The Artificial Kid
Page 22
Suddenly a gust of warm wind drove the balloon down into the tree and we heard the fabric rip. The balloon went flaccid almost at once, but it did not explode, and we were grateful for that. The strain abated at once. Crossbow and I cut ourselves loose.
The immense tree whose branches we gripped seemed perfectly normal; the whiteness of the Mass did not show on it anywhere. Its bark was smooth and gray; its waxy green leaves were as broad as two hands set side by side. The leaves were tri-lobed and smelled faintly of cinnamon. Smelly pale sap showed where our impact had broken and twisted some of the smaller branches.
“Ants!” Crossbow yelled suddenly. I could barely hear him. “Ants! Climb down, climb down! They’re all over me!”
Suddenly I too felt a tickling on my feet and exposed neck. Tiny black ants were pouring out of large wooden galls attached to some of the twigs. I saw them doubled up, biting my feet vigorously, but the pain was very slight. It felt a little like a stiff hairbrush laid lightly on the skin. The ferocity of their painless attack alarmed me, however, and I descended as rapidly as I could, burdened as I was with the heavy pack. I crushed some of the ants on my way down, but that was a mistake, for they smelled horrible.
I could see as I descended that the jungle was divided into three distinct vertical layers; a sunny canopy, where we had landed, a denser middle layer, crowded with the green crowns of the shorter trees, and, far below, a dappled jungle floor.
With my agility I easily outdistanced Anne and Crossbow and dropped the last ten feet to the ground. Satisfied that I would no longer annoy their beloved tree, the ants flowed off me in dense black streams.
My hearing improved with every passing minute and I became aware of the Reverid jungle cacaphony. The entire aural spectrum was as crowded with sounds as the jungle was crowded with life. I had heard these sounds before in drone tapings, but it was different to stand there, to feel the faint cool breeze, smell the odors, feel the leaf-crowded black humus under my feet. Prominent among the sounds was a piercing, rather oily-sounding double creak, endlessly repeated; insects without a doubt. It was interrupted occasionally by a mellow booming like an iron drum half-filled with water, and by low, almost subsonic, rumbles, like slowly moving doors with rusty hinges. In the upper register I heard the whine of passing bugs, the querulous, lean-throated cries of treetop animals, the warble and cackle of birds. There were other sounds, too; rustling, dripping, scraping. And these were only the usual ones; sounds you heard so often that they immediately faded into the background. The unusual sounds: roars, cries of alarm, territorial signals perhaps—were remarkable for their elaborateness. Where another animal would have settled for a simple bellow, a sonic-conscious Reverid beast had to introduce some arpeggio, some arresting variation.
Anne and Crossbow joined me on the ground; Crossbow was sucking a small scratch on one of its webs. “Those ants are so strange!” Anne said. “Why didn’t they sting?”
“Oh, they stung, all right,” Crossbow said. “But their venom has no effect on our metabolism. If you look carefully you can see the bites, but they’re not at all inflamed.”
Anne brushed leaves from her loose, balloon-cloth garment. “It’s delightfully cool down here,” she said. “I thought jungles were supposed to be steamy and sticky.”
“That may be true on other planets, but Reverie is always a special case,” Crossbow said. “This jungle is the product of advanced evolution, not tropical circumstances. Reverid photosynthesis is very efficient. Because it traps more of the sun’s energy, plants here can support a much larger population than plants on other worlds. And a jungle is more stable ecologically than other environments, because there is room in it for a vast variety of species. The stability of an ecosystem depends on its diversity; that is an elementary law. This jungle is billions of years old.”
Anne laughed gaily. “I had thought this would be a horrible place. But it’s beautiful, like a park! Look at those majestic trees! Why, it’s marvelous down here. I like this much better than the balloon.”
“Don’t depend on a snap judgment,” Crossbow said. “We still have the Mass to deal with before we can reach the shore again.”
“I’m starving,” I said. “Let’s have something to eat before we start our hike. Smuff gives me an appetite.”
Crossbow Moses looked at me reproachfully. “Are you still taking that drug? Why, you’re almost healed. Your bruises are practically gone.”
