by Linda Nagata
The spiders—and the skaters too—were really just chassis that the globes used to get around. They could be discarded and replaced whenever more advanced designs appeared … or when fashions changed. Spiders were mostly passé. Globes that had stumbled around on land a few weeks ago were now mostly transported by water skaters—though now and then, when the silt cleared a little, spiders could still be seen ambling along the muddy bottom.
Now Ela’s spider returned to the deck, tapping curiously at the firewood as they off-loaded it, and generally getting in the way. Somehow, they managed to avoid crushing it as the wood was stacked beside the hut, then covered with the tarp. “Done!” Oanh said, brushing wet pressboard crumbs from her hands. “Now we have about three minutes to return the boat.”
“Take one of the chickens,” Ela said. “See if you can trade it for some rice.”
“You’re not coming?” Ninh asked uneasily.
Ela sighed. The Roi Nuoc did not spend time alone; they had been schooled to believe it unsafe … which of course it was, for them. No one is more vulnerable than a child alone without friends or family. “You go with Oanh,” Ela said. “You know I’ll be all right here.”
He didn’t like it, but he was getting used to her eccentricities. “We’ll be back soon.”
“No hurry.”
As soon as they were gone though, she felt a rootless melancholy rise inside her. She sat cross-legged on the platform’s edge, watching the rain touch the water, thinking of the night. Sometimes at night she would lie awake and listen to Ninh’s soft snoring on the other side of the hut. In that late hour her clothes would be nearly dry; she would be almost warm. That was when desire rose inside her. She would listen to Ninh’s breathing and know she was in love—though not with Ninh.
She pushed her hood back, letting the rain slide across her face. Love was an unproductive and dangerous emotion, designed to sneak into a woman’s life and turn her into a housemaid, a slave, obliging her to a life of servitude. Under normal circumstances anyway.
Ela’s life was hardly normal, but she still did not welcome any needy feelings. Her attention must be reserved for more important things, and anyway, there was no time …
So she had learned to meditate, using the LOVs to find a cool, hard state where the sound of Ninh’s breathing was nothing but a sound. Sadly, this tactic never worked for long, and when the desire returned it was stronger, and more painful than before, as if the LOVs enhanced that too.
The spider startled her from her thoughts, its glassy leg tapping across her shoulders. She looked up to see movement on the water. Another trio of skaters, gliding in from the east on an erratic zigzag path, looking as startled as the first group. Ela sat up straighter, trying to see what had set them off. A line of shrubs lay in that direction, with only a few feet of yellowing branches still showing above the water. Perhaps a crocodile had taken up residence there. Beyond the shrubs, a row of gloomy casurina trees drew a dark curtain across her short horizon.
She searched her screen for Mother Tiger’s half-hidden image. “Is the research boat out there?”
In its noble voice, the ROSA provided a one word answer. “No.”
“Then what is out there?” Ela asked.
“An anonymous object.”
Ela scowled. Anonymous? “Does that mean you don’t know?”
“No.”
“Then what does it mean?”
“That it cannot be identified.”
“But there is something there? You’ve seen it?”
“Yes.”
“Then show it to me.”
“No.”
No? Ela felt her mouth fall open in astonishment. Never before had Mother Tiger denied such a simple request. “Why not?”
“It is anonymous.”
Ela was stunned. Mother Tiger existed to provide information. When had it begun to cooperate in keeping secrets? She stood up and squinted against the rain, trying to see what might be out there. A single skater moved beyond the brush. Farther away, a spider tottered on the dike beneath the casurina trees, leading her gaze to a wide gray shadow that slid beneath the branches.
A boat?
It had to be a boat, though it did not look like any boat she had seen before. It was much too wide, too round. And how could it cross the dike like that? The water there was only a few inches deep. The object glided out from under the trees, into the afternoon’s gray light, and Ela made a small noise of surprise. The boat—or whatever it was—was not floating on the water. It hovered above the water. A foot or two above the water. She could clearly see the casurina trunks behind it.
Okay then. It was some sort of aerostat drone. A truly big one, drawing closer at a stately pace of two or three feet per second. Two figures lay prone on a surface wider than a backyard trampoline. Two grinning figures.
“Virgil?” she blurted, jumping to her feet as she recognized him at last. “Ky?”
She was answered by Ky’s mocking laugh. “We have thrown off all restraints!” he shouted as they drew near. “Just as you counseled! And look what’s come of it! A new toy!”
They had almost reached the platform. Close enough for Ela to see that the aerostat was shaped like a thick round pillow, or like two Frisbees glued together on their concave sides, and that it was made of LOVs. Shimmering white glassy LOVs, like none she had ever seen, looking as if they were embedded in a membrane of stretched plastic. Around the perimeter of the disk were scattered blue-green spots: living LOVs, presumably concerned with controlling air pressure? In the center of the disk, between the two men, she could see a little well, and inside, immersed in a pool of water, a blue-green globe, bland in the daylight. “So you’ve made a flying saucer.”
It was a little more advanced than the boat she had wanted to build.
