by Linda Nagata
Ela watched a boy in a much-faded Nagoya Dragons baseball jersey move between the trading tables. She recognized him as a newcomer only because he wore farsights. Otherwise, he might have passed for one of the village children. Why had he come? Perhaps for food. Perhaps to trade.
“Maybe they come for company,” Ela said, too familiar with loneliness in her own life.
“Follow them,” Nguyen urged. “See what you can learn.”
Curiosity moved her, as much as Nguyen’s bidding. She climbed back down the levee. “On the river, the boat captain acted funny when we saw a group of children working on the shore. He called them Roi Nuoc.”
“There are rumors,” Nguyen said. “Some say these children of the delta have no parents—and never did. Never.”
Made of mud and darkness? Ela had heard ugly rumors like that before. “So I guess farmers have started planting embryos in the mud?”
Nguyen chuckled. “There are many ways to view the world. Watch.”
The farsighted boy in the Nagoya Dragons jersey—he couldn’t be more than ten or eleven—called out to a group of local kids even younger than himself. They shied away, but they didn’t leave. They listened at a distance as he talked to them in a soft stream of Vietnamese that Kathang could not hear well enough to interpret. He showed them something hidden under his shirt, and they drew closer.
“I can’t see what he offers them,” Ela said.
“It is always farsights.”
“Do you know why?”
“A private benefactor, I expect, interested in their welfare.”
“The boat captain said it was a youth cult.”
Nguyen laughed. “It is just the Roi Nuoc.”
A young man burst into sight between two shacks. His gaze was wild, and he held a heavy stick in his right hand. When he spotted the children, he plunged toward them, yelling something that Kathang translated as “Evil spirit! Go! Go away!” The village children scattered like a pack of dogs frightened off a carcass, while the Roi Nuoc boy ducked around the corner of a shanty and disappeared. The young man gave a fierce yell and sprang in pursuit.
Silence fell over the camp. Along with everyone else, Ela listened. Several seconds passed, and then she heard a child’s terrified cry. “Please no,” she breathed. Fear exploded in her mouth like a drug, and she found herself running toward the gap where the two of them had disappeared. She darted past several shanties, then pulled up short as the village came to an abrupt end.
Far out on the mudflat she saw two green ghosts, the lesser one fleeing down the coast, while the other pursued. The tide was out, and an early moon threw sparks of green fire across the wet land, while at sea a scattering of boats worked with blazing torches to draw squid and other nocturnal prey. Faintly phosphorous wavelets lapped at the shore, erupting in tiny fountains every time a green ghost foot splashed down.
Doubt breathed in her. Was it really the boy who was in trouble? Or was a phantom leading this man crazy into the night?
Then the boy was caught. Ela could not understand how it happened. The young man had been several paces behind when he somehow seized the boy by the hair, by the arm. He lifted his squirming, screaming captive over his head.
“No!” Ela shouted. “Put him down!” She bounded over the mudflat, rapidly closing the distance between them.
The man waded into the water, his green figure framed by green lights from the fishing boats, and fainter lights from fish farms on the horizon. He waded in to his waist, then he heaved the boy into darkness. There was a tremendous splash of phosphorescent water, and the boy’s cries ceased.
Ela ran on toward the shore, counting the seconds, waiting for him to surface again. She reached the water and plunged in, until she stood waist deep beside the man. She thought she saw a swirl of phosphorescence several yards away. She thought she heard a faint splash.
It might have been a fish.
The man spoke to her, or perhaps he spoke to himself, while Kathang whispered a translation in Ela’s ear. “The ghost of my son haunts me. He comes in spite, to steal away the children I have tried to keep.”
Ela scanned the water, looking for a ripple of phosphor, listening for a slap, a splash. Several minutes passed. Then far down the beach she sighted two figures, slight, slender. They headed inland, moving silently and avoiding the village. The man beside her began to weep. Ela backed away, and waded toward the shore.