“Those are just the ones that show,” I said. “Anyway, I hate pain.”
“Very well,” Crossbow said. It shrugged off its pack. “But we’ll have to make our provisions last. Otherwise we’ll have to live off the land, and in the middle of the Mass that entails some risks. The venom of the ants didn’t affect us, but there are things harmless to Reverid organisms that will kill us as dead as sea shells. At one time I knew most of these things, but now my memory.… And in the Mass it’s often hard to tell, as you’ll soon see.”
It dug into its pack and drew out three tasty seaweed cakes, part of the stock of travelling food it had saved for itself. “We’ll have to eat sparingly, so you get only one,” it said, passing them out. “The island was provisioned for one, not four.” We bit eagerly into the dense green cakes. We had hardly downed the first swallow when we were assaulted by a horde of bright yellow butterflies. “Holy Death, what are these things?” I demanded, for I had never seen a butterfly before. I swatted at them ineffectually. The smell of the food seemed to drive the insects wild; they kept alighting on my cake. Crossbow mumbled something that I didn’t catch, for it had wisely stuffed the entire cake into its mouth. I did the same, but I had to spit out bitter butterfly bodies and lost a good chunk of my cake, which fell to the jungle floor followed by a swarm of insects. Crossbow guarded its mouth with both hands as it chewed and swallowed. Our heads and shoulders were covered with them.
More and more of them poured in from the depths of the jungle. We couldn’t even see one another, especially as they insisted on settling on our eyelids, even on my cameras. I went into a wild capering dance, but they clung to me as if I were a tree trunk. Finally I danced my way out of the enveloping cloud of insects and swallowed what was left of my cake. Then I pried a wetly adhering butterfly wing from the roof of my mouth. Bugs followed the scent on my breath, so I breathed through my nose.
Once we had swallowed the cakes, we were able to escape most of them. But a large number stayed with us tenaciously, clustering on our heads and around the flaps of our packs, which held more of the cakes.
“These are butterflies. Harmless,” said Crossbow through gritted teeth, brushing them away as they sought to cling to his lips. “You won’t see them on Telset, but they’re common here. Come on, let’s run.”
We eventually outdistanced most of the butterflies, though at least a dozen of them clung to the strands of my plasticized hair. We sat down to rest on the lumpy knees of a huge tree with thin, light-red bark.
“It’s the scent of the sea that does it, I suppose,” Crossbow said mournfully. “Normally, when they follow that scent, it leads them to the site of an island splashdown. From now on we can eat inside the tent, if need be. By the way, the tent is in your pack, Kid, so don’t lose it.”
A number of the small yellow butterflies were climbing doggedly about in Crossbow Moses’ bushy blond hair. Others sat sedately like little jewels on Anne’s smooth, blunt-cut brown hair and her feather barette. I laughed at the sight they made; Anne looked at me and laughed back.
“Your hair looks different now, Kid,” she said. “It lies down flat now instead of standing up all prickly.”
I brushed my hair self-consciously, dislodging a number of flutterers. “It’s growing,” I said. “It’s not plastic down to the roots any more, and it’s bending on a hinge of normal hair. I have to re-do it every week, when I take my hormone treatment.” I paused. “Uh-oh.”
There was a weighty silence. Crossbow said, “You didn’t take any treatment with you, Kid?”
There was a second weighty silence as each of us considered the implications of this peculiar predicament.
“Well,” said Crossbow at last, “there’s no help for it, then. You’ll have to go through a forced adolescence. You’re in for a strange experience, I’m afraid.”
“But I’ve been on suppressants for almost thirty years now,” I said. “Who knows what the effect on my body will be?”
“The effects will be serious, no doubt about that,” Crossbow said. “But almost all young males go through the process, and without the calmness of maturity to help them endure it. You’ll just have to manage with the inconvenience until we get back to civilization. I’m sure you can deal with it.”
“I don’t suppose I have any choice,” I said morosely. I snatched a butterfly out of midair, reacting absently as it fluttered too close.
