“It’s not just that. It—”

“I don’t want to discuss it. This is policy. You understand, Mr. Oberg? You are ordered in from the field. I want you in this office tomorrow morning, and I want you contrite.”

He was stunned. “I can’t do that.”

“You’re refusing?” A certain relish now in Wyskopf’s voice.

“Yes,” Oberg said, “all right, fuck it, I’m refusing. But you don’t understand. You—”

“Shit on that,” Wyskopf said. The screen went blank.

None of them understood.

He went to a bar, sated himself with a meal of feijoada, drank and played wordless pool with three grinning fishermen. He made money and then, still drinking, lost it. Walking down a narrow night street, alone, he thought: I am a soldier and a veteran and a patriot, and I have been closer to this thing than any careerist in any of the federal agencies.

He had been touched by it. Literally.

He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things … but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing. It was what they told him in basic. Oberg had been part of a segregated battalion of what the psych people called Latent Aggressives, highly motivated men inured to violence. He hadn’t volunteered for it. His EEG had volunteered him; his genetic map had volunteered him. He had all the earmarks, they said: spike discharge in the cerebellum, periodic episodes of depersonalization, a stunted endorphin system, a history of petty violence. His CO, a rural Georgian named Toller, explained that they were unique because they had all been born without their “bump of sympathy.” And grinned, saying it. God made us what we are. And it was true, wasn’t it? Trite but undeniable.

They called themselves God’s Own. The baseline troops called them Baby killers.

They were terror troops. They penetrated the guerilla-held outlands in a series of punitive raids against posseiro villages, destroying crops, burning buildings, racking down the guerillas’ political and economic base. It was bloody and vile work. They all agreed about that. But it was uniquely their work. God made us what we are.

He rose in the ranks. He acquired a certain notoriety.

He did not care to remember much of what happened during those years. What really mattered was that the war had given him an identity, a sense of self. He had been drafted out of a foster home in rural southern Texas, where his life had been a haze of fast violence and routine indignities. He was incredulous when a Juvenile Offenses worker told him he would love the Army. But he did. It was a fact. The Army had groomed and educated and disciplined him. The Army had analyzed and decoded him; the Army made him useful. And if the Army required him to practice his vices in the hinterland of this terrible country, then that was the least of what he owed them.

He assumed, when he was discharged, that the violent part of his life had also ended. He took civilian work with the Agencies on the recommendation of an Army buddy. He was a good field man, despite what Wyskopf had said. His life was stable—had been stable. And if he had not acquired a wife or family or the accouterments of a statistically normal existence, perhaps it was because he could not shake the image of himself as a Latent Aggressive, God’s Own, one of the blank-eyed minority born without a bump of sympathy. But he did not think about it often.

He had harbored a deep suspicion of the oneiroliths even before he was assigned to the Virginia facility. In part it was his instinctive fear and hostility for the foreign, the Other. But it was also a deeper revulsion. He disliked occupying a room where one of the stones had been. He was sensitive to the aura of them. It made his hair prickle, his stomach chum. He was conscious of the tremendous value of the oneiroliths, of the data being downloaded from them: but it represented a gift of unknown provenance, and gifts made him wonder about motives. Lots of abstract knowledge, but nothing about the Exotics themselves, who they were, where they had come from or why. And this strange interaction with the subjects from Vacaville. It was like all those antique movies. Body snatchers from outer space. Oberg took the idea seriously, though he knew the research people would laugh at him; the research people had no perspective. It was his business to be suspicious. He represented the federal agencies; he represented the less overt but no less solemn suspicions of his employers. For twenty years the world had been lulled into a blithe familiarity with these artifacts, while Oberg cultivated a professional paranoia.

But he had only been convinced of the essential evil of the stones with the arrival of the more potent deep-core oneiroliths from Brazil. He had seen their influence on hardened criminals like Tavitch… and he had felt it himself.

The contact was brief but unavoidable. He lived in the research compound and several times a day shuttled from his cell-like room to the communal toilets one locked door away from the inmates’ wing. He was making this pilgrimage one winter day, a cold front out of Canada seeping through the inadequate insulation and into the hallway of the cheap concrete buildings, when the wire-mesh security door burst open and the convict Tavitch came bulling through.

Tavitch was clearly insane. His eyes rolled, spittle flew from his open mouth. He stared back at the open door, ahead at Oberg. A pair of orderlies tumbled through behind him. They stood on two sides of Tavitch, panting; neither seemed to want to move. “You were supposed to lock the goddamned door!” one said. The other remained silent, eyes on Tavitch.

Tavitch, the murderer. Tavitch, who claimed to see into the past. Oberg felt his hackles rise. He was trapped in this tableau.

Tavitch stared at him. Their eyes met, and Oberg was appalled by the look of recognition Tavitch gave him. “Christ,” he said quietly.

Tavitch’s fist was clenched.

“Take him,” the second orderly said, but Tavitch ran forward then, directly at Oberg. Oberg’s instinct was to flinch away, but he was conscious of the orderlies watching him, and he threw a body check into Tavitch instead. They toppled onto the cold tile floor together.

The contact was momentary. A second, maybe less. But it was enough.

Horrified, Oberg felt the strangeness of the dreamstone pulsing through him.

He opened his eyes and saw a village deep in the hinterland. Some Indio village. Men in bowl haircuts and ragged T-shirts, women with their pendulous breasts exposed. Some deep river village, he thought dazedly, maybe refuge for a few sertao revolutionaries or an East Bloc weapons cache, more likely not: but there was a thread-rifle in his hand and the assault was on, he was in the midst of it, firing into their bodies, into their eyes like the startled eyes of deer caught in headlights, and he was getting into it, rolling with it; it was singing in him, the high eroticism of this mass kill. God’s Own. But suddenly it was not good at all. By some terrible miracle he was sharing their terror and their pain, these Indios he was killing, scything wire into his own body somehow, burning his own village. The pain and outrage boiled up in him unstoppably, and it was more than wounding: it opened a hole in him through which any horror might at any minute rush.

He gasped as the orderlies pulled Tavitch away and the corridor fell into focus around him. A nightmare, he thought desperately. But Tavitch stared down at him with a terrible, knowing leer.

“You and I,” Tavitch said. “You and I.”

Oberg threw up in the hallway.