Limit of Vision (26 page)

It started
raining on the way. Ky produced from his pocket an object the size of a bar napkin, popping it open into a conical, broad-brimmed hat that kept the rain out of his face and off his farsights. Virgil envied him, plagued as he was by a constant storm of droplets running down his screen.

After a few minutes’ walk, they came to a small pasture of lush, tangled grass. “We’re close now,” Virgil said. “It was somewhere in this field.”

“I see,” Ky answered in an amused voice, as Mother Tiger highlighted the exact spot in their farsights.

The path had been used several times since the find was made; whatever telltale tracks there might have been were long gone. But off to one side, on a berm half-reclaimed by pasture grass, rainwater had gathered in an interesting spattering of little holes, each one perfectly round, so that it looked like tiny coins had been dropped in the mud.

“I hadn’t noticed that,” Virgil admitted when Ky pointed it out. “It wasn’t so obvious before the rain.”

Ky pressed the end of the tube into a hole. “Perfect fit. Cribbage?”

Virgil slipped his little finger into another hole. It was less than a quarter inch deep. He explored several more. All were nearly the same depth, the same width. “Hey, what’s this?” he asked. Instead of soft mud walls, he had found a peg hole lined with something sharp and brittle. He crooked his finger and carefully drew out a flat, muddy ring that transformed to bone white as the rain washed it clean.

“It’s part of the tube,” Ky said, lifting it off Virgil’s finger. The size was right. He held it close to his farsights. “
L
ov
s,” he confirmed. “All dead shells.” Experimenting, he poked the tube into the mud. It left a ring mark, not a pit. He looked at Virgil. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. The peg holes all seem to be concentrated in this one area, but take a step away from the path . . .” He did so. “And suddenly the grass is too thick to allow prints.”

Ky ventured past him, studying the ground. “It’s not all grass out here. Look.” Apparently a cow or a water buffalo had been put to graze on this patch of grass. Ky pointed to a pile of dung, marked with two water-filled peg holes. “A child at play,” he suggested.

“Do children play with dung?”

“You want a mystery.”

“I’ve got one.”

They crossed the pocket pasture without finding any other marks. Then Ky stooped, retrieving something from the ground, and holding it up in triumph. “The end piece of the pipe,” he announced.

That
was
what it looked like: a slip of pipe with one end bluntly tapered in a closed cap. Ky tried it against the longer section he held in his hand. The width was the same, but it did not match. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he muttered.

By this time they had attracted the attention of several cadres of
Roi Nuoc
. . . or perhaps Mother Tiger had summoned them. Ky looked pleased to have the help. He organized them in a neat line and together they combed the ground, looking for more peg holes, or bits of broken pipe. But the search went all the way to the next rice paddy without finding anything more.

They huddled at the paddy’s edge, enduring a rain that fell with the steadiness of a suburban hose as they tried to decide what to do next. “Either we go through the paddy,” Ky said. “Or we go back and try the other side of the path.”

Virgil was already cold and wet, his fatigues encrusted with mud. He had no desire to go wading into the paddy, but that wasn’t a universal feeling. Two little girls had plaited a grass fishing line, baiting it with a crushed beetle. Now they were wading between the rows of rice, hunting for secretive crayfish. Virgil frowned at them. “I guess I’d rather go back—”

His offer of retreat was interrupted by a duo of sharp screams, followed instantly by hysterical giggles as the two girls stumbled backward out of the paddy. Virgil thought it must have been an awfully big crayfish to inspire that reaction, but then the girls’ excitement spread to the kids who met them on the bank. Little screams and sharp, incredulous laughter marked their retreat as they scattered from the paddy.

Along with everyone else Virgil hurried over to see the cause of the excitement.

Staggering through the narrow lane between loose rows of early rice was a thing like a cartoon spider, or one of those deep-water arctic crabs. It had four spindly, bone-white legs, each with a single limber joint bent in an upside-down V. A veiled globe of
L
ov
s the size of a grapefruit was suspended in a glittering white cage between the legs . . . like the body of a daddy longlegs.

