Limit of Vision (31 page)

“No one here,” Oanh observed.

Ela sighed in relief. She did not trust the researchers, and she did not like their endless questions.

As they drew closer a rare spider scuttled into sight from behind the A-frame thatch shelter Ninh had built. It had six short legs, and the cage that held its globe was finely made and very fragile, to save on weight. Though it had changed its design in the intervening weeks, Ela was fairly sure this was the same spider she had faced in her first cognitive circle. It had supervised the construction of her original, failed platform, as well as this new one that had replaced it. She watched it kneel at the water’s edge. Then it plunged in, reappearing seconds later on the stilts, climbing about like a crab as it inspected the joints.

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
L
ov
s 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
L
ov
s 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
R
osa
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
L
ov
s. Shimmering white glassy
L
ov
s, 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
L
ov
s, 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
L
ov
s 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
L
ov
s. 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
L
ov
s alive despite the IBC,” Virgil added.

“The woman who filmed a documentary amid gunfire and car crashes, to win Hanoi’s sympathy to her cause.”

Virgil cocked his head, making his topknot bob. “Are you afraid?”

She tapped her
L
ov
s. “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
L
ov
s 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
L
ov
s.

“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
L
ov
s, 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
L
ov
s. 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
L
ov
s 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!”