Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  “People have come.”

  “Only for a minute.”

  “I think it’s Nash … and another man I don’t know.”

  Virgil sat up with a frown of sharp concern. His arm went around her shoulder. “Stay here in the tent.” He mouthed the words, putting hardly any volume into them.

  “Why?” Her voice was not as loud as her heartbeat. “What’s wrong?”

  “The new man, Steven Ho. He calls himself a research scientist, but I’ve seen him. He’s a professional soldier.”

  “Then he’ll already know who I am.”

  “I don’t want him to know about us. He could use it against us.”

  “He already knows, Virgil. You know they’re watching all the time, with their peeper balls, their surveillance drones, their robo-subs, and who knows what else. They’re listening to our whispers right now. They know.”

  He shrugged. “I still want you to stay.”

  He pulled on his pants and his shirt. He slipped on his farsights.

  “Virgil,” Nash called in a low voice. Ela could hear him shifting from foot to foot as he waited a few yards beyond the Quonset hut. “Virgil, we know what you tried to do this morning.”

  Virgil kissed Ela’s cheek. He kissed her ear, his reluctant sigh flowing warm against her neck and shoulder. “Stay here.” Then he crept out of the hut and stood, blocking the entrance so that she could not get out if she wanted to. Rainwater ran off the blue tek-fabric of his shirt as he crossed his arms over his chest. She could not see his face.

  “Hello, Nash.”

  Nash answered, sounding querulous. “We know about the smuggling attempt, Virgil. It’s over for you now. We’re asking to have your asylum revoked. You and Ela Suvanatat.”

  “We didn’t do anything.”

  From the back of the hut Ela heard a ripple of water, as soft and mechanically smooth as a desktop waterfall. She looked around, in time to see a tiny glass canoe slip past, only a few feet from the platform. Glass boats were not so unusual anymore. Seated in this one was a willowy girl dressed in light cotton clothes that might have once been white. A conical rain hat hid her face, but as she flashed past, Ela glimpsed her hand resting on the gunwale. It was pale, and skeletally thin … and it did not hold a paddle, or a pole.

  So how did the boat move?

  Ela scrambled to the back of the hut and looked out as the canoe rounded the end of the platform. The girl sat perfectly still, looking as if she had willed the canoe to turn.

  Ela glanced back at Virgil. In the growing heat of argument he had apparently forgotten his resolve to blockade her inside the hut, for he had stepped away from the door. She heard him contesting with Nash about the smuggling incident: what it meant, if it had even happened. She didn’t think he had seen the canoe. It rode low in the water, and it had passed so close to the elevated platform that it was unlikely either man had seen it.

  So Ela slipped her farsights on, tapped them to record, and scrambled out of the hut. Virgil looked at her in sharp surprise as she skipped past him. She in turn spent only a glance on Nash Chou, draped in a yellow poncho. Then she loped across the platform. On the other side, she looked down at the water, but already the canoe was out of sight. So she cut around the shower room—and almost ran into a stranger.

  He stood at least six foot six, his bronze face veiled by a curtain of rain that ran off the brim of his canvas hat. He wore loose field pants stuffed into shiny, knee-high boots, and a green tek-fabric shirt that showed the line of every well-developed muscle in his broad shoulders. His eyes were hidden behind opaque farsights. He looked her over, before his attention returned to the water.

  Virgil was right. Steven Ho did not look much like a researcher.

  Ela shuffled cautiously up to the edge of the platform, not daring to take her eyes off him for more than a second or two at a time. She remembered the IBC cop who had tried to arrest her on the edge of the reservation, and how helpless she’d been in his hands. But her curiosity was stronger than her caution. She peered over the platform’s edge in time to see the girl making her way out of the glass canoe and onto the ladder. She looked to be about fifteen.

  Ela leaned down, one hand on her knee. “How does your boat move?” she called.

  The girl looked up with a radiant smile. In the space between her eyebrows and her hat, Ela could see a solid bridge of LOVs. Never had she seen so many on one person. They gleamed like luminous skin. “The LOVs in the hull all pump water like tiny squid, pushing the boat forward,” she explained, speaking in the Australian-accented English that seemed so popular among the Roi Nuoc. “My name is Lien.”

