Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  “Then there’s reason to think this person really does have a sample of LOVs?”

  “I need you to help me answer that—and I’ll need your help to contain them if she does.”

  Summer nodded, gazing thoughtfully at the musicians as they followed their music through a complicated passage. “My skills don’t lie in blockades and interdiction. So I’ll guess you’re talking about me developing a biocontrol to use against the LOVs?”

  “You’re the expert.”

  “Copeland’s the expert.”

  “But you’re on my side.”

  She nodded. Unlike the ambivalent members of the ethics committee, Simkin knew what must be done.

  chapter

  16

  A BLACK-PLASTIC water bag had hung all afternoon in the sun; now, with the fall of night, Ela stood beneath a silken spray, washing a film of soap and dirt and sweat from her skin. Stars stared down. Outside the garden she could hear clashing strains of canned music and the voices of drunken tourists on the street, trying to explain to themselves why they had come so far south as Ca Mau. Closer, she could hear the chirping of frogs and crickets, and closer still the whine of mosquitoes hunting her in the tight confines of the palm-thatch shower stall; she felt the soft nudge of their wings. Only the water kept them away, so it was with some reluctance that she turned the shower off.

  She dressed with her skin still wet, acutely aware of the blue-green glow of the LOVs, just visible from the corner of her eye. For two days now, no more had died. The Cannabis crown galls had made the difference, providing the nutrients the LOVs required to survive. Ela still hoarded a few of the infected stalks in a sealed plastic bag, but in the tropical heat they were rotting fast. They couldn’t last much longer.

  “Ela?” a soft child’s voice asked.

  “I’m done.” Slipping on her farsights, she emerged from the thatch to find Tran and Cu, two young Roi Nuoc boys—eight or nine years old—waiting on a turn in the shower. They looked at her through their farsights and smiled, eager to practice their novice English: “Our turn now?” “The water is warm?”

  Ela stopped a minute to chat.

  She had come south by truck from Soc Trang province with the Roi Nuoc girl, Oanh, and two older boys. Tran and Cu had joined their party here in Ca Mau. She had come to think of these Roi Nuoc as her “English contingent” because they all spoke the language with varying skill, and all wanted to practice constantly. Apparently there was something in the spontaneity, the irrationality of true human conversation that surpassed the simulations and drills prepared for them by Mother Tiger. Or perhaps they just liked to show off? Tran and Cu earned money translating for tourists, most of whom only wanted to know the cheapest bar or the fastest way back to Saigon.

  Leaving the boys to their shower, Ela made her way back through the papaya grove, using nightvision to place her steps, always wary of snakes. The Roi Nuoc had rented a corner of the little backyard grove to string their hammocks. The papaya trees were old, their tall, unbranching trunks averaging eight inches across. The fruits dripped like fat, swollen tears from beneath crowns of rustling leaves.

  Oanh lay in her hammock, her face glowing green from the illumination of her farsights while the rest of her body faded into shadow. The smell of mosquito repellant drifted on the night air, sweet and cloying as jasmine. Oanh said: “Ninh and Thu went to the street to listen.”

  Ninh was seventeen and Thu fifteen. The two boys had escorted Oanh and Ela south after the police search grew too intense to evade. They spent most of their time exploring the town, searching for any hint of official interest, but so far as they could tell, Ela’s identity had gone undiscovered. This was their fourth night in the south, camped out on the edge of the Ca Mau swamps.

  “I want to go back tomorrow.”

  Oanh shook her head. “It’s too soon.”

  “I can’t wait. The crown gall is rotting, while my no-oct shipment waits for me in Soc Trang.” She sat down in her hammock. Then she slipped off her farsights and held them to the side of her head so their button cameras could record the cluster of LOVs. “Kathang,” she whispered. “Take an image.”

  Oanh sat up, always fascinated by this process. Her Roi Nuoc farsights would not show her an image of herself. It was one of the peculiarities of the Mother Tiger ROSA: according to its script, she should not be focused too closely inward.

