Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  Ky was silent for a beat. Then, “I am so glad to hear it,” he said. “Given that foreigners have attempted to trade away this nation so many times before.”

  Ela winced, while Virgil launched into a quick apology. “Ky, I didn’t mean—”

  Ky raised his hand. “I am teasing, my friend. Of course we must aim for some level of sovereignty—which is why I’ve prepared a petition for the United Nations, to be signed by all of the Roi Nuoc—”

  “They’re underage,” Ela objected, eyeing Oanh, who fidgeted on the physician’s stool.

  “It doesn’t matter. We can’t allow it to matter. We must petition the UN to recognize the Roi Nuoc and their LOV symbionts as a distinct people. Recognition on this level will give us rights that even the IBC cannot overturn.”

  “It would legalize the LOVs,” Virgil said. He sounded impressed. “At least, the symbiotic ones. But Ky, do you really think there’s a chance it could work?”

  “Oh yes.” Ky stood by the door, his fist on his chin and a faraway look in his eyes as if he were posed for a propaganda shot … and when Ela considered the farsights that she and Ninh and Oanh wore, she saw it was exactly that way.

  Ky said, “Just think on the stew of greed, of pride, of indignation, and nationalism we might play to our favor. This is politics on a remote and not easily accountable scale. There are many reasons for votes to be cast that have nothing to do with the merits of the issue.”

  Ela could not share his optimism. “I don’t think you’re being realistic. The IBC would never allow it.”

  “But that’s the beauty of it,” Virgil said. “It won’t be up to the IBC.”

  Ky nodded. “And if you still can’t believe it, Ela, then let me believe it for you.”

  “You?” She could not suppress a laugh. “Ky, you don’t even have LOVs.”

  She had not meant to be hurtful, so it surprised her when the warmth drained from his face, and the telltales of anger emerged: the faint tightening around the eyes, the suggestion of shadow between the brows. He said, “That’s not important.”

  But wasn’t it? All of the Roi Nuoc had taken on their own constellations of symbiotic LOVs. Every one of them was irrevocably committed. Only Ky could still go back. She searched his face and found herself wondering what betrayal would look like.

  “Sign the petition, Ela,” he said. “I’ll see to it after that.”

  She nodded. “I’ll sign it. It could buy us some time, at least.”

  VIRGIL had experienced this exchange as if the emotions of Ela and Ky were being piped into his own head and replayed there with full fidelity. Afterward he walked outside with Ky. It was night, and the stars were blurred points behind a thin veil of rain. Virgil did not ask questions. Not out loud.

  Ky answered anyway, as rain-wet grass rustled against their ponchos. “We have been forced to trust one another on the thinnest of evidence.”

  “I don’t suspect you,” Virgil said.

  “But like Ela, you wonder.”

  “So what if I do? The LOVs are not a rite of passage. You don’t have to use them to prove your loyalty. Nobody is asking that.” But even as Virgil said this, doubt stirred. All the Roi Nuoc had long since adopted symbiotic LOVs in patches or in constellations across their skin. Ky alone had not made that commitment.

  Now Ky pulled back his hood, allowing the rain to fall in tiny droplets across his hair and his farsights—and his unilluminated brow. “There is no reason I should have to defend myself,” he said softly. “I have given up everything for this venture. That should be proof enough of my loyalty.”

  Virgil waited.

  “But it’s not, is it?” Ky asked. “Not to Ela. Not even to me.” He walked on and Virgil followed. “I stand on the border,” he said, his farsights gleaming as he glanced at Virgil, then looked away. “But I do not step over. I encourage others to go … to embrace this new humanity, but I stay behind … Dammit! Will you say something?”

  “What should I say?”

  “What you already know—it amazes me how much all of you can read in a face, in a voice—you know the LOVs terrify me.”

  “They would terrify any rational person.”

  “Don’t say that too loud.” Then after a moment: “It makes my guts turn to water when I think about what we are doing. When I really think about it. We are creating a new kind of human, aren’t we? And it’s beautiful, but frightening too, like a birth … you enjoy letting me ramble, don’t you?”

