Limit of Vision (32 page)

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.

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
L
ov
s 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
L
ov
s 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. His 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
L
ov
s 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
L
ov
s were an aspect of vibrant life that led to more life, not less. Losing the
L
ov
s 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.

The boy handed his farsights over to Virgil without protest, without tears, without angry words. Mother Tiger had arranged it all. But despair looked out of his eyes. As the Australian medic started to wheel the gurney through the houseboat’s French doors the boy had grabbed Virgil’s wrist, his tiny voice speaking a frantic question in Vietnamese. Mother Tiger translated: “He asks you, Why do they want to make me less human?”

The medic had frowned at the contact. “Better disinfect,” he advised Virgil. “Or you’ll be in here tomorrow.”

But there was no way to disinfect. And given the political storm that surrounded the
L
ov
s, there was no reason to believe the UN would rule on their petition anytime soon. That was why Virgil turned to smuggling.

His
accomplices were the
Roi Nuoc
cadres outside the reservation. They did not share in the
L
ov
s, but they looked forward to a time when they would. Over a period of two days these
Roi Nuoc
had secretly released three thousand sealed packets of antibiotics into the water upstream of the reservation. Virgil hoped to recover at least five percent as they drifted seaward on sluggish currents that followed the beds of old irrigation ditches and flooded canals. To do it, he’d enlisted the help of Ela’s spider.

He’d laid out the mission during a cognitive circle supervised by Mother Tiger: The spider was to slip beneath the water to search for packets, while alerting others of its kind to do the same. It had appeared to understand its role, but when they sent it out to search, it failed to return. Other spiders were sent after it, but not one of them came back. No antibiotic packets were recovered, and no one knew why.

“They’ve probably just misunderstood us,” Ela said again, as if saying it over and over might make it true. “They’re probably gathering the packets and hoarding them somewhere.”

Virgil was busy using wire ties to secure his newly acquired farsights to a short-legged spider that had been brought up in a net that morning. He didn’t believe in Ela’s benign explanation, but he didn’t want to argue, so all he said was, “We need to find out.” He fixed a two-foot-long wire antenna to the farsights so they could link to Mother Tiger even when the spider was submerged. Then they rode the flying saucer to the western edge of the reservation, gliding a few feet above the water.

The rain had stopped, and scattered blades of sunshine sliced the clouds. Mosquitoes hovered over the water in smoky black clouds. Ela threw a veil of mosquito netting over her head. Virgil smeared mud on his face and hands and the back of his neck, in his hair and over his ears, but he still suffered bites on his lips and eyelids. Yellow fever and malaria had turned up all along the Mekong since the beginning of the flood.

Nothing to be done about it now.

They stopped a quarter mile short of the fluorescent orange PVC poles that marked the reservation’s edge. Ela guided the flying saucer down, settling it on the surface of the water. Peeper balls floated past them, technological thistledown, watching as Virgil released the spider over the side.

The water was less than two feet deep, so the antenna protruded well above the surface. Virgil eyed the inset image in his farsights, but all he could see was drifting silt and dead weeds on the muddy bottom. With any luck the spider would find the packets—or at least find out what had happened to them. He watched as it marched away, its silver-blue shape blurring, then disappearing behind obscuring clouds of silt. Soon only the antenna marked its path.

Virgil felt a frisson of anxiety. He leaned forward, searching the water.

“Careful,” Ela said, from her post at the center of the flying saucer. “You’re going to fall.”

“Let’s follow the spider.”

“What? Why?” She tapped her farsights. “We can see where it’s going.”

“But we can’t see the spider itself, can we?”

“Is that important?”

“I don’t know.” He nodded at the touch pad. “Just for a few minutes.”

Ela looked grim as she stepped on a pad. Air hissed from the vents, and the flying saucer lifted, gliding after the little V-wake of the spider’s antenna. “We can’t go far.”

“We won’t.”

No one else was on the water, but peeper balls were everywhere. The IBC was watching, and they would certainly be arrested if they passed beyond the boundary poles.