“Don’t kill it!” Anne said. Surprised, I shrugged and let the butterfly go. She looked embarrassed. “Look at the bright side,” she suggested tentatively. “Your voice will change. You’ll probably grow a beard. And when you cut off that plastic coating from your hair, you’ll be unrecognizable. Already your skin color has changed—you’re darker, and it doesn’t have the greenish tint it used to have from that oil you used. The cosmetics are gone from around your eyes. If it weren’t for your chain weapon and your cameras, no one would possibly guess that you were the Artificial Kid.”
“Holy death, a beard!” I said, clutching at my face. Was there already a trace of stubble under my panicked fingers? “Good God, my image will be ruined!” My voice climbed into its higher registers. “I’ll be finished! Washed up! The Cabal has probably already revoked my shares, burned down my house—how will I get the money for new treatments? Death, that stuff’s expensive, it costs as much as smuff! And—oh no, what’s even worse—I’ll look just like Tanglin!” Clutching my head, I reeled back, looking straight into one of my cameras and making sure that another got a good side shot. “Just like Old Dad! My best friends won’t know me! Poor Quade will scream and run when she sees me! What a catastrophe! Is this the end of the Artificial Kid?” I hadn’t thought of poor Quade in a long time—a tear trickled down my cheek.
Anne looked at me, upset. “Don’t take it so hard, poor Arti! Your career’s not so important, is it? After all, when we reach Telset, we’ll still have to stay in hiding. You’ll have to give up fighting anyway, give up your fame. You should be thankful that you have such a good disguise!”
She had upstaged me again. Amazed at her gall, I dropped my hands and looked at her nonplussed. She looked back at me innocently, surprised at my sudden change of mood. “Right, right,” I muttered in disgust. “Belittle my difficulties. Never mind, I’ll probably have to edit all this anyway—it would never do to be seen with these linking butterflies in my hair.” I stood up, washing my hands of the whole business. “Come on, let’s get a move on.”
Crossbow Moses got to its feet. “We’re faced with a choice now,” it said. “We can try to detour around the Mass, or we can plunge directly through it. If we detour it will take us much longer—weeks, perhaps. Our provisions will soon be exhausted. We could try to live off the land, but we risk death by poison. If we were at the shore, I could feed the three of us indefinitely, but the forest is not my area of expertise.”
“Let’s get to the shore as soon as possible, then,” I said.
Crossbow nodded. “Water would be our worst problem if we took the forest route. But the Mass has plenty of water. It is riddled with stagnant karst pools, of course, and I wouldn’t advise drinking from those, but it has a number of streams and a major river. If we can reach the river our difficulties are over; we can reach the sea easily, just by walking down the riverbank.”
“What about the molds and bacteria?” Anne said. “The chances of illness?”
“It’s true that the Mass is especially rich in microfauna, but if we keep up a good pace our exposure will be brief,” Crossbow said. “We’ll have to depend on our bacterial ecosystems to protect us. Besides, the forest itself is rich in bacteria. Our chances of infection would actually be worse if we were weakened by short rations and a long trek.”
I looked at it through narrowed eyes. “You’re hiding something, Professor. Chairman, I mean. You want us to go through the Mass. Why?”
Crossbow looked innocent. “I know the Mass better than the forest. That’s all. Besides, I’d like you to see the Crossbow Body at work. You patently doubt my theories. What better proof can I offer?”
I shook my head. “If the Mass is so harmless, why has it been off-limits all these years? Why is its reputation so foul? They call it ‘a thousand square miles of disease.’”
“Academy propaganda,” Crossbow said confidently. “The Mass has only one disease, and that’s the Crossbow Body. And that’s no disease, that’s a benefit. Trust me, Arti. Have I ever deceived you?”
“No,” I admitted. I turned to Anne. “What do you think?”
Anne tore her eyes away from a small yellow butterfly sitting, tamed, on her forefinger. “We haven’t any other guide or expert,” she said. “We’d better accept its advice.” And so we did.