  “Someday I’ll learn to speak Vietnamese.”

  “Will you? That will be amusing.” He bowed his head. He raised his hand to shade his farsights from the rain. It was a gesture powerfully reminiscent of Panwar. “I fear to lose myself.”

  “It’s not like that,” Virgil said past a throat suddenly dry. Would he be here at all if Panwar had lived?

  Ky looked up, perhaps troubled by the change in Virgil’s voice.

  “It’s an enhancement,” Virgil said, aware of a trembling in his hands.

  “Yes. That’s why we are here, no? It’s why I’m here. Because somehow we will need to become more than we are—or risk being left behind.”

  “That’s what Panwar would have said.”

  “Your partner,” Ky said thoughtfully. “He is dead now, yes?”

  Virgil nodded. “Ky, you should not accept the LOVs if you’re not ready.”

  “And duty be damned?” he asked. “That is a very modern thing to say.”

  “When you’re ready,” Virgil insisted. “Not before.”

  chapter

  26

  ON THE DAY the last farming family left the reservation, Virgil climbed up to the cab roof of an army truck—the highest point around other than a distant line of gloomy casurina trees—and sat cross-legged on the gently curved composite shell, surveying the pancake-flat delta that surrounded him.

  It was near noon, and each breath he took stewed in his lungs, a storm brewing. Heavy black clouds hid the sun but trapped the steamy heat. The landscape rolled away from him: green rice paddies and black ponds, their surfaces undisturbed by any breath of moving air. Detail dissolved in muted shadow.

  Now and then he could see someone moving in the distance: a patrol of government soldiers strolling idly from pond to pond, or a small band of Roi Nuoc off to negotiate with their neighbors. Always far away. Insignificant as the figures in a Chinese landscape painting.

  The farmers had been paid off, compensated for their hardship by EquaSys as part of a continuing settlement. By all reports it had been a good deal; they would not need to work quite so hard anymore, but were they happy, parted from their land?

  The Roi Nuoc could not replace them. Ky’s UN petition had made surprising progress on the assertion that the Roi Nuoc were “a distinct tribal entity,” an evolving culture growing through rips in the social fabric—but the farmers were that fabric. They had built stable lives here and cultivated a sense of place.

  The Roi Nuoc had no similar experience of permanence. They were like a flash of sunshine between rain showers: ephemeral, unstable. Incapable—or uninterested—in holding on to the civilization that had thrived here only a few weeks ago. The jungle was crawling back into that vacuum. Weeds were the vanguard, goaded by the long rains into luxuriant growth along dikes and levees and abandoned ponds, while the ghosts of ancient forests assembled in the mist.

  The sound of footfalls in the mud startled Virgil from his ruminations. He turned, to see Ky Xuan Nguyen approaching with a cheerful smile. “Hail the outpost!” Ky called. “How goes the kingdom?”

  “It is without a king—but then they always were a pain in the ass.”

  “Anarchist.”

  Virgil smiled. “Kind of you to say so.”

  Ky stopped beside the truck, leaning an elbow against the hood as he regarded Virgil through the opaqued lens of his farsights. He was dressed in green fatigues and a black T-shirt, his coppery skin shining with the damp that was everywhere. His hair had grown longer. Trying n
ot to be obvious, Virgil glanced between the strands that fell over Ky’s brow, but he could still see no LOVs glittering there.

  “Why are you up there?” Ky asked.

  Peeper balls stood off at a distance, waiting for his reply.

  Virgil looked away across the delta. There had been so much rain, and not just here. In the highlands too, in Laos, in Cambodia. The water was rising, as it did every year. “It’s all going wild,” he said. “Can you feel it? Something wild is crawling up out of the land.”

  Ky considered this for several seconds while a peeper ball crept unusually close. “Our sanctuary won’t last with that kind of talk. Do you want our petition to fail?”

  “But you can feel it, can’t you? Change. Not just here. Not just with the LOVs. Do you think there are any other ROSAs like Mother Tiger?”

  “You’re in a strange mood.”

  Yes.

