“I was arrested several times during nonviolent resistance sessions. I was jailed for almost two years. I saw people killed in riots and I threw my body between combatants sometimes and I was beaten with the rest. I saw injustice and violence and hatred. And it was real violence, with real pain.” Anne looked at me with a frown.
“My trial lasted two years. I’m certain that Madame Tanglin had something to do with it, though that could never be proved, of course; she was much too clever. The movement put its whole force into the trial. We wanted to bring the persecutors to their knees. And we lost. The sentence was supposedly very light. As if they didn’t know that the death of the moas would be the cruelest punishment they could inflict on me.
“They sent me here. The Confederacy has no love for Niwlind, so news is scarce. And I can never return, so I’m dead to Niwlind, and it to me.”
She sighed. “I never thought I could love any place but the moors, but these islands, this beautiful sea.… I think I could have been happy here, if circumstance had let me. I’m not sorry to die, but I’m sorry not to have seen it all.” She fell silent as a cloud drifted mercifully over us, plunging us into cool shadow. “I guess that’s all I have to say.”
Moses Moses and I said nothing; we were both touched by the simple sincerity of her story, but for different reasons. I felt sorry for Anne. I did not doubt for a moment that Crestillomeem Tanglin had destroyed her career and had her exiled. What chance did poor Anne, Tanglin’s pawn, have against the malignant woman who had destroyed Old Dad himself? It would have been like a five-year-old child clenching her tiny fists to fight a combat artist.
A bathetic rush of mingled emotions washed through me like the synergetic effect of a dozen different drugs. Despair at our situation, grief at the death of my best friend Armitrage (I felt a sharp pain of loss—how he would have loved to hear what I had just heard), pity for Anne, the bitterness of irony and my own flinty self-possession, and above it all, a peculiar cosmic humor that was beyond all this and beyond all self. I smiled, turning by long habit so that the cameras could catch me at my best angle.
“Anne, you’re getting sunburned,” I said. “Let me give you my combat jacket. You can use it for shade.” Treading water, I unlaced it and pulled it off. “Don’t lose it,” I said. “It has all my smuff and my camera controls.”
I adjusted the jacket so that the stiff collar shaded her face while the back of the jacket was supported by her oblong head. “Thank you, Kid,” she said. “I’ll take good care of it.” She seemed glad that I hadn’t mocked her. Her gratitude embarrassed me. I reached unobtrusively inside the jacket and touch-set the controls so that they would continue to follow me rather than the jacket. I needed the comforting presence of their attentive lenses as I told Anne and Moses my story.
9
“I’m sure it will be no surprise to you, Mr. Chairman, to realize that I am Rominuald Tanglin. Or rather, I was once Rominuald Tanglin. Our relationship is a peculiar one, rare enough so that there are very few terms for it. At any rate, Secretary Tanglin underwent terminal personality disruption and I now inhabit his body. You can call me his son, his clone, his successor, or anything you please.
“This happened twenty-eight years ago, so you might call that my age. That makes me the youngest of the three of us by far, and I have the tastes and appetites of the young—well, some of them, anyway. I have what old people call the vices of the young—impatience, impetuousness, carelessness, cruelty. No doubt you could name several more, Anne. I’ve had mine named often enough. Named to me by old people, of course, old people who slaver at the idea of a young man following his own pursuits instead of their fossilized scheming. Since they deprived the young of any chance of making a mark in the world, we chose our own ways; is that so bad? And if it is, can you stop me? I have power and vitality, you see that I have no patience with argument, because words are the nets of the old, and old people are stuck waist-deep in their own approaching deaths and they long to lure the young into the mire as well.…” My voice died away and I shook my head in frustration. Long oratory didn’t suit me; I shared Rominuald Tanglin’s contempt for long-winded formal apostrophes. My best efforts were in the exchange of stinging insults, followed by the cry of combat, the sizzling crunch of impact. I was no orator, no politician. I preferred to make my point with a blunt edge.
“You’ll be old yourself one day. Or you would have been,” Anne said.
