by Linda Nagata
Oanh muttered something evil under her breath. Then she let the door close again. Reaching into a pocket hidden in an inner fold of her green gauze coat, she withdrew a pair of farsights. For a moment she held them against her chest. “This isn’t right. You’re too old.”
“Old? I’m nineteen.”
“That is too old to become Roi Nuoc.” Nevertheless, she stiffly offered the farsights to Ela. “Hurry! Take them. Then you will believe. Take them! I won’t fail.”
“Fail what?” Ela asked, eyeing the farsights with deep suspicion.
“Fail to save you! What else? Take them!” She shoved them into Ela’s hands, then stomped past her, back to the screen door. The two boys were standing, peering anxiously down the road.
Ela examined the Roi Nuoc farsights. They were Mystery brand, very cutting-edge. She turned them over, exploring them with her fingers. They looked to be an off-the-shelf set. Hesitantly, she took her own farsights off, hooking them on the collar of her borrowed shirt. Then she put the Roi Nuoc farsights on.
The eyes of a goddess filled the screen. They were dark eyes, looking out from some dim, candle-laden altar. Reflected fire glinted in irises the deep, ruddy color of rosewood. They were wise eyes, calm, and very beautiful: the eyes of an ancient forest deity. The goddess looked at Ela, her thick lashes a velvet frame that softened the intensity of her gaze.
Shadow guarded the rest of her face. Only her eyes seemed vulnerable to light.
“Oanh has warned you,” the goddess said.
Ela could not see her mouth, but she knew this must be the goddess speaking. Such a deep, rich, musical voice must belong to those eyes.
“The national police are moving from house to house, searching for you. You were seen by many farmers yesterday. Some may choose to remember you.”
As the goddess spoke, her image faded, to be replaced by a vid of a beige jeep parked outside a tin-roofed farmhouse; a scene that was swiftly nudged to the side by another vid of a similar jeep speeding along a dusty road; and then another of a truck inside the fenced compound of a warehouse complex; and a second truck on a road; and another jeep; and several motorcycles.
Ela’s heart beat harder and harder as each new scene compressed the others before it, squeezing them into tight, distorted fields. “Are these scenes of the search? Are they real time?”
The goddess confirmed it.
“But how could you have cameras at all these places … ?”
Even as Ela asked the question, she knew. “The Roi Nuoc. These are video feeds from their farsights.”
“This is true,” the goddess purred. “What they see is fed back to me.”
“And what are you?” Not a goddess. Surely this was a ROSA? One more advanced than Kathang, but still a ROving Silicon Agent, manufactured and trained to its task like any other.
“I am Mother Tiger.”
“You are a ROSA called Mother Tiger.”
The tiger goddess purred again. “Or a complex of ROSAs?” she mused. “Perhaps.”
Perhaps? Ela did not like the uncertainty in that answer. ROSAs should provide direct answers to direct questions … but there was no time now to pursue the issue. “This search—it’s coming here?”
The eyes of the goddess returned to the screen, but smaller this time: They were the eyes of a translucent ghost tiger prowling Ela’s field of view like a living watermark. “A patrol is ten minutes away to the east. Another is seven minutes away to the north. It’s not clear yet which will be assigned to Mrs. Dao’s house.”
Ela’s chest tightened. One certainly would.
She turned a panicked gaze to the back door. Oanh waited with one hand on the latch, anger and anxiety written on her heavy features. She stomped her foot. “Will you go or not? Valuable time is being lost!”
“Why are you protecting me?”
“Ela,” the goddess said. “Do you see there will be repercussions for Mrs. Dao and her grandchildren if you are found in this house?”
Ela caught her breath. She hurried to the kitchen door. Old Mrs. Dao was working in the shadows, packing oranges into plastic shipping crates. She glanced up and smiled. Mrs. Dao did not wear farsights. She understood very little English. She had no way to know that Ela had become a danger to her.
“All right,” Ela whispered. “I’ll go.”