Virgil leaned as far over the side as he dared, hoping for a glimpse of the spider’s silvery legs or of the blue-green globe at the base of the antenna—until unexpected motion drew his gaze away to the right. Something dull silver wavered there in a stray beam of sunlight. He pointed. “Is that another spider?” The inset image still showed only silt.

Ela shrugged. “We could go see.” She leaned on a touch pad, changing the flying saucer’s trajectory. At the same time the silver shape turned, gliding across their path, moving much too quickly, too smoothly, to be a spider. Sinuous as a fish. Just as the flying saucer passed over it, Virgil watched it spit out two silver capsules of turbulent water the size of his thumb. “Slow down!” he shouted as twin projectiles streaked from under the saucer and out of sight, on an angled path toward their spider.

Ela stomped a touch pad and brought the saucer to a dead stop as, twenty yards out, a burst of white light flashed twice under the muddy water. The inset image vanished as the water erupted in a brown dome six feet across, that collapsed back on itself with a rush and a roar. Whites shards of broken spider legs arced through the air, glittering as they tumbled end over end in the motley sunlight, falling back to the churning surface with a tinkling sound.

“Oh God,” Ela said. “They blew up the spider. Virgil, we’ve got to get out of here.”

She stomped the touch pad. Air hissed, and the flying saucer jerked backward, sending Virgil pitching forward onto his hands and knees so that he was staring at the water as the saucer passed back over the sinuous silver fish shape. Its tail thrashed. Its back crested the surface in a ridge of metallic segments and then it was gone. “What the hell was that?”

“Get away from the edge!” Ela shouted. She was beside him now, pulling him back toward the center. “Get back! If you slip into the water they’ll shoot you too. They’d love to do it, and call it an accident.”

“But what
was
that?” he asked as he scrambled to safety. “I never saw anything like that before—”

“I have.” She pulled him down, as if they had to hide from sniper fire. “It was a robo-sub. They’re used to guard the offshore farms, but the one I saw was armed with harpoons, not explosives.”

He closed his eyes, feeling the voracious mosquitoes bump against his hands and face. Anger nipped him. “I never even guessed! How long have they been patrolling the boundary of the reservation?
Shit
. They must have eliminated every spider that ever came this way.”

“And the antibiotic packets too.” He looked up to discover tears standing in Ela’s eyes. Tears. He had never seen her cry before. “Virgil, we aren’t going to last through this. We aren’t. They want us all to die here, one by one—”

“Ela—”

“It’s true! They talk at the UN but a vote never comes. The IBC trashes us. The media trash us. We are freaks! Dangerous criminals. But the IBC never wants a vote to take us out.
Why not?
Why do they want us to die like this? It makes no sense!”

Her fear broke against him, interpreted and enhanced by his symbiotic
L
ov
s, but he refused to submit to it. “We’re not going to die,” he said. “Not now. Not from this.” He gestured at the flood, trying not to see the broken spider legs littering the surface. “And sometimes freaks and dangerous criminals win in the end.” He tried a tentative smile. “You’ll see. In a few years we’ll all be glorious revolutionaries—” She started to turn away. “Ela?” He risked a light touch against her shoulder. “Don’t go. Don’t . . . give up. Please. Stay. Please?”

He opened his arms, and to his surprise she came to him. She leaned her head against his chest, her dark eyes staring out past her veil of mosquito netting to the receding orange boundary poles on the edge of the reservation. He held her, wanting to apologize, to say how sorry he was that his
L
ov
s had dragged her into this mess. But it wasn’t the truth. He was grateful to have her there.

34

They were silent
on the slow journey back, each alone with their thoughts. Ela worked at getting her dread locked up behind heavy pressure doors. Not so much under control, as confined. It had taken her by surprise, the way it had burst out whole like that. She was still keenly aware of it. It brushed at her consciousness, like the distant screams of a lunatic aunt locked up out of sight in a garden shed. But she could pretend not to hear.