Limit of Vision (19 page)

Later
that evening Virgil linked. He was troubled when he learned what they had done. “Ela, it’s not a good idea to spread the
L
ov
s. You’re putting these people in danger. Not just from the IBC, but maybe from the
L
ov
s themselves. We don’t know—”

“We never do,” she interrupted, crossing her arms. Kathang would be busy extrapolating her position, her posture—her annoyance—from the cues of her facial expression and muscle tension. It was this fabricated image that Virgil saw. His image was similarly assembled. She reminded herself of this as she looked at his sad, tranquil eyes. He seemed always tranquil. Too tranquil. The
L
ov
s should not be used as sedatives. “Are you still coming?” she asked.

He nodded. “If I can get in past the shore patrol.”

“Are you that close?”

“Another day.”

“The
Roi Nuoc
will look for you. You’ll be all right.” Then she added: “Bring the no-oct. All of it.”

“Any word on the shipment?”

“I heard today. It’s arrived in Soc Trang. I’m going north tomorrow to claim it.”

“Be careful.”

She promised that she would.

Afterward she lay in her hammock, watching the stars wink like
L
ov
s set across the face of the sky. What a precious crew of outcasts they made! The
Roi
Nuoc
and Virgil and herself: thrown together and forced to trust because they shared a desire to see the
L
ov
s survive.

Still, trust went only so far. She had told no one about the possibility of escaped
L
ov
s, though she knew it couldn’t stay secret much longer. Tomorrow she would go north to pick up the shipment of no-oct and to discover what, if anything, was growing in her pond.

17

It was late
afternoon when Ela stood on a sidewalk in the town of Soc Trang, stretching up on her tiptoes to see past a rush-hour crush of bicycles, mopeds, and little electric trucks. The delivery girl from Elegant Courier had been instructed to bring the no-oct shipment here, to this place on the street. So where was she?

Caught in traffic, no doubt.

“
Ela!
” Oanh’s voice whispered from her farsights. “
Look there.
Is that her
?”

Oanh was a block up the street. An inset image opened in Ela’s farsights, the view zooming in on a single dusty moped, ridden by a gray-haired woman in a green uniform.

“Okay,” Ela said. “It must be her.”

She leaned into traffic, signaling as the moped neared. The courier saw her and swooped toward the roadside, putting a foot down against the new asphalt to balance the bike. The woman’s eyes were invisible behind the black span of her farsights. Ela gazed at her own reflection and suddenly she knew: her image was being recorded.

It had been a mistake to come here. A fatal mistake? Maybe, but she needed the no-oct tablets.

“Pass code?” the courier demanded in a harsh, tinny voice.

“B-blossom, scripture, one hundred seventeen.”

“Humph.” Without a smile, without another word, the courier handed off the package. Ela felt so frightened she almost dropped it. “Th-thank you,” she stammered as the woman gunned her moped and shot into traffic.

A touch on her elbow made her jump. She spun around, expecting the police, but it was only Ninh, one of the two
Roi Nuoc
boys who had escorted her these past few days. “Twisted bitch,” he said, nodding in the direction the courier had taken. “
Cái bà vô duyȇn
. Come on. Let’s go.”

They hurried through the haphazard streets, following a map laid out by Mother Tiger. At every step Ela expected to see a police officer approaching on a motorcycle or appearing suddenly from behind a paper-covered shop door. Her anxiety grew, until she was jumping at the shouts of children or trembling at the bleat of a moped’s horn.

Yet nothing happened. No one took notice. She could hardly believe they had gotten away, and yet it seemed they had.

After a few blocks they were joined by Oanh and the other
Roi Nuoc
boy, Thu. Together they made their way through a rough neighborhood of poor hovels and small factories, until finally Soc Trang fell behind, and Ela’s anxiety with it.

Once again they were walking between the green rectangles of pump-irrigated rice paddies, heading east toward the coast, and a farm where the
Roi Nuoc
were welcome as laborers. Ela had been surprised to learn how many such places there were. Then again, the
Roi
Nuoc
were ideal workers. They knew what needed to be done even before they arrived. They required little instruction and no supervision, and when the job was finished they would disappear.

