Authors: Linda Nagata
Tags: #science fiction, #biotechnology, #near future, #human evolution, #artificial intelligence
25
“
Now that the
no-oct mutation is known, everything will change,” Ky said. His gaze moved from Virgil, to Oanh, to Ninh, and finally to Ela.
Crowded together as they were in this dimly lit room of the medical tent, Ela felt a nervous thrill, imagining them to be a secret cell, a radical conspiracy out to overthrow the corrupt status quo. Except there was nothing secret about this meeting. Each one of them was wearing farsights and any
Roi Nuoc
inside or out of the reservation could be monitoring what they said.
“The affable Nash Chou,” Ky continued, “has already presented the UN with strongly worded testimony calling for the IBC to act immediately and unilaterally to control the
L
ov
s, and to control us—despite our government’s sovereign claims.” He shook his head. “We cannot expect Hanoi to resist such pressure for long. We are tolerated now because of nationalist sentiments and the promise of financial returns. But as pressure mounts, our support must crumble. We will be given up, turned over to our persecutors—unless we find stronger allies.”
Virgil stirred, leaning over the examination bench so that the light from the fluorescent ceiling strips fell directly on his face. “I won’t start a war over this, Ky. I won’t make a deal with another government, or sell out to corporate pirates.”
Ky was silent for a beat. Then, “I am so glad to hear it,” he said. “Given that foreigners have attempted to trade away this nation so many times before.”
Ela winced, while Virgil launched into a quick apology. “Ky, I didn’t mean—”
Ky raised his hand. “I am teasing, my friend. Of course we must aim for some level of sovereignty—which is why I’ve prepared a petition for the United Nations, to be signed by all of the
Roi Nuoc
—”
“They’re underage,” Ela objected, eyeing Oanh, who fidgeted on the physician’s stool.
“It doesn’t matter. We can’t allow it to matter. We must petition the UN to recognize the
Roi Nuoc
and their
L
ov
symbionts as a distinct people. Recognition on this level will give us rights that even the IBC cannot overturn.”
“It would legalize the
L
ov
s,” Virgil said. He sounded impressed. “At least, the symbiotic ones. But Ky, do you really think there’s a chance it could work?”
“Oh yes.” Ky stood by the door, his fist on his chin and a faraway look in his eyes as if he were posed for a propaganda shot . . . and when Ela considered the farsights that she and Ninh and Oanh wore, she saw it was exactly that way.
Ky said, “Just think on the stew of greed, of pride, of indignation, and nationalism we might play to our favor. This is politics on a remote and not easily accountable scale. There are many reasons for votes to be cast that have nothing to do with the merits of the issue.”
Ela could not share his optimism. “I don’t think you’re being realistic. The IBC would never allow it.”
“But that’s the beauty of it,” Virgil said. “It won’t be up to the IBC.”
Ky nodded. “And if you still can’t believe it, Ela, then let me believe it for you.”
“You?” She could not suppress a laugh. “Ky, you don’t even have
L
ov
s.”
She had not meant to be hurtful, so it surprised her when the warmth drained from his face, and the telltales of anger emerged: the faint tightening around the eyes, the suggestion of shadow between the brows. He said, “That’s not important.”
But wasn’t it? All of the
Roi Nuoc
had taken on their own constellations of symbiotic
L
ov
s. Every one of them was irrevocably committed. Only Ky could still go back. She searched his face and found herself wondering what betrayal would look like.
“Sign the petition, Ela,” he said. “I’ll see to it after that.”
She nodded. “I’ll sign it. It could buy us some time, at least.”
Virgil
had experienced this exchange as if the emotions of Ela and Ky were being piped into his own head and replayed there with full fidelity. Afterward he walked outside with Ky. It was night, and the stars were blurred points behind a thin veil of rain. Virgil did not ask questions. Not out loud.
Ky answered anyway, as rain-wet grass rustled against their ponchos. “We have been forced to trust one another on the thinnest of evidence.”
“I don’t suspect you,” Virgil said.
“But like Ela, you wonder.”
“So what if I do? The
L
ov
s are not a rite of passage. You don’t have to use them to prove your loyalty. Nobody is asking that.” But even as Virgil said this, doubt stirred. All the
Roi Nuoc
had long since adopted symbiotic
L
ov
s in patches or in constellations across their skin. Ky alone had not made that commitment.
Now Ky pulled back his hood, allowing the rain to fall in tiny droplets across his hair and his farsights—and his unilluminated brow. “There is no reason I should have to defend myself,” he said softly. “I have given up everything for this venture. That should be proof enough of my loyalty.”
Virgil waited.
