by Linda Nagata
Along with everyone else Virgil hurried over to see the cause of the excitement.
Staggering through the narrow lane between loose rows of early rice was a thing like a cartoon spider, or one of those deep-water arctic crabs. It had four spindly, bone-white legs, each with a single limber joint bent in an upside-down V. A veiled globe of LOVs the size of a grapefruit was suspended in a glittering white cage between the legs … like the body of a daddy longlegs.
Except half its legs were missing.
It stood knee high.
Virgil watched, openmouthed, as it tottered out of the paddy. The kids scattered from its path with a chorus of delighted screams.
The globe was bright blue-green, glittering and alive. Green streaks like tributaries ran up from it, to touch the green-tinted joints. Rainwater struck it and sluiced away as the thing staggered, slipping in the mud, only to gather its balance somehow and push on. Apparently, it had started with more legs than it was currently using. Virgil could see two useless stumps sticking up in the air like short antennas. Even as if he watched, the tip broke from one of its remaining limbs. The bolder of the two little girls rushed in to pick it up.
Despite the injury, the creature continued across the pocket pasture, stumbling constantly, over tufts of grass, old branches, and dung piles. And still it recovered its balance every time, like a wounded soldier, struggling for dignity.
The kids followed it, and Virgil and Ky went with them.
The spider’s progress across the pasture was slow, but once it reached the path its gait changed. It moved rapidly, scuttling through puddles of rain water, looking always as if it were on the edge of toppling over yet never quite falling all the way. The kids followed in a raucous parade, with more Roi Nuoc joining at every turn until at last the path dipped down close to a shrimp pond.
The LOV spider staggered toward the water as if this had been its goal all along. It plopped in, instantly disappearing beneath the rain-pocked surface.
“Well,” Nguyen said, over the children’s sudden silence. “That is interesting.”
Virgil resisted the temptation to shove him into the pond.
The spider did not reappear again that day, but the next morning three spiders, with six legs each, scurried out of the pond. Dozens more had been seen at other sites across the reservation, and Virgil had a new theory to explain where the missing globes had gone.
chapter
27
LATE ONE NIGHT Virgil awoke to the sound of familiar voices engaged in loud argument. He had fallen asleep in an empty treatment room inside the medical tent. Now he lay in the dark, listening, as the UN physician, Dr. Morikawa, put on an indignant defense:
“Try to understand what I’m telling you, Nguyen. I don’t have the medical supplies to treat her. This girl is already severely dehydrated. If her fever is not brought down, if her diarrhea isn’t controlled—”
“She’ll die!” Ky said. “I know it. That’s why I brought her to you.”
“I’ve already told you—”
“Supplies can be brought in!”
“Not according to authorities. She must be evacuated now. Tonight.”
Virgil levered himself off the exam table where he’d been sleeping and stumbled to the curtained door. His sudden appearance brought a pause in the argument as both Ky and Dr. Morikawa turned defensive stares in his direction.
“Who is she?” Virgil blurted, irrationally afraid that it would be Ela. He lifted aside the curtain of the second treatment room to see a little girl lying on the cot. She was eight or nine years old at most. Her face had an unhealthy sheen, and she twitched in a restless sleep. LOVs glittered on her forehead.
Virgil let the curtain fall back into place and turned again to Dr. Morikawa. “She has LOVs. She can’t be evacuated. You have to request supplies.”
The doctor shook her head, anger drawn in tight furrows between her eyes. “Supplies will not be permitted. Do you think we haven’t planned for this situation? It was only a matter of time before a case like this turned up. I’m surprised it took this long, given the foul conditions you subject these children to—”
“Conditions imposed on us by the treaty!” Ky interrupted.
“Politics are not my concern. Medical issues are. The guidelines for this situation require evacuation of the patient. Once she’s in hospital, her LOVs will be removed.”
Virgil stalked closer, certain he must have misheard. “You’re planning to remove her LOVs?”
“We have to.” Dr. Morikawa backed off a step, glancing nervously at Ky. “They’re illegal outside the reservation.”
