Robert Wilson: Memory Wire

1. Because of the monomolecular wires twined deep into his cerebral cortex, Raymond Keller’s memories often announced themselves as scents. He would smell dust and concrete and think, seconds later, of the water-rationed conduit suburb in which he had spent his childhood. Gasoline, he would think, and be back in his father’s oily garage, chain-lifting an antique internal combustion engine.

Tonight—standing in the kitchen of his Los Angeles apartment with a glass of water in his hand—he smelled the hot granular earth of a manioc field in Brazil, and knew the memory would be a bad one.

He put aside the glass with a deliberate motion and moved to the translucent outer wall of the living room. The sky beyond it was dark and starless; across the long bow of the harbor, the scattered lights of the boat barrios flickered.

The memory trick was one side effect of his Angel wiring. There were others, mostly minor. He had grown accustomed to it, or so he told himself. The biosynthetic wires grown under his skull were microscopic and immunosuppressive; in terms of tissue displacement or body weight, they hardly existed. But, Keller thought moodily, the body knows. Leiberman, the Network M.D., had told him so. “The imperial flesh,” Leiberman had said. “Poke it, it responds.”

He closed his eyes and sighed.

In the flickering retinal darkness, bright lines of tracer fire stitched out.

Helpless, he watched Megan Lindsey die one more time.

Keller was periodically employed as a Recording Angel by the news and documentary arm of the largest satellite video network operating out of the western United States. In the course of his work he had sold burned-out krytrons in the Oslo weapons market, he had endured the terrors of the joychip underground. But he knew what he guessed most Angels knew: the real terrors are internal.

Wu-nien, he told himself. No-thought. In the silence of his apartment, the memory fading—after midnight now —he practiced the lonely rigors of Angel discipline.

When he had achieved a measure of calm, he emptied the card windows of his wallet and placed the plastic rectangles side by side on the slab of smoked glass that was the surface of his coffee table.

Pacific Credit Exchange, the Military Registrar, California DMV. A handful more. Some of them featured his photo in two or three dimensions: a man in his mid-thirties frowning out from the photographs with an expression Megan had once described as “the blessed innocence of failed comprehension.” He wore nonprescription eyeglasses and his hair was cut back to stubble. The name embossed or printed on each card was Grossman, William Francis.

The cards were insubstantial, Keller thought: soap bubbles. A year ago they had meant a good deal to him. They had represented a new life, a new identity, yet another chance to outrun the juggernaut of his past. When the Network issued him the ID, part payment for his dangerous and prolonged penetration of the joychip covens, Keller had in effect invented William Grossman: a mild, inoffensive man with modest pleasures and no ambitions. He had created a past for him—parents, a school, lovers. He had coached himself in this artificial history until he was convinced he could in some sense become William Francis Grossman, and for months it seemed to work. He told the Network he didn’t work for them anymore.

For a time it seemed as if he had found a way back into the world.

But lately, gazing out the walls of Grossman’s luxury apartment at the coastline stretching north to the Santa Monicas, he had felt the old fears creeping back. And now—terrible memories still flickering in the lights of the tidal barrios—he knew it was the end of Grossman.

He stacked the cards carefully, picked them up, fanned them out. They were artificial and a cheat.

Tomorrow, he thought, I will burn them.

He would go back to the Network. He would light up the wires in his head. He would be an Angel again.

2. In the morning Keller traveled to the Network building in the city core and met his contact there, an independent producer named Vasquez. Vasquez sat in a large private office with polarized windows and vertical blinds, and the angle of vision the windows allowed was intentionally oblique, so that one saw only the blueness of the ocean and not the shabby patchwork of the Floats.

Vasquez regarded him with a mild curiosity and said, “I thought you didn’t do this anymore.”

The work Keller did was sublegal, his contacts with the Network strictly sub rosa . He worked without contract, and so he was, to a degree, at the mercy of Vasquez. But he was also good at his work; he knew it; Vasquez knew it. “I changed my mind,” he said.

Keller outlined the proposition his friend Byron Ostler had made him a couple of weeks ago.

The Network executive nodded. At first, as Keller spoke, Vasquez seemed excited; then a patina of concern came across his face. “What you’re proposing,” he said, “would be dangerous.”

Keller admitted it would be.

“Maybe more dangerous than you think,” Vasquez persisted. “Not everybody can be bought off. There are too many competing interests. The military, the government, the Brazilians—”

“I appreciate that. I can handle it.” Keller sat forward in his chair. “No one has footage like this. You know how valuable it would be.”

They talked a while longer. As Vasquez relented, his excitement crept back. Keller had known it would: Vasquez was already embarked on an investigation of the oneirolith trade and the deal was too tempting to refuse. Keller held out for a little more money than he ordinarily received; Vasquez agreed easily.

He was committed now. No pulling out. The idea was faintly but suddenly disturbing.

Vasquez withdrew a notepad from his desk, scribbled on it, lifted the sheet of paper and handed it across the desk. “Give this to Leiberman. Go this afternoon. He’ll make time for you. I’ll arrange it.”

Keller nodded.

The appointment with Leiberman was for three. At lunch Keller met Byron Ostler at a waterfront cafe down the coast highway, a high patio overlooking the boat barrios, barcos viviendas in Gypsy colors sprawling between the mainland and the distant tidal dam. Byron was alone, waiting. But he would have been impossible to miss even in a crowded room. His thick archaic eyeglasses, round as coins, sat on his pinched face like a challenge or a rebuke. His hair fell down over his shoulders in white cascades. He wore an old khaki jacket threadbare at the collar and loose around his narrow throat. He looked, Keller thought with some amusement, like a painting by El Greco of a consumptive jockey.

“Ray,” Byron said, and the smile widened fractionally.

“I’m still Grossman,” Keller said. “Oh?”

“For a few hours.” He pulled up a chair. “So it’s on? You’re making the trip?”

“Looks that way,” Keller said. Byron chuckled softly.

Keller ordered a sandwich from the bored day waitress. “Something’s funny?”

“You,” Byron said. “Me. That there’s two of us crazy enough to go back.”

“You said it was arranged. You said—”

“I know. It is. Safe passage guaranteed. Still… there’s this irony in it.”

Byron had a right to talk. Byron had been there. Byron had been Keller’s platoon Angel all those years ago; he would show you—if he was in the mood—the pale blue Eye tattoo on his skinny forearm, washed over with blond hair now, fading but intact.

Keller, after the war, had had his own tattoo removed. Leiberman had performed the skin graft. It was a good job: only a rigorous microscan would reveal the seams. Byron was a ’lith chemist long since gone underground out in the Floats; he could afford to keep his Eye insignia. Keller, a private Angel, could not.