12
We adjusted our packs. The heavy clouds that had been above us all day were descending through the upper reaches of the forest canopy. A silvery mist began slowly drizzling around us, not so much falling as drifting. We felt dazed and lost as we meandered among the shadowy columns of immense trees. The underbrush was not heavy, mostly shade-tolerant herbs and ferns, heavy with dew, with occasional lacework bushes dotted with flowers. Fallen tree trunks were our largest obstacles. The process of rotting was fast and riotous, and the fallen trunks were slippery with orange shelf-fungus, fat-bodied slug-like slimemolds with wet skins as varicolored as oil slicks, heavy green carpet mosses, ferns with entangling stems as tough as ceramic fiber, and blood-colored puffballs that ruptured at a touch to fill the air with stinking, choking spores.
We detoured when we could to avoid the fallen forest giants, but it was difficult. The hole left in the forest canopy spurred the growth of lush bamboos that crawled with fat, furry sapsuckers and chitinous marmosets. Immense dragonflies flitted past us, snapping up mosquitoes that Crossbow would not let us swat. “They don’t give diseases,” he said. “They inject vaccines. After all, it’s in their best interest to keep us healthy, so that we’ll have plenty of blood.” Their bites left no welts.
Sometimes we left the ground to clamber over rough-barked lianas that webbed whole groves together, their saprophytic roots sunk deep into the wood. Twice I had to fight off hives of hairy spiders that had caught my cameras in their tough, dense nets.
At noon we slept, slinging our light, balloon-cloth hammocks from low branches. After three hours Anne and I were awakened by a loud rip and a crash as Crossbow fell to the forest floor.
Mildew was devouring our packs and hammocks, and Anne’s dress. Crossbow gave her a bodytight that was much too large. We repacked what we could into the tough synthetic fabric of our tent and slept, cramped and miserable, in the crotches of trees.
When we awoke, we slung the tent from a long wooden pole that Anne and I carried over our shoulders.
We marched until sunset. The terrain, which had been gently sloping, grew more difficult. We began to find immense lumps of primordial limestone, like gigantic toadstools, thrusting their rounded heads up through the thick forest humus. They were thickly crusted with fossilized shells and bones, and were densely festooned with creepers, ferns, tough bushes, and small trees whose naked brown roots gripped the rock like stiff snakes.
When night fell the forest grew incredibly raucous. From above our tiny campsite under the shelter of a weathered, crumbling knoll came rich howls of glee and showers of dead twigs and excrement. Booms and metallic screeches that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere added a stirring counterpoint. We choked down wads
of seaweed cake that already had the first lingering aftertaste of rancidness. Phosphorescent globes as big as eyeballs meandered through the branches above us, glowing red and blue and green, sometimes casting reflected pinpoints of light from the eyes of treetop animals.
When something large came thudding and snuffling past us, I decided I had had enough. “Let’s build a fire,” I said. Anne nodded eagerly; Crossbow said nothing but handed me a small flashlight from its pack.
I advanced on a nearby bush. It retreated warily. With a shriek of terror I attacked the bush and it exploded into its component elements: long, brown, multi-limbed twigs, fluttering, green-winged leaves, even feeble, tiny-legged flowers.
“Don’t hurt them!” Crossbow called out. I retreated to the shelter of our limestone overhang, trembling a little. Crossbow was squatting on its haunches, a melancholy expression on its face; the long walk had been hard on its aquatic legs. “It might have unforeseen repercussions,” it said. “Everything is connected to everything else.”
I looked at the other bushes warily. “Are they all like that?”
Crossbow shrugged. “Some of them,” it said. “Mimicry is very advanced here.” With a sigh, it sat on a patch of moss and propped up its tired feet on a fallen limestone boulder. It began to rub its legs with its webbed hands. “Actually, that particular adaptation was camouflage, not mimicry proper,” it said.
After a more successful search, I returned to the fire with an armload of dry leaves, twigs, and branches that had been sheltered from the mist. Unfortunately we had no lighter—Crossbow hadn’t had much use for one in its aquatic existence—but Anne explained to us the principle of the bow-drill. By chafing away at dry, rotten wood till our fingers blistered, Anne and I produced a few feeble sparks that we fanned to a flame. As the dry leaves ignited with a bright flaring we heard a startled snort from perhaps six feet away. A small, burly, bear-like animal got up on oddly-jointed legs and stalked off into the forest.