“Yet you won’t treat her inside?” He turned to Ky. “You see what they’re doing? They know conditions will only get worse. They’ve designed this to be a war of attrition.”
“Evidently,” Ky said flatly. He turned to Dr. Morikawa. “Exactly how will you remove her LOVs?”
“A neurosurgeon has been retained. It shouldn’t be hard. She hasn’t had them long.”
Virgil said, “It will be hard on her.”
The physician turned to him with an angry glare. “Do you want her to die, Dr. Copeland?”
“Of course not!”
“There is no choice in the matter. She must be evacuated.”
Ky lifted his chin, his smooth face falling into a masklike expression. “Where will she be taken?”
“I can’t answer that. Security concerns, you understand.”
“I want to be kept posted as to her condition.”
“That may not be possible. Medical records are private, and she is not your daughter after all.”
Ky’s hands coiled into fists. It was the only sign that betrayed his fury. “We are a family,” he said. “A … a tribe. Our petition for UN recognition claims rights of kinship—”
“The petition hasn’t been granted yet,” Dr. Morikawa interrupted icily. “Mr. Nguyen, you did the right thing in bringing her here. That’s why I’m taking this time to talk to you. When another child falls ill—and it’s inevitable, it will happen—I hope you make the same choice. I have my own fleet of peepers. I try to keep track of things, but it wouldn’t be hard to discover an illness too late. You may see evacuation as an unpleasant outcome, but it is better—far better—than death.”
Virgil listened to this speech, searching Dr. Morikawa’s face for some hint of shame, but he found none. She believed every word she was saying. “This is a war of attrition,” he said bitterly. “A siege. Sooner or later each of us is bound to succumb to something.”
“If it’s a siege, at least it’s a humane one,” Dr. Morikawa snapped, stepping toward the treatment room. She lifted aside the curtain. “Be grateful you won’t have to face the tragedy of your own dead.” Then she disappeared behind the cloth, putting an end to the debate.
“Don’t lose heart,” Ky said, placing an encouraging hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “We only have to survive until our petition is granted. They know our urgency. It can’t be long.”
chapter
28
ELA CROUCHED BESIDE a tiny farm road that linked two complexes of catfish ponds. It was past midnight, and the rain fell in a mild, yet relentless drizzle. No one stirred. No one human anyway.
Strips of half-drowned grass marked the dike tops dividing the rain-flooded ponds. Along these disappearing paths, at least a hundred glass spiders scurried in random bursts of motion, first in one direction, then another. Like ants, Ela thought, trading instructive scents. Or like puppies touching noses. Some had four jointed legs; some had six. A few had many more than that. In nightvision their legs were dull silver, while the living globes—nested inside a hanging cage suspended within the circle of their legs—blazed a brilliant white.
It looked like a Hollywood alien invasion.
The spiders had changed in the handful of days since Ky and Virgil discovered their existence. Their structural LOVs had developed thicker, stronger walls, and they were fused together in multiple layers, producin
g toughened legs and less breakage. Even more interesting, the LOV spiders had become skilled walkers. Stumbling was rare now, and none ever fell down.
They still did not seem to have much of a visual sense. The central globe could detect minute shifts in light—that was how they communicated—but it seemed doubtful they could assemble light into coherent images. When traversing an unfamiliar trail they appeared to feel their way using one front limb. Ela suspected they could trace scent trails too, and of course they could trade information with one another, perhaps creating a mental map of neighborhoods they had never actually visited.
She turned to look in the other direction, where she could just see the second pond complex. It was smaller, and there were fewer glass spiders in sight—perhaps half as many—most of them still moving sluggishly out of ponds peppered with rain.
One of the soldiers had given Ela a rain poncho. She huddled inside it, listening to the patter of drops and waiting. Gradually, the activity she had observed over the last two nights began once again as a lone spider ventured out of the larger pond complex. It tapped at the slick mud of the tiny farm road. Then it edged forward on four legs, before pausing to tap again. Ela waited, motionless, as it drew near. It paused again when it was just a few inches away. Its front leg reached out, gently tapping her knee. She shifted, lifting away the hood of her poncho, exposing the arc of LOVs that gleamed along her hairline.