Except half its legs were missing.

It stood knee high.

Virgil watched, openmouthed, as it tottered out of the paddy. The kids scattered from its path with a chorus of delighted screams.

The globe was bright blue-green, glittering and alive. Green streaks like tributaries ran up from it, to touch the green-tinted joints. Rainwater struck it and sluiced away as the thing staggered, slipping in the mud, only to gather its balance somehow and push on. Apparently, it had started with more legs than it was currently using. Virgil could see two useless stumps sticking up in the air like short antennas. Even as if he watched, the tip broke from one of its remaining limbs. The bolder of the two little girls rushed in to pick it up.

Despite the injury, the creature continued across the pocket pasture, stumbling constantly, over tufts of grass, old branches, and dung piles. And still it recovered its balance every time, like a wounded soldier, struggling for dignity.

The kids followed it, and Virgil and Ky went with them.

The spider’s progress across the pasture was slow, but once it reached the path its gait changed. It moved rapidly, scuttling through puddles of rain water, looking always as if it were on the edge of toppling over yet never quite falling all the way. The kids followed in a raucous parade, with more
Roi Nuoc
joining at every turn until at last the path dipped down close to a shrimp pond.

The
L
ov
spider staggered toward the water as if this had been its goal all along. It plopped in, instantly disappearing beneath the rain-pocked surface.

“Well,” Nguyen said, over the children’s sudden silence. “That
is
interesting.”

Virgil resisted the temptation to shove him into the pond.

The spider did not reappear again that day, but the next morning
three
spiders, with six legs each, scurried out of the pond. Dozens more had been seen at other sites across the reservation, and Virgil had a new theory to explain where the missing globes had gone.

27

Late one night
Virgil awoke to the sound of familiar voices engaged in loud argument. He had fallen asleep in an empty treatment room inside the medical tent. Now he lay in the dark, listening, as the UN physician, Dr. Morikawa, put on an indignant defense:

“Try to understand what I’m telling you, Nguyen. I don’t have the medical supplies to treat her. This girl is already severely dehydrated. If her fever is not brought down, if her diarrhea isn’t controlled—”

“She’ll die!” Ky said. “I know it. That’s why I brought her to you.”

“I’ve already told you—”

“Supplies can be brought in!”

“Not according to authorities. She must be evacuated now. Tonight.”

Virgil levered himself off the exam table where he’d been sleeping and stumbled to the curtained door. His sudden appearance brought a pause in the argument as both Ky and Dr. Morikawa turned defensive stares in his direction.

“Who is she?” Virgil blurted, irrationally afraid that it would be Ela. He lifted aside the curtain of the second treatment room to see a little girl lying on the cot. She was eight or nine years old at most. Her face had an unhealthy sheen, and she twitched in a restless sleep.
L
ov
s glittered on her forehead.

Virgil let the curtain fall back into place and turned again to Dr. Morikawa. “She has
L
ov
s. She can’t be evacuated. You have to request supplies.”

The doctor shook her head, anger drawn in tight furrows between her eyes. “Supplies will not be permitted. Do you think we haven’t planned for this situation? It was only a matter of time before a case like this turned up. I’m surprised it took this long, given the foul conditions you subject these children to—”

“Conditions imposed on us by the treaty!” Ky interrupted.

“Politics are not my concern. Medical issues are. The guidelines for this situation require evacuation of the patient. Once she’s in hospital, her
L
ov
s will be removed.”

Virgil stalked closer, certain he must have misheard. “You’re planning to
remove
her
L
ov
s?”

“We have to.” Dr. Morikawa backed off a step, glancing nervously at Ky. “They’re illegal outside the reservation.”

“Yet you won’t treat her inside?” He turned to Ky. “You see what they’re doing? They know conditions will only get worse. They’ve designed this to be a war of attrition.”

