by Linda Nagata
“I understand this perfectly, but what else can we do? Are your tissue cultures succeeding?”
Virgil swore softly. Ky knew the first round of cultures had succumbed to a fungal infection. “I’m starting over.”
“Good. Your efforts will at least distract the authorities.”
“Ky, don’t make jokes. This is a disaster.”
“I am not joking. This may be our only chance to continue. So say nothing, Virgil, and keep working. Let us wait and see.”
Virgil’s second round of tissue cultures failed even more quickly than the first, and though the no-oct tablets were carefully rationed, the day soon came when the last of them went into the water. Several of the UN officials came along to witness the event, including Nash Chou. Virgil watched the no-oct powder disappear beneath the dark surface of a shrimp pond, feeling as if another door was closing.
The mood was brighter among the watching officials. They murmured congratulations to one another, and many shook hands. Nash gave Virgil’s shoulder a friendly squeeze. “It’s over now, son.” Nash had a naturally warm disposition, and his anger with Virgil had been fading along with the stock of no-oct. “This has been an unprecedented opportunity for us to study the development of an artificial life-form. I think we can be grateful for that. It’s something positive, at least, to take away from this disaster.”
Virgil knew he was saying these things only because he expected the LOVs to soon die out. Like the other officials who roamed the reservation, Nash wanted to explore the frontiers of cognition, but he wanted his discoveries to come with limits. With safety rails.
Nash looked on the pond with a satisfied smile. “Now we wait for the end. How long do you think it will take?”
Virgil shrugged.
Nash hardly noticed, happy to answer his own question. “Two to three days, at the outside. That’s my guess. You need to start assessing your options, Virgil. This legal bubble you’ve built around yourself won’t last a minute once the LOVs are gone.”
Virgil promised to look into his legal status, but who could say what that might be?
The UN negotiations had produced no results. They had been cordial but pointless, perhaps because all sides had silently agreed to wait: When the LOVs went extinct, there would be nothing left to argue.
A day passed, and then another. When trouble came, it was from an unexpected direction.
FOR the first two weeks of the embargo food had been plentiful. Local farmers had happily traded rice, fruit, and catfish from their ponds in exchange for labor from the Roi Nuoc. They saw their homes reroofed, their private roads scraped smooth, their orchards harvested and pruned, and new ponds dug almost for free. But as the days passed, and the farmers still were not allowed to sell their produce outside the reservation, the good feelings waned. They recalled their prejudices, and remembered their fear of the Roi Nuoc and refused to employ them anymore.
So the Roi Nuoc changed strategy.
Overnight, the banks of the ponds were planted with sweet potatoes. Vegetables sprouted along roadways. Tiny ponds were dug in strips of boundary land that had no real use, and catfish fry appeared in them, along with the ubiquitous LOVs. The farmers reacted in anger to this assault on their land and property rights, sending their wives and children out to fill in the squatters’ ponds while letting their pigs graze on the roadside gardens.
The Roi Nuoc made no move to stop them. It was not their way to fight. But under cover of night much of the work they had done was undone. Recently repaired roofs were damaged. New ponds were filled with silt. Seedlings in the rice paddies reappeared in the nursery beds.
It fell to the government soldiers to keep the peace. Nguyen was hauled before the regional commander, where he spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “We are not allowed to import food. What can you expect? The Roi Nuoc will not agree to starve.”
“They can leave. We are now prepared to offer a general amnesty if they will submit to an inspection and the removal of all symbiotic LOVs.”
“They will not leave,” Nguyen said. “And they will not give up their LOVs. They know where their future lies. Of all humans, they will have the best chance of staying competitive with machines. So let us bring in food, now, before the sight of starving children proves an international embarrassment.”
The commander insisted he did not have that authority, but he was a practical man. All the scientists assured him the LOVs would survive at most for another day or two. He told himself that when the LOVs were gone the Roi Nuoc would go too. He had only to keep the peace in the meantime. So he quietly ordered that his soldiers should begin receiving double rations at every meal, with the extra food always sliding somehow into the hands of the Roi Nuoc.