  “I’m Ela. Your boat is lovely.” She said it with full sincerity as the girl climbed onto the platform.

  Virgil joined them, his fingers touching Ela’s arm. “Hello, Lien.”

  “Pleasant to see you again, Dr. Copeland.” Lien nodded, at the same time loosening the sash beneath her chin that held her hat in place.

  Virgil looked to Ela. “Lien transplanted my LOVs to Ky.”

  Nash stood behind him now, an impatient look on his face. “Virgil! This new canoe is just one more rea—” He made a little gasping sound as Lien tipped off her hat to stand bareheaded in the rain. Ela felt her own breathing stop.

  Lien’s head was sheathed in LOVs. She had no hair, and no visible skin anywhere on her scalp. Only a glittering helmet of LOVs that began at her eyebrows, ran past her ears, and ended at the nape of her neck.

  “My God,” Nash whispered.

  Steven Ho spoke in a coarser voice, “Holy Christ.”

  Ela felt mesmerized by the glinting display; it took an effort of will to turn away. Apparently Virgil did not feel so vulnerable. He gazed at the girl while a faint, incredulous smile warmed his face. “Lien, you have been busy.”

  She blushed. “Solutions are not so easy to find.”

  “Where are your farsights?” he asked, and for the first time Ela realized the girl was not wearing any.

  Lien patted the pocket of her blouse. “They are here.”

  “Why aren’t you wearing them?”

  She looked a little sad. Then she ran a hand across her glittering LOV helmet. “Mother Tiger does not approve.” She slipped her hat back on, her lips pursed, as if it were a small thing, like spilled tea. “I am still Roi Nuoc.”

  Nash stepped forward, his poncho rattling. He shook his round head. “Look at her, Virgil! This child. What do you think will be left of her when those LOVs are removed? This is what it’s come to. This is what you’ve done!”

  Lien looked at Nash as if he were some strange, wild beast. Then she turned back to Virgil. “I have a design for a citadel that will offer shelter to all the Roi Nuoc.”

  “Shelter from what?” Steven Ho asked, speaking over Ela’s shoulder.

  Lien took a moment to examine him. Then she smiled. “Shelter from the rain, the wind, the sea, the heat when it returns … but not from bombs or guns. We cannot hide from that if you finally choose to come against us.”

  chapter

  35

  SUMMER HAD NOT been outside in days. She was afraid to go outside; afraid of the very bodyguards who had been assigned to “protect” her. Their real job was to make sure she did not talk to the wrong people, she was sure. So day after day she sat in her office, under the surveillance cameras of the IBC, and toyed with design after molecular design, projected in three dimensions on her wall screen.

  She had supervised the development of six separate viral weapons to be used against the LOVs. Three were simple, organic toxins attached to a viral vector. They would act as mutagens, interfering in LOV reproduction. Three were debilitating viruses that would act directly against a LOV host. All had been designed to distinguish between a symbiotic LOV and one outside a human immune system. She still brooded over the reason behind this. Why did Daniel Simkin want to preserve the symbiotic LOVs?

  Of course Simkin denied that preservation was his goal; he cited international laws against
germ warfare: We may not be allowed to attack the symbiotic Lovs directly; we need to be prepared for whatever level of war we are allowed to wage.

  It was a sound argument. So why couldn’t she believe it?

  She looked up at a molecular model of her latest effort projected on the wall screen of the darkened room. It rotated slowly, glowing in colorful 3-D. Her team had not synthesized it yet, but if they could learn to fabricate it, they would have something quite different from any other project developed to date. This was a marker virus, designed to find any remnant asterids that might have been left behind in the evacuated children, when their LOVs were removed.

  Perhaps, though, what was really needed was a marker virus to find the evacuated children? They were being kept under a remarkable veil of secrecy. Even the tabloids, with all their money, had not found even one of them to interview. Summer had a hard time believing that everyone involved in the welfare of these children was immune to bribes.