“Evidently,” Ky said flatly. He turned to Dr. Morikawa. “Exactly
how
will you remove her
L
ov
s?”

“A neurosurgeon has been retained. It shouldn’t be hard. She hasn’t had them long.”

Virgil said, “It will be hard on her.”

The physician turned to him with an angry glare. “Do you want her to die, Dr. Copeland?”

“Of course not!”

“There is no choice in the matter. She must be evacuated.”

Ky lifted his chin, his smooth face falling into a masklike expression. “Where will she be taken?”

“I can’t answer that. Security concerns, you understand.”

“I want to be kept posted as to her condition.”

“That may not be possible. Medical records are private, and she is not your daughter after all.”

Ky’s hands coiled into fists. It was the only sign that betrayed his fury. “We are a family,” he said. “A . . . a
tribe
. Our petition for UN recognition claims rights of kinship—”

“The petition hasn’t been granted yet,” Dr. Morikawa interrupted icily. “Mr. Nguyen, you did the right thing in bringing her here. That’s why I’m taking this time to talk to you. When another child falls ill—and it’s inevitable, it
will
happen—I hope you make the same choice. I have my own fleet of peepers. I try to keep track of things, but it wouldn’t be hard to discover an illness too late. You may see evacuation as an unpleasant outcome, but it is better—far better—than death.”

Virgil listened to this speech, searching Dr. Morikawa’s face for some hint of shame, but he found none. She believed every word she was saying. “This
is
a war of attrition,” he said bitterly. “A siege. Sooner or later each of us is bound to succumb to something.”

“If it’s a siege, at least it’s a humane one,” Dr. Morikawa snapped, stepping toward the treatment room. She lifted aside the curtain. “Be grateful you won’t have to face the tragedy of your own dead.” Then she disappeared behind the cloth, putting an end to the debate.

“Don’t lose heart,” Ky said, placing an encouraging hand on Virgil’s shoulder. “We only have to survive until our petition is granted. They know our urgency. It can’t be long.”

28

Ela crouched beside
a tiny farm road that linked two complexes of catfish ponds. It was past midnight, and the rain fell in a mild, yet relentless drizzle. No one stirred. No one human anyway.

Strips of half-drowned grass marked the dike tops dividing the rain-flooded ponds. Along these disappearing paths, at least a hundred glass spiders scurried in random bursts of motion, first in one direction, then another.
Like ants
, Ela thought, trading instructive scents. Or like puppies touching noses. Some had four jointed legs; some had six. A few had many more than that. In nightvision their legs were dull silver, while the living globes—nested inside a hanging cage suspended within the circle of their legs—blazed a brilliant white.

It looked like a Hollywood alien invasion.

The spiders had changed in the handful of days since Ky and Virgil discovered their existence. Their structural
L
ov
s had developed thicker, stronger walls, and they were fused together in multiple layers, producing toughened legs and less breakage. Even more interesting, the
L
ov
spiders had become skilled walkers. Stumbling was rare now, and none ever fell down.

They still did not seem to have much of a visual sense. The central globe could detect minute shifts in light—that was how they communicated—but it seemed doubtful they could assemble light into coherent images. When traversing an unfamiliar trail they appeared to feel their way using one front limb. Ela suspected they could trace scent trails too, and of course they could trade information with one another, perhaps creating a mental map of neighborhoods they had never actually visited.

She turned to look in the other direction, where she could just see the second pond complex. It was smaller, and there were fewer glass spiders in sight—perhaps half as many—most of them still moving sluggishly out of ponds peppered with rain.

One of the soldiers had given Ela a rain poncho. She huddled inside it, listening to the patter of drops and waiting. Gradually, the activity she had observed over the last two nights began once again as a lone spider ventured out of the larger pond complex. It tapped at the slick mud of the tiny farm road. Then it edged forward on four legs, before pausing to tap again. Ela waited, motionless, as it drew near. It paused again when it was just a few inches away. Its front leg reached out, gently tapping her knee. She shifted, lifting away the hood of her poncho, exposing the arc of
L
ov
s that gleamed along her hairline.

