Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  “Because we are crazy,” Virgil said, touching the tiny specks of his new LOVs. “You said it on the ship. Our LOVs have driven us mad.”

  Summer must have been awake, listening to their debate, because she spoke up now in a hoarse, whispery voice. “The disappeared won’t believe that—if they’re still alive. They know you. They’ll think the same way you do.”

  Mother Tiger’s voice purred from the speakers, overriding all other talk: “They will know you would choose to return. That is why you will not return.”

  With an arm around Virgil for support, Ela sat up a little straighter. “A ROSA is telling us what we must do?”

  “It’s not the first time,” Virgil said. He told her why she had been in the water so long. “Mother Tiger didn’t want to bring you and Summer aboard—because of Summer’s farsights, I think.”

  Ela looked from him to Oanh, too stunned to speak, feeling as if she were drowning again.

  “It’s true,” Oanh said. “We were going to switch this sub to manual control. That’s when Mother Tiger gave in and started to help.”

  Ela did not want to believe it. “But Mother Tiger is our ally.”

  “Ela, listen to me!” Virgil said. “I tried to tell you before. Even Ky had doubts.” Then he told them all of Ky’s suspicions. “He thought Lien’s death might be more than a tragic accident.”

  “So if anyone follows Lien, that one isn’t Roi Nuoc anymore?” Ninh asked. “Is it our link with Mother Tiger that makes us Roi Nuoc?”

  There was a brief debate about it, mostly in Vietnamese. The air was getting stuffy again, and Ela was remembering. “I saw something when Ky died,” she said softly. Only Oanh and Virgil heard her, but Oanh quickly signaled the others to listen while Ela described the blinding flash of light that had erupted from Ky’s farsights. “He jumped to pull them off, and they shot him.”

  She wanted to show them a vid to prove what she was saying, but the marathon was too far underwater, and Mother Tiger’s partial persona would not or could not respond. But Summer offered herself as a witness. “I saw it too. I wondered about it. I thought maybe it was Daniel’s work, or a government official who wanted to close the books.”

  “Mother Tiger would have filtered those inputs,” Virgil said.

  The partial persona remained silent. Perhaps it did not have the complexity to respond to these accusations, or perhaps it saw no need.

  “We should vote now,” Oanh said. “Who wants to go back?”

  All around the marathon, hands rose. There was no dissent.

  “Then change course,” Virgil said to the ROSA shell that had charge of navigation. “Take us back to the delta.”

  They listened intently, but none could sense the marathon changing direction.

  Summer sat up a little straighter, twisting around to look at the console. “It’s a question of psychology,” she said, her voice still hoarse, hardly more than a whisper. “Products like the marathon are made for people who like adventure. People who like adventure don’t like depending on a ROSA. When I was in Australia last summer I rented a marathon. It wasn’t hard at all to handle it on manual.”

  SUMMER was able to pilot the marathon to within a few miles of the delta coast. There they surfaced, hoping for a news update. Instead they received a full link with Mother Tiger. Virgil had expected keen argument from the ROSA, but its intelligence was more subtle than that, and it did not have human pride or human peevishness. It had only a goal: to keep the Roi Nuoc safe. So when it calculated that it could not stop them from going ashore, it offered to guide them instead.

  Virgil urged the others to accept the ROSA’s help. “We’ll be safe, so long as our goal and the ROSA’s is the same.”

  They waited until evening. Then Mother Tiger steered them to an unguarded river mouth far south of the reservation. Debris thrown down by the hurricane clogged the waterway, forcing the marathon to surface. It glided silently upstream, sending a V of ripples out across the moon-spangled water. Ela squeezed out of the hatch and watched the ripples unfolding, rolling outward until they tangled in the drowning vegetation. Streamers of clouds snaked in a high-elevation wind, but along the river the air was still.

  Ela was keenly aware of the marathon moving through her own inner map of the world. She felt more aware of everything: the soft voices from below, and dashing shapes of fish in the river, hurtling satellites, and the rumble of ancient generators reverberating over the water, the smell of night blossoms and of mud, and the count of each soft beat of her heart.

  The Roi Nuoc from beyond the reservation had been alerted to their coming. Mother Tiger had instructed them to gather farsights and cash cards, and to hide these things beneath a concrete pier that served a shrimp-packing company set up along an otherwise empty stretch of waterfront. The kids themselves were long gone by the time the marathon pulled up to the moonlit pier.

  Ela was first out. She scrambled under the pier to retrieve the stashed bundle, passing it up to Ninh. There were clothes wrapped around the farsights: clean white tek-fabric shirts and slacks. Cash cards were abundant. Cash, at least, was no longer a problem for any of the Roi Nuoc thanks to Ela’s income.

  Ela put on the new garments. Then she threw her old clothes into the swollen river. Moonlight glittered on the water as the marathon slipped away from the pier, a dark shadow gliding downstream, faster than the current. Ela watched it go.

  She still held her new farsights in one hand, reluctant to put them on. She was not the only one who hesitated: Oanh stood beside her, looking undecided. “You don’t trust Mother Tiger anymore, do you?” she asked, glancing nervously at the other Roi Nuoc. Most of them had slipped their farsights on even before changing clothes.

