The Artificial Kid

by Bruce Sterling

  The news about Angeluce had devastated poor Crossbow. It sat with its head in its hands, groaning a little from time to time. Moses Moses helped himself to more fish. I had finished eating. I got out Crossbow’s old tape screen.

  “Here, Professor, I’d like to show you a few things,” I said.

  We spent the rest of the day examining my tapes and explaining our horrible difficulties. We cheered when Angeluce fell in the water; we sobbed unashamedly at Armitrage’s death, which was his final tape appearance but undoubtedly the very best of his career. My spirits soared when I saw the quality of the recordings. They were the finest I had ever done.

  It did me good to be working in tape again; it reaffirmed my self-image. Crossbow’s equipment, however, was so old-fashioned that I hesitated to do any real editing. I had plenty of tape time left—six months’ worth of thin metallic image ribbon, so I didn’t erase anything. I spent several happy hours, however, cleaning and oiling my cameras.

  We fell asleep at sunset after eighteen exhausting hours of wakefulness. I woke up at about two hours past midnight. I took some smuff, and when I got up for some water I noticed that Crossbow and Moses Moses were gone.

  “Anne,” I said. She threw off her thin fabric coverlet and sat up on the floor. She yawned. “What is it?”

  “They’re gone,” I said, waving my hand at Crossbow’s empty hammock. Crossbow had taken down some of its phosphorescent bulbs before we slept and there were peculiar multiple shadows in the little cell. My cameras resumed full activity as I touched the controls in my jacket. I put the jacket on and began to lace it up; I had already sponged the brine off of it.

  “Yes,” she said sleepily. “I saw them creeping out through a hole in the floor a while ago. They woke me up. Didn’t you feel the wind?”

  I shook my head. I always slept deeply when I was wounded; my body knew best. I was healing very rapidly, thanks to the actions of my follicle mites, which had struggled on manfully despite sunburn and prolonged soaking in sea water. The wounds that had required stitches were gummily sealed up and the big splotches of rainbow-colored bruises were turning paler.

  I looked at the floor and noticed a thin zipper in the heavy fabric. It was another airlock, still damp inside with sea water. The new ventilation hole in the floor of the cell had been cut very recently, after the flying island had risen up from the Gulf; the old zippered airlock had been Crossbow’s entryway into the balloon while it was still underwater. I opened up both sides of the lock and a heavy draft of wind swept through the cell. I turned off the ventilation fan, but not before a small cloud of dried fish scales, bits of seaweed, and fragments of beaded wire modelling had been swept out through the old airlock.

  I slid onto my stomach and looked down through the hole in the loose flapping fabric of the airlock. It was dark outside. There was a short rope ladder, no more than twenty feet long, leading down into the darkness. Below it was an expanse of rich, black, smelly bottom mud, laced together with roots and cables—the island’s payload. Seventeen thousand tons of it, the Professor had said. A forest of thick cables attached it in hundreds of places to the fabric of the balloon, distributing the strain of the immense burden. It was slowly drying out, at a rate that offset the loss of lift as hydrogen slowly seeped out of the balloon.

  “Hey, look, it’s the island itself!” I said. “Let’s go down and see what the bag dragged up.”

  “Here, take one of the bulbs,” Anne said, handing me one. “You go ahead, I’ll come down in a moment.” I attached the sticky side of the bulb to the fabric of my bodytight, at the sleeve. Then I went down the ladder, grinning secretly. Poor Anne, she was so embarrassed at her own natural functions that she couldn’t bear to perform them with me in the room.

  I climbed hand over hand down the ladder, carefully, for I was a little dizzy with smuff. A crumbly, dried crust, interlaced with fibrous white roots, had formed in the sun-baked mud. It was thick enough to bear my weight, and I soon grew used to the pungent smell.

