The Artificial Kid Page 9

  I gestured casually with my nunchuck. The base was unscrewed and ready to come off with a pull of my hand. “Why should I tell you?”

  Slummer looked almost apologetic. “You might as well, Kid. This is blood feud. We’ve been ordered not to leave you alive. It’s a dirty shame, too, if you ask me. I’ve got all of your tapes.”

  That saved his life for him. “Well,” I said, “for one thing I’ve violated the gun code,” and I blew off Slummer’s left leg. He fell to the carpet, squalling. I jumped out of the armchair, evaded the hasty swing of Stag’s mace, and whipped the chain of my nunchuck around one of his antlers. I yanked savagely and heard his neck crack. He fell, unconscious, but it didn’t kill him.

  Slummer had passed out. I ripped off some of his rags and put a tourniquet around his leg, just over the knee. I grimaced. His leg was still barely attached, and it was ugly.

  “God,” I said. “Guns really lack style.” I picked up Slummer’s little pistol and tucked it into my waistband. I screwed the nunchuck back together and dosed Stag and Slummer with their own smuff. Then I violated the artists’ Code again; I stole some of their smuff. It deeply embarrassed me, but I needed it. I looked up at my cameras. “I’ll have to cut this part later,” I said.

  Manies was staring transfixed at the thick pool of Slummer’s blood on his carpet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid I find this performance just too too strongly stated.” He reached tremblingly into his drugging jacket and pulled out a small red bulb with a white jet nozzle. He squirted a puff of black dust or vapor into each nostril, inhaling sharply. He passed out not long afterward. Annabella Manies still said nothing, but she began to stroke her husband’s knee with one hand, very slowly.

  I gestured Moses Moses and Saint Anne to their feet. They got up, averting their eyes. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll all die if we stay in Telset. We’ll take the Albatross out to sea. I hope Armitrage has enough sense to hide himself.”

  Chalkwhistle was still unconscious when we got to the outside door; it had been blown to splinters, but the bulk of a chair had protected the neuter. We all put on our infrareds as we stepped outside. We heard shouts and thumps from the beachhouse; they weren’t party noises. Probably the Instant Death had looked there for us first.

  A bullet ricocheted screaming across the paving stones outside Manies’ doorstep and threw stinging powder into my shins. I jumped backward, crowding Anne and Moses back into the house. The bullet had left a long scar in the hard travertine; it had come from further up the hillside, to the east. This particular wall of Many Mansions faced north to the sea. The direction of the scar in the rock showed that the sniper would take a while to reach a position where he could shoot through the shattered doorway. We started piling up furniture as a barricade. We heard the rapid thumping of his footsteps as the sniper came sidling along the wall, and we took cover. He never made it. We heard a solid impact and the unmistakeable sound of a body falling to earth. In a moment I peeked outside.

  I saw Armitrage leaning over the sniper’s body. “Look,” he said. “It’s Orange.”

  “Good,” I said. “How did you manage?”

  Armitrage grinned. “I was up on the roof,” he said. “When he came running along the wall, I just leaned over and gave him a nice thump in the head.” He shook his weighted quarterstaff.

  We dragged Orange back inside the house and peeled off his skintight mask. He had an anonymous, handsome face, the product of cosmetic surgery. His rifle was so complicated that none of us could figure out how to operate it; we couldn’t even find the trigger. He also had a long, nasty knife attached to his belt. He wasn’t carrying a memory wiper, which was too bad for him. My hair crackled. “Don’t look,” I said. I opened his jaw, put the tip of the blade against the roof of his mouth, and hit the pommel with my hand. It went in deep, so easily that his skull might almost have been hollow and held together with a kind of black fiber. At the thought of this I trembled with a long, sickening thrill.

  Armitrage licked his lips. “Let’s reef him,” he said.

  “There’s no time,” I said. “Besides, we don’t have the weights. Let’s get out of here.” My hands wouldn’t stop trembling. He was the first man I had ever killed.

  We ran downhill back toward the docks. Two of the Clone Brothers were there; they had found the Sea Whip and were busy demolishing her with their chains. They were making a lot of noise, but they stopped their high-pitched cries of excitement when they saw us at the docks.

