A month later Wexler told her he had set up a purchase, not here or in the Orient but in Brazil, Pau Seco, the mine itself. It was an unorthodox and expensive move but it would be worth it, he said: the new stone would yield up answers, secret wisdom—she felt a little of his own flagging enthusiasm—the final gnosis. All he needed was a courier, someone without a criminal record, someone not too closely connected with him.

Byron was appalled when she volunteered. “You don’t know anything about it… Christ, what were you thinking of?”

“You don’t understand. I need to go.” They were walking down a market canal after hours, the boat stalls locked under their awnings, salt glittering along the boardwalk under a string of sodium vapor lights. She took his hands, knowing in that moment that he was authentically frightened for her; that his curious, lopsided love was as alive as it had ever been. “It matters that much. It’s not something I can let alone.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

She agreed, because he knew the country, because his intuition might have been correct: it might not be as easy as Wexler had promised. And she consented when he chose to bring along the Network Angel, Raymond Keller, also a veteran. But that was all the concession she would make. And so they had come here.

She was a window away from Pau Seco. She could smell it. She could feel it—the nearness of that ancient artifact, star-stone; its scattered fragments. But the mine was a vast and ugly place, and it had shattered all her certainties. She had risked her life, she thought grimly— and Byron’s, and Keller’s—because of a voice in her head. Because of a dream.

Because she was lost. Because she had been lost for years… lost for most of her life.

She was afraid to go to sleep. Thinking about the tiny black pills, the synthetic enkephalins, had stirred an old longing in her. If I had one now, she thought—it was a dangerous, traitorous thought—I would take it.

She stared through the window at the starless sky, willing the dawn to come.

CHAPTER 9

Stephen Oberg was dismayed when he met the man in charge of the military presence at Pau Seco: a huge back-country Brazilian with dark eyes and an obviously strong sense of territoriality. The man introduced himself as Major Andreazza and offered Oberg a painfully narrow cane-backed chair. His office overlooked the broad canyon of the mine; Andreazza himself occupied a plush swivel chair behind a sumptuous desk. “Thank you,” Oberg said.

Andreazza regarded Oberg at great length and said, “You must tell me why you came here.”

And so, laboriously, he explained it again. The Pacific Rim powers were very anxious, he said, that the deep-core oneiroliths should not fall into unauthorized hands. To this end security had been tightened up at the research facilities in Virginia, in Kyoto, and in Seoul. However, an informant close to the American cultist Cruz Wexler had tipped off the Agencies to a purchase that had been arranged here, at Pau Seco. Oberg had come to interdict it.

Andreazza turned his chair to face the window. “We put a considerable effort into security ourselves,” he said.

“I know.” With guns, Oberg thought, intimidation, the making of public examples. There had been hangings at Pau Seco as recently as last year. “I understand,” he said. “Still”—treading carefully—“the process isn’t airtight.”

Andreazza shrugged. “The formigas are frisked every night as they leave. We have informants in the labor compounds. I fail to see what more we can do.”

“I’m not here to criticize your efforts, Major. I’m sure” they’re exemplary. All I want to do is to locate three Americans.” He opened his briefcase, withdrew the photographs he had obtained from the SUDAM official, and passed them across Andreazza’s desk.

Andreazza gave them a cursory glance. “If they’re here,” he said, “I don’t suppose they look so clean anymore.”

“We know they have a contact in the old town,” Oberg persisted. “A man who may be sheltering them.”

“The mine we control,” Andreazza said. “The compounds, yes. But don’t overestimate us, Mr. Oberg. There are a quarter of a million peasants who live outside the fence. The old town is an anarchy. Without at least a name, there is a limit to what we can accomplish.”

“We have a name,” Oberg said.

“Oh?”

“The name is Ng.”

“I see,” Andreazza said, nodding.

They shared lunch at the military commissary. Oberg was anxious to get on with his work—prickling now with the urgency of it—but Andreazza forced him through the protocols of delay. And the food, of course, was dreadful.

“Oberg,” Andreazza said suddenly, “Stephen Oberg… did you know there was an Oberg here during the war?

Special Forces, I think. Razed some villages out west of Rio Branco. It was a scandal. Killed a lot of women and children:” He smiled. “So they say.”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” Oberg said coolly.

“Ah,” Andreazza said thoughtfully. “Yes.”

CHAPTER 10

Roberto Meirelles woke before sunrise on the day of the deal and knew there would be trouble. The question for him had become: to go through with it or not?

He slept on a platform bed in a shack in a valley below the old town of Pau Seco. It was a bad location. Most of the town’s sewage flowed past Meirelles’s shack in a muddy brown streamlet, down past the ugliest tin habitations and finally into the bush, which the waste matter had made verdant and lush. Everything Meirelles owned was in this shack. He owned two faded khaki T-shirts, two pairs of denim pants, a mattress, a photograph of his wife and child.

And the stone.

This morning—already nervous, but carefully not thinking of the day ahead—he took the oneirolith out from the place he had made for it, a slit in the mattress where he had removed some of the ticking, and regarded it gravely in the dim light of a battery lamp.

You, he thought. You could be my fortune or you could be my death.

He held the oneirolith carefully. Over time he had learned the nuances of the stone. Held gently in the open palm of his hand—as now—it created only the faintest tingle of strangeness, a gentle electricity that seemed to focus a physical sensation behind his eyes. If he clasped it tightly, it would begin to work in earnest. It would make visions; visions of places so impossibly distant Meirelles could not begin to make sense of them; or more often these days, visions of his home.

Meirelles understood that the oneirolith had come from another world, traveled somehow across an unimaginable gulf. And although he had marveled at that once, it no longer seemed strange or remarkable to him. It was a fact, and facts grow smooth with handling. What made the stone remarkable—and precious—to Meirelles was the way it unlocked these memories of his wife and child in Cubatao. With luck, he thought, it could carry him back there—a wealthy man.

He shook his head. Such dreams were premature. Worse, dangerous. He tucked the oneirolith back into the mattress and deferred his decision. As far as it was possible, he worked to make his mind blank.

Outside, the sky was beginning to lighten. Pots- and pans rattled, cocks crowed, bony scavenger dogs howled away the night. It was a morning, he told himself sternly, like any other.

He was what the others called a formiga, an ant, though he loathed the word himself. Meirelles was a proud man and resented being compared to an insect. Still—joining the surge of humanity down into the overheated canyon of the oneirolith mine, the sun like a blade against the back of his neck—he supposed the comparison was inevitable.

He wore huge canvas bags strapped to his shoulders and waist. The work and the diet of protein stews served in the labor compounds had made him thin but strong. Meirelles was thirty-five years old, and not a young thirty-five, but he had become proud of his body. He had survived the outbreak of Oropouche Virus that had swept Pau Seco a year ago. His body was wiry now—and far healthier, he knew, than it would have been had he stayed in Cubatao.