The Artificial Kid

by Bruce Sterling

  “It’s a lovely night,” Crossbow offered.

  I looked at Anne; she was tight-lipped. I decided I’d better talk for the both of us. “Yes, I noticed,” I said. “Have you eaten? I cooked some prawns.”

  “You look worried, Anne,” Moses said perceptively. I decided to take the plunge. “Yes,” I said. “There’s something unspoken between the four of us.”

  “Oh,” said Crossbow. “You noticed the problem with the parachute.” There was an uncomfortable silence.

  “The parachute?” Anne said in a small voice.

  “Yes, of course,” Crossbow said bluffly. “Moses and I had a chance to talk it over this morning, and there is no cause for alarm. It’s true that we have only one parachute. And it’s true that we haven’t the slightest idea how to make another one—not one that would work, anyway. But if we begin work today, with luck, we can cut one of the flotation cells free and use it to float down to earth well ahead of the detonation.”

  “Yes,” Moses chimed in. “The island will lose some lift, but probably not enough to make it explode prematurely. On the other hand, if we wait until the last moment, when the island has dried out and is primed to explode, then our meddling will almost certainly blow us all sky-high—or perhaps I should say ground-low.” He smiled charmingly. Both of them looked quite hearty. Their palms were brick-red, but it could have been the effort of climbing the rope ladder that had done it. Not likely, though.

  “Luckily I have some hunting harpoons, some knives, and some spare glue,” Crossbow said. “Under my direction, we should be able to do the work with a minimum of risk. However, we’ll have to start work at sunrise. We can sleep through the hottest part of the day and start work again in the evening.”

  “There’s not much time to lose,” Moses said. “As the balloon fabric dries out and ages in the sun, it becomes brittle and volatile. And the balloon will be over the Mass in four days, according to the Professor’s calculations.”

  “Right,” said Crossbow. “And we ought to have the flotation cell cut loose from the island before the phoenixes come to attack it. Hopefully the phoenixes will ignore a target as small as a single cell, and I suppose it’s possible that there might not even be phoenixes around the Mass. But I would imagine that there are.”

  “What are phoenixes?” Anne said.

  “They’re just small birds, about the size of a sandpiper—very pretty birds too, all orange and vermilion. Not much is known about them; I’d meant to capture a few specimens on this trip. Each bird carries a number of tiny eggs within its body, and the eggs become fully fertile only when the parent bird’s body is charred by intense heat. The eggs incubate in mud. These phoenixes fly very swiftly, and they have sharp beaks. They dive at the island, fold down their wings, and punch right through the balloon fabric. That alone might generate an explosion, but I suspect that they have some other method of producing flame—perhaps by striking sparks off certain rough scales on their legs. We should see a great many other birds in the next few days, too. I believe I’ve already seen a few nightkites circling the island—I glimpsed their silhouettes against the stars. And by morning there will be seabirds in to search for crabs and carrion and insects. Many of them will carry the seeds of certain symbiotic plants, which they will bury in the mud. Oh, it’s all very complex, and should be completely fascinating.”

  And that was that. For some reason, Anne and I couldn’t bring ourselves to challenge them over their odd behavior, perhaps from fear of provoking something worse. Dawn found us on the top of the balloon, bristling with knives and harpoons, shivering in the cold predawn air of the altitudes.

  Crossbow was tramping around one particularly large cell. “Here, this one looks good,” it said. “I won’t guarantee that it will be an easy landing, but it should slow down the three of us considerably.”

  “The three of us?” Anne said. She hugged her elbows and shivered. Her pleasant, broad-cheeked, freckled face was peeling horribly, skin shredding off in thin, dirty, tenuous sheets.

  “Yes,” Crossbow said. “I think the Chairman should take the parachute, don’t you?” Anne nodded at once, self-sacrificing to the point of masochism, and I was willing to go along.

  “Let’s start by scraping off this luminescent gel,” Crossbow suggested. “It seems to generate heat as well as light, and it probably has something to do with the detonation.”

