The Artificial Kid Read online

  My hair rose, crackling. Armitrage touched my wrist. “Don’t hit him, Kid. He isn’t armed.”

  “Right,” I said. “I won’t argue patronage with you, Clone. Meet me in three days, midnight, at Rubble Plaza.”

  “Too late, too late,” squeaked the Clone. “Haste is the essence of Red’s request. No, we destroy you today, rash Kid.”

  “This is a holiday,” Armitrage said indignantly. “Show some class, Clone!”

  “See to your own health, officious and interfering Armitrage!” snapped the Clone. “The minor details of combat courtesy no longer concern us. Our new patron is powerful, and his commands predominate. Do not become his enemy!”

  “If you attack the Kid today, you’ll have to come through me first,” Armitrage promised.

  “Don’t bother,” I told Armitrage. “They can’t force me to fight today. I’ll pick my own ground and my own conditions.”

  “Think again, unwise Kid. You have ambushed and beaten us singly, but our corporate quartet will break you, tonight.”

  “All four of you intend to attack me, alone?”

  “We have challenged you in accordance with the Code. Our techniques are our own business.”

  “In that case, I’ll help the odds right now!” With a shriek of anger, I crushed the Clone’s left instep with a heavy stamp kick and drove the handles of my nunchuck deep into his gut. He doubled over and I struck an overhand hammer-fist into the back of his neck. He fell in a heap.

  As I administered smuff to the unconscious Clone, Jet Pink shook his head. “You attacked an unarmed man!” he said loudly, for the benefit of the crowd that had gathered during the argument. “Your arrogance calls for a heavy reprisal, Artificial Kid.”

  I gave him a deadly glare. “You know my communiqué line, Pink. For you, I’m ready any time.” I pushed him aside and shoved my way through the crowd.

  Armitrage caught up with me before I had left the palanquin grounds. By that time I had recovered my good humor. I clapped him on the back. “Come on, let’s find old Oswald Pigment. I could use some White Light.”

  “Take it easy on the drugs today, Kid. That’s my advice.”

  “Ha! I never thought I’d hear that from you, ’Trage!”

  “You have a powerful enemy. You’ll need your alertness.”

  “This is Harlequinade, dammit! No skinny little replica spoils my holiday. You saw how I disposed of him.” I snapped my fingers. “Besides, no one fights today. How can they make me? I’ll stay with friends.”

  Armitrage nodded slowly. “I’ll see to that, anyway.” Suddenly he grimaced. “Death, here comes my patron.”

  It was the lady Elspeth Milvain, Money Manies’ closest rival, being borne in state in an immense flower-covered palanquin carried by a chain-gang of eight nude pornotapers.

  “You there!” she crowed at Armitrage. “The ravishing gentleman with the disease! When can we tape that lovely body in action? We’ll give you anything! Perhaps we’ll even cure you!”

  “Nothing can cure me but a healing kiss from the Queen of Beauty,” cried Armitrage gallantly. He leapt athletically up onto her palanquin, sending the bearers staggering, grabbed Milvain by her feathered crown-mask and kissed her open mouth. Then he leapt back down and stripped the artificial bubos from the sides of his neck. “My recovery is complete!”

  Elspeth Milvain laughed up into the higher reaches of hysteria and struck the side of her palanquin with her whip. Glaring blackly at Armitrage, her bearers shuffled off.

  Armitrage watched them go. “The old bag,” he muttered. “Here, Kid, see if you can help me tape these bubos back on.”

  Eventually we found our friend Oswald Pigment, surrounded by his aesthetic disciples, the Pigment Group of painters. He gave us some White Light, a drug which vastly intensifies visual imagery. From then on the day began to disintegrate.

  To fully describe our drug-raddled wanderings would be tedious. There was one odd series of occurrences: we kept running into Money Manies, or people who looked like him. He was wearing a different costume every time we glimpsed him. I suspected that most of the multiple Moneys Manies were wandering holograms. Laughing, he admitted as much. “I told you I’d be everywhere at once, didn’t I?” Somehow I got into a bizarre conversation with Money Manies’ Alien, who was disguised as a human being. (There were those who claimed that Manies’ Alien had actually once been a human being, but that was probably a slander.) The Alien was wearing a pair of infrared night-glasses that were fragmented into colored polygons like an insect’s compound eyes. As usual, the Alien’s face was hidden behind a thin white veil. Its false human skin looked rather dry and rubbery. “How good the crowd smells,” the Alien observed. “I will never understand why people are not allowed to be eaten.”

