He, She and It (38 page)

“What can we do?” she muttered to Yod.

The four—two apes, two assassins, she would guess—lumbered along, with the two Y-S execs within the square they formed. However, when they reached the wrap flap, they had to enter single file. One of the whip-lean assassins entered first, glanced around with his bright blue eyes like shiny metal. Then the exec who’d spoken; then what she realized from the lack of cosmetic shaping was probably a high-level techie, crammed into a backless suit and oozing out. Then two apes, security men the size of bears. Then another assassin, a woman whose topknot brushed the ceiling, a being of extremely long limbs, entered fiddling frantically with a necklace probably as menacing as Shira’s. “The sensors aren’t functioning. We’re blind,” she announced. “I recommend withdrawal.”

“Our sensors aren’t functioning either,” Shira said. “This is blackout for both sides. We’ll have to talk like normal people and make guesses. You called for this meet. What do you want?”

“Y-S misses you, Shira.”

“Who are you two?” The assassins and apes would never be introduced, of course. Then she realized who the techie was. “I recognize Dr. Rhodes.” One of their top cybernetics men. Her tension screwed another turn higher around the peg of her spine. He did not meet her gaze. He was looking only at Yod.

The blond man spoke. “I’m Tenori Bell of the personnel department. Delighted to see you, Shira. Y-S wants you back.”

“Y-S took my son, gave him to my husband and shipped both of them to Pacifica Platform.”

“We’re prepared to offer you immediate posting to Pacifica.”

Her heart stumbled. For a moment she thought she would cry. Then her gaze came to rest on the two assassins, like traps about to spring shut, and on Dr. Rhodes, whose stare never wavered from Yod. “After debriefing, of course.”

“Oh, purely formal.”

A little bout of mnemosine, and they would unspool from her brain everything about Tikva defenses and Yod’s specs that
they desired to know, leaving her only half there. “Same rating, same scale?”

“We’re prepared to raise you one and a half ratings, with equivalent scale.”

That translated into some travel privileges, access to the newest fertility techniques, a higher ed track for Ari, better housing—although on Pacifica that meant only a bigger cube. If she ever saw Pacifica. How could she trade Malkah, whom these people had tried to kill, and Yod and Tikva for a nail paring’s chance to share her son with Josh? Could she believe them? “I must consider this generous offer carefully. When do you need my answer?”

“In the next five minutes,” Tenori Bell said pleasantly.

“I can’t decide that quickly. This is important to me.”

“In four minutes fifty seconds, the offer will be withdrawn. I urge you to act, while you can. Think of your son, lonely for his mother. The sooner you decide to return with us, Shira, the faster we can get the process underway to rush you to Pacifica.”

It was what she had dreamed of, that she would be given a chance for her son, but she could not accept. Dr. Rhodes kept edging closer to Yod, who stood at parade rest behind her, quite conscious, she was sure, of the military message of his posture. He watched the apes and the assassins but also kept track of Dr. Rhodes and Tenori Bell. Yod was a diver poised on the board over a pool, awaiting the right moment to execute a perfect back flip in. He longed for the fight with a single-minded yearning she could feel like a vibration. The talking bored him. He anticipated his time of action. Still, she trusted him, that he would do nothing to provoke what he wished to happen.

“A small facility such as Tikva cannot begin to compete with what Y-S can offer you. If you don’t wish posting to Pacifica, I am authorized to transfer both your ex-husband and your son back to the Nebraska enclave effective August one. We can’t offer the bonus satellite work provides, but that rise in your status by one and one half grades stands.”

“That’s very generous. But I need time. I have to talk to my family.”

“You have a very interesting family, Shira. Unfortunately we must have your decision in two minutes thirty-five seconds.”

The constant referral to her by her first name was calculated, just the way medical facilities behaved. Reduce her to childhood. False intimacy drains power. Her time readout wasn’t
working in the damping cushion of the sensor-killer. She wondered how many of Yod’s functions were impaired.

