He, She and It (29 page)

Why did I stop it? A fatigue with the flesh. It was a lovely way to end my sex life, for I found that not only were the physical demands and the drain on my energy considerable, but I simply did not want to put that much into a relationship with any lover, not even a cyborg programmed by me myself to satisfy. In many ways Yod was dear and even relaxing, without all the neuroses and complications of any human male; but he is still quite demanding in his own way, and my solitude and my energy are precious to me.

I did not know I was ready to relinquish that part of my life, for I had always believed that as long as I lived, I would be interested in love; in making love. My identity was fused with the notion of conquest, perhaps. From the time I was a young girl, all through womanhood, I was never beautiful; I was considered so by many men, never by any woman. It was a fleshy, sensual, highly charged sexuality I emitted, a focused desire full of ripples and zing. It worked. It was honest.

Further, I always thought that my creativity was linked, somewhere at that point where the spine blooms into the strange cauliflower of the brain, to my sexuality, so that they fed and stoked each other. Yet since I passed sixty, I have been twice as creative, longer-sighted, more daring, building on a grand scale more dazzling webs.

Yod offered his friendship, his attention, his pure scalding luminous desire, almost too bright to endure, his unpracticed bountiful tenderness, his endless desire to please, and I received all those gifts as I had already given him my own presents, now deeply embedded in his being. I came to realize there is a time when one lets go. That dying has already slowly begun, at this time when, until the attack, I have never been as creative and as strong in my work. I saw myself as a tree giving all its energy into its fruiting. Now I am cut down.

Shira is troubled about me, and I strive to respond, but I feel as if all my nerve endings are charred. How shall I tell stories, when I cannot find myself? I have no center. I am a devastation. I am afraid, all through my mind and body, my imagination tainted and permeated by fear. Despair. Stasis. Myself broken in my bed. We have come full circle and stop.

I must break out of this loop of despair. The only direction is in and down. The descent to the chariot, the early Jewish mystics called it. I will begin with breathing exercises, I will begin with my old meditation sequences, the chants that I used to center myself that year of passion just before Riva brought me the baby Shira. Mohatela the Lion had coaxed me to Johannesburg when he was attempting to undermine the multis of the world with gold and diamonds, to shake loose the grasp of Europe and Asia on Africa, and I was designing systems for him and in love with him and his vision. I spent a year and a half away from Tikva, till the Lion was cut down before me, assassinated as he spoke to the world—in my nostrils, singeing my sinuses and my throat, the smoke of his flesh as they burned him down. I came home scarcely remembering who I had been. My world felt empty of purpose. Then I gathered the fragments of myself, then I found within me a fire and a discipline that could weld them back together. That winter Riva arrived with a month-old girl. “Here, this is for you.”

After all these years, I can still hear his voice if I permit it. How often the powers that rule cut down the best, pay for their murder and return their energy to dust, and then later comes another, more fanatical, more violent, one who does it all with power and without beauty. There are losses so great that personal
mourning feels almost beside the point, and you simply keep it to yourself and try not even to remember. Others to whom he belonged carried out the public mourning and the public remembering. The Lion is history, and that we loved each other in quiet hours and that once he cried in my arms can matter little to anyone but me. That is a story in which I do not even belong, the story of his people’s freedom.

Before Riva arrived with Shira, I saved myself from despair. Now perhaps I will chase the most beautiful chimera of all through all the spinning worlds of the mind until the blinding atmosphere of the self thins out. Then at that level of consummate darkness and utter cold, will I find that burning light I have once or twice glimpsed? Beyond appetite and affection and desire, beyond opinion and belief and commitment, the conscious point of emanation. That is the adventure left to what is left of me.

TWENTY

Base and Treble

Shira struggled upward through heavy water. “Shira, I am very sorry to wake you, for my sensors report you as sleeping.” The house was speaking sotto voce, an apologetic cast to the warm female voice. “The mechanism you call Yod is urgently requesting you access the Base. It insists that this message is important.”

She summoned time: 12:45:03. “Thank you. I’ll plug in.” Could it be a trick? Who would want to execute her? No, it must be Yod. Could he somehow be stuck in the Base, unable to retreat after such long immersion? Putting on her robe, she looked hesitantly into the courtyard. The light was out in Malkah’s room. Perhaps her grandmother had finally fallen asleep. Shira would not bother her. Shira shut the door and sat down at her own terminal.

She plugged in with a sense of queasiness, the slime of unacknowledged fear. There was no way to contact someone immersed in the Base except to enter in full projection—fully vulnerable to attack. She moved quickly through the access
modes, seeing in her mind the familiar landscape of Tikva entrance. The conventional imagery the Base used was a room with many doors, labeled with the names of sub-bases. She walked straight through to the central double doors and flung them wide. She was entering the heart of Tikva, the working base where they created their products. The imagery here was of herself as hovering outside the three-dimensional sketch of a building, its plan which she could fly over, alongside, into, which she could examine floor by floor. As she moved toward the area in which Malkah was building her chimera, she expected to move into Malkah’s imagery. Instead she found herself on a broad field. Coming toward her was a figure shuffling along. It was Frankenstein’s monster, in the form and makeup used by Boris Karloff in the flat film from the twentieth century.

“Yod?” she thought. Conversation was not exactly what happened in the Base. Rather here you thought words in a particular way: thinking forward, it was called, a loud, carefully formulated mental speaking that would be heard by the other you were addressing.