  The Professor had told us that these seventeen thousand tons of rich black mud were grasped by roots into the shape of an inverted cone, roughly round and deepest in the center where it followed the island’s tap root. The expanse of mud was about sixty feet across, and at its thickest it was eighteen or twenty feet deep. The entire mass had been wrenched up from the sea bottom, leaving a wide crater in the silent, black deeps now far behind us. Some of the island’s volume was made up of the porous network of roots, but the rest was rich, prime mud, stolen by erosion and now returned, with interest.

  I crouched down to examine the mud, digging into it gingerly with the end of my ’chuck. The white rootlets were incredibly tough. Trapped beneath their tendrils were tons of chipped shell, yellowed fish bone, and greasy mud half-turned to squashy slate. I dug up a long, ragged, broken ray’s tooth and knocked the mud from it; it was as long as the width of my hand.

  There were a few bottom animals scattered about, too weak, slow, or stupid to escape the island as it began its ascent: sea stars, thick, gut-colored bottom worms with armored heads, some tiny skates, some big-eyed flounders puffed up to bursting. I kicked one of the flounders over and a host of tiny crabs the color of roots ran out from under it, their minuscule pincers rich with rotting flesh. I wondered how the little scavengers expected to survive the detonation. Perhaps they would simply leap off the island once they had eaten their fill.

  A few paces later I stepped into the mouth of something’s burrow and almost tripped. I don’t know what made the burrow but it hissed in annoyance as I skipped away.

  It was Reverie herself at work. Even in this temporary ecosystem, life was stuffing itself into every available niche.

  I saw Anne come rapidly down the ladder, her white garments floating out around her like a nimbus as she descended. She had given up wearing her saint’s garb, because we couldn’t spare the water to wash its coarse fabric. She stepped daintily off the end of the ladder, her feet scarcely denting the crusted mud. She had a phosphorescent bulb attached to each shoulder.

  “Oh, it’s like a fairyland,” she said, looking around wide-eyed.

  “This filthy wasteland?” I almost said, but I bit back the words. Looking around, I made a conscious effort to see it through her eyes. I became aware of its peculiar beauty. It was the light that had done it; the pale yellow light of our bulbs, the wan greenish lights from the phosphorescent spots dotting the cells of the balloon, the weak bluish glow from clustered stars around the horizon. The jackstraw verticals of the hundreds of supporting cables gave the scene an eerie unreality, and if it weren’t for the smell of the mud, you would swear that it was a mosaic—it was a broken jigsaw of shrunken plates of crumbly mud, linked by roots, touched with phosphorescent green amid the shadowed black of its interstices.

  “It’s pretty,” I said. “I wonder where the Professor and Moses are.”

  Anne looked at me anxiously. “Kid, do you really want to see them? I’d rather be alone. With you.”

  I was touched. “Really? I thought you hated me.”

  She shook her head. “No, Kid, of course not. But Moses and Professor Crossbow are acting so strangely, and we’re stuck here alone with them.”

  I smiled cynically. “You want me to protect you, then, is that it? How could I? If they wanted to kill us all, all they’d have to do is touch one little flame to that hydrogen up there and we’d all be tumbling lumps of charcoal.” I enjoyed the look of horror that appeared on her face after this sadistic bit of teasing. “We’d be helpless. How could I possibly stop them?” Anne looked so unhappy that I repented.

  “Oh, Anne, don’t be so soft-headed. Crossbow’s a gentle soul. When that precious hero of yours, Tanglin, was betrayed by all around him and sunk neck-deep in madness, Crossbow was the last friend he had. Crossbow was the person he chose to trust right up to death and through to the other side. Crossbow was the person he chose to raise him, to tutor him, to be his parent. No need to be afraid of it or of Moses e
ither. They’re old people. You have to allow them their quirks. They allow us ours.”

  “Kid, Tanglin was a great man. You should respect him. After all, you were him once.”

  “No. Never.”

  “You say that, but I see it differently. Now that I know, I can see the resemblance. You don’t talk like him, but the way you walk, the way you … well … move your eyebrows, move your hands. I can tell. It’s very strange. I think you’re the strangest man I’ve ever met.”

