We slept and then trudged on. Buds of ivy popped through my skin around my head in a dozen places. Crossbow’s joints grew so stiff that it was hardly able to walk. Finally we attached ropes to it and towed it along in the water like a log.
By late afternoon the Mass was slowly being replaced by tough shrubs, then small trees, then riverside ferns and weeds and birds and, more and more often, mangroves. We could smell the sea. It was the heavy, dense-rooted mangrove so typical of the continental shore. When sunset began, we were wading around and through a network of thick round roots, scolded by aquatic birds and small, armored sapsuckers. We heard the roar of the surf, and it led us on. We were just in time to catch the last glimmer of the yellow sun on the blessed Gulf of Memory.
Anne explored for two days and found us a small patch of white beach amid the miles of tangled mangroves, where we camped to await Crossbow’s death. There was a small freshet of water there, and the banks of the little creek were rich with deep black dirt. That was where Crossbow chose to stay. Its eyes and mouth were already webbed shut, and its joints were as stiff as wood. It had never removed the splinters from its palms, and that was where its transformation began.
It started slowly, as slowly as the growth of ivy around my head. It took whole months. The leaves grew in the damp spaces under the blisters on Crossbow’s hands; when they were fully formed, they burst through the skin. We could do very little for Crossbow, but we heaped up dirt around the brown barky knobs that had been its ankles and made sure that it got plenty of water. Its fingers shrivelled into pliant twigs, bark crept up its calves, seaming its legs together, and its skull dissolved as strong, vigorous branches broke out through eyes and ears and mouth.
Anne and I lived on fish and crabs and clams and seaweed. We lived well. Even the ivy growing from my scalp seemed to thrive. Anne cut it for me when it dangled down into my eyes. My follicle mites prevented it from spreading any farther; it was confined to the areas where my head had been soaked in the thick Mass fluid. It didn’t hurt, thought it bled red sap if Anne pruned it too close to the scalp.
I was growing, too. I grew three inches in a month, and it ruined three hundred years’ worth of ingrained reflexes. I lost my smooth, fluid, self-aware grace, and it was replaced with adolescent gawkiness. For the first time in my life I found myself stumbling, stubbing my toes, dropping things. I even cut myself when I tried to shave with Crossbow’s tiny scalpel. My career was ruined. It was useless to even think of resuming it.
We had no reason to return to Telset. Since my cameras were gone, we had no way to support our testimony. We had no political advisor, no leader who could rally resistance to the Cabal. We had no reason to risk our lives voyaging to Telset in a homemade boat. Even if we reached Telset, we had no guarantee that we would not be shot on sight.
Survival occupied our energies. When our tent wore out, we built a snug thatched shack out of mangrove wood and foliage, with my leather combat jacket for a door. We wove nets out of vines and bark and built fishtraps out of rocks and driftwood. We kept a hearthfire burning. We grew brown and lean and tough.
I had expected Anne to argue about our moral obligation to return to Telset. But Anne had changed, just as I had. One night in our third month, I looked at her curiously as we sat beside our driftwood fire. She had changed. It was not merely the long wisps and curls of tangled hair over her ears and the base of her neck. It wasn’t the explosion of freckles under her sunburn, or her ragged bodytight, torn and stained. Something was missing. An element of tension in her face, a certain grimness around her mouth, was gone. She looked—not determined—only calm.
“You’ve looked different ever since you lost your feather brooch,” I said. “The little ornament you wore in your hair. You never told me what happened to it.”
“It was no ornament,” Anne said. “It was a badge. I never wear ornaments.”
“Did you lose it?”
“No. I gave it away.” She hesitated for a long time, looking up at the night sky. Then, slowly, the words came to her. “Rominuald Tanglin gave me that brooch. He asked me to wear it for him, to wear it always. Especially on camera. It was supposed to identify me to the public. It was made of moa feathers, shed by the favorite birds in my flock. I wore it for thirty years.” She looked at me intensely. “But its age doesn’t matter. It was still made up of cells, the cells of the birds that grew the feathers, and cells have genes, and the genes are the heart of life. Some of the genes must have still been viable. I threw it away! I threw it into the pool that Crossbow fell in. It’s been broken up and preserved in the Crossbow Body, forever. My birds can never die now. No matter what anyone does. I’ve saved them. I did it, no one else.”
