He, She and It (18 page)

Even now her instinct was to protect Gadi, to defend him. She forced herself to sound barely interested. “What has Gadi done now?”

“He’s got into trouble again. Bad trouble.”

“What kind?” Shira asked cautiously. She was not sure she wanted to know, but she had little choice. Nothing was going to happen today until she had calmed Avram, until he got out of the way and let them work. Trying to teach Yod how to pass for human was a more than full-time job but often amusing, as they acted scenes together like bright children, playing at the interactions he soon must carry out in earnest with people of the town. His questions startled her. “What does ‘excuse me’ mean? Excuse me from what? If I shouldn’t do something, why do it? If it’s permissible, why apologize?”

How little time it had taken, the six weeks they had been working together, for the two of them to close ranks against Avram, quietly, almost secretively, trusting each other more than they could their boss. Yod was holding himself together,
but Avram’s tension obviously aroused his need to defend, so that he kept clenching and unclenching his fists. He quivered with what in a human would have been anxiety. In Yod she suspected it was the unfulfilled need to take action: move out, defend, attack. Inadvertently his hand closed on the edge of the table and broke off a piece of the metal rim. He looked embarrassed and slipped it in the pocket of the shorts she had bought him.

Avram stopped pacing and turned to face them. “This must go no farther than this room, although we may not be able to keep it quiet. Gadi has … He has become sexually involved with a fifteen-year-old.”

“A male or a female?” Yod asked blandly.

“A girl. My son’s a flaming dandy, but he’s monotonously heterosexual.”

Sexuality was one of those areas that changed utterly from multi to multi, town to town. What was the norm in one place was forbidden in another. In Uni-Par, Gadi’s multi, the commonest marriage was a triad. She felt a roiling hot mixture of emotions, like a pot of thick fudge about to boil over, but there was no sweetness in it, only resentment, guilt, complicity. Was Gadi still trying to re-create that lost and secret place of pure sugar intensity, fused bodies and hearts? For a while she knew he had sought that lost ecstasy in drugs, but it eluded him. “Where did this happen?”

“Azerbaijan. He’s lucky to get out with his neck. He was publicly flogged. If he wasn’t so overvalued by Uni-Par, his corpse would be fueling a waste power plant now. Because of his virons, they negotiated a flogging and they’ll be shipping him out by closed zip.”

“He creates the imaginary worlds of the stimmies?” Yod asked. “And people value the experience of exotic landscapes?”

Both Shira and Avram nodded without looking at Yod. Shira asked, her voice betraying her by quavering, “Shipped where?”

“Here. He’s in disgrace. Oh, they’ll recall him. No one in Uni-Par has a memory longer than six months.”

She felt trapped. She had to get out. She couldn’t. She found herself breathing quickly. Yod, whose hearing was abnormally sensitive, was about to speak, when she made a gesture asking him to keep silent. He understood.

“I want you to know, Shira, I did not invite him here. I found his last visit taxing enough, and that was only a long weekend. How my son and I will survive six months under the same roof
is more than I can fathom. How could he be such a complete schmuck? He acts without thinking, just as he did when he was a child. He has never grown up, never!”

She found she could form only short sentences and still control her voice, her rising panic. “When is he coming?”

“Tomorrow.”

“So soon …”

“Isn’t it.” Avram looked hard at her. “You’re not looking forward to him any more than I am.”

“I’m comfortable talking to him image-to-image. That nice electronic remove makes it safe.”

“This is going to be awkward indeed. And just when we were making some headway. Yod has developed daily since you’ve been working with him. His progress is measuring consistently above my projected curve.”

Yod threw her a veiled look of gratitude. She forced a weak smile at Avram. “I agree, we’re making progress.”

When Avram finally left them, Shira tried to administer one of the cognitive tests, but she found herself pulling the plug from her temple and crashing the program abruptly. “Yod, I have to go out. Outside the wrap. Do you have a sec skin, or should I go alone?”

“You mean into what’s called the raw? The unprotected light and air? I don’t require a sec skin. I was built to endure the raw without protection.”

