by Linda Nagata
He opened the door of the front passenger seat, shrugged out of his poncho, then ducked inside.
The cab was a microcosm transplanted from another world: warm light and soft music—a soulful techno symphony—and amazingly cold air spilling from the vents, all powered by fuel cells that would likely go on working until the car was finally drowned.
Ky was not in the driver’s seat.
Startled, Virgil twisted around to check in back. He found Ky there, though not alone.
A girl sat with him. She was dressed in mud-splattered trousers that must have once been white, and a loose cottony shirt not quite so far gone. Virgil guessed her age as fifteen years. He stared at her, stunned by the sight of hundreds of LOVs glittering on her forehead, more than he had ever seen on one person before. From his own LOVs he felt a flush of pleasure and something more. A sense of unexplored levels, stretching inward for miles …
Only with an effort did he turn away from her to nod at Ky. But something was wrong. Virgil saw it immediately on Ky’s face. Despite the calm pose of his expression it was easy for Virgil to distinguish the fear and tension that lay below. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing.”
Virgil’s gaze cut back to the girl. She had a slight smile now, with something shyly maternal in it. She did not wear farsights. Ky did not. So Virgil took his own off and slipped them into a thigh pocket.
“Virgil,” Ky said, “please meet Lien.”
“So pleased to know you, Dr. Copeland,” Lien said in heavily accented English. “You have brought so much to us.”
There was veneration behind her words; a devout affection that Virgil found deeply disturbing. “Not so much,” he said thickly. “A lot of trouble.” Her gratitude touched him, and he looked away. Mud was beginning to seep in under the passenger door.
“It is worth this trouble, I think.”
He nodded. He felt the same. “Why are we here?”
“Because it’s time,” Ky said. “Lien has agreed to transplant the LOVs for me. She is an expert, Virgil. She knows more about the LOVs than anyone else. Even you.”
“I can see that.”
“This is not true,” Lien said. “I know some of the wild LOVs here in the delta, but not all of their kind. Many strains I don’t know.”
“Have you grouped them into strains?” Virgil asked eagerly. “Are there records? I’d love to—”
“No,” Ky said. “Not now.” Sweat shone on his cheeks and forehead, though the cab of the Mercedes was cold. “Now I have a favor to ask of you, Virgil. Lien has offered to blend the best of these wild strains into a balanced array of LOVs—”
“But that is not always the best way,” she said in her quick and quiet voice, as if heading off a debate already finished. “This giving of LOVs can be …” She frowned at Ky; the two of them exchanged a few words in Vietnamese. Then Ky took over.
“The word is ‘personal,’” he said. “Giving and accepting LOVs is a very personal rite because the LOVs will link us to each other. Lien suggested I might feel more comfortable if my LOVs came from … a friend.”
Virgil did not know what to say. Then he was speaking anyway, true words: “I’m honored, Ky. And I’m happy to do it, of course. But you know the LOVs I have are only distantly related to the rest.”
“Lien has mentioned this.” Ky sat tall on the Mercedes’ soft seat, looking stiffer than a frozen corpse.
Virgil’s smiled faded. “You don’t have to do this.”
“No. I want to do it.”
His fear was plain, but his resolve was just as clear. And it was his choice. So Virgil turned to Lien, and nodded. “I’ve never done this before. Please tell me what I need to do.”
chapter
32
IT WAS A rainy season like no other. The fall of rain was deceptively gentle, exhibiting no fierceness, yet it fell without end—and not just in the delta. The highlands were awash in continuous storms that fed the river, driving its expansion far beyond its banks. Farms were obliterated. Roads disappeared. The corpses of animals—and sometimes, people too—drifted beneath the shimmering surface, distorted memories of a drowned world, now food for fish.
