He watched her. He was aware of Byron watching her.

On the third day they caught a bus into the city and rode an elevator up the white glass tower of the SUDAM building, the monolithic Superintendency of the Amazon, the agency that controlled the development of the vast Brazilian hinterland. Byron had obtained from Cruz Wexler the name of a friendly SUDAM bureaucrat, Augusto Oliveira. Oliveira’s receptionist downloaded their ID into her desktop I processor and told them in unaccented English to wait, please, Mr. Oliveira was in conference. They waited through most of the morning in the plush, relentlessly bright office. Keller had picked up some rough Portuguese during the war, and he spent a little time deciphering the legend on Oliveira’s door; far as he could tell, it was Department of Mines, Maps, and Documents.

Oliveira himself appeared shortly before noon. His inner office was a sanctuary of wall windows and broad, flat filing cabinets. Outside, a rack of cumulus clouds cruised above the microwave dishes that crowned the old white buildings.

Oliveira waved them into chairs and gazed at them aloofly. Byron cleared his throat and said, “We’re from Cruz Wexler. He said you could get us—”

Oliveira’s look became aggrieved. “Please,” he said. “Don’t mention that name here. I have no connection with Cruz Wexler.” He added, “I know who you are.”

“We want to get into Pau Seco,” Byron said. “The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

“Everybody wants to get into Pau Seco. Obviously. Pau Seco.”

“Is it possible?”

“It may be.” Oliveira hooked his hands behind his back. “You want to own a plot, is that it? Dig in the dirt? Become garimpeiros?”

“Just visit,” Byron said stiffly.

“Pau Seco is seldom visited. Journalists are forbidden. Foreigners of any kind are very unusual. Really, you’re ;asking a lot.”

“Wexler said—” Byron caught himself, glowered. “We were told it would be possible.”

“Possible but dangerous.”

Oliveira moved behind his desk, thumbed his intercom, and said something in Portuguese to his secretary. A cavernous silence fell over the room. Byron crossed his arms and leaned back, scowling. Oliveira watched calmly. Keller understood that the bureaucrat was savoring their discomfort now. In return he watched Oliveira closely: he did not doubt this footage would find its way on to the Network, set amidst some stern dicta regarding the corruption of government officials.

Oliveira gazed at them silently until his secretary arrived with a cafezinho: dense, fragrant coffee in a thimble-sized cup. He drank it back convulsively and said, “How much do you know about Pau Seco?”

“It’s the mine,” Teresa said, “where the oneiroliths come from.”

“It’s a hole in the jungle,” Oliveira said, “where thirty thousand men are attempting to become wealthy. It’s also a national security area. The military is in charge. Anarchy and martial law—both, you understand? Here, look.”

He tapped a keyboard. Keller sat forward: the surface of Oliveira’s desk had become a topological map, black contour lines on a field of gently glowing blue.

“The Pau Seco mine,” Oliveira said.

The scale was immense.

“It’s operated the way the gold mines at Serra Pelada were operated. Foreign powers came in very quickly back in the twenties, you understand? The land was surveyed, there were sophisticated interferographs made of the soil beneath. But in the end it was Brazil that prevailed. Our antique mineral-rights laws.” Light from the liquid-crystal display played up the soft angles of Oliveira’s face. Absorbed now, he swept his hand over the desktop. “This is where the Exotic deposits appear. All this territory. Ten square miles of mud and clay, progressively less rich from the core deposit, here. The government allots the land in units of four square meters. For a brief time, years ago, the plots were sold cheaply. Now they’re auctioned. No one may own more than one, and it must be worked for the owner to retain title. Any given plot may produce nothing… but understand that even a small stone, a small oneirolith, is worth at least three hundred million cruzeiros.” He shrugged loftily. “Someday this may end. We may decipher all there is to be deciphered from these artifacts. The secrets of the universe, hm? And then Pau Seco will go back to jungle and all the garimpeiros can go home. Maybe that day is coming. But not yet. Every stone we unearth sheds new light, reveals a little more of the puzzle. Once its data have been abstracted, of course, the stone loses its enormous value … it might be duplicated, it might even find its way into the black market as a sort of drug.” He looked at Byron and smiled. “But I wouldn’t know about that. At Pau Seco the government buys the stones directly from the garimpeiros and takes a commission against their value on the international market. They may not be sold or traded privately. The price we offer is competitive… and there is the military to prevent smuggling.”

Teresa’s eyes were fixed on the top map. She said contritely, “We’ll need a permit to get in—”

“Get in! If you go to Pau Seco, you’ll need a permit to eat, a permit to sleep, a permit to piss—”

“Can you get us these permits?”

Oliveira became haughty. “It’s been arranged.” He waved his hand: it was trivial, a non-issue “But I want you to be prepared. There are no hotels in Pau Seco, you understand? There is only mud and shit and disease. Are those familiar words? You might get dirty.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Byron said.

Oliveira switched off the top map. The blue glow faded. “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine it would.”

His secretary gave them their documents on the way out: thick sheafs of buff-colored paper with the SUDAM stamp embossed on every leaf.

“Thank you for your patience,” she said politely.

CHAPTER 5

1. The irony, Oliveira thought later, was that because Brazil had become essential to the world, it had been lost to the Brazilians.

It was inevitable from the moment the Valverde regime called on the Pacific Rim nations for military aid. They had come more than willingly. The Japanese, the Koreans, the Americans. They had come, and in an important way they had never left. Brazil controlled the resource that controlled the world… but the world controlled Brazil.

He felt no loyalty to the man who had approached him through the American embassy. Oberg was his name. A man with thinning hair and a faint, obscured Texas accent; a man who looked like a schoolteacher and who was, beyond doubt, something far less pleasant. Oberg worked for the Agencies, the integrated complex of intelligence-gathering and enforcement bureaus that constituted a second and largely covert American government. Things being what they were, Oliveira owed the man a certain deference. But not loyalty.

But he felt no loyalty either to Cruz Wexler—a bourgeois cultist with highly-placed contacts in Brazil and an American’s faith in the corruptibility of foreign governments. And certainly Oliveira owed nothing to the three innocents who had appeared in his office today.

And without loyalty, Oliveira thought as he punched up Oberg’s telephone code—without loyalty there is no such thing as betrayal.

Oberg answered personally. His face was flat and oblique across the plane of Oliveira’s video screen. In the room behind him Oliveira saw a stone window, a stand of mimosa. Oberg looked at Oliveira and said simply—a soft, suppressed twang in his voice—“They’ve come, then?”

“They were here. I gave them the documents.”

“You’re certain it was them? The man and the woman?”

“They fit the description. And one other.”

Oberg seemed taken aback. “An American?”

Oliveira nodded casually and sketched out a description of Keller. Oberg scribbled notes. “I’ll want a photograph,” the Agency man said finally, “plus any information the man gave you.”