Limit of Vision (33 page)

After a while she raised her head from Virgil’s chest, realizing they had gone too far. They had passed the platform she shared with Ninh and Oanh. The air was filled with the unaccustomed smell of the sea. “Where are we going?”

“I have something to show you,” Virgil said. “A surprise.”

Ela pulled away from him, feeling the return of her habitual caution. “
Surprise
is a tricky word, in the way it can mean either good or bad.”

“Good is the default meaning. You’ll like this.”

He had made his platform in sight of the ocean. He took her there, and it looked different than she remembered, bigger, with a white tower rising from one corner like a steep-walled tepee, or like a giant cone shell, eight feet high, with its point in the air. A light swell drew parallel lines of foam on the ocean, but nestled behind the sheltering wall of a levee, the water around the platform remained calm.

Ela stepped onto the mud-stained deck, while Virgil took the flying saucer down to the water, where he would moor it. She looked around, not so much because she was curious, but because if she didn’t divert her mind the subliminal raving of Auntie Dread might turn into words.

An olive drab canvas that looked as if it had been cut from the abandoned medical tent was stretched over a low frame of arched ribs, so that it made a mini Quonset hut. Mosquito netting covered both ends. Ela knelt to examine the interior and was not surprised to see that the ribs were made of structural
L
ov
s.

Beside the Quonset hut were several stacked crates of watertight plastic that looked as if they had been rescued from the medical tent along with the canvas. Behind them, young sweet potato vines trailed from a trough on the edge of the platform.

She turned, to find Virgil watching with an approving smile as she nosed about. He glanced meaningfully at the cone-shell tepee. She could smell the smoke of a citronella candle, and she wondered if someone was in there. “This is a large space for one person,” she observed.

Virgil shrugged. “I’m an American.”

Ela nodded. Her heart was beating faster now, though she could not say why. She took off her farsights and slipped them into the pocket of her pants, wanting to keep this surprise for herself. Then she circled around the back side of the cone-shell tepee until she found the door. Or the entrance, anyway. It was a narrow slit, formed as the wall wrapped around itself like the closing spiral of a seashell. A panel of mosquito netting draped the opening. Ela lifted the cloth and stepped through into a tiny alcove, where a citronella candle burned in a waist-high niche. Her shoulders scraped the walls. It seemed dark there, but only in contrast to what lay beyond. Slipping past the curve of the inner wall, she stepped into a tiny chamber brilliant with light that glittered and refracted against the white walls and white floor, playing among circular streaks of blue-green shadow.

Water trickled from overhead. Ela looked up to see crystal-clear streams dripping and twisting from the roof, like springwater seeping from porous stone. She thought it was rain leaking in until she realized that the water splashing against her feet was
warm
. She held her hand out, and a ribbon of water pattered her palm, pooling in her hand, warm and clear.

“It’s pumped up by veins of
L
ov
s,” Virgil said. She looked back, to see him standing in the slotted entrance. He watched her anxiously. His farsights were nowhere to be seen. “It’s filtered, then funneled through hollow spaces in the walls where it’s heated by sunlight.”

“It’s a shower?”

He nodded. “It’s not very hot.”

“I don’t remember what hot is.” She peeled off her poncho and dropped it on the floor. Then she stepped under the braided trickles. As the water ran through her oily hair and flowed past her closed eyes, she felt a frantic little laugh forming deep in her belly. It was a shower! A blessed, warm-water shower.

She wasn’t going to shower in her clothes.

Tossing her head back, she peeled off her long-sleeved shirt and dropped the filthy wreck on top of her poncho. Now the water’s fingers ran down past her gray sports bra and her mud-stained khaki pants. She unbuttoned those, and kicked them off too, watching Virgil watch her.

After a few seconds, he edged a little farther into the brilliant chamber. Then he hesitated . . . giving her a chance to scream or flee or order him out? Most gentlemanly. But when she failed to take advantage of this window of opportunity, he peeled off his own shirt and added it to her pile of things. The light wrapped across his pale skin, finding each seam between his muscles, each hollow between his ribs, glinting against the nearly invisible shafts of golden hair that sprouted in a sparse cross on his chest and belly.

He smelled of mud.

She smiled for the first time that day as the knots in her soul began to loosen. “Will you sit with me?”

She did not wait for an answer, but settled cross-legged on the floor, the warm water splashing, trickling through the candle-scented air. He hesitated, half-crouched, one hand on his knee. “You’re sure?”

She nodded, smoothing her wet hair back from her forehead. “Face me,” she said. “Think with me.”

He was warming up to this. She could see it in his eyes, in his half smile as he sat cross-legged on the glittering floor, combing his hair back with his large hands. He had started with a scattering of solitary
L
ov
s across his brow, but each one of those had since reproduced many times so that now his
L
ov
s gathered in gemlike clusters along his hairline. In the scintillating rainbow light they were almost colorless. He said: “I can’t hide what I’m feeling.”