Oanh gave her no chance to change her mind. She bolted out the back door, scattering a clutch of fat, black chickens. Ela paused only long enough to step into the plastic slippers she had worn to the outhouse, before leaping after her.
They ran through the farmyard, then out past a rusting car hulk half-gone to grass. A cat shot past Ela’s feet, darting into a small stand of sugarcane. She cried out—then remembered her wet suit, and pulled up short. “Oanh! I have to go back. If my wet suit is found, or my clothes, the police will know I was here.”
Oanh turned back, panic in her eyes. Then the ROSA called Mother Tiger spoke, “A good thought. It has already been taken care of.”
Relief swept Oanh’s face. “You heard her! Come on. Ɖi Nhanh Iȇn!”
She turned and ran down the path. Ela followed: first into the tangled shade under a stand of mango trees, and then across a sluggish irrigation ditch. The sun was high, and the air steamed. Mosquitoes hummed in every patch of shade. Ela swiped at the perspiration that refused to evaporate from her face. “Where are we going?” she panted. “Is there a place we can hide?”
“We hide by moving! Circle back, cut across the police line. Get behind them.”
This sounded much too daring, especially if the police were using drone surveillance. “Will we see Nguyen?”
Oanh pulled up beside a stand of head-high grass. Hands on her knees and shoulders heaving, she peered past its yellowing blades. A water buffalo grazed on the other side. Beyond it lay a potholed dirt road. She asked, “Who is Nguyen?”
“Ky Xuan Nguyen.”
Bending low, Oanh crept into the brittle grass. The dry blades rustled around her. After three steps she shot Ela a puzzled look. “That big shot Viȇ?t Kiȇu who drove you to Mrs. Dao’s? Is he your boyfriend?”
“No! You don’t know him?”
“Oh yes. Sure I know him. We party every evening. He likes to spend his money. Some fun.”
Ela sighed. “You must see him coming around sometimes.”
“Not before he came with you. You working for him?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
Oanh shrugged. “Could be. Sometimes Mother Tiger makes the deals. Now come on.”
Ela followed Oanh through the grass, pleased to know Nguyen had not set himself up as some kind of god in his little cult.
If it was his cult.
She crouched beside Oanh at the edge of the road. The water buffalo eyed them while Oanh looked up and down the deserted track. “Let’s cross quick.”
Ela nodded. They darted across the road, their sandals kicking up plumes of dust. Then they plunged into another stand of grass on the other side. The blades sliced Ela’s calves and thighs, leaving itching welts. Insects buzzed her face. At least she had not seen any snakes.
The grass gave way to a parched, weedy field. By the look of it, the patch had been abandoned before the start of the dry season. All that remained of the original crop were machete-scarred stumps a few inches in diameter, surrounded by a wasted crown of secondary shoots, most of them swollen and malformed. Only a few healthy leaves remained, looking like petite copies of the familiar T-shirt icon. “Cannabis,” Ela whispered. She knelt to touch one of the bubbly, thickened shoots, thinking that it looked quite a bit like the pictures of crown gall Kathang had shown her.
“Hurry up!” Oanh called, from the far edge of the field. “This path won’t be open for long.”
Quickly, Ela swapped the Roi Nuoc farsights for her own. “Kathang. Identify.”
Several seconds passed. Then Kathang whispered, “This appears to be crown gall damage on Cannabis sativa. Assessment 96 percent accurate.”
Ela grinned. With rough gestures she started breaking off the worst-looking shoots, tossing them into a pile on the weed-choked ground. Dust from the decaying tissue tickled her nose.
Oanh was back. “What are you doing? A drone will come through here in just a few minutes. We must go. Now.”
Ela nodded. “I’m almost ready.” She snapped off another half dozen branches. “Can you find the way back to the pond I hid in yesterday?”
“The pond … ?” Oanh cocked her head, studying something on the screen of her farsights. “Oh. Why do you want to go there?”
Ela snapped off another branch, sneezing twice before she could answer. “Humor me, okay?”
“Humor you … ?”
Ela smiled, wickedly pleased to have found an idiom Oanh did not understand. “Do it because I ask you to do it.”