  After night had fallen, Armitrage and I watched part of the hologram display from the beach, where members and hangers-on of the Cognitive Dissonants were roasting fresh-caught fish over a driftwood fire. I hadn’t talked to any of the Cogs in weeks, and the occasion was pleasant. The food was good, the night was good, the drugs were fine. Even the hokey old hologram projections, stuffy, slow-paced stuff that only old people could enjoy, were fun to jeer at. From the beach, we could barely see the titanic, lumbering holos. Anyway, their color was off.

  I hadn’t planned on joining the Cogs on the shore, but Armitrage had subtly steered me there—at some risk to himself, since he had a minor bruise feud going with Million Masks. It was all good will and camaraderie, however, until Armitrage began talking with Chains. I was close enough to listen in, since I had been staring in fascination at the links of Chains’s light chain mail dress. Under the influence of White Light, her outfit was all splintered glittering.

  “I talked to Brains today,” Armitrage began, innocently enough.

  Chains shrugged. “So what?”

  “He was your man, Chains.”

  “Our breakup is no business of yours, friend.” She hesitated, then said, “I couldn’t live with him; he was analyzing us to death. He’s too remote, too detached. He can’t release himself. He’s too smart for his own good—far too self-conscious. It drove me crazy.”

  “Words,” said Armitrage. Slowly, he continued: “But love isn’t words. Love is the other. It grows within you. It holds you. It warms you. It is its own being. It is a power, like fire. It cares nothing for the woman who thinks she owns it. It cares nothing for the man who thinks he can replace it. If you fight it, it will sour and poison you. If you suppress it, it will only sink deeper and destroy you.”

  “This tirade from you, Armitrage?” Chains laughed mockingly. “I know your promiscuity. You’ll link with anything that moves. I’ve seen your tapes.”

  “Did I say that was love? Brains still loves you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t seek his own destruction so ardently. I’m asking you to save him. He’s too proud to ask for himself.” He sighed. “Pride is the great vice of us Reverids.”

  “You’re beginning to bore me, Armitrage. Shut up, I’m warning you.”

  “You are too proud to admit that you need him.”

  Reflex took over. Chains suddenly screamed at him and went for his face with a tiger-claw grip. Armitrage blocked the blow and knocked her down, blacking one of her eyes. Chains challenged him and they agreed to meet in a week’s time, Armitrage and his combat staff against Chains and her weighted manrikigusari. Armitrage then left.

  I stayed. Sumo and I had a good laugh over Armitrage’s sentimental posturings. We agreed with Chains that he had been insufferable. It was true, but I liked him all the more for it. I didn’t understand him, but friends are all the better for a touch of mystery.

  I stuffed myself with fish, then wandered about twenty paces down the beach to lie down and listen to the surf. I pillowed my head on my padded nunchuck. I had fitted the padding myself, because this nunchuck was a special legacy from Old Dad. It had been built for him on Niwlind, during one of his peaks of paranoia. The bottom of each club unscrewed with a quick
twist of the hand, revealing the muzzle of a single-shot projectile weapon.

  I had tried the guns before on lonely beaches; either gun would blow a hole bigger than my head in wet, packed sand. Guns, however, were forbidden in the Zone by the combat Code, just like blade weapons, stilettos, explosives, and other immediately lethal arms. Even my good friends the Cognitive Dissonants would have been honor-bound to beat me to a pulp for carrying such a thing, if they had known about it. If I had actually used it on someone, they would have reefed me; weighted my feet with chains and dropped me off the reef to be food for rays.

  But this candy-striped nunchuck was one of my favorites. I liked having something special in reserve; I liked having a final card to play. That, too, was a legacy from Tanglin.

  “Pssst!” The hiss barely reached me. Torpid as a poolful of carp, I hardly stirred. The hiss came again, and this time I looked around.

  It was Brains. He was lying prone in a spiky growth of marshgrass, about four strides away. He was peeking out through a gap in the thick blades of tall grass, his gaudy costume well hidden.