“But it’s not, is it?” Ky asked. “Not to Ela. Not even to me.” He walked on and Virgil followed. “I stand on the border,” he said, his farsights gleaming as he glanced at Virgil, then looked away. “But I do not step over. I encourage others to go . . . to embrace this new humanity, but I stay behind . . .
Dammit!
Will you say something?”
“What should I say?”
“What you already know—it amazes me how much all of you can read in a face, in a voice—you know the
L
ov
s terrify me.”
“They would terrify any rational person.”
“Don’t say that too loud.” Then after a moment: “It makes my guts turn to water when I think about what we are doing. When I
really
think about it. We are creating a new kind of human, aren’t we? And it’s beautiful, but frightening too, like a birth . . . you enjoy letting me ramble, don’t you?”
“Someday I’ll learn to speak Vietnamese.”
“Will you? That will be amusing.” He bowed his head. He raised his hand to shade his farsights from the rain. It was a gesture powerfully reminiscent of Panwar. “I fear to lose myself.”
“It’s not like that,” Virgil said past a throat suddenly dry. Would he be here at all if Panwar had lived?
Ky looked up, perhaps troubled by the change in Virgil’s voice.
“It’s an enhancement,” Virgil said, aware of a trembling in his hands.
“Yes. That’s why we are here, no? It’s why I’m here. Because somehow we will need to become more than we are—or risk being left behind.”
“That’s what Panwar would have said.”
“Your partner,” Ky said thoughtfully. “He is dead now, yes?”
Virgil nodded. “Ky, you should not accept the
L
ov
s if you’re not ready.”
“And duty be damned?” he asked. “That is a very modern thing to say.”
“When you’re ready,” Virgil insisted. “Not before.”
26
On the day
the last farming family left the reservation, Virgil climbed up to the cab roof of an army truck—the highest point around other than a distant line of gloomy casurina trees—and sat cross-legged on the gently curved composite shell, surveying the pancake-flat delta that surrounded him.
It was near noon, and each breath he took stewed in his lungs, a storm brewing. Heavy black clouds hid the sun but trapped the steamy heat. The landscape rolled away from him: green rice paddies and black ponds, their surfaces undisturbed by any breath of moving air. Detail dissolved in muted shadow.
Now and then he could see someone moving in the distance: a patrol of government soldiers strolling idly from pond to pond, or a small band of
Roi Nuoc
off to negotiate with their neighbors. Always far away. Insignificant as the figures in a Chinese landscape painting.
The farmers had been paid off, compensated for their hardship by EquaSys as part of a continuing settlement. By all reports it had been a good deal; they would not need to work quite so hard anymore, but were they happy, parted from their land?
The
Roi Nuoc
could not replace them. Ky’s UN petition had made surprising progress on the assertion that the
Roi Nuoc
were “a distinct tribal entity,” an evolving culture growing through rips in the social fabric—but the farmers
were
that fabric. They had built stable lives here and cultivated a sense of place.
The
Roi Nuoc
had no similar experience of permanence. They were like a flash of sunshine between rain showers: ephemeral, unstable. Incapable—or uninterested—in holding on to the civilization that had thrived here only a few weeks ago. The jungle was crawling back into that vacuum. Weeds were the vanguard, goaded by the long rains into luxuriant growth along dikes and levees and abandoned ponds, while the ghosts of ancient forests assembled in the mist.
The sound of footfalls in the mud startled Virgil from his ruminations. He turned, to see Ky Xuan Nguyen approaching with a cheerful smile. “Hail the outpost!” Ky called. “How goes the kingdom?”
“It is without a king—but then they always were a pain in the ass.”
“Anarchist.”
Virgil smiled. “Kind of you to say so.”
Ky stopped beside the truck, leaning an elbow against the hood as he regarded Virgil through the opaqued lens of his farsights. He was dressed in green fatigues and a black T-shirt, his coppery skin shining with the damp that was everywhere. His hair had grown longer. Trying not to be obvious, Virgil glanced between the strands that fell over Ky’s brow, but he could still see no
L
ov
s glittering there.
“Why are you up there?” Ky asked.
Peeper balls stood off at a distance, waiting for his reply.
Virgil looked away across the delta. There had been so much rain, and not just here. In the highlands too, in Laos, in Cambodia. The water was rising, as it did every year. “It’s all going wild,” he said. “Can you feel it? Something wild is crawling up out of the land.”
Ky considered this for several seconds while a peeper ball crept unusually close. “Our sanctuary won’t last with that kind of talk. Do you want our petition to fail?”
“But you can feel it, can’t you? Change. Not just here. Not just with the
L
ov
s. Do you think there are any other
R
osa
s like Mother Tiger?”
