and distant. “It’s just … I would like not to be alone.” And opened her eyes a moment to see him.
Slowly, he nodded. Watching her—his eyes on hers with the intense
scrutiny of a frightened animal—he reached his big hand across the table.
The contact was electric.
Old, powerful memories.
She saw Keller in Cuiaba a decade ago.
Keller the draftee. Keller riding in on a mottled green military transport from Rio. Keller and a couple of other recruits dispersed to a combat unit in this dusty meat town, dazed, an Army-issue thread-rifle slung over one shoulder and his duffel over the other.
His face was indistinct—an image glimpsed and ignored in mirrors—but cruelly young. He was stick thin, clean-shaven, made naive by a childhood in the simmering conduit suburbs. “The blessed innocence of failed comprehension”—Meg had said that.
Megan Lindsey was one of the women in his platoon. A Pfc like Keller, but she had some combat experience; she had been on patrol down the dangerous corridor of BR-364. “California-born,” Byron said, “like you. Doesn’t talk much. Attitude problem, some people say. I think she’s just scared—and scared to show it.”
Byron Ostler was the platoon Angel. Keller was fascinated by him, this white-haired gnome drafted out of an industrial-chemistry course at some midwestern agricultural campus, a year younger than Keller. Byron showed him the scar at the back of his neck. “Angel scar,” he said. “Look for it.” He regarded Keller through his protective lenses. “You should stay away from me, you know. If you run with the freaks, you are a freak. Plus, who knows what might get downloaded?” He flashed his tattoo. “The eyes of the Personnel Branch are upon you.”
“They look at all these recordings?”
“Combat mainly. Running them in realtime is what you might call problematic. But you never know.”
It didn’t bother Keller. He was fascinated by Byron, and more fascinated by Meg. He maneuvered himself next to her in the mess hall, talked to her a little. She seemed grateful for the attention. Her family ran a bacteria farm up in the San Fernando Valley ; she had been burned brown walking the enclosures every summer since she was ten, reading out fermentation gauges into a pocket recorder. She was lithe and small and her face was mobile, but Keller thought Byron was probably right: there was fear there, too, not far below the surface.