“That was clever,” I said. I looked up at her with genuine admiration. The months with Anne had wrought a bizarre and drastic change in my way of expressing and feeling. She was the only audience I had left, so I played to her. At first, it had seemed a waste to feel anything without an audience to share it, but the deadly apathy wouldn’t cling to me; there was too much else to do. There was the task of staying alive, there was the wind, there was the sun, there was the wet green ivy that circled my head and haunted my dreams .…
I couldn’t have hidden the effects of my puberty from Anne, even if I’d wanted to. Hair was appearing all over me, like the rank, coarse fur of an animal, long-buried in my flesh, but awake now and moving with irresistible, lazy power. It was the Other, the Other Thing that Armitrage had spoke of; I was abandoned to it, and it grew inside me, wet and green and strong like ivy. I had dreams of flying, dreams of burning; even broken dreams of Tanglin’s adult flesh, touched by ghost fingers of the women of the past. Anne was among the women.
Anne was the only woman. I saw her with new eyes, not the calm blackrimmed eyes of the Artificial Kid, but older, hotter eyes that showed slow heat shimmering just above the surface of her skin. I had never seen that the lines of a woman’s body were curves; that they were not static, not just the outside layer of skin over muscle and tendon, but flowing and living. Before, I had seen proportion; now, I saw grace. When I had seen Anne’s face before, I had seen her features; now, I saw a woman.
“I did it alone,” Anne said. “No church could have helped me. I didn’t need any church. I didn’t even need Tanglin. It was Tanglin that put that badge on my head. It was only feathers, but Arti, it weighed so much! I fought so long to keep it there, even when the weight of it was crushing me. While my flock lived, I couldn’t fail them; when I failed them, there was nothing left for me but shame.
“But how can I feel shame when there are only the two of us? We’re marooned here. Reverie is a big world, but we only need a piece of it. This beach is our world, and we’re the only people on it. You don’t care what I did in the past. You don’t care about me and the Church, or about me and Tanglin. That’s what I’ve learned from you, Arti. I’ve learned not to care.”
“I care, Anne. Without you here, I’d have died. You are the only person I’ve ever really known.… You are my audience, Anne, but you’re more than audience … Another person can be like a whole world, can’t she? And we’re all the world that’s here.”
“Yes, that’s it!” Anne laughed then. It was a brittle, high-pitched laugh, with a cutting edge of hysteria in it; it sounded like chains breaking. She scrambled to her feet and ran down the beach. Sand scattered with each footstep. “There’s no one to see us!” she shouted. “There’s no one left to care! I’m dead to the old world, to the old things!” She spun around suddenly, looked at the sky, and stabbed her finger accusingly at one of the stars. “I’m dead to you, do you hear? I did everything you wanted, and now I’ve thrown you away! I’m my own world now. I’m my own people! I’m reborn! I declare myself reborn, right now! No one else can do it for me!” She sprinted suddenly for the foamy line of surf and threw herself into the sea. She poured briny sea water over her tousled head, three times, carefully, with cupped hands.
The shock of the cool wat
er seemed to calm her. She came out of the water, dripping, and threw aside her wet clothing to stand naked, ankle deep in the foam.
“I am newborn,” she said quietly. “Did you understand the ritual?”
“It’s happened to me before,” I said. “I wish it had been that clean and that easy.”
“I suppose I’ll keep the name Anne,” she said musingly, digging into the sand with one naked toe. “I like the name Anne. Why shouldn’t I keep it? From now on I’ll do what I want.”
“What do you want to do, then?” I said. Something awful was happening to me. My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding at my ribs like a madman at a prison door.
“I want to dance.”
I got to my feet. “All right. I’ll teach you.”
