Limit of Vision (36 page)

38

They were halfway
back to their platform when Ela stirred. “The clouds are breaking up,” she said. “I can’t believe it. It’s been weeks since we’ve had so much open sky.”

Virgil looked up, to see broken floes of luminous white clouds set against a pearly background. He chuckled. “Maybe we’ll finally get to dry out.”

“With our luck we’ll get sunburn.”

“The weather is changing,” Mother Tiger said. “There is a danger.”

An inset window opened on Virgil’s farsights, displaying a satellite image of the South China Sea. Just off the coast, centered over the western half of the Spratly Islands, was the ominous white spiral and well-defined eye of a summer typhoon. He heard the catch of Ela’s breath.

Mother Tiger said, “It has been upgraded to a Class IV storm. The waves are already rising.”

Virgil asked, “How many hours away?”

“Twenty to twenty-four.”

Ela stiffened in his arms. “Look there!” She leaned forward, her slender finger pointing to the eastern sky where the sun was just beginning to rise. Its searing light picked out a staggered line of shimmering points running from north to south, the highest no more than twenty degrees above the horizon.

“Drones?” Virgil suggested.

“I think so.”

The sun slipped from behind a low cloud and all doubt evaporated as its horizontal rays glinted and shimmered over a fleet of miniature airplanes, each one trailing a misty rainbow tail. Virgil stared at the spectacle. “They’re dropping something. Some liquid chemical.”

“Over the Sea Palace,” Ela whispered, extricating herself from his arms. She tapped her fingers. “Oanh! Everyone should be inside, under the roof, before they breathe it in.”

Virgil’s view shifted. He looked out of someone else’s farsights; he could not tell whose. Someone at the Sea Palace. There was Oanh, grilling a breakfast of catfish on the stairs, while five other kids—all of them older kids in their middle teens, for none of the young ones were left anywhere on the reservation—lounged and chatted at the water’s edge. In the next instant the scene transformed: All six were on their feet, bounding up the stairs and in through the Palace door without a cry being uttered, or a moment of discernible confusion. Two other teens were inside, still sleeping. Oanh stopped to rouse them, while four more came charging down the inside stairs. They rushed together into the windowless ocean room.

The light dimmed. The view turned back. Virgil gazed beyond a frame of two arched doorways, out to a brilliant morning through which a fine mist fell, splitting the sunlight into sprays of color.

Ela was tugging at his arm. “Get down!” His focus shifted. He glanced up to see the drones almost overhead now. Then he dropped with Ela against the saucer’s deck. She pulled her rain poncho over both of them. “They’re trying to poison us,” she hissed. “That’s what they’re doing.”

He could not hear the mist fall. He couldn’t hear the passing drones. He stayed huddled with Ela beneath the poncho all the way to the Sea Palace, and when the saucer bumped up against the stairs they did not bother to moor it, but ran inside, not touching any surface except with their bare feet.

Ky met
them inside, resolving the mystery of whose farsights Virgil had been gazing through. “I saw what happened at the research station.”

Virgil nodded, hearing the basso growl of waves washing against the building’s prow. “Did you know before?”

Ky looked at Ela. It was not a friendly expression. “No.”

She turned and walked away toward Oanh.

Virgil said, “Mother Tiger knew.”

Ky did not answer this. “We are all here except Lien and her cadre,” he said brusquely. “They cannot be contacted.”

“None of them are wearing farsights?”

“No. I was with them yesterday evening. They don’t believe they need farsights anymore.” He stepped closer to a pillar wrapped in veins of gleaming
L
ov
s. He laid his hand on it. The
L
ov
s Lien had transplanted to his forehead had grown into tiny diamond clusters. “They may be right. They’ve grown beyond us, I think. Taken another path. They are no longer
Roi Nuoc
.” His voice grew soft. “It’s too bad we won’t have more time. I would have loved to see how this all turned out.”

Virgil said, “It’s not over yet.”

Ky nodded. Then his melancholy seemed to leave, as if he had closed a door on it and turned away. “Do you know what chemical they dropped on us?”

“No. Do you?”

