The Artificial Kid Read online

  Moses Moses was still piloting; we were heading due north. He was a good pilot, relaxed yet alert and keeping an eye on the sonar. As usual, the Gulf was calm. Our course was north, not because we had a destination, but simply because it was the quickest way to put distance between ourselves and Telset.

  Although Money Manies was one of my oldest friends, I had known him for only a fraction of his long, long lifetime. Succumbing to curiosity I began to pick through the heap of objects Anne and Armitrage were piling on the deck. There was a neatly folded bag full of spare sails and coils of spare line, a dusty case of handsome, spotless fishing knives, a plastic valise full of old navigation maps with a sextant and star guide. Their copyright date read C.R.Y. 380. Money Manies had been a mere two hundred and thirteen years old when they were published.

  Armitrage handed Anne a square, black album. She opened it, looked inside for five seconds, then gasped and clapped it shut. She dropped it to the deck as if it had scalded her. I opened it. It was an album of porno stills, featuring an incredibly young-looking Money Manies. The nose and eyes were his, but the lips were thin and cruel and he was wearing a close-fitting tall red hat adorned with slick-looking swollen bulbs. He wore a pair of fetishistic thorny black bracelets around each ankle as well, but nothing else. I broke into helpless laughter at the next still, in which all three participants were fully clothed. It was like an essay on the history of Reverid fashions. Judging by the immense, jutting lapels, feathered sleeves, and elastic webwork of colored strings that crisscrossed their legs from waist to ankles, the picture was at least two centuries old. “Hey, Armitrage, come up and have a look at this,” I said.

  “Just a sec,” he answered. Then he emerged from below decks, carrying a small generator crusted in old, dried-up grease. He dropped it to the deck with a crunch, and its starting handle snapped off with a pleasant metallic sproingg and fell into the Gulf.

  “Crap,” Armitrage said. “Oh well, it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.” He took the album, glanced at it briefly, then began to thumb through it avidly, with a critic’s eye. “My word, look at that,” he said, pointing at a picture of Money Manies and two friends suspended in harnesses above a parquet floor. “That’s really hard to do. Takes a lot of technical skill, Kid.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “They look like idiots.” I looked at him. “Did you ever try anything like that?”

  “Well, of course. But never with anyone quite that large.” He looked again and winced a little.

  Anne had gone down into the hull. She emerged, smiling. “Look what I found!”

  I looked at the peculiar object she had located, a squat, fluted cylinder of metal and glass with a thin wire handle. “What is it?”

  “It’s a lantern, of course! Haven’t you ever seen one?”

  I took it from her and looked it over. “I don’t understand. Where’s its lens? Where’s its power source?”

  “Here, silly, I’ll show you.” She took it back and shook it next to her ear. “It still has some oil in it. Now these little sticks here are called matches.”

  “Why?” said Armitrage. “What do they match to?”

  She shook her head, shaking off his question with a peculiarly Niwlindid gesture. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen a lantern like this since I was a little girl. My great-great-grandfather, the Catechist, used to have one. He lent it to me sometimes. Now, you see, you pump this little rod like this to get pressure up—then you raise the chimney like this and light one of the matches.” She rubbed the colored end of one of the sticks across the deck and with a pop and faint hiss it burst into flame. Surprised, Armitrage and I took a step back. The lantern lit with a whoosh and a dirty yellow light illuminated us. Anne replaced the chimney, and I heard four faint clicks as Armitrage’s cameras switched lenses.

  “It’s a lighting device!” Armitrage said. “How bizarre! Look, Kid, it uses flame for light. How wasteful! Think of the waste heat.” He clicked his tongue.

  “Interesting lighting effect, though,” I said. “Makes you look good, ’Trage.”

  “You think so?” he said, pleased. “Let’s try the other hull and see what we can find there.”

  Happy now that action distracted us from our anxiety, Anne, Armitrage, and I immediately began to ransack the starboard hull. The first things we found were a dozen books, some spoiled by sea water. Armitrage tossed them aside incuriously, as he had never learned to read. He found a pocket autoharp, but unfortunately it was missing two strings. I found a hexagonal chessboard for three players, but Anne didn’t know how to play.