“You’re in a strange mood.”
Yes
.
He handed down to Ky the artifact that had set him thinking. “One of the kids turned this in this morning.”
It was a section of tube with a single joint at its center, fifteen inches long and the width of a pencil, bone white except for a faint shadowing of darker longitudinal veins, and a ring of sickly green around the knuckle. Ky held it at both ends and flexed it back and forth. “And what is this supposed to be?”
“It’s a
L
ov
cluster.”
Ky’s chuckle expressed a delighted skepticism. “What is it really? It’s not bone.”
“It
is
a
L
ov
cluster,” Virgil insisted. “Look at it under magnification.”
Ky scowled, but he held the tube up close to his farsights, his shoulders hunched as he strained to remain absolutely still. “Most of the
L
ov
s are dead,” Virgil said. “That’s why it looks white. But you can see the tube is made from
L
ov
shells that have fused together like . . . like coral polyps.”
“It’s hard to hold steady.” Ky shifted, resting his elbows against his sides. “They’re smaller than ordinary
L
ov
s, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“A new variety . . . it must be defective, to make such a malformed structure.” He straightened up. Again he flexed the tube at its central joint. “Is it getting stiffer?”
“Yes. The
L
ov
s that form the joint have no source of nutrients, so the more they are forced to move, the sooner they will die.”
“They’re still alive?”
“Yes, but just around the joint. I don’t think they’re defective, though. Just a different variety. Their limbs are structured differently. They’re longer, and they’re found only in a circle around the shell, instead of all over.”
Ky’s eyes narrowed as he considered this. “So they could only join in a plane? A plane a single layer deep. That’s why they formed this tube instead of a globe . . . okay.”
“The joint is an interesting structure,” Virgil suggested. “Don’t you think?”
Ky flexed it again. Then he scowled. When he looked up, his gaze was hard. “Did you design this?”
Virgil sighed. Was he going to be accused of a feat of engineering every time the
L
ov
s learned something new? “I didn’t have anything to do with it. It was found like that. I didn’t design the mutant
L
ov
s on the Hammer, I didn’t design the no-oct mutation, I didn’t design the veil, and I didn’t design this.”
“The
L
ov
s designed it themselves?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“Why? What’s it for?”
Virgil shrugged. “What are any of us for? I’m more interested in locating the colony that made it.”
“That shouldn’t be hard. The child who brought it to you must have said which pond it came from.”
“It didn’t come from a pond. It was found along a path, a hundred feet from any water. And none of the nearby ponds have colonies. I checked.”
“Ah, so you’re brooding over how it got on the path? That’s easy. A dog carried it there. Or someone dropped it.”
“No
Roi Nuoc
would have dropped it. You know how acquisitive they are. Any of them would have picked it up and reported it for the gain—just as it happened.”
“A dog then.”
“Pinch the end of the tube.”
Ky did, not exerting much pressure. With a glasslike chime, the tip of the cylinder shattered into dust. Ky swore, looking momentarily horrified, until he realized the damage was minimal. Most of the tube was still intact.
He glared up at Virgil. “You knew that would happen.”
Virgil shrugged. “A dog would have shattered it. Even a gentle nick of the teeth—”
“
All right
.”
“I’d like to find the globe that produced it.”
“Have the kids check the ponds, then.”
“They haven’t reported anything strange. Ela’s reports don’t show any hint either.”
Ky turned away, his own gaze searching the green land that lay submissively waiting beneath the lowering clouds. “Have you considered the die-off?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Virgil, his gaze strangely intense.
Virgil stiffened. Yesterday morning
Roi Nuoc
near the coast had reported disaster: all the globes within a cluster of interlinked ponds had gone missing. When Virgil examined the site, he found a thick layer of
L
ov
s in the bottom of every pond, thriving just beneath the mud. It had looked as if the globes had dissolved, losing their coherence, their organization . . . But that theory was dashed when he checked an unaffected pond and found the same layer of unattached
L
ov
s. Apparently every pond had them. So he was left without a theory to explain the missing globes.
Nash Chou had taken to calling it a die-off. Virgil didn’t like the term; it made too many assumptions. But he couldn’t deny the problem was serious. In the past twenty-four hours the disappearances had spread slowly outward, to encompass fourteen sites.
“The tube wasn’t found anywhere near the site of the missing globes,” he said.
Ky raised his eyebrows. “Apparently the tube wasn’t found anywhere near anything.”
Virgil shrugged. That was a fair description. He’d been to the place where the tube was found, and then he’d tramped around for an hour trying to figure out where it had come from.
“Show me the site,” Ky suggested. “There might be some clue that you missed.”