Limit of Vision (34 page)

35

Summer had not
been outside in days. She was afraid to go outside; afraid of the very bodyguards who had been assigned to “protect” her. Their real job was to make sure she did not talk to the wrong people, she was sure. So day after day she sat in her office, under the surveillance cameras of the IBC, and toyed with design after molecular design, projected in three dimensions on her wall screen.

She had supervised the development of six separate viral weapons to be used against the
L
ov
s. Three were simple, organic toxins attached to a viral vector. They would act as mutagens, interfering in
L
ov
reproduction. Three were debilitating viruses that would act directly against a
L
ov
host. All had been designed to distinguish between a symbiotic
L
ov
and one outside a human immune system. She still brooded over the reason behind this. Why did Daniel Simkin want to preserve the symbiotic
L
ov
s?

Of course Simkin denied that preservation was his goal; he cited international laws against germ warfare:
We may not be allowed to attack the symbiotic Lovs directly; we need to be prepared for whatever level of war we are allowed to wage
.

It was a sound argument. So why couldn’t she believe it?

She looked up at a molecular model of her latest effort projected on the wall screen of the darkened room. It rotated slowly, glowing in colorful 3-D. Her team had not synthesized it yet, but if they could learn to fabricate it, they would have something quite different from any other project developed to date. This was a marker virus, designed to find any remnant asterids that might have been left behind in the evacuated children, when their
L
ov
s were removed.

Perhaps, though, what was really needed was a marker virus to find the evacuated children? They were being kept under a remarkable veil of secrecy. Even the tabloids, with all their money, had not found even one of them to interview. Summer had a hard time believing that everyone involved in the welfare of these children was immune to bribes.

Of course, reports had been issued on each evacuated child. Summer had received copies like everyone else, but each bulletin amounted to nothing more than a brief, vanilla description: “all signs normal; rapid recovery; a bright and healthy child.” All in all, a benign portrait that could only stir suspicion. Neurological intervention was never that easy, but Simkin refused to discuss her concerns, and no one else she had cornered would admit to knowing more.

Summer cautioned herself against unwarranted speculation. No meaningful conclusion could be drawn on a mere absence of fact. Still, she could not escape a sense of unease. Were the children being kept out of sight because the procedure used to remove the
L
ov
s had gone seriously wrong?

She dropped her farsights on the desk. Then she got up, and paced.

What if there
had
been trouble? What if the neurosurgery involved in removing the
L
ov
s was more dangerous than anyone wanted to admit? Was it possible that some (or all?) of the children had suffered permanent brain damage?

The procedure could only grow more difficult with each successive child, as time enhanced the complexity of neural connections, and the children continued to accumulate
L
ov
s.

Summer stopped her pacing. She clasped her hands behind her back, staring past the rotating display. Might the
Roi Nuoc
win their petition by default, if experience showed the symbiosis was impossible to undo?

Simkin would want to hide a fact like that, no matter what his personal agenda might be.

She sighed, knowing the true explanation might be completely different.
God, how I hate secrecy!

“Refresh screen.”

The display blanked to a dim gray glow that bled into the darkened room, picking out edges, wrapping around the raw shapes of things.

When Summer had first conceived the
L
ov
project it had promised so much. Mental illness had always haunted human history. A subtle imbalance of brain chemicals could turn a loving individual into a helpless, hopeless shell of humanity, steered by a mind utterly detached from reality. Drugs and therapy and even surgery sometimes helped, but they were all crude cures, akin to setting off bombs in a city to kill the rats that spread plague. By contrast the
L
ov
s had offered a subtle, infinitely adjustable means of balancing neurochemical signals—but nothing ever unfolds as foreseen.

Summer had conceived the
L
ov
project as a cure for a host of mental afflictions, but now she had to wonder: Had she accomplished the destruction of these children instead?

36

The Sea Palace
grew on the coast, beyond the last of the sea dikes with their forests of replanted mangrove. Its foundation was an estuarine mudflat, built up by silt and sediment from the flood. When the dry season came and the river receded to its banks this would be new land, unowned by anyone. For now though, water stood knee deep over the site.

That didn’t matter to the spiders. They convened around Lien as she crouched in the shallows, forty-eight of them, gathered in loose concentric circles. In the gray daylight beneath the perpetual clouds, the
L
ov
s on Lien’s skull could be seen gleaming as they communicated to the spiders the design she had conceived for the Sea Palace. Virgil stood at a respectful distance with a small crowd of
Roi Nuoc
. He hungered to know what Lien herself was feeling during this exchange. Did she have a direct awareness of the dialogue between the
L
ov
colonies? Or was she just another kind of chassis for the
L
ov
s to ride? Spider legs with an agile pair of hands attached, and a little extra processing power . . .

Mother Tiger still did not approve. The
R
osa
had become a tiny icon stalking the screen of Virgil’s farsights, back and forth, back and forth, anger caught within a cage. Lien did not wear her farsights.