  Armitrage caressed the smooth top of a hip-high machine, cylindrical and studded with orifices and extrusible prongs. “Recognize this, Kid?”

  “Sure, I’ve seen enough of them,” I said. “Better make sure it’s in working order if you want to use it. It’s just about the oldest one I’ve ever seen. Sure is ugly.”

  “I think it looks sort of sweet,” Armitrage said. “I might have known old Manies would have at least one of these on board. For those long solo voyages, you know.” He bent over and briefly kissed its plastic top. Anne, who was carrying the lantern, looked at him curiously. She obviously didn’t understand the machine’s use at all.

  “Can anyone tell me what these are?” she said. She showed us a metal cylinder with a connected ring-pull and a pair of lace-up plastic shoes with wheels attached to their soles.

  “Good lord! Are those really shoes with wheels?” Armitrage said. With a wry expression he twirled their small metal wheels with the palm of his hand. The wheels whizzed along merrily on noisy ball bearings. The strangeness of the outré sight caused us all to break into loud, incredulous laughter that lasted almost five minutes.

  Finally we threw the peculiar shoes aside. I tried pulling the ring-pull on the metal cylinder. An inflatable life raft, its fabric rotten and all its pressure gone, bloated its way flabbily out of the cylinder to lie in a blobby orange heap on the floor of the hold. We stared at it silently.

  “Is that the only life raft on board?” Anne asked sepulchrally.

  “I think I saw another one in the cabin,” Armitrage said doubtfully, but the carefree hilarity was gone from his voice. The sight of the musty-smelling orange raft, puffed and flabby like a gigantic slimemold, put a damper on our spirits. Petulantly, Armitrage kicked it with his pointed boot and it ripped loudly.

  We continued to search the hold. We found other strange objects: a life-sized glass eyeball, a pair of crab gigs, a plastic tent, a glass bottle full of moldy white tablets, and a half-crushed wicker hamper containing two empty bottles, the fossilized crumbs of a meal, and a carefully folded, blood-stained handkerchief. There was also a square lacquered box full of small hook-shaped flanges of metal, of unknown function.

  At last we found a heavy wooden trunk behind a dirty shroud. It proved to be full of clothes, musty, rustling antique clothes, many discolored with age, others actually woven out of threads of cloth fiber. We hauled the trunk up on deck.

  At this point I offered to spell Moses Moses at the tiller, but he politely assured us that he was not tired. Armitrage and I stripped and started to try on the clothing. I saw Anne’s eyes widen as she learned for the first time that Armitrage was a multisexual; even old Moses Moses seemed a little taken aback at Armitrage’s surgically altered wealth of endowment.

  All of the clothes were too large for me, which piqued me considerably. They fit Armitrage well, though. Particularly striking was an open-throated black one-piece, somber yet extravagant, adorned with dozens of soft, black, rubbery spines. Armitrage donned the accompanying wide-brimmed spined hat and studded, square-toed boots. It was impossible to resist his charm as he stretched and pirouetted, striking out briefly and precisely with his combat staff. Admiration and envy overcame me. “Armitrage, you amaze us all!” I cried. “Such antique majesty! Really, it touches me to the heart.” I embraced him. Flattered and pleased, he hugged me close and kissed my forehead. “How marvelous to be prai
sed, even by a captive audience,” he said. “It is rather striking, isn’t it? Anne, won’t you try something on? You must be sick of that old white bag by now.”

  Anne stiffened. “This is the uniform of my order,” she said.

  “But you must’ve worn it for days now! Say, you’d look delightful in this.” He pulled a sleek ankle-length gown thick with glimmering pink scales from the bottom of the trunk. “This would complement your eyes beautifully.” He ran his hand across the smooth inner fabric. “Ah, its texture is delightful. Imagine this clinging deliciously to your skin. Here, just feel it.” He handed it to her.

  “It’s regrettably thin,” she said, holding it up with a frown. “Really, I have no need to flaunt my body in a garment of this kind. It promises actions I have no intention of fulfilling.”

  Armitrage smoothed the brim of his spiny hat. “Such rigorous self-discipline,” he said mockingly. “Very well, I’ll try it on myself.” And he did. It looked marvelous on him.

