Limit of Vision (4 page)

4

Hunger lay beyond
the river mouth.

Ela Suvanatat stood at the side rail of Cameron Quang’s boat, staring in disbelief at a vast fleet of motley vessels cluttering the glassy surface of the South China Sea. The boats must surely number in the hundreds. She crossed to the other rail. It was the same. Most of the vessels were old: tiny, battered skiffs, their paint faded or gone. Their crews worked the water with nets and poles and wire traps: dark-haired men with skin like polished wood, or women swaddled in worn colors to cheat the sun. The boats filled the bright blue water out to a hazy horizon where oil-drilling platforms walked in ghostly steps, winking into view, only to fade into the haze before appearing again farther down the coast.

In the heat, in the brilliant sunlight, Ela had a wavering sense that none of this was real. These fisherfolk were not people, they were spirits, human desire endlessly drawing in empty nets.

But hunger could not be dreamed away.

Ela tapped her fingers, summoning Kathang to record the view through her farsights. A panoramic would be needed somewhere early in the article—but she felt sick thinking about what that article would show. The Coastal Society wanted an exposé on the ravages of overfishing. They did not want to ponder these people who must make a life where life had been all used up.

At least it was going to be easy to get dramatic material.

She clipped goggle cups to her farsights, then she made her first dive. It was a short foray, ten minutes to get some video of the stripped bottom. Lost nets and tangled fishing line were everywhere, half-buried in the mud or floating ghostlike in the murky water near the seafloor. As she returned to the boat she saw one small school of coin-sized silver fish. They darted into sight and disappeared, like an omen of good fortune that decided not to stay.

Cameron Quang was drinking another Coca-Cola when she climbed out of the water. “See anything?” he asked.

“A few small fish. A lot of garbage.”

She made two more dives as the red-eyed boat journeyed slowly out to the oil-drilling platforms.

The offshore fields were tapped out, but the platforms still found use as the hubs of vast fish farms. As the boat drew closer, Ela could make out fiberglass poles rising from the ocean, with floating lines strung between them that enclosed vast acres of calm water. The closest fishing boat was a quarter mile away. “Can I dive out here?” she asked the captain when the boundary was only a few hundred feet off the bow.

His answering grin was sly. “You wanh uh do some poaching?”

“I want to get some pictures.”

“That’s what theah all say.” But he cut the boat’s engines. Then he used his farsights to talk with someone on the platform. “Okay, ah warned them you’ll be out here, so maybe they won’t shoot you? You dive while ah do my business. Half an hour, and ah’ll pick you up.”

She nodded and slipped her rebreather pack on. “Don’t forget where I am.”

His grin widened.

Ela dropped over the side of the boat, letting her weight carry her slowly down through the blue water. At thirty-five feet she found the bottom . . . and a robotic drone found her. The meter-long robo-sub eased silently out of the murk, moving with fishlike sinuousness. Button cameras studded its prow, while two racks of steel harpoons were mounted on either side. Ela froze, staring at the device, afraid to move, afraid some jerk on the platform was looking back at her through the cameras, just waiting to launch a harpoon if she so much as twitched a finger. She understood now why the fisherfolk stayed away.

The standoff continued for two or three minutes, and then Ela’s patience gave way. The rebreather pack would let her stay there all day, but the captain had given her only half an hour. She did not believe he would spend much time looking for her if she failed to appear.

So she dug her fingers into the muddy bottom and pushed off, gliding slowly backwards. The robo-sub followed her—but it didn’t shoot. She took encouragement from that. Checking her compass, she determined the direction of the fish farm, and with a slow kick of her fins, she set off to find it. The robo-sub kept pace, but it did not try to stop her.

In less than a minute a dark shadow loomed in the murk, resolving into a wide-gauge mesh wall, rising from the ocean floor all the way up to the bright blue surface. It marked a boundary of terrible contrast. Beyond the mesh she could see a seemingly endless school of meter-long fish swimming counterclockwise along the barrier, moving with machine efficiency through the middle depths. Outside the mesh there was nothing.

