Robert Wilson: Memory Wire

He was not sure how much time he had. There was no knowing how potent Oberg’s burn-out chip might be. It would kill him, he thought, but even before it killed him it would begin to destroy neural tissue. He had seen joy wire addicts rescued too late from their addiction, left in a state of hopeless dementia. It could be beginning already. Might already have begun. He was trembling…

But that was a bad thought and he suppressed it. Oberg had seen the memory trace; Oberg knew the way to Teresa. Cling to that, he thought. Oberg would kill her. It was a fact. Oberg might be there already.

He was the only one who knew. He was the only one who could help.

When someone is hurting, you help.

But he felt himself slipping down into delirium again.

Frantically, he scrabbled in the dirt and weeds around him. He knew what-he wanted. There were shards of glass here, broken bottles, but they were all rounded and sun-faded. They wouldn’t do. Sobbing, he groped through the dark. Surely, he thought, surely somewhere in all this trash—

—and he touched something then, his hand encountered a brittle edge—

—but the pain and the delirium carried him back into darkness. He rolled on the ground, stricken.

It might have lasted forever.

He was back in Rondonia forever, and Megan Lindsey was extending her hand to him forever, calling out to him, fear and pain and a terrible grieving disappointment etched on her features … an eternity, until he understood that it was not Megan’s face but Teresa’s.

But that was impossible. He had edited Megan out of his memory: she could not touch him. And he had edited Teresa. Angel training. Wu-nien. They were looped out, excised, extinct.

But then, he thought giddily, it would happen again. That was the curse. As Megan had died, Teresa would die.

Teresa was not Megan but she was like Megan; he was in love with her, and he was letting her die. Dying here, he was allowing Oberg to kill her. And that was a fact, and he could not erase or edit it; it was written on some larger, indelible scroll.

She could be dying now.

The thought shocked him back to awareness.

He couldn’t tell how much time had passed. There were a few dim stars; there was a trail of light, miles across this wasteland, a traffic artery. His limbs jerked spasmodically and he knew that he might not have another lucid moment: Oberg’s joychip might already have damaged him beyond repair. But it didn’t matter. Teresa mattered.

He understood that, suddenly and with a bright, calm clarity. Strange, he thought: burned into innocence. It had all fallen away, his Angel training, wu-nien, all the architecture of his life, all seared away, and yet this luminous thing was left: his love for her. Burning, tie understood and admitted it.

He groped in the weeds for the blade he had located moments or hours before. He found it when it sliced into the flesh of his thumb: an agonizing, amplified pain. Moaning, he picked it up and regarded it. It was an aluminum lid peeled off somebody’s lunch months or years ago, foggy with oxides but not hopelessly rusted. It flashed in the bitter sodium-vapor light. He was not certain he could do what he needed to do with it. The pain…

But there was no avoiding it.

He lifted the wedge of aluminum behind him and sliced it down spastically against the socket at the base of his neck.

The pain rang through him like a bell. His hand shook, which complicated things. After the second attempt he came close to passing out. His head was like a dry gourd, drained of everything but pain. He thought of flesh severed and bleeding, neural wires severed where they joined the spine, pain distilled and purified down screaming basal ganglia. It was impossible, he thought; even for her, even for Teresa, whom he loved; even for her, it was impossible … but the third gouging attempt succeeded and he felt the socket fall away like an abscessed tooth.

He felt a shuddering sense of relief. Relief and a huge, encompassing weariness. He wanted to sleep. He was exhausted. Had to sleep.

But he couldn’t sleep. Not yet.

Sighing, unsteady, trembling and bloody, he moved up the embankment toward the road.

Dazed, obeying some impulse, Teresa moved down from the roof of the float shack into the back room, through the door into the kitchen.

The man in the kitchen had a gun.

Byron and Wexler sat at the table, motionless. Wexler was staring at the gunman, his eyes wide, skin pale, lungs laboring at the still air. Byron turned slowly to look at her. He was warning her with his eyes—don’t do anything, don’t move—but there was a limpness, a hopelessness in the motion which made her feel afraid.

The enkephalins were powerful, but she had taken them hours ago; her heart was beating hard now, her fingertips tingled. Stress hormones rivered down her bloodstream.

She had become, she thought distantly, a kind of chemical battlefield.

She looked at the man with the gun. He stood in the doorway with the door ajar behind him. He was a man of maybe Byron’s age, receding hairline and a pursed, narrow mouth. His eyes were fixed, unblinking, remote. He was calm in a situation that should have made any normal person anxious, and that was worrisome: there was no judging what this man might do.

Death, she thought. Death in these drab clothes on her doorstep.

The man looked at her and said, “I want the oneirolith.”

She answered without thinking. “I don’t have it. It’s gone.” A lie.

Strange, that she should lie.

The man—who could only be the rogue Agency man, Oberg, the one Wexler had talked about—moved the gun fractionally so that it was pointed now at Byron. “Bring the stone or I’ll kill both these men.”

“It’s in the back room.” No hesitation this time, because she understood he was telling the truth.

“Get it,” he said. “Leave the door open.”

She stumbled once against the doorframe, then moved in dreamy, slow steps to the old Salvation Army dresser.

Watching from his chair at the table, Cruz Wexler gasped for breath.

He could only stare at Oberg. Oberg with the gun, Oberg who had found them somehow. The gun was aimed only a degree away from him, and it was too easy to imagine a bullet erupting from the muzzle, tearing into him, the damage it would do.

But he was dying in any case. His emphysema was advanced and he impoverished; his money was tied up in Agency liens and he could not afford new lungs or long-term treatment. Why should it matter how he died, if the dying was inevitable?

But of course it did matter. It mattered very much.

He had spent the last decades of his life pursuing mysteries. Wisdom, gnosis, the Philosopher’s Stone. It had been a game and a profitable business, but he had been sincere too. The oneiroliths had always inspired this feeling in him, of trembling on the brink of a revelation.

But death—this final mystery and most absolute gnosis—it frightened him terribly.

He watched Oberg watching Teresa. “Now bring it here,” Oberg said. The stone, he meant. That mystery abandoned too: Oberg feared it and would destroy it.

But there was a motion in the darkness, in the doorway beyond Oberg, a flicker of movement… seeing it, Wexler felt his heart hammer suddenly against his ribs.

Pick it up.

Teresa stared down at the Pau Seco artifact in its oilcloth binding, shadowed in the depths of the wooden drawer. Pick it up. Touch it.

It was the old and new voice inside her, the voice the enkephalins should have quieted. The voice of the little girl who had died in the fire fourteen years ago, unaccountably alive inside her. Almost dead now for real, Teresa thought, but drawn out once more by this crisis: Pick it up, hold it, touch it.