  I shook my head. “Anne, you’re so innocent! You’re so full of silly delusions! When will you give up this dumb fixation about Tanglin? Do you think you were the only woman in his life? For death’s sake, he had hundreds of followers like you. He charmed them. He made a science of it. It wasn’t respect that made him treat you the way he did. When he first saw you he summed you up in fifteen seconds. Then he did whatever was necessary to make you obey him.”

  “That’s cruel, Kid. And it’s not true.”

  “Isn’t it, though? You weren’t even a warm body to him. You were a tool, a statistic. He couldn’t even find the time to seduce you. You should thank your God that Crestillomeem Tanglin kept him busy, or your precious chastity would be just a memory now.”

  At last she was angry. “I didn’t expect a lecture on sex from you! What makes you the expert? Do you think I know nothing about it, just because I restrain myself? I’ve been approached by experts in seduction—by wealthy, powerful, handsome men, and women, who would have offered me anything to sin. You forget that I was famous—that my seduction would have made any man’s reputation. I’ve seen the temptations and I’ve turned away from them, which is a great deal more than you can say.”

  The justice in her retort annoyed me. “I’ve seen the gamut too—don’t forget I’m a Reverid, and Money Manies’ friend! I stay cool and detached, like Crossbow, because it’s easier that way—and because sex ruined me once. It destroyed Tanglin. He trusted his lover, and she ripped his insides out. I’ve learned by his mistake. It’s just a complication. It’s a lure I’d rather avoid.”

  “We’re in agreement there, then,” Anne said. She looked at me speculatively. “I like you for your frankness, Kid. I’d much rather hear that than the guile of some seducer, some deceiver. I’ve never had any patience with such people. They are uncaring. They cause pain and humiliation and exult in it. The best any such person can offer is a few moments of sterile pleasure that only detract from discipline and good works.”

  She looked at me again to see how I was taking it. I nodded a little, thoughtfully. She soon warmed to her topic.

  “Our Church has a very common-sensical attitude, I think. They accept the role of sex in marriage, and the role of marriage in life. We marry only once. That is why we insist on a long betrothal period—ten years at least. If my cause had been successful …” Reflexively, she touched the feathers in her hair, lightly, as if she were touching a bruise. “… I might be betrothed now. I’ve always meant to marry and have children, so that I could continue the lineage of the Catechist. Now that duty falls to my cousins. I had other duties … too many other duties. Now that I live on Reverie, marriage is out of the question.”

  “You’re still alive,” I said.

  “Yes, but I could never bring up a child in Telset. The moral atmosphere is too corrupt. A child is a sacred responsibility. It’s no light decision, to create a life. And I am severed from the chain of descent. My child would be born outside the Church.” She paused. “If I had this planet all to myself, just myself and the child’s father, then things would be different.” The fancy seemed to please her; she smiled. “I believe in life. I want life to go on, the life that came to me through my mother and her mother and her mother in a long chain back to the beginning of Life itself. But I’m not alone on this planet. I’m only isolated. And Church members marry only once. What Reverid would spend his life with me? Better to forget such things and devote my life and strength to my moral duties. You’re a Reverid, so I doubt if you understand. But what do you think of that, Kid?” She looked at me. “I’m surprised you’re not laughing.”

  “No, of course I’m not, but it sounds very odd,” I said. “But knowing you as I do now I think it’s about what I expected.” Her little speech had roused an odd feeling in me—a sort of fascination mixed with distaste. It sounded so earthy, so primeval—especially that remark about the chain of descent to the beginning of time. I had a sudden quick-flash vision of Anne, apelike, filthy, covered in skins, suckling a naked brat at one discolored breast. I shook it off with a rattle of plastic hair.

  Anne looked at me curiously. “So now I’ve told you,” she said. “But what about you, Kid? What about your ideas for the future, your ambitions?”

  I shrugged. “Hadn’t thought of it. Besides, all plans are off now. Now I just want to survive long enough to bash the brains out of Angeluce and Instant Death.”

  “But didn’t you have plans before all of this started? What were they? Tell me, I’m interested, really.”