  They tried to climb out of the Whip and onto the dock. It would have been better theater to beat them up, but there wasn’t time. I started shooting at them. Either Slummer’s little gun was horribly inaccurate, or else the smuff had destroyed my aim; they jumped into the water and swam to safety under the dock. I think I may have winged one of them.

  Armitrage, Moses Moses, and Saint Anne jumped aboard the Albatross. I stood guard while Armitrage and Moses Moses raised the mainsail. They were both shaken and it took them a long time, long enough for the Clone Brothers to work up courage and begin taunting us from beneath the dock. One of them sent out a camera to watch us and I wasted a bullet on it, which missed.

  “Blood feud, Kiddy!” they called out. “Blood feud!” You would have thought they were having the time of their quadruple lives. “Red wants your red blood! Blue wants your blue veins! The Colors will cut you up and the directions will scatter the pieces!”

  I cast off, so smuffed that I fell into the water and almost lost the little gun. As I pulled myself aboard, the joints in my elbows made weird popping sounds, giving eloquent testimony to tissues strained to their limits of endurance. My arms were swollen to twice their normal size, and I could feel a few of the wounds seeping up with blood beneath the skinseal.

  A brisk breeze blew up off the reef and we put out to sea. In the light of the open doors of the beachhouse we could see innocent hedonists hustled out at gunpoint. The Cabal had probably made a bad mistake in hiring the Instant Death, but perhaps they were the best henchmen they could get on short notice. I was glad that we hadn’t met Instant Death himself. He was one of the very few people on the planet who inspired me with real physical fear.

  The Albatross’s sails were blue plastic and were soon lost in the darkness. No doubt the Clone Brothers gave the alarm as soon as they could, but by that time we were out of rifle range.

  6

  We put up the jib. Moses Moses took the tiller. It was three hours past midnight; I could tell by the position of the stars. As Telset dwindled to a dark lump on the horizon the four of us gradually relaxed. For a long time we said nothing, sunk in our private thoughts. I took a wound kit out of one of my sealed pockets and got out needle and thread. I stripped, pulled the skinseal off one of the larger wounds, and started sewing it up. It was black with mites, which were doing a wonderful job and would soon have the swelling down. I felt a rubbery stretching sensation as I stitched up a loose flap of skin; it always feels very odd, even when it doesn’t hurt. I used a special thread; the mites would eat it after it had done its work. Armitrage helped me sew the wounds on my back. Like many multisexuals, he had a very gentle touch.

  Finally Saint Anne said, “What do you think will happen to poor Mr. Manies?”

  I shrugged. (“Don’t do that!” Armitrage said.) “I don’t know,” I said. “There’s never been a crisis like this before. Money Manies is a pretty popular figure. He practically owns six channels and has access to dozens more. If his programming is disrupted, it’ll change the lives of hundreds of thousands of viewers, floaters and grounders alike. I don’t think the Cabal would want to do anything that obvious; they’ve always stayed in the background since Fox Day. I’d guess that they’d try to make some kind of deal with Manies. But I don’t know what kind of terms he would demand.”

  “But what if Mr. Manies decides to fight?” Saint Anne said.

  “Fight what?” I said. “The Cabal knows all about Manies. Where he lives, how he lives—he’s publishe
d enough lifetapes so that everybody knows his habits. But the Cabal’s a phantom. Sure, he could attack the Instant Death and get a lot of people killed, but he wouldn’t have touched the Cabal itself. How could he prevent a Fox Day in his own home? It would be easy enough to smuggle explosives into Many Mansions and blow the whole place to atoms. He’ll be forced to compromise with them.”

  “I think they made an error by hiring the Instant Death,” Armitrage said. “The Death have no class. They’re louts and bullies. They’re bound to rouse a lot of resentment. Besides, every time the Cabal gives an order there’s a chance that someone will trace it back and discover their true identities. Then they’d be vulnerable. The temptation to strike back would be hard to resist. I know I would, if I could.”