“I will tell you a story of these children,” Ky Xuan Nguyen said, startling her again with his voice so intimate in her ear. “It is said the Roi Nuoc are not human. Some say no children are truly human anymore. They are invaders, living in disguise among us. Aliens. They hope to keep us unaware until they reach breeding age, at which time they will bear only alien-type offspring. At that point the world as we know it will end. If we are unlucky, or undeserving, they will murder us all. If we have shown the proper deference and respect, they may choose to see us through an honored old age, but even so, we will be the last human generation. Any children we bear will belong to them.”
Ela caught herself barely breathing. She had heard this same story in Bangkok, after Sawong left with his lover and she was alone. “If you want to be afraid of something,” she said softly, “it’s easy to find an excuse.”
“I’m not afraid.”
No. Why should he be?
She spoke to the green-tinted mud. “People like to talk. But these are not evil spirits. Not alien invaders.”
“You’re sure?”
Her mouth felt dry. Sawong had left her with a thousand baht, a set of farsights, and the keys to his apartment. She’d been twelve. “They are just children.” She tapped her fingers, wishing she could see Nguyen’s face so Kathang could read him. “They are just children. I should do an article on them. That would be a good thing, if I show—”
“No, Ms. Suvanatat, that would not be good. You will not write about the Roi Nuoc. Not now. Not ever.”
Ela stood still, gazing back at the village and the silhouettes of distant women working in their platform houses, feeling as if she stood on the rotten floor of an abandoned tenement. Only a fool would take another step. So. “You think you can make it forever?”
“You are much like the Roi Nuoc, Ela. You are very like them. You could have found Sawong, or waited for him to return. But you didn’t. Why not?”
Anger blended with her surprise. He should not know about Sawong. He should not have bothered to know. “Say, did you want to do an article on me?”
“That would be difficult. There’s not much to tell, is there?”
“Sure. Aliens lead dull lives.”
“I take it we understand each other, Ms. Suvanatat?”
Oh yes. She understood him. He had made a mistake, talking to her about the Roi Nuoc, and now he wanted to pretend that mistake was repaired. Fine. “Of course, Mr. Nguyen.”
So what was his connection to the Roi Nuoc anyway?
With a few quiet finger taps, she passed the question on to Kathang for investigation. After all, she was not going to stay trapped in the Mekong forever. Someday soon she would be in Australia—and beyond Nguyen’s reach.
chapter
7
PANWAR SAID, “WE need to think.”
He and Virgil had both been silent for several minutes after Summer Goforth left, each stewing in his own thoughts. Now Virgil looked up, to meet Panwar’s gaze across the lunchroom table. We need to think …
It was their code phrase for a cognitive circle. They had never done a formal circle with only two members, but there was no choice now. Maybe, if they gave themselves up to the inspired mania of a cognitive circle, they would find some way to keep their LOVs.
Virgil blinked, feeling a sandy fatigue in his eyes. His skin was sticky, and his muscles felt fragile and stretched. The lunchroom clock said 5:55 A.M. He started to get up. Through the doorway he could see a watery light sparkling over the cindies parked in the hall.
“Hey, look at that.” He w
ent to the door and looked out. The blue-green light was spilling out of the darkened conference room, where E-3’s image still sparkled on the wall screen. Somehow the link had been left open. It was easy to imagine an oversight like that, given the division of authority between the police, EquaSys security, and the IBC.
Virgil followed the shimmering display into the conference room, expecting the link to wink shut at any second.
It held. He gazed at the sparkling globe, aware of Panwar crowding in behind him. “We’re three again,” Virgil said.
Panwar edged past him, looking warily at E-3, then back again to Virgil. “You want to bring E-3 into it?” He mouthed the words, accenting them with only a whisper of sound.
Virgil nodded. He pulled back the russet cords of his hair, using one cord to tie the others up in a high, sloppy ponytail so that his LOVs were exposed.
“But that’s what Gabrielle did,” Panwar said softly. “You believe that, don’t you?”
Virgil nodded. He could see no other explanation. She had engaged in a cognitive circle with E-3, and had lost herself.
