He, She and It (43 page)

“Have you no vanity, Nili? I have tribes of it.”

“I have vanity,” she said. “About certain things I can do, I’m shockingly vain. So, silver man, do you dance?”

“Of course. Very well. Can you do these dances?”

“Any dances that anyone can do, I can do,” Nili said. “That’s my vanity speaking. There is no motion of which I am not physically capable.”

Gadi extended his arm in a courtly gesture. Nili stared as if wondering what he wanted her to do with it. Then she seized him by the wrist and yanked him swiftly, roughly toward the spiral.

“If you want to dance, I’m sure I can imitate those motions also,” Yod said softly to Shira. “Would you find that pleasant?”

She nodded vigorously. She caught a glimpse of Malkah attempting to lure Avram toward the dancers. Gadi and she had used to dance; in college the computer students had their own dance bar where they hung out in the old city. Since then, Josh had not been willing to loosen his dignity in dancing, nor had Y-S parties tended to encourage or even allow it. They were marts for affirming or improving social status, places where gossip could be created or exchanged. She had not danced since Edinburgh.

Yod had obviously been watching the dancers while the rest of them talked, because he had already selected a set of gestures and movements. Above them on the next turn of the spiral she could see Nili leaping high and at one point raising Gadi straight up over her head. They were a sensational pair as they more or less managed to coordinate their initiatives and dance in the same general manner. Gadi had always been a supple and energetic dancer. Nili danced like a demon. Precisely. Superhuman energy and strength, totally enraptured by her own movements and the music.

Yod began stiffly. Shira urged him to loosen up, exaggerate the gestures, move with the rhythm he could surely feel. He
attempted to obey her. “Human relaxations are frequently more effort than their work activities.”

“The harder we work physically, the more we want simply to collapse afterward. The harder we work mentally, the more we want to leap around, flexing the muscles and straightening the spine. Look. We can pass gestures and movements back and forth between us. Watch Danny with his lover, Roy. See how they play as they dance?”

“Nili and Gadi seem to have trouble communicating with each other, yet they seek each other out.”

“Attraction isn’t logical. It just happens.”

“All events are caused, Shira.”

“But the causes of attractions and repulsions can lie in something long buried in infancy or childhood, something we don’t even recognize as triggering a desire or a fear.”

“I had no infancy.” He was moving more easily now, with that totally efficient grace. “What I want is quite logical.”

How she loved watching him at moments like this, when his elegance of motion was displayed, almost exaggerated. To watch him was to want to envelop him. “Yod, your desire is no more logical than Gadi’s. It only feels so because we work together and we communicate well, although that isn’t entirely logical either. It’s a small miracle.” She considered it miraculous, too, that they could dance so well together, so seamlessly now it felt like a form of lovemaking. She watched him try out the moves of dancers around them, discard what felt awkward. “You may not have a sense of what’s beautiful in other people, but you have a sense of aesthetics about how you move.”

He was silent for some minutes, contemplating what she had said. “I understand elegance in algorithms, in motions, in equations, in systems design. That I can grasp.”

My hunger got horns and a tail
Goodbye hook, goodbye sleep
Gotta jack, gotta rock
Gonna fly my bat tonight.

Malkah must have given up on Avram, for she danced now with Gila and several other friends in a large circle down on the first level. “This is the old ladies’ level,” she heard Gila hoot at a young couple. “You go upstairs with the other wet ones.” Shira thought that perhaps before she had lived in the Y-S enclave, she had never appreciated Tikva as she did now, its tolerance of human variety, of age, size, sexual typology.

Nili had started to strip off her shirt—she was sweating and hot—and Gadi was arguing with her. Avram was nowhere to be seen. She assumed he had left, an observation she offered to Yod as they slithered and twisted together. “No,” Yod said. “He has climbed to the very top, and he is watching everyone, but especially Gadi and especially us.”

As if casually, she threw back her head and saw Avram, observing as Yod had said. She waved to him, and he turned away. He looked lost above the maelstrom of dancers. It was not age. Besides the group around Malkah, many older people were dancing. In some corporate enclaves, rigid age segregation was considered normal, but here people tended to mix. Without class distinctions, perhaps age did not seem as important.

Hannah cut in on them. When Shira looked around, Ilana, who had sat with Riva’s remains, was beckoning to her, and they danced together. Then Gadi appeared, as she had been half afraid he would and half afraid he would not. The entire party was a fantasy garment swirling around him as the centerpiece. His metallic eyelids caught the flashing lights. His eyes were gleaming mercury. He wore reflective black, slashed tunic and slit pants. Past him people were shooting the slides from the top, whipping out over the crowd on trapezes and double swings like crescent moons.

After the first dance, he touched his wrist, and slow music throbbed sinuously from the forest of speakers. He gathered her into his arms. The slither of the material against her with its dozens of slits through which she felt the warmth of his skin, the scent of his perfume loaded with pheromones rising to her nostrils, made her breath catch in her throat as if turned to fur. Her skin prickled. She longed to scratch herself nervously. She longed to take a deep breath but could not. “Does Nili respond to pheromones?” she asked.

For answer he drew her closer. The multiplied voices sang siren-like:

I take you in my mouth like sweet red wine.
I take you in me and you make me shine.

“Are you just a little jealous, Ugi? Greening around the edges?”

“I’m curious. She fascinates me as much as she fascinates you—although in a different way. I don’t find her attractive.”

“Perhaps she’s too challenging. With the walking vibrator, you’re safe.”

“You’re telling me that you wouldn’t rather have a woman with an Off switch? A mechanical geisha is the ideal woman, and we all know it. But Yod is real and quirky, and he wasn’t created as a sex toy.”