“I have recently learned the profession my mother followed and why this may have affected my treatment by your personnel office.”

“ ‘Followed’? As far as we’re aware, no change has occurred. Do you know otherwise?”

“I know little about Riva Shipman. I haven’t seen her in eight years. I assume she’s dead.”

“Your time is up. What is your answer?”

“I told you, I cannot accept without speaking to my grandmother.”

“Either you will agree to come with us, or you will come with us anyhow. It’s very simple.” Tenori nodded to his security.

Before Tenori made that quick gesture, Yod was already moving. The first ape lay on the floor with his head twisted backward. His neck had been broken before anyone else moved. Dr. Rhodes backed to the flap and unsealed it. He called to the guards outside. The woman assassin was advancing on Shira, while the remaining ape and the male assassin went for Yod. Dr. Rhodes was still calling. From outside came the whine of laser weapons firing. Shira cringed, expecting the tent to melt around her.

The woman launched herself on Shira, seizing her by the right hand. Shira drew the resin knife left-handed, but the woman’s long leg, like the limb of a steel spider, darted out and kicked her wrist. She could feel the bone snap, and the knife went flying, right through the wall of the wrap. She tried to fumble for her necklace, but the woman was on her. She crashed to the earth. As her broken wrist bent, she blacked out. She came to as the weight of the woman lifted off her and the assassin arched backward unnaturally, bending until her spine snapped and Yod dropped her. He had a great rent in his side, exposing his biochips, through which colorless fluid leaked copiously, but the second ape lay mangled over the body of Tenori Bell.

Outside, someone screamed. She could smell cooked flesh and burning plastic. She dragged herself up, pulling with her functional hand on the pole and starting for the open flap. She had to see what was happening outside. Behind her Yod and the assassin were tangling. The assassin was flung back but twisted in the air and righted himself. Shira slipped past them. She saw Riva hit the ground outside, still firing, and then her mother vanished in a burst of fire from the fast tank.

Shira cried out, turning back. The surviving assassin came at Yod with a razor gun, a palm-sized weapon that projected a wire. Yod plucked it from the air, although it slashed his palm deeply. He did not bleed but leaked more fluids, and his circuitry lay bare. It was oddly mesmerizing. She heard laser fire behind her, and someone screamed. An explosion shook the earth, knocking her to her knees. She crawled out of the way of the struggle, grasping her broken wrist and looking for some weapon to use. Acrid smoke wafted in. Nili appeared at the door. She was covered with a dull brown paint that had scraped off in several places. Sighting with a laser pistol as if carelessly, she shot the assassin in the center of his back.

“Out of here now. Put this on.” Nili held out a sec skin.

“I can’t use my wrist.”

Yod helped Shira into the skin. He asked Nili, “Did you dispatch the two outside guards?”

“Sure. We garroted them. But the driver saw us when we came round to join in.” Nili was leading the way at a brisk trot. Shira was in great pain. She kept feeling as if she were going to faint. She realized she was bleeding from a cut in her thigh she had not felt. “Riva is dead,” Nili added. “The driver got her before I got him.”

Shira glanced around for Riva’s body, but the fast tank had created a huge smoking hole when it exploded. “Shouldn’t we use the float car?”

“They’ll shoot it down. I have an air bike in the bush. We had it delivered last night, and we camouflaged it before dawn. Faster.”

Yod picked up Shira and carried her. One of his hands was out of commission. He was still leaking and only partially functional. He traveled in a fast shuffling trot after Nili, the only one of them uninjured. They labored up a hill and down the other side, where Nili pulled off a layer of dirt over a thin covering. Under it was a two-wheeled device on gel treads. “Get on. Move. We’re being followed already.”

