The Artificial Kid

by Bruce Sterling

  “As money poured through our dwelling oneills, we were unable to resist making them beautiful. In my original plans they were only campgrounds, orbiting arks if you prefer. But after a century one feels differently; you learn to love the work of your own hands, to think of it as home. And oneills have their advantages; the lack of gravity at their cores for instance. That gave rise to hundreds of different pursuits from sports to sex, things that made us uniquely us, that people were loth to give up. Just as we started colonizing the planet, some oneills began canceling their centrifugal spin, going completely floater, like the Confederates themselves. They orbited Reverie, because it’s such a beautiful planet, but they’d made their decision to stay in space and there was nothing I could do about it; it would have ripped the social fabric. I set an example by moving down to the planet, and I lived in those ugly drone-built fortresses that I’d helped to construct myself. They were uncomfortable and hideous, and every time a fresh wind blew in off the continent we would all come down with some minor ailment. We kept a close watch on our health, of course, and there weren’t many fatalities, but we were constantly hampered by precautions. There were endless tests and inoculations and immunizations, and most of us were at a low level of illness much of the time—rotten little ailments like colds and diarrhea, stomach aches, low fevers, sticky eyes, peeling blisters on the hands and feet, bumps and itches—not dangerous things, not really challenging things, just trivial annoyances that sapped the will instead of strengthening it. After all, we were pioneers, and even with the full backing of a powerful technology, a pioneer faces difficulties. But the orbiters didn’t see it that way. With a camera drone you can experience much of Reverie, sight and sound, without risking illness, from the lavish comfort of your oneill. You’re not weighted down by gravity; you don’t get sunburned, you don’t get sand in your shoes. With a direct cerebral hookup you can even get good approximations of touch and scent. It was just too tempting to stay in orbit, to see the whole planet at a glance instead of a few acres through a tiny quartz window. They didn’t want to struggle any more, and after the Mining Century, who could blame them? And oneills are close to self-sufficient, they have to be, since each is its own life-support system; an oneill naturally tends toward insularity, toward becoming a city-state. Our good communications prevented that, luckily, but nevertheless they were hard to control.…

  “Things slowly got better as the decades passed, faster and faster, each one seeming to take less time than the last. The older settlers became immunized, we were able to see more, travel more, develop customs of our own, to take advantage of the incredible bounty of this planet. We grew to love it as a mother rather than fight it as an adversary. It’s so beautiful, it’s a gift. It had an intelligent race once. I often wonder what they were like. It was thoughtful of them to destroy themselves and leave their planet to us.”

  He grinned sardonically. “Death comes to us all, though not so quickly as it came to them. Death is rooted within me, it travels along every nerve. A man is lucky to live to three hundred. With a purpose in life, something to focus his will to survive, he may see three hundred and fifty. But the urge to die is as strong as the urge to live; it only manifests itself more subtly. After I passed three hundred, my death began to assert itself. Subtly at first, then more urgently. The degenerative process is peculiarly horrifying.”

  He looked at both of us, slowly, earnestly. “It started with the breakdown of memory. Distant memories had been blurred for a long time; I had depended on my computer to sort them out for me. But then I found myself prey to increasing absentmindedness. I would forget the events of days or even mere hours past. I would forget if I had eaten a meal, forget errands and appointments, repeat myself in conversations. Then it became more intense. I suffered from the nightmarish feeling that I was living a single week over again; I began to suspect, insanely, that time had doubled back on itself, that I was trapped in an endless loop, like a tape.

  “I felt that I was becoming thinner—stretched out into an intolerable, vulnerable state. I began to slip into the classic degenerative syndromes of extreme old age, the state we call Panan. Do you know what Panan is? Does it still exist?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know what it is. It’s pananesthesia—a sort of overall numbness.”

