by Linda Nagata
The captain’s gaze grew fierce as he studied the kids. “No one watches them,” he muttered. A hard V had formed between his eyes. “They should not be heah.” He reached for another pack of firecrackers, though no submerged burial had appeared on the sonar. He lit the pack and tossed it in the air. Ela hunched against the noise. Onshore, a couple of boys paused in their work to jeer at the passing boat, but most of the ragged children did not even bother to glance up from their labor. The captain was right: There were no adults in sight.
“What was that for?” Ela asked. “What’s your problem with these kids?” She looked to the captain for an answer, but he only stared straight ahead as if he had not heard her speak. Puzzled, she looked again at the laboring children.
“They ah Roi Nuoc,” the captain said reluctantly. “A cult of the farsights.” He tapped his temple. “You unduh-stand?”
“A youth cult?”
He nodded. “They hav’ been bewitched.”
chapter
3
A SECURITY OFFICER escorted Virgil Copeland, Randall Panwar, and Nash Chou to the LOV project suite, where they were met by a detective named Mitchell Kanaha. He was a lightly built officer with faded brown hair, his eyes invisible behind opaqued farsights the same brassy color as his skin. Virgil had no doubt that a ROSA was at work behind the lens, drawing up an assessment of their emotional states from the telltales of their expressions and the temperatures of their skins. Were they sufficiently shocked? Sufficiently grieved? Or could a trace of guilt be read into the precise period of time they held his gaze? Virgil imagined himself to be suddenly transparent.
Nash recognized his vulnerability and took hold of the situation, relieving Virgil of the need to speak. “Have you determined what happened? And when?” he asked, as they huddled in the suite’s short hallway between bulletin boards cluttered with announcements, ads, and joke pictures. All three office doors stood open.
Kanaha said, “When it happened is easy. The M.E. puts time of death at no more than an hour before the report was made.”
Virgil blanched. “Then if the cindy had come in …”
“Just a little earlier, yes, it might have been possible to save her. She was probably unconscious for several hours before death. Certainly she was dehydrated.”
Virgil had never thought to look for her in the lab. Why should he? If she’d been in the lab, she would have been in easy reach of a link. He turned to look for Panwar, and spotted him ducking out of his office, his right hand deep in the pocket of his trousers.
“I just don’t understand it,” Nash said. “She wasn’t sick. In fact she was in perfect health. Right, Virgil?”
Virgil started, tearing his confused gaze away from Panwar. “Huh? Oh. Right. Of course. She exercised every day, and almost never got sick. She was perfect … that way.” Beautiful. A beautiful, intricate, self-aware organic machine, an exquisite dance of biochemistry, stopped now. Broken.
“No sign of violence?” Panwar asked as he moved close to Virgil.
“No external signs at all,” Kanaha confirmed. “Toxicology will have to tell us what happened.”
Nash frowned, puzzling over this. Virgil closed his eyes, waiting for Nash to catch on. He didn’t disappoint. “Oh. You’re thinking some sort of … recreational drug?”
“It’s the most common means for stopping the heart of a healthy young woman.”
Virgil stared at the floor, biting the inside of his lip. Let Kanaha believe that! Let him believe that Gabrielle’s long unconscious period had allowed the drug residue in her body to drop to undetectable levels.
“Of course,” Kanaha said, “we’ve found no supporting evidence. No needles, skin patches, vials, powder packs, anywhere on her, or anywhere in the suite.”
“I never knew her to use illegal drugs,” Panwar said. “Then again, I did not share her private life.” He laid a companionable hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “May we see the body now?”
Kanaha nodded. He turned; Nash followed. Panwar used the moment to slip a pair of needle-nose forceps into Virgil’s hand. “You loved her best,” he murmured.
Virgil fumbled the delicate instrument and almost dropped it. He barely managed to shove it into a pocket of his charcoal gray pants before Nash looked back, his shiny brow wrinkled in concern. “Virgil, are you all right with this?”
“I’m fine.”
“It’s hard on all of us,” Panwar said.
