"Memory Wire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

CHAPTER 4

1. They arched up beyond the curvature of the Earth in an AeroBrazil jumpflight, briefly spaceborne; but the journey was not so much outward, Keller thought, as inward —into the Basin, into the strip mine of Pau Seco, into the past. Gliding down the arc of the trajectory, he wondered whether there was not some hidden momentum that had carried him here, his mind’s own traitorous clambering into the abyss of memory.

The wheel, Byron had said. It was a bad and persistent thought.

The plane banked toward the floating runways of Guanabara Bay, past the statue of Christ the Savior threadbare and alone up windy Corvocado Mountain. Last time he came here, Keller had been a nineteen-year-old draftee riding a military transport, and the statue dominating the mountain-top had been his first signal that he was entering strange territory: this weatherbeaten Christ, granite eyes unfocused, hands raised in mute blessing over a city as big as the horizon. Seeing it again, Keller felt his fingers tighten against the armrests. He had vowed once that if he were allowed to leave this country, he would never come back … an old but fervent promise, and it echoed with painful irony in the roar of the aircraft cabin.

“You all right?” Teresa asked, and Keller managed to nod.

“Be fine,” he said, thinking wu-nien, abstracting himself, retreating down the icy corridors of his cultivated aloofness—taking refuge there.

They had to wait overnight for their connection to the capital. Byron, extravagant with Wexler’s credit line, had booked them a room in one of the bone-white hotels overlooking the bay. “Only the best,” he said. But Keller had fixed his attention on Teresa, on her profile as she peered ahead through the window of the transit bus.

The image was spooling down into his memory chip, but most of this was wasted footage, trivial and hardly dramatic. Too, by the final edit she would have become a stranger, her features systematically altered beyond recognition: protecting his sources. Keller was, in his own wordless way, a journalist, and he understood the necessity of editing, of extracting significance from the raw ore of experience. Still, the finished product never failed to surprise him. He had felt that way about the last Network project he had worked on, an expose of the joywire underground. He had spent three months in hospitals, in lean-tos, in the grimmest recesses of the Floats. He had grown to know some of these men (almost always men, mostly combat veterans) who had accessed the deep reward centers of their brains and who burned out slowly, like wax candles, in the neglected corners of the urban nuclei. He thought sometimes that what he saw, the tertiary stages of their terrible addiction, must surely cauterize the wires in his own head, overload the circuits, defy memory. It had tested the limits of his wu-nien, his old Army training. He had cared perhaps too much about these people whose deaths had become inevitable.

The documentary aired in prime time and drew a respectable market share through the urban Pacific Rim. Keller’s footage was embedded among statistics and interviews and a pious commentary. The documentary was not exploitative, and he was not ashamed of his work; still, he thought, it was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat glaze of a video screen. Even the deaths he had witnessed—digital traces of his immediate experience, enhanced and polished for the final cut—had become squalid but somehow inevitable, a logical consequence of the schematic flow of events.

It tested his faith. Faith, he thought, was not too strong a word. He believed in what he was doing; he was not cynical about his work. The joy wire documentary had fueled the demand for publicly-funded rehab clinics; some lives had been saved. He believed in his objectivity, in his ability to become a dispassionate witness; he believed it was important.

And yet … in the face of such horror, wasn’t “objectivity” itself a little monstrous?

He talked it over with Byron after the documentary aired. “You dignify it,” Byron said, “with all these words. All the Angel Zen they taught you back in Santarem. But : maybe that’s not what it is. Maybe it’s a side effect from the neural harness. Flat affect. Maybe you don’t know how to care anymore, maybe you can only piss and moan over whether you care. Or maybe it’s something else.”

“What?”

Byron hesitated. “Fear,” he said at last. “Cowardice”.

No, Keller thought.

You cope, he thought, that’s what matters. Some things were simply too terrible to bear. You have to look away, that’s the truth of it… and if you cannot look away, you have to learn how to look for the sake of looking.

Vision without desire. The perfect mirror.

They rode an elevator up to their room, Byron pressed his thumb against the lock, and through the window Keller once more confronted the Christ of Corvocado Mountain across the blue angle of the bay.

This country made you, the statue seemed to say. This country is your mother and your father.

Teresa moved to the window, obscuring the view. “We’re wasting time here,” she said. “We should have gone straight on to the capital.”

“We’re tourists,” Byron said. “What does it matter? A day or two—”

“I can feel it,” she said. Her eyes were distant. “Sounds crazy, right? But I know it’s out there. Pau Seco. The place the stones come from. Buried out in the Basin all those centuries.” She gave a small, involuntary shiver. “I want to go there.”

“Soon enough,” Byron said.

Keller nodded, uneasy now in spite of himself: soon enough.

2. They rode a domestic flight into Brasilia.

It was the interior at last, the old white chess-piece city scoured by the winds of the planalto, set like an island in this sea of poverty and forest. For two decades hard currency had been rivering into the capital, and while it had done nothing to alleviate the squalor in the barrios and the box cities, it had in part paid for the scaling and renovation of this antique landmark, the last century’s stern vision of the future. The chief industry of Brasilia was government; all these buildings were government buildings.

For a few days they lived like tourists in another big hotel, breakfast in the Continental Lounge, sunlight in the rooftop gardens. Keller, idle, found himself watching Teresa. She spent a lot of time in the pool—as if it reminded her of home, of the Floats or the distant ocean—moving through the water with an absentminded grace. And yet there was this alertness about her, somber and intent. He thought of the time she must have spent with the oneiroliths, artifacts from some unknowably distant world: as if some of that strangeness had rubbed off on her.

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.