He, She and It (23 page)

“Would I look better to you if I wore stones around my neck?”

“Men sometimes wear pendants—a single stone. It depends on the place.”

“It depends on the neck, to be precise.” He smiled. Perhaps he was making a joke. A weak pun. “Body covering has symbolic and aesthetic values that elude me. Clearly this climate in June is warm enough so that there’s no real use to clothing.”

“As an adult, when you strip, you make yourself vulnerable. Nakedness has a symbolic side also.”

Yod was silent for the next two blocks. That was unusual enough for her to take his arm and ask, “Yod, what’s wrong?”

“I’m trying to overcome a desire to attack Gadi as soon as I see him.”

“Yod, if you’re thinking of attacking him, you go straight home.”

“I’m in control. I promise I am in control.”

“Why do you want to attack him?”

“Both you and Avram perceive him as a threat.”

“Not a threat like pirates or organ scavengers, who kill people. Just a source of discomfort.” She held on to Yod’s arm. “If you think you may attack, you must go home.”

“I won’t attack. I will be still. Keep holding on to me.”

“I can’t do that in the room, when we go in. Why do you want me to?”

“It helps me to keep control. Half of me wants to demolish him. Half of me is curious and wants to know him.”

“Yod, could you be jealous of Gadi? Is that possible?”

“I don’t know what jealousy is, precisely, as applied to myself.
It’s true, he’s the biological son. I’m a weapon, a tool, but also designed to perform well at activities Gadi failed.”

“Then he should be jealous of you.”

“Why? I’m not even human. Half the time you don’t think I’m real, not fully real, not as real as Gadi.”

“Is anyone as real to me as Gadi? Only my son.”

Gadi’s room was in the recovery wing of the hospital, rooms that opened on an external corridor, rooms with trees in buckets and window boxes full of flowers. In his window box verbena grew. She had to pull her gaze away from the bright heads of flowers and make herself meet Gadi’s cool stare. His room was full of toys, presents, objets d’art, fresh bouquets.

He was sitting up in bed, wearing purple into mauve translucent silk pajamas, with an amethyst band about his head, enhanced jewels, small but very reflective. He also wore one long amethyst earring and a large amethyst square-cut on his left-hand wedding ring finger. “Gadi, are you engaged?” she asked, pointing at the ring.

“To myself. ‘Above all else to thine own self be true.’ Isn’t that the quote? Who’s this?” He drew himself up in bed. She could tell he was not pleased. His gaze ran pointedly up and down Yod, who stood as close to her as he could get without actually squatting on her head.

“This is Yod Oblensky, Avram’s cousin.” Oh, shit, she thought, Gadi is going to know Avram doesn’t have a cousin Yod. “His second cousin. He’s working for Avram too, as you know I am now.”

“One happy lab rat family,” Gadi intoned, extending his hand.

“Gently,” she muttered to Yod as he pounced on Gadi’s hand.

“Yod Oblensky? I don’t remember.… Family is one of those tedious subjects I have never bothered to keep up with. I suppose then we’re second cousins once removed, whatever that means, although removing relatives does appear attractive.” Gadi motioned Shira toward the bed. “Sit here.”

Yod promptly sat on the bed between Shira and Gadi. “Thank you.”

Shira had an abrupt desire to giggle. Gadi looked astounded. Yod was heavier than a person of his size would be, and the bed sagged alarmingly. Shira sat in the only chair. “How are you feeling?”

“How do you suppose I’m feeling? They had to replace a kidney. My poor body has been extensively processed by various
machines, what else? I can’t wait to get out. Boring! I must figure out what to do with myself for the next three to six months, until I’m redeemed, resurrected and can ascend again to the heights of stimmieland.”

“Perhaps you could be knocked out till your time is up,” Shira said. “That would eliminate the boredom.”

“Don’t be nasty. I’m delighted you’re here. That puts a whole different cast on events. We can amuse each other.”

“Perhaps so,” Yod said. He intentionally moved into the line of sight between them. “What do you think you’ll do?”