The LOVs fed too, thriving on the wealth of dissolved organic matter. Ela trailed her hand in the water, finding some amusement in the way her brown fingers became yellow and grossly distorted just a few inches below the surface. She was crouched in the prow of a slender, open boat, rain sizzling in tiny drops against her hood. Whenever she coughed, convulsive vibrations shuddered through the boat’s wooden hull, disturbing first Oanh, who sat behind her, and then Ninh, who stood in the back, wielding the pole. Ela coughed a lot. All of them did. The constant wet was not good for people, but it was good for LOVs. Suspiciously good. Ela found herself toying with the theory that this flood was no natural event at all, but the will of a god determined to remake the world in favor of the LOVs.
Of course, similar theories could be proposed to explain any natural event, which added up to no explanation at all.
Ninh leaned on his pole, grunting as he slowed their forward rush. “Watch your hand,” he called, reminding Ela to snatch her fingers out of the water a moment before the bow struck with a gentle thunk against the porch of a farmhouse abandoned now for many days.
Ela was first out, her sandaled feet sloshing in the half inch of water that overlay the porch. She tied the boat to a post that had begun to gather a crust of LOVs; Oanh secured the stern. They had the boat for only an hour, so it was essential to work quickly.
Ninh ventured first into the house, an axe in hand.
Ela followed, wrinkling her nose as she crossed the threshold. Pigs had foraged here. Turds strewn across the floor told of their occupation. They had turned over most of the furniture and left behind bones that might once have been a goat. Pictures of dour grandfathers hung on the walls, frowning down at the mess, their eyes sternly insisting that their families would return, someday. Ela could not believe it. She started pulling empty drawers out of a press-wood bureau, bashing them hard against the bureau top to shatter the staples, then laying the planks in a neat stack beyond the water’s reach. Oanh went to work on an overturned chair. These days, life could be measured in the firewood they used to grill their fish and dry their disintegrating clothing.
Over the past week, most of the government soldiers guarding the reservation had been reassigned to flood-relief duties in other provinces. Those few who remained were quartered in a houseboat, along with the research scientists. They were no longer allowed to share food with the Roi Nuoc. It was the latest tactic concocted by the haggling officials at the UN for removing the children from the reservation. Like city pigeons denied their usual crumbs, or temple monkeys who find their offerings of fruit no longer appearing each morning, the Roi Nuoc were expected to give up when denied their handouts. They were supposed to see reason, and move on to the friendlier territories of Saigon, or Hue.
The Roi Nuoc were more stubborn than temple monkeys. So far only the injured and the ill had given in. Fourteen in all. Eighty-three remained on the reservation, surviving on the fish and the frogs they could catch and flash-grill over stolen wood, on wild spinach and water cress, and the fruit that still could be salvaged from the trees. But it was a lean diet, with too little fat. Hunger loitered always on the edge of the mind.
So when a nervous clucking arose from the back room, Ela paused in her destruction. She turned her head, catching Ninh’s eye. He smiled, and laid his ax on top of a cabinet housing porcelain statues of white-bearded old men. Then he eased silently past a once-pink curtain now blackened with mildew and water stains.
A brief but highly chaotic interval erupted, resulting in three hens with broken necks, and one seriously bruised shin. Ela examined the wound, shaking her head. “You have to be careful,” she reminded Ninh. “If the skin had broken …”
There was no need to say more. The water was filthy with disease, and even slight wounds
could quickly go septic. Ky Xuan Nguyen had pleaded again and again with the government and its medical officers to allow them to buy antibiotics, but top officials in Hanoi no longer listened to him. They did not trust him anymore, not since he had converted to the LOVs. They had been pleased to work with him when they saw him as keeper of the Roi Nuoc zoo, but now that he was one of the aliens, only a few dedicated bureaucrats would still accept his links. They passed on his pleas for humanitarian relief to the UN, where the IBC vetoed every one. While the status of the reservation remained under UN debate, no relief supplies were to be allowed. None. Not medicine, or tampons, or toilet paper, or condoms, or soap or coffee or Kleenex or chlorine tablets. It was a siege. A war of attrition. And if they were miserable, they could turn themselves in at the houseboat.
The IBC promised no charges would be pressed against children who were brought in for evacuation, but it was impossible to know for sure, because once through the doors of the houseboat, their farsights were confiscated.