  Anne, Crossbow, and I went to our hands and knees and began to scrape the yellow-greenish crust away with the blunt backs of our kitchen knives. We wrinkled our noses at the sharp chemical reek of the glowing paste. Moses collected it in a broad scrap of fabric, then walked to our balloon horizon to fling it over the edge and down to the mist-shrouded sea a mile below.

  We soaked down the fabric with a little of the precious fresh water from a fish-bladder squeeze-bulb. “I hope this helps,” Crossbow said. “All right, now let’s attach the tethers.”

  The tethers were long reins of knotted balloon fabric, braided for extra strength by our dexterous saint. We glued them to the fabric of the cell we had chosen, using the glue sparingly, as there wasn’t much left. The free ends of the tethers were attached to nearby cells.

  “We’ll open small slashes in the neighboring cells,” Crossbow said. “We’ll let them deflate slowly, to minimize the risk, Then one of us will have to crawl down through a deflated cell and cut through the attachments to the interior cells. With luck, some of the fabric may peel away spontaneously when the other cells expand to take up the deflated space. If we pull on the tethers, we may be able to peel it loose without having to break all of the connecting cells. We’ll have to break at least six, and that represents a lot of lift. If we begin to sink too drastically we may have to go down to the island’s payload and try to lighten it by cutting cables and dumping off mud.”

  “That won’t be easy,” I objected. “Those connective roots have it all webbed together into one big lump.”

  “We’ll just have to make the effort,” the neuter said. It stroked its red, feathery gills, which hung limp and moist at its neck. “Let’s put it this way, Arti. If I hit the water, I won’t drown. But I can’t vouch for the rest of you.”

  “Do you have any spare gills?” Anne asked hopefully.

  “Yes, but I can’t do the necessary surgery,” said Crossbow with a smile. We all laughed. Poor Anne knew very little about amphibious life.

  Shading his eyes, Moses pointed into the sunrise. “Look, kittiwakes.” We all turned to look, squinting. A flock of kittiwakes were coming in; we could faintly hear their grating, high-pitched cries.

  They circled the top of the balloon once, screeching. Their blade-like black wings and long, elegant scissor tails flashed in the yellow morning sunlight. “They’ve come to search the mud for carrion,” Moses said.

  I looked at him, surprised. He seemed to have adopted the Professor’s detached, Academic tone. Crossbow, on the other hand, paid little attention to the birds but stood with its chin in its hand, vigorously contemplating the problem before it, quite the resolved person of action. It took one of the instruments from its embroidered belt, knelt, and punctured the skin of a neighboring cell. We smelled the escaping gas at once.

  “We’ll see how this one goes before we attempt the others,” it said authoritatively. Moses, nodding, stepped tentatively off to one side.

  The first deflation went well and Crossbow quickly punctured the skins of the other five surrounding cells. The cells were naturally spherical; it was only their close packing that had forced them to assume a hexagonal shape.

  The central cell expanded with the loss of external pressure and slowly rose upward, tugging at the slackened skins of the flabby adjoining cells. We heard a long, muffled shredding sound as the force of its lift began to peel it free from the sticky, clinging skins of the other cells.

  “Excellent!” Crossbow cried. “I believe it will rip free of the cells beneath it without our having to cut. Quickly, Arti, help me slash it free of these
others.”

  Crossbow and I leapt onto the collapsing fabric of the other cells and began slashing for all we were worth. My section of the fabric ripped completely and once again I tumbled downward into the balloon. I bounced off the resilient interior cells, keeping the presence of mind not to puncture one accidentally with my knife. It smelled terrible. I held my breath and cut away wherever I detected a strain on the fabric.

  Two of my cameras were caught under the shroud, and my foot was trapped momentarily between the bulging edges of two expanding cells. I wrenched myself free, though, and had the satisfaction of seeing our savior cell rise up slowly from the body of the balloon, held only by shreds of white skin and our four tether lines.

  I retrieved my cameras and, dancing adroitly so as not to get trapped again, I managed to scramble out of the deep, deflated pit. We heard muffled popping and peeling sounds all around us as the cells rearranged themselves beneath our feet. Anne and Moses were both knocked down.

