by Linda Nagata
The boy handed his farsights over to Virgil without protest, without tears, without angry words. Mother Tiger had arranged it all. But despair looked out of his eyes. As the Australian medic started to wheel the gurney through the houseboat’s French doors the boy had grabbed Virgil’s wrist, his tiny voice speaking a frantic question in Vietnamese. Mother Tiger translated: “He asks you, Why do they want to make me less human?”
The medic had frowned at the contact. “Better disinfect,” he advised Virgil. “Or you’ll be in here tomorrow.”
But there was no way to disinfect. And given the political storm that surrounded the LOVs, there was no reason to believe the UN would rule on their petition anytime soon. That was why Virgil turned to smuggling.
HIS accomplices were the Roi Nuoc cadres outside the reservation. They did not share in the LOVs, but they looked forward to a time when they would. Over a period of two days these Roi Nuoc had secretly released three thousand sealed packets of antibiotics into the water upstream of the reservation. Virgil hoped to recover at least five percent as they drifted seaward on sluggish currents that followed the beds of old irrigation ditches and flooded canals. To do it, he’d enlisted the help of Ela’s spider.
He’d laid out the mission during a cognitive circle supervised by Mother Tiger: The spider was to slip beneath the water to search for packets, while alerting others of its kind to do the same. It had appeared to understand its role, but when they sent it out to search, it failed to return. Other spiders were sent after it, but not one of them came back. No antibiotic packets were recovered, and no one knew why.
“They’ve probably just misunderstood us,” Ela said again, as if saying it over and over might make it true. “They’re probably gathering the packets and hoarding them somewhere.”
Virgil was busy using wire ties to secure his newly acquired farsights to a short-legged spider that had been brought up in a net that morning. He didn’t believe in Ela’s benign explanation, but he didn’t want to argue, so all he said was, “We need to find out.” He fixed a two-foot-long wire antenna to the farsights so they could link to Mother Tiger even when the spider was submerged. Then they rode the flying saucer to the western edge of the reservation, gliding a few feet above the water.
The rain had stopped, and scattered blades of sunshine sliced the clouds. Mosquitoes hovered over the water in smoky black clouds. Ela threw a veil of mosquito netting over her head. Virgil smeared mud on his face and hands and the back of his neck, in his hair and over his ears, but he still suffered bites on his lips and eyelids. Yellow fever and malaria had turned up all along the Mekong since the beginning of the flood.
Nothing to be done about it now.
They stopped a quarter mile short of the fluorescent orange PVC poles that marked the reservation’s edge. Ela guided the flying saucer down, settling it on the surface of the water. Peeper balls floated past them, technological thistledown, watching as Virgil released the spider over the side.
The water was less than two feet deep, so the antenna protruded well above the surface. Virgil eyed the inset image in his farsights, but all he could see was drifting silt and dead weeds on the muddy bottom. With any luck the spider would find the packets—or at least find out what had happened to them. He watched as it marched away, its silver-blue shape blurring, then disappearing behind obscuring clouds of silt. Soon only the antenna marked its path.
Virgil felt a frisson of anxiety. He leaned forward, searching the water.
“Careful,” Ela said, from her post at the center of the flying saucer. “You’re going to fall.”
“Let’s follow the spider.”
“What? Why?” She tapped her farsights. “We can see where it’s going.”
“But we can’t see the spider itself, can we?”
“Is that important?”
“I don’t know.” He nodded at the touch pad. “Just for a few minutes.”
Ela looked grim as she stepped on a pad. Air hissed from the vents, and the flying saucer lifted, gliding after the little V-wake of the spider’s antenna. “We can’t go far.”
“We won’t.”
No one else was on the water, but peeper balls were everywhere. The IBC was watching, and they would certainly be arrested if they passed beyond the boundary poles.
Virgil leaned as far over the side as he dared, hoping for a glimpse of the spider’s silvery legs or of the blue-green globe at the base of the antenna—until unexpected motion drew his gaze away to the right. Something dull silver wavered there in a stray beam of sunlight. He pointed. “Is that another spider?” The inset image still showed only silt.