“Virgil designed it,” Ky admitted, sitting up on the saucer’s back. Dressed in fatigues and a rain poncho, his hair growing out so that he had to sweep it back to keep it out of his eyes, he did not look much like the polished businessman she had first met. In the gloom of the afternoon, it was easy to see the blue-green glimmer of LOVs across his brow. There was no going back for any of them now. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Ky insisted.
Ela could not immediately agree. “It has an explosive hazard, right? It has to. The pressure in that disk must be near zero, or it couldn’t hold your weight.”
Virgil looked insulted. More accurately, he looked like an insulted warrior from some suburban Hollywood high-school tribe. His poncho had been worn to shreds, so now he went without, wearing only the blue water-wick boating fatigues he had brought with him, and a tek-fabric shirt. His head was bare, his Egyptian-wrapped hair grown out an inch and tied up in a sloppy topknot. He frowned at her through farsights that were an opaque strip of blue-green. Ela could not see his eyes, yet she could feel his stare inside her mind: a tense, thoughtful sensation that gripped her as his farsights’ field of virtual LOVS traded information with her own symbiotic colony. “The disk’s interior is not like a balloon,” he said, standing up on the saucer’s back. “It’s a honeycomb of independent chambers. The pressure is high, sure, but if the disk is breached, only a few chambers will collapse. It won’t explode.”
“Except in a catastrophic attack,” Ky added thoughtfully.
“It wouldn’t matter, then, would it?” Virgil countered. He stepped with one bare foot on a patch of colored LOVs. Ela was made aware of a hissing of air only because it ended. The aerostat ceased moving. It hovered docilely, its lip just overlapping the platform. “Want to go for a ride?”
Ela’s suspicions were not allayed. What if the saucer failed? There were crocodiles in the water after all.
“She hesitates,” Ky said. “Is this the woman who was diving the wreck of the module within minutes of impact?”
“The woman who kept the LOVs alive despite the IBC,” Virgil added.
“The woman who filmed a documentary amid gunfire and car crashes, to win Hanoi’s sympathy t
o her cause.”
Virgil cocked his head, making his topknot bob. “Are you afraid?”
She tapped her LOVs. “I’m smarter now.”
They laughed, but they did not give up on her, and after a minute she found herself shedding her sandals to climb aboard barefoot in a carefully timed exchange with Ky. He slid onto the platform as she shifted her weight to the flying saucer, so that it did not bob into the air or sink onto the water.
It did wobble a little beneath her feet as she walked stiffly to the center of the disk, her arms spread for balance as if she were walking on a tightrope. Virgil grinned. “You’ll only slide off if you believe you will.”
“Shut up.”
He laughed again. “Sit down then, if it makes you feel better.”
She remained standing, her feet spread for balance as the hiss of air returned, and the flying saucer began to move away from the platform … rising as it went. “We’re going up,” Ela said nervously, peering over the side. The water was five feet away, then six. Then eight.
Virgil said, “I want to know how high we can go.”
“How high have you been?”
“This is the record so far.”
“Virgil—” Her angry retort was stopped by his grin. She couldn’t withhold an answering smile. “All right. We keep pushing. No boundaries now.”
He frowned. “Well personally, I think I’ll accept a limit of two hundred feet or so. The LOVs can pump air for only so long, you know.”
She threw a mock punch at his shoulder. He caught her fist. “Flying lessons?” he suggested. “You really should learn how to control the disk—”
“It’s a flying saucer,” she interrupted, staring at their linked hands. Surprising herself because she did not let go. No boundaries now?
She relaxed her fist. His hand slid hesitantly into hers. She could feel his doubt, and his surprise, downloading through her LOVs.
“All right,” he said softly. “We can call it a flying saucer if you like.”
He showed her how to command the saucer by stepping on the touch pads of living LOVs, one to change its direction, the other its elevation. They rose slowly, at least two hundred feet, maybe more. They were the highest point for miles around. She could see the little village on stilts below them, and the wooden boat with a new boy at the pole, bringing Oanh and Ninh back to the platform. She could see the water, spreading wide beneath them in a gloomy sheet, broken here and there by lines of trees and half-drowned houses on stilts, and towers and platforms of glistening LOVs. She could see no land, none at all, and the gray rain clouds seemed to sit upon their shoulders.
How much longer could they last here?
Long enough.
They were alien now. But what was alien today could become conventional tomorrow. It was the way of the world. Survive long enough, and strangeness becomes cliché.
“We should go back now,” Virgil said, “before the LOVs are exhausted.”
They returned to the platform, sliding off the saucer one by one as air poured into it and it settled on the water. Ninh and Oanh were back, and there was a fire going in the hut. Ela could smell chicken grilling. “How did you like your ride?” Ky asked. The rain had almost stopped for once, and he had thrown the hood of his poncho back.
“Beautiful,” Ela said. “If we could market this, we would soon be rich—but it will at least make a good addition to my documentary.”
“I wanted to talk to you about that. Have you checked your balance lately?”
She smiled. There were dozens of scientists and soldiers on the reservation, and every one of them, as far as she could tell, had a contract with some news service or other. Ela had tried for a while to get a contract too, but by then the offers were so low it had not been worth doing. So she set up her own commercial site, where she displayed her ongoing coverage. It was a simple system: the first hit was free, and subsequent hits were billed at a few pennies each. She kept it up so that official opinions would not be the only ones represented. “The site is just there for the public record,” she said. “I don’t expect a lot of traffic.”
