Limit of Vision (42 page)

Summer
was able to pilot the marathon to within a few miles of the delta coast. There they surfaced, hoping for a news update. Instead they received a full link with Mother Tiger. Virgil had expected keen argument from the
R
osa
, but its intelligence was more subtle than that, and it did not have human pride or human peevishness. It had only a goal: to keep the
Roi Nuoc
safe. So when it calculated that it could not stop them from going ashore, it offered to guide them instead.

Virgil urged the others to accept the
R
osa
’s help. “We’ll be safe, so long as our goal and the
R
osa
’s is the same.”

They waited until evening. Then Mother Tiger steered them to an unguarded river mouth far south of the reservation. Debris thrown down by the hurricane clogged the waterway, forcing the marathon to surface. It glided silently upstream, sending a V of ripples out across the moon-spangled water. Ela squeezed out of the hatch and watched the ripples unfolding, rolling outward until they tangled in the drowning vegetation. Streamers of clouds snaked in a high-elevation wind, but along the river the air was still.

Ela was keenly aware of the marathon moving through her own inner map of the world. She felt more aware of everything: the soft voices from below, and dashing shapes of fish in the river, hurtling satellites, and the rumble of ancient generators reverberating over the water, the smell of night blossoms and of mud, and the count of each soft beat of her heart.

The
Roi Nuoc
from beyond the reservation had been alerted to their coming. Mother Tiger had instructed them to gather farsights and cash cards, and to hide these things beneath a concrete pier that served a shrimp-packing company set up along an otherwise empty stretch of waterfront. The kids themselves were long gone by the time the marathon pulled up to the moonlit pier.

Ela was first out. She scrambled under the pier to retrieve the stashed bundle, passing it up to Ninh. There were clothes wrapped around the farsights: clean white tek-fabric shirts and slacks. Cash cards were abundant. Cash, at least, was no longer a problem for any of the
Roi Nuoc
thanks to Ela’s income.

Ela put on the new garments. Then she threw her old clothes into the swollen river. Moonlight glittered on the water as the marathon slipped away from the pier, a dark shadow gliding downstream, faster than the current. Ela watched it go.

She still held her new farsights in one hand, reluctant to put them on. She was not the only one who hesitated: Oanh stood beside her, looking undecided. “You don’t trust Mother Tiger anymore, do you?” she asked, glancing nervously at the other
Roi Nuoc
. Most of them had slipped their farsights on even before changing clothes.

Ela turned her own set over in her hands, watching moonlight play across the lens. “I am thinking of what
Roi Nuoc
means. ‘Water puppets.’ Little doll figures that perform on a stage of water. Whose puppets have we been? I used to think Ky Xuan Nguyen was the puppet master, but I know now that was never true. It was always Mother Tiger.”

Ky had once asked her about Sawong, the old transvestite who had cared for her until he had gone away with his lover, leaving her alone in Bangkok.
You could have looked for Sawong, or waited for him to return, but you didn’t.
Why not?
Ela finally had an answer for him: “I don’t need a master.” She drew back her arm, and cast her farsights out across the water.

Oanh saw what she was doing and jumped to stop her, too late. She made a little cry as the farsights disappeared with a splash. The other
Roi Nuoc
gathered around, murmuring in shock: “Why did you do that, Ela? Did you mean to do it? You are angry with Mother Tiger, aren’t you?”

Oanh looked mournful. “It will be hard to live without the
R
osa
.”

“We have the
L
ov
s now,” Ela reminded her. “We don’t need Mother Tiger anymore.”

Phan’s grin flashed from beneath his farsights. “Mother Tiger is saying you were never really one of us anyway.”

“More lies,” Oanh said.

Ela shrugged.

Lam spoke now, in Vietnamese. Ela had picked up enough of that language to gather the meaning: “
Mother Tiger asks What is
Roi Nuoc
?
How can we be
Roi Nuoc
without our farsights?
”

Ninh nodded vigorously, his forehead wrinkled in a worried frown. “How can we find each other without them?”

Even Virgil was ready to compromise. “We can’t just throw an advantage away, Ela. We won’t know what’s going on if we can’t see through other lenses. We won’t know if one of us is in trouble, or what’s happening in the world.”

“But with them, we will always be under Mother Tiger’s eyes,” Ela countered. “Have you already forgotten Ky? And Lien? And me?” She shook her head. “We escaped the IBC. Now we have a chance to create the life we want, without asking anyone’s permission.
Anyone’s
. We are not little children anymore.”