According to Dr. Morikawa the evacuees’ LOVs were registered and mapped while they were still aboard the houseboat. Then a helicopter was summoned to ferry them away, to an unnamed hospital, where a neurosurgeon was standing by to remove their LOVs. The doctor assured everyone that the fourteen evacuees were doing well, but Ela had to wonder—why weren’t they allowed to report that fact themselves?
Dr. Morikawa still claimed it was an issue of privacy and guardianship. As minors, the evacuees were wards of the state, with no right to decide for themselves.
Ela thought of them as the disappeared.
At least there was still dry wood to burn.
It took only a few minutes to strip the house of its cabinets, stools, tables, chairs, and shrine facings, leaving the dry interior walls for another day. They piled the wood under a plastic tarp that Ela had “stolen” from Nash Chou’s research boat when he kindly looked away.
“Twenty minutes,” Ninh announced as he secured the tarp. Ela scowled. They must not be late returning the boat to the Roi Nuoc cadre who owned it or they would have to pay a penalty to be named by Mother Tiger—perhaps all three of the chickens. It would be a severe penalty because there were few boats, and so their use must be carefully rationed.
The rain picked up as Ninh leaned on the pole, shunting them toward home. Impact circles exploded on the water’s translucent surface. A snake swam past. Oanh pointed to a crocodile lurking within a stand of flooded sugarcane, only its eyes showing above the water.
Ela again had the bow seat. It was her job to look for floating logs or submerged dikes, calling to Ninh whenever an obstruction loomed. He had gained a lot of skill with the pole, and the keel scraped only two or three times.
He steered them toward a looming forest of scrawny, ill-made towers, rising out of a drowned shrimp farm, ten or more feet into the air. Like the legs of a spider, these towers were made of fused masses of structural LOVs: Their individual shells were smaller, thicker, and stronger than the shells of the cognitive LOVs that formed the globes. But unlike spider legs, they were not neatly put together. They looked like drip sculptures, the kind of thing children made on the beach by scooping up a handful of fine, wet sand and letting it run through their fingers, gradually raising a stack higher and higher until it collapsed of its own weight.
A few of the thinnest towers had already broken off at the top, but most were intact. They did not gleam with light except at their summits, where a tuft of growth and activity crowned the white and lifeless spire. Nestled within the living LOVs at each peak was a blue-green globe immersed in a little pool of dirty water. Presumably there were also living LOVs inside the towers, forming tubes to pump or siphon the nutrient-laden water to the top. No one knew what the towers were for, or who had designed them (if anyone). Virgil thought it likely that the summit globes had simply duplicated old, inherited commands, mindlessly repeating a fragmented instruction with no “stop” signal.
Ela had been the first to try coaxing a designed structure from the LOVs, that night she entered the cognitive circle. Cracking the light codes had consumed all of Mother Tiger’s capacity during that first encounter—and during the many that followed on that chaotic night. Cognitive circles were safer now, since Mother Tiger had redesigned its interface to prevent any more runaway sessions.
A few days after that first experiment, Ela had proudly watched as her rectangular platform emerged on eight legs from the rising water. She had waded out to it and climbed aboard, turning in triumph to face a muddy shore crowded with scientists, and jealous-eyed Roi Nuoc all nursing projects of their own. She smiled and waved, and the platform promptly fell over.
The image of her crashing into the muddy pond was replayed again and again on every news service around the world. The humiliation had been excruciating, but the failure itself mattered little. Even as she was slogging back to shore, dozens of other projects were maturing, and soon, stable platforms dotted the floodwaters all the way across the reservation.
Ninh poled the boat past a small village of platforms, some with tents and tarps set up on them for shelter, some with thatch-roofed huts, and a few with little cottages made of wood filched from the abandoned farms. The Roi Nuoc who occupied them looked up from their fishing, their crafts, or their studies, waving as the boat slipped past.
Not all the platforms were made of the usual silicate shells. The LOVs seemed to be able to hijack genetic material from other life-forms, so that in the quest for structural strength, different strains had evolved: some resembling coral, others with woody crusts, and some as neat and colorful as seashells.
