Limit of Vision (28 page)

Ky and
Ela had taken the road, so Virgil decided to strike out between the ponds. He’d gone only a few steps when he started questioning his decision. The ground felt like it was dissolving under his feet. Hardly any separation remained between the ponds. He slogged through mud that clutched at his ankles, slipping and sliding in his sandals as he worked his way across the backs of eroded dikes. Alone in the dark, it was easy to imagine the river as a sentient thing, oozing up from the ground to meet the falling rain and the rising ocean in some sinister plot to swallow the world in a slow tide of water.

A tapping spider approached along the back of a narrow dike. Virgil stepped aside to give it room to pass, and the saturated ground gave way beneath him. He slid down, riding an underwater avalanche of fine-grained silt, until he stood thigh deep in the water. The spider scuttled past, taking no notice of him. He watched it go by, wondering how many cognitive circles Mother Tiger was engaged in. How much had the
R
osa
learned? More than he might ever know, Virgil realized. Unless it had been caught in a web of infinite calculation, striving to decode the meaning of every microsecond flash across a hundred million
L
ov
s.

Did the
R
osa
have an error-correction system that would let it escape a near-infinite task? And if it did, what would it be like when it emerged? Mother Tiger was like no other
R
osa
Virgil had ever encountered. It was a complex entity existing on many servers. It already seemed to be eroding the barriers dividing
R
osa
s from sentient beings. Could its interaction with the
L
ov
s push it all the way over?

He climbed up onto the dike again. It was tempting to retreat to the road, but a glance back showed that he had already come more than halfway through the pond complex. A grove of banana trees offered shelter on the other side, so he pushed on, head down as he watched the placement of every step.

He didn’t look up again until he was climbing a slight rise to the banana grove. He was startled to glimpse a petite figure moving among the trees, slender and shy, disappearing as soon as he saw it. Then another sprite, slightly taller, leaned into view.

“Hey!” Virgil called. “There’s been trouble. Mother Tiger’s in trouble!”

They peeked out again, two little girls clinging to each other, their eyes wide with confusion and terror. They watched him through their lifeless farsights as he tried to explain what had happened to Mother Tiger. Could they even see him in the dark? He told them what they must do, then asked if they understood.

One of the little girls answered—in Vietnamese.

“No English?” Virgil asked.

She shook her head.

Virgil thought for a moment. Then he tapped his fingers to open a link. “Ky.”

“Here.”

“They don’t speak English.”

Ky’s image scowled. Then he nodded shortly. “Lend your farsights. I’ll talk.”

It was a quick exchange, and then the girls vanished on separate paths, feeling their way like spiders. He listened to their shrill voices calling out ahead of them to their hidden friends.

Ela came on-line. “This can’t go on long,” she said in encouraging tones. “The globes have no way to store the nutrients they need. They can’t be out of the water for more than a few minutes.”

She should have been right, but minute after minute dripped past, and Mother Tiger still did not recover.

Virgil slogged on through the mud, up to his knees at times. His breath whistled in and out of his lungs. Every few steps he stopped and the rain, falling straight down, dripped off his hood in a sparkling curtain. “
Roi Nuoc!
” he would call into the night. “
Roi Nuoc!
” Then he would add the words Ky had given him: “
M
e Cop ðang gâp nguy hiȇm. Chúng m
ình phai giúp cúu Me Cop
.” “
Mother Tiger is in danger and we all need to help.
” He searched groves of trees for hammocks. He rattled the tents pitched in pastures or on the margins of ponds and rice paddies. Many of the kids were still asleep and his shouting woke them so that he came upon them in their first moments of terror after they discovered the empty screens of their farsights. He would comfort them as he could. He would have them view Ky’s recorded spiel. Then he would move on.

Once Virgil heard the engine of a distant truck, grinding as it fought the mud. It was a welcome sound, for he guessed that Ky had persuaded the army to help.

Ky linked every ten minutes or so, to check Virgil’s status, and to relay reports of more and more cognitive circles uncovered. Dozens of the
Roi Nuoc
had imitated Ela, but as she had predicted, none of the circles lasted for long because the spiders could not survive more than a few minutes out of the water. As their nutrients were used up, they retired, breaking the circles long before any kids could come to harm.