Of course it was this same prescient efficiency, and especially their ghostly elusiveness, that made the
Roi Nuoc
unwelcome in many more places. Strangeness was always a challenge to human sensibilities, and the
Roi
Nuoc
were not just strange, they were threatening too, because they did recruit. Oanh had all but admitted that she had a mother in Saigon. Not a good mother, no. But she had not been abandoned. Instead she had chosen to leave, walking away from whatever abuse, neglect, or emotional oppression had scarred her young life—and that, Ela thought, was the root of the bad feeling against the
Roi Nuoc
; it was the reason behind the ugly rumor of alien nature that Nguyen had used to taunt her that night in the fishing village. Real children did not leave their parents, and if they did, they did not thrive.

And Nguyen . . . where was he? Ela had heard nothing from him since Mrs. Dao’s house. Had his interest slipped? Or had he found his own trouble with the IBC?

A farm truck appeared behind them, roaring out of Soc Trang on a plume of dust. Ninh stepped into the road and flagged it down. He dickered a minute with the driver; a cash card changed hands. Then they were climbing into the back, joining a trio of German boys who were lounging on their backpacks, smoking fat marijuana cigarettes.

The boys sat up straight when they caught sight of Ela. Then they eyed Ninh, as if to size him up. None of them wore farsights. “Porno?” one asked, tapping his finger beside his eye.

“No,” Ninh said with a superior smile. “Fascinating shrimp-farming lessons.”

The boys laughed so hard they drooled, but they did not make any move toward Ela.

She turned her back on them, leaning over the side of the truck, enjoying the rush of wind past her face as she watched the road ahead. Marijuana smoke mingled with the smell of dust from the recently scraped road. On her farsights, a map of the countryside showed her location as a bright red spot. The shrimp pond where she had lost the
L
ov
s was marked in hazy blue. The two points drew steadily closer together as the truck raced east, but they would not intersect if she stayed on this road.

Oanh crouched at her side, a veil of dirt obscuring the gleam of the
L
ov
s on her brow. “I have felt odd today,” she said softly.

Ela did not know how to answer. She was still wired after the encounter in Soc Trang, keenly aware of every least thing around her as if some prescient sense were whispering, warning her to stay alert. Was that the
L
ov
s working? Or her own native fear? She scanned the sky, hunting for some anomaly in the brassy haze that might be a surveillance drone. “I’ve been thinking we should not stay together.”

Oanh looked at the sky too. “You’re going back, aren’t you? To the pond where you spilled the crown galls. Are there
L
ov
s in the water?”

“I don’t know,” Ela answered, quietly astounded. “Maybe. At the crash site, I filled a packet with spilled
L
ov
s, but most of them escaped.”

“You’re right of course. We should separate.” Her gaze settled on the package in Ela’s hand.

Ela tore it open. Inside were four plastic bottles. She gave one to Oanh. “If there are
L
ov
s in the pond, I’ll need more.”

“I understand.”

On her farsights, the red dot that marked her position had reached its closest approach to the target shrimp pond. Ela tapped the truck’s rear window, motioning the driver to stop. Ninh must have gotten an update from Mother Tiger. He was ready to go, following Ela over the side of the truck as the vehicle slowed. As soon as they were clear the truck sped away. The German boys looked back at them with startled faces, but Oanh did not look back. She did not raise a hand to wave good-bye. With Thu she watched the road ahead, while the truck dwindled in the vast, monotonous land.

Ela turned away, feeling oddly disoriented by the sudden, uncelebrated separation. She told herself the
Roi Nuoc
were like that. Fluid. Connected through their farsights as much as through their flesh.

She dug out her own
Roi Nuoc
farsights and slipped them on. Mother Tiger was there, a ghost image in the shape of a prowling tiger, pleased to see her, pleased at her cleverness in preserving (possibly) an extra stock of
L
ov
s. She presented Ela with a new map that drew a path between the paddies, leading her directly to the pond.

Ninh sighed. “That looks like an hour’s walk. Do you have any food?”