The compromise pleased no one. The Roi Nuoc had never before depended on handouts, and the farmers still felt threatened. After all, these were not mere homeless children squatting on their land. Whispered rumor claimed the most outlandish things: that the Roi Nuoc were human mimics, and not true humans at all. That they had no parents—had never had parents. That they were ghosts seeping out of a dreadful future, an alien threat in human form, come to steal the world away from true human hands.
In daylight these speculations seemed absurd, but when dusk fell, the world changed. With the coming of darkness the bizarre blue-green spheres could be seen glowing in a hundred different waterways, ghost lights, ethereal beacons with some undiscovered power. The same blue-green light gleamed in sparks upon the brows of the Roi Nuoc who tended them with none of the caprice, or the natural volatility, of human children.
ELA had waited for evening before visiting the last pond on her daily round. She approached cautiously, pausing every few steps to listen in the direction of the farmhouse, a quarter mile away across the flat delta. Government soldiers had been here in the early afternoon to break up an altercation between the Roi Nuoc who claimed the LOVs in this pond, and the farmer who owned it … though “altercation” was the wrong word. The Roi Nuoc were not fighters. The three had defied Mother Tiger and refused to retreat when the farmer, backed by his two grown sons, had ordered them away. Two had been severely beaten; the third had suffered dog bites to the thigh and hands. All were in the medical tent now, and the pond looked deserted.
But as Ela crept toward the water’s edge, a small figure emerged from a stand of banana trees. A little girl. At first Ela thought she might be one of the Roi Nuoc, but no. She wore no farsights, and when she saw Ela she darted away toward the farmhouse, screaming for her father to Come! Hurry, come!
Quickly Ela waded into the water, hoping to finish her inspection before the men could arrive. Yesterday there had been four large globes in this pond and at least two new marble-sized spheres … solid proof that the talent for synthesizing no-oct had been successfully transferred, for the LOVs couldn’t reproduce without it.
She jumped at a rustle in the grass behind her, turning to see Ninh on the bank. “You scared me!” she gasped. She had not seen him all day. “Where did you come from?”
He looked puzzled. “From our pond.”
That was over a mile away. Mother Tiger must have anticipated trouble. “Come help me,” she said, “and I’ll finish sooner.”
Ninh shook his head. “It’s too late.” He stood gazing at the farmhouse, where a yellow light gleamed in the window. “They’re already coming. The old man with his two sons.”
An inset of his point of view appeared on Ela’s farsights, confirming it. One of the youths carried a long pole. She swore softly. Then she turned and scrambled for the shore. Her body was still sore from her encounter with the IBC cops; she had no desire for another confrontation. “Hurry, Ela,” Ninh urged.
“We should move these globes!”
“Tonight,” he agreed. “We’ll come back.”
She retreated up the bank just as the farmer reached the far side of the pond. He stood there with his two tall sons, his features erased by the fading light. His voice crossed the water, sh
arp and confrontational. Mother Tiger translated: “He says to go away. Don’t interfere. The ponds must be cleaned.”
Ela understood then the purpose of the “pole” that one son carried. It was really the long twin handles of a rolled up net, of a variety used to seine the ponds and gather the shrimp … but the shrimp in this pond were not ready to harvest. “Where are the soldiers?” she whispered.
Ninh shook his head. “They are here to keep the foreigners out, not to fight our own people.”
“Not to protect the LOVs?”
He didn’t answer. Across the pond the two young men unrolled their net. The mesh was too large to catch shrimp.
“Go away!” the farmer shouted, gesturing at them as if he were casting a spell that would make them magically disappear. They didn’t move. So he turned to his sons instead and shouted at them to get to work. His tone brought looks of resentment to their faces, but they obeyed, stretching the net to its full length as they took up posts on either side of the pond. They slid the net into the water, stirring up a storm of panicked shrimp that boiled through the mesh.