  “Brains!” I said.

  “Not so loud!” he said. “Come down the beach a ways. I don’t want to be seen.”

  I lurched to my feet and met Brains again in a sheltered spot out of earshot of the rest of the Cogs, who were doing a ritual dance anyway and paying absolutely no attention. “Get down, get down,” insisted Brains, crouching in the sand. “I mustn’t be seen here. She’s just over there.”

  “Who cares?” I said. “You’re being ridiculous, Brains doll.”

  Brains clapped the heel of his hand to the transparent window set into his skull. “This is the thanks I get? I’ve got important news, Kid. I wouldn’t come within a mile of that woman otherwise.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “It’s your housekeeper. The tall woman, with arms like pencils. She’s been taken. Kidnapped by the Clone Brothers.”

  I stared at him. “My client? My servant? But that’s a blood insult. Clients are sacred! They’re asking for blood feud!”

  Brains shook his head. “I heard about the way they challenged you today. Now they’re just trying to force you to fight.”

  I stood upright. “I’ll rally the Cogs. This is going too far. This kind of transgression involves all of us. At least Chill and Icy—”

  “No, no!” Brains said hastily. “Don’t tell them!” He motioned me back down again. “Come on, Arti. You don’t need a lot of Cogs to hog your glory. This is a great scenario! Master to the rescue and all that. And I’ll help you track them down.”

  “You?” I said.

  “Sure, why not? We always worked well together in the Cogs. Didn’t I bring you the news? Don’t you owe me one? Give me a break, Arti. I’ve left the Cogs, you know. I’m trying to make it solo. A tape with the Kid would help a lot. Come on, please?”

  I looked at him skeptically. “Are you in condition to fight?”

  “I’m always in condition,” Brains said, offended, flexing his arms. He was a fanatic for fitness. Maybe it was his lack of humor that had kept him from reaching top rank. “There are only three of them. You practically crippled the fourth one today, if what I hear is true. The two of us can handle them. I’ve fought the Clones before. And I brought my tonfa.” He held up his rotating club.

  “Well.…” I reached into my drugpak for my syringe and some stimulant. I injected a little into the plastic drugduct in my left forearm and breathed deeply as the rush cleared cobwebs from my head. Anger and confidence surged through me. “All right, Brains. You’re on.”

  “Great! The Clones will never know what hit them.”

  “We have to find them first.”

  “Rubble Plaza, Kid. Their favorite turf. That’s my guess.” He was exultant. “Let’s go, let’s go! My new career is waiting in the wings. Come on, we’ll redo the discovery scene.” He shook himself. “Ready? One, two, three, four! ‘Arti! Your servant! She’s been stolen!’”

  Once, Rubble Plaza had been the thriving center of Old Telset. Now it was the blasted, empty heart of the Decriminalized Zone. The transition had come in a single day, when the Fox Day bomb was smuggled into the Chairman’s Building. Rumor said the bomb had been placed directly on the great black cryocoffin that was Moses Moses’ resting place and living monument.

  Now, at the center of the Plaza, stood the forty-foot bronze statue of Moses Moses, the Founder of the Corporation. White floodlights lit it from below tonight, and gave its immense metal face a sinister appearance. The titanic Founder seemed to be peering into the gutted five-story building that had once housed the Board of Distribution. The Fox Day blast had ripped the building’s roof off and mashed its nearer wall into a shattered patchwork. The same for the Board of Records. The same for the Consular Library. I didn’t know the names of the other broken buildings.

  As for the Chairman’s Building itself—once Telset’s pride, stern and austere outside, but inside as rich and ornate as the Corporation’s fantastic wealth could make it—it had been utterly leveled. Boulder-sized bits and pieces of it lay heaped everywhere, some with long jackstraw spars of metallic epoxy reinforcement jutting out. Chunks of the upper stories had been thrown as far as Telset Bay. Most of the building, however, had leapt out as a devastating wave of shrapnel that had knocked gaping holes even through the thick, solid, windowless walls of the surrounding structures.

  It had never been restored. It would never be repaired. In itself, Rubble Plaza was a monument. For three hundred years it had been a place of silence. Now, part of the Zone, it was an artificial slum for the Zone’s artificial thugs.