“Nonetheless, we’ll find one for you. We can’t let anyone discover your unique properties. I bet Gadi’s old suit is still where he used to keep it.” It was. She ran home to fetch hers and then returned for Yod.

The perimeter was more tightly guarded than it used to be, so Shira left officially. She walked fast. The bay. She wanted the comfort of the sea. She had not been swimming since she had been back; she had not been swimming all her years at Y-S. Yod strode beside her easily, his head bobbing in constant surveillance. “What is that?” He assumed a defensive posture.

“A vulture.” It had found a dead rabbit. Rabbits had survived UV radiation by becoming nocturnal. “They’re birds that can live in the raw. Ignore it.” She hurried them over the dunes and through little boggy hollows of cranberries and drifts of beach plum in blossom. The air smelled salty. In the dunes it was hot indeed. Under the firmgel she was sweating freely. She headed into the drowned town below. The tide was out, so some of the old streets were dry, seaweed lodged between the tilted slabs of century-old cement. They had to hike and then
wade through several ruined blocks before they came to a good swimming beach. With the bay risen over drowned marshes, seaside houses, roads, with the massive hurricanes they experienced yearly, which left wreckage of buildings, vehicles, machinery under water, a good beach was one where she could hope to swim without being maimed or impaled on some hidden wreck.

They squatted on a broken wall, what had been the lower story of a house now washed away and half buried. She peeled off her sec skin, reached for the waterproof grease that was supposed to protect her, then hesitated at stripping further before Yod. In Tikva, children were not instilled with nudity taboos. Nobody under twelve hesitated about tossing off their clothes, with the result that nobody over the age of twelve was ever naturally modest.

She had since lived in cultures, like Y-S, that had fierce injunctions concerning what parts of the human body should be displayed in what circumstances. It went with rigid sex roles—not at work, of course, for no one could afford such nonsense, but in every other sector of living. Women dressing for dinner often bared their breasts at Y-S functions, but the legs were always modestly covered to midcalf. The back was usually bare; the standard business suit, with its deeply cut back, was designed to show both men’s and women’s musculature and fitness. However, it was the custom to keep ears and nape covered for women, who were required to wear their hair at least shoulder length, often artificially straightened. Malkah had cut Shira’s to a sleek cap just last week. At Uni-Par, Gadi’s multi, nudity was a sign of status. The higher you were on the pyramid, the less you wore, the better to show off the results of the newest cosmetic surgery performed on your body. At Aramco-Ford, women wore yards of material and short transparent symbolic veils.

She had never owned a bathing suit, and she wanted to swim. She wanted to feel the salt water stinging all the small cuts and abrasions of her body like benign sandpaper; she longed to feel salt-cured, wet on the surface and dry at the bone. She needed to lose herself in swimming. Why was she hesitating to strip before a machine?

“Do you know how to swim, Yod?”

“Yes, although that’s a skill I’ve never before accessed. I’m programmed to enjoy exercising all my functions. Do we swim in this moving water?”

“This is Massachusetts Bay, and yes, we swim in it.” She was
still squatting there in her briefs and shirt. Finally she pulled off her tank top, left on her brassiere and briefs, sliding the resin knife into the seam, rubbed herself all over with protective grease and waded into the water. Even more quickly, Yod undressed. He stood on the edge of the crumbling wall, looking doubtful. He was drawing in air in long sharp breaths as his midsection inflated strangely. Of course; he was heavier than a human of the same size. He had to create added mass to avoid sinking. “Come on in,” she called.

“This water is radioactive and highly polluted with toxic chemicals, including petrocarbons, acetic acid, chloroform—”

“This is the only ocean we have in our backyard. It will have to do.”

She glanced at him, poised uncertainly on the water’s edge. His body was exactly the same color all over, a rich olive. He had pubic hair, although almost no chest hair. He had been given a navel, absurdly, and also a penis, which she quickly looked away from. He looked bloated, puffed with air. “If you aren’t coming, wait for me here.”

“Shira, this is dangerous. Wait.” She heard a large splash and then a loud churning of the waters.