Oanh bowed her head. She held her farsights for a second, her gaze lingering regretfully on their beautiful silver frame. Then she sighed and, looking up, she hurled them into the river, watching them through their long, spinning flight, until they splashed down in a little geyser of spray. “I am no longer a water puppet,” she said. “Ela and I have become something else now . . . something different. Water fairies.
Tien Nuoc
. Without masters, we find our own way.”

Summer Goforth had been standing on the edge of their circle. Like the rest of them she was dressed in white, but unlike them she did not have farsights. Now she met Ela’s gaze and asked, “Aren’t the
L
ov
s your master now?”

Ela shook her head sadly. “You don’t understand it. The
L
ov
s are part of us. They
are
us. Their fate and ours is the same.”

Summer had helped them escape the ship, but it was clear she still did not approve what they did. “What are your plans for me?”

Ela frowned over this. “My plans? I don’t have plans for you. It’s your life. Your choice.”

“Mother Tiger doesn’t agree,” Ninh said softly.

Ela threw him a sharp look. “I can guess what the
R
osa
has to say!”

“I can too,” Summer said. “Does it explain that I could betray you? That I could bring authorities after you and that you must do whatever is necessary to prevent this?”

Ninh admitted that was the essence of it. “Mother Tiger has never asked such a thing of us before.” He sighed and slipped off his farsights. Then he looked at Oanh. “I cannot be
Tien Nuoc
,” he said. “Not a lady spirit. Let us be
Tiên Thân Nuoc
, instead. A spirit of the river; one that cannot be seen.”

Oanh smiled, bowing her head in approval.

Tiên Thân Nuoc
. Ninh stepped to the river’s edge and tossed his farsights spinning into the moonlight.

Virgil looked grim, but he joined Ninh, casting his own farsights away into the water. The others followed. One by one they severed their link with Mother Tiger, becoming
Tiên Thân Nuoc
. Becoming free.

When the last of the farsights was gone, Virgil turned to Summer. “Will you betray us?” he asked. “Or will you join us? You made this thing—maybe just in time . . .”

Summer shook her head in firm denial. “What Simkin wanted to do to you—that was worse than anything you’ve done. But this . . .” Her gaze swept their circle. “It’s out of control. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see how dangerous this is?”

Ela slipped her arm around Virgil’s waist. “Yes. We can see it. We have the
L
ov
s. We see both sides.”

The delta myths had not been wrong. They were an alien generation. Ela had known it about herself ever since she’d been a child in Bangkok, telling the fortunes of humble people who looked on her and her affinity for unknown things and were afraid. Such people would try to hold the world still, but for that it was much too late.

“
Will
you betray us?” Ela asked.

Summer glanced around at the anxious faces waiting on her reply. “It’s not me you need to worry about.”

“The disappeared,” Oanh said. “If they’re alive, they’ll be looking for us.”

Ela nodded. “I think they’re alive.” Too much had been invested in them to let them die. She glanced over her shoulder, dreading to see a peeper ball drifting out of the vegetation. There was nothing. Not yet, but her uneasiness spread to Virgil, and then to Oanh, who said, “We should go.”

So they parted, scattering in twos and threes into the countryside. Virgil was anxious to be off, but after a few steps Ela hesitated, and turned back. Summer eyed her warily. “You have no trust of us,” Ela said. “Maybe it must be that way. But in time I think you will come to see this is not wrong.” She raised a quick hand before Summer could argue. “We are not changing our minds. You know this.”

“It’s something I’m learning,” Summer admitted.

“That’s good. Learning is a skill most people forget.”

“Ela,” Virgil said, “we should go.”

Ela nodded, but still she did not leave. “I did not get to tell you about my
R
osa
, Summer. I think Mother Tiger has found it by now, but when it was mine, it was good at telling fortunes. For you, I think Kathang would say something like ‘This one cannot close her eyes. Even when she turns away, she will always see through to the heart.’”

Summer responded with a skeptical laugh. “Your
R
osa
must have been out of practice, Ela, because I can’t even see through to my own heart. I can’t see past this night.”

“Still, I think you will not betray us.”

Summer wasn’t so sure. Long after Virgil and Ela were gone, she stood alone on the pier, watching the muddy water run past. Insects called, an airliner growled far overhead, and somewhere, a bird spoke. Could the
L
ov
s still be contained? It was possible. Certainly new weapons could be designed . . . but how could they be deployed against the disappeared? Daniel had made control immeasurably more difficult so that Summer found herself considering failure:

Would it be better to live in a world created by the
Roi Nuoc
or by Daniel Simkin?

That was the heart of it.

“I will come after you, Ela,” Summer promised, speaking softly to the night, to the flowing river. “But only after I bring Daniel down.”