“I haven’t been conscious long enough to slap plans together. I’ll improvise and play with Shira. Annoy my father. See old friends. Maybe teach some bright local kids about stimmies, run a sort of school in the streets. Graduation prize being a chance back in Veecee Beecee. Maybe I’ll make Shira the heroine of a fabulous adventure among the Green Fang People.”

A suspicion took her, a cold sinking suspicion, that Gadi was assuming they would become reinvolved. He might well think that way: she was available, convenient, with the intervening years giving her a patina of novelty. It was hopeless. It could not work. It would be fatal. She would love him again, and he would not love her. It was a pit.

“Hannah is here,” Yod said. “Perhaps you can play with her.”

How did Yod know about Hannah and Gadi? Certainly Avram never told him. It had to be Malkah, conspiring with him again. How could she keep her grandmother from gossiping with her cyborg? Or had Hannah herself told him? “Yod, you’re a terrible gossip. You love to collect old scandal.”

“Everything about Shira interests me,” Yod said blandly to Gadi.

“I can see that,” Gadi said. Shira strained back in the chair so that she could catch a glimpse of Gadi around Yod. Gadi looked annoyed, his eyes slitted. Then he produced a broad smile. “Last time I was here I tried to go swimming at the white beach where we used to so many times, but it’s drowned now. It’s just an offshore island. And the fisherman’s house where he used to stack his lobster pots to dry—remember he gave us a bag of lobsters once and we carried them home?”

“I’d forgotten.” For a moment she warmed to him, remembering the pot Malkah had set to boil, the feast under the peach tree. “Who did you try to go swimming with?”

“I was thinking of you the whole time.…”

Two guys they had gone to school with ten years before
arrived with three teenagers, all breathless about meeting the designer of Mala Tuni’s last seven stims, the designer who had created Devora, Land of Endless Desire. Shira took the opportunity to slip out, tugging Yod along. He came semireluctantly. She could tell he was curious about the group and still eager to try to confront Gadi. When they were on the street, she felt herself sagging with relief. “I can’t believe I got through that.”

“With one blow I could smash his skull.”

“Stop that. Do you want me to be afraid of you?”

“I exist to protect you. I would never let harm come to you. Never.”

“No one can keep anyone else from all harm, Yod. I could be harboring a disease at this moment. I could be struck by a piece of a falling satellite. But you did make it easier for me to see him.”

“He wants you. He wants to have you back.”

“I doubt it,” she said lightly, walking more quickly.

“Don’t doubt it. He wants you.”

“How would you know that?”

“I recognize it. It is the same as me.”

“What?” But she had heard him, and she kept walking numbly, more slowly. “That can’t be.”

“It is. The wanting is the same.”

How did I let this happen? she wondered. How
can
it happen? This is nonsense. This is absurd. I am not hearing what I think I am hearing. This walking computer cannot want to perforate me. “Yod, you’re a very intelligent and able machine, but you’re a machine. What does it mean to want a person?”

“I want to do with you exactly what he wants to. But I can do it better. I promise. I’m stronger than Gadi, more intelligent, more able in every way. I want to please you far more than he ever could.”

This was a facsimile talking, a machine like a beverage dispenser, and it was spouting nonsense. Fused circuits? Overload? Malfunction? She did not want to confront Avram, but she would surely bring up this malfunction with Malkah. “Avram hired me to teach you social interactions. That doesn’t include sexual initiation, frankly.”

“I don’t require initiation.”

“You’re telling me you’ve been with women sexually?”

“Only one. So far.”

Had Hannah got to him so quickly? It would not astonish Shira. But then could Hannah be so stupid as to fail to observe he was not human? None of that speculation got her off the
large hook on which she was dangling. However absurd she found being propositioned by a computer, she had to let him down gently as if he were a human male. “Yod, I don’t want to become involved with anyone. I’ve told you I can’t respond. I’m a kind of cripple. And it would be extremely inappropriate. I don’t believe in complicating the teacher-student relationship, which ought to remain disinterested.”

“I am not disinterested. It’s an obvious equation. As Gadi is to you, so you are to me.”

