He talked about the Exotics.

He had spent his life in this kind of speculation. She understood that it was his nature, that he asked the questions no one else wanted to ask. Everybody was deriving technical data from the ’liths but nobody asked the profounder questions: maybe, he said, because they were afraid to. But Wexler had seen the trance landscapes, had glimpsed the whirlpool of history.

“If someone asked me now,” he said, “my guess would be that it was planned. All of it. There’s one kind of stone, very common, with its binary microvoltages: basically, it talks to machines. It says something altogether different to people like us. There are visions, a sense of significance, a sense of imminence. And then this rarer stone. It has even more to say. But at a price.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. Truly. But I can guess. It depends, doesn’t it, on what the Exotics thought of us—the kind of creatures they took us to be. And I think, to them, we were broken things. Fractured. Divided.” He paused for breath. “Divided against ourselves. Not only collectively but individually. The mind against itself. I think it surprised them.”

She said, “They were different?”

“Whole, in some important way, where we’re broken. But you must have felt it.”

She had. The memory was warm but somehow chastening, a kind of rebuke. The,pill wearing off, she thought. She felt the gritty flush of sobriety.

“They anticipated us,” Wexler was saying. “They understood that we were good with tools. They guessed, I think, what we might do with our technology.”

She shook her head, confused still.

“Well,” he said, “what have we done? We can manipulate the mind itself. But we don’t heal it. We don’t make it whole. Instead we fracture it. We divide it. We have creche soldiers, we have battalions of neurotics. We train our psychoses as if they were dogs, to do tricks for us. We make ourselves over to suit our function.”

“Like Ray,” Teresa said.

“Like Ray. Like everybody else. And it’s bad, it’s dangerous. It makes us conscienceless; in some important way I think it makes us soulless.”

But he had said much of this before. She remembered him at his estate in Carmel, a rambling Spanish-style ranch house he had bought with the money from his early successes, maintained—but shabbily—with the money funneled back through ’lith chemists like Byron, lecturing to a crowd of equally shabby Float artists. He had talked as grandly about the traditions of Paracelsus, the Gnostics, cryptic wisdom. Grandiose nonsense. And it had come down to this: a sick old man in a decaying float shack. It depressed her.

He must have seen her skepticism. He ducked his head; he put his hands on the table. Old hands. The skin was pale and papery, the nails gnawed short. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I get carried away.”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she confessed. “The stone. The Pau Seco stone. It was what I wanted. It really was. The memory. Myself. But … I couldn’t bear it.”

“I wonder if that’s true.”

She glared. “You weren’t there.”

“Obviously. But I think it’s what they demand of us.” He said gently, “It makes sense.”

She felt offended, obscurely threatened.

“It’s the part of themselves they withheld,” he said. “The part of themselves they wouldn’t give to the machines. A wealth of real knowledge. Time and history. But only between mind and mind, you understand? A whole mind.”

“I don’t want it that badly.”

“Maybe,” he said softly, “you need it.”

She stood up. Her head had begun to ache. He had come here and confused her, and that was bad. “You do it,” she said petulantly. “You be the one.”

His voice was faint. “It frightens me,” he said. A confession. “Distressing. After all this time. The gnosis. The real thing. But it frightens me.” He smiled hollowly. “Not only that. I think it demands a kind of innocence. Which I do not possess.”

“You think I do? You think I do?” Mysteriously, she was shouting. The words erupted from her, sourceless. “I’m not innocent!” She was panicking. She needed a pill. Quiescence. Peace. Her body cried out for it. “I’m not good!”

She ran for the door.

Byron had been listening from the other room. Wexler stood up when the chemist emerged. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I thought—”

“It’s the way she’s been,” Byron said. “I meant to help.”

“I understand.”

“Well … I should leave.”

Byron said, “You meant all that? What you told her?”

Wexler nodded.

“We can’t help her.”

“Apparently not.”

“But Ray could?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe.”

Wexler allowed Byron to roll out a mattress for him in the corner of the float. Too late to go back to Cat’s; his breath was troubling him. So he accepted the offer. Three people in this two-room shack.

He was awake when Teresa came home. She moved through the darkened room with the elevated grace of her enkephalin high. She had been an addict, and she was spiraling back into her addiction now with terrifying speed.

He had sent her perhaps blithely to Pau Seco. But in fact he had anticipated none of this… suspected, at least, that if a crisis came it would be a domestic crisis and she would be safer out of it. The arrangements had been meticulous, and he had put a vast amount of money into it, confident that he was guaranteeing her safety.

What he had not counted on was his own weakness.

So he owed her whatever help he could give. And so he had come here.

But the help she needed—as Byron had pointed out— was not within his power.

He slept and dreamed of a terrible and oppressive future, half men like Oberg riding out to the stars in warships, chitinous bodies of metal welded to flesh, protein circuits spiked into their nervous systems. It was not so much dream as prophecy, and he woke from it with a sense of imminence, a sense that this conflict—between Oberg and Teresa, between Teresa and her fears—would one day be played out on a much larger stage. That what they did here prefigured an enormity.

It was an oppressive idea. It was more than he wanted to believe.

He woke with morning light harsh in his eyes.

Terrible, he thought, to be so old and so frightened.

Teresa was cooking up breakfast; he resolved not to mention their conversation of the night before. He moved around her cautiously. Her attention was focused on the food.

It was for him, she said. She wasn’t hungry. He said, “Byron’s gone?”

“Gone to the mainland.” She regarded him across the table. “I think he’s gone to look for Ray.”

CHAPTER 22

1. Keller was alone in the booth when Byron found him.

The lights were dim and the monitors running, images cascading across the tiny enclosed space: the Mato Grosso from the window of a bus, Pau Seco, the Ver-o-Peso. The audio was faintly audible on all these sources—ghost whispers from an ancient world. Keller said, “I’m surprised you found me.”

“I talked to Vasquez. He gave me a Network pass.”

Keller worked while Byron talked. His fingers moved deftly over the mixing board. He felt quite firmly embedded in his Angel training now, gliding over this memory landscape around him, an archeologist among the ruins of his own experience. On a dozen monitors the altered Teresa gazed palely across the docks at Belem, at a Japanese tanker moving with silent grace toward its harbor. All events converging, Keller thought; all of us moving toward harbor. He had been drinking a little.

Byron talked in a soft, persuasive voice about the Floats, about the shack he had rented there, about Cruz Wexler (who was impoverished and alone now)—finally, about Teresa. “You know,” Byron said, “she’s not really here. You edited her and you ran your programs on her and you filed her and now you think that’s her—this picture you made. But it’s not. I know how that works. It’s easy, and it feels good. But she’s not here.” He waved dismissively at the monitors. “She’s out in the Floats, Ray. She’s flesh and blood out there. And I think she would like to see you again.” He hesitated, then—firmly—“She needs to see you again.”