“I know very little. There has been a rather severe communications problem this morning. It seems no one in Hanoi can receive my link.”

Though Ela stood across the room, her voice intruded from their farsights. “So we go beyond Hanoi,” she said. “And beyond the UN—”

“Ela,” Ky said, “the world already knows about us. We are a popular evening entertainment—but no more than that. There will be no protest when we are canceled.”

“There must be something more we can do. If we come together, if we think about it together . . .” It was their code phrase for a cognitive circle. “We might find some way—”

She was interrupted by a cry of alarm from the second floor. “
Lȇn ðây coi cái này!
Come up here! Come look!” It was Ninh’s voice, shouting down the stairwell. “The Sea Palace is melting!”

Virgil
was first up the stairs. He raced up from the gloom of the ocean room into a sea of blinding light. Line after parallel line of foaming waves had thrown up a mist of salt spray, saturating the air and dissolving the sun’s rays, so that light seemed to ooze from everywhere at once. The edges of shadows were lost and color boundaries blurred. Ninh looked at him with wide eyes. Then he pointed at the parapet.

Virgil skidded to a stop before it. His first glance showed him nothing obviously wrong with the wall. It looked intact, undamaged. Not melted at all.

Then he peered into the trough that topped the wall, and understood the reason for Ninh’s alarm. Something had gone wrong. The water that should have nourished the globes looked milky white. Virgil dipped his hand in, tipping a little of the discolored water into his palm. He whispered his farsights to magnify what he saw and the truth unfolded:

The water was filled with white structural
L
ov
s, but they were deformed. They had no limbs, no way to attach to one another. He ran his fingers along the top of the trough and it was the same thing: his fingertips came away sparkling with legions of unattached
L
ov
s, like a fine dust of tiny diamonds.

He raised his gaze to the sky, seeing again in his mind the rainbow tails of mist falling from the passing drones. “It was a mutagen,” he said. “That’s what they dropped.” He rubbed finger and thumb together, feeling the diamond dust slide between them. “These are the
L
ov
s that have been made since then—the next layer in the wall.”

All around him tentative hands rose; fingers brushed the
L
ov
s embedded on worried brows. It was a religious gesture.

“It didn’t fall on us,” Ela said. “All of us here, we took shelter.”

“It could still be here as a vapor in the air,” Virgil pointed out, waving his hand at the salt spray. “We could be breathing it in right now.”

He looked up at the sound of a helicopter. It was coming out of the north, moving low over the water and drawing swiftly nearer as it followed the coast. Some of the
Roi Nuoc
edged closer to the stairs.

Not Oanh. She dug her nails into the parapet. “This chemical won’t affect old
L
ov
s,” she said firmly. “We won’t lose what we have.” As if pushed away by her will, the helicopter swung out to sea as it neared the Palace, passing a quarter mile offshore.

Ky watched it go by. “Even if that is so, Oanh, there will be no more like Lien. New
L
ov
s cannot attach without their limbs.”

“Don’t assume anything,” Ela warned. The helicopter was turning inland now, on a line for the research station. “The
L
ov
s will mutate again. They’ll adapt to this, like they’ve adapted to everything else.”

Softly, Virgil said, “I don’t think so.” The helicopter hovered over the station, descending to the rooftop landing pad. The staff would be gathered there, waiting to evacuate. The reservation had gotten dangerous, now that
L
ov
s had learned to hunt their hosts. “This is only the start. There will be more genetic weapons, or viruses, or chemical drops. They’ve had time to develop an arsenal. After all, they have Summer Goforth.”

“And we have the
L
ov
s!” Ela snapped. “Look what they’ve already done for us. Virgil, we can’t give up.”

“We won’t give up.” But he couldn’t imagine what they would do.

Ky said, “The IBC will surely wait to hear of our surrender before the next plague is released”—a flurry of protest arose from the
Roi Nuoc
, as they insisted they would not surrender; Ky smiled—”so we should still have a little time.”

“There is a storm coming,” Virgil said as his gaze shifted to the unhappy sea.