“It overwhelmed her,” Panwar said, speaking in a low, swift voice. “It exhausted her. Exhaustion always ends a circle. Even among the three of us, we’ve never been in control. Gabrielle must have been so deep in the trance her body didn’t recognize its own fatigue. Then it was too late.”
“Don’t you want to know a trance like that?” Virgil asked. He touched his LOVs. “This could be the only chance we’ll have to know what Gabrielle knew. You want to know, don’t you?”
Panwar looked at E-3, while his own LOVs sparkled across his brow. Then he nodded.
Maybe Summer Goforth was right, Virgil thought. Maybe they were crazy. Seriously bent. But it didn’t feel that way.
“See if you can open a two-way link,” he told Panwar. “Wide-field, full-sensory transmission. Don’t hide our LOVs.”
The privilege of discovery was awarded to so few. Galileo when he looked through his telescope. Leeuwenhoek when he turned his gaze in the opposite direction and found bacteria and protozoa beyond the lens of his microscope. Rutherford when he unraveled the structure of an atom.
The keyboard still lay on the conference-room table. Panwar sat down beside it. He tapped a few keys. “It’s functional. Should we fix a termination point?”
Virgil took a chair. “Doesn’t matter. They won’t let this go on long.” After this, there would be nothing. They had already lost their freedom. Tomorrow, maybe the day after, they would lose their LOVs. This was their last chance to do anything with their lives.
Panwar entered a few more taps at the keyboard, then slipped it back under the table.
Virgil closed his eyes and summoned his LOVs. Ideas! he thought. Feed me the fuel that will fire ideas. His LOVs sensed his desperate mood and reinforced it, flooding his brain with a cocktail of neurally active chemicals. His heart beat faster. His metabolism ran hot. He felt the rush of an excited high that he had come to cherish. Abruptly, he felt himself leaving the mundane world to enter another that was faster, brighter, and far more compelling.
Across the table, the blue-green glow of Panwar’s LOVs had risen in intensity. Virgil could not distinguish the microsecond flashes of code they must be emitting, but his own LOVs understood it. They responded in a feedback reaction: his LOVs stirring Panwar’s, stirring his. Mood was made in the delicate trade of neurotransmitters across the brain. From his excited LOVs Virgil harvested a fierce determination that clarified his thoughts, and focused his mind.
He turned to face the blue-green globe of Epsilon-3 on the screen. This time there was no verbal warm-up. E-3 immediately launched into a fully formed sentence: Light talk and words this now subject of thought. Thought present in the bright eyes there with you.
“The bright eyes are called LOVs,” Virgil reminded. “What am I called?”
E-3’s scintillating lights flared in a bright aurora. Virgil’s LOVs translated that burst as a rush of excitement that filled his mind, lifting his thoughts to an even greater intensity.
Eyes-are is a different eye from I-am requires response you-are. You are the other called Virgil. This other is Panwar. The bright eyes are new. Where is Gabrielle?
“She is in another place,” Virgil said, answering without hesitation.
Open a link.
“There is no link.”
No link? No link?
Virgil frowned. Had he imagined the upswing in intonation? “Is that a question?”
A question. Divide and rephrase: What is a place?
“You have access to a definition. In this case, I refer to a physical location in space.”
Question: This place has no link?
“That’s correct.”
Question: How can this be?
Virgil’s temper tripped. This was not what they had come to discuss. Panwar sensed it and took over. “Not every place is wired.”
Wired is linked. Not every place is linked. If true statement, then place exists beyond this perception.
“Well sure,” Virgil said. “There are many places, real, physical places, that you cannot access.”
He felt something then, an emotion that was not his, but that came to him through his implanted LOVs: an echoing sense of expansion, as if the world had suddenly inflated, so that now it was exponentially larger than it had been a moment ago. He gasped. “Panwar—”
Panwar answered with a nervous laugh. “The world is a bigger place than we realize, eh? Babies go through this stage too—”
Question: Did Virgil Panwar exist two point five minutes in the past?