  “That’s not half of it,” Moses Moses said. “It involves physical numbness, of course. In its worst state, you can smash your fingers in a door and not even notice it until you see the dripping of blood. But it’s a mental numbness too. Your strongest emotions, your deepest convictions run out of you like water from a broken jug. Apathy devours you. Black depression settles in, suddenly, without warning, and when you least expect it. You feel horribly distant from life, as if you were encased in glass, and other people seem like puppets. You can almost see the strings.” He shuddered.

  “God, it even hurts to talk about it! The pleasures that rooted you to life, that made it seem worth living, are leached away. Sex for example. I’ve been impotent for a long time now—decades. Aphrodisiacs would restore the function of my body, but it was as if it were happening to someone else. You feel out of phase with your body, as if you had drifted away from it. That’s the very worst part of it. It’s madness, a madness peculiar to the old. You begin to suspect that your body is useless, that it drags you down. You begin to hate your body, you begin to hate yourself. Your catch yourself inflicting small punishments on the body; you become accident prone. Most old people die by accidents, by indirect suicide. Only a few have the nerve to confront death directly and take their own lives.

  “I didn’t want to die. Consciously, I hated the idea of death. Unconsciously, I planned my own destruction. I convinced myself that a shock would restore my appetite for living; I took up mountain climbing, gliding, diving. I confronted these natural risks, and I manufactured more of my own. It didn’t work, but it did show me the opposite side of the coin. It’s called Hyperas. From hyperasthesia, of course.

  “In many ways Hyperas is worse then Panan. Instead of being distanced, you feel suffocatingly close. Instead of feeling numb, you are hideously sensitive. Whispers sound like shouts and shouts like earthquakes. The softest clothing chafes you. The tastiest food is cloying, sickeningly rich. You notice everything, even the tiniest things that you never realized existed. Not merely people’s faces, but the dirt in their clogged pores, the stubble in their follicles, the split ends in individual hairs. You notice the smallest, most fleeting expressions; people behave like slapstick clowns, mugging everything. You can tell what they say before they say it, what they’ll do before they do it. Actually this is true for most old people; it’s a matter of experience. But in Hyperas, your perceptions become so acute that it dehumanizes people. They seem like programmed drones. You rob them of their free will, and suddenly it seems that they never had any.

  “You notice so many tiny details that you smother under the rush of information. It drives you frantic. It forces you to retreat from your usual haunts into a less cluttered environment; a bare room, for instance. I tried that, but I became painfully fascinated by the texture of the wall, by the weaving of the sheets on my cot, by the dust motes in the air, even by self-induced ringing in my ears. During my worst attack I retreated to a sensory deprivation tank; warm water, silence, darkness. It seemed to work; I calmed down. But when I finally came out, I was completely engulfed by Panan. From then on, the two states alternated, sometimes in a single day. When I realized that I was being driven to suicide, I decided to postpone my final confrontation with death by putting myself under ice. I started preparing my cryocoffin. When I had this task to distract me, my sanity was restored. I suppose the cryosleep was close enough to death to satisfy my destructive urge, so it granted me a respite from my self-torment. I picked what I thought would be a significant date for my reawakening; I thought that the marvels of the distant future would distract me long enough to provide a few more decades of life. If the Panan returned, I would kill myself, or go back und
er ice again. That way I could extend my life almost indefinitely.

  “Also, there was an element of vanity. Naturally I wanted to see how long my social handiwork would last. Curiosity was a good enough reason to live. It aroused my interest, it broke the shell of apathy. So I did it. I never thought it would end in this, though I was prepared for disaster. I carefully hid my coffin, you remember. But I never anticipated this.” He shook his head. “At least it relieves me from the moral effort of suicide. People tell me that suicide, deliberate, self-conscious self-destruction, is the only way to die with dignity. But I never believed that. The perfect death, for me, would have come quickly, without warning, as it did when the drone pierced my oneill. But death had his chance then, and he failed to get me. Since, then, I’ve resolved on life. When the rays come to get us, I suppose I’ll fight them! That should be a sight to see.”

  He laughed lightly, mocking himself, but without bitterness. “I’ve said enough. Who’ll be next to tell their story?”