She waited on the pier for three more hours, until a district police officer chanced past on his motorcycle. Summer convinced him to take her to the police station. From there she called her
R
osa
, and after that she opened a confidential link to the United Nations. Some there still knew her name.

Enjoy These Sample Chapters of

by Linda Nagata

Jubilee is a bold young woman of seventeen, on the cusp of leaving the security of her family home to seek out her own future. But her life is thrown into tumult by a visit from a forbidding stranger who has come looking for Jubilee’s beloved brother, Jolly—who is seven years dead.

Jolly died as a child, consumed in an unprecedented flood of “silver”—a mysterious substance resembling a thick, glowing fog. Silver is a force of both destruction and creation. Sometimes it dissolves what it touches, at other times it randomly rebuilds structures from the lost past, but no person caught within its reach has ever survived it.

And yet . . .

If Jolly is truly dead, how could this stranger know him? And if Jolly is alive, how did he survive the silver? And where has he gone? Jubilee soon discovers that the stranger is not the only person interested in her brother’s fate.

Looming over all is the question of the silver’s nature and purpose. Silver is rising in the world, flooding ever more often and more deeply so that someday soon the world must drown in it.

Determined to find answers, Jubilee leaves home one step ahead of a ruthless pursuit. The quest she undertakes will unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther than she ever imagined.

Chapter 1

When I was ten I had a blanket that was smooth and dark, with no light of its own until I moved and then its folds would glitter with thousands of tiny stars in all the colors of the stars in the night sky. But the pale arch that appears at the zenith on clear nights and that we call the Bow of Heaven never would appear on my blanket—and for that I was glad. For if there was no Heaven, I reasoned, then the dead would always be reborn in this world and not the next, no matter how wise they became in life.

This was always a great concern for me, for my mother was the wisest person I knew and I feared for her. More than once I schemed to make her look foolish, just to be sure she would not get into Heaven when her time came. When my antics grew too much she would turn to my father. With a dark frown and her strong arms crossed over her chest she would say, “We have been so very fortunate to have such a wild and reckless daughter as Jubilee. Obviously, she was sent to teach us wisdom." My father would laugh, but I would pout, knowing I had lost another round, and that I must try harder next time.

I seldom suffered a guilty conscience. I knew it was my role to be wild—even my mother agreed to that—but on the night my story begins I was troubled by the thought that perhaps this time I had gone too far.

I lived then in the temple founded by my mother, Temple Huacho, a remote outpost in the Kavasphir Hills, a wild land of open woods and rolling heights, infamous for the frequency of its silver floods.

As often as three nights in ten the silver would come, rising from the ground, looking like a luminous fog as it filled all the vales, to make an island of our hilltop home. I would watch its deadly advance from my bedroom window, and many times I saw it lap at the top of the perimeter wall that enclosed the temple grounds.

That wall was my mother’s first line of defense against the rise of silver and she maintained it well. Only twice had I seen a silver flood reach past it, and both times the chemical defenses of the temple kobolds that lived within the wall stripped the silver of its menace before it could do us harm. True silver is heavy and will always sink to fill the low ground. But the remnant silver that made it past the wall spired like luminous smoke, tangling harmlessly in the limbs of the orchard trees.

Because silver was so common in that region no one dared to live near us. Only a temple, with its protective kobolds, could offer shelter from the nocturnal floods, and Temple Huacho was the only one that had been established anywhere in Kavasphir. So the mineral wealth the silver brought was ours to exploit, while the temple well was famous for producing new and mysterious strains of the beetlelike metabolic machines called kobolds. My mother harvested the kobolds while my father prospected, and eight or nine times a year small convoys of truckers would visit us to collect what we had to trade.

On that evening, two trucks had arrived from distant Xahiclan and the drivers had with them a boy named Tico who was also a lesson in wisdom for his parents. Naturally I loved him on sight, and so did my brother Jolly who was a year older than me but not nearly so useful to our parents. We abandoned our younger siblings (who we were supposed to watch) to play wild games in the orchard. After dinner—a magnificent feast that my parents had prepared and that we did not appreciate except for the sweets at the end—we disappeared again, this time on a special quest.

In the old enclaves like Xahiclan the temples all had long histories. Thousands of players depended on their protective powers, and so they had become sacred places. Children were not allowed to play on the grounds, and only the temple keepers were permitted inside the buildings. None of this solemnity was attached to Temple Huacho. Our outpost was not thirty years old; it was home to no one but our own family; and it was the only playground my brothers and sisters and I had ever known.

