It worried him a little. The night he moved into the balsa, he rolled out his mattress over the stained wooden floor and wondered whether he might have gone too far. He had always depended on an external structure for discipline, for rules. The Army, in an important way, had made him what he was. They had named him. Potent magic. He was a Latent Aggressive. And it was not a pathology but a talent, a useful quirk of character. He. could be depended upon for certain acts. He was conscienceless but loyal: it was a loyalty that had never faltered.

Until now. Now he was an outlaw, a loose cannon. He had assumed a task and made it his own, and he could not see beyond it. Without him, the deep-core stone from the Pau Seco mine might be casually reproduced, might spread—and surely that was what its unknowable creators had intended—among the furtive and marginal people of the Floats. And he could not allow that.

Because he understood, and he was persuaded that he was the only one who understood. He understood the nature of the stone: its alienness, its powers of memory. He had touched Tavitch, and through Tavitch, the stone. And the stone had touched him.

It was a bad and dangerous thing, a kind of weapon. It eroded the marrow of the soul. It must not be allowed to exist.

He believed this as fiercely as he had believed anything in his life.

The force of his belief was its own justification. It comforted him.

It was a fire to warm him, out here in this wilderness.

In the morning he placed a call to an Agency bureaucrat back east, a man named Tate. Tate, seeing Oberg’s face in the monitor, did an elaborate double-take. “You!” he said.

Oberg smiled. “Me.”

“One minute.”

Oberg waited while Tate called up a security program, shunting his terminal out of the routine record-and-monitor loops. Tate, a pockmarked man of Oberg’s age, looked harried when he reappeared. “That was a stupid thing to do!”

“I need your help.”

“You’re hardly entitled to it. Everybody knows you went rogue back in Brazil. Fucking bad form, Steve.”

“This isn’t an official call.”

“We’re not friends.”

“We’re old friends,” Oberg said. “The hell we are.”

But it was true. If not friends, then at least something like it: comrades, colleagues. Tate had been a point man for Oberg’s platoon.

It was not something that drew them together; they had seen each other only a handful of times since the war. But they had parallel careers; and there was that unspoken bond, Oberg thought, the tug of old loyalties. He said, “I want whatever you have on the three Americans. I assume you processed the files from SUDAM. There must have been something.”

“That has nothing to do with me.”

“You have clearances.”

“I’m not your dog. I don’t fetch when you say fetch.” He looked pained. “This is not your business anymore.”

“As a favor,” Oberg said.

“As far as I know,” Tate said, “there’s nothing substantive. A couple of Floaters, no extant ID except what they bought. You know all this.”

“There’s the third man.”

“Keller. Well, we have the name. But this all went into limbo when you turned up AWOL. Are you listening? Steve: nobody cares.”

“Check it out for me,” Oberg said. “Please.”

“Give me a number where you are. I’ll call you back.”

“I’ll call you,” Oberg said, and cleared the monitor.

For a couple of days he explored the neighborhood.

It was a seedy area south of the factory district, close to the urban mainland. Most of the people here worked mainland jobs during the day. At night the boardwalks lit up with paper lanterns; the bars and dance shacks opened for business. Commerce came the opposite way after dark —venturesome mainlanders shopping for the illicit pleasures of the Floats. These were more legendary than real, Oberg understood. But there were certain things for sale.

Drugs, for instance. Well, drugs were everywhere. It was a truism that the economy could not function—or at least compete—without the vast array of stimulants, IQ enhancers, and complex neuropeptides for sale on the street or by prescription. Oberg had done time with the DEA and understood that it was a traffic no one really cared to interdict. Most of the field agents he knew were either neurochemically enhanced or skimming money from the trade. Or both. It was called free enterprise.

But the Floats made dealing a little looser. No government functionaries to take a percentage, although he understood the Filipino and East Indian mobs would sometimes muscle in. Generally, though, it was a loose friends-of-friends distribution network… and that worked in his favor.

For three nights he frequented a bar called Neptune’s, which catered almost exclusively to mainlanders. He watched the canal traffic, the waitresses, the tidal flow of alcohol over the bar. In particular he watched a lanky, pale teenager who occupied a rear booth—same booth all three nights— and who would periodically step out with one or two customers, through a back door onto a catwalk overlooking a waste canal. The boy was not a hooker; there were others, more sophisticated, handling that trade. But he fit the mainlander’s image of a drug pusher, and Oberg guessed that was an advantage here; it was like a sign, an advertisement. The teenager kept his hands in his oversized jacket, and when he brought them out, Oberg imagined, they would be holding pills, powders, blotters.

His fourth night in the Floats he approached the boy.

“I would like to buy drugs,” he said softly.

The teenager looked at him, amused. “You would like a hat?”

Oberg showed him the vial he had taken from Teresa’s studio. He shook out the resinous black pill into the palm of his hand and held it so the boy could see it.

The boy laughed and looked away. “Shit,” he said.

“I’m serious,” Oberg said.

“I bet you are.” The teenager tapped his hand nervously against the tabletop.

Probably he was doing some CNS stimulant himself, Oberg thought, pumping chemical energy out of his neurons. Crash every morning, up every night. It was pathetic, and he resented the boy’s condescension. “I can pay,” Oberg said.

The boy took a second look. “You prepared to buy in quantity? I don’t sell candy.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Well.”

The boy led him outside.

The walkway was narrow and dark. Presumably, it was useful for dumping trash. It overlooked a waste canal, dark water drawn down open conduits to the sea. There was a single sodium-vapor lamp overhead and nothing beyond the canal but the blank stucco wall of an empty warehouse. The sound of music trickled out from the bar through this single door, closed now. The sound was anemic and far.-seeming.

The boy dug into the deep recesses of his jacket and brought out a sweaty handful of pills. They glistened in the harsh light. They were small and black. “This is all I have,” the boy was saying, bored with the transaction already, “but you come back Tuesday, I might—hey!”

Oberg swept his fist out and knocked the boy’s hand away. The pills flew up in an arc, twinkled a moment, dropped inaudibly into the canal.

The boy stared, a little awed. “Son of a bitch!” No one had ever done this to him, Oberg thought. Oberg could have been anyone, a mob enforcer, a new competitor. But the boy had only dealt with mainlanders. He was surprised and confused.

Oberg waited.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “You can fucking throw them away if you want to,” he said finally, “but you pay for ’em either way. So pony up, asshole.” He took a knife from under his belt.

Oberg had anticipated it. He leaned inside the boy’s reach, bent the arm, extracted the knife. He held it against the boy’s throat.

He felt a pleasure in this that he had not felt for years.