The sun was low in the sky when they turned away from the ocean.

“If you had the stone,” Byron said, “if you had it now, what would you do with it?”

Wexler moved like an old man. In this light, he was not inspiring. He walked with his legs bowed, his head down. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Would you touch it?”

“I don’t know … I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

He was a long time answering. His lips were pursed, his gaze abstracted. “Maybe,” he said, “there are things I would like not to remember.”

“Like what?”

Silence.

Byron said, “You were the only one who knew. You were the one who sent us to Pau Seco, and you were the one who made the arrangements. Nobody else knew.”

His voice was faint now, tremulous. He said, “Suppose I lied. Suppose I was arrested in the sweep. Suppose I was interrogated by the Agencies.” He closed his eyes. “Suppose I was afraid, and suppose that—because I was afraid—I confessed, I told them about the arrangements I’d made in Brazil. And suppose, because I told them, they let me go.” His smile now was bleak and humorless. “Wouldn’t that be something I might like to forget?”

By the time they reached the cafe, night had fallen, the air was cool, and most of the tables were empty. Wexler ordered a drink; Byron said he had to get going.

“I can tell you one thing that might be useful,” Wexler said.

Byron waited. The beaten look on Wexler’s face had begun to make him nervous.

“I still talk to people at the Virginia facility,” he said. “There are a few untapped bit streams, if you know where to find them. The news now is that the Agencies have cooled off a good deal. The stone left Pau Seco, and they are not interested in tracing it. They decided it doesn’t have a big future on the black market-^-and from what you say, that is probably true. The issue is dead, except that they’ll install a military force at Pau Seco to oversee the Brazilians.

“But you may have a problem yet. There was a man at the Virginia facility, an Agency man, a latent sociopath from the war years. His name is Stephen Oberg. He was in charge of the Pau Seco interdiction. Word is that he has an obsessive personal fear of the oneiroliths… and that he went rogue after the stone left Brazil.” Wexler peered at him, wheezing faintly. “He may still be on your case.”

“Oberg,” Byron said. The name was faintly familiar. It called up some sinister echo.

Wexler sat down among the shadows. He pulled his collar up, as if against a chill only he could feel. “Rumor has it,” Wexler said, “the man is quite insane.”

2. Byron navigated his rental barque home through the night canals now, past neon-lit dance shacks and constellations of paper lanterns.

He was mindful of the Angel tattoo on his arm: Wexler had mentioned it. He had spent so much time, he thought, trying to erase it. Not the symbol but the thing, the fact, what he had become in the war.

What he had told Keller back in Belem was true. He did not want to be a machine; he understood that he had become a machine; he understood that the road back into the world was treacherous and painful. Teresa was his road. All he had ever wanted was a life with her. That would be enough. But if not that, then at least the scars of humanity: the pain of a commitment he could not revoke.

The question he entertained now, for the first time, was: when is it enough?

How much pain is proof? How much is too much?

I could disappear, he thought. I could buy documents and disappear into the mainland. Leave the Floats, leave the dream trade, leave no trail for this Oberg to follow. Make some new life and disappear into it, maybe find a woman who might love me, he thought, and make babies with her. The old tattoo had pretty much faded. A sleeve was enough to cover it.

It was an intoxicating thought, but also dangerous. He forced it away as he docked the boat. Too much unfinished business. She needed him yet. There was still the possibility he could do something for her.

The balsa was dark inside. Pushing through the door, he heard a moan from the back bedroom.

He flicked a wall switch; an antique incandescent bulb radiated sterile and sudden light. “Teresa?” But she only moaned again. The sound might have signified pain or pleasure.

He pushed through a rag curtain into the back room.

She was alone on the bed, blinking at the light. Her pupils were massively dilated.

Byron picked up the small wide-necked bottle from the floor beside the bed. It was three-quarters full of tiny black pills. Enkephalins, he thought. Concentrated, potent. “My Christ,” he whispered.

Her moan was abstracted pleasure. She was obviously ashamed—in some corner of her mind—that he had found her this way. She averted her face. But the shame could not override the flush of chemical well-being. There were pinpricks of sweat on her forehead.

Hardly aware of himself, he sat on the bed and cradled her head against him.

She rolled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was faint, hollow, oceans distant. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

But there was nothing to say. Nothing worth saying.

He held her, and the boat rose in the swell.

CHAPTER 19

Keller contacted Vasquez, the Network producer, and negotiated an infusion of credit into one of his phantom accounts. Vasquez also supplied some temporary documentation and access to the downloading facilities in the Network technical compound. “But make it quick,” Vasquez urged. “I’m under a certain amount of time pressure. Is it good footage?”

Keller recalled Pau Seco, the mine and the old town, the bars and brothels. He nodded.

“Good,” Vasquez told him. “You have an appointment with Leiberman.”

Leiberman, the Network neurosurgeon, plucked out Keller’s memory chip and closed the socket wound with adhesives. In a month there would be no visible scar. “Once again,” Leiberman said loftily, “you are merely human.” He handed Keller the memory in a tiny transparent pillbox, as prosaic in its bed of cotton as a pulled tooth.

Keller went directly to the Network compound, displayed his new ID to the machine at the gate and claimed an editing booth. The technical compound sprawled over a vast expanse of desert west of Barstow, bunkers and Quonsets and a string of satellite bowls solemnly regarding the southern sky. There was a floating staff of Network engineers, but most of the people here were independent contractors—by his ID Keller was one of these—sharing time on the Network mainframes.

The booth was private, a small room crowded with monitors and mixers. Keller plugged his memory into a machine socket, named it and gave it an access code. He pulled the keyboard into his lap and put his feet up on the mixer.

Time, he tapped.

Forty-one days, the monitor said, twenty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds since the memory was activated. He registered a faint surprise: it had seemed like more.

He instructed the edit program to install index marks at every twenty-four hour point—day marks—and then divide them into hours. “Laying ordinance,” it was called. He installed special index points at Day Seven (Arrival, Rio), Day Fifteen (Arrival, Pau Seco), and Day Twenty-five (Arrival, Belem). Further index points could be installed as necessary; these were the basics, a kind of crude map. Now he could call up a day or an hour and retrieve it at once, enter it into the mainframe memory as part of the ROM package he would eventually hand Vasquez.

Protection first, however. He called up the Identity Protect subroutine, then scanned through Day Two until he arrived at a full-body image of Byron Ostler.