Keller turned away from the board. “You don’t understand.”

“No. I don’t. Definitely not. But I will tell you what I do understand. I understand that she is in a desperate situation, and that I can’t help her, and that she is wanting you so bad it hurts.”

“I can’t help her either.”

“Maybe you’re wrong.”

Keller said faintly—it made him unhappy to admit it —“We were together. Back in that hotel room with the stone. Together in a way you can’t imagine. She saw things—”

“You think …” Pure outrage in his voice. “You think that matter\s?”

There was silence for a moment. On the walls luminescent numbers counted down seconds to the minute, minutes to the hour. Past time, Keller thought, spooling away.

He had been awake last night, staring at the sculpture he’d bought at the gallery up the coast, the twin faces of it, woman and child verso. It fascinated him and it made him uneasy. She needed help. Well, obviously she needed help. Maybe she had always needed help.

I would go, Keller thought bleakly, but there are things I cannot face. Her fears and his had been connected somehow. The stone had connected them. She could not face the child in the sculpture; he could not face her.

He could not imagine this changing.

But… if someone is hurting, you help.

Wu-nien, he thought desperately. The Ice Palace. He longed for it; lately it had been elusive.

Byron said slowly, as if the words had been drawn from some kiln inside him, “She’s on the pills again. She’s doing enkephalins, Ray. It’s a bad downhill road, and it will end with her dying unless we do something.” He looked at Keller; Keller was startled by the fierce, obvious pain in his expression. “Unless you do something.”

But that was impossible.

She couldn’t die.

She was here. She was all around him. She was video now. She was substantial.

She had only begun to exist.

Byron stood up.

He disliked this place where Keller was. It was a bad place, an Angel place, and it reminded him too much of the socket he used to wear. He had spent the war years in the same kind of wire daze Keller had entered now, the gauzy and pleasant territory of not-caring, which people like Keller rendered as “objectivity.” He understood the attraction, but it was the same attraction Teresa must feel for the pills: a surrender. He hated it especially because he wanted it. After all these years, he still had the taste for it.

But he had proved something today. It was maybe a hollow consolation, but he felt as if he had erased the Angel tattoo on his arm: if he looked for it, it would be gone. He had pleaded with Keller—who had become Teresa’s lover —to go back to her, and surely that was the last labor that was required of him… this pain, surely, was sufficient. He had done that for her, and there was no more he could do. He had earned his way into the world.

But she would die anyway, and that was the terrible thing, the irreducible thing, maybe the thing he wanted so desperately to hide from: you do everything you can, and sometimes the bad thing still happens.

“Listen,” Keller said suddenly, “you don’t have to leave. You—”

But it was pointless. They didn’t connect. Byron felt an abstracted pity for Keller, gaunt in his plush chair, hands poised over the faders. “It’s okay,” he said wearily. “Do what you need to do.”

Out in the world, the sun was terribly bright.

2. Keller was alone then.

Memories cascaded around him in cool crystalline light. Voices whispered.

One time, talking about Byron, Teresa had said, “He is the best of us.” Keller hadn’t understood. Now he felt a flicker of comprehension. But it was the kind of goodness he did not wholly understand, troubling and absolute. The old phrase echoed through him: When someone is hurting, you help. If it had been a video memory, he could have excised it, looped it out of existence; but it persisted, and it frightened him.

After a time he left the editing booth.

His hotel room faced one of the old suburban arteries, traffic noises all night and running water between ten and ten. He poured a drink, took a long shower, regarded himself in the mirror. His reflection—he considered it objectively —looked strung-out and haggard. His cheeks were sunken, his stubble unshaven. Who was this man? He looked like some wirehead. Some faded combat veteran dying in the Floats.

He closed his eyes.

In the night, drinking again, he called up Lee Anne, with whom he had once had a contract for affection: he recalled, with some fondness, the scent of her perfume. She appeared in the monitor as perfect as ever, stark in white makeup and her lips a piquant red. She peered at him coolly from the crystal display. Keller forced a smile. “We had a contract once,” he said. “You remember? We—”

But she shook her head. “I don’t know you,” she said.

The monitor went blank.

In the morning he was back in the booth.

It was almost unbearable. He winced away from the image of Pau Seco, the open oneirolith mine like a wound in the earth. It was all too vivid. He could smell the squalor of the old town, the dust, the stale heat. It was terrifying: it seemed about to rise from the monitors and surround him.

If someone is hurting, you help.

She was hurting, Byron had said. Keller circled the knowledge but dared not approach it. She was hurting. She was wounded. But the resonance was too terrible to acknowledge.

He hurried through the last of the editing. The print he delivered to Vasquez would be coldly objective, panoramic, a glimpse into the mechanics of the dreamstone trade, Pau Seco, SUDAM, the garimpeiros and the formigas, this last and strangest frontier. The rest—the merely personal —would be erased. Erased, it would in some important sense cease to exist. Erased, it would become bearable.

His hand was poised over an Edit command when the door opened.

He swiveled on his chair, thinking it might be Byron again. He saw instead a carefully dressed man with receding hair and a generic smile. Some Network executive maybe. But the man stepped closer, and suddenly Keller could smell his mint-scented breath and feel a hint of his terrible and enormous hostility. The man was smiling even as his hands balled into fists. “My name is Oberg,” he said.

CHAPTER 23

Killing Keller would have been redundant, though in some fashion satisfying, and Oberg was practicing his best professional manners. A death in the Network compound would have alarmed too many people. So he had come prepared.

He struck Keller once; Keller fell to the floor, dazed. Quickly, Oberg bound Keller’s hands with tape and ran a strip of the same metallic tape across his mouth. Keller’s eyes were closed. The Angel blinded, he thought; the Angel silenced. He worked methodically now. He rolled Keller over and put a foot across the small part of his back, to immobilize him. From his hip pocket Oberg withdrew a miniature scalpel and a tiny pronged microchip.

He had purchased these things from a black-market neurotechnician working out of the Floats. The chip was a joywire chip, slightly modified. Attached to the socket behind Keller’s neck, it would pulse a voltage down Keller’s neural wiring, stimulating the reward centers in Keller’s brain. But Oberg had instructed the neurotechnician to substitute a more powerful voltage source.

“It’s insane,” the neurotech had told him. “You’d burn a man out. It would not be pleasure, it would be pain—immeasurable! And disorientation. And the victim —I can only say victim—would bum out in a matter of hours. Days, at most. He would proceed almost instantly to the last stages of wire psychosis. It would be murder.”