The glass spider froze with its probing limb half-raised. Ela felt a sense of recognition wash over her and she wondered if this spider might carry one of the original globes she had tended in the ponds. What a lucky break that would be, if it was already familiar with her!
She touched her forehead, hoping her desire for communication could be read in the pattern flashed by her gleaming LOVs. An answer was immediately returned as her mind flooded with an alien echo of her desire. “Talk to it!” she whispered, eyeing Mother Tiger’s watermark outline crouched in the corner of her screen. The tiger shape was all but invisible to the casual glance; only the tip of its twitching tail caught the eye. Now the cat stood, gaining solidity as it lifted itself from the background. “As we have planned,” Mother Tiger purred.
A band of blue-green expanded over Ela’s farsights, blocking her vision, while immersing her in a sensorium of LOVs. This was Mother Tiger’s voice, translated to the optical spectrum. The ROSA had swallowed everything Virgil could teach it of LOV language in only a few hours. Then it had leaped ahead with its studies, feeding on data gathered from the ponds.
It was hard to know how much it understood. Direct translation was still not possible, and Mother Tiger had suggested it might never be, because LOVs did not communicate in words, or link naturally into grammar modules. It was true E-3 had spoken, but E-3 had been artificially schooled and provided with an electronic speech synthesizer. In these flooding delta ponds a different style of communication had developed that had little in common with human language. Tonight would test whether Mother Tiger had truly gained an understanding of it.
Ela breathed softly, shivering a bit in the rain. Her LOVs flashed, communicating unknowable complexes of information to the intelligence embodied in the LOV globe, nestled before her within its carriage of spider legs. Through Ela’s farsights Mother Tiger flashed still another LOV pattern. While I—this self-aware human I—speak and listen to Mother Tiger.
It was a cognitive circle. Ela’s breath caught as she realized this. A cognitive circle made of herself, the ROSA, and the shimmering globe.
Gabrielle had died in a cognitive circle.
“But I am not Gabrielle.” She spoke the words aloud, like a prayer. “I am not Gabrielle.”
She had come here to relay a very specific idea; she would not allow herself to be trapped in an open-ended conversation.
Drawing a deep breath, she pushed her fear aside.
The blue-green light of her farsights was all she could see now. It flowed over her, enfolded her, and for a long time she perceived it only as raw sensation, inducing a hypnotic state for her mind to play against, but then gradually, gradually, meaning seeped from the color. New memories condensed out of the chaos of light. She felt—or had she known it before?—the glass spider was only a mechanism. A tool made by the cognizant globe, grown from special structural LOVs that fused to form these legs and then died—like coral polyps blending to build a reef. Being mechanical components, they no longer required nutritional support.
Only the joints were alive.
She grew aware of the pulse of fluids pumped through tiny tubes (formed of yet a different kind of structural LOV) delivered to the living LOVs that formed the joints. It was a crude, inefficient system. Already the globe was drying up as its scant store of nutrients ran out. Within minutes this spider would need to return to a pond and refresh itself with dissolved organic matter.
Ela knew these things. They were facts, formed in her mind from the neural connection of her implanted LOVs, and the whispering voice of Mother Tiger. They became her own experience.
What she communicated in return she could not say, or how many seconds passed before Mother Tiger opened the question that had inspired Ela to undertake this cognitive circle: Since structural LOVS can be used to build limbs, might they be arranged as other structures too? She strove to visualize what she desired, while Mother Tiger conversed in unknowable detail.
Time passed, and the language evolved. Mother Tiger’s clumsy first efforts grew more refined while Ela felt her own mind adapting, so that she no longer distinguished between the sensations of her swarming thoughts and the ROSA’s hypnotic murmur.
