He, She and It (42 page)

“If I wanted a human mate, Yod, the town is full of men. I’m with you because I want to be with you. Some things work between us and others don’t—for what couple isn’t that the way? But does it ever bother you I’m so messy and biological, that I’m an animal? I bleed, I sweat, I get tired. Sometimes I feel embarrassed before you since you’re so much neater. Don’t I seem rather gross to you, always putting stuff in or letting it out?”

“My sense of smell is more analytical than sensual. I am not programmed to find some smells pleasant and others unpleasant. What bothers me is altogether different—that I failed you: I didn’t protect your mother.”

“I asked her not to come. She and Nili chose to. It isn’t your fault, and one cyborg can’t defend the entire town.”

“I think, however, I’m supposed to.”

A message came over the Net from Y-S, saying that her former boss, Dr. Yatsuko, regretted that pirates had attacked the previous meeting and hoped that she was in good health. He said that Y-S was interested in regaining her services with a promotion by one and one half grades that perhaps had been discussed in the aborted meeting. In the meantime she might be interested to know that her son was now with her ex-husband in the Y-S enclave in the Nebraska desert, where they had lived together.

She and Malkah asked for copy and studied the transmission intently, each with a page before her as they sat over coffee at the kitchen table.

“They have no record of the meeting. The wrap baffles sufficed to dampen their recorders as well as their sensing devices,” Malkah said.

“So they don’t know what happened. They may suspect the trouble started when I rejected the offer, but they don’t know. And they probably don’t know the size of the attacking party, since they had no survivors and the camera on the fast-tank was blown up.”

Malkah put her elbows on the table, frowning. When she frowned, Shira was reminded of Riva—although she would never know what Riva had really looked like. Malkah asked sternly, “Do you believe this stuff about Ari? That they’ve brought him back from the space platform with Josh?”

“As bait?”

“Bait or bribe. Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know. But I have an idea how to find out. I’ll send a message robot to Ari personally, to wish him Happy Birthday. His birthday is in twelve days. I’ll order one only for Nebraska Y-S station and return. If Ari isn’t there, it won’t deliver its message to anyone else or anywhere else but will simply return. If it doesn’t return, then I’ll know they destroyed it and they’re lying.”

“Let me pay for it. He’s my only great-grandchild.”

Imagining Ari only two thousand miles away instead of vanished from the planet made Shira restless. If only she could find out what they were planning to do with Ari, what great game they were playing with her son as sacrificial pawn. But she had never been a good chess player. Josh was a fine player. Sometimes before Ari was born, on interminable evenings when they ran out of small talk and small tasks, when neither had enough brought-home work for screening, then they had played chess or go or other games associated in her mind now with the feeling of hours and hours of time that must be passed through together. They could of course have escaped each other in a stimmie; that was what poor bastards in the Glop did; that and drug out. Log too much stimmie time, and a Y-S counselor would be asking you gently what was wrong. Like the continual blood and urine testing, it was a fact of corporate existence; too great a reliance on manufactured fantasies could reduce your edge, your efficiency. Every aspect of life was monitored in the enclaves.

“Ari feels more important to me now that Riva is dead,” Malkah said quietly. “I know that’s absurd, but it’s true.”

“Her life was the opposite of yours and of mine. Did she actually live anyplace?”

“She had what she called a hidey-hole on an island off Georgia; that’s all I know. Nili may know more, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Now that she’s dead, I find myself thinking of her far more than I ever did when she was alive. I find myself wondering about her—what her private life was really like.”

“I don’t think Riva had what you and I might think of as a private life. She had time off. Rest. But what mattered to her was the dangerous work she did. The rest was just … filling in.” Malkah sighed heavily.

“Why do you and I care so much about our attachments to others?”

Malkah rubbed her eyes. “I used to wonder what I did
wrong. But now I think that unless you grossly mistreat a child or spoil her or let her be injured, basically there’s a given element in all of us, something from genes or the moment. From birth on, a child follows her own path. She learns, but she also unfolds from within.”