  I liked Rubble Plaza. I felt at ease there. I had explored all the buildings, even the most hazardous, where the floors creaked ominously and the rotted ceilings were poised to mash you like a bug. Old people never went there. That was why I liked it.

  Tonight, there were a few floating globes of light still left for the late stragglers or wanderers from the Harlequinade. Not many would come to this desolate place without a reason.

  “They’re not here,” I said.

  “They’re probably lurking in one of the ruins hoping you’ll show up,” Brains said confidently. “Let’s split up and flush them out.”

  I shook my head. “Better stay with me. You don’t want to be caught alone.”

  Brains disagreed. “Nonsense. I can take care of myself.” He whirled his tonfa efficiently. “Yell if you need help. I’ll do the same if I have to. But I won’t. Remember, they don’t know I’m looking for them.” He trotted off into the darkness.

  “Hold on!” I said. When he replied, his voice was already eerily echoed from the tilted slab of a ruined wall. “Don’t worry! I’ll soon flush them out!”

  This rashness was so unlike Brains that for the first time that night I stopped and soberly considered my situation. “This smells,” I said, speaking aloud for the cameras. “This smells of a set-up.” But it couldn’t be. Brains had helped me too many times; we had fought back to back; we had guest-edited each other’s tapes when I was a neophyte and he was already a hardened veteran.… Could it be that Brains so envied my success that he would betray me? Surely not if it meant helping the repellent Clone Brothers.

  I would have plunged into the ruins myself in search of the Clones, but I had forgotten my infrared glasses. Stupidly, I had left them in my palanquin. I could see well enough to pick my way through the rubble, but fighting in the darkness was out of the question. If I met the Clones tonight, it would have to be by the statue of Moses Moses, in the glow from the floodlights.

  I picked my way through the weeds and hip-high chunks of shattered masonry, looking for an area with good footing that was relatively clear. A floating orange light drifted over toward me, following its rudimentary programming, and my cameras switched lenses. About twenty feet from the statue’s base, I found a clear area, about four strides square. The rubble there seemed to have been cleared deliberately. All the broken detritus had somehow been
shoved off to one side, away from the statue, leaving scrape-marks in the gritty dust. No weeds grew there. The ruined scraps of heat-seared tile underfoot showed that this had once been the ornate floor of the Chairman’s Building.

  The Clone Brothers might have cleared this area themselves, knowing I would come here. It seemed suspicious. I checked the surrounding rubble for traps or hideyholes where the Clones might strike from ambush. I found nothing. The footing was solid and well-lit. Satisfied, I began pacing, stretching, clearing my lungs, doing my kata.

  I heard a sound in the darkness. I leapt into a defensive position. A luminous white figure came toward me from the dimness, almost seeming to drift. My hair crackled and stood on end.

  “Mr. Kid? It is you, isn’t it?” I recognized the voice at once. It was Saint Anne Twiceborn. As she came into the light I saw that she was wearing her usual baggy white saint’s garb, a shapeless sack that fastened tight around wrists, neck, and ankles.

  I pulled off my flimsy Harlequinade domino mask. “Yes, it’s me. What are you doing here? The Zone gets nasty again after Harlequinade. You’re not even armed.”

  “We were hiding,” said the Saint. “We saw a monstrous creature stalk by here, not long ago. It had great spiny jowls and a flattened pig’s nose, and huge cruel arms with taloned fingers. It was naked, and it had no feet. It had hooves instead. Its legs bent backwards. It smelled awful. I’ve seen some horrible costumes today, but this was no costume, Mr. Kid. It was real!”

  I laughed. “You make him sound terrifying! Why, that was just little Goaty, the gargoyle of the Zone. He’s slow! He’s stupid! Being heavily altered surgically—well, it slows you down. I could step on his neck as easy as crushing a bug.” I considered. “Easier. I like bugs.”

  “He terrified us.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ business?” I said impatiently. “Is there someone else with you, or do you have tapeworms?”

  “I suppose you enjoy abusing those who have done you no harm,” Saint Anne said tartly. “I’ve known people of that stripe before. Terrible things happen to them.” She turned and called over her shoulder into the darkness. “Come on out, Mr. Whitcomb. It’s safe now. I know this man.”