  “Sure you would, now that they’ve attacked you personally,” I said. “But I don’t think the average Reverid would. After all, you could hardly call the Cabal an oppressive government. They’ve always been very careful to cover their tracks. They have the Rump Board to carry on the minutiae of government for them—distributing stock and the like. Besides, their real power is in their money. The Rump Board is just a sort of shell. The Cabal has always left well enough alone. They just want to be left in peace so that they can hoard millions of fracs. That’s always been my understanding, anyway.”

  “Millions of fracs?” said Moses Moses, aghast. “How did they get into such a position? The Bill of Incorporation forbids any stockholder to hold more than three shares of stock. That was the very cornerstone of my social design! Why in death’s name would anyone want so much money? One share of stock guarantees all the necessities of life, plus a nice discretionary income. Was pure greed so powerful?”

  Armitrage had finished sewing up my back. He patted new skinseal into place, then turned to Moses Moses and spread his hands apologetically. “The Bill of Incorporation is a dead letter,” he said. “Of course, your signature at the bottom makes it a sacred document, but it doesn’t give it any more relevance. Besides, there was so much discretionary income! A thousand fracs a year, each, for millions of people! Naturally it started to accumulate in the hands of those who wanted it. Collecting money became a kind of game. And the Board of Directors was awfully lax. Their powers were so strictly limited that they had to depend on prestige, and when you left they lost a lot of it. They were trying to reassert their power when the Fox Day blast wiped them out. Then there was only the Rump.”

  “You could hardly call the Rump a government,” I said. “They only handle routine matters, and most of that is done by computer anyway. I’ve seen tapes of the Rump in session. It’s nothing but talk. Real mud-belching stuff. They only meet once a year.”

  Armitrage continued, “It’s a ceremonial position. Some people say that the members of the Rump are directly appointed by the Cabal, but I don’t think that’s true any more. I think that the Board members retire when they get sick of it and sell the office to the highest bidder, or give it to a friend. There’s not much turnover, though. They may be impotent, but they love to hear themselves talk.”

  “What about voting?” demanded Moses Moses. “The Board of Directors is supposed to be elected by shareholders! One share, one vote!”

  “Oh, voting’s outdated nowadays,” Armitrage assured him. “Anyone with a complaint just calls up the central computer directly. It’s programmed to respond to personal communiques. Why get involved with the Rump Board?”

  “But they’re supposed to be your advocates! They’re supposed to obey the will of the shareholders! Doesn’t anyone ever complain about it?”

  “Sure, you can complain to the computer if you want,” I said. “But the computer’s riddled with taps by now, and it keeps all its messages on permanent file. It’d be easy to find out who spoke up against the Cabal; then the Cabal could buy them off or arrange an ‘accident,’ if they thought it was necessary. But they’re very tolerant. Except, of course, when their existence is directly threatened, like we threaten it.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you at all to have lost your liberty?” Saint Anne said.

  “Liberty?” I said. “Death, I don’t know. The Cabal has ruled Reverie for three hundred years; that’s longer than the Board of Directors ever did. I can tell you this much, though. I own four shares of stock. And if the old Board was still in power I wouldn’t even have a profession. They would never have allowed combat art or a Decriminalized Zone. Or bet-slavery, or smuff, or personal servitude, or pornotapes, or the patronage system.”

  “Or multiple sexuality, or radical surgical alteration,” Armitrage said. “Hell, we Reverids were used to the Cabal. They were like old shoes.” Armitrage and I both sank into gloomy silence as we both realized how much we had lost, and how much more we stood to lose even if we survived. Moses Moses had returned and the Second Coming was bound to turn our world upside down.

  We were trapped, too. Even if Armitrage and I clubbed Moses Moses and took him captive to the Cabal—a loathsome act of treason—we would still be killed, because we knew too much. Besides, a blood feud was on. I had sworn to kill Angeluce to avenge the murder of my servant Quade, and that meant war to the death with him and the Cabal. Any enemy of the Cabal would be a friend of ours, and their worst enemy—Moses Moses—would have to be our best ally. Armitrage and I both knew this.