“If you can see how miserable my early fix on Gadi made me, can’t you abort what is obviously a losing pattern?”

“If you’re with me, you’ll feel protected from him.” They were walking along the street just outside the old hotel. In the shadow of a large maple that filtered the light from the antique streetlamps, Yod stepped in front of her. He bent forward and laid his hand gently along her cheek, fingers spread. Lightly, barely perceptibly, his fingers explored from cheekbone to chin.

Unbelievably, she felt a stir of response in herself. She stepped back, jerking away. “No, Yod. No. Can I trust you to listen to me?”

“You can always trust me.” He dropped his hand and retreated a step, clasping his hands behind his back. “I obey.” He went up the steps to the door. He took hold of the doorknob and then, with a twitch, crushed it. Slowly he entered, stopping to glance back at her where she stood under the maple. She hoped he would not entirely demolish Gimel in their martial arts routine that night.

SIXTEEN

Little Girl Lost

Summer has landed; the heat is enervating. However, in Prague in 1600 it is April, season of buds unfurling and small persistent rains. The rain is pattering on the gray stone and the mustard and terra-cotta stucco, on the red tiles of the roofs, on the gray waters of the Vltava, on the hills and the winding alleys that climb them, streets that are steps worn by centuries of feet. The castle on its cliffs hangs like a mirage at the top of random
ways. Old lindens bend over courtyards where four hundred years later I drank wine and ate traif, at inns marked by the signs that name them in the time of Rabbi Loew: a hunter and an elk, three swans, a bear dancing, two camels. Twilight and love affairs seem about to stretch on forever. I was younger than Shira is. No one born now will experience the world of gentle air we could walk through on impulse, without protection, winds and rain that caressed our skin, deep thick woods, grass like green hair growing thick from the moist earth. We were killing the world, but it was not yet dead. The world of my youth was still the earth of 1600, when the Maharal penned up in the ghetto seldom sees trees, either, but paces in his worrying and prays.

Now Passover approaches, time for anti-Semites to crank up the favorite fable of the time, the blood libel. (Lest we imagine, dear Yod, that this is a quaint medieval superstition, let me remark that in 1899 a Czech Jewish shoemaker was brought to trial on charges of ritual murder in which it was claimed the whole Jewish community of a village was involved. He was promptly convicted in the press and then in court and only saved from death by Tomáš Masaryk, later founder of the Czech republic.) Every night the Golem stalks the streets in feverish quest for troublemakers. Saturday of the week before Pesach, he catches two toughs carrying between them a burden wrapped in old carpeting. He lays one out with a blow, crushes the other under his foot while he unwraps the carpeting to expose the bruised body of a young boy whose head has been bashed in. He ties the two toughs to the body and carries them to the watch. Maybe they were just getting rid of the body and the ghetto seemed a likely place; maybe they were going to plant it to be discovered as proof of Jewish ritual murder.

In gentile Prague a story begins to circulate that shortly becomes a festering scandal: a maidservant from the household of a prominent knight has disappeared, vanished on the day she was sent to redeem a pledge from a Jewish moneylender. Maria is a sixteen-year-old who shines in all the reports ever more virginal and pure, more pious and more beautiful. Maria has disappeared, and the rumor circulates like a growing bad smell that the Jews have kidnapped and murdered her, for the Christian blood to make matzoh.

“Search,” the Maharal tells the Golem. “I don’t doubt she’s been murdered. Find the corpse. I’m sure it is already secreted in the ghetto or about to be. They’re going to plant her body on us, I know it.”

Down the darkest back alleys, into cellars, old excavations, tunnels, buildings that have fallen in, the Golem roams, daytime and night, searching for the body of a girl he has never met. Maria has been briefly described to him: braided brown hair, blue eyes, wearing a red coarsely spun overskirt, a brown smock. Around her neck hung a necklace made of a single gold coin strung on a ribbon, and a second ribbon with a wooden cross on it. She is of medium height, with a scar on the back of her left hand. She was born to a family of servants who worked for the knight on his country estate. She had found favor and been brought to the city to work as a housemaid.