Ela shrugged. “We could go see.” She leaned on a touch pad, changing the flying saucer’s trajectory. At the same time the silver shape turned, gliding across their path, moving much too quickly, too smoothly, to be a spider. Sinuous as a fish. Just as the flying saucer passed over it, Virgil watched it spit out two silver capsules of turbulent water the size of his thumb. “Slow down!” he shouted as twin projectiles streaked from under the saucer and out of sight, on an angled path toward their spider.
Ela stomped a touch pad and brought the saucer to a dead stop as, twenty yards out, a burst of white light flashed twice under the muddy water. The inset image vanished as the water erupted in a brown dome six feet across, that collapsed back on itself with a rush and a roar. Whites shards of broken spider legs arced through the air, glittering as they tumbled end over end in the motley sunlight, falling back to the churning surface with a tinkling sound.
“Oh God,” Ela said. “They blew up the spider. Virgil, we’ve got to get out of here.”
She stomped the touch pad. Air hissed, and the flying saucer jerked backward, sending Virgil pitching forward onto his hands and knees so that he was staring at the water as the saucer passed back over the sinuous silver fish shape. Its tail thrashed. Its back crested the surface in a ridge of metallic segments and then it was gone. “What the hell was that?”
“Get away from the edge!” Ela shouted. She was beside him now, pulling him back toward the center. “Get back! If you slip into the water they’ll shoot you too. They’d love to do it, and call it an accident.”
“But what was that?” he asked as he scrambled to safety. “I never saw anything like that before—”
“I have.” She pulled him down, as if they had to hide from sniper fire. “It was a robo-sub. They’re used to guard the offshore farms, but the one I saw was armed with harpoons, not explosives.”
He closed his eyes, feeling the voracious mosquitoes bump against his hands and face. Anger nipped him. “I never even guessed! How long have they been patrolling the boundary of the reservation? Shit. They must have eliminated every spider that ever came this way.”
“And the antibiotic packets too.” He looked up to discover tears standing in Ela’s eyes. Tears. He had never seen her cry before. “Virgil, we aren’t going to last through this. We aren’t. They want us all to die here, one by one—”
“Ela—”
“It’s true! They talk at the UN but a vote never comes. The IBC trashes us. The media trash us. We are freaks! Dangerous criminals. But the IBC never wants a vote to take us out. Why not? Why do they want us to die like this? It makes no sense!”
Her fear broke against him, interpreted and enhanced by his symbiotic LOVs, but he refused to submit to it. “We’re not going to die,” he said. “Not now. Not from this.” He gestured at the flood, trying not to see the broken spider legs littering the surface. “And sometimes freaks and dangerous criminals win in the end.” He tried a tentative smile. “You’ll see. In a few years we’ll all be glorious revolutionaries—” She started to turn away. “Ela?” He risked a light touch against her shoulder. “Don’t go. Don’t … give up. Please. Stay. Please?”
He opened his arms, and to his surprise she came to him. She leaned her head against his chest, her dark eyes staring out past her veil of mosquito netting to the receding orange boundary poles on the ed
ge of the reservation. He held her, wanting to apologize, to say how sorry he was that his LOVs had dragged her into this mess. But it wasn’t the truth. He was grateful to have her there.
chapter
34
THEY WERE SILENT on the slow journey back, each alone with their thoughts. Ela worked at getting her dread locked up behind heavy pressure doors. Not so much under control, as confined. It had taken her by surprise, the way it had burst out whole like that. She was still keenly aware of it. It brushed at her consciousness, like the distant screams of a lunatic aunt locked up out of sight in a garden shed. But she could pretend not to hear.
After a while she raised her head from Virgil’s chest, realizing they had gone too far. They had passed the platform she shared with Ninh and Oanh. The air was filled with the unaccustomed smell of the sea. “Where are we going?”
“I have something to show you,” Virgil said. “A surprise.”