“No,” she said. “I’ll teach you. First we draw the eight-spoked wheel in the sand, like this.” She stooped over gracefully and began to scrape a wide circle in the damp sand. Trembling, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see, for fear it would happen too soon. I pulled off the rags of my bodytight and dropped them in the sand. “The males go on this side, the females on the other. There seem to be only two of us, but there are really four: you and your older self, and me and mine. So, we begin.”
The dance did not last long. Instead, we made love in the sand, like gods. “Rominuald,” she said, and I shuddered in her embrace because the name sounded so right.
There came a day when we had been on the beach for five months. We had caught a huge ray with one of our heavy bone fishhooks and we were roasting it over a bonfire. They told us later that it was the dark pencil of smoke that had attracted them.
We heard the boat coming and we hid in the mangroves. They would never have found us if I hadn’t recognized the boat as Ruffian Jack’s exploring hydrofoil, the Ruffian’s Delight.
Even then we were cautious. We didn’t come out until we saw Ruffian Jack and Alruddin Spinney wade ashore, surrounded by clouds of cameras. When we came out of the brush we received a standing ovation and a round of cheers from Jack, Spinney, and their five-man crew.
Jack and Spinney ran toward us, grinning broadly. Jack embraced me. Spinney and his mantis embraced Anne. Even the crew jumped ship and slogged in toward shore, with more cameras, narrating the historic moment with off-satellite transmitters.
“A beard! I can’t believe it,” bellowed Jack, holding me at arm’s length. “Is it really you, Kid? Or should I be calling you Mr. Tanglin now?” There were cameras all around us—a dozen of them at least. I looked into their lenses nonplussed. “What do you know about Tanglin?” I asked cautiously.
Jack laughed. “God’s Death, boy, we’ve got all your tapes! Alruddin, look, he doesn’t know! Kid—Arti my lad—they were beautiful! You’re a hero! Anne’s a heroine! A cult idol! And what about Crossbow, eh? What about its amazing discovery? Where is our sexless savant? I swear it’s more of a man than any of us!”
I pointed to the tree. Jack looked. Cameras trained their lenses on it. “Sylvaticum pinnatus,” said Jack absently. “Not native here. What’s it doing this close to shore, eh? Lovely tree.”
“It’s Crossbow’s grave,” I said soberly. “We planted it there. It would have wanted it that way.”
“You mean he’s died?” said Spinney, letting go of Anne for the first time.
“It was an accident,” Anne said, catching on fast. “In the Mass. A terrible illness. The long trek was too much for it.”
“It was a martyr to the Cause,” said Spinney sadly, tears coming to his eyes. It was the first line of what was to become Spinney’s lyric masterpiece, “Martyr to the Cause.”
“What’s the situation like in Telset these days?” I said.
“Why, we’ve won! The Old Cabal has been annihilated! The New Cabal and the Reformed Board have everything under control. It was your tapes that did it, Kid. Tanglin, I mean. Angeluce is dead. Instant Death surrendered! Your tapes caused a planet-wide riot, a full-fledged Revolution! It’s the greatest tape accomplishment in history!” Ruffian Jack waved his arms wildly. “Back on board, crew! It’s back to Telset and a hero’s welcome!”
Half-ushered, half-dragged by Jack’s crew, Anne and I were heaved on board and surrounded by yelling, cheering sailors, who ripped bits of our tattered bodytights off for souvenirs and demanded autographs and statements for the planet-wide live broadcast. Jack gunned the engines wildly and the backwash from his craft’s powerful engines nearly swamped the little hut Anne and I had built. We were in Telset in an hour and a half.
13
Our reception was half power-fantasy, half baroque nightmare. The entire population of Telset met us on the docks. The shore was black with people and packed so tight that citizens were being forced chest-deep into the sea by the pressure of crowding. Every man, woman, and clone in the city was screaming his, her, or its lungs out and setting off powerful, dangerously haphazard fireworks that rained red-hot cinders on unprotected necks and heads. They were chanting, too. “Tang-lin, Tang-lin, Tang-lin!”
“Merciful God, I haven’t seen anything like this since Peitho,” yelled Anne.