“Check your balance,” Ky urged.
“Why? Have I made a hundred dollars?”
He smiled.
She felt abruptly nervous. She tapped her fingers, instructing Kathang to look into the numbers. When the figure displayed, her face went slack. Ky chuckled, but she could hardly hear him past the buzzing in her ears. She sat down on the wet deck. Smoke from the grill teased her nose, and she sneezed.
Twenty-one million dollars.
“Your site’s been busy,” Ky said gently. “And that’s only a small part of the money that could be made from the biotech being developed here.”
“I had no idea.” Her voice no more than a whisper. A cold little laugh uncoiled in her throat, escaped her mouth. “So … I have finally scored big!” She looked at Ky, then at Virgil, then at Ninh, who was checking the fishing lines. And Oanh, crouched just inside the hut. “I’m a millionaire,” Ela said. Then she patted her belly. “A starving millionaire!”
Tears started in her eyes. “The money’s no good if it can’t buy us the things we need.”
“Money’s always good for something,” Ky said.
“Bribes?”
He nodded.
She thought about all the things she wanted. Then she said, “Maybe we can find out what’s become of our disappeared. Ky? Will you use it for that? You know better than me what can be done with it. I’ll turn it over to you.”
“No. I’ve already given them almost everything I have. Save this fortune. Don’t let anyone else know you have it. Listen—” He beckoned to all of them, and they gathered around him in a somber circle. “I’ve preserved some holdings among the offshore farms. Everything else is gone: transferred or sold off to pay for our sanctuary here, but I held on to the farms. We might need those resources before this is done. They are owned now by a company called Roi Nuoc, Inc. Everyone of you are shareholders. Every one of the Roi Nuoc, whether they are inside the reservation or without. It’s all quite legal. I’ve made Ela and Virgil and Ninh the officers because they’re the only ones old enough for the job. I want you to know this. I want you to know there will be no complications in the event of my death.”
“You don’t own shares?” Virgil asked.
“No. If I did, they would trace it, and demand payment. I have no authority over this corporate entity at all.”
“I want to put money into it too,” Ela said. “Even if we can’t use the money, there are more Roi Nuoc outside the reservation than inside it. Let it go to them.”
Ky nodded. “If you like, transfer some. But hold on to the rest. You may find a need for ready cash before this is through.”
They feasted on the chicken, and some ration bars Ky had brought along—the very last, he told them. The gray afternoon faded to twilight, and then to night. With the coming of darkness, the rain started in again.
chapter
33
AS THE DAYS passed more and more of the Roi Nuoc succumbed to disease. Dysentery took most, but there were incidents of malaria and yellow fever too. The afflicted children were evacuated as soon as their condition was discovered, but most tried to hide their illness as long as they could, for they knew that leaving meant their LOVs would be extracted. Most would sooner amputate a hand.
On this morning a twelve-year-old boy from one of the coastal cadres had been airlifted from the reservation. He had not gone willingly.
It made Virgil wonder: Were they truly so changed by the LOVs that losing them was a diminishment of their soul, of their sense of self? Or were they just addicts in denial, living for a corrupt promise of chemical enlightenment?
He had to ask himself, What has changed about me?
Simply put, he saw more. His mind perceived more detail in everything, from the feel of air across his skin to the emotional tells on a soldier’s face. He paid attention to everything and remembered more of what he saw. H
is innate instincts for pattern recognition had been enhanced. His mind had become adept at seizing on elusive details that would have once escaped him; at patching together seemingly unrelated observations to expose a deep order in the flow of microevents in which every life was embedded. It was as if the world, which had once seemed made of many parts, had now resolved into a singular thing, a flow state of physical interaction that included himself and all others with no clear boundaries between them.
At once one and infinitely many.
A new religious credo?
Or raw self-deception, no different from the blissful enlightenment of an LSD trip?
Every event occurring in the mind was a state brought about by electrical flow and chemical interaction. Every human being was an addict, chained to brain chemicals that interpreted the world and synthesized a sense of self—a sense that changed by the minute, disturbed by the weather, the season, by flowing hormones or diet, age, and alcohol, and a hundred thousand drugs. Where was the baseline state? Was there a baseline state? Did it matter?
If addiction was defined as desire that leads to self-destruction, then the LOVs were not an addiction, any more than the hormones that commanded hunger and sexual passion and the drive to build monuments and to make art for art’s sake and music were an addiction. The LOVs were an aspect of vibrant life that led to more life, not less. Losing the LOVs was not like losing a hand. It was like losing a feeling for music, or a desire for love.
This was what would be lost by the boy who’d been forcefully evacuated this morning. What rational ethic could ever make that right?
Virgil had been waiting when the uniformed soldiers brought the boy to the research station on their silent metal launch. He stepped off the floating shell of his flying saucer to meet them at the dock. Heavy black wings fluttered in his mind. He saw himself as a vulture, poised against the last flow of breath from a dying body.