Ela pulled out two nutrient bars. Ninh made a face, but he took one. They ate as they walked, and they talked about the
L
ov
s. Ninh wanted to know what they were good for; even Mother Tiger had not answered him satisfactorily on that. “Will they make you smarter? Are you smarter now?”

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t feel exactly smarter, just . . .
sharper
. As if her native intelligence was working without the impediments, the distractions she usually stumbled over: the incessant worries, the self-doubt, the boredom . . . the loneliness. Everything she did seemed interesting, worth doing. Except sometimes it went too far. In Soc Trang she had let herself become too afraid. “Maybe they exaggerate emotions?”

He glanced up sharply. She ducked, cowering beneath a shadow drifting in the late-afternoon sky. It was only a bird.

Ninh started walking again. “This is an interesting experiment,” he said. “I hope it survives a while.”

“Me too.” But Ninh was right: That could not be assumed.

They
reached the pond just after sunset. Ela crouched on the steep bank amid the sweet-smelling weeds. Midges peppered the air. A few eager frogs croaked. Nothing seemed changed since her previous visit. She could even see her old footprints at the water’s edge, but she could see no sign of
L
ov
s.

Virgil had said the
L
ov
s might survive in this environment. They were hardy and adaptable, but had Ela asked too much of them?

She walked carefully down the spongy bank and waded in, feeling the tiny bodies of juvenile shrimp bumping against her legs in their panic to get away.

A reflection of the deep blue twilight sky floated on the black water. Dancing in the ripples was a fainter reflection: a little circle of dusk-tinged blue-green.

Ela glanced up, expecting to see a patch of cloud aglow in the last high rays of the sun, but the sky was clear. She gazed again into the water, while midges buzzed about her head. The evening’s last light was fading quickly . . . not so the second, inexplicable reflection. It grew brighter, more substantial with every passing second until she was sure it was an object, and not a reflection at all. A little blue-green sphere, smaller than a Ping-Pong ball, submerged in the water but rising, rising nearer to the surface as she watched.

She felt a flush of recognition; at the same time, from the corner of her eye, she saw the dazzle of her own patch of
L
ov
s gleaming just the same blue-green against the falling night.

From the shore Ninh called softly, “Ela? What is that thing?”

She remembered then that she still wore the
Roi
Nuoc
farsights; Ninh could see what she saw. “I think it’s the
L
ov
s.”

She reached for the little sphere with trembling hands. It did not evade her grasp. It responded not at all. She cupped her hands around its scintillating blue-green glow. It felt like a crumpled necklace chain: hard yet supple, shot through with deep folds and convolutions. She raised it to within a quarter inch of the surface, and felt an intense curiosity flow through her, a profound sense of newness, and discovery.

“It’s a colony of
L
ov
s,” she whispered. She turned to look at Ninh. “The
L
ov
colonies on the EquaSys module were supposed to be like . . . like living computers.”

Ninh said, “This one is small.”

She nodded. It was young—
but it was thriving!
The
L
ov
s that had escaped from her packet had reproduced; they had organized without any outside guidance. “I’m going to break it into pieces.”

Ninh took a startled step forward, his sandaled foot splashing in the water at the pond’s edge. “Why? It is beautiful. Why break it?”

“So more will grow. I’ll leave part of it here. The other parts I’ll put in other ponds. If they’re scattered, they’ll be harder to wipe out.”

He was silent a moment. Then he chuckled softly. “
That’s
why you sent Oanh away.”

She floated the little colony to shore, careful to keep it always in the water. In her hand it felt as light as an aluminum can. Ninh made a mud corral along the bank to keep it from floating away.

Now they faced the problem of transporting the
L
ov
s.

“Do we have plastic?” Ela asked.

They searched their meager possessions, but all they had were the foil wrappers from the nutrient bars. Then Ela had an idea. Borrowing a knife from Ninh, she cut her hand towel into long strips. She soaked them in the pond water. Then she opened a bottle of no-oct tablets and crumbled several of them over the strips, massaging the dry powder until it dissolved into a pasty gray mud that clung to the fibers of the cloth.