“I’ve been old! I’ve seen what happens to me—to him, that is.” I looked at them suspiciously. “He went insane. You probably think that I’m afraid that the same thing will happen to me, that I’m afraid of age because I know I share his weaknesses. Well, it’s not so! I’m independent of him, completely independent, I assure you. I don’t share his vices, his weakness, or his madness. I’ve never met him, of course, but he left me an extensive collection of tapes, so I’ve seen him at his worst, and I know him well. His last madness took the form of a persecution mania. He claimed that humanity was riddled with cunning aliens impersonating people, who preyed on human vitality. He claimed his own wife was one of them. Leeches, he called them. I won’t bore you with the details.
“I was born an adult, you know. Into an adult body. I was born able to speak and with a knowledge of basic trained behavior, table manners, hygiene, how to walk, run, swim, operate a keyboard. I was never a child, not really. I suppose that’s why I chose to live in an artificially childlike body. As you can see, it’s nothing like Tanglin’s body; it’s my own, dammit, mine! But although I was born an adult physically, I shared certain traits with other children. Innocence. Sensitivity. I was very impressionable. So when I saw Tanglin’s tapes I was terrified. I’ve always thought of him as my father. Strong, cold, remote. And I could tell that he was tormented by exhaustion and fear. Oh, I believed in Leeches, very strongly. There were days when I trembled in terror in my bed. Nights when I could swear I saw withered hungry faces at the window. The fear was worse because I was so isolated. I lived on the continent, you know, on the eastern edge of the Gulf, northeast of Telset. Not far from here, in fact; only thirty miles or so. I rarely saw people except in tapes and broadcasts. It was just me and my tutor, Professor Crossbow.”
“Professor Crossbow!” Anne said.
“Yes. Do you know it?”
“Of course I do, it was world-famous. So it’s true. You were telling the truth.” Tears came to her eyes. “I’m sorry, Rominuald.”
“Don’t call me that!” I shouted. “I’m not your lover, you dumb cow! Do I look like him? Do I talk like him? No, no, no! I’m my own person, I’ve proved that!” A weighty silence fell. Anne turned her face from me and wept quietly. Moses Moses looked on with an expression of cool remoteness.
I shrugged helplessly. “All right, so it makes me anxious. Put yourself in my place. It’s like living in a house whose builder died mad. It’s like having a ghost at your elbow. I’m his heir. I have his legacy. His reflexes, his speed, his altered body, his cunning. But what else did he leave me? What guarantee do I have that he will stay dead? How do I know that he’s not still in here—” I tapped my head—“hiding and biding his time? It would be just like him, you know. A masterstroke of horrible cunning. And it would make him a Leech. Disguising himself as me. I’m sure the thought occurred to him just as it occurred to me, because our thoughts run in the same channels, how could they help it? But I don’t believe this. I’ve overcome those childhood fears. A man like Tanglin casts a long shadow, but I’m out of it now. I have my own friends, my own reputation, my own fame. I don’t owe it to him. Oh, I used his fighting skills, but his were academic. Gymnasium fighting. The act of a paranoiac. I put the edge on it. I made it a marketable commodity. If I met Tanglin man to man I could break his back in ten seconds.” I was quiet for a while. The weight of my nunchuck was dragging me down a little, despite the buoyancy of our makeshift air-float. I had been treading water for hours now and a rubbery fatigue was invading my legs through the tingly numbness
of smuff.
“I’ve never told this to anyone before,” I said at last. “Professor Crossbow was the only one to know, and I haven’t seen it in years. It may be dead. It was old, as old as Tanglin. And it was a hermit at heart. Its studies meant more to it than anything, even its friendship with Tanglin. I loved that old neuter. It was probably the only friend Tanglin had. It could have destroyed me so easily—turned me into another Tanglin. But it let me go my own way, at my own speed. It took away the burden of sex. Sex destroyed Tanglin. It made him his wife’s dupe. I know better. I have no wife. I have no lovers.…” I choked on my words as I remembered Armitrage’s last declaration. There hadn’t been time to think about it. Now the memory was like a kick in the stomach.
“He loved you,” Moses Moses said. Anne looked puzzled. “You overheard?” I said.