The glass spider froze with its probing limb half-raised. Ela felt a sense of recognition wash over her and she wondered if this spider might carry one of the original globes she had tended in the ponds. What a lucky break that would be, if it was already familiar with her!

She touched her forehead, hoping her desire for communication could be read in the pattern flashed by her gleaming
L
ov
s. An answer was immediately returned as her mind flooded with an alien echo of her desire. “
Talk to it!
” she whispered, eyeing Mother Tiger’s watermark outline crouched in the corner of her screen. The tiger shape was all but invisible to the casual glance; only the tip of its twitching tail caught the eye. Now the cat stood, gaining solidity as it lifted itself from the background. “As we have planned,” Mother Tiger purred.

A band of blue-green expanded over Ela’s farsights, blocking her vision, while immersing her in a sensorium of
L
ov
s. This was Mother Tiger’s voice, translated to the optical spectrum. The
R
osa
had swallowed everything Virgil could teach it of
L
ov
language in only a few hours. Then it had leaped ahead with its studies, feeding on data gathered from the ponds.

It was hard to know how much it understood. Direct translation was still not possible, and Mother Tiger had suggested it might never be, because
L
ov
s did not communicate in words, or link naturally into grammar modules. It was true E-3 had spoken, but E-3 had been artificially schooled and provided with an electronic speech synthesizer. In these flooding delta ponds a different style of communication had developed that had little in common with human language. Tonight would test whether Mother Tiger had truly gained an understanding of it.

Ela breathed softly, shivering a bit in the rain. Her
L
ov
s flashed, communicating unknowable complexes of information to the intelligence embodied in the
L
ov
globe, nestled before her within its carriage of spider legs. Through Ela’s farsights Mother Tiger flashed still another
L
ov
pattern.
While I
—
this self-aware human I
—
speak and listen to Mother Tiger
.

It was a cognitive circle. Ela’s breath caught as she realized this. A cognitive circle made of herself, the
R
osa
, and the shimmering globe.

Gabrielle had died in a cognitive circle.

“But I am not Gabrielle.” She spoke the words aloud, like a prayer. “I am not Gabrielle.”

She had come here to relay a very specific idea; she would not allow herself to be trapped in an open-ended conversation.

Drawing a deep breath, she pushed her fear aside.

The blue-green light of her farsights was all she could see now. It flowed over her, enfolded her, and for a long time she perceived it only as raw sensation, inducing a hypnotic state for her mind to play against, but then gradually, gradually, meaning seeped from the color. New memories condensed out of the chaos of light. She felt—or had she known it before?—the glass spider was only a
mechanism
. A tool made by the cognizant globe, grown from special structural
L
ov
s that fused to form these legs and then died—like coral polyps blending to build a reef. Being mechanical components, they no longer required nutritional support.

Only the joints were alive.

She grew aware of the pulse of fluids pumped through tiny tubes (formed of yet a different kind of structural
L
ov
) delivered to the living
L
ov
s that formed the joints. It was a crude, inefficient system. Already the globe was drying up as its scant store of nutrients ran out. Within minutes this spider would need to return to a pond and refresh itself with dissolved organic matter.

Ela knew these things. They were facts, formed in her mind from the neural connection of her implanted
L
ov
s, and the whispering voice of Mother Tiger. They became her own experience.

What she communicated in return she could not say, or how many seconds passed before Mother Tiger opened the question that had inspired Ela to undertake this cognitive circle:
S
ince structural
Lovs
can be used to build limbs, might they be arranged as other structures too?
She strove to visualize what she desired, while Mother Tiger conversed in unknowable detail.

Time passed, and the language evolved. Mother Tiger’s clumsy first efforts grew more refined while Ela felt her own mind adapting, so that she no longer distinguished between the sensations of her swarming thoughts and the
R
osa
’s hypnotic murmur.