The globes were clustered at the pond’s center. Ela trembled as the net drew near. Ninh touched her arm. He meant it as a calming gesture, Ela knew that, but it ignited her anger instead. “Stop it!” she shouted. She shrugged off his hand and ran, sprinting around the spongy border of the pond to confront the closest boy. “Stop it!” she cried again, seizing the net’s wooden handle and trying to wrest it from his grip. On his wide, round face she saw a look of goofy surprise. Then mud splashed past her face and somehow she was on the ground, looking up at him, with a burning pain in her belly and no air in her lungs until something loosened and air rushed back into her chest with a noisy gasp.
Hands grasped at her, picking her up out of the mud. She twisted around to see Ninh. “We have to stop them,” she whispered, her voice high, tinkling with the sparsity of air. “They’ll destroy the globes.”
Ninh shook his head. “The Roi Nuoc do not fight. Come away. It’s their pond.”
She turned back to look. A gleam had appeared against the net, a large, luminous globe, rising to the surface under the forward pressure of the mesh. It bobbed like a float, half in the air. But as she watched it sank again, through the net. Slowly. Slowly dropping through the mesh, without breaking, emerging whole on the other side. Ela’s eyes widened. She clung to Ninh’s arm. Surely this was some kind of illusion? The solid globe could not pass through an unbroken net … yet it had.
The two youths saw it too and froze, staring with waxy faces at the blue-green globe, drifting now behind the net, just beneath the water’s surface. A second globe could be seen against the mesh. As they watched, it too slid through, as if the net had become immaterial. Or as if the globe itself were a ghost.
One of the youths murmured. Mother Tiger translated: “He says it is a Roi Nuoc demon.”
Ela wondered if he might be right.
The two boys lifted the net out of the water. They rolled it up and laid it on the ground beside the pond. Then they ran for home.
Their bullying father had already disappeared.
chapter
23
EVERYONE HAD GONE away. Virgil listened for the voices of the Roi Nuoc as he wandered beneath an evening sky of softly polished steel, but the only sounds he heard were the static of the rain and the rhythmic peeping of some unseen insect, slowly fading.
He stood now on the collapsing ground between two newly planted rice paddies. The dark water at his feet was lit from below by the eerie glow of LOV colonies, their images blurred and fragmented beneath the rain-peppered surface so that they looked like human faces sleeping in the mud. Virgil stepped carefully down.
The water was only calf-deep. He waded between the wispy rice seedlings until he reached the first globe. He stooped to look at it, and found himself gazing at a mask of LOVs in the shape of a woman’s face. “Gabrielle?” he whispered. Her eyes opened underwater, and LOVs gleamed there too.
Virgil reached for her, drawing her up to the surface. Mud clung to her hair and to her naked body, but everywhere among the filth, scattered LOVs were gleaming. “Why are you here?” he asked as he cradled her at the water’s surface. “How can you be here?”
She blinked her eyes. She opened her mouth to speak and words came faintly; he leaned close to hear as she breathed them in his ear. “Come down with me. Come. Cross over.”
He held her more closely still. “You learned something from E-3, didn’t you? Gabrielle? What did you learn?”
“To give in.” She reached up to touch his cheek, and her hand was gloved in tiny, blue-green diamonds, glinting, glimmering. Crawling. Instantly flowing over his face in gooey streams.
He could feel diamonds tumbling and scraping within the currents of his blood, murmuring his name as if it were a question.
Virgil? Virgil?
They spoke with Ela’s voice.
What’s wrong with you? Look at me! Virgil!
“Ela?” He looked around, but he could not see Ela anywhere, and when he turned back, Gabrielle was gone. It was only a typical LOV colony that he held in his hands. He released it into the water.
A hand touched his shoulder. “Virgil!”
Ela’s voice again. She was angry now. “Virgil, look at me! What are you on?”
He still could not see her, but he felt her cool knuckles brush his temples, and then the world peeled away, exposing another world behind it. A world in which Ela existed. She crouched beside him as he sat in a chair at a desk in the tiny treatment room of the medical tent. She had his farsights in her hand. “What are you on?” she asked again, holding the farsights up to squint at the image onscreen. “Is this a game?”