Ela pulled away from him, feeling the return of her habitual caution. “Surprise is a tricky word, in the way it can mean either good or bad.”
“Good is the default meaning. You’ll like this.”
He had made his platform in sight of the ocean. He took her there, and it looked different than she remembered, bigger, with a white tower rising from one corner like a steep-walled tepee, or like a giant cone shell, eight feet high, with its point in the air. A light swell drew parallel lines of foam on the ocean, but nestled behind the sheltering wall of a levee, the water around the platform remained calm.
Ela stepped onto the mud-stained deck, while Virgil took the flying saucer down to the water, where he would moor it. She looked around, not so much because she was curious, but because if she didn’t divert her mind the subliminal raving of Auntie Dread might turn into words.
An olive drab canvas that looked as if it had been cut from the abandoned medical tent was stretched over a low frame of arched ribs, so that it made a mini Quonset hut. Mosquito netting covered both ends. Ela knelt to examine the interior and was not surprised to see that the ribs were made of structural LOVs.
Beside the Quonset hut were several stacked crates of watertight plastic that looked as if they had been rescued from the medical tent along with the canvas. Behind them, young sweet potato vines trailed from a trough on the edge of the platform.
She turned, to find Virgil watching with an approving smile as she nosed about. He glanced meaningfully at the cone-shell tepee. She could smell the smoke of a citronella candle, and she wondered if someone was in there. “This is a large space for one person,” she observed.
Virgil shrugged. “I’m an American.”
Ela nodded. Her heart was beating faster now, though she could not say why. She took off her farsights and slipped them into the pocket of her pants, wanting to keep this surprise for herself. Then she circled around the back side of the cone-shell tepee until she found the door. Or the entrance, anyway. It was a narrow slit, formed as the wall wrapped around itself like the closing spiral of a seashell. A panel of mosquito netting draped the opening. Ela lifted the cloth and stepped through into a tiny alcove, where a citronella candle burned in a waist-high niche. Her shoulders scraped the walls. It seemed dark there, but only in contrast to what lay beyond. Slipping past the curve of the inner wall, she stepped into a tiny chamber brilliant with light that glittered and refracted against the white walls and white floor, playing among circular streaks of blue-green shadow.
Water trickled from overhead. Ela looked up to see crystal-clear streams dripping and twisting from the roof, like springwater seeping from porous stone. She thought it was rain leaking in until she realized that the water splashing against her feet was warm. She held her hand out, and a ribbon of water pattered her palm, pooling in her hand, warm and clear.
“It’s pumped up by veins of LOVs,” Virgil said. She looked back, to see him standing in the slotted entrance. He watched her anxiously. His farsights were nowhere to be seen. “It’s filtered, then funneled through hollow spaces in the walls where it’s heated by sunlight.”
“It’s a shower?”
He nodded. “It’s not very hot.”
“I don’t remember what hot is.” She peeled off her poncho and dropped it on the floor. Then she stepped under the braided trickles. As the water ran through her oily hair and flowed past her closed eyes, she felt a frantic little laugh forming deep in her belly. It was a shower! A blessed, warm-water shower.
She wasn’t going to shower in her clothes.
Tossing her head back, she peeled off her long-sleeved shirt and dropped the filthy wreck on top of her poncho. Now the water’s fingers ran down past her gray sports bra and her mud-stained khaki pants. She unbuttoned those, and kicked them off too, watching Virgil watch her.
After a few seconds, he edged a little farther into the brilliant chamber. Then he hesitated … giving her a chance to scream or flee or order him out? Most gentlemanly. But when she failed to take advantage of this window of opportunity, he peeled off his own shirt and added it to her pile of things. The light wrapped across his pale skin, finding each seam between his muscles, each hollow between his ribs, glinting against the nearly invisible shafts of golden hair that sprouted in a sparse cross on his chest and belly.
He smelled of mud.
She smiled for the first time that day as the knots in her soul began to loosen. “Will you sit with me?”