  Of course, reports had been issued on each evacuated child. Summer had received copies like everyone else, but each bulletin amounted to nothing more than a brief, vanilla description: “all signs normal; rapid recovery; a bright and healthy child.” All in all, a benign portrait that could only stir suspicion. Neurological intervention was never that easy, but Simkin refused to discuss her concerns, and no one else she had cornered would admit to knowing more.

  Summer cautioned herself against unwarranted speculation. No meaningful conclusion could be drawn on a mere absence of fact. Still, she could not escape a sense of unease. Were the children being kept out of sight because the procedure used to remove the LOVs had gone seriously wrong?

  She dropped her farsights on the desk. Then she got up, and paced.

  What if there had been trouble? What if the neurosurgery involved in removing the LOVs was more dangerous than anyone wanted to admit? Was it possible that some (or all?) of the children had suffered permanent brain damage?

  The procedure could only grow more difficult with each successive child, as time enhanced the complexity of neural connections, and the children continued to accumulate LOVs.

  Summer stopped her pacing. She clasped her hands behind her back, staring past the rotating display. Might the Roi Nuoc win their petition by default, if experience showed the symbiosis was impossible to undo?

  Simkin would want to hide a fact like that, no matter what his personal agenda might be.

  She sighed, knowing the true explanation might be completely different. God, how I hate secrecy!

  “Refresh screen.”

  The display blanked to a dim gray glow that bled into the darkened room, picking out edges, wrapping around the raw shapes of things.

  When Summer had first conceived the LOV project it had promised so much. Mental illness had always haunted human history. A subtle imbalance of brain chemicals could turn a loving individual into a helpless, hopeless shell of humanity, steered by a mind utterly detached from reality. Drugs and therapy and even surgery sometimes helped, but they were all crude cures, akin to setting off bombs in a city to kill the rats that spread plague. By contrast the LOVs had offered a subtle, infinitely adjustable means of balancing neurochemical signals—but nothing ever unfolds as foreseen.

  Summer had conceived the LOV project as a cure for a host of mental afflictions, but now she had to wonder: Had she accomplished the destruction of these children instead?

  chapter

  36

  THE SEA PALACE grew on the coast, beyond the last of the sea dikes with their forests of replanted mangrove. Its foundation was an estuarine mudflat, built up by silt and sediment from the flood. When the dry season came and the river receded to its banks this would be new land, unowned by anyone. For now though, water stood knee deep over the site.

  That didn’t matter to the spiders. They convened around Lien as she crouched in the shallows, forty-eight of them, gathered in loose concentric circles. In the gray daylight beneath the perpetual clouds, the LOVs on Lien’s skull could be seen gleaming as they communicated to the spiders the design she had conceived for the Sea Palace. Virgil stood at a respectful distance with a small crowd of Roi Nuoc. He hungered to know what Lien herself was feeling during this exchange. Did she have a direct awareness of the dialogue between the LOV colonies? Or was she just another kind of chassis for the LOVs to ride? Spider legs with an agile pair of hands attached, and a little extra processing power …

  Mother Tiger still did not approve. The ROSA had become a tiny icon stalking the screen of Virgil’s farsights, back and forth, back and forth, anger caught within a cage. Lien did not wear her farsights.

  Almost two hours passed, and then the conference of spiders broke up. Some scuttled fifty yards up or down the coast; others waded closer to the silt bars and the foaming lines of breakers that marked the estuary’s intersection with the sea. An IBC platform had been anchored beyond the breaking waves. Virgil could see someone there, watching the gathering on shore while a cloud gray drone floated overhead, recording the spectacle of the spiders arranging themselves in precise ranks, defining the shape of a regular pentagon with an area as large as a city gymnasium, one point facing out to sea. The spiders crouched in place, so that their central globes disappeared beneath the shallow water; only the bend in their knees remained above the surface, leaving the estuary looking as if it had been pierced with circles of shining white sticks.

