He, She and It (44 page)

“Your town doesn’t subscribe?” Avram asked Nili incredulously.

Nili shrugged. “We know a lot about some things, less about others. It doesn’t seem as if your Net has made you universally wise.”

They were all a little shocked. It was a truism that everyone was on the Net, although a poor child might grow up in the Glop, work for a gang or sell labor to a multi, die of one of the viral plagues that swept the Glop every year, and never once plug in to access the Net. Nili did not partake in what was universally considered the central artifact of contemporary culture.

“On this mission, you can’t help us,” Yod said in his quiet voice.

“I can learn how to operate in your Net.”

Malkah put her hand on Nili’s shoulder. “Once we’re back, it would be my great satisfaction to introduce you to the uses and pleasures of the Net.”

“We can’t pause to teach you. I’ll have to protect Shira and Malkah as best I can. We each have individual knowledge and skills. Avram himself won’t enter with us.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Avram said slowly. “If we do plan to carry out effective sabotage, I think you’ll need me.”

Malkah swung about to smile ruefully at him. “It cannot be, Avram. If I’m killed, it may hurt our people, but if both you and I should die at once, that would be a disaster. One of us must remain outside in case of attack.”

In three days, the message robot returned. They had paid extra for a voice recording of Ari, rather than the robot’s voice. Riva
had not risked recording her own voice, Shira thought, clasping herself nervously as she escorted the robot to the lab, where Yod prepared to record the transmission.

The little cylinder, like a headless dachshund on wheels, asked for Shira’s finger to take the blood sample. She jumped at the prick, as she was clenched in anxiety. The robot reiterated the instructions she had given it. Then it announced it was giving the return message paid for in advance from Ari, the child of Shira. “Hello, Mommy, hello. Are you in there?” Ari’s voice burst into giggles, a wildly hysterical fit new to him. But the voice was his, unmistakably his. “Mommy? I just had ice cream. Strawberry va-yellow. Mommy? Where are you? Why don’t you come out? Mommy, can you hear me?” A voice spoke behind him. There was a scuffling sound. Finally Ari spoke again. “They say to say I am okay. We rode in a rocket. I don’t have my koala Wawa, he broke. Daddy says we’ll get another, but I want a kitty like I saw on Papaka. Where are you?” There was another mumbling in the background and a loud thump. “They say to say bye-bye, Mommy, and are you coming to Daddy and me? They say you can come here. They say if you want to come, you can come and be with me. Bye-bye.”

“Let me work on the background on the recording,” Yod said. “I can enhance it.”

She told the robot to repeat, adding to Yod, “Record it a second time. Just in case something goes wrong with the first recording.”

“The first will suffice to decode the voices.”

“Yod, I just want to keep it. It’s his voice!”

He nodded, although she could tell he found that desire mysterious. She had a twinge of gratitude toward him, that he so seldom argued with her. If he often did not understand her wishes, he nonetheless frequently acquiesced to them. Perhaps it was his general desire to please that distinguished him most from anyone else in her life. Like him, she was programmed to please when she could, although Malkah could not be blamed for that programming. Malkah’s desire to please had always been highly particular.

By lunchtime, Yod had enhanced the recording enough to make out the voices. They all listened to the results:

The kid has to speak right at the robot. I’m not convinced it’s picking up his voice. We can’t play it back, you know
.

“That’s no one I know,” she said.

I don’t see the purpose of this. He’s grown adjusted to her absence. This is upsetting him to no end
.

“That’s Josh.”

Y-S expects you to do your part, Rogovin. We need your cooperation
.

Ari, speak into the little grid there. Right. Speak to … your mother. The woman who just spoke to you. Tell her you’re okay
.

I know Mommy. Where is she?

She’s not here, which is a mercy anyhow
, Josh said.
Speak into it again
.

The original voice said,
Tell her that you’re okay. Tell her that right now
.

The next patch of conversation occurred when apparently Ari kicked the message robot and it fell over.

Don’t do that again, kid. We’re lucky the damned thing didn’t blow up. Now ask her to come here. Come on, talk to your mother, Ari, and tell her you want her to come home to you. Don’t you want your mother? Now come on, sell it to her, make your mother come here. Tell her she can be with you and your daddy
.