Ky nodded. “We need to find Lien and her cadre. They know better than any of us what the
L
ov
s can do. We can shelter together in the Sea Palace, and consider our options.”

The
overflights continued, but after the first pass with drones the IBC switched to helicopters, saturating the reservation and the surrounding sea with their chemical mists. For the first time in weeks the sun refused to retreat behind its veil of clouds. Its fierce rays refracted in the salt spray, and in steam rising from the muddy shallows, driving these natural vapors to mix with the chemicals released by the IBC until every breath became thick with salt and unknowable poisons. Sweat pooled on the skin and in the eyes, stinging miserably.

Despite the terrible air, Ky left to find Lien. Virgil went with him, wearing Ela’s poncho in the hope it would keep some of the falling chemicals away from his skin. It was fantastically hot, and he sweated profusely beneath the waterproof garment.

They took the largest remaining wooden boat and poled toward the mangrove stand where Ky had visited Lien and her cadre just last night. Three times they had to get out and float the boat over shallow mud bars. Their feet stirred puffs of white
L
ov
s in the silt. Once they passed a submerged dike encrusted in
L
ov
s. Milky rivulets flowed off of it, following the current.

They had brought no drinking water. For weeks it had rained so persistently that clean water for drinking had been taken for granted. But half an hour in the sun changed that attitude. Virgil pulled off the poncho, preferring to risk poisoning over heatstroke. It hardly mattered. Sweat poured off him, even as his mouth went musty and his tongue swelled. Ky was no better off. So they changed their route, turning inland toward a cluster of platforms.

It was a ghost town on the water. The
Roi Nuoc
who had lived there were gone, evacuated to the Sea Palace, or to IBC custody beyond the reservation. Now only silence lived there; the soft plop of Virgil’s pole in the water was an intrusive sound.

As they passed the first platform, Ky nodded at muddy rings on the stilts marking the highest reach of the flood. “The water has dropped at least fifteen inches.”

“The typhoon could reverse that with a storm surge.”

Ky looked grim. “If the storm is bad enough, this land could be lost forever. The ocean’s level is rising. A little erosion, and this delta will be gone.”

Virgil poled the boat toward the lowest platform. With any luck the catchment system would still be working. They might even find a few clean containers to carry water.

Ky crouched in the bow, balanced on one knee, his hands raised to catch the edge of the platform which stood at the height of his chest above the water. Virgil dragged his pole, slowing the boat so they bumped gently against the stilts. Ky grabbed the platform’s edge and swung himself up.

Virgil wanted to blame his heat-addled mind for what he saw next: The platform appeared to
move
, sliding toward the boat in a slow, soundless glide.

Ky’s eyes widened. He dropped flat against the deck. “It’s slipping off!” he shouted. “Back the boat away!”

Virgil jabbed the pole in the mud and bore down on it, sending the boat shooting backward. He turned in time to see the deck glide off its stilts, toppling into the water where it splashed like a calving glacier. Ky jumped free just before it hit, landing several feet away in his own muddy explosion of spray. He popped back up to the surface, spluttering and treading water while Virgil strove to bring the boat around.

“Did you see that?” Ky shouted. “Nothing was holding it in place! My weight unbalanced it.” He stroked back to the half-submerged platform, and climbed up on its slanted surface so that Virgil could bring the boat in and pick him up. Afterward they circled the stilts.

All the platforms had been designed to rise with the floodwaters; a living layer of
L
ov
s at the top of every stilt continuously added to its height. But the mutagen had changed the structure of those
L
ov
s. Without limbs to hold them in place while their shells bonded, they acted like tiny ball bearings. Ky’s weight had been enough to unbalance the platform and send it sliding off into the muddy water.

They poled between the other platforms, eyeing the rain catchment systems, some with basins obviously full. “We could try again,” Virgil said.

Ky shook his head. “We can’t risk crushing the boat. Let’s find Lien. There will be water when we get back to the Sea Palace.”

It took
twenty minutes more to reach the mangrove stand where Lien had built her platform. They called out as they approached. But the helicopters had returned with another load of chemical spray; if anyone answered their hails, it was impossible to hear over the droning engines.