She treaded water, waiting. He had not quite got the knack of his programming yet. He was splashing in all directions, sputtering, thrashing and kicking. She swam back toward him. She felt efficient, sleek in the water. As long as it had been since she had swum, she was at once at home in the water. It was strange she should want to swim today, for it was something she had always done with Gadi or, when she was much younger, with Malkah, who had not been at all reluctant to slip out to the bay, in an era when it had not been as dangerous as it was now. The higher the water rose, the more hidden traps lay underneath, and organ pirates had multiplied. The sea had always been the great escape from school, from home, from tension.

“I’m programmed to watch for sharks. I have an image I can call up on my retina of a shark, but I see none.”

“This isn’t their preferred hunting grounds, but keep an eye out anyhow. There can be a first time.”

“Often people speak in tautologies, Shira, even yourself.” He straightened out in the water and began to cleave it with his strong arms, heading toward her. His perfect coordination had taken over. She realized he could probably swim across the ocean to Europa, steadily churning through storm and calm alike; except that he did require nourishment every day or two.
Perhaps he could convert sea water to energy, like the fusion plant whose stacks she could see sticking up on the next inlet. He slowed to her pace. “This is most interesting and novel to me, but I don’t understand how swimming relates to the great sense of distress you demonstrated in the lab.”

“I don’t know if I can explain.”

“Why don’t you wish Gadi to come?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of him? In what way? I can defend against any threat to you.”

“How am I going to explain this? What do I fear? Remembering. Gadi and I loved each other when we were children, but not what they call puppy love.”

“The love for domesticated animals is common—”

“I mean we loved as intensely as adults love, perhaps more so.” She had stopped swimming, and she found herself sinking as she spoke. She let herself go down and then arced toward the surface again. Yod seized her by the shoulder and hauled her up.

“I don’t need rescuing, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said blandly, swimming circles around her. “I don’t understand what you fear.”

“He ended it. I still remember the pain. I’m afraid it’s inside me, waiting to break out.”

“Doesn’t human memory have a tendency to fade, to lose intensity?”

“Yours doesn’t?”

“I can play back events, fast, slow, stopping at will.”

“I’d lie down and die if I had that ability.”

“I study every interaction between us. I learn about human behavior from this replay, and above all, I understand you better.”

“Every interaction?”

He nodded.

“Would you mind editing out my getting undressed?”

“Why?”

“Never mind.”

“That’s an expression I don’t understand. To return to Gadi, you fear the pain of remembering, but you remember anyhow.”

“I fear wanting him back when there is no back. No way to return to the place where we both knew love. Neither of us can love anyone, Yod. I know to you that must seem no more than as if I said I can’t fly, but it matters to me.”

“I understand, theoretically speaking, the value of love in
human intercourse. But you love Malkah. Obviously you love your son.”

“Love is an ambiguous word. We speak of loving roast turkey or swimming. I don’t mean that I can’t feel affection. But my capacity for bonding in passionate love with a man seems to have been burned out at age seventeen.”

“You see in Gadi this same problem. In the fifteen-year-old he is seeking you at fifteen, since this is not the first event of this nature.”

How did he know that? That was Malkah speaking, she knew it, that was Malkah’s analysis. She let herself sink for a moment, then bobbed up, angry. “Have you been discussing me with Malkah?”

“I haven’t seen Malkah since that day in your house.”

“You eel! You and Malkah chatter on the com-con nightly.” That was the internal communication of Tikva, used by its inhabitants, computer to computer, house to house, from the time they could talk. Could he actually lie?

“I’ve made you angry?” He cocked his head, marveling. “And this time I didn’t break or ruin anything.”

“You have a strong will to survive.”

He nodded. “It’s a primary part of my programming. As of yours.”

“Then do not, do not, do not discuss me behind my back with my grandmother, ever again.”

“What are you threatening me with?”

“My displeasure, Yod, nothing more. I have no power, over you or over anyone in the whole entire world.”

“But you do have power over me, the strength of my desire to please you. Gadi’s important to you because he came early into your life, as you’ve arrived early in mine. You don’t like to hurt anyone, so I’m not afraid of you as I’m afraid of Avram. When I discuss you with Malkah, it’s to learn.”