  Anne and I exchanged glances. Anne’s freckled face was sunburned; it was noon and the burn would get much worse if we lived until sundown, nine hours away. “I’ll go next,” she said.

  “All right,” I said. I looked overhead. A flock of dark, long-winged birds were flying west in a V formation. Perhaps one of the towering, white-piled thunderclouds would drift over us and shade us. Perhaps it would even rain on us. Although we were neck-deep in water, I was getting thirsty. I tried not to think about it. The hunger was worse, anyway; as usual, the smuff stirred my appetite.

  8

  Anne said, “I believe in God, the catalyst of life, the core of the universe, the essence of good. I believe in good, and I believe in evil, and I have sworn to support the first and destroy the second. I believe in a soul, which is manifested in matter, but is different from matter and superior to it. God breathed life into matter, because God is pure soul, and the souls of all living things return to God when their stay in the realm of matter is dissolved by death. Evil comes when the pure and passionless soul is polluted by material lust and greed. The way of salvation is to purge the soul of evil and return to the good. All forms of life contain some good, because they all come from God; therefore all life is sacred and not to be wantonly destroyed. Such is the creed of my Church; such is my creed; such is my faith.”

  After this strange statement she fell silent for so long that I thought she had finished. I was annoyed and amused. “That’s it, then?” I said mockingly. “That’s your life story?”

  “That is the core of it,” she said. “The rest is only personal details.”

  “Well,” said Moses Moses with an air of humorous restraint, “perhaps you should go ahead and tell us a few of them. Maybe you’ll find it easier if you start with the history of your Church.”

  “The history of my Church is the history of my life,” said Anne with a quiet womanly dignity quite amazing for one sunk to her neck in sea water. “I was born into the Church, because I am the great-granddaughter of the Mysteriarch. She is the leader of our Church, and her father is our greatest theologian, the wisest man alive. He is five hundred years old.”

  “Impossible,” said Moses Moses and I, together.

  She shook her head. “It’s the truth.”

  “Then he’s had a memory wipe, probably several,” I said. “How do you know he’s that old? What proof can he offer?”

  “Church leaders never lie,” Anne said indignantly. “Sometimes they prefer to meet questions with silence, but they never lie. Men and women are not born to destroy themselves; that idea is the lie. Those outside the faith die early, because they tear themselves apart with frustration and despair. Their lives are pointless; they have nowhere to turn; they have no goals in life nobler than the gratification of their own vanity. Their lives are empty! Hollow, echoing, empty! They have nothing to live for! They have nothing beyond themselves! Is it any wonder that they die? No. The wonder is that they manage to live so long. God put no limitation on life. Those who follow the path of righteousness can live indefinitely, because they dedicate their lives to God.

  “Their lives are healthy, because they are dedicated to a noble purpose, the noblest there is: they do good. They do good, and they avoid the black paths of suicidal evil: Hate. Envy. Greed. Luxury. Sloth. The dissolutions of the flesh. They avoid all those things. They avoid all those things and they focus their eyes on the sublime.” She looked piously upward. “That’s why our creed has spread, slowly but surely. Now there are over a million men and women in our Church family. We are a force to be reckoned with on Niwlind.”

  I said, “What’s Niwlind’s current population? About six billion, right?”

  “Six point two billion,” she said. “But our million are the best among them, and the rest will see the light in time.”

  Moses Moses was aghast. “Are there that many people now? How did it get so overcrowded? There were only three billion when I left.”

  “It was evasion of the population laws,” Anne said calmly. “Everyone does it. People need children, you know; it’s a very deep-seated need. I intend—well, I intended to have children someday. It’s too late now, of course.”

  I was interested. “Really?” I said. “Do you favor artificial insemination, or were you going to give yourself to some man’s sweaty fleshy embraces?”

  Anne looked at me coldly. “Marriage is a sacrament. It is a meeting of souls. Marriage in the Church transcends carnal lusts.” I nodded skeptically. She frowned. “I didn’t expect you to understand that. Obviously it’s completely beyond you.”