  Ela kept her own Roi Nuoc farsights in the waist pouch Ninh had given her, though she had found herself using them more and more every day. There was something addicting in the persona of Mother Tiger. It did not act like a typical ROSA at all. A ROSA was supposed to be a servant, a secretary, an interpreter, an intermediary, a researcher: in short, an aide. Quiet, unobtrusive … and inferior.

  By contrast Mother Tiger was imperial—a wise, ancient, and often stern teacher, as well as a counselor, a psychologist, and a strategist devoted to keeping the Roi Nuoc safe in a perilous world. All of that, with none of the failings of a human parent.

  Ela put her farsights back on, studying the new image of the LOV cluster. It showed a thriving colony, glowing with the blue-green light of the LOV’s inexplicable communication. She had talked to Virgil many times in the days since their first contact, and he had explained about the microsecond flashes of LOV code; while Kathang could perceive them, she could not. It did not seem quite fair.

  “Magnify,” she said. The blue-green patch exploded in size, inflating from the scale of an earring stud to that of a wall map. Tapping her fingers, Ela scrolled across the image, examining the congealed disks, the faint outlines of interlinked limbs, the dark windows of porous membranes.

  There.

  She stared at an irregularity on the edge of the cluster, where the rim of a disk pushed out from beneath the neat surface layer of LOVs. A new disk? It must be. Ela was quite sure it had not been there in the morning. “They’re reproducing.”

  She heard a rustle as Oanh drew near. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. I see a bud.”

  Virgil had warned her: If the bacteria in the crown galls produce octopine instead of nopaline, expect the LOVS to reproduce.

  Ela felt Oanh’s breath against her cheek as she bent to examine the LOV cluster. Oanh had studied the literature. She knew as much about LOVs as Ela … except how it felt to have them as part of her mind. “Ela,” she reminded, “you said you would let any buds be transplanted.”

  “I have seen only this one so far.”

  “Look for more.”

  It wasn’t long before she found them. Her heart ran faster with every new discovery. After a few minutes, Ela counted twelve. It gave her the creeps to think of the LOVs reproducing on her. They were like a cancer she had volunteered for. Why had she done it?

  To make money, okay.

  That wasn’t why she’d kept them though, nurturing them for four days with a repulsive brew of rotting crown galls.

  During the long truck ride south from Soc Trang province Ela had felt something change inside her. It had begun as a state of preternatural alertness, her thoughts flowing with an unhindered intensity that she had felt only two or three times before in her life, in those moments when a fiery creativity had burned away all doubt and all distractions from her mind. Details sprang into her awareness, only to submerge again in the seamless whole of her surroundings. It felt like magic, to perceive at once the particulars and the breadth of the world, and to be fiercely aware of her own place in it: an intricate component in a natural machine of beautiful, unfathomable complexity.

  Oanh stirred, anxious to have an answer. “Will you share them, Ela?”

  If taken this night, before their axonal root began to grow, the budding LOVs could be transplanted to another host. Ela eyed Oanh’s anxious face. “Are you sure you want—?”

  “Yes!”

  “I can’t see to do it myself.”

  “I’ll do it,” Oanh said, a slight tremor in her voice. Ela didn’t remark on it. Oanh had waited three days for this
.

  They worked quietly, as if they’d sworn themselves to a conspiracy of two. Neither said it, but Ela knew they both wanted to be done before Ninh and Thu returned.

  “Sit down over here,” Oanh whispered, pointing to a low rung on a ladder left leaning against a nearby papaya tree. A sharp insect buzz ignited as Ela took her new seat, while beyond the checkered canopy of papaya leaves a meteor drew a microsecond trail of light across the sky.

  Holding a tiny knife, Oanh rested the heel of her hand against Ela’s forehead.

  “Only take the new ones,” Ela warned. “Don’t damage the others.”

  “Don’t worry. Mother Tiger moves my hand.”

  That was not literally true, though Ela did not doubt the ROSA was directing Oanh’s every move down to the assignment of a whispered mantra to keep her calm. She would be seeing the LOV colony under nightvision, the image magnified and enhanced so that no distracting detail remained to confuse her. Ela felt the pressure of the flat side of the knife against her skin. “Hold your breath,” Oanh whispered.