  Anne was visibly disturbed by Armitrage’s graceful, ambivalent posturing. She turned her attention to the Albatross’s old charts. “Perhaps it’s time we plotted out a course for ourselves,” she said. “Where do you think we should go, Kid?”

  I examined the maps in the lantern light and frowned. “It’s a good thing we have the sonar,” I said. “The reefs have grown miles since this thing was printed. Let me see. I suppose it would be best if we headed for Jucklet. It’s the only large city on the continent. Sylvain is way the hell on the other side of the planet and Eros wanders, of course, so it’s out. It’d be safer to stay on water rather than going overland, so here’s our course. We could head north and leave the Gulf through these gaps in the atoll here, the Straits of Circumstance. Then we’ll be on the outside of Aeo, and we can sail along the reef, here, west, and then southwest, and then south, you see, paralleling the circular shore of the continent. By the time we dock here we can disguise ourselves, and the hunt for us will have cooled off a little. There’s a little settlement on the edge of this bay, though it doesn’t show on this old map. I forget the name of the place.”

  “Let me see,” Moses Moses said eagerly. “Jucklet was just a village when I entered cryosleep.” I showed him the map. “My, how it’s grown.”

  “But Jucklet is far into the mountains here,” Anne said. “What are they called? The Crater Mountains? That’s a peculiar name.”

  “They’re peculiar mountains,” Moses Moses said. “They’re artificial. They date back about three billion years. They’re bomb craters.”

  I looked at the map. “They’re big craters.”

  “They were big bombs.”

  “They made a magnificent landscape, though,” Armitrage said. “All lakes and woods and ridges. I’ve been there. There’s no combat art, though.”

  I shrugged. “Jucklet’s a hick town. The population’s pretty well thinned and scattered through the mountains. That’s good for us, because we won’t attract too much attention when we enter town. If we just get smelly and hairy enough, we can pass ourselves off as backswoodsmen. Of course, then we’re still faced with the problem of fighting the Cabal. But at least in Jucklet we’ll have resources to draw on. We’re completely harmless to them on this boat.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Moses Moses said. “The Cabal is aware of our predicament too; they can follow our logic. We can’t expect to sail there unmolested.”

  Armitrage sat down gracefully on the wooden deck. “What do you advise, then, Mr. Chairman?”

  “Oh, a little patience,” Moses Moses said. “It’s my experience that, if you wait long enough, Time will drag your enemies, dead, past your door. The Cabal will expect us to land and begin agitating for their removal. Instead, we could put in at one of these hundreds of small offshore islands, and hide the boat. If we simply lie low for a little while, it’ll drive them crazy. They will think one of two things: that we are dead, or that someone is harboring us. If they think we’re dead, they’ll stop looking for us, and we can return to Telset in safety. If they think we’re being hidden, they’ll intensify their search in the major cities. But don’t you think that would arouse resentment against them?”

  “Sure,” I said eagerly. “Not only that, but it’ll spread the rumor that you’re alive. All Telset has probably heard by now. My friend Chill Factor knows the truth, and Telset is wired. Rumor moves at the speed of light.”

  Moses Moses was pleased. “There, you see?” he said. “By attacking an enemy who ducks aside, the Cabal will upset itself. One should never strike at an enemy when he expects the blow and where he is braced for it. One should confuse the enemy first, so that his reactions are slow and inappropriate. They expect us to challenge them; so, we will duck that challenge. They will strike at us with all their force; they will miss us, and look like fools. Their morale will be hurt. They will not know where we are, or when we intend to strike. We will have turned the table on them. We will be the New Cabal. We will be hidden in the shadows; they will be open and vulnerable. By trying to protect themselves from all possible modes of attack, they will spread themselves thin.”

  Armitrage laughed incredulously. “You mean we can do all that just by disappearing? Without striking a blow?”

  “Yes,” said Moses Moses. “I think it would be the most disconcerting scheme we could hatch against them.”

  “Ha!” said Armitrage gleefully. “That really cracks me up! It seems so simple once it’s explained! That’s genius, Mr. Chairman. Pure genius!”

  Moses Moses shook his head modestly. “No. Just elementary strategy.”