“But your diving gear has already—”
“I don’t care about that!” Using the hem of her T-shirt for a sling, Ela gathered up the diseased shoots. Then she stood. “If you don’t want to take me, Oanh, I can always have my ROSA guide me back.” This was partly bluff. Though Ela did not doubt Kathang could find the way back, avoiding patrols and the spying cameras of aerial drones was another matter altogether.
“Okay!” Oanh snapped. “You want to do this stupid thing? Then okay! Just get your butt moving out of here now.”
“Fine,” Ela said, loping past her. “Let’s go.”
Oanh caught up with her at the end of the field. “I don’t think you’re worth this much trouble, Ela Su-van-a-tat.”
“Then again, you could be wrong.”
Oanh shook her head. “I know you’re not worth this much trouble. Why did I have to learn English anyway? If I had learned French, someone else would have to deal with you.”
Ela smiled, feeling like things were finally going her way.
chapter
15
SUMMER GOFORTH LEANED back in her chair, gazing out the window of her plush second-floor office in the Kapolei R&T park. The lights in the parking lot had just come on, projecting amber halos in the thin evening drizzle. Palm trees stood in silhouette against the crisp white face of the neighboring building. She was supposed to be editing a journal article. The hard copy lay strewn across her desk but her mind wasn’t on it. The LOVs filled her thoughts, and little else could enter.
Three days had passed since the module fell, with uncounted hours lost to the debates of the ethics committee. Summer could not see the point of further talk. The LOVs had clearly proved themselves an intolerable hazard. If any were still in existence, they needed to be found, and destroyed. She had urged the committee to acknowledge this, and to act, but to no effect. The talk went on and on.
With a sigh she tried again to return to the work at hand, but again she found her thoughts straying toward the puzzle of the mutated LOVs. How had they developed? How had they come to infest the Hammer’s fiber-optic lines? In the panicked rush to regain control of the station, no one had bothered to get a sample. Now they were gone, hard-cooked under a blast of steam, and if a successful postmortem had been performed on the residue, Simkin had not told her. He had hired her as a consultant, but he did not feel a need to keep her well-informed. She had not heard from him since the day the module fell.
In a way though, it was enough to know the LOVs could adapt—and quickly. Too quickly for their transformation to be explained by the slow pace of natural mutations. Could the LOVs be aware of their own structure? Could they be capable of changing it? She felt a rush of dread every time she touched on this idea. An intellect that could willfully modify the platform on which it ran was an intellect poised for runaway development.
Still … it would be interesting to do some experiments, expose LOVs to varying environments and observe how they respond. She was toying with ideas on how it might be safely done when the dry rattle of dragonfly wings brought her back to the present. She looked askance at the farsights left lying on her desk. Her ROSA must have received some item it considered worthy of her attention.
With a sigh Summer slipped the farsights on, expecting to find a link icon from one of the committee members—but the link was from Daniel Simkin. So. Had he finally found something for her to do?
She tapped the code to accept, and Simkin’s image coalesced, looking like sweet victory. That was when she remembered his promise to call when Copeland was found. “You’ve got him, haven’t you?” she blurted.
Simkin’s smile was sly. “Copeland? Very nearly. Any chance you can get away tonight?”
“Where? For how long? Is he still on the island? Are you going to make an arrest?”
His brows rose. “That would be nice, but I was really visualizing something more along the lines of a quiet dinner.”
Summer sagged back into her chair, feeling as if reality had slipped just a bit. Dinner? “Why?”
His brow furrowed, though whether he was annoyed or amused she could not tell. “The usual reasons. Food. Companionship. Conversation. How often are we in the same city anymore? Come on, Summer. It’s not such an odd thought.”
Oh, but it was odd, and uncomfortable too. This was how they had started, once upon a time, with an innocent “business” dinner during her senior year. Within a few weeks she’d moved in with him. Three months later she was still living in his apartment, but he had moved on. “I don’t—”
“We’ve made real progress on the case. And you’re supposed to be my consultant. I’d like to get your input.”