“I don’t know. Let me—”
He reached for the farsights, but she spun half-away, keeping them outside his grasp. “No. You talk to me first.”
“Ela—”
“Virgil, no one has seen you for hours. You weren’t accepting any links or responding to any messages.”
He touched the LOVs on his forehead. There were more now than the original thirty-six. He had taken octopine, and they were reproducing. “I asked my ROSA for a privacy screen. I was thinking.”
“You were in a trance.”
Virgil couldn’t deny it. The experience had seemed as real as this room in the medical tent. Did another reality lie behind this one? And another after that? He said, “I was thinking about Gabrielle.” Ela nodded, concern in her dark eyes. “We used to sit in a cognitive circle,” Virgil explained, “Gabrielle, Panwar, and me. Our LOVs would signal each another across the circle, enhancing our emotions. We didn’t share thoughts, except the way they’re shared in speech, but we did share mood. I could feel Gabrielle’s jealousy. I could feel Panwar’s. They each wanted to be the first to get inside the thoughts of the LOVs, to understand an artificial mind. Gabrielle died for that.”
Ela looked uncertain as she crouched beside him, still holding on to his farsights. “You’re alone here,” she pointed out. “Not part of a cognitive circle.”
His gaze rested on the farsights in her hand. “I’m not alone. I’ve been working with my ROSA, on the language problem.”
“Your ROSA is part of a cognitive circle?”
The question startled him. “Do you think it could be? The LOVs use a code that runs too fast for our senses to perceive, but not—”
“Not too fast for the ROSAs!” Her dark eyes grew wide. He could see the idea was new to her too. She cocked her head. “Has your ROSA learned the language of your LOVs?”
He thought about the visual metaphor he had just experienced. It had felt real. Utterly real, as if his mind, and not just his eyes, were being deceived. Had it been a collusion between his ROSA and his embedded LOVs? One working visually, the other through emotion? To what end? He shook his head, feeling as if he were running, sprinting all out just to keep up with this thing they had invented. “If that was a language, it hasn’t evolved as fa
r as words. It was all metaphor … founded on emotion … I wonder …”
“What?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”
“What is language?”
She smiled, rising at last from her crouch. “The way we talk to one another—and you’re talking very strangely. Let’s go outside. Let’s take a walk, get some fresh air.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t—”
“I just want to think about this for a minute. The LOVs really are so profoundly different from any familiar paradigm. Each one a tiny, independent mind. You knew that, right?”
She nodded.
“A single LOV can function on its own.”
“It won’t be alone for long,” she pointed out. “It will reproduce.”
“Yes. And a million LOVs can snap together like a set of Legos and think as a group. Or they can set up modules within the group to handle different kinds of thinking, in a way that parallels the functioning of our own brains. Except LOV modules can be pulled apart and employed in other ways if the need arises. We can’t do that. So really, there has never been anything like this before, and—”
“You’re worried we will never understand what they are thinking.”
He nodded. “Language has to reflect the platform it runs on, don’t you think? It’s possible we’re just wired wrong, so that all we’ll ever grasp of the language the LOVs use between themselves is this emotional link.” He touched his forehead. “Where is the symbolic component of this language?”
“It’s too early to say.”
She was right of course. He reached up to touch the smooth skin of her cheek. She didn’t pull away. That surprised him. Judging by the puzzled look in her eyes, it surprised her too. “Are you all right?” she asked softly.
“I’m being strange, aren’t I?”
“I already said that.”
He laughed. The patch of LOVs on her temple glinted and glimmered like a third eye set off to one side of her graceful brow. Flecks of gray no-oct paste speckled the cinnamon skin around it. “Imagine,” he said, “that you could listen to alien music, and that your brain interpreted it as a sad cacophony. But if an alien listened to it, it would receive explicit instructions for engineering a washing machine. You see? We might think we’ve glimpsed meaning in their language, while really, the only meaning we’ve grasped is what we invent.”