“I don’t want you to.” Desire unfolded inside her like a lotus blooming, its petals falling open to reveal a banked fire at its center blazing up at the kiss of oxygen. She gave herself up to the feeling, leading her
L
ov
s to capture it, amplify it—

—and to
project
it.

She watched his eyes and saw lust bite down on him like a cobra’s jaws. A glassy look washed over his face. When he spoke, his voice had been squeezed to a hoarse whisper as if he were on a rack and this was all pain and not pleasure. “Why now, Ela?”

“I don’t know. I guess . . . in case there is no other time.” Striving not to lose this link with his eyes, she wrestled her sports bra off over her head. She slipped out of her mildewed swim shorts, cursing them for a chastity belt and swearing she would never put them on again.

Everything had changed. All her life, the future had been a mass tugging at her, drawing out her desires over years. A strange attractor bending her behavior on a long curved path around it. Now her future had burst apart into a fog of particles, and she could not see even an hour ahead.
Now
was all, and everything she was or ever would be felt suspended in this moment.

So intense was the focus the
L
ov
s gave her, that reality seemed to bend around her now, closing the two of them off in this chamber of light and candle scent and warm trickling water. She rose to her knees before him, drunk on the blush of her own body, suffused with warmth from toes to scalp.

He rose to meet her and she felt swallowed by a beast of slick warm hungers as he took her in his arms. “You’re not afraid.”

The words came from somewhere subterranean, rumbling beneath an Earth of blood and bone. True words. She whispered them back, as if they were a mantra. “
I’m not afraid
.” Her
L
ov
s had let her finally leave that behind.

Some
untroubled time had passed—hours, maybe—when Ela awoke to an insistent drumming, a pounding rhythm that forced her back into the world. She blinked, and the sound resolved into the drumming of rain against the dark curve of olive drab canvas that roofed Virgil’s Quonset hut. Gray light passing through the mosquito netting at the hut’s arched ends fell across her bare shoulder, illuminating a tiny, perfect, feather-soft organic robot crouched upon her skin, feeding on her blood. She watched it, marveling at its delicate wings, its fragile legs finer than a human hair, its tiny eyes, its sharp proboscis perfectly shaped to draw the life fluids from her body. Then she pulled a hand out from under the thermal sheet that covered her and shooed the engorged mosquito away.

Virgil slept beside her, covered by only a corner of the blanket. His face was a face of ancient beauty, an alabaster Buddha that has become one with the forest, embraced in vines, hearing enlightenment in a bird’s song—while along the curve of his pale hip three mosquitoes were having their way with him. She shooed them off too, then lightly kissed his lips, tasted his breath, brought her
L
ov
s close to his and shared the tranquility of his nondreaming mind.

The rain eased, giving way to human voices drawing nearer across the water. She sat up, wondering how she had come to be in the Quonset hut anyway. Her last memory was of the world ending in a blinding meltdown, an ecstatic dissolution of time and space as some god breathed into her soul and set a new world forming there.

Perhaps such a world had been conceived in some other fold of reality . . . while she had fallen back into the same world that had always claimed her.

She found her clothes—still soggy—draped across a line, and wriggled into them. Her farsights were still tucked in the pocket of her pants.

The voices arrived, along with the thunk of a boat against the platform. The soft tread of footsteps soon followed, generating a faint vibration in the floor. Virgil stirred and touched her back. She turned to find a tired smile on his face. “Lie down with me,” he whispered.

“People have come.”

“Only for a minute.”

“I think it’s Nash . . . and another man I don’t know.”

Virgil sat up with a frown of sharp concern. His arm went around her shoulder. “Stay here in the tent.” He mouthed the words, putting hardly any volume into them.

“Why?” Her voice was not as loud as her heartbeat. “What’s wrong?”

“The new man, Steven Ho. He calls himself a research scientist, but I’ve seen him. He’s a professional soldier.”

“Then he’ll already know who I am.”

“I don’t want him to know about us. He could use it against us.”

“He already knows, Virgil. You know they’re watching all the time, with their peeper balls, their surveillance drones, their robo-subs, and who knows what else. They’re listening to our whispers right now.
They know
.”

He shrugged. “I still want you to stay.”

He pulled on his pants and his shirt. He slipped on his farsights.

“Virgil,” Nash called in a low voice. Ela could hear him shifting from foot to foot as he waited a few yards beyond the Quonset hut. “Virgil, we know what you tried to do this morning.”

Virgil kissed Ela’s cheek. He kissed her ear, his reluctant sigh flowing warm against her neck and shoulder. “Stay here.” Then he crept out of the hut and stood, blocking the entrance so that she could not get out if she wanted to. Rainwater ran off the blue tek-fabric of his shirt as he crossed his arms over his chest. She could not see his face.

“Hello, Nash.”

Nash answered, sounding querulous. “We know about the smuggling attempt, Virgil. It’s over for you now. We’re asking to have your asylum revoked. You and Ela Suvanatat.”