“No,” Moses said. “But I could tell by the way he looked at you. And that woman in your apartments—the tall, frail one, that the Cabal murdered.…”
“Quade.”
“Yes, Quade. She loved you too.”
“No,” I said. “She never told me so. She knew it was impossible. She was loyal, that’s all. Loyal and stubborn.”
Moses smiled ironically at my naïveté. “Do you think she stood the torture because she was stubborn, Kid? Do you really believe that? Or did you know all along that she loved you? Did you know how she longed to hold you, to touch you, to mend your wounds?” I jerked my face up to look at him and we locked eyes. His ancient yellow gaze pierced me with its insight; he seemed to suck up the thoughts from my head. “Ah, now you remember,” he said softly. “You remember how she tended to you, worked for you, obeyed your least whims. And your response, Kid?” He nodded, sucking in his lower lip. “Yes. You knew she loved you. You knew she burned for your embrace and you lorded it over her. You threw her scraps of your affection, you flattered her, you led her on. You won her heart and you kept your own cool and shielded. Just as Tanglin did with this poor girl.” He waved one finger-wrinkled hand at Saint Anne.
Anne cried indignantly, “No! You don’t know that. You weren’t there, so how can you say such a thing?”
Moses Moses turned his calm gaze on her and she withered instantly. She almost cowered and I shuddered at the way he had dropped his mask, at the way he spared us nothing. The old are powerful. They see too much. Maybe that is what drives them mad. “I can guess,” he said gently. “It’s not for nothing that we say the young are cruel. The old are cruel too sometimes, cruel in their madness and their desperation to live; but the young are cruel naturally, like trees that grow and crowd out their brothers. They cause pain because they don’t understand, because they love themselves wholeheartedly. They have not yet developed the self-contempt that poisons all our enjoyment, the wisdom that comprehends our own weaknesses. And when you first begin to gain that wisdom, then you’ll look back on your youth, and you’ll see all the pain you have caused. But,” and he smiled, “those who die young are spared that. So you are both fortunate.”
After that there was little to say. Anne and I traded glances and we saw the wariness and fear that the old man had inspired in both of us. For the first time I realized that Anne was warm and human. I felt a surge of friendliness toward her. “Anne, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll be your friend from now to the end, I swear.”
“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I had no right to judge you. I’m just a fool, I suppose. A dupe.” She shook her head bitterly.
“Don’t say that,” said Moses Moses kindly. “It’s no sin to be young. It happens to all of us once.” He smiled at me. “Sometimes twice!”
We heard splashing and turned to see a large school of fish swimming toward us, leaping above the water. They were skipperjacks, foot-long, yellow-backed, elegant fish. As they drew nearer we saw that they were a whole shoal; dozens leapt above the water, but there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, swimming beneath the surface in gleaming phalanxes.
“Will they hurt us?” Anne said. “What shall we do?”
“No, they won’t hurt us,” I said. “They’re only skipperjacks. I guess they’re migrating.”
“They look to me like they’re running from something,” Moses Moses said. They were coming from the north. The current was drawing us in that direction.
“Here they come!” I said. In moments they were all around us. One of them leapt by and rattled my hair as I ducked. I felt their fins and scaly sides brush slickly against my bare legs. Anne shrieked. They were making no special effort to avoid us, and their fishy intimacies made us laugh in embarrassed half-revulsion. In half a minute it was over; they were gone.
“I wonder what that was all about?” Anne said.
“I don’t know, but they’ve provided lunch,” said Moses equably. He held up a large skipperjack which he had somehow snagged with his bare hands. It was still struggling weakly.
“Ugh,” said Anne. “Do you expect us to eat raw fish? Take my share. I’d rather go hungry.”
“How will we gut it?” I said. “We’ve got no blades.”
“And the blood may attract rays,” Anne said practically. “Maybe you should let the poor thing go.”