“No, that seems to have been your idea.”

“Wrong again. It was his.”

He took a deep breath, holding her out at arm’s length. “We’re doing it again. Forget the terminal man, and let’s enjoy each other’s company. How are you enduring working for my father?”

She glanced up at Avram, watching the two of them with cold intensity, as she had half expected. “Why can’t he enjoy himself?”

“I think he dealt with the pain of Mother’s slow dying by denying himself any respite except work. He got to the point where when she was finally dead, he had learned to enjoy abstention. He gets more fun out of refusing to overindulge, refusing sex, refusing pleasure, than us messy types get from wallowing in our passions. Literally, he looks down on us.” Gadi sighed. “Sometimes I almost admire him. If he wasn’t my father, maybe I could. But we’re so locked into our little duels and pin-sticking contests.”

“He said to me once he had given up a normal life for the cyborgs. As if he could only create life if he gave up loving and living.”

“Okay, so you can give up loving and living—but to give up sex?” Gadi laughed. “How many years has it been since we danced?”

“You made me dance with you once at our graduation, in front of everyone, where I couldn’t refuse. You were with Hannah.” She flinched at the sound of her own voice, the pain and anger suddenly trembling there.

“You came alone. Very touching. I knew at least three boys had asked you, so I assumed you’d done it to make me feel guilty.”

“I felt I’d be giving false encouragement, since I wasn’t interested in any of them. I thought you were cruel to ask me to dance.”

“Cruel? Ugi, I couldn’t stand not to touch you. I was free, and I hated it. I couldn’t bear for us to stay on different sides of the room all night.”

“I can remember that night so vividly. When I wept, the tears made little marks on my blue dress. I thought I’d never care for another man.”

He tilted her chin up. “Weren’t you right?”

“Gadi, we can crawl out of it. We can. It’s a myth we’ve both clung to, used to keep ourselves from the risk of being really hurt by anyone.”

“If you think that, you’ve forgotten what it was like.” His voice was no longer silkily mocking but serrated. “I can’t forget. I’ll never forget. I could take you back there, Shira.”

She could not look away from his silver eyes. “We’re not the same people, Gadi. There is no back.”

He held her closer and spoke into her ear. “I have friends, Shira. They made a spike for me. I use it when I need to. When I can’t live without it.”

“A spike?” Why was she suddenly afraid, as if someone had jammed a needle into her spine and were injecting a cold dangerous liquid? It was in her mouth to say that spikes were illegal, when she realized that in Gadi’s world, nothing was truly illegal. They manufactured and exported sensations for money. Nothing was out of bounds. Just sometimes, when their needs conflicted with other powerful subworlds, they might brush against taboos, laws, alien customs, and, like Gadi, be briefly punished. “What kind of a spike?”

“Us, Ugi. Us as we were.”

“How could it be?”

“You’re a computer simulation. But it doesn’t work, like all spikes, unless there’s a nervous system for it to inhabit. In stimmies, it’s the recorded sensations of the actor you experience. In spikes, it’s you yourself.”

She could not breathe. She could not stop staring at him. She could not break free. “Gadi, I don’t want to go back. That sounds like hell to me.”

“You’ve made yourself forget, Shira. Out of fear. Out of pain. But me, I’ve never forgotten. Once we had what everyone wants. I can take you back to the only time the two of us were really alive.”

He could not have offered anything that would have frightened her more: the fragile webs of her life slashed through; herself transfixed with love and pain, caught in the past like a bubble in blown glass. No, she thought, No!

TWENTY-NINE

How Much Would You Mind?

“We have no choice,” Avram said. “We must penetrate them. We must read their plans and find out what they want and how they mean to get it. The Council has given us a mandate to proceed.”

Shira was sitting beside Yod on the far lab table. “Will something that sensitive be in their system?”

Malkah snorted. “Nobody can think anymore without AI. It’s like asking someone to walk to California or cross the Atlantic on a raft. Everything is on a system. Just as nobody could do arithmetic anymore without a calculator after they were introduced, who can think with just their own brain?”

“You want me to attempt to enter the Y-S Base, locate information on their war plans and aims.” Yod’s demeanor was mild. He had become so accustomed to being with people, he no longer jumped at every gesture or prowled nervously. His voice was as neutral as if he had asked if he should open the door.

“You’ll need help,” Malkah said. “Their chimeras will be extremely sophisticated. You need me to get in.”

“You’re not afraid?” Avram asked her. “They almost killed you once.”

“I’m afraid. What else is new?”

“You’ll also need me,” Shira said. “I’m the only one familiar with the Y-S system. From working on interface problems all over the system, I have a clear idea of the structure.” While she was in the Y-S system, she hoped to find out what part Ari played in their schemes. Moreover, she could not bear waiting outside again while the two of them sat there dumb and blind and she wondered helplessly if they were still alive or already burned out.

“Once we’ve penetrated the system, shouldn’t we do some damage?” Yod asked. “Shouldn’t we introduce worms and viruses? One incursion might be the only chance we get.”

Avram smiled. “Well spoken. We must prepare agile and
powerful programs. Malkah, the whole Base collective should start on this tomorrow.”

“At your service.”

Nili spoke up. “I don’t understand what you’re planning to do. How will you get past their guards? Which complex will you try to enter? I can be of help in the attack, surely.”

Yod turned to her. “We won’t be physically present in Y-S. Our attack is purely mental. We use the worldwide Net to travel. Then we’ll attempt to penetrate the Y-S Base. All Bases need to communicate with the Net, but all of them—like our own—are defended against intruders.”

“Who does the Net belong to?”

“The Net’s a public utility,” Malkah said. “Communities, multis, towns, even individuals subscribe.”