Virgil pushed past him, silently cursing Panwar for forcing on him the gruesome task of extracting the LOVs. But he stopped short at the end of the hallway when he encountered the odor that had disturbed the routine of the little basketball-sized cleaning robot known as a cindy.
It was a nauseating, fecal smell, sour, with an overlay of bitter sweat. He edged past Kanaha and into the darkened conference room.
The only illumination came from the wall screen, where a twinkling, blue-green globe was displayed, its surface deeply etched with complex folds and channels.
“What is that?” Kanaha asked, nodding at the screen.
“That’s, uh, the heart of our project,” Virgil said. “It’s a colony of LOVs. That’s the form they take when they cluster together in an aquatic environment.”
“LOVs?”
“They’re an artificial life-form.”
“Here?”
“God no. On the Hammer. There’s a two-year moratorium, you know.”
“I know. What’s their purpose?”
“We use them to study neural function. They … have a capacity for spontaneous learning, for self-teaching.”
“Like a neural net computer?”
“Not exactly. No. Their problem-solving procedures … they have more in common with our minds than they do with silicon-based neural nets. Especially in a colony. They can interact much like human neural cells in a brain.” Except the LOVs communicated through light, as well as through the chemical and electrical impulses propagated through their linked asterids. “Gabrielle thought they might have some … some capacity for one or more degrees of … of consciousness.”
He swallowed hard. Then, as if guided by a will that was not his own, his gaze shifted to Gabrielle.
She lay in a recliner on one side of the oval table, facing the display, her face ghastly pale, waxlike, the blood all stolen away from her surface cells. Her lips had faded to pale, withered ridges. Her eyes were mercifully closed. She looked as if she had been wrestling with evil spirits for hours on end. Her hair was sodden, her clothes soaked with a rancid sweat, and worse things, released as her body gave up its struggles. Her fingers were pale, waxy-smooth, and lovely as a sculpture, their tips tinged a faint blue. Across her graceful forehead, her LOVs glittered blue-green in the shifting light.
Softly, Virgil said: “Hark, cancel the display.”
The screen winked off. The overhead lights came up, illuminating every detail of Gabrielle’s face.
“You’ve got auditory pickups in here?” Kanaha asked. “I was told this suite was exempt from routine observation.”
Panwar nodded. “The project ROSA monitors. It doesn’t record.”
“Why not?”
“It would be a security risk,” Nash said. “A disgruntled employee could sell out to our competitors. Besides, our cutting-edge projects show superior progress when we give our people privacy and a free rein. Being under constant observation cramps creativity. Studies have proved it.”
Kanaha responded to this with a noncommittal grunt. “So it looks as if Dr. Gabrielle Villanti might have been working with, with …” He waved his hand at the blank screen.
“One of the LOV colonies,” Virgil said. “Epsilon-3, if you want to know. It’s one of twenty. Gabrielle was devoted to the project.”
“She wanted to be the first,” Panwar added, “to meet a nonhuman mind. That’s what we do here, Detective Kanaha. We try to convince ourselves that the LOV colonies are real entities, with alien minds.”
“Randall, please,” Nash said.
Then he turned to Kanaha. “Are you done here? Can she be moved now, to a more dignified setting?”
Virgil had to wonder what kind of dignity there was in an autopsy. Tenderly, he touched her forehead. Her skin was cool and damp, almost rubbery. Not her skin at all.
“They were lovers,” Panwar said. “Would it be all right if Virgil had a minute alone with her … ?”
Virgil froze, remembering the forceps in his pocket. Say no, he prayed. Say no.
“Sure,” Kanaha rumbled. “The gurney’s still on its way up anyway.”
Virgil listened to them walk away. He heard the door close behind him. Now! he thought. Do it now.
He retrieved the forceps from his pocket.
What happened when the machine stopped? Where did the person go? People had worried over that question since the beginning of thought, but Virgil could not parse the popular speculations. The beautiful machine that was Gabrielle had ceased to function, and he could not bring himself to believe that some magic part of her could survive that terrible stop-motion. Like a projection when the lights went out, surely she had simply ceased to be?
