The central thirty-inch monitor showed Byron in front of his huge, ramshackle balsa deep in the Floats. Keller stilled the image, zoomed on the face, keyed Alter. The face was replaced abruptly with its own ghost image in topographic lines against limbo, glowing amber.
Keller used a light pencil to push the lines around.
Cheekbones up, a narrower chin. He rotated the image and similarly altered the profile. He called up flesh again and there was Byron standing by his float once more, but it was not Byron any longer; the face was not even faintly familiar. It was some older, heavyset, hawkish man. A generic face, neither good nor evil, Retain, Keller typed. The authentic image would never appear in the finished edits. Next he called up Teresa.
This was more painful. The sight of her stirred old feelings in him, a longing he labored to suppress. She moved across the monitor, regarding him.
I can’t see making this trip with somebody I don’t trust… intuition is all I have right now, you understand?
Her voice filled the booth. A sixteen-bit recreation of the trace he had laid down on this chip. She peered out from the monitor into, it seemed, his eyes. Convulsively, he called up Alter.
She became a matrix of lines, an artifact of geography.
Better that way.
Sweating now, he changed the lines with his light pencil. Moving with professional instinct, he flattened the mouth, rounded the nose, shortened the hair. He worked by rote, eyes narrowed. Wu-nien. It was a question of not caring.
He performed similar alterations on Ng and Meireilles, who might still be vulnerable—he was conscientious about protecting his sources—then paged ahead to the most significant footage, the footage Vasquez wanted, the Pau Seco footage.
Day Sixteen. The frame shook as he stepped out of Ng’s Truck, Hold Frame Pan, he typed, and played it back. Now the motion was smooth, effortless. The image flickered as he blinked away dust. Keller keyed out Hold Correct; the dropouts vanished. Beginning to look like video now. The perspective moved up to the lip of the mine, peered into its depths, began a slow pan. Audio, he typed.
The sound came up instantly. Clatter of ancient tools. Human voices ringing off distant cliffs. Abyss of time. Formigas moving in insect lines up those clay steppes and rope ladders: it might have been yesterday or today or tomorrow. Keller reached for a fader, but his hand struck the volume slide instead. The clangor of voices and tools was suddenly deafening, a roaring in the booth. He blinked at the monitor and for one giddy instant believed he had actually entered the past, transported himself somehow back to Pau Seco, that he might turn and find Teresa beside him. He slapped the Enter key.
The playback ceased. The booth filled up with silence.
When he could not bear the work any longer, he signed out and drove west. He had used a portion of the advance from Vasquez to rent a hotel room, but he didn’t head directly back. He drove west along a high, fast traffic artery until he hit the coastline, and then he turned north. On his left the Floats sprawled out to the distant gray line of the tidal dam. He drove through colonies and outposts of the cityplex, malltowns and industrial parks. He had gone miles before he understood where he was going.
Bad idea, he thought. It was a bad impulse that had brought him here: Angel sin. But he pulled off the highway when he spotted the sign.
Arts by the Sea. She had mentioned the name once, long ago.
It was not the newest or the best of these businesses. Bamboo walls sunk in a cracked concrete foundation, roof of chalky-red Spanish tile. The door rang a bell when he opened it. Inside, a buckled wooden floor supported shelves and display cases of thick protective glass gone gray with time.
The items on display were, in Keller’s judgment, fairly prosaic Float work. Soapstone carvings, junk collages, a few high-priced crystal paintings under glass. He gazed a while at a stylized trance landscape, bread-loaf hills rolling under an azure sky, treehouses like pagodas clustered in the foreground. Some real place, Keller thought, some Exotic venue wrenched out of time. He was staring at it when the proprietor pushed through a curtain from the rear of the store.
She was a chunky gray-haired woman in layered pastel skirts, and she regarded Keller across a chasm of suspicion. “Is there something you were especially interested in?”
“A certain artist,” he said. “I understand you sold some of her work. Her name is Teresa… Teresa Rafael.”
She looked at him more carefully now, his face and his clothes. “No,” she said finally. “We have nothing.”
Keller extracted the Pacific Credit gold card Vasquez had obtained for him. In fact his account was strictly limited, but the card itself was impressive. He slid it across the counter; the woman ran her finger over the embedded microchip. “She hasn’t displayed here for years. Her work has appreciated in value. You understand? She has a reputation now. A following.”
“I understand.”
The woman licked her lips. “In the back,” she said.
Keller followed her through the curtain. There were a dozen pieces in this smaller room—all “appreciated,” Keller assumed: it was a commonplace practice for street dealers to hold back the work of a promising newcomer. But he recognized instantly which of it was Teresa’s. “These,” the woman said loftily, “are early pieces.”
She must have been a girl when she did this, Keller thought. He was impressed. Some of the work was awkward; none of it was naive. A few pieces displayed the obvious skill and muted passion that had made her successful. Mostly they were junk sculptures, assembled out of pipe and copper wire and mechanical oddments scavenged from the old Float factories gutted in the fire; but she had polished and shaped the material until it seemed nearly alive, more liquid than solid.
“You’re familiar with the work?”
“No… not really.”
Under the woman’s alarmed stare he picked up a small piece of sculpture and examined it. The metallic tangle resolved into the image of a face. No—two faces. He rotated the piece in his hand.
A woman’s face, gaunt but curiously childlike in its sadness.
. And a child’s face, with an adult’s expression of fierce resolve.
The proprietor took it from him. Keller was startled; he restrained an impulse to take it back. She named a sum, and it was approximately the money Vasquez had entered into Keller’s account, minus living expenses. A huge amount. But he agreed without haggling.
He drove home with the piece beside him in the car, confused and faintly shocked at himself. He was like a sleepwalker, acting out some dream. He knew only that he wanted something from this knot of metal, something tangible; a piece of her, he thought, a relic, or that forbidden and finally dangerous thing—a memory.
In the morning he went back to the Network technical compound and called up yesterday’s work on the monitor.
The sight of it shocked him. He sat back in the cloistered silence of the editing booth and stared.
He had altered Teresa’s features to protect her anonymity. Standard procedure, and he had worked by rote. Successfully. It didn’t look like Teresa anymore.
But the face he had given her was Megan Lindsey’s.
CHAPTER 20
Stephen Oberg had stepped outside the bounds of propriety -often since the debacle at Pau Seco, but he did not feel authentically like an outlaw until the day he rented a cheap balsa in the Floats.
It was an outlaw place; he was an outlaw in it. The faces he saw along the market canals were furtive, obscure, hidden. He imagined he looked the same. A shadow-thing now, outside the bright thoroughfares of law and custom. The only light here was the beacon of his own intense desire; the abyss of the ocean was unnervingly close.