“So why hasn’t Mother Tiger recovered?” Virgil asked as he paused for breath in the middle of a flooded pasture.

“Because something is still occupying its attention.” Ky looked grim, a little head-and-shoulders image caught in Virgil’s farsights. “I checked with the resident servers. There is nothing wrong with the platform or the software. The
R
osa
is busy. That’s all they can tell me.”

“So somehow a cognitive circle has survived?”

“We have to find it,” Ky said. “And soon.”

Virgil wandered on alone. Near three-thirty in the morning he was standing waist deep in yet another pond, after a misstep had sent him sliding into the water. He decided to rest there a moment. The
L
ov
s had helped him keep his head clear and his exhaustion at bay, but it was all catching up to him now. His legs ached, and his fingers and toes were shriveled with the unending wet. He couldn’t even see the dike he’d fallen off of, because it was hidden under at least six inches of water. He held up his hands, examining them for signs of algal growth. Maybe this was the season of infinite rain, when they would all transform to water creatures and swim away forever into another world.

Or maybe he was just woozy with exhaustion and cold. His hands were trembling. His eyes ached. He slipped off his farsights, letting the darkness fall against his eyes in a soft kiss. He longed to call off the search, give up, go back. But Gabrielle haunted his mind.

She had become a ghost—though not the traditional variety. Virgil did not believe in the supernatural. The ghosts he acknowledged had nothing to do with metaphysics, and everything to do with the mind. Gabrielle had become a meme complex, a pattern of information within his brain. A warning.

He couldn’t stop searching, not while the possibility remained that somewhere, someone lay trapped within the hypnotic grip of a cognitive circle, mesmerized, unaware of time passing or their own physical existence. How long could a child endure that? Exhaustion had killed Gabrielle. One or more of the
Roi Nuoc
might be dying now, as he dithered in the water.

He cursed himself. Then he clawed his way back up onto the submerged dike.

He had to rest again after that, kneeling in the water, his head bowed, his eyes closed, his farsights still clutched in his hand. Gradually he grew aware of a deeper noise beyond the steady drizzle of the rain. After a moment, he identified it as the sound of waves running up against the mangroves that lined the shore. Had he come so far?

He stood up, determined to push on to the edge of the reservation.

It was then he saw the light: a faint, blue-green glow beneath the mangroves.

Hands shaking, he slipped his farsights back on and looked again. The glow was so faint that with nightvision it blended into the background outline of mangroves and he could not see it. So he took his farsights off again. He gave his eyes a minute to adjust.

The light had not changed.

He fixed his gaze on it and staggered forward through the dark, wading through ponds and over dikes until he reached the trees. The grove stood in a shallow swamp of swirling water, and he could not tell if it was the rain, the river, or the ocean that had laid claim to this territory, but the glow had brightened. It gleamed from within the center of the grove, a few feet above the water’s surface.

He slipped his farsights back on. The forest emerged from darkness, all bent limbs and knobby aerial roots. It made him think of a spider with infinite legs, squatting over a gleaming green moonrise, as if to hold all that light for itself, keep it from the world. Virgil advanced slowly, clambering over roots, splashing past driftwood, bumping his head on branch after branch and tearing his poncho.

He found the
Roi Nuoc
at the center of the grove. There were three, all girls, huddling at equally spaced points around a rough circle. They each had a ribbon of symbiotic
L
ov
s in a horizontal band across their foreheads, with a second band of
L
ov
s projected across the active screens of their farsights.

Two of the girls were adolescents, twelve or thirteen years old. They perched on knobby roots while the rain dripped around them, punching expanding rings into the black water. The third girl was much younger, a tiny creature, eight years old at most. She lay slumped in the water, her little head resting against her arm, her face as fixed and smooth as wax. If she breathed, Virgil could not see it. None of the girls showed any awareness of his arrival. The glittering fields of their farsights were all turned to the center of their circle, where there hung a
L
ov
colony . . . or
colonies
. . . such as Virgil had never seen before.