Jolly and I were oldest, so we could go where we wanted within the confines of the temple wall, though perhaps not to the well room, not without supervision. But Tico wanted to see the well of the kobolds. He told us he had never seen a kobold well before. Jolly and I were so astonished to hear this that it took only a moment for us to reason that the rule about not visiting the well room was an old one, and that if we were to ask, our mother and father would surely say we were old enough now to go there on our own . . . but of course we couldn’t ask: they were busy with the truckers and would not want to be bothered, while it was up to us to keep Tico entertained.

So we crept quietly through the halls, accompanied by Jolly’s little dog, Moki—a sharp-faced hound with large upright ears, a short back, lush red fur, and a long tail. Moki had been Jolly’s pet for as long as I could remember. He stood only knee-high, but he followed my brother everywhere. Now he trotted beside us, his nails clicking against the tiled floor.

Temple Huacho was a house of stone, made from the abundant minerals of Kavasphir. The floor tiles were a cream-colored marble laced with gold; the walls were of lettered stone, in a shade of green like malachite with the letters compressed into barely readable veins of black print; the ceilings were made of translucent slices of a lighter green stone bearing the image of fossilized forests. Lights shone behind the ceiling panels, giving the effect of walking through a woodland on a cloudy day. Tico was much impressed by this décor. On the way to the well room he kept whispering about how wealthy we must be until I decided that perhaps I didn’t like him quite as much as I had thought.

The entrance to the well room was framed by the trunks of two trees fossilized in white jade. Jolly held on to Moki while I leaned past the nearest trunk, taking a quick, cautious look around the room, confirming that it was empty. Then I motioned Tico and Jolly forward.

The well room was a round chamber, its walls lined with cabinets holding hundreds of tiny, airtight drawers where mature kobolds were stored. On the right-hand side, in front of these cabinets, was the broad jade table that served as my mother’s workbench. Her microscopes and analytical equipment were shapeless lumps beneath a white dust cover. On the left side of the room another workbench supported stacks of transparent boxes—test chambers for uncataloged kobolds—but they were empty.

At the center of the room was the temple well. A thigh-high mound of fine soil surrounded its throat. Over the years I had watched this mound grow until now it spilled onto the tiles around it, where its soil was scuffed and crushed to a fine brown powder by passing feet.

Tico did not wait for further invitation. He strode past me to the mound’s edge, where he looked over the embankment of dirt, and down, into the dark, jagged hole that was the throat of the well.

A kobold well is made wherever a plume of nutrients chances to rise from the steaming core of the world, a bounty that awakens the kobold motes, tiny as dust, that lie dormant everywhere in the soil.

I felt proud when I saw the awe on Tico’s face. The well was the heart of Temple Huacho. It was the reason my mother had settled there. It was the source of our security, and our wealth. So I was surprised when Tico’s expression changed. Awe became confusion. And then confusion gave way to a wicked scowl. “Is that it?” he asked. “A dirty hole in the ground?”

I frowned down at the fine, loose soil, wanting desperately to impress him. “There are kobolds,” I said, and I pointed at the well’s throat where two newly emerged kobolds were using their weak limbs to claw free of the hard-packed ground. These were large metallophores—metal eaters—as big as my father’s thumb and beetlelike in appearance, their color as dull as the soil that nourished them.

Kobolds were a kind of mechanic, a machine creature, and like any machine they were created by the labor of other machines: the kobold motes, to be specific. That was the essential division among the animate creatures of the world: mechanics were made, so that they began existence in finished form, while organic life had to strive for existence through the complexities of birth and growth and change.

Mechanics were living tools. The metallophores that I pointed out to Tico could be configured to make many kinds of simple metal parts. As a spider eats and secretes a web, so kobolds could take in raw material, metabolize it so that it took on a new form, and secrete it. But where spiders secreted only webs, kobolds could produce things as diverse as medicine or machine parts, depending on the strain. The common metallophores of our well did their work inside a metabolic foam, which they would excrete in layer upon layer for many days depending on the size of the artifact they had been programmed to make. When the project was complete the foam would be washed away, revealing the fan blade, or bracket, or truck body that the configuration had called for.

All players were dependent upon mechanics, but we were especially dependent on the kobolds. We could not have survived without them, so it was easy to believe the legends that said they had been made for us.

But Tico showed no sign of being impressed by the large metallophores, so I hurried to look for other kobolds, and soon I spotted some that were tiny, the size of a grain of wheat or even smaller, moving through the mound’s soft soil. “See those?” I asked Tico. “There. Where the soil quivers? Those are probably the kind that make platinum circuits. My mother’s been trying to improve that strain.”