“Ari was himself almost from the first. He had a personality. He had a special gentleness, unlike other boy babies the women around us had. He also had a fearfulness—a capacity to be startled—that worried me. I would wonder if I was too anxious and I was infecting him.”

“Show me a mother who isn’t anxious, and I’ll show you a happy idiot.”

“Malkah, did you really want another baby when you were forty-five? Didn’t you have some resentment at having a kid dropped on you?”

“No, Shira, I’ve told you the truth. You were her gift to me. Maybe if I was living with a man or stuck in a permanent relationship I might have hesitated. But I’d raised Riva, she was gone, and I felt a little at loose ends. I’d had enough time alone to think how much better a job I could do now I was so much smarter and kinder.” She laughed sharply.

“And you didn’t feel overburdened?”

“Sometimes, sure.” Malkah smiled. “But I think I was better at hiding it. And you were dessert in my life.”

“Do you think I’ll ever get Ari back?”

“I think you have to live as if you believe you will.”

The Commons had originally meant a square in the middle of town that had existed long before the wrap had enclosed them, dating back to the founding of the town in 1688, when it had been a cow pasture and later a drill ground for the local militia. The Commons often referred now to the town food facility, where people could eat or pick up takeout. The square itself had once been half paved, but when the wrap was constructed, it had been dug up except for strips for walking, cycling and delivery vans. It was half intensely cultivated gardens and the rest trees and grass. It was that half, facing the Commons building, that Gadi had taken over for a party.

The festival began at seven, but it took them a while to get organized. Even Yod was late coming to Malkah’s house, because for once he was accompanied by Avram. Avram had taken an hour to get ready, muttering complaints the entire time, Yod told Shira softly. Nili sat in the courtyard, watching them all with avid curiosity. She was dressed as she always was
now, in her fatigues. She had dropped the role of nurse. She was just Malkah’s guest.

Yod sat beside Nili, watching too. As Shira dressed, she glanced down from the balcony to check on them below. Her bed was a hill of tossed fabric. Malkah was wearing a purple caftan trimmed with iridescent streamers. She and Avram were arguing about something that had happened forty-odd years before Avram had married Sara and left Tikva for California. Shira could easily hear their raised excited voices batting at each other from below. Yet she did not think either of them could be described as annoyed; in fact they were having fun. They fought for the pleasure of it—part ritual, part agon, part fencing match.

Everyone finally lined up and started bellowing at her. She was compelled to stop fussing and come down. “As far as I can see,” Nili said, “you looked better before you began.”

“What do you think?” Shira asked Yod.

He looked unhappy. “I can’t tell the difference. One set of clothing is like another to me. That doesn’t appear as comfortable.”

“You look beautiful,” Avram said, bowing to her. “Never mind the rest of them. An attractive woman is allowed to take her time so that she can please us when she does appear.”

Altogether she felt like an idiot. She was compelled to attempt to create a fine impression on Gadi; she could not help it. Her dress was one she had bought to celebrate when she had recovered her figure after pregnancy. It was cut close to the body and made of fishcloth—tiny glittering scales of changing color in the sea palette, looking metallic but actually silicon-enhanced silk. It had a demure high neck but two cutouts on the front so that half of each breast was exposed. The dress had been the proper modest midcalf length required at Y-S, but she had shortened it a couple of days before so that it stopped above the knee, in case she wanted to dance. Gadi had promised dancing.

They arrived at the Commons. From the outside of the viron only the generators were visible and an area of opacity stretching up to the wrap, with a marked entrance blinking. They passed through into a world of silver palms tinkling, glittering, dropping an occasional tinsel frond. The floor and the sky were black streaked with silver, lit with arcs of light that met at the horizon. In the sky, silver snakes and angelfish swam, releasing glowing bubbles. Under the floor, bright rainbow fish darted.
Every tenth tree was a speaker, pulsating waves of Afro-Indian rock.

The dance floor was a spiral that flung out platforms. It had been constructed, or rather put together of ready-mades, yesterday. Shira had passed on her way to supper when they were locking the segments together. Most people on the spiral were dancing to the Afro-Indian group, but several of the platforms were bubbles with different music; she could tell from the rhythm of the dancers.