Yod placed Shira on the riding column and mounted behind her, holding her around the waist against him. She felt herself slipping into darkness, tried to shake herself loose and then went under. The wild rocking of the bike shook her back into consciousness. Nili was driving full tilt, and it bucked and tossed. Her brown paint continued to flake in the fierce wind of their speed. “What’s that paint?” Yod asked. “What’s its function?” Although he was wounded and Shira assumed he felt pain, his voice had little inflection.

“It prevents registering on sensors. It makes you invisible to surveillance devices—except the naked eye. I’m surprised you can’t tell.”

Yod took up a fleck of the paint with his functional hand and slid it into a pocket. All that while he held Shira with his injured hand, although it would not close. “Half my sensors are dysfunctional. I am failing.”

“Can Avram repair you?” Shira asked nervously.

“I believe so, probably with Gimel’s help. The only emergency is replacing my fluids quickly. My level of fluid is too low for me to continue to function. I am already experiencing shutdown of several systems.”

A bolt of laser fire struck near them, close enough for her to feel the scorch on her face and be blinded momentarily. “I’m taking your pistol,” Yod said calmly to Nili and then swung around in his seat and fired behind them. She heard something crash.

Shira fumbled at her com link. “Tikva, we’re coming in, emergency. Shira, Yod, Dalia’s nurse. Stand ready to admit us at once.”

“Cover yourself up, robot,” Nili said over her shoulder. “Your parts are leaking. Hide your hand and your body unless you mean to announce your nature through the streets.”

Yod nodded. He did not seem able to speak. He sat unnaturally rigid behind Shira, and now she had to hold on with her good hand. Fortunately they were approaching Tikva wrap. She thought for a moment they would collide, but Nili brought them up just at the gate with a great screech. With Nili’s help, Shira yanked off the sec skin and pulled it over Yod just as two guards charged out to see what was wrong. More supporting Yod than supported by him, she stumbled inside. Her stranger mother was dead; the hope for getting Ari back was just as dead. They had suspicions about Yod. She was an official enemy. Riva had been killed for nothing.

The medics came running, shouting, “Casualties?”

“Only me,” Shira said. To Nili she said, “Get him to Avram at once!”

The medics took her off in a glide chair. She felt helpless and guilty. She wept from shock and from an enormous unfocused sense of loss.

TWENTY-SIX

I Never Knew Her

“How could they know about Yod? They were simply keeping an eye on him because he was the security,” Avram asserted, as if speaking louder than usual could make his words more powerful, more convincing—to himself or me? Shira wondered. Her wrist was in a light cast, after a set of injections of fast-mend, but she found herself still in a state of aftershock. Avram insisted she help him repair Yod, who lay barely conscious, connected to a unit that kept his brain functional while they worked on him. “Edinburgh is famous for insisting every computer student learn hardware and software. You had the equivalent of what would have been an engineering degree. It’ll come back to you. It’s only your left wrist, and you can still use your fingers.”

She was awkward, for no matter how light the cast, it was still a cast, and her wrist had been shot full of nerve-number, but Avram was right: her training came back to her fingers. They were replacing damaged chips, seared and slashed connections, dead biochips, reinfusing the lubricant and nutrient fluids that had bled, while Nili paced or glumly watched. Avram found it difficult to stand that long, and preferred monitoring Shira from a stool. She asked, “So what was Dr. Rhodes doing there at all? He wasn’t my boss. Yod was his focus.”

Yod’s eyes opened. He tried to speak but could not yet. Avram said, “That’s pure speculation.”

“They were expecting something,” Shira said adamantly. “Dr. Rhodes wasn’t there to embrace me back into the bosom of Y-S.” She wished Malkah were present, to bring her intelligence to bear on the confusion; but Malkah was making preparations for Riva’s memorial service at sunset. Nili had returned in the night to search for Riva’s body, but the charred remains had been carried off already, probably by Y-S for attempted identification. She had found only a burned fragment, probably a foot, and fused plugs, which she had brought back for burial. Malkah was disturbed by the lack of a body. It was as if she could not mourn properly, could not focus her sense of loss.