  Ela closed her eyes, plagued by dark thoughts. It would be so easy for Oanh to lop off the whole cluster, leaving her with nothing.

  Why do I imagine these things?

  It wasn’t something Oanh would do, out of honor, but even more because if this transplant failed Ela remained the only reserve of LOVs …

  Maybe.

  Before leaving Soc Trang province she had returned to the pond where the LOVs had escaped. Wading in, still carrying the collection of Cannabis crown galls in the belly of her T-shirt, she pretended to search for some possession lost underwater. And then, quite deliberately, she slipped. She had plunged underwater, taking the gall-infested stems with her, shoving as many into the mud as she could before Oanh waded in to help her back to her feet.

  A tiny prick of pressure; a soft, short gasp from Oanh. “It’s off!”

  Ela did not dare turn her head for fear of spoiling the delicate operation. “Don’t drop it,” she whispered. “Don’t breathe on it. Don’t even touch it. Set it against your forehead.”

  From the corner of her eye she could see Oanh gripping the knife, her knuckles shining with the tautness of her skin. Instead of lifting the knife to her forehead, she bent over the blade, pressing the flat side against her skin just above her right eyebrow. She held it there a full minute, giving the LOV time to grip her skin with its slow, tiny limbs. Tran and Cu returned from their shower to watch with puzzled eyes, but they did not ask questions. Perhaps Mother Tiger had warned them to be silent.

  At last Oanh lowered the little blade. Then, slowly, she raised her head. On her brow Ela could just make out the blue-green glint of a single LOV fixed to her dark skin. “Next one,” Oanh whispered, the light of an explorer’s passion shining in her eyes.

  LATER that evening Virgil linked. He was troubled when he learned what they had done. “Ela, it’s not a good idea to spread the LOVs. You’re putting these people in danger. Not just from the IBC, but maybe from the LOVs themselves. We don’t know—”

  “We never do,” she interrupted, crossing her arms. Kathang would be busy extrapolating her position, her posture—her annoyance—from the cues of her facial expression and muscle tension. It was this fabricated image that Virgil saw. His image was similarly assembled. She reminded herself of this as she looked at his sad, tranquil eyes. He seemed always tranquil. Too tranquil. The LOVs should not be used as sedatives. “Are you still coming?” she asked.

  He nodded. “If I can get in past the shore patrol.”

  “Are you that close?”

  “Another day.”

  “The Roi Nuoc will look for you. You’ll be all right.” Then she added: “Bring the no-oct. All of it.”

  “Any word on the shipment?”

  “I heard today. It’s arrived in Soc Trang. I’m going north tomorrow to claim it.”

  “Be careful.”

  She promised that she would.

  Afterward she lay in her hammock, watching the stars wink like LOVs set across the face of the sky. What a precious crew of outcasts they made! The Roi Nuoc and Virgil and herself: thrown together and forced to trust because they shared a desire to see the LOVs survive.

  Still, trust went only so far. She had told no one about the possibility of escaped LOVs, though she knew it couldn’t stay secret much longer. Tomorrow she would go north to pick up the shipment of no-oct and to discover what, if anything, was growing in her pond.

  chapter

  17

  IT WAS LATE afternoon when Ela stood on a sidewalk in the town of Soc Trang, stretching up on her tiptoes to see past a rush-hour crush of bicycles, mopeds, and little electric trucks. The delivery girl from Elegant Courier had been instructed to bring the no-oct shipment here, to this place on the street. So where was she?

  Caught in traffic, no doubt.

  “Ela!” Oanh’s voice whispered from her farsights. “Look there. Is that her?”

  Oanh was a block up the street. An inset image opened in Ela’s farsights, the view zooming in on a single dusty moped, ridden by a gray-haired woman in a green uniform.

  “Okay,” Ela said. “It must be her.”

  She leaned into traffic, signaling as the moped neared. The courier saw her and swooped toward the roadside, putting a foot down against the new asphalt to balance the bike. The woman’s eyes were invisible behind the black span of her farsights. Ela gazed at her own reflection and suddenly she knew: her image was being recorded.

  It had been a mistake to come here. A fatal mistake? Maybe, but she needed the no-oct tablets.