There were three globes, all suspended within a lacy mesh of blue-green tubes stretched between the trees and anchored in the flowing water. It looked like a glowing spiderweb, set with shimmering jewels. Beneath the water more strands gleamed, like roots laid out on the surface of the mud. Were they questing for nutrients to pump up to the
L
ov
s that composed the globes? That would explain why this cognitive circle had not collapsed like all the others.

“Ky,” he said softly, tapping his fingers to open a link. “I think I’ve found the source of our troubles.”

Ky looked through his lens and swore. Then, “Pull your hood low,” he said, “so your own
L
ov
s aren’t mesmerized too.”

Virgil did it, and felt a frisson of disappointment. Had he already been falling into the sublime trance of the circle?

“Take their farsights,” Ky said. “Break the circle.”

Virgil moved first toward the littlest girl. Was she still alive? Her fixed, waxy expression reminded him too much of Gabrielle. He whispered a prayer that left his lips without direction. Then he lifted her farsights away from her face.

She did not stir, or protest.

He laid a hand against her chest, seeking the rise and fall of her breath, but he was shivering so violently he could feel nothing. Panic slipped loose. He fumbled with her farsights, shoving them into a pocket. Then he grabbed her under her arms and sat her up. Her head flopped like a broken doll. He turned her away from the suspended globes. “Wake up,” he whispered. “Wake. Please.”

She gasped: a sharp, shallow inrush of air as if her body had suddenly remembered its need to breathe. Another rattling breath and then a long moan. Virgil held her against his chest. He did not dare to put her down. It would be so easy for her to slide into the water and drown. So he held her with one arm as he turned to the next girl.

“Move quickly,” Ky said. “This one may resist.”

Virgil nodded. The girl was crouched on a mangrove root, her arm around the trunk for balance. She looked strong. He drew a deep breath, then grabbed her farsights, peeling them off her head.

Her chin came up and she turned to him, her eyes revealing a dark melange of surprise and fury. Virgil stumbled backward, ready to throw her farsights into the tangle of forest if she came after him, but her anger faded as quickly as it had formed. She turned to face the colonies again, reentering her trance without the aid of farsights.

“Ky! You’ve got people coming, right?”

“A couple minutes,” Ky assured him. “Get the other farsights too. Turn them off.”

“I’m doing it.” He stumbled toward the third girl, who still had not moved. She didn’t seem to notice when he stripped her farsights away. Her gaze did not waver from the gleaming colonies. Looking into her eyes, Virgil felt his hackles rise. What was she seeing? What strange paths had her mind found to explore?

“Virgil!”

He flinched at Ky’s voice, sharp and loud in his ears.

“Look away from her, Virgil.”

“I’m not caught.”

“Look away from her, and turn off all the farsights.”

Virgil did as he was told, his numb fingers fumbling for the power switches while he balanced the little girl in one arm. The last toggle slid home with a satisfying click, audible over the rain. Virgil grinned in giddy triumph, looking up at last, his gaze sweeping over the suspended colonies. “It’s done—”

The world vanished behind a blue-green glinting sea of infinite depth. At the same time he heard a soft, growling welcome. Mother Tiger stirred, a watermark prowling against a background of
L
ov
s. “You’re back,” he whispered. It felt as if days had passed since he had last seen the
R
osa
.

“Come. Follow me,” Mother Tiger commanded.

Virgil hesitated.
R
osa
s should not behave this way. He raised his hand to touch the earpiece of his farsights, troubled by the thought that he should take them off.

“That danger is past,” Mother Tiger said.

Yes, of course. The cognitive circle had been broken.

He turned to follow the
R
osa
as it stalked beyond his left shoulder, at the same time using his free hand to sweep away his constricting hood. “Have you done it?” he asked, as if the
R
osa
was a human entity. “Have you decrypted the language of the
L
ov
s?”

“It is an evolving process,” Mother Tiger said in its low, purring voice. “The task is not finished yet. Will you help?”

“Yes, I—”

Heat swept over him. A glorious, blissful warmth that sent him to his knees, splashing in the flowing water. The little girl reacted violently, squirming in his arms. Virgil held her close, puzzling over her presence. Hadn’t he been doing something else? Something important?