Focus!
The LOVs were glints across her smooth forehead. He pinched one with the forceps and pulled. It shattered into powdered glass.
Virgil stared in horror. Where the LOV had been there remained a tiny hollow, cupping a speck of shiny white tissue.
He smoothed it over with a trembling hand.
Her fingers twitched.
Virgil froze. It was a dead reaction, he knew it. Like the kick of a frog’s severed leg when an electrical current is applied, his touch had sent a chaotic signal straight down the LOV’s nerve trunk to her brain … and somehow, some part of the system still worked.
But even the LOVs would be dying by now.
Damn it, focus!
How much time could Panwar buy him? The forceps weren’t going to work. He needed a different tool to remove the LOVs. A metal pick maybe, or a scalpel. They’d been damned stupid never to give a thought to extraction.
He only had the forceps.
So he tried again, pinching deeper to get the forceps beneath the next LOV, not squeezing so hard this time.
Pop!
The LOV shattered into dust.
Virgil stared at the botched job, all too aware of the panicked rush of his own breathing. He was not going to be able to do this, not with the forceps. Then how?
The door banged open, revealing Nash, his round face twisted in horror. Kanaha stood behind him. Virgil followed his smug gaze to a corner of the ceiling where an aerostat floated, riding on differential air pressure, its button cameras fixed on Gabrielle’s body.
“What are you doing?” Nash demanded. “What have you done to her?”
Virgil couldn’t think what to say, and yet he spoke, his mouth moving as if some other consciousness directed it. “She moved. When I touched her, her fingers twitched.”
Kanaha stripped the forceps from his hand and deposited them in a sample bag. He leaned over Gabrielle, his shadow falling across her face. With a gloved hand he stroked her forehead, tracing the pattern of her LOVs. He scowled. “Hey. They’re producing light. Little flickers of light. I saw it before, but I thought they were reflecting the color of that colony thing that was up on the wall.” He turned to look at Nash. “Is this some kind of body jewelry?”
“That’s right. That’s what it is,” Virgil said, his voice whispery as it emerged from his dry mouth. “Luminescent chips. Glued on. Very pretty.”
Nash added: “Panwar has them too.”
“It’s a … a fashion,” Virgil stammered. “Where is Panwar?”
“In his office.” Kanaha studied Virgil, giving his personal agent time to collect the telltales that would confirm his emotional state. “He didn’t like it when he saw you handling the corpse. Why did you want to remove the chips?”
Virgil’s chin dropped low. Again he found himself talking, almost without volition. “Her mother … she wouldn’t approve.”
“She worried about things like that?”
Virgil turned half-away, his hands shaking. “She did. Sometimes.”
Nash looked at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Virgil? It is body jewelry? That’s what I always assumed.”
“Sure, Nash.”
Nash shook his head. “You don’t lie very well.”
“Step back,” Kanaha suggested. “Let Dr. Chou have a look.”
Reluctantly, Nash approached the corpse. He leaned over Gabrielle, shading her face from the overhead lights as he examined the embedded LOVs. Then he looked up at the blank screen, a thoughtful frown creasing his brow. Abruptly, his face paled. His mouth opened in a round oh of pained surprise. Without saying a word, he ducked his head and hurried from the room.
“Nash!” Virgil leaped after him, catching him in the hallway outside Panwar’s office. “Nash, wait. Listen to me, please. Before you say anything, try to understand why—”
“You think I don’t understand?” Nash shouted. “That I don’t think the way you do? Dream the things you dream? I’m fat and balding and middle-aged, Virgil, but I’ve seen as far as you! Farther! I’ve felt the temptation, but never, never would I have pulled a stunt like this.”
“Nash, please. It’s not like it was harmful—”
“Gabrielle is dead! You used her for a test animal. And you have the balls to tell me it wasn’t harmful?”
“We don’t know what killed her. This is not like Van Nuys.”