  “Pass code?” the courier demanded in a harsh, tinny voice.

  “B-blossom, scripture, one hundred seventeen.”

  “Humph.” Without a smile, without another word, the courier handed off the package. Ela felt so frightened she almost dropped it. “Th-thank you,” she stammered as the woman gunned her moped and shot into traffic.

  A touch on her elbow made her jump. She spun around, expecting the police, but it was only Ninh, one of the two Roi Nuoc boys who had escorted her these past few days. “Twisted bitch,” he said, nodding in the direction the courier had taken. “Cái bà vô duyȇn. Come on. Let’s go.”

  They hurried through the haphazard streets, following a map laid out by Mother Tiger. At every step Ela expected to see a police officer approaching on a motorcycle or appearing suddenly from behind a paper-covered shop door. Her anxiety grew, until she was jumping at the shouts of children or trembling at the bleat of a moped’s horn.

  Yet nothing happened. No one took notice. She could hardly believe they had gotten away, and yet it seemed they had.

  After a few blocks they were joined by Oanh and the other Roi Nuoc boy, Thu. Together they made their way through a rough neighborhood of poor hovels and small factories, until finally Soc Trang fell behind, and Ela’s anxiety with it.

  Once again they were walking between the green rectangles of pump-irrigated rice paddies, heading east toward the coast, and a farm where the Roi Nuoc were welcome as laborers. Ela had been surprised to learn how many such places there were. Then again, the Roi Nuoc were ideal workers. They knew what needed to be done even before they arrived. They required little instruction and no supervision, and when the job was finished they would disappear.

  Of course it was this same prescient efficiency, and especially their ghostly elusiveness, that made the Roi Nuoc unwelcome in many more places. Strangeness was always a challenge to human sensibilities, and the Roi Nuoc were not just strange, they were threatening too, because they did recruit. Oanh had all but admitted that she had a mother in Saigon. Not a good mother, no. But she had not been abandoned. Instead she had chosen to leave, walking away from whatever abuse, neglect, or emotional oppression had scarred her young life—and that, Ela thought, was the root of the bad feeling against the Roi Nuoc; it was the reason behind the ugly rumor of alien nature that Nguyen had used to taunt her that night in the fishing village. Real children did not
leave their parents, and if they did, they did not thrive.

  And Nguyen … where was he? Ela had heard nothing from him since Mrs. Dao’s house. Had his interest slipped? Or had he found his own trouble with the IBC?

  A farm truck appeared behind them, roaring out of Soc Trang on a plume of dust. Ninh stepped into the road and flagged it down. He dickered a minute with the driver; a cash card changed hands. Then they were climbing into the back, joining a trio of German boys who were lounging on their backpacks, smoking fat marijuana cigarettes.

  The boys sat up straight when they caught sight of Ela. Then they eyed Ninh, as if to size him up. None of them wore farsights. “Porno?” one asked, tapping his finger beside his eye.

  “No,” Ninh said with a superior smile. “Fascinating shrimp-farming lessons.”

  The boys laughed so hard they drooled, but they did not make any move toward Ela.

  She turned her back on them, leaning over the side of the truck, enjoying the rush of wind past her face as she watched the road ahead. Marijuana smoke mingled with the smell of dust from the recently scraped road. On her farsights, a map of the countryside showed her location as a bright red spot. The shrimp pond where she had lost the LOVs was marked in hazy blue. The two points drew steadily closer together as the truck raced east, but they would not intersect if she stayed on this road.

  Oanh crouched at her side, a veil of dirt obscuring the gleam of the LOVs on her brow. “I have felt odd today,” she said softly.

  Ela did not know how to answer. She was still wired after the encounter in Soc Trang, keenly aware of every least thing around her as if some prescient sense were whispering, warning her to stay alert. Was that the LOVs working? Or her own native fear? She scanned the sky, hunting for some anomaly in the brassy haze that might be a surveillance drone. “I’ve been thinking we should not stay together.”

  Oanh looked at the sky too. “You’re going back, aren’t you? To the pond where you spilled the crown galls. Are there LOVs in the water?”