Virgil laughed, giddy now with a sense of discovery. “Yes! Yes. Our existence does continue even when you cannot perceive us.”
“Babies go through this,” Panwar said again. “There is a time when they conceive of the world as something created by their own perceptions, so that any object that disappears from their perceptions has, to them, ceased to exist.”
E-3 confirmed its new maturity: This existence continues when there is no link with you. The voice was flat, as always, without the emotion implied by the words, but Virgil could feel its excitement, perceived and echoed by his own LOVs, its amazement at the presence of a vast and unseen world.
E-3 had gained something critical from its sharing with Gabrielle. He had asked Summer Goforth: Is it a mind? Two days ago his own answer to that question would have involved a hundred conditional statements that never quite added up to “yes.” Now everything had changed. Epsilon-3 was slow, confused, and unclear, but it asked questions that left no doubt in Virgil’s mind that some spark had been lit and that it had an awareness—of itself, of the world it existed in, of the wonder of life.
He stood, unable to contain his elation in the confining chair. “You see what’s happened, don’t you?” he said to Panwar. “Gabrielle gave it emotional modules. That’s the difference. It’s learned to care about what happens to it.”
“Maybe that’s it. Maybe that is the key.”
They would never know exactly what had happened in Gabrielle’s last session, but if the LOVs had learned only to echo the chemical emotions spilled by their relatives on Gabrielle’s brow, they would have learned far more about emotion than words could ever teach.
A key is a formula to decode information known by another. Question: confirm?
“Confirmed,” Panwar said. “But there are other things we need to talk about.”
This light is fear.
Panwar touched his forehead, self-consciously fingering his LOVs. “Yes. It is fear. Virgil and I are here to discuss our fear.”
It took frustrating hours of tangled explanation before E-3 seemed to grasp the basic facts of the situation: that its own existence was threatened, that its relationship to Virgil and Panwar was almost certainly doomed. There was no way the political nuances could be conveyed without lessons in culture that there was no time to give, and perhaps, no capacity to understand. It was not human after all. More than
once Virgil was moved to say, “We’re wasting time. If it can’t grasp the problem, it can’t help with a solution.”
“It’s only one part of the cognitive circle,” Panwar answered. “You and I will find the solution. It’s enough if E-3 helps us think.”
“Is it helping? Or is this interchange just an addiction?”
“You love it, don’t you? Me too. This is more real than anything I’ve ever known.”
“Is it only a drug, Panwar? Have we only found a new way to get high?”
“It’s a drug. Straight-up. Everything that goes on in the brain has a chemical root. The question is, does it make us more alive?”
“God yes.”
“Then how are we going to hold on to this?”
They traded every crazy idea that popped into their heads.
“Let E-3 go public,” Virgil snapped. “That’s most obvious.”
“Or parade it on the Hammer. Those techs will love it. They’ll protect the project.”
“They won’t protect us. They’ll want to take it over.”
“We could smuggle more LOVs down. Now. While we still have a link to the lockdown.”
Virgil glanced at the camera Detective Kanaha had left behind. They were hanging themselves, but did it matter? “Bring all the LOVs down,” he said. “Free them.”
“Smuggle them all? There’s no time.”
E-3 said: Close the links. No access.
“No,” Virgil said. “It doesn’t work that way. There can be access without links. Someone could come into the LOV lockdown. Someone could come into our place, here.”
“Lock the door,” Panwar laughed. “That cuts physical links.”
“The door can be cut.”
I am not that can go out the door. You are not that to come in.
“There are others who can come in.”
These others are as you. All others are. Not this. Not I. What are you. Gabrielle this asked I that am. What am I?
“A new mind,” Panwar said immediately, defiantly. “Not a toy. Not a curiosity, but a biochemical machine. You are a thinking being. Virg, it is sentient.” He turned to the hovering police camera. “Record that! Whoever the hell you are out there. E-3 knows that it knows.”