  Crossbow cut its way through a thin, flabby shroud and clambered out of the pit to join us. “There,” it said. “That’s fine. We’ll leave what’s left of the skin on it for now. When we cut the rest of the skin the cell will turn upside down, because we’ve attached the tethers to the top. Also, the remaining skin will help distribute the strain. I don’t want to put too much of a strain on our glue bonds. I don’t think it will rip free, but the tension might make the cell lose too much hydrogen.”

  “I thought I saw something slithering around in the bottom of the pit,” Anne said.

  Moses nodded. “Ah, yes. That would be the cell slugs. They live in the lining between cells. They eat sap. Isn’t that so, Professor?”

  Crossbow nodded briefly.

  “I wish we could have caught a specimen,” Moses said. I looked at Moses sharply. This was too much. The intonation was Crossbow’s, syllable for syllable. Crossbow must have been aware of the mimicry, but it said nothing about it.

  “Well, that’s that,” Crossbow said cheerily. “It went much more smoothly than I expected.”

  My ears popped. “Hey, we’re descending,” I said.

  “Let’s go back to our study,” Crossbow said. “We’ll go down to the island’s payload. We can judge our rate of descent from there, and if necessary we’ll cut a few cables and hope for the best.”

  Once again, we made the tiresome descent through the center of the balloon. The hundreds of rungs were a trial; they blistered Anne’s hands, and I almost fell again.

  We grouped together down on the crunchy, crusted mud. The morning sunbeams slanted in, cool under the balloon’s immense bulk. Kittiwakes and shrikes were everywhere, perching on the cables, squabbling over the bodies of parched, bursting fish and filling the air with their cries. A few of them darted curiously over our heads, but most of them ignored us. Probably they had never before seen a human being.

  Drifting with the tradewind, the balloon sank within fifteen hundred feet of the sea, low enough for us to see gentle swells chasing one another across its gilded surface. Then the heat of the sun inflated the balloon and it rose a little, up to perhaps two thousand feet. We drifted into a thin cloudbank, and dew began to collect on the island’s support cables.

  Moses Moses dropped to his knees and stared intently at the cracked mud. “Look at this mold growing,” he said. Furry, greenish patches of some kind of mold were growing in the wet valleys between the cracked plates of mud. “Look,” he said wonderingly. “This is life itself. This mold has seized the chance to live, if only for four days. Look how it accepts life, so completely, so gratefully. It has a great deal to teach us, if we will only deign to listen.” He sighed. “When I look at this I feel that I have foolishly wasted my life. I’ve squandered so many years in pointless, useless strife, and all along, all these centuries, the secret has been here.” He looked at us with tears in his eyes. “I want a chance to live again.”

  I looked at Crossbow. “Crossbow, this is your doing.”

  Crossbow shrugged. It had caught Moses’ characteristic shrug perfectly; it was uncanny. “I need someone to complete my work,” it said. “He needs someone to complete his. What could be more natural? By exchanging lives, we can revitalize one another.”

  “So that’s what you intend to do?” asked Anne. “Trade lives?”

  “We must,” Moses said. “I can’t go on the way I was, with madness nibbling at me day by day. And Crossbow’s work is vital. I can lose myself in it.”

  “And I’ve given it the best years of my life,” the neuter said bitterly. “But I’ve seen the truth I dedicated my life to, mocked by charlatans. I trusted the Academy. I trusted in the disinterested search for truth. I sincerely thought that they would want the truth revealed. I thought that they would rejoice in my discovery, just as I did. But I’ve been cheated by political maneuverings. The arrival of Angeluce has opened my eyes to their true motivations. I can’t let him ruin my hopes as he did fifty years ago. And since he has the Cabal on his side, he has made them my enemy as well as Moses’s. Death take him! I’ll fight them all to my last drop of blood!” It clenched its thin, webby fists.

  “Wait a minute, wait!” I shouted. “This is ridiculous! Listen to what you’re saying! Moses, you can’t do Crossbow’s work. You’ve never been scientifically trained.” I was furious. I shook my head, but my hair wouldn’t stand up. For some quirky reason, that annoyed me even more than did their calmly stated madness. “You don’t know a microscope from a micrometer. You don’t know gram-positive from gram-negative!