Almost two hours passed, and then the conference of spiders broke up. Some scuttled fifty yards up or down the coast; others waded closer to the silt bars and the foaming lines of breakers that marked the estuary’s intersection with the sea. An IBC platform had been anchored beyond the breaking waves. Virgil could see someone there, watching the gathering on shore while a cloud gray drone floated overhead, recording the spectacle of the spiders arranging themselves in precise ranks, defining the shape of a regular pentagon with an area as large as a city gymnasium, one point facing out to sea. The spiders crouched in place, so that their central globes disappeared beneath the shallow water; only the bend in their knees remained above the surface, leaving the estuary looking as if it had been pierced with circles of shining white sticks.

The spiders did not move again. Lien returned to her territory; the other
Roi Nuoc
scattered to their own holdings on small glass boats or flying machines. Virgil stayed until sunset, but nothing more happened that day—at least, nothing he could see.

By next morning the situation had changed. The spiders were still in place, but now a low, pentagonal foundation of
L
ov
s grew around, beneath, and between them, like a concrete pour locking their legs in place. The day after that the spider chassis were completely buried—but the globes no longer nested within them. They had been lifted above the growing platform, each one held in a transparent cup at the top of knee-high pedestals that rose as the platform rose.

The UN scientists brought in heavy equipment to map the subterranean structure; they drilled test cores and what they found surprised no one: The Sea Palace grew from roots extending deep into the mud of the delta. Ten thousand years of mud. Ela tried to imagine the archaeology being done down there as the roots dissected the remains of animist cultures, of Chinese and Viet and French kingdoms, of twentieth-century war.

When Lien first shared her plans, Ky had worried about the wisdom of the project: “It’s too big. It will be seen as a fortress. It will look as if we are
daring
the IBC to attack.” The
Roi Nuoc
had listened politely while the project advanced with the same unalterable momentum that seemed always to surround the
L
ov
s. It was as if they generated a cultural gravity that pulled everything around them faster and faster into an unknowable future.

The foundation grew for a week, fed by its invisible root system. It was the trick of
L
ov
s that they would program most of their structural members to die off, so that the mass of the project grew rapidly while the number of living
L
ov
s requiring metabolic support increased at a much slower rate. Most structural
L
ov
s survived only long enough to deposit one more scant layer of limestone, before they were buried by the progeny that would form the next.

The root system expanded in a similar fashion: Its network of fragile veins grew far faster than the number of living
L
ov
s requiring nutritional support, so that as the days passed, more and more material was transported to the Sea Palace, allowing it to grow at an ever-increasing rate, until oxygen became the limiting factor. No one realized how thoroughly the
L
ov
s’ frantic metabolism had scoured the air around the platform until Ky made the mistake of taking two reporters on a tour of the project, on a day when the rain had stopped and the wind did not stir. Within minutes they were dizzy from lack of oxygen. Ky guessed what was happening and made it to the platform’s edge with one of the reporters in tow, but the other had to be rescued by a UN helicopter.

After that, the
Roi Nuoc
would inspect the platform only on windy afternoons, but the UN scientists would go out anytime, wearing oxygen tanks while they gathered air samples at different heights above the project.

Within a week the foundation grew into a solid block of pseudolimestone eight feet high, its sides hung with lovely filigrees of living pipe. At that point the pattern of growth changed as walls began to form. On the seaward side of the palace the walls were eight feet thick, breakwaters built to withstand the pounding waves of Class IV storms. The interior walls, at a mere three feet in width, were almost petite by comparison.

The platform was divided into two huge rooms that were eventually enclosed with vaulted ceilings so that they looked like coral caves in an undersea palace. The chamber on the inland side had a wide, arched doorway, numerous window slits, and a band of frosted glass at the top of the outer walls. The ocean room at the building’s massive prow was darker, a shelter built to withstand foul weather and waves. It had no windows. Air was pumped in through the walls by capillaries of living
L
ov
s, while columns of brightly luminous
L
ov
s cast an eerie glow against the darkness. Two stairways led to the roof, where the walls of a lighter second story were just beginning to form.

Ela climbed the stairs one windy evening to stand beside a parapet three feet high. Globes floated in troughs at the top of the growing walls, casting a gleaming light upward against her face. She stood at the point of the pentagon that faced the sea—the prow—and leaned over, looking down at the building’s gleaming foot. There the geometrical perfection of the Sea Palace failed. The
L
ov
s at the seaward point had never stopped reproducing. They laid down layer upon irregular layer of limestone, building a miniature headland as a buffer against the pounding waves of future storms. As the building eroded, it would be rebuilt again.

It would last longer than the people it had been made to shelter.

She wondered if this was why the UN had put off its decision for so long: Did they hope to claim what was left when the
Roi Nuoc
were gone? What was the market value of the knowledge evolving here?

“
Ela?
”

She started at the sound of Virgil’s voice, emanating from her farsights. Then she answered softly, “I’m here.”

His image appeared onscreen. She could see candlelight behind him, and the dusky blue of the twilight sky. His
L
ov
s gleamed blue-green across his forehead, casting a wan light that emphasized the gaunt lines of his face. “Thuyen has dysentery,” he said. “She’ll be taken out tonight.”