This is unfair to him. Unfair to me. I don’t want her back here
.

Come on, Ari, ask her nicely. Then you can have another ice cream
.

“Well,” Malkah said, “he’s in Nebraska. And Josh sounds pissed.”

“Ari’s just bait for them. They don’t care about him. I’m halfway sorry I sent the message robot. It must have been deeply upsetting for him to hear me speaking from a damned machine. No wonder he kicked it. He must be furious at me for disappearing.”

“You had to find out where he’s being kept,” Malkah said reasonably. “If he’s upset in the short term, if we can get hold of him, he’ll be happier in the long run.”

“Many ifs. But at least a chance.” She made herself sound strong, although she longed to crawl away and collapse around a missing that felt larger than her body, as if the depression surrounded her rather than inhabited her. She wondered what he looked like now. She wondered what he ate, what he wore, what he played with. She could not bear to imagine how he thought about her, what they told him, what they didn’t tell him. She had buried her pain deep inside her because the resolution was impossible. Now it had risen, greater than ever, and she could think of nothing else.

*  *  *

Nili stood in the doorway of Shira’s room, as if uncertain of her welcome. “Come in,” Shira said heartily, and heaved herself off her bed, where she had been staring at the ceiling imagining conversations with Ari.

“I didn’t know you were resting.”

“I wasn’t. Do come in.”

Gingerly Nili picked her way among the furniture. She stared at Shira’s dresser with its bottles, salves, lotions. The closet door was open, and Nili looked askance at the row of dresses, tunics, blouses, pants. She sat on the desk chair, leaving it in position but straddling the back with her legs, facing Shira rather than the computer terminal. “You and Gadi were lovers when you both lived here before?”

Shira nodded wearily. Gadi’s surprising story about the spike had haunted her briefly, but Ari’s voice had driven Gadi from her mind.

“Why are you not lovers now?”

“Our relationship stopped months before I went away to college.”

“Why hasn’t it begun again?”

“If you stick your hand in the fire and it burns you, why don’t you stick your hand in the fire again?”

Nili rocked the chair closer. “In what way, burning?”

“Pain.”

“He is brutal? I find that hard to believe.”

“Brutal? Of course not. He ended it. He wanted more freedom. I was so much in love with him, I felt devastated. It was simply a function of being young and vulnerable.”

Nili frowned, considering. “He did not mean to hurt you?”

“Nili, what is this? If you want to know, you should also ask Gadi. I can’t tell you how it would be for you, if you’re interested in him.”

“How is it, making love with a man?”

“With what should I compare it?”

“You’ve never been with a woman?”

Shira shook her head no. “You’re nervous about being with a man?”

“I must do it. We know that if we open up to the world, we’re going to have to deal with men. I’m supposed to find out what they’re like. He seems as good a choice as any. He’s very curiously made and strange. Everything he does is out of my range of experience. Surely I’d learn a great deal about things completely foreign to us.”

“Also you find him attractive.”

“I think so. I’m not sure, but I have to choose someone soon as a first experiment.”

“That’s a fine rationale for doing what you want to, Nili.”

Nili grinned. Her teeth were strong ivory against her dark skin. “You don’t object? I believe women and men frequently feel possessive toward each other.”

“Gadi’s attention makes me nervous.”

“The machine, he’s not so bad when you get to know him.” She strolled over to Shira’s dresser, staring down. “He is very serious. My people would like him. He works hard and he is not easily distracted, admirable traits. You see, I’m no longer prejudiced.”

“Women who meet him and don’t know what he is usually find him attractive.”

“I don’t understand this whole attraction business—”

“He doesn’t either.”

“I mean, at home we tend to become involved with the people we work with. We find that natural.” She picked up a lipstick, smelled it, put it down. Her first response to all the cosmetics and lotions was to smell them. “I knew I’d probably have sex with Riva because we were traveling together. Unless we took a dislike to each other. Sometimes there’s no chemistry.”

“What about love?”