She started to swim closer, but her presence startled the school. It broke up, the fish spilling inward to escape her predator shape. The robo-sub responded, slipping in front of her to block her advance.

It was time to go anyway. She headed for the surface, feeling only a little worried when she discovered that Cameron Quang was not there. She inflated her buoyancy vest and drifted a few meters outside the mesh. After several minutes her worry grew more intense. She was a long way from the dock on the distant platform. She could probably swim that far . . . if the patrolling robo-subs would let her.

Several more minutes passed. She listened to wavelets slap against her rebreather pack and wondered why she had chosen to devote herself to a journalism career when she could have been telling fortunes or dealing in stocks or . . . or . . . teaching Thai at some university in Australia. Yeah.

After another minute she tapped her fingers, sending a link request to her job broker, Joanie Liu.

Joanie surprised her by picking up right away. She looked flustered, which was even more unusual. “Ela? So glad you checked in. How did you know to call? I have a gentleman on-link who is interested in the story you’re doing. I advise you to talk to him.
Very
influential. It could mean an important job for you.”

“I’m stranded at sea,” Ela said.

Joanie rolled her eyes. “Ela, why must you be so difficult? This is no time for you to be particular.” She did not wait for a reply. Her image dissolved, coming together again as the image of a handsome, crisply dressed Asian businessman, perhaps thirty years old. There was something calculating in the set of his eyes, as if he were in the habit of evaluating everything he saw in terms of its investment potential. Kathang confirmed it.
This one sees without a veil
—
when he is not looking at himself
.

The businessman’s smooth lips turned in a ghost of a smile as if he had overheard. “Ms. Suvanatat,” he said. “Lately of Bangkok? I am Ky Xuan Nguyen. Your broker . . .” He frowned. “What is her name?”

Ela was sure he knew her name perfectly well. “Joanie Liu,” she said in a timid voice.

“Ms. Liu, yes. She has given you poor advice. The Coastal Society is not an organization you want to deal with.”

Ela felt suddenly cold. Her gaze shifted to Kathang’s little salamander image. She tapped a code and nodded, setting the
R
osa
to stalking Nguyen’s profile. A wavelet splashed in her mouth. She spit the salt water out, and said, “I’m only preparing an article, Mr. Nguyen.”

“A propaganda piece.”

She didn’t dare to contradict him. Hadn’t she thought the same thing?

He asked: “Do you know why the public waters here are barren?”

It was obvious wasn’t it? And still it sounded like an accusation that she did not want to make. “T-too many . . . people.”

“That is the shallow answer. I’m sure you don’t feel we should exterminate the people so the fish might make a comeback. Of course not. The deeper reason these waters remain barren is because groups like the Coastal Society have sponsored international regulations banning fertilization in the open ocean. Boosting the level of dissolved nutrients in these waters would boost the population of plankton, with repercussions all the way up the food chain. But international law forbids this, with the result that independent fisherfolk starve, while commercial farms thrive producing protein that only the rich can afford.”

Kathang returned, to whisper a report into Ela’s water-filled ear: “
Ky Xuan Nguyen is the thir
d-
ranking officer in a regional advertising firm known as Middle Nature.
A graduate of Harvard Business School
. . .
” Ela’s eyes widened as she listened. She could not imagine why such a man cared about fish.

“Ms. Suvanatat?” Nguyen prodded. “Have you learned enough about me to give an answer?”

Ela felt her cheeks heat, despite the cool water. Softly: “I’ve only been charged with showing what
is
, Mr. Nguyen.”

“That would be hunger.”

The Coastal Society would not want to hear that side of the story, but Ela nodded anyway. It didn’t matter: The link with Nguyen had already closed.

Cameron Quang returned with the boat a few minutes later. He helped her aboard, but he did not make any jokes about poaching. He looked frightened, like a man who has been shown his tomb, with the date of death tentatively chalked on the wall. “You want to go ashore now?” he asked quietly, his Southern-American drawl much faded. Ela set the rebreather pack down on the deck and nodded, wondering if he had been talking to Nguyen too.