  I considered. “Well,” I said slowly, “I’m still young, and still top dog in my profession. I thought I’d fight a few years more, accumulate a few more shares of stock, and then get out of active combat art while I was still at my peak. I wouldn’t wait for brain damage or spine damage to put me out of it. And I’d stay in trim so I’d never have to refuse an honest challenge. And I’d probably run with the Cogs every once in a while, for old times’ sake.” I looked at Anne. She seemed to be drinking in every word, so I went on with a little more enthusiasm.

  “Then I’d like to have my own channel,” I said. “I’d edit everything that went on it, personally, so that it was really top-drawer stuff. Then I’d become a patron, and get myself a talented group of proteges to do all the hard work—you know, like Money Manies does. I’d just do the fun stuff—a little light editing here and there, a few art tapes. I’ve always wanted to work with video mandalas, for instance. Then I’d get a few more channels, build myself an industry. The sort of thing you can run on an income of twenty-five or thirty shares. That’s as rich as I’d ever like to be, really; anything more would be ridiculous. Oh, and I’d move out of the Decriminalized Zone, and build myself a fine villa on the shoreline somewhere, half-buried in the reef, like Crossbow’s old house where I grew up. With a dock, and an airlock, and a big stand of Tower Coral. Then I’d get a nice household going, with lots of parties and celebrations, and lots of interesting people to call me their patron, and lots of good art going on—the kind of art that’ll make a name for you. And everyone would toe the line, because they knew if they didn’t their patron would beat them black and blue. And I wouldn’t grow old, either; if I felt myself going batty I’d just kill myself at once and put an end to it. Clean. Efficient. Straight-from-the-shoulder. That’s the kind of life I’d like to lead.”

  Anne looked at me doubtfully. “It sounds rather sterile.”

  “Yes. Right,” I said enthusiastically. “Sterile.”

  Anne slowly nodded, then looked away absently as if she had lost all interest. “Let’s explore the island and see if we can find the others.”

  “Fine,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s. I could use some breakfast.” I walked along lightly at Anne’s shoulder, content to let her lead while I looked for interesting bits and pieces of stuff from the sea bottom. I had picked up a few shells and was crumbling the mud from them when Anne stopped suddenly and I bumped into her. “Hey,” I said, and then fell silent at the tableau before us.

  Crossbow and Moses were sitting on a spread-out section of balloon fabric, in a small clearing where the long support cables were especially numerous. They were sitting in the dark. I didn’t see any of the glowing bulbs they had taken with them. Crossbow probably knew the whole area by heart, anyway. They sat cross-legged, silent; their eyes were closed. Their hands were palm to palm—Crossbow’s webby ones to Moses’ hairy ones. It was dark and it was hard to tell, but there was a hypnotic rigidity to their arms and a certain c
ompression about the interfaces of their hands that suggested that the flesh was blurring—that their hands were stickily adhering—that their palms had blobbed together somehow like two bacteria exchanging genes.

  Anne backed up quickly, nearly trampling me, then turned and ran. I stayed a little longer, curious, making sure that my cameras got it all. The two of them didn’t move, they hardly seemed to breathe. It was eerie. As I stood and watched, a feeling of sickly nausea welled up in me from some place deep in my being, like a cold upwash of murky water from the ocean’s bottom. I left too.

  The rope ladder was still swaying when I reached it; I found Anne back up in Crossbow’s dwelling quarters. She was pale, but seemed to have reasserted her self-control.

  “Look at these shells,” I said.

  She didn’t spare them a glance. “Never mind the bravado,” she said. “What were they doing?”

  I shrugged. “Ask them. I never saw anything like it. You want something to eat? I’m going to fix something.” I opened the refrigerator.

  “Are you going to eat at a time like this? Aren’t you worried?”

  “Yes, I’m worried, but smuff gives me an appetite,” I said patiently. “How about some of these prawns? They look really good.”

  I was bolting down hot prawns in tangy white sauce when Moses Moses and Professor Crossbow came up through the airlock.