She did not wait for an answer, but settled cross-legged on the floor, the warm water splashing, trickling through the candle-scented air. He hesitated, half-crouched, one hand on his knee. “You’re sure?”
She nodded, smoothing her wet hair back from her forehead. “Face me,” she said. “Think with me.”
He was warming up to this. She could see it in his eyes, in his half smile as he sat cross-legged on the glittering floor, combing his hair back with his large hands. He had started with a scattering of solitary LOVs across his brow, but each one of those had since reproduced many times so that now his LOVs gathered in gemlike clusters along his hairline. In the scintillating rainbow light they were almost colorless. He said: “I can’t hide what I’m feeling.”
“I don’t want you to.” Desire unfolded inside her like a lotus blooming, its petals falling open to reveal a banked fire at its center blazing up at the kiss of oxygen. She gave herself up to the feeling, leading her LOVs to capture it, amplify it—
—and to project it.
She watched his eyes and saw lust bite down on him like a cobra’s jaws. A glassy look washed over his face. When he spoke, his voice had been squeezed to a hoarse whisper as if he were on a rack and this was all pain and not pleasure. “Why now, Ela?”
“I don’t know. I guess … in case there is no other time.” Striving not to lose this link with his eyes, she wrestled her sports bra off over her head. She slipped out of her mildewed swim shorts, cursing them for a chastity belt and swearing she would never put them on again.
Everything had changed. All her life, the future had been a mass tugging at her, drawing out her desires over years. A strange attractor bending her behavior on a long curved path around it. Now her future had burst apart into a fog of particles, and she could not see even an hour ahead. Now was all, and everything she was or ever would be felt suspended in this moment.
So intense was the focus the LOVs gave her, that reality seemed to bend around her now, closing the two of them off in this chamber of light and candle scent and warm trickling water. She rose to her knees before him, drunk on the blush of her own body, suffused with warmth from toes to scalp.
He rose to meet her and she felt swallowed by a beast of slick warm hungers as he took her in his arms. “You’re not afraid.”
The words came from somewhere subterranean, rumbling beneath an Earth of blood and bone. True words. She whispered them back, as if they were a mantra. “I’m not afraid.” Her LOVs had let her finally leave that behind.
SOME untroubled time had passed—hours, maybe—when Ela awoke to an i
nsistent drumming, a pounding rhythm that forced her back into the world. She blinked, and the sound resolved into the drumming of rain against the dark curve of olive drab canvas that roofed Virgil’s Quonset hut. Gray light passing through the mosquito netting at the hut’s arched ends fell across her bare shoulder, illuminating a tiny, perfect, feather-soft organic robot crouched upon her skin, feeding on her blood. She watched it, marveling at its delicate wings, its fragile legs finer than a human hair, its tiny eyes, its sharp proboscis perfectly shaped to draw the life fluids from her body. Then she pulled a hand out from under the thermal sheet that covered her and shooed the engorged mosquito away.
Virgil slept beside her, covered by only a corner of the blanket. His face was a face of ancient beauty, an alabaster Buddha that has become one with the forest, embraced in vines, hearing enlightenment in a bird’s song—while along the curve of his pale hip three mosquitoes were having their way with him. She shooed them off too, then lightly kissed his lips, tasted his breath, brought her LOVs close to his and shared the tranquility of his nondreaming mind.
The rain eased, giving way to human voices drawing nearer across the water. She sat up, wondering how she had come to be in the Quonset hut anyway. Her last memory was of the world ending in a blinding meltdown, an ecstatic dissolution of time and space as some god breathed into her soul and set a new world forming there.
Perhaps such a world had been conceived in some other fold of reality … while she had fallen back into the same world that had always claimed her.
She found her clothes—still soggy—draped across a line, and wriggled into them. Her farsights were still tucked in the pocket of her pants.
The voices arrived, along with the thunk of a boat against the platform. The soft tread of footsteps soon followed, generating a faint vibration in the floor. Virgil stirred and touched her back. She turned to find a tired smile on his face. “Lie down with me,” he whispered.