Nili poked her in the arm. “What is the purpose of this?”

“It’s just a party. Don’t your people ever have parties?”

“We make music, we dance, we feast and drink our wine. We eat funny mushrooms that make us high. We act silly and tell bad jokes we think are uproarious. But this construction, this waste of energy, I find strange.”

Malkah asked, “Does it offend you, as conspicuous consumption?”

Nili scowled. “It’s so strange to me I mistrust my own reactions. In a way it’s sweet, all this effort spent on having a good time.”

“Is that what we’re supposed to do?” Yod asked. He nodded at the dancers gyrating on the seven levels of the spiral. “Like that?”

“It’s all silliness,” Avram said. “In our youth we didn’t need to immerse ourselves in fantasies to enjoy life.”

“Oh, come on, Avram. I remember you and me going to Green Ziggy’s concert at Foxboro Stadium—do you remember, before it fell down? Sixty thousand screaming fans, a sound system loud enough to deafen us all for a week, a galaxy-class light show. Flying tigers, demon wrestlers, a dragon. The lead singer shot up in a rocket. Remember?”

“The summer we were both nineteen.” He sighed. “You were so beautiful then.”

“I’m just as beautiful now.” Malkah stuck out her tongue at him. “It’s your eyes and your appetite that are failing, not my beauty.”

Shira was looking cautiously around for Gadi. Yod stayed at her side. She asked, “You really don’t think this dress is attractive? Just a little sexy?”

“Shira, I don’t understand the concept.”

“Yod, you must understand attraction, since you’re attracted to me.”

“But not because you look any particular way.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t have any standard by which to judge human appearance. I wasn’t programmed for that. I like the way you look, but then I like the way Malkah looks too. I find most people interesting to watch.”

She drew back, offended. She was astonished that her feelings could be hurt by what he had said, and yet at the same time, she recognized a bright side to his ignorance. He thought Malkah equally attractive. Never would she have to worry about her appearance, because he seemed incapable of distinguishing her best days from her worst, any more than the kittens would ever judge her by her facade. So often she found that with Yod, when she moved into her usual behavior with men, she was playing by herself. Whole sets of male-female behavior simply did not apply. They would never struggle about clothing, what he found sexy, what she found degrading to wear or not to wear, whether she was too fat or too thin, whether she should wear her hair one way or another. Small pleasures, small anxieties, sources of friction and seduction, all were equally stripped out of the picture.

“But you look at me a lot when we’re together. Why?”

“I like to look at you. From small changes in posture and gesture and expression, I try to read your feelings and your reactions. I find it … pleasant to look at you because you are Shira,
my
Shira. I’ve been pondering what that phrase means and how it can apply to a cyborg. What someone who doesn’t possess himself can do with a sense of me and mine.”

She was touched by what he said, about to answer, when Gadi stepped out of a huge tree trunk. “Ah, there you people are. About time. Why aren’t you dancing?” He put his arm possessively about Shira, touching her bare back, tracing the line of her spine.

“It’s beautiful,” Shira said. “It’s amazing what you did here.”

“Isn’t it, with only two decent generators and one from the Dark Ages. It’s thrown together, but I must say myself, it’s thrown together nicely. I wanted to give everyone a lift.” His hand dropped briefly on Yod’s shoulder. “My battery-pack brother, welcome. And I can’t believe it: Aveinu, welcome indeed.” Gadi made as if to touch his father but did not. Shira could not remember them ever embracing. “I can’t believe you agreed to visit my wee installation. I hope you’ll condescend to let it amuse you a little.”

Avram looked uncomfortable. “I was curious, I’ll admit. I wanted to see what you do.”

“I make butterflies—pretty ephemeral things that make people happy. There’s too little pleasant in this nasty dying world. We all need to remember how to play, how to be children together for a little while.”

“Being entertained is not the same as being happy,” Nili said.

“Hello, lioness. I could have lent you a gown for tonight. Not that you don’t look gorgeous anyhow.”

“Why should I care whether others look at me? The pleasure is in the looking, no?”