She
could not get Ky Xuan Nguyen out of her mind. What did he want from her? She had accepted the Coastal Society contract. She had already spent their money. She
had
to do the article. She had to make it acceptable to them, and still she brooded over what Nguyen had said about shallow answers.

At least the panoramas and the underwater scenes were done. The next requirement of the article was a critical look at “an illegal shoreline settlement.” That meant a night spent at a squatters’ village, gathering a profile of life on the coast.

She packed her equipment, cramming everything but the rebreather into her backpack. She would have to take it all with her. The balance of her fee would be forfeit if the diving equipment was not returned, and she did not trust Cameron to hold it.

The captain’s face took on an expression of acute concentration as he worked his way past a final shore-guard of inner tubes, swimming children, and tiny canoes. The shore itself was a mudflat, slick and glistening and utterly bare of debris. As the boat approached, throngs of tiny, bright-eyed children spilled out of a shantytown built on poles above the high-water mark. Dressed in T-shirts and faded shorts, they ran back and forth at the water’s edge, leaving faint, wet impressions where their feet touched, their motion intense and intermittent, like sand crabs.

As Ela prepared to leave the boat, she pretended a confidence she did not feel. She’d explored alone before and knew that strangers were usually welcomed by villagers as a potential source of money, food, information—even entertainment. Still, one could never be sure.

She hefted her backpack onto her right shoulder, the dive pack onto her left. When the water was three feet deep, the captain threw a rope to some boys who had been working a small hand net. They held the boat, while Ela slipped over the side. She still wore the sleeveless vest of her wet suit, but she had pulled on a pair of shorts and a long-sleeve shirt to protect herself from the sun.

She hesitated beside the boat, looking up at the captain, wondering if he would come back for her tomorrow. She had held on to part of his fee to ensure his return, but it was a minuscule sum. Not nearly enough to buy loyalty. “Tomorrow,” she muttered. Then she waded ashore onto land that had not existed a year ago.

The muddy coast of the Mekong Delta fought a continuous battle with the sea. Each rainy season, alluvial deposits were laid down in the annual flood, extending the coastline by up to two hundred feet . . . until the rising sea crawled over the new land, chewing at it, filling the rivers with salt. Massive sea dikes guarded much of the coast, but nothing protected this strand. That had not stopped people from settling here. The ramshackle village boasted hundreds of homes, all built on poles above the steaming mud. Some had walls of black-plastic greenhouse cloth. Others had half-height rails of mismatched timber or broken pieces of old government signs. There wasn’t much point in building something more permanent, Ela decided as she walked between the shanties. At best, these people could stay there only through the dry season. When the Mekong flooded again, they would have to move on.

Several older women stared at her as she went by. They refused to smile, or return her greeting. It was not an unusual reaction, given their age, and Ela refused to let herself become discouraged. After a few minutes she spotted a new mark: a young woman, sitting cross-legged on a platform, working at a snarled knot of fishing line while a little boy whispered in her ear. His furtive glance darted to Ela, then he slipped behind a crate. The young woman smiled.

It was the best opening Ela had seen. “
Chào
,” she said, hurrying forward. Then she expended her full arsenal of Vietnamese. “
Tên tôi là Ela Suvanatat
.
Xin lôi
, c
ô
t
ên
l
à
gì
.
”
What is your name?

The woman returned Ela’s greeting, giving her name as Phuong. Her black hair was tied in a neat ponytail and she wore a double layer of faded T-shirts, the outer one short-sleeved, the inner one long. Her trousers were loose-cut, gray-black.

Ela produced a wireless speaker from an outside pocket of her backpack. Then she tapped her fingers, directing Kathang to translate. “
May we talk?
” she whispered. A flurry of stiff, metallic Vietnamese poured from the little box.

Phuong raised a hand to her face to hide a laugh. “I speak English,” she said, a giggle in her voice. “Also some French.”

Ela blushed. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask.

At the
center of the roofless platform a pile of plastic crates defined a little room where four young children clustered around a flowscreen powered by a car battery. An animated turtle demonstrated how to draw an
X
in the romanized Vietnamese alphabet, while the kids stared wide-eyed at Ela as she sat with Phuong on a
chiêu
, a plastic reed mat.