  Ela turned her own set over in her hands, watching moonlight play across the lens. “I am thinking of what Roi Nuoc means. ‘Water puppets.’ Little doll figures that perform on a stage of water. Whose puppets have we been? I used to think Ky Xuan Nguyen was the puppet master, but I know now that was never true. It was always Mother Tiger.”

  Ky had once asked her about Sawong, the old transvestite who had cared for her until he had gone away with his lover, leaving her alone in Bangkok. You could have looked for Sawong, or waited for him to return, but you didn’t. Why not? Ela finally had an answer for him: “I don’t need a master.” She drew back her arm, and cast her farsights out across the water.

  Oanh saw what she was doing and jumped to stop her, too late. She made a little cry as the farsights disappeared with a splash. The other Roi Nuoc gathered around, murmuring in shock: “Why did you do that, Ela? Did you mean to do it? You are angry with Mother Tiger, aren’t you?”

  Oanh looked mournful. “It will be hard to live without the ROSA.”

  “We have the LOVs now,” Ela reminded her. “We don’t need Mother Tiger anymore.”

  Phan’s grin flashed from beneath his farsights. “Mother Tiger is saying you were never really one of us anyway.”

  “More lies,” Oanh said.

  Ela shrugged.

  Lam spoke now, in Vietnamese. Ela had picked up enough of that language to gather the meaning: “Mother Tiger asks What is Roi Nuoc? How can we be Roi Nuoc without our farsights?”

  Ninh nodded vigorously, his forehead wrinkled in a worried frown. “How can we find each other without them?”

  Even Virgil was ready to compromise. “We can’t just throw an advantage away, Ela. We won’t know what’s going on if we can’t see through other lenses. We won’t know if one of us is in trouble, or what’s happening in the world.”

  “But with them, we will always be under Mother Tiger’s eyes,” Ela countered. “Have you already forgotten Ky? And Lien? And me?” She shook her head. “We escaped the IBC. Now we have a chance to create the life we want, without asking anyone’s permission. Anyone’s. We are not little children anymore.”

  Oanh bowed her head. She held her farsights for a second, her gaze lingering regretfully on their beautiful silver frame. Then she
sighed and, looking up, she hurled them into the river, watching them through their long, spinning flight, until they splashed down in a little geyser of spray. “I am no longer a water puppet,” she said. “Ela and I have become something else now … something different. Water fairies. Tien Nuoc. Without masters, we find our own way.”

  Summer Goforth had been standing on the edge of their circle. Like the rest of them she was dressed in white, but unlike them she did not have farsights. Now she met Ela’s gaze and asked, “Aren’t the LOVs your master now?”

  Ela shook her head sadly. “You don’t understand it. The LOVs are part of us. They are us. Their fate and ours is the same.”

  Summer had helped them escape the ship, but it was clear she still did not approve what they did. “What are your plans for me?”

  Ela frowned over this. “My plans? I don’t have plans for you. It’s your life. Your choice.”

  “Mother Tiger doesn’t agree,” Ninh said softly.

  Ela threw him a sharp look. “I can guess what the ROSA has to say!”

  “I can too,” Summer said. “Does it explain that I could betray you? That I could bring authorities after you and that you must do whatever is necessary to prevent this?”

  Ninh admitted that was the essence of it. “Mother Tiger has never asked such a thing of us before.” He sighed and slipped off his farsights. Then he looked at Oanh. “I cannot be Tien Nuoc,” he said. “Not a lady spirit. Let us be Tiên Thân Nuoc, instead. A spirit of the river; one that cannot be seen.”

  Oanh smiled, bowing her head in approval.

  Tiên Thân Nuoc. Ninh stepped to the river’s edge and tossed his farsights spinning into the moonlight.

  Virgil looked grim, but he joined Ninh, casting his own farsights away into the water. The others followed. One by one they severed their link with Mother Tiger, becoming Tiên Thân Nuoc. Becoming free.

  When the last of the farsights was gone, Virgil turned to Summer. “Will you betray us?” he asked. “Or will you join us? You made this thing—maybe just in time …”

  Summer shook her head in firm denial. “What Simkin wanted to do to you—that was worse than anything you’ve done. But this …” Her gaze swept their circle. “It’s out of control. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how dangerous this is?”

  Ela slipped her arm around Virgil’s waist. “Yes. We can see it. We have the LOVs. We see both sides.”

  The delta myths had not been wrong. They were an alien generation. Ela had known it about herself ever since she’d been a child in Bangkok, telling the fortunes of humble people who looked on her and her affinity for unknown things and were afraid. Such people would try to hold the world still, but for that it was much too late.

  “Will you betray us?” Ela asked.

  Summer glanced around at the anxious faces waiting on her reply. “It’s not me you need to worry about.”

  “The disappeared,” Oanh said. “If they’re alive, they’ll be looking for us.”

  Ela nodded. “I think they’re alive.” Too much had been invested in them to let them die. She glanced over her shoulder, dreading to see a peeper ball drifting out of the vegetation. There was nothing. Not yet, but her uneasiness spread to Virgil, and then to Oanh, who said, “We should go.”