  “And as for you, Crossbow—my death, I never heard such idiocy! You? Politics?” My voice rose to a squeak. “What do you think you can do? What do you think will happen when we reach Telset? Do you think that the citizens are going to rush out, saying, ‘Hurray, it’s not Moses Moses, but it’s the next best thing!’?” I grabbed his muscular arm. “Professor, you’re a complete political nonentity! You haven’t even been seen in seven years, and the Gestalt Dispute is completely forgotten! Do you think a wire model is going to topple the Cabal? We don’t have a chance without the prestige of Moses Moses! He’s the only rallying point we could possibly have! Good God, I don’t know much about politics, but any child could tell you that much! You shouldn’t need me to tell you this!” I lowered my voice. “Now, Professor, talk sense. Don’t joke with us. It’s easy to belittle Anne and me because we’re young, but our lives are at stake. We’re worried. Don’t say such things, even in jest.”

  “I knew it was something suspicious even from the beginning,” Anne said shrewishly, looking at the two of them through narrowed, puffy eyes. “Be serious. You can’t just abdicate your responsibilities like this. None of us ever can. Mr. Chairman, this is your society whose future is at stake. You can squirm all you like, but it’s your moral responsibility, and that’s a fact. You can’t just hide and get this—this person to rush out and lead all three of us to our deaths. You saw the kind of hoodlums that were pursuing us. What chance would we have against them, without you to help us? Are we supposed to live under the tyranny of the Cabal forever, as hunted fugitives? You know they’ll kill us, just because we once saw you!”

  “They might even turn it around,” I said. “They might say we kidnapped you, took you from the island, and killed you ourselves. Without you there to prove otherwise, we haven’t a chance. Now, be sensible. You can study biology anytime. The Professor can give you lessons. And Professor, you can study politics. You could help us by defaming Angeluce, and giving us a chance to kill him legally—if I can wait that long, which I doubt. Doesn’t that make sense? Isn’t that what you planned?”

  “Frankly, no,” said Moses. “My work here is too important to be interrupted by a political squabble. Politics is ephemeral. I’m dealing with eternal truths.” He got up and brushed mud from the knees of his bodytight.

  “And you underestimate me,” Crossbow said loftily. “Even fifty years ago I gave them the fight of their lives, and I know better now. With the intuition of Moses Mos
es to help me, I’ll turn the lot of them inside out. I’ll make them wish they’d never been born. Besides, they’ll be looking for Moses Moses. They won’t expect me. When we get back to Telset, I’ll burrow from within like a deadly parasite. I’ll find Angeluce and destroy him. He couldn’t escape me if he hid at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Moses said, but with the detached coolness of a spectator rather than the fervid warmth of a participant. “I’ll drop the three of you off at the shoreline. You can make your way south along the coast until you are west of Telset, then float across the Gulf by boat. You’re both accomplished sailors. You could manage the Gulf even in a homemade craft. I can lend you the tools. They’ll be abandoned when the island detonates, anyway.”

  “And what will you do then?” I demanded angrily. “You’ll parachute alone into the wilderness, right?”

  “Right. But with Crossbow’s insight to guide me, I’ll be able to survive quite handily. After all, that’s what it intended to do in the first place, right, Professor?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “How do you expect to have Crossbow’s insight when Crossbow is miles away, with us?” Anne demanded scornfully. Her answer was identical smiles from the two of them, smiles that chilled us both.

  “When the transference is complete,” said Crossbow bleakly, “I intend to adopt the name of Crossbow Moses. The Chairman will rejoice in the name of Moses Crossbow. Thus our internal exchange will be perfectly mirrored externally, as is only right.”

  “But you can’t do this,” insisted Anne, close to tears. “It’ll ruin everything.”

  Moses shrugged. “As you may have guessed,” he said, “it’s already too late.”

  11

  The next four days were hell for Anne and me. Moses and Crossbow gave up all pretense of normal behavior. They spent every spare moment in their strange communion. They ignored us completely whenever possible; when we forced them to confront us, they faced us as blankly as men in a trance. They refused to answer our most earnest pleas, our begging, our frenzied denunciations.