He, She and It (55 page)

“Jews of Prague,” the Maharal cries as he tries to clamber up a barricade. Joseph lifts him easily and holds him up to speak. His voice is clear and penetrating as always, no longer as strong as once it must have been, but a voice that commands attention even against chanting and the shouts of an angry worked-up mob. “Today we must defend our gates. Today we must stand as a shield, the Magen David, between our people and certain death. They don’t expect us to fight. If we stand firm, we can
discourage those who don’t like killing Jews enough to die for the pleasure. Let us put ourselves in the hands of the living ha-Shem and fight like holy men and demons.”

“Now take my grandfather to the Altneushul to safety,” Chava says to Joseph, who is still holding the Maharal. “Take him now.”

Joseph lifts the Maharal high in the air and bears him through the streets. “Put me down, thing!” Judah mutters, unwilling to shout in front of everyone. “Davar,” he curses, which means both word and thing.

“If I have to look out for you, I cannot fight well,” Joseph says. “The people in the Altneushul need you more than the fighters. You shouldn’t be in the presence of death, and you must pray for us. Your prayers are strong as my fists.”

“Prayer doesn’t work that way,” the Maharal says quietly and sadly. “It makes the heart and mind strong in belief, but it doesn’t keep one leaf from falling from the tree. Still, I will pray.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Desert Apples

Shira had enough credit by now so that she and Yod could have gone west by zip, but she preferred mass transportation that left no trace. They decided to ride the tube all the way to a terminal relatively close to the Y-S enclave where Ari had recently been staying. Shira did not dare take the tube to the station at the Nebraska enclave, for fear she would be recognized by a grud, guard or monitor. Furthermore, the enclave entrance required a palm print.

The tubes crossed the continent in about twelve hours, minus stops. An hour tube ride was a standard commute for day laborers, who did not live in the corporate enclaves. Thus the enclaves could be several hundred kilometers outside the Glop or similar areas—El Barrio in the Southwest, the Jungle on the Gulf Coast—and still draw on cheap labor pools. They were heading for Omaha, off the direct transcontinental route. They changed in what was still called Chicago, although it stretched
from Green Bay to halfway up the far side of Lake Michigan. Residential use of much of what had been Michigan and Wisconsin was restricted, since these northern lands still got rain. The soil was not as thin as farther north. Agricultural land was strictly regulated. They weren’t going to get any more of it, and much had been damaged, paved over, eroded or poisoned before the protections had been established.

The Rural Zones were areas that the multis did not own or control. Agribusiness was blamed for the Great Famine. Now all soil farming was based on organic practices and biological controls. The pesticide residues still found in every living being contributed to the mass sterility that plagued Shira’s generation. Using poisons or allowing them in contact with the soil or the water table was an offense punishable by death, enforced by the eco-police of the Norika Sector government. Shira wondered what life was like for the small holders of the Rural Zones, but tourism was not encouraged there.

In Chicago they left the tube and locked themselves into a rented cubicle in the underground warren of the station. With Yod, she felt safe in the six-by-eight room with its bunks and minimal toilet facilities. They were close enough to Lake Michigan for the shower to function, tepidly and sporadically.

It was like trying to sleep in the works of an old and noisy machine, an antique with gears and levers clanking. The coming and going of the tubes shuddered through the walls. Above, behind and from all sides came the mutter and shriek of voices. Footsteps ran. Bodies landed hard. A stink of rotting matter and unwashed flesh in dirty clothes thickened the air, along with cooking smoke and something acrid and chemical. She monitored the air. The oxygen was close to minimal, but what could she do about it? She had to take off the filter for a while. “Yod, didn’t I see you massage Malkah’s shoulders when we were working all night in the lab?”

“I’m programmed to give a mean massage, Malkah says.”

She smiled. Her face felt as if it were flaking off. “I don’t think I’ve smiled since we left home.”

“Is that conversational, or do you wish to know? I can replay.”