Ela noticed a smooth, narrow boat hull of cloudy white glass budding from the back side of the last platform. “Hey. Look there,” she said, pointing to it.
Ninh made a low, throaty sound, conveying an emotion somewhere between disgust and envy. “We could do that, and not have to borrow a boat anymore.”
“How easy to break it?” Oanh wondered.
“You would need care,” Ela conceded, for—as they had learned the hard way—LOV structures were fragile. The strongest platform could be easily demolished with a baseball bat. The rogue towers could be cracked and shattered by pelting rocks.
“We should use wood shells,” Ninh decided. “They’re tougher than glass.”
Their own platform lay a few hundred yards beyond the village, hidden from sight by a crescent of trees that grew on a high dike, so that the water had just begun to lap at their trunks. A trio of water skaters darted out from behind the trees. The skaters were spider descendants. They had the same basic structure of four or more jointed legs supporting a central globe, but they had gone on to develop wide, flat feet so that they could stride on the surface of the water. This trio was moving in a fast, erratic pattern: a behavior learned after attacks by dogs, crocodiles, and government researchers.
“Something’s frightened them,” Oanh said.
Ela nodded. “Maybe they’ll tell us.” She pulled her hood back, then leaned out over the prow of the boat. “Ninh, can you get close?”
“They will be tired soon,” Ninh said. “No problem.”
He was right. Like the spiders that had come before them (and that had now mostly vanished) the water skaters had lousy circulatory systems. It took time and effort to transport nutrients to the living LOVs in their joints; in periods of brisk activity supply could not keep up with demand, and the water skaters were quickly exhausted. As if to prove this theory, the trio soon slowed to a sedate pace that allowed Ninh to pole the boat between them.
Ela brushed her hair back from her forehead. Then to Mother Tiger she whispered, “I want to know what has frightened them.” No other ROSA would have responded to such vague instructions, but Mother Tiger had always been eerily intuitive. Since the night of the cognitive circles it had ceased to feel like a ROSA at all. It understood nuance and unspoken desire as well as anyone Ela had ever known.
One of the skaters had noticed her band of implanted LOVs. It gli
ded closer. Ela felt a pleasant sense of recognition and greeting wash over her. Then her farsights opaqued as Mother Tiger translated her question into the blue-green flow of LOV communication. Several seconds passed before Ela realized that a long, tapered, shadowy shape had emerged from the granular field. She blinked in surprise at what was certainly a boat. “Did the skater actually see that?” she whispered, astonished because she had thought the only light they could detect was the blue-green flashes of their own communication.
“A limited visual sense appears to have emerged,” Mother Tiger answered. “Sensitive to a narrow range of colors and perceived as a two-dimensional field of varying intensity. Other sensory cues, especially chemical sensitivity, confirm the identity as a boat powered by a silent fuel-cell engine.”
“A research boat, then.”
“One has been seen working in this area.”
By the time her farsights cleared, Ninh had poled them past the barrier of trees. Their platform lay just ahead, a frosty gray rectangle on six stilts, perched a foot and a half above the surface, high enough to discourage crocodiles from visiting. Beneath it, in the shadowed space where stilts and platform joined, Ela could see the glow of living LOVs. The stilts were still growing, rising slowly as the water rose, continuously lifting the platform so that it remained above the flood.
“No one here,” Oanh observed.
Ela sighed in relief. She did not trust the researchers, and she did not like their endless questions.
As they drew closer a rare spider scuttled into sight from behind the A-frame thatch shelter Ninh had built. It had six short legs, and the cage that held its globe was finely made and very fragile, to save on weight. Though it had changed its design in the intervening weeks, Ela was fairly sure this was the same spider she had faced in her first cognitive circle. It had supervised the construction of her original, failed platform, as well as this new one that had replaced it. She watched it kneel at the water’s edge. Then it plunged in, reappearing seconds later on the stilts, climbing about like a crab as it inspected the joints.