“Whose idea was this?” I screamed in Jack’s ear.
“Money Manies’, who else?” he said.
The screaming, billowing crowd was on the hair-trigger edge of mass hysteria. Members of the Cognitive Dissonants and the Fourways were trying to keep order. I noticed that they were wearing new armbands, not the rainbow armbands of the Civic Detail, but thick bracelets of linked beads.
“Go up to the bow and wave to them,” Jack howled. “Go on, or they’ll tear the city apart!”
Anne and I walked to the bow, joined hands, and waved. The crowd went absolutely out of their minds. In seconds we were in the middle of a maelstrom of cameras, bashing each other, cracking their lenses, spinning around in tight circles, going completely out of control as the drone wavelengths were overloaded with contradictory signals. When one of them knocked Anne down, I went berserk and started whacking them to rubble with my nunchuck. They were so thick that we couldn’t see the crowd, could barely see each other.
Jack reacted quickly, gunning the engines and pulling us out of the dock, so rapidly that I was almost thrown overboard and Anne saved herself only by grabbing the brass railing on the bow.
Coral grated under the hydrofoils as Jack ran the Delight out to sea, ignoring the usual navigation channels. We zipped out of sight of the island, waiting for the cover of darkness while we monitored the riot on four channels, all of them Money Manies’. “My aching death, look at Hammer whacking the daylights out of that noncombatant!” I marveled. “Look, Ice Lady’s whipping that man half to death! The Cognitive Dissonants are really beating the crap out of unarmed civilians! What in creation is happening here?”
“Oh, Chill Factor, your old friend, is part of the New Cabal now,” Jack assured me. “He’s in charge of keeping order, and he’s doing it. Without guns, too. It hasn’t been easy in Telset these last few months. Angeluce had a purge, you know. Eighty people were executed: Then there were the fatalities in the Decriminalized Zone—look, what’s left of the Zone is coming up on screen four now.”
“Good God, it’s been leveled!” I cried.
“Yes. It was the scene of the first pitched battle between Old Cabal and revolutionary forces. It came just two weeks after you left—an abortive uprising in favor of Moses Moses. Word of the Second Coming got out almost immediately, of course. Angeluce lured them into the Decriminalized Zone and blew them sky-high. We learned later that he had been manufacturing explosives in an orbital oneill for almost two years.”
“And my house?”
“Rubble. We saved a few of your tapes. Your computer’s gone, though. I’m sorry.”
“So am I. Poor Old Dad.”
Jack smiled. “Oh, don’t worry about him. His reputation’s made. Imagine, all this time, and I never knew you were really Tanglin! Why, the news set all Telset on its ear. Look, that’s where work is progressing on the new statue of Moses
Moses. There’s been no word on Crossbow Moses, by the way. Or Moses Crossbow, whatever you call him. You know, the one with the beard.”
“Right,” I said.
“At any rate, the true, original Moses is safely dead now, so we can deify him like a hero deserves.” Jack guffawed. “I really liked the old gaffer. I’d like to shake his hand, or his successor’s hand—whatever you call the guy who went down with the balloon. He was okay in my book. Shook the place up a little, through no fault of his own. Maybe it needed some shaking. Look, they’re chasing the crowd back from the docks. Oooh, that was a shrewd blow. Looks like the worst is over now.” He turned off the tapescreens from a central switch. “It’ll be dark soon. I’ll take you in to see old Manies. He’s been anxious to have a good talk with the both of you. Congratulations. Celebrations. Parties all night. You know, the usual stuff.”
“Right,” I said again.
Money Manies did us the signal honor of meeting us at his private dock. “Darling Kid! You don’t know how much this cheers an old man’s heart!” he cried, embracing me and printing a wet social kiss on my forehead. “The days and nights I’ve spent, consumed with worry! But come in, come in! I’m just starting breakfast.”
Manies touched his bracelet and the door of his mansion swung open. There were still a few raw bullet pock-marks on the wall that faced the sea. “Mementos,” smiled Manies. He hurried us inside.
The Artificial Kid Page 25