Nash just stared at him, his face damp, his brown eyes half-gone behind heavy lids, but still piercing, still potent. Virgil glanced over his shoulder. Kanaha had followed them, his farsights recording every word as he waited for the puzzle to resolve itself.
Panwar seemed to have given up. Virgil could see him in his office, hunched over his desk, head bowed against his hands. Nash followed his gaze, and nodded. “You’ve done it to yourselves too, haven’t you? You and Randall. I’ve seen his pretty glitter, but you’re in it too, aren’t you, Virgil? All three of you were in it, tucked in here together, so close and so quiet.” He stepped forward. With startling speed his hand reached up to sweep the slim cords of Virgil’s Egyptian-wrapped hair back from his brow. Caught off guard, Virgil stumbled, but a single step brought his back against the wall.
For some immeasurable time Nash stared at the LOVs on Virgil’s brow. Then his hand dropped stiffly to his side. Tears stood in his pinched eyes. “I want to protect you,” he whispered. “I do. But I can’t. It would be wrong. Don’t you understand? We have systems to regulate development. Necessary regulations. They don’t exist to stymie the careers of brilliant youth. No. It’s to give ourselves, as a society, time to think. You’ve trashed that system, Virgil, and it’s an act that will hurt everyone who’s ever done, or ever hopes to do, cutting-edge research.”
“We’re not Van Nuys,” Virgil said again. “The LOVs are not infectious. They’re not dangerous. They are utterly under control.”
Nash shook his head. “You reached too far, son. My God. What a waste.”
chapter
4
HUNGER LAY BEYOND the river mouth.
Ela Suvanatat stood at the side rail of Cameron Quang’s boat, staring in disbelief at a vast fleet of motley vessels cluttering the glassy surface of the South China Sea. The boats must surely number in the hundreds. She crossed to the other rail. It was the same. Most of the vessels were old: tiny, battered skiffs, their paint faded or gone. Their crews worked the water with nets and poles and wire traps: dark-haired men with skin like polished wood, or women swaddled in worn colors to cheat the sun. The boats filled the bright blue water out to a hazy horizon where oil-drilling platforms walked in ghostly steps, winking into view, only to fade into the haze before appearing again farther down the coast.
In the heat, in the brilliant sunlight, Ela had a wavering sense that none of this was real. These fisherfolk were not people, they were spirits, human desire endlessly drawing in empty nets.
>
But hunger could not be dreamed away.
Ela tapped her fingers, summoning Kathang to record the view through her farsights. A panoramic would be needed somewhere early in the article—but she felt sick thinking about what that article would show. The Coastal Society wanted an exposé on the ravages of overfishing. They did not want to ponder these people who must make a life where life had been all used up.
At least it was going to be easy to get dramatic material.
She clipped goggle cups to her farsights, then she made her first dive. It was a short foray, ten minutes to get some video of the stripped bottom. Lost nets and tangled fishing line were everywhere, half-buried in the mud or floating ghostlike in the murky water near the seafloor. As she returned to the boat she saw one small school of coin-sized silver fish. They darted into sight and disappeared, like an omen of good fortune that decided not to stay.
Cameron Quang was drinking another Coca-Cola when she climbed out of the water. “See anything?” he asked.
“A few small fish. A lot of garbage.”
She made two more dives as the red-eyed boat journeyed slowly out to the oil-drilling platforms.
The offshore fields were tapped out, but the platforms still found use as the hubs of vast fish farms. As the boat drew closer, Ela could make out fiberglass poles rising from the ocean, with floating lines strung between them that enclosed vast acres of calm water. The closest fishing boat was a quarter mile away. “Can I dive out here?” she asked the captain when the boundary was only a few hundred feet off the bow.
His answering grin was sly. “You wanh uh do some poaching?”
“I want to get some pictures.”
“That’s what theah all say.” But he cut the boat’s engines. Then he used his farsights to talk with someone on the platform. “Okay, ah warned them you’ll be out here, so maybe they won’t shoot you? You dive while ah do my business. Half an hour, and ah’ll pick you up.”
She nodded and slipped her rebreather pack on. “Don’t forget where I am.”
His grin widened.