Ela nodded, unsurprised. Unless something changed, it was only a matter of days for all of them. She could see their future in Virgil’s face, as the hard outlines of his skull emerged from beneath his thinning skin. He looked as if he were melting away. They all looked that way. Ela could feel her own teeth loosening in her gums. When Thuyen was gone, only nineteen
Roi Nuoc
would remain on the reservation. Each one of them was determined to stay, but they could not hold out forever.

Virgil looked uneasy with her silence. “Ky and I will take Thuyen to the research station.”

“You’ll talk to Nash again?”

“I’ll try.”

“Maybe there will be some vitamins you can steal.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

The link closed. Voices floated up the stairwell from the lower rooms; smoke from the flash grill on the landing thickened the air. No matter what the UN finally decided, Ela knew they truly had become a tribe, sharing what fish they could catch. There was nothing else but fish.

She leaned on the parapet, her folded arms resting on the lip of the trough. The ocean was a dusky blue even darker than the sky. Lights gleamed on the IBC barges, and in merry outline on the observational blimps anchored up and down the coast. Closer, colder, was the light of the globes in the trough. Their chill blue-green glow brightened as night descended. They were aware of her. Ela watched the closest globe migrate toward her, producing a petite swirl and distortion of water behind it as it moved. The familiar sense of recognition and greeting touched her. Mother Tiger stirred, and all around the edge of Ela’s screen a crust of blue-green ice began to build.

“We must hold out as long as we can,” she whispered into the nascent cognitive circle. They must survive until the UN made its decision. The lawyer had promised it would not be much longer. He’d been more positive lately about their chances. He thought that maybe the remaining
Roi Nuoc
would be allowed to negotiate to keep their Lovs . . . but at the same time he warned that no matter what, she and Virgil and Ky would face prosecution in an international court.

The uncoupling of their fates from that of the children had come as a relief to her. She did not want to give up, but it was easier to believe in a future for the children alone. To hope for their reprieve.

“We have to survive until the decision,” she whispered.

Then relief supplies would be flown in, even over the objections of the IBC, and their society would go on for a while longer.

Mother Tiger stalked the base of her screen, while the blue-green field expanded. Ela felt herself falling forward along a slow arc, deeper and deeper into the mesmerizing pull of the
L
ov
s.

“Survival depends on our supply of food and medicine. We have no way to get medicine . . . and the only food left is fish.”

The tiger sat, twitching its tail, waiting for her to find the path she wished to walk.

“We can survive on fish. For awhile, anyway. We could . . . if there was enough.”

“Fish are abundant,” Mother Tiger said, its low voice soft and warm and soothing as candle light.

“We are not so good at hunting them,” Ela conceded. In fact, they were getting worse. “We have no energy to go after them, and nothing to replace our damaged nets.” She smiled wistfully. “It would be easy if the fish swam to us! If they swam into pens or ponds. If we had them in ponds, like before the flood, then it would be easy to take them. How could we get them into ponds? How could we get them to swim to us? This is silly, right? But I heard whales can be driven to beach themselves. It’s a brain infection, or something. A virus or bacteria that drives them to do it?”

Mother Tiger said, “That is a dominant theory.”

Ela nodded. “Everything we do—everything any creature does—depends on brain chemistry, on the electrochemical interactions in our brains. And we know how to affect that. Yes, I mean the
L
ov
s. They link to neural tissue. Could they form a symbiosis with a fish brain? Probably not. But a symbiosis is not really what we need. We want to drive the fish to our pens, to our nets. Could the
L
ov
s do that? Suppose they could. Then they would be a parasite that controls the behavior of its host. We could send them out to hunt for us, the way we might have sent out the men of the village to hunt for meat.

“But how could
L
ov
s ‘catch’ fish? We know it’s the other way around. Fish eat
L
ov
s. They are shining, glimmering prey, and they don’t survive in the fish stomach.
L
ov
s find new hosts only when we move them. We are voluntary hosts. Transplanting the
L
ov
s is part of our role in the symbiosis. But fish won’t volunteer. So how to get the
L
ov
s to the fish? They might be shot at the fish, attaching when they hit. But they are so tiny and light they could not go far. Perhaps they should have a way of moving, some sort of flagellum. A chain of
L
ov
s could form a flagellum. Like a delicate sea snake. It wouldn’t have to swim long distances. Mostly it would drift, until a victim drew near, probably wanting to eat the shiny tendril. Then it could whip into action, driving its leading segment into the fish’s head. Then the
L
ov
s could use their chemical factories, driving the fish toward the hormones leaking from the Sea Palace . . .”

Her voice trailed off as the sound of light footfalls reached her, drawing nearer as someone mounted the stairs. “Ela?” It was Oanh’s voice. “Your farsights wouldn’t accept a link.”

Ela turned, the blue-green field of her awareness burning away like a dream image.
Had
it been a dream?

“I would not have bothered you,” Oanh said. “But we are ready to eat.”

“I’ll come. In a minute.”

Oanh nodded, her eyes black pits beneath the light of her
L
ov
s. “Are you all right?”

It could not have been a dream. Ela had imagined a new kind of
L
ov
, a
predator
. There had never been predatory
L
ov
s before.

Ela looked back at the globe, moving away now along the trough.

What have I done?