  The spiders did not move again. Lien returned to her territory; the other Roi Nuoc scattered to their own holdings on small glass boats or flying machines. Virgil stayed until sunset, but nothing more happened that day—at least, nothing he could see.

  By next morning the situation had changed. The spiders were still in place, but now a low, pentagonal foundation of LOVs grew around, beneath, and between them, like a concrete pour locking their legs in place. The day after that the spider chassis were completely buried—but the globes no longer nested within them. They had been lifted above the growing platform, each one held in a transparent cup at the top of knee-high pedestals that rose as the platform rose.

  The UN scientists brought in heavy equipment to map the subterranean structure; they drilled test cores and what they found surprised no one: The Sea Palace grew from roots extending deep into the mud of the delta. Ten thousand years of mud. Ela tried to imagine the archaeology being done down there as the roots dissected the remains of animist cultures, of Chinese and Viet and French kingdoms, of twentieth-century war.

  When Lien first shared her plans, Ky had worried about the wisdom of the project: “It’s too big. It will be seen as a fortress. It will look as if we are daring the IBC to attack.” The Roi Nuoc had listened politely while the project advanced with the same unalterable momentum that seemed always to surround the LOVs. It was as if they generated a cultural gravity that pulled everything around them faster and faster into an unknowable future.

  The foundation grew for a week, fed by its invisible root system. It was the trick of LOVs that they would program most of their structural members to die off, so that the mass of the project grew rapidly while the number of living LOVs requiring metabolic support increased at a much slower rate. Most structural LOVs survived only long enough to deposit one more scant layer of limestone, before they were buried by the progeny that would form the next.

  The root system expanded in a similar fashion: Its network of fragile veins grew far faster than the number of living LOVs requiring nutritional support, so that as the days passed, more and more material was transported to the Sea Palace, allowing it to grow at an ever-increasing rate, until oxygen became the limiting factor. No one realized how thoroughly the LOVs’ frantic metabolism had scoured the air around the platform until Ky made the mistake of taking two reporters on a tour of the project, on a day when the rain had stopped and the wind did not stir. Within minutes they were dizzy from lack of oxygen. Ky guessed what was happening and made it to the platform’s edge with one of the reporters in tow, but the other had to be rescued
by a UN helicopter.

  After that, the Roi Nuoc would inspect the platform only on windy afternoons, but the UN scientists would go out anytime, wearing oxygen tanks while they gathered air samples at different heights above the project.

  Within a week the foundation grew into a solid block of pseudolimestone eight feet high, its sides hung with lovely filigrees of living pipe. At that point the pattern of growth changed as walls began to form. On the seaward side of the palace the walls were eight feet thick, breakwaters built to withstand the pounding waves of Class IV storms. The interior walls, at a mere three feet in width, were almost petite by comparison.

  The platform was divided into two huge rooms that were eventually enclosed with vaulted ceilings so that they looked like coral caves in an undersea palace. The chamber on the inland side had a wide, arched doorway, numerous window slits, and a band of frosted glass at the top of the outer walls. The ocean room at the building’s massive prow was darker, a shelter built to withstand foul weather and waves. It had no windows. Air was pumped in through the walls by capillaries of living LOVs, while columns of brightly luminous LOVs cast an eerie glow against the darkness. Two stairways led to the roof, where the walls of a lighter second story were just beginning to form.

  Ela climbed the stairs one windy evening to stand beside a parapet three feet high. Globes floated in troughs at the top of the growing walls, casting a gleaming light upward against her face. She stood at the point of the pentagon that faced the sea—the prow—and leaned over, looking down at the building’s gleaming foot. There the geometrical perfection of the Sea Palace failed. The LOVs at the seaward point had never stopped reproducing. They laid down layer upon irregular layer of limestone, building a miniature headland as a buffer against the pounding waves of future storms. As the building eroded, it would be rebuilt again.

  It would last longer than the people it had been made to shelter.

  She wondered if this was why the UN had put off its decision for so long: Did they hope to claim what was left when the Roi Nuoc were gone? What was the market value of the knowledge evolving here?