He shrugged. “Who cares about kobolds? I’ve seen thousands. I thought you were going to show me a well like the ones in Xahiclan. They’re a hundred feet across, with crystal walls crawling with rare kobolds no one’s ever seen before.”

A hundred feet across? I wondered if it could be true. I looked at Jolly. He had circled around to the well’s other side where he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, a sure sign he was getting angry. Moki sat beside him, his alert ears listening for any familiar words in our conversation. Jolly said, “At Temple Huacho we find lots of kobolds no one’s ever seen before. More than in all of Xahiclan, because this temple is new.”

I smiled, pleased at my brother’s parry. But now the line had been drawn and Tico had territory to defend. “New kobolds out of this little hole? I don’t believe it!”

It took me a moment to understand that he had just called my brother a liar. When I did, my cheeks grew hot. “Why do you think your dad comes all the way out here?” I demanded. “It’s because our kobolds are special.”

“Uh-uh!” Tico countered. “It’s for the minerals.”

Jolly smiled his signature half smile. I saw it, and took a step back from Tico. In a quiet voice Jolly said, “You forget where you are, Tico. This is the Kavasphir Hills. You’re not in an old, tame enclave like Xahiclan. We don’t need a big well, because the silver here is powerful.”

Jolly was a beautiful child, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed, his blue-black hair sprouting in unruly spikes—but he was eleven, and the easy cheerfulness of his early years had already begun to fade under the pressure of a growing self-doubt, for no talent from his past lives had ever returned to him. Every new skill had to be learned with great labor, as if for the first time. Though I was younger, I was far ahead of him in reading and math, because for me each new lesson only wakened a knowledge I already had, while Jolly had to earn it. He would grow frustrated, and rail that he must have been the stupidest player in existence, to have learned nothing from his past lives.

That night though, he was a player. He told Tico, “This land belongs to the silver. It’s in the ground. It’s in the well.” He stomped his shoe softly. “It’s here, right under our feet.”

Tico didn’t like this idea. He took a step back. “It’s not.”

“Oh, yes it is,” I said, rising to my brother’s aid—though the idea of silver lying in wait underground was new to me, and deeply unsettling . . . because it made sense. Questions I had never thought to ask were suddenly answered, and I echoed them aloud: “Where do you think kobold motes come from?” (As if I knew!) “The silver makes them, that’s where. It’s in the land.”

“It is not!” Tico said. He was becoming desperately angry now. “My uncle’s a stone mason. I’ve been to a quarry where stones are cut out of the ground, and there’s never been any silver underneath any of them.”

“This is a temple,” Jolly said.

Well it certainly was and Tico had never been in a temple before. What did he know about temples? Nothing except the silly rumors he’d heard in Xahiclan of wells a hundred feet across. But Tico was proud of his ignorance. He shrugged; his lip thrust out in a pout. “Your well is still boring to look at.”

This was too much for me. To belittle the well was to belittle the life my mother had made for all of us and that I could not bear. “Come with me, then,” I said, and I started to climb carefully over the mound. “If you want some excitement, then come with me and see the silver—unless you’re afraid.”

Jolly’s eyes widened when he saw what I was doing. “Jubilee!” But the well lay between us, and he could not stop me.

I looked over my shoulder at Tico. “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to come?”

Warily he asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to climb down the well. That’s what you have to do to see the silver.”

“But I can see the silver outside any window. It’s rising tonight. My dad said so.”

I edged closer to the well’s dark throat, placing my feet carefully so as not to crush the lumpy shapes of dormant kobolds that lay buried beneath the surface of the mound. “But it’s in the well too. Always. Night or day. Don’t you want to see it?”

I didn’t expect him to follow me. I thought fear (or wisdom) would get the better of him, and he would run away and then Jolly and I could have a good laugh together. But Tico was a gift to his parents, and to me. “Okay,” he said. “You go first.”

Of course I had never climbed down the well. I had no idea if the silver really could be seen at the bottom, or even if there was a bottom, but Tico was watching me with a wicked smile. He knew I was lying. He was only waiting for me to give up and admit it, but how could I? I glanced at Jolly. He was my big brother. He was supposed to keep me out of trouble, but he only looked at me with merry eyes, saying, “The chimney bends about ten feet down, but if you wriggle past that, you can keep going for almost thirty feet.”

I could not hide my astonishment. “You’ve been down the well?”

“Sure. How do you think I know about the silver?” He looked past my shoulder and his smile widened to a grin. I turned to see Tico fleeing the well room. The sound of his footfalls faded in the direction of the dining hall. “He won’t tell on us,” Jolly said. “He’d only get himself in trouble.”