  We exchanged glances. Under his cheerful exterior, Armitrage was a moody, sensitive sort, and he seemed to be rapidly despairing. To cheer him up, I said, “Look at it this way, Armitrage. If the Cabal kills us, then that’s it, zip. We’re dead and it doesn’t matter any more. Besides, everyone dies. But if we live, we’ll be the heroes of the age. We’ll be incredibly famous. It’ll be the performance of our careers. This completely transcends anything we’ve ever done before, and just think, we’re getting it all on tape.” I gestured at his cameras; he had four of them, big clunky eyes with three lenses each and top-notch audio pickups.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I have about two months’ worth of tape left. Of course, I can always go back and erase what I’ve already recorded. It’s mostly personal memory stuff—personal pornotapes and the like. There’re a few good fights, too, but like you said, they pale compared to this. We’re pretty lucky, really. We’re in a privileged position. I just wish I’d been warned—I could have put everything in the computer and started off with clean, fresh, crisp tape.” He looked up moodily at his cameras. Then he reached into the baggy sleeve of his fighting robe and pulled out his comb. He turned it on with a flick of his thumbnail and started to comb his long luxuriant black hair with practiced flicks of his wrist.

  Armitrage was appallingly handsome, with his clear, sea-green eyes, his milk-white skin, his straight, surgically corrected nose (broken many times), his full lips and beardless face. But he was completely without vanity. What many others had mistaken for vanity was only a dedicated combat artist’s concern for image. If he had a weakness it was his forthright, careless passion for sex. Like most multisexuals his bloodstream was a seething tide of hormones and libido stimulants. He had spent a year as a pornostar but quit because his hundreds of tapes were flooding the market. He then turned to combat art so that he could continue to support his personal entourage: two women, two men, and another multisexual. He always had at least five people around to minister to his personal needs, but his personnel were always changing because of his lecherous taste for novelty. Armitrage was a legend. He was only thirty.

  “Say,” he said suddenly, “I wonder what they’re going to do about my new tapes. I had a great tape of a fight with Steam Engine that’s supposed to premiere in four days. What about you, Kid?”

  I shrugged. “The last thing I did was a tape critique for Cewaynie Wetlock. I was doing a gang tape but it fell through.”

  Armitrage smiled. “I saw that critique. Getting soft in your old age? You treated her a lot better than she deserved.”

  “Show some class,” I told him. “Cewaynie Wetlock’s great. You just don’t understand Art with a Capit
al A.” I was glad that Armitrage had cheered up enough to tease me. I let him do it because we both knew I could beat him up any time.

  Armitrage leapt to his feet. “Hey, I bet Money Manies has some spare tapes here on board! Let’s search the hold and see what we can find!”

  The Albatross was a wooden catamaran, thirty-five feet long, fifteen across. Her two hulls were both sheathed in thin white ceramic to prevent the attack of teredos and boracles and to protect her against sharp coral. There was a wooden cabin on board that would sleep six, but I had already looked through it. It had Manies’ old fishing equipment, which he no longer used, but kept for guests. It also had a dusty shelf full of vacuum-sealed provisions in glass jars, some with unhealthy-looking marbled streaks that suggested a choking death by poison for anyone unwise enough to eat them.

  Money Manies was notorious for his reluctance to discard anything, which was unusual even among tidy, cycle-minded Reverids. It wasn’t that Manies was methodically thrifty, far from it; he simply never threw anything away. He had seen so much of the past crumble and decay that it bothered him to see it happen to his own personal effects, to see entropy devouring his past even as he left it.

  Though he seldom used her nowadays, the Albatross was still Manies’ favorite boat. She was almost two hundred years old (though she had been repaired and refurbished so many times that hardly an atom remained of the original craft).

  Armitrage opened the trap door to the port hull and climbed down the short stepladder into the darkness. “What do you see down there?” Saint Anne asked curiously.

  “Junk,” he said. “Wau, it smells down here. Looks like it hasn’t been cleaned out in decades.” We heard echoic clunking and scraping as he grabbed something below decks. Saint Anne went to the hatch to peer in and he handed her a collapsible, incredibly old-looking tapescreen. “There’s a little generator to run it, too,” he said. “But it looks broken. I’ll have some trouble getting to it. Here, Anne, help me get some of these antiques out of the way.” He began to hand her things through the hatch.