  So they parted, scattering in twos and threes into the countryside. Virgil was anxious to be off, but after a few steps Ela hesitated, and turned back. Summer eyed her warily. “You have no trust of us,” Ela said. “Maybe it must be that way. But in time I think you will come to see this is not wrong.” She raised a quick hand before Summer could argue. “We are not changing our minds. You know this.”

  “It’s something I’m learning,” Summer admitted.

  “That’s good. Learning is a skill most people forget.”

  “Ela,” Virgil said, “we should go.”

  Ela nodded, but still she did not leave. “I did not get to tell you about my ROSA, Summer. I think Mother Tiger has found it by now, but when it was mine, it was good at telling fortunes. For you, I think Kathang would say something like ‘This one cannot close her eyes. Even when she turns away, she will always see through to the heart.’”

  Summer responded with a skeptical laugh. “Your ROSA must have been out of practice, Ela, because I can’t even see through to my own heart. I can’t see past this night.”

  “Still, I think you will not betray us.”

  Summer wasn’t so sure. Long after Virgil and Ela were gone, she stood alone on the pier, watching the muddy water run past. Insects called, an airliner growled far overhead, and somewhere, a bird spoke. Could the LOVs still be contained? It was possible. Certainly new weapons could be designed … but how could they be deployed against the disappeared? Daniel had made control immeasurably more difficult so that Summer found herself considering failure:

  Would it be better to live in a world created by the Roi Nuoc or by Daniel Simkin?

  That was the heart of it.

  “I will come after you, Ela,” Summer promised, speaking softly to the night, to the flowing river. “But only after I bring Daniel down.”

  She waited on the pier for three more hours, until a district police officer chanced past on his motorcycle. Summer convinced him to take her to the police station. From there she called her ROSA, and after that she opened a confidential link to the United Nations. Some there still knew her name.

  Enjoy These Sample Chapters of

  Memory

  by Linda Nagata

  Jubilee is a bold young woman of seventeen, on the cusp of leaving the security of her family home to seek out her own future. But her life is thrown into tumult by a visit from a forbidding stranger who has come looking for Jubilee’s beloved brother, Jolly—who is seven years dead.

  Jolly died as a child, consumed in an unprecedented flood of “silver”—a mysterious substance resembling a thick, glowing fog. Silver is a force of both destruction and creation. Sometimes it dissolves what it touches, at other times it randomly rebuilds structures from the lost past, but no person caught within its reach has ever survived it.

  And yet …

  If Jolly is truly dead, how could this stranger know him? And if Jolly is alive, how did he survive the silver? And where has he gone? Jubilee soon discovers that the stranger is not the only person interested in her brother’s fate.

  Looming over all is the question of the silver’s nature and purpose. Silver is rising in the world, flooding ever more often and more deeply so that someday soon the world must drown in it.

  Determined to find answers, Jubilee leaves home one step ahead of a ruthless pursuit. The quest she undertakes will unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther than she ever imagined.

  Chapter 1

  When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on my blanket—and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.

  This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, “We have been so very fortunate to have such a wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wisdom.” My father would laugh, but I would pout, knowing I had lost another round, and that I must try harder next time.

  I seldom suffered a guilty conscience. I knew it was my role to be wild—even my mother agreed to that—but on the night my story begins I was troubled by the thought that perhaps this time I had gone too far.

  I lived then
in the temple founded by my mother, Temple Huacho, a remote outpost in the Kavasphir Hills, a wild land of open woods and rolling heights, infamous for the frequency of its silver floods.

  As often as three nights in ten the silver would come, rising from the ground, looking like a luminous fog as it filled all the vales, to make an island of our hilltop home. I would watch its deadly advance from my bedroom window, and many times I saw it lap at the top of the perimeter wall that enclosed the temple grounds.

  That wall was my mother’s first line of defense against the rise of silver and she maintained it well. Only twice had I seen a silver flood reach past it, and both times the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds that lived within the wall stripped the silver of its menace before it could do us harm. True silver is heavy and will always sink to fill the low ground. But the remnant silver that made it past the wall spired like luminous smoke, tangling harmlessly in the limbs of the orchard trees.

  Because silver was so common in that region no one dared to live near us. Only a temple, with its protective kobolds, could offer shelter from the nocturnal floods, and Temple Huacho was the only one that had been established anywhere in Kavasphir. So the mineral wealth the silver brought was ours to exploit, while the temple well was famous for producing new and mysterious strains of the beetlelike metabolic machines called kobolds. My mother harvested the kobolds while my father prospected, and eight or nine times a year small convoys of truckers would visit us to collect what we had to trade.

  On that evening, two trucks had arrived from distant Xahiclan and the drivers had with them a boy named Tico who was also a lesson in wisdom for his parents. Naturally I loved him on sight, and so did my brother Jolly who was a year older than me but not nearly so useful to our parents. We abandoned our younger siblings (who we were supposed to watch) to play wild games in the orchard. After dinner—a magnificent feast that my parents had prepared and that we did not appreciate except for the sweets at the end—we disappeared again, this time on a special quest.