He was shuffling forward, and he raised in his hand a decapitated head, swung by the hair.

“Yod, don’t do this. Be yourself.”

“Is this better?” He was Gadi, still coming toward her but mincingly. He was a parody of Gadi, dressed in the translucent silk gown Gadi had worn in the hospital, swinging the head jauntily like a woman’s purse.

“Yourself, or I’ll leave.”

“Why? You like this better.”

“That’s not necessarily so. I want to see you.”

Now he was Gimel. “Is this how I am to you?”

She turned and walked back, away from him. She did not know if she could exit this part of the program without his help, but she was angry enough to try. Then he stood before her again, this time as himself.

“Better.” She stopped. “What’s that gory thing?”

“The raider.” He raised it. It stared at her out of its sightless eyes.

She gave a short cry. “Yod, I know him! That’s Barry Joyce. He’s Y-S.”

“I killed him. I burned his brain.” He tossed the head up, and it turned into a pigeon and beat away on short stubby wings. “I followed the other raider back through the Net until I had her just outside the Y-S facility and about to escape within.
Then I burned her too. They sent out security, and I demolished them. It was a lovely battle—just what I was created for.”

“Yod, they killed five programmers here. If you hadn’t intervened, they’d have killed Malkah.”

“You believe my actions were correct.” He held out his hand, and into it popped another head. “This is the other raider.”

Involuntarily Shira gasped, flinching. “I know her too. I went to school with her, Yod. Zee Levine. I haven’t seen her since we both went away to college, but I remember Malkah telling me she had gone to work for Y-S maybe two years ago. How could she do this to us? Turn on us?”

“There is no doubt. They were both razors—computer assassins.”

“She must have brought specs of the Base defenses with her to Y-S. Everything will have to be restructured.”

“Malkah and Avram will reconfigure. The whole Base collective will have to stop work on everything else. I can help also. Did you know Joyce well?”

“I’ve only seen official Y-S stimmies about the heroism of Barry Joyce. Zee wasn’t in Nebraska but at some other facility. Could you please get rid of that head? It makes me nauseous.”

“That was hostile of me, wasn’t it. Here.” He thought a rose around them, huge, so that they were standing inside an enormous flower the size of a bed, thick with petals. “A real rose would have scent, of course.”

“This is a beautiful viron, but tricky to stand in.” She lost her balance, and he caught her arms. She looked into his eyes, brown with green flecks like bits of jewel. She felt as if everything were tilting inside the great red rose. “Rosa Mundi,” she thought, and pushed herself forward against him. She felt desperate and giddy. She felt frightened. She could not think yet about what it meant that the enemy were not information pirates but rather the multi that had owned her and still owned her ex-husband and her son.

He let go of her arms and put his own around her, pulling her tightly body-to-body. The clothes thinned and then dissolved till they were standing together naked, although of course it was the thought of flesh, not flesh itself. The contact was purely mental. Their thoughts sounded in both their minds. It was strange and dizzying, as if the world had turned into the weirdest of stimmies.

She drew back and stared at him, asking with her mind, “Is this what you want? This joining in the Base?” Hoping that was enough.

“No, no,” he answered mind-to-mind. “This is only the image. I want the reality. Let me come to you where you are in your house, in your room.”

He let her go, and she was running rapidly back toward the double doors she saw before her, out into the hall. Then she was disengaged, sitting at the terminal. Her body thrummed as if she had just run physically. “House, Yod may come. If he does, admit him. Do not bother to announce him, and do not wake Malkah.”

She opened the door to look out. The moon had risen high enough to shine into the courtyard, a waxing moon past the half. She left the door open and climbed into her bed. She lay very still, crossing her hands on her chest. Through the thin cotton of her nightgown she could feel her heart racing. What she had just experienced was not possible in the Base. She had worked with many other programmers fully projected, and while they had apparent bodies, they were obviously a representation of reality. Typically objects in a base were highly abstracted: the idea of Malkah, the idea of a building, the idea of a flower, usually neatly labeled (sepals, anthers, ovary). Yod had the ability to manipulate imaginary computer objects with more authority than any human could muster.

He came so quietly she did not hear him until he was in the room. He stood by the window. “Shira?”

She felt closer to fright than to desire. Her heart was pounding, but in her mind was the idea that it was time to treat him as a person, fully, because he was nothing less; she knew, too, that she was choosing to try sex with him because when she was
with him, she did not think of Gadi. He seemed able to fill all available mental space. In the intervening years, only her child had done that, her lost child. She sat up in bed. “Come.”

He paused with his hand on the bedside table. “You wish it to stay dark?”

“Yes. Not because I find you ugly, but because I don’t want Malkah to wake and see the light. She often has insomnia.”

“Shira, why did you change your mind? Is it because I cleared the Base of danger? For Malkah?”

“Don’t ask silly questions. I’m doing it because I want to.”

He tore off his few garments, letting them fall, and slid between the sheets. She wondered exactly what one did with a cyborg. She had waded through gigabytes of material on his hardware, but she was still confused. Could one kiss a cyborg? Would not his mouth be dry as a can opener? It was not. His lips were soft on hers. His tongue was a little smoother than a human tongue but moist. Everything was smoother, more regular, more nearly perfect. The skin of his back was not like the skin of other men she had been with, for always there were abrasions, pimples, scars, irregularities. His skin was sleek as a woman’s but drier to the touch, without the pillow of subcutaneous fat that made it fun to hug Malkah, for instance.