  “How long would we have to remain in hiding?” I said.

  “Not too long,” said Moses Moses. “Three, maybe four years.”

  “Four years!” I said, aghast. “My death, that’s half my career! I’ll be forgotten, washed-up, a has-been! Things move fast in combat art!”

  “Four years is a big chunk of my lifetime!” Armitrage objected.

  Moses Moses smiled indulgently. “When you get to be my age, you’ll see four years for what they really are. An eye blink. A moment. A small interlude. And we’re operating on the Cabal’s time scale. The Cabalists are old. Aren’t they?”

  Armitrage and I traded disgusted glances. It was self-evident that the Cabalists were old. Only old people could have kept up such a long and elaborate charade. Of course, the original Cabalists must be dead by now, but we could rest assured that their successors were old as well.

  “Well, Armitrage,” I said, “once again we’re buggered by ancients.”

  Armitrage nodded gloomily. Suddenly an idea occurred to him and an expression of sly glee touched his face. With naive duplicity he suppressed it. “Four years isn’t that bad,” he said, with a judicious air of compromise that fooled no one. “Time passes quickly in pleasant company like this. It beats being dead, anyway.”

  “You’ve got no argument there,” I said. I yawned. “But what about my house, my friends, my mobiles.” The words sounded flat and pettish, even to me. Here we were, playing with the destinies of millions, and I was insisting on the primacy of my narrow, personal world. Embarrassed, I pretended a deeper fatigue than I felt. “I haven’t slept in hours,” I said. “Let’s postpone any decisions until I’ve had some sleep. Is that agreeable, Mr. Chairman?”

  “Of course,” Moses Moses said kindly. “I only offer suggestions; I don’t intend to dictate. All our lives are equally at stake, so each of us should have an equal voice. As for myself, I believe I’ll stay awake until dawn. I’ve had such a long sleep that I hesitate to return to it.”

  I walked into the cabin and pulled aside the fresh, scented sheets on one of the two lowest bunks. It was dark, but I could see well enough with my infrareds, so I didn’t turn on the light. As I stripped I felt an intolerable weariness settle over me; my battered body was finally taking its due. I took a little smuff to sweeten my dreams, slipped into bed, and slept, lulled to sleep by the comforting hum of my cameras, and the sl
ap of waves on the hulls.

  “Kid! Mr. Chairman! Wake up!” I swung my feet out of bed, focused blurry eyes on Armitrage’s face, and felt a hot flush of pain course through me. I found my combat jacket and took some smuff. I felt better. “What time is it?”

  “Four hours past dawn,” Armitrage said. He was in his combat robe and was holding Slummer’s tiny pistol in one hand. “You’ve slept almost ten hours.”

  I started to dress. Moses Moses, who had been sleeping perhaps an hour, pried open gummy eyes with a pitiful look of confusion on his bearded face. Old people often suffer such disorientation immediately after waking; their brains are so crowded with dreams. “What’s the matter?” he asked vaguely.

  “It’s a glider,” Armitrage said. “Anne saw it. I was snoozing out on deck.” I saw that Armitrage’s skin was slick with the anti-tan lotion he wore in sunlight; it kept his skin milk-white. “I thought I’d wake you up. It might mean trouble.”

  “I’ll check, Mr. Chairman,” I told Moses Moses. “You’d better sleep. We’ll need you to pilot at night, anyway.”

  “No,” Moses Moses said. “No, I can’t sleep now. I’ll go with you.” He began to pull on his pinstriped suit; I saw that he slept in a white one-piece underall. His arms and legs were remarkably hairy, with reddish-brown hair the color of his beard.

  With a touch I restored my cameras to full function, then adjusted my jacket, slipped into my pants and shoes, and looped my nunchuck around my neck. I went out on deck with Armitrage, wincing at the bright yellow sunlight. I shaded my eyes with one hand; my fingers were no longer swollen. “Where is it?” I asked Anne. She was at the tiller.

  Without a word, she pointed. I saw a black speck silhouetted against the looming, faraway bulk of a morning thunderhead. It was a black sailplane with extremely long, thin wings; as I watched, she climbed, lifting on a thermal with the bright precision of a razor.