IT WAS an hour past midnight when the display on Virgil’s farsights froze.
He lay on a cot, in the treatment room of the medical tent that had somehow become his residence, studying Mother Tiger’s evolving map of LOV development. The three-dimensional image resembled mountainous terrain, with LOVs of different varieties crawling and reproducing on the slopes and summits. The peaks charted the LOVs’ phenomenal growth and spread, as well as their changing structure, as recorded by the Roi Nuoc who worked with them every day, and often into the night.
As Virgil soared past sedimentary layers he was amazed again at the LOVs’ versatility, at the speed with which they changed—and he could see only one explanation for it: Somehow the LOVs must have learned to deliberately reprogram their descendants’ genetic structure.
Then abruptly his gliding viewpoint froze. In all of that artificial landscape nothing crawled, or replicated, or faded away.
He propped himself up on his elbow, conscious of the whisper of rain against the tent canvas, the distant crow of a restless cock. He stared at the display, waiting for it to resume.
Nothing.
“Mother Tiger?”
No response.
He heard footsteps, then the rustle of canvas, but when he turned to look the frozen image blocked his vision. He had to slide the farsights down his nose to see.
Ky stood in the door, holding up the tent flap, his farsights in his hand and a haunted look in his eyes. “They have taken out Mother Tiger! It shouldn’t be possible. This ROSA runs on over twenty servers around the world. But it has been done.”
As if to belie that, the image on Virgil’s farsights shifted, leaping forward in time. He pushed them back into place. “Mother Tiger?”
The ROSA answered with a purr. Ky whipped his farsights on and began making demands in sharp, staccato Vietnamese. The image froze again. Jerked forward. Froze.
Virgil brought his own ROSA on-line and used it to dictate a short text message—
♦ Are you being attacked?
—to be delivered to Mother Tiger … now. He tapped “send” as the image shifted again. This time the ROSA remained active for several seconds, long enough to respond in its verbal purr, “All is well.”
But all was not well. The image froze again. Virgil used the interlude to dictate another message:
♦ What has caused your intermittent activity?
At the same time he was aware of Ky muttering and cursing at his farsights.
Returning abruptly to an active state, the ROSA purred its answer: “Resources have been shifted to support a communications project.”
“What is this project?” Ky demanded, shouting now in angry English. “Where is it?”
Virgil’s screen cleared. Then a transparent map winked into existence, showing a blazing point near a pond complex less than half a mile from the medical tent. “What is there?” Virgil asked.
“Ela Suvanatat.”
“Open a link.”
“No links are being accepted.”
“Show me then! Show me what she sees!”
The map vanished, replaced by an opaque field of blue-green LOVs. Virgil stared at it, uncomprehending. “What is this?” he asked.
“This is what Ela sees.”
ELA stirred, conscious once again of the night around her: of the rain, still falling at its deliberate pace, and of the hunger in her belly, and the narrow farm road that had become a thoroughfare of LOV spiders. They scuttled past in jerking stop-motion, their footfalls audible plops in the mud. Most stopped every few feet, to tap the ground, or to tap limbs against one another. Only a few spiders were solitary. Most moved in groups of two or three. When they met spiders moving in the opposite direction they would freeze for several seconds. Their globes would sparkle. And then both groups would move on again, occasionally tripping one another as they passed.
Ela’s spider stepped into this bidirectional flow. It did not turn. It simply stepped “sideways”—assuming she had been looking at it face-to-face. But it had no face. It had no front or back. In its radial perspective all directions were equal so that it could move toward any point of the compass without turning. She found something disturbingly alien in this trait, but refused to be swayed by it. Shrugging off her uneasiness, she hurried to follow the spider as it joined a trio of others heading toward the second pond complex. Fearing she might lose track of “her” spider among all the others, she made careful note of its peculiar features: four legs, exceptionally long, the pattern of mud splashed across them, the complex shape of the cage holding its globe above the mud, the unusually fine texture and colorless gleam of its structural LOVs. She instructed Mother Tiger to memorize these traits.