3. The evening before he left Pau Seco, Oberg walked to the gallows hill where the body of Ng had been left to hang overlooking the old town, an object lesson to the illiterate formigas.
The day was windy and overcast, and the body turned restlessly on its pivot of rope. The corpse was bloated with death, and Oberg felt only the faintest connection now between this carcass and the man who had faced him in Andreazza’s office. Hence only a murmur of satisfaction… a shiver of triumph.
The Vietnamese man had lived three more days before he confessed, and the confession he made was useless. Oberg learned the name of the formiga who had bartered away the stone—Morelles or Meirelles—but Meirelles had vanished with the money and was beyond punishment now, lost in some smoky industrial barrio. Such men were untraceable. Raymond Keller and Byron Ostler and the American woman Teresa Rafael had ridden an Eletronorte truck as far as Sinop, Ng had said, and presumably then vanished. Toward the east, Oberg suspected; but there was no way to confirm the suspicion unless they attempted to use credit or buy passage out of the country.
Until then it was a question of laborious pursuit, proceeding first to Sinop and then following their trail wherever it led. Tedious and thankless work, but he was braced for it.
The desolate gallows hilltop made him uneasy. He regarded Ng’s dead, petulant face, and was possessed by a sudden fear that the eyes might spring open, the mouth unlock; that Ng might tumble free and croak out some new and loathsome accusation.
It was crazy, of course. What the dead know, they do not speak. Someone had said that. Someone he did not care to remember.
But the body moved in a river of wind from the Mato Grosso, and Oberg shuddered and turned his back. It was disgusting, he thought. Primitive. They should bury the dead. They should have the decency.
CHAPTER 13
1. Keller went with Byron to a cafe overlooking the docks along the Amazon, where they had agreed to meet an American who could arrange their passage out of Brazil.
The Amazon here was so broad it might have been the sea. The water was brown and turgid; the ships moored at the dock were ocean ships. Keller ordered tucupi and watched an Israeli trawler inch forward from the horizon, its radars and solar panels silhouetted against the margin of the sky. By the time the trawler made port, Byron’s contact had arrived: a stubble-haired combat vet with bright, feverish eyes. He shook hands with Keller but flinched when Byron introduced him by name. Denny.
“This was supposed to be private,” Denny said.
Byron looked at Keller; Keller nodded, put down money for the tucupi, and wandered out along the dock road a little.
He stood against an embankment watching Brazilian stevedores unload a corporate fishing boat, Esperance stenciled in white letters across the gleaming stack flues. Esperance, he thought: hope. A commodity they had just about run out of. Teresa had elected to stay at the hotel, pleading a need for privacy; Keller wondered now if they should have left her.
She was tempted by the dreamstone. They had been in Belem a week, and he had watched the dance she did with it, a nervous pirouette of attraction and fear. Better, of course, to leave it alone until they reached some safer venue. But she was drawn to it. She said so. Fear and hunger…Fear and esperance.
Too, he was worried about the time they were wasting. They were fugitives, and it was too easy to forget or ignore that. The longer they stayed in one place, the more vulnerable they became. Worse, their prospects were not improving. Twice now Byron had attempted to buy them onto a clandestine flight out of the country. Twice the deal had fallen through. Denny was a long shot, friend of a friend, reputedly a smuggler of some kind… but in Belem that was hardly a distinction. The port city was swarming with transients and foreigners, and Keller consoled himself that it was probably the best place to be, under the circumstances. Here, anyway, three indigent Americans were not conspicuous.
But he was aware of the forces that had been mustered against them, and he was far enough now from the consolations of wu-nien that he worried especially about Teresa.
He looked at the cafe and saw Byron waving him back. Denny had left. The negotiations had been brief.
Keller hiked wearily up the cobbled street. “Did he deal?”
Byron shook his head. “He’ll call us.”
They walked in silence back to the hotel off the Ver-o-Peso. Byron knocked at the door—there was no answer —then plugged his key into the lock. The mechanism clattered, the door eased open. Byron hesitated in the doorway. Keller, anxious now, pushed past him.
Teresa lay curled on the floor, the dreamstone clutched in both hands.
2. She was embedded in the dream now.
It was all around her and more vivid than it had ever been. It surrounded her like an ocean, and at the same time she contained it: an embrace of knowledge. She knew more than she had ever known.
A surfeit of questions. An excess of answers.
She was curious about the blue-winged people. In so many ways they seemed so familiar—so human. She was able to take in their history at a glance now, to remember it, and the similarities, she thought, were awesome. Like human beings, they had evolved from arboreal creatures sometime in the ancient past. They possessed opposable thumbs, a large cranial capacity, a vast array of cultures and languages. They had mastered human technologies: flint knives, fire, agriculture, iron. She knew all this instantly and without effort.
So human, she thought. And yet…
Their history was curiously placid. There were wars, but fewer and briefer than human wars had been. Their religions were more often ecstatic than militant. They were pantheists and nature worshippers. They were quick to develop written language, and quickly fostered an almost universal literacy. They had been using crude printing presses as early as their Bronze Age.
They possessed a genius for information technology which had led them from books to binary circuits to molecular memories and beyond that into storage-retrieval mechanisms so subtle and immediate she could not begin to comprehend them. She understood that the oneiroliths were the end product of this process, its final and most absolute incarnation.
The stones were more than they seemed. They existed in a complex hidden topology, each linked to each, each in some sense a reflection of each, each with a special affinity for the geometry of sapient awareness… and their function was almost ludicrously simple. They remembered.
They contained the past, or were a kind of passport to it: the distinction had been lost. They were both history book and time machine, limited only by a kind of proximity effect. The Pau Seco stone contained most of the history of the Exotics and much of the modern history of the Earth. Beyond those margins—as if that weren’t enough—she was unable to see.
The oldest memories were dim. She saw the blue people most vividly as they had been at their apex: a world made so strange that it defied her understanding. They had expanded to the limits of their planetary system, colonized the cold ring of dust and stone that marked its farthest outpost, constructed there the fragile, huge interstellar vehicles that went winging out like butterflies between the stars. The pilots of these vessels were immortal, binary intelligences undisturbed by the passage of vast spans of time but recognizably modeled after the winged people, and in some sense descended from them. The butterfly ships in their diaspora mapped more barren worlds than Teresa cared to think about. One of them had angled past the Earth when the Chou Dynasty was succeeding the Shang and the Assyrians were marching into Babylon. (A few neolithic American tribes actually saw the craft in its looping polar orbit: a star of many colors. The observant Babylonians were preoccupied; the Chinese were in the wrong place.) It was a divided and primitive world—still is, Teresa thought distantly—but the winged people had deemed it at least potentially worthy of their gift (it was a gift), which they directed, perhaps wisely, into the then-uninhabited and unnamed depths of the Mato Grosso. A garden for the tree of knowledge.