She returned to the water. The
L
ov
colony floated like a gleaming jellyfish in Ninh’s mud corral. Gently, Ela lifted it out of the water. Like a jellyfish, it collapsed into a shapeless blob. But even in that reduced state it looked beautiful, tremulously alive. Aware? She refused to believe it, and yet once again she felt a sense of recognition come over her, a joy of emotional connection.

That was not important now. They must work quickly, and move on, before someone noticed them here.

“We have to tear it apart,” she whispered to Ninh, as he crouched beside her, yet she hesitated.

“Do you want me to do it?”

To her own surprise, she nodded.

She watched his graceful hands as he touched the colony, exploring its strength and structure. Then he pinched it. He pulled it apart. Ela felt a sudden, taut sense of expectation, and curiosity. She bit her lip, but she did not move.

Ninh took a pinch of the
L
ov
s and smeared them along one cloth strip. They gleamed faintly in the wet no-oct paste. He smeared another pinch along the next strip, and the next. By the time he had finished, the
L
ov
colony was smaller than a jambolan plum that had been smashed in the road and turned to jelly.

Ela cupped it in one hand as she retrieved several more no-oct tablets from the bottle. Then she waded back into the water, releasing the remnant colony and the tablets with it. The lightless water swallowed them up. When she returned to the bank, Ninh was rolling up the cloth strips, tucking them neatly into the foil wrappers. “They should be transplanted tonight,” Ela said.

Mother Tiger chose that moment to whisper, “Do not be alarmed.”

The admonition had the opposite effect. Ela’s chin rose in instant dread. In the deepening twilight she heard the approach of fast tires on a dirt road. There was no audible hum of engine noise, which meant it was a fuel-cell engine, a modern car. She turned to look for Ninh, but he was gone—vanished—along with the packets of
L
ov
s. Only his footprints remained in the mud.

“
Ninh!
” she whispered frantically.

“Do not be alarmed,” Mother Tiger repeated.

“Where is Ninh?” she squeaked.

“He has gone to plant the
L
ov
s.”

He had taken the no-oct with him; all of it. Only the shipping container remained.

Ela stomped her foot. “I don’t like the way they keep leaving!”

“It is hard,” Mother Tiger agreed, sounding, for the first time, like it was using a stock response. That lapse reminded Ela that it
was
a
R
osa
, and no true entity at all. She realized then how much she had come to depend on its advice, how she had been manipulated into dependence. Understanding made her angry. She had been on her own too long to give up her independence to a stupid
R
osa
playing goddess in a farsight cult.

“Tell me who’s coming,” Ela commanded, her voice cold.

“That one you call Ky Xuan Nguyen.”

Nguyen
. She had told him there were no other
L
ov
s. By now he would know she had lied.

The car appeared on the levee road, advancing without headlights. Quickly Ela pulled the
Roi
Nuoc
farsights off, replacing them with her own. Kathang’s moist skin shimmered as its head bobbed a greeting. It whispered to her that a message from Virgil had come in; Ela shook her head slightly. No time to hear it now.

The levee road was several feet higher than the pond. The car drew even with her, then stopped. Down by the pond it was dark, but up on the road, in the open, twilight still lingered, enough to see Nguyen as he stepped out of the car. He looked down on her with a bemused expression.

“You are more than you seem, dear Ela.”

Ela decided an active offense was her best strategy. “What I am is a fugitive. You promised to help me, but where have you been?”

His farsights gleamed faint green against his shadowed skin, suggesting a negative image of a human face. “I have been in Hanoi, lying my ass off and sucking up to government officials whom I in fact despise, all to persuade them to order an end to the IBC’s search for you. It is because of my efforts, by the way, that you are still a fugitive and not a prisoner. Did you notice the absence of surveillance drones since your return?”

Ela turned away, blushing, grateful for the dark. “I did notice,” she said hoarsely.

“A thank-you might be in order. After all, it was not
my
idea to remove
L
ov
s from the impact site.”

“You’re angry because I lied to you about the
L
ov
s. But how could I know to trust you?”

“I have far more to lose in this venture then you do, Ela. Do you want my help or not?”

“I need your help.”

“Yes. You do. I’m glad you understand that. I’ve brought someone to see you.”