  He handed down to Ky the artifact that had set him thinking. “One of the kids turned this in this morning.”

  It was a section of tube with a single joint at its center, fifteen inches long and the width of a pencil, bone white except for a faint shadowing of darker longitudinal veins, and a ring of sickly green around the knuckle. Ky held it at both ends and flexed it back and forth. “And what is this supposed to be?”

  “It’s a LOV cluster.”

  Ky’s chuckle expressed a delighted skepticism. “What is it really? It’s not bone.”

  “It is a LOV cluster,” Virgil insisted. “Look at it under magnification.”

  Ky scowled, but he held the tube up close to his farsights, his shoulders hunched as he strained to remain absolutely still. “Most of the LOVs are dead,” Virgil said. “That’s why it looks white. But you can see the tube is made from LOV shells that have fused together like … like coral polyps.”

  “It’s hard to hold steady.” Ky shifted, resting his elbows against his sides. “They’re smaller than ordinary LOVs, aren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “A new variety … it must be defective, to make such a malformed structure.” He straightened up. Again he flexed the tube at its central joint. “Is it getting stiffer?”

  “Yes. The LOVs that form the joint have no source of nutrients, so the more they are forced to move, the sooner they will die.”

  “They’re still alive?”

  “Yes, but just around the joint. I don’t think they’re defective, though. Just a different variety. Their limbs are structured differently. They’re longer, and they’re found only in a circle around the shell, instead of all over.”

  Ky’s eyes narrowed as he considered this. “So they could only join in a plane? A plane a single layer deep. That’s why they formed this tube instead of a globe … okay.”

  “The joint is an interesting structure,” Virgil suggested. “Don’t you think?”

  Ky flexed it again. Then he scowled. When he looked up, his gaze was hard. “Did you design this?”

  Virgil sighed. Was he going to be accused of a feat of engineering every time the LOVs learned something new? “I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was found like that. I didn’t design the mutant LOVs on the Hammer, I didn’t design the no-oct mutation, I didn’t design the veil, and I didn’t design this.”

  “The LOVs designed it themselves?”

  “I can’t think of any other explanation.”

  “Why? What’s it for?”

  Virgil shrugged. “What are any of us for? I’m more interested in locating the colony that made it.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard. The child who brought it to you must have said which pond it came from.”

  “It didn’t come from a pond. It was found along a path, a hundred feet from any water. And none of the nearby ponds have colonies. I checked.”

  “Ah, so you’re brooding over how it got on the path? That’s easy. A dog carried it there. Or someone dropped it.”

  “No Roi Nuoc would have dropped it. You know how acquisitive they are. Any of them would have picked it up and reported it for the gain—just as it happened.”

  “A dog then.”

  “Pinch the end of the tube.”

  Ky did, not exerting much pressure. With a glasslike chime, the tip of the cylinder shattered into dust. Ky swore, looking momentarily horrified, until he realized the damage was minimal. Most of the tube was still intact.

  He glared up at Virgil. “You knew that would happen.”

  Virgil shrugged. “A dog would have shattered it. Even a gentle nick of the teeth—”

  “All right.”

  “I’d like to find the globe that produced it.”

  “Have the kids check the ponds, then.”

  “They haven’t reported anything strange. Ela’s reports don’t show any hint either.”

  Ky turned away, his own gaze searching the green land that lay submissively waiting beneath the lowering clouds. “Have you considered the die-off?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Virgil, his gaze strangely intense.

  Virgil stiffened. Yesterday morning Roi Nuoc near the coast had reported disaster: all the globes within a cluster of interlinked ponds had gone missing. When Virgil examined the site, he found a thick layer of LOVs in the bottom of every pond, thriving just beneath the mud. It had looked as if the globes had dissolved, losing their coherence, their organization … But that theory was dashed when he checked an unaffected pond and found the same layer of unattached LOVs. Apparently every pond had them. So he was left without a theory to explain the missing globes.

  Nash Chou had taken to calling it a die-off. Virgil didn’t like the term; it made too many assumptions. But he couldn’t deny the problem was serious. In the past twenty-four hours the disappearances had spread slowly outward, to encompass fourteen sites.