  I was annoyed. “I don’t pretend to understand sex, but I know hypocrisy when I see it.”

  “That doesn’t suprise me,” she said cuttingly. “You claimed to be Tanglin’s young son when you’re really hundreds of years old. Obviously you’re an old hand at hypocrisy.”

  “Why, you mudbrained idiot,” I began, but Moses Moses interrupted. “Children, please,” he said smoothly. “Let’s avoid squabbling. These are my last hours. Let me live them in peace. You’ll have your chance to explain yourself, Kid. Let Anne have hers.”

  My anger evaporated. “Yes, of course,” I said. “Go ahead, Anne.” I relished the thought that she would soon know the full truth about Tanglin, and our relationship.

  Anne said, “The Uplands on Niwlind are one of the planet’s oldest areas. They are a high plateau. The air is thin and it is cold and windy, especially in winter. It has never been heavily populated. Even now most of the development is in mining camps. But that is where the Mysteriarch founded our Church Sanctuary, and that is where I was born, fifty-two years ago.

  “Only the initiates know the full extent of Sanctuary. Visitors only see the domes and churches that cling to the side of the rock. Sometimes rumors are heard about the tunnels in the valley cliff wall. They do not realize that there are miles of tunnels. And not all the tunnels were built by men.

  “The Upland Plateau itself is grassy and arid. We chose to dwell in the canyons, great, deep river canyons that the water carved over millions of years. The rock is the continental shield itself—there is no sedimentation, no colorful layering in it. It is black and gray and sometimes, rarely, dark red. The canyons are thousands of feet deep and sometimes miles wide. The rivers are thin and sinuous and in some places they are blocked by falls of rubble. Then thin, deep little fjords appear, and there are rapids. The water is dark and very cold.

  “Every morning and every evening, with sunrise and sunset, winds whip through the canyon, and they howl. If you listen carefully you can hear voices in the howling, but it is best not to listen to them. The wind tears at everything it touches—that’s why the plants of the valley floor are almost all roots. They are small and gnarled and tough, but if their seeds land behind a windbreak then they grow tall and put out hard stiff colorful flowers whose petals can scratch glass.

  “Even as a little girl I didn’t like the valley floor—it is too dark, the walls are too high. I wanted to live
on the moors instead. The moors are windy too, it blows all the time. But it blows steadily, not with the brief killing violence of the morning and evening valleywinds. And it is open. You can see the sun and the dark battered clouds and the knee-high grass and smell the little flowers and see the little denizens of the plains. There are beetles and grasshoppers and flutterbys, and little marmots and rabbits and goats, and of course moas. The moas are best.” Anne reached up slowly and touched the sodden cluster of dark feathers pinned to her hair.

  “I was a good girl and I understood the truth of the catechism almost from the first, and I was better even than they expected me to be. Until I was ten I stayed almost all the time in Sanctuary, because I was an illegal child and the old habits of caution die hard. But after a while I was given a forged identity and I went through my Borning and I took my adult name, Anne.

  “Then I was allowed to go up the steep trail from the valley floor up to the moors, where I worked in the gardening domes with my uncle and cousins. During prayertime in the mornings and evenings, when the valleywinds blew, I was able to go out on the moors to meditate. I saw my first moa when I was twelve. It was an old moa—an old female with dirty feathers and big pendulous wattles on her neck. I was wandering, and so was she. I wasn’t frightened, although mother had told me that in the first days of Sanctuary a child had been pecked to death by big rogue moas. The old moa wasn’t frightened either. She just backed away slowly and then ran off over the grass on her great thick scaly legs.

  “That night I dreamed that I was wandering over the moors and I came into a depression like a grassy bowl. And I dreamed that in the middle of the depression was a big circular track of beaten earth, like a big wheel, with eight dirt tracks like spokes. And in the dream something called me to step into the center of the wheel, but when I stepped over the boundary of the circle I woke up.