A man had emerged from the passenger side of the car. Now he walked to the edge of the road, where he stood silhouetted against the dark-steel sky. He was taller than Nguyen, though not by much. “Ela?”

Her eyes went wide as she recognized his voice, made familiar by a dozen conversations. “Virgil?” She stepped forward, her bare feet splashing in the shallow water at the pond’s edge. “You made it! Is it you?”

“Yes. I’m here. Thanks to Ky.”

“He came in on Cameron Quang’s boat,” Nguyen added. “Just past noon.”

Ela did not like the challenge she heard in his voice. “And do you own the Marathon now, Mr. Nguyen?”

“It’s at one of the fish farms,” Virgil said absently. “Ela, why didn’t you say anything about these other Lovs . . . ?” The sentence trailed off as he tilted his head back, looking up into the star-pricked sky.

Ela followed his gaze to see a shower of huge raindrops drifting out of the evening gloom, falling so slowly they looked as if they had renegotiated the usual contract with gravity. The deep blue of the western sky slid in oily reflection across their spherical faces.

Peeper balls
, Ela realized, as the spheres came to rest several feet above the ground. She looked at Nguyen, her heart tripping in a fast, watery beat. Her voice squeaked: “They are yours . . . right?”

Nguyen stood on the edge of the road, the hem of his beige jacket fluttering in a faint evening breeze. Peeper balls glinted all around him like subtle party lights. “No, Ela,” he said, his voice low, and thick with anger. “They’re not mine. Rather, it seems that you were followed.”

She backed a step away. “It might have been you.”

He laughed shortly. Then he swore in a long, soft tirade. Virgil edged toward the car.

The unexpected motion panicked Ela. She stumbled back, away from the pond, away from the road. Nguyen though, made no move to go. “Did you stop somewhere, Ela, on your way up from Ca Mau?” It sounded like a casual question, so calm it made her tremble.

Her gaze cut to the Elegant Courier package discarded on the ground.

“Ah,” Nguyen said. “A brief rendezvous in Soc Trang . . . where you picked up . . . an order of no-oct? What is that?”

Virgil spoke softly out of the darkness. “It’s a nutrient the
L
ov
s require.”

Nguyen turned to him. He did not ask a question; that demand came from his posture alone.

“I ordered it for her,” Virgil admitted.

“Is there any other use for this chemical, in this form?”

Virgil shrugged. “It’s pretty specialized.”

“Let me guess. You went through your usual source?”

“I guess I did.”

Nguyen’s anger at last slipped free. “Why not just take out an advertisement announcing ‘We’re here!’?” he shouted. “Is this the kind of smarts the
L
ov
s bequeath? If so, then why have I wasted my time on you?”

Dead silence rang in the darkness. Then Ela said softly, “Dr. Copeland’s
L
ov
s are an early generation.”

Nguyen crossed his arms. “Are you accusing Dr. Copeland of being guided by primitive and stupid
L
ov
s, Ela?”

Virgil said, “We should go.”

“No.” Nguyen turned, raising his hands as if to address the flock of peeper balls. “In fact, we will stay right here in the delta. This land has become the last refuge of
L
ov
s. They exist here now with the permission, and under the protection, of the government. We did not ask for this distinction. We did not ask for them to be scattered in wild colonies across our land, but they are here. They are our responsibility. The official announcement will be made tonight: This land has become a
L
ov
protectorate.”

Ela stared at him in disbelief. Had he lost his mind?

Or . . . was he running a bluff?

After all, he was in advertising.

Surely though, if it was a bluff, it could work only if the world were convinced the
L
ov
s were benign and already widespread—too populous to be controlled without disrupting thousands of innocent lives.

So she jumped in to back him up. “Hundreds of people have already been accidentally infected by the
L
ov
s,” she declared, in the sincerest voice she could muster. “I have seen
L
ov
s thriving in ponds all along the coast.”

It was bullshit, but wasn’t that what advertising was all about?

Nguyen cast her an admiring glance. “The IBC expected to experiment on our people, but we have turned their biohazard into a blessing—and we will protect it.”

Bullshit
, Ela thought. But it was the only chance they had.