“We didn’t do anything.”

From the back of the hut Ela heard a ripple of water, as soft and mechanically smooth as a desktop waterfall. She looked around, in time to see a tiny glass canoe slip past, only a few feet from the platform. Glass boats were not so unusual anymore. Seated in this one was a willowy girl dressed in light cotton clothes that might have once been white. A conical rain hat hid her face, but as she flashed past, Ela glimpsed her hand resting on the gunwale. It was pale, and skeletally thin . . . and it did not hold a paddle, or a pole.

So how did the boat move?

Ela scrambled to the back of the hut and looked out as the canoe rounded the end of the platform. The girl sat perfectly still, looking as if she had
willed
the canoe to turn.

Ela glanced back at Virgil. In the growing heat of argument he had apparently forgotten his resolve to blockade her inside the hut, for he had stepped away from the door. She heard him contesting with Nash about the smuggling incident: what it meant, if it had even happened. She didn’t think he had seen the canoe. It rode low in the water, and it had passed so close to the elevated platform that it was unlikely either man had seen it.

So Ela slipped her farsights on, tapped them to record, and scrambled out of the hut. Virgil looked at her in sharp surprise as she skipped past him. She in turn spent only a glance on Nash Chou, draped in a yellow poncho. Then she loped across the platform. On the other side, she looked down at the water, but already the canoe was out of sight. So she cut around the shower room—and almost ran into a stranger.

He stood at least six foot six, his bronze face veiled by a curtain of rain that ran off the brim of his canvas hat. He wore loose field pants stuffed into shiny, knee-high boots, and a green tek-fabric shirt that showed the line of every well-developed muscle in his broad shoulders. His eyes were hidden behind opaque farsights. He looked her over, before his attention returned to the water.

Virgil was right. Steven Ho did not look much like a researcher.

Ela shuffled cautiously up to the edge of the platform, not daring to take her eyes off him for more than a second or two at a time. She remembered the IBC cop who had tried to arrest her on the edge of the reservation, and how helpless she’d been in his hands. But her curiosity was stronger than her caution. She peered over the platform’s edge in time to see the girl making her way out of the glass canoe and onto the ladder. She looked to be about fifteen.

Ela leaned down, one hand on her knee. “How does your boat move?” she called.

The girl looked up with a radiant smile. In the space between her eyebrows and her hat, Ela could see a solid bridge of
L
ov
s. Never had she seen so many on one person. They gleamed like luminous skin. “The
L
ov
s in the hull all pump water like tiny squid, pushing the boat forward,” she explained, speaking in the Australian-accented English that seemed so popular among the
Roi Nuoc
. “My name is Lien.”

“I’m Ela. Your boat is lovely.” She said it with full sincerity as the girl climbed onto the platform.

Virgil joined them, his fingers touching Ela’s arm. “Hello, Lien.”

“Pleasant to see you again, Dr. Copeland.” Lien nodded, at the same time loosening the sash beneath her chin that held her hat in place.

Virgil looked to Ela. “Lien transplanted my
L
ov
s to Ky.”

Nash stood behind him now, an impatient look on his face. “Virgil! This new canoe is just one more rea—” He made a little gasping sound as Lien tipped off her hat to stand bareheaded in the rain. Ela felt her own breathing stop.

Lien’s head was sheathed in
L
ov
s. She had no hair, and no visible skin anywhere on her scalp. Only a glittering helmet of
L
ov
s that began at her eyebrows, ran past her ears, and ended at the nape of her neck.

“
My God
,” Nash whispered.

Steven Ho spoke in a coarser voice, “Holy Christ.”

Ela felt mesmerized by the glinting display; it took an effort of will to turn away. Apparently Virgil did not feel so vulnerable. He gazed at the girl while a faint, incredulous smile warmed his face. “Lien, you have been busy.”

She blushed. “Solutions are not so easy to find.”

“Where are your farsights?” he asked, and for the first time Ela realized the girl was not wearing any.

Lien patted the pocket of her blouse. “They are here.”

“Why aren’t you wearing them?”

She looked a little sad. Then she ran a hand across her glittering
L
ov
helmet. “Mother Tiger does not approve.” She slipped her hat back on, her lips pursed, as if it were a small thing, like spilled tea. “I am still
Roi Nuoc
.”

Nash stepped forward, his poncho rattling. He shook his round head. “Look at her, Virgil! This
child
. What do you think will be left of her when those
L
ov
s are removed? This is what it’s come to.
This is what you’ve done!
”

Lien looked at Nash as if he were some strange, wild beast. Then she turned back to Virgil. “I have a design for a citadel that will offer shelter to all the
Roi Nuoc
.”

“Shelter from what?” Steven Ho asked, speaking over Ela’s shoulder.

Lien took a moment to examine him. Then she smiled. “Shelter from the rain, the wind, the sea, the heat when it returns . . . but not from bombs or guns. We cannot hide from that if you finally choose to come against us.”