Nili was staring at a manicurist, the little tube into which Shira inserted her fingers. “Basically don’t you think it’s a matter of what you’re used to and what’s in front of you? If you raise chickens, you eat chickens and you eat eggs. You people live on fish.”

“I don’t think attraction is nearly so pragmatic. For me it’s a fraught area.” Shira smiled at Nili. She had to restrain herself from going to protect her cosmetics, for she was afraid Nili was going to break something. Also she was embarrassed. She thought of herself as using few enhancements, but Nili’s scrutiny made her feel like one of the toy women at Y-S. At the same time, she found Nili’s predicament likable. Perhaps it offered her a way in to Nili, seeing her confused. “Follow your impulse with Gadi. I’d be delighted if you became involved with him.” Oddly enough, she realized she was telling the truth. She could not promise she would feel no jealousy; but she preferred jealousy to the temptation he represented. “Now I have to throw you out. What I’m supposed to be doing up here is recalling everything I can of the Y-S system. So I’d better resume.”

*  *  *

Everything she remembered she told to Malkah and Yod. Once she was inside the system, more would come back. Avram had administered a very low dose of mnemosine. A larger dose could have produced from her brain whatever she knew in the given area of association required, while damaging the brain permanently. They had mapped out what she had been able to recall, and now they were ready to try to go in.

There was no one time better than any other, since Y-S was worldwide and offworld as well, so they decided to go in the next morning, simply for their own convenience. They would use the terminals in Avram’s lab, where all three could line up. Avram had been reluctantly persuaded to remain outside to monitor, along with Sam Rossi, the third Base Overseer. Everyone ate together at Malkah’s that night. She was in the mood to cook. “It may be our last meal. Let’s have a little feast,” Malkah said with determined cheer. Sam, a tall ruddy-faced man with brown curls and sloping shoulders, had come with his wife, Zipporah, a fat woman with a pretty rosy face, current chair of the Town Council. She was a woman strangers always underestimated; their best negotiator. She ran the Commons food services and ran them well.

Malkah made a basic Mediterranean fish soup, rich with tomatoes, basil, fennel. The bread was from the Commons bakery, but the salad was from their own garden. The wine came from Maine, where vineyards had been planted on the south-facing slopes of the seaside mountains. It had turned into good wine country for stony whites the color of straw, a bitingly dry champagne. The eight of them dined at the table in the courtyard, an extra leaf laid in. As August ended, the evenings were appreciably shorter, especially in the courtyard. They dined under Chinese lanterns; since Shira’s childhood they had lit summer evenings when the light began to fail, casting a warm pale glow over their faces.

She was trying to figure out whether anything of significance had happened between Gadi and Nili. Malkah and Avram were perched on chairs at the ends, which the head and which the foot conveniently vague. Yod sat beside Shira, Zipporah on her other side—she was still careful to interpose herself whenever possible between Yod and anyone ignorant of his true nature—while Gadi, Nili and Sam sat opposite them. Yod was a dainty eater. He required less food than she did, since he combusted it thoroughly. Shira was not hungry, nervousness manifesting itself more as heightened gaiety than as anxiety.

Whenever Nili and Gadi touched, she could feel electricity snap between them. It was a gathering tension, a series of small shocks. No, she did not think they were yet lovers, but both were considering that option. Gadi remembered to throw her lingering glances from time to time, to flirt, but it was perfunctory. The twilight was a lake on which they were floating, mauve, pale gray, pearlescent colors, the scent of late auratum lilies, of stocks heady on the air of the courtyard but overwhelmed unless she leaned back by the strong savors of the meal.

“I still think this expedition is too dangerous,” Zipporah began, but Avram stopped her at once with upraised hand.

“No business chat at supper, we all promised,” he said smoothly. “Let us talk of what is truly interesting, beyond this pulse of anxiety.”

“In the Middle Ages,” Malkah was saying, “our ancestors believed that demons ate odors. They hovered everywhere but especially in what were considered waste places. Our attitude toward the land we aren’t using has changed drastically. Our idea of paradise is less a garden than a real forest we haven’t yet logged off, poisoned. Now some of us find our demons in the Glop, some of us in the multi enclaves, some in drugs or stimmies.”