Her gaze shifted to the printed pages scattered on her desk. Edit an article? she asked herself. Or get on the team aimed at cleaning up her own ill-considered legacy?
“I did want to talk with you about the mutated LOVs,” she said.
“Let’s make it eight o’clock then. We can meet halfway. There’s a place in Pearl City called Miki’s Haven. Your ROSA will know where it is.”
DESPITE the name, Miki’s Haven was a restaurant designed for business: well lit, with widely spaced tables, and live music from a trio featuring oboe, cello, and a keyboard programmed to harpsichord—just enough noise to obscure conversation, but not to inhibit it.
Simkin was engaged in a link when Summer arrived at the table. He gestured for her to sit down, then turned half-away to finish the conversation.
Summer ordered a glass of chardonnay. Then she watched Simkin over tented fingers, wondering how long it would be before her turn came. The wine arrived. She sipped at it a while. Then, finally, Daniel tapped his thumb and finger, ending the link. “Sorry about that.”
She shrugged. “Tell me about the case.”
“Copeland is stirring.” In a curiously intimate gesture, he slipped his farsights off and laid them on the table. “He’s put in an order for a nopaline-octopine compound from his usual source.”
“Surely not under his own name?”
“Anonymous.”
“Then how do you know—?”
“It’s the only anonymous order for no-oct the company has ever received.”
“You’re sure it’s no-oct?” she asked, “and not just nopaline?”
“Quite sure.”
“Nopaline will keep his LOVs alive, but nopaline with octopine will let them reproduce.”
Simkin nodded. “You see our problem.” He leaned forward. “Why do you look surprised?”
Her answer was delayed by a waiter arriving with menus. When he had gone again she said, “This isn’t making sense to me. Remember that Copeland’s two partners, quite likely his two closest friends in the world, are dead because of the LOVs. Shouldn’t a reasonable person be entertaining second thoughts, instead of preparing the LOVs to reproduce?”
As Simkin considered this a slow, hungry smile spread across his face—a disturbingly familiar smile that seemed to have slipped up some temporal wormhole straight from their mutual past. A flush touched her cheeks. “Summer,” he asked, “are you implying something significant about Copeland’s state of mind?”
She forc
ed herself to focus on the question. “I don’t know. I don’t have enough information to know, but the LOVs do affect his emotions.”
“So he could be irrational?”
“He could be driven in a way that doesn’t make sense to us. Is that irrational?”
“As far as I’m concerned.”
Summer wasn’t so sure. “Rational behavior depends on one’s frame of reference, doesn’t it? If his values have shifted from what we might view as normal, his behavior could become quite unpredictable.”
Simkin shrugged. “He values the LOVs.”
The waiter returned to take orders, coolly efficient, and soon gone.
Simkin resumed his argument: “Copeland’s LOVs are the key. With his buddies gone, the LOVs might be the only thing left he does value. I think that’s all we need to know to successfully predict his behavior. He’ll do what he needs to do to keep his LOVs alive … which means he will eventually claim his order of no-oct. We’ve tagged it, of course. When he picks it up, we’ll have him.”
“Unless it’s a ruse?”
“Our eyes are open.”
She acknowledged this with a nod. “So what happened to the diver? The one who reached the impact site?”
Apparently that was the wrong question. Simkin’s eyes narrowed. His long fingers rapped the table. “You know what I hate? I hate politics. I hate bribes. I hate anonymous bigwigs, and I hate nationalist sentiment.”
“I take it you haven’t found the diver?”
He snorted. “How could we? We’re working with our hands cuffed. For the first twenty-four hours the Vietnamese government did everything they could to help, but yesterday that changed. Now they’re demanding a withdrawal of our surveillance drones from civilian areas. They’ve pulled their military and police units off the search. And they’re insisting IBC operations be limited to the impact site.” He raised an eyebrow. “One could easily get the impression they’ve found something worth hiding.”
“It might be something as mundane as a drug operation.”
“I’d like to know that. I’d like to talk to Ela Suvanatat too—the diver,” he explained.