“Let it go?” said Moses indignantly. I could see that he had slipped back into his shell, and I was glad to see it; his frankness had deeply disturbed me. “After the trouble it took me to catch it! I’m thirsty, aren’t you? This sea water is far too briny to drink, but the juice from this fish would be—”
“Holy death, look at that!” I shouted. Something was approaching us from the north. It was deep under the water, twenty or thirty feet down, at the limit of clarity. But it was huge. It was hard to tell its exact size because of the distance, but it was at least fifty feet across, I would swear to that. The cameras back me up on this. They show that it was an oblong, black oval, and there is a suggestion that it undulated slowly. We drew up our feet in silent terror. It seemed to take forever to pass under us. When it was gone we felt the chill of an icy upgush of deep water.
Half a minute passed before we dared to speak. “What was that?” Anne said. Moses and I shook our heads; it was impossible to tell, and the placid seas of Reverie hold many secrets. “I lost my fish,” Moses said sadly.
The afternoon passed slowly. We grew bored. Moses Moses had not slept much, so we stuck the back of his head into the crotch of the air-float and let him sleep as we floated on our backs. I kicked off my shoes, but I still kept my nunchuck; I couldn’t bear to part with it. Besides, its explosive charge offered a quick, clean death if the rays were tardy.
After Moses had slept, Anne slept; then it was my turn. It was not very restful. I never liked to sleep on my back and the gentle swell of the water was not soothing. I was forced to sneeze brine several times and when I finally gave up the attempt to sleep I was crotchety and miserable. My wounds were beginning to ache again, and it was not wise to take smuff on an empty stomach.
By the time the sun went down we were in terrible shape. All three of us were sunburned, especially on our faces. Anne’s was worst. If she lived, she would lose all the skin on her face. Her eyes were swollen and her lips were chapped. We were all horribly thirsty. Anne and I had washed out our mouths with the bitter sea water, though we hadn’t dared to drink it, following Moses’ warning. Even so, it had made our thirst worse. Anne’s hair was a mess; even the feather ornament in her hair looked drab and soaked. My plastic hair had crusted up considerably with brine.
After sundown I put my combat jacket back on and reset my cameras. I even reattached the electrical charge to my hair, but the sea water had shorted it out. Luckily the camera controls were rugged. They were designed to resist heavy impact and soaking with blood, so the water hadn’t damaged them.
“I wish it were over with,” Anne said at last, as the first stars showed after a magnificent sunset. “Why are we going on? Is there any chance of rescue at all? Ocean liners? Airplanes that might spot us?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “I know thi
s area well; I used to sail out here when I lived off the Tethys Reef with Professor Crossbow. This is wilderness. I suppose there’s a chance in a million that someone’s pleasure yacht might spot us, but certainly not at night. The only other things that come out here are camera drones. We might stumble over one of them, but they’re pretty rare, and who would want to tape the middle of the ocean? There are aquatic drones, but they stay underwater. And their range is limited. They can only see as far as their lights can reach.”
“Well, why haven’t the rays gotten us?” Anne said fretfully.
“How should I know?” I said petulantly. “Maybe they’re just not very fond of human flesh. It probably tastes funny. We’re alien to this planet. You know. Biochemically.”
“I can’t understand why the first rays didn’t get us,” Moses said.
“Armitrage was full of smuff,” I said bitterly. “Maybe it poisoned them. ‘The Effect of Smuff on Rays.’ That sounds like one of Professor Crossbow’s experiments.”
Hours passed. A flying island blew up over the continent. None of us talked; our mouths were too parched.
At midnight it was my turn to blow up the float again. When I put my head underwater, I heard the incredible: a dull, resonant boom from deep below.
I surfaced and said, “Listen. Did you hear that? Put your ears underwater.”
We all heard it. Loud booming, like the taut skin of a drum. “What could it be?” Anne asked wearily. None of us knew. “Fish, maybe,” croaked Moses. “Some kind of sonar.”
It meant nothing to us, but the fish knew better. We heard flopping and splashing all around us as fish fled in panic. It was too dark to see them. The booming grew louder and more urgent; we could hear it faintly even with our ears above the water. Several times we felt backwash as big animals swam past us. “The water’s getting warmer!” Anne said. She was too tired to resist her fright; we were all on edge.
“Look!” Moses said hoarsely. “Look down into the water; do you see it?”
The Artificial Kid Page 15