  “The tube wasn’t found anywhere near the site of the missing globes,” he said.

  Ky raised his eyebrows. “Apparently the tube wasn’t found anywhere near anything.”

  Virgil shrugged. That was a fair description. He’d been to the place where the tube was found, and then he’d tramped around for an hour trying to figure out where it had come from.

  “Show me the site,” Ky suggested. “There might be some clue that you missed.”

  IT STARTED raining on the way. Ky produced from his pocket an object the size of a bar napkin, popping it open into a conical, broad-brimmed hat that kept the rain out of his face and off his farsights. Virgil envied him, plagued as he was by a constant storm of droplets running down his screen.

  After a few minutes’ walk, they came to a small pasture of lush, tangled grass. “We’re close now,” Virgil said. “It was somewhere in this field.”

  “I see,” Ky answered in an amused voice, as Mother Tiger highlighted the exact spot in their farsights.

  The path had been used several times since the find was made; whatever telltale tracks there might have been were long gone. But off to one side, on a berm half-reclaimed by pasture grass, rainwater had gathered in an interesting spattering of little holes, each one perfectly round, so that it looked like tiny coins had been dropped in the mud.

  “I hadn’t noticed that,” Virgil admitted when Ky pointed it out. “It wasn’t so obvious before the rain.”

  Ky pressed the end of the tube into a hole. “Perfect fit. Cribbage?”

  Virgil slipped his little finger into another hole. It was less than a quarter inch deep. He explored several more. All were nearly the same depth, the same width. “Hey, what’s this?” he asked. Instead of soft mud walls, he had found a peg hole lined with something sharp and brittle. He crooked his finger and carefully drew out a flat, muddy ring that transformed to bone white as the rain washed it clean.

  “It’s part of the tube,” Ky said, lifting it off Virgil’s finger. The size was right. He held it close to his farsights. “LOVs,” he confirmed. “All dead shells.” Experimenting, he poked the tube into the mud. It left a ring mark, not a pit. He looked at Virgil. “What do you think?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know. The peg holes all seem to be concentrated in this one area, but take a step away from the path …” He did so. “And suddenly the grass is too thick to allow prints.”

  Ky ventured past him, studying the ground. “It’s not all grass out here. Look.” Apparently a cow or a water buffalo had been put to graze on this patch of grass. Ky pointed to a pile of dung, marked with two water-filled peg holes. “A child at play,” he suggested.

  “Do children play with dung?”

  “You want a mystery.”

  “I’ve got one.”

  They crossed the pocket pasture without finding any other marks. Then Ky stooped, retrieving something from the ground, and holding it up in triumph. “The end piece of the pipe,” he announced.

  That was what it looked like: a slip of pipe with one end bluntly tapered in a closed cap. Ky tried it against the longer section he held in his hand. The width was the same, but it did not match. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he muttered.

  By this time they had attracted the attention of several cadres of Roi Nuoc … or perhaps Mother Tiger had summoned them. Ky looked pleased to have the help. He organized them in a neat line and together they combed the ground, looking for more peg holes, or bits of broken pipe. But the search went all the way to the next rice paddy without finding anything more.

  They huddled at the paddy’s edge, enduring a rain that fell with the steadiness of a suburban hose as they tried to decide what to do next. “Either we go through the paddy,” Ky said. “Or we go back and try the other side of the path.”

  Virgil was already cold and wet, his fatigues encrusted with mud. He had no desire to go wading into the paddy, but that wasn’t a universal feeling. Two little girls had plaited a grass fishing line, baiting it with a crushed beetle. Now they were wading between the rows of rice, hunting for secretive crayfish. Virgil frowned at them. “I guess I’d rather go back—”

  His offer of retreat was interrupted by a duo of sharp screams, followed instantly by hysterical giggles as the two girls stumbled backward out of the paddy. Virgil thought it must have been an awfully big crayfish to inspire that reaction, but then the girls’ excitement spread to the kids who met them on the bank. Little screams and sharp, incredulous laughter marked their retreat as they scattered from the paddy.