“I just mean that I’ve been very tense. This is the first time we’ve been alone. It isn’t that I feel safe here—only an idiot would feel safe in the middle of the Chicago Glop in a tube station cube.” She undressed and lay on the cot, on which she had already spread her bag so that she would not touch the mattress.

Yod knelt over her. His hands began working the pain and stiffness from her muscles. She groaned. “Am I hurting you? Should I use less pressure?”

“It’s not a bad pain. Do it the way you were.”

“Isn’t all pain bad?”

“You feel pain, don’t you?”

“Not as you do. It’s mental. It’s more of a warning signal coming on and demanding I notice it. It’s disagreeable, but I can turn it down.”

“I could have used that ability in childbirth. I could use it every day.” She drifted into pleasant surrender to the shaping, releasing hands. She must have fallen asleep, because she woke with the room almost dark—as dark as it got. A spattering of shots outside. She saw no reason to investigate. Loud voices gave way to footsteps running. Shots, more distant. Then a single whining moment of laser fire. The monotonous ka-blam ka-blam of canned drumming vibrated the floor.

Since she did not see him, she called his name. She was immediately frightened, even though she was certain he was just above her, in the top bunk. He answered at once.

“How long did I sleep?”

“Nine hours, twelve minutes.”

“I never sleep more than seven hours, never!”

“Never does not apply any longer.” He jumped down neatly, turning at once toward her.

“Since Ari was born, I’ve never slept a night through.”

“You fell asleep at twenty twenty-eight local time, and now it is five-forty. Are you hungry?”

“We have rations in the green pack. First we need to disinfect and filter some water.” She took her second tepid shower while the water for reconstituting their food trickled through a unit the size and shape of a big carrot. Diseases hit the Glop, ebola one year, a new killer flu the next. Viruses previously confined to the tropics now flashed through the cities with the speed and deadliness of a fire storm.

“Shira … If I were human, I’d know if the fact that you haven’t dressed again means that you wish to have sex. Or is it warm for you in here?”

“It’s warm, yes. I hadn’t actually thought about sex, but the water isn’t through yet.” Outside, loud voices argued about payment. In here, dense sticky air, but a feeling of momentary nest, ease, safety. “Do you want to?”

“Of course.”

She watched him undress, swiftly, piling his few clothes in a
stack on the upper bunk. She asked, “Why of course? You might not be in the mood. Why should I assume you’re willing?”

“But I don’t have moods.”

“But you don’t always want to have sex.”

“With you? Why not? Hypothetically I might consider it inadvisable if we were in a dangerous situation. I doubt you’d propose it then.”

“You mean you’re always ready?” She laughed, half in embarrassment. “Does this apply to everybody? Could you do it with anyone at any time?”

He put his hand on her bare shoulder. “Shira, I grasp the pragmatic basis of modern monogamy: if I don’t do it with anybody else, you won’t. That’s agreeable to me if it is to you.”

They lay down on the narrow lower bunk. She traced his sleek back with her palms. Next door, something heavy fell. Through the ceiling came a sound as if someone were swinging a pickax on the floor. “Emotions, but no moods?”

“My emotions are reactive, mostly. But they grow stronger with use.”

“Is that good?”

“I don’t think it was intended, but yes. Life is less boring. I have something to care about now besides following instructions. I have a friend, I have a lover. Soon we’ll have a child to care for, and then I’ll understand the mystery of human childhood.”

“Don’t! The odds on getting Ari back are lopsided against us. Don’t say that, ever—don’t speak as if it were done when I can’t endure the thought that we may fail.”

“My speaking one way or the other has no effect.” He ended the conversation by beginning to kiss her.

Sometimes Yod’s behavior was what she thought of as feminine; sometimes it seemed neutral, mechanical, purely logical; sometimes he did things that struck her as indistinguishable from how every other male she had been with would have acted. His cloture of the discussion of Ari by kissing her was one of those times. She was not annoyed, because she preferred confining conversations about Ari to logistics, tactics. She did not like to talk about success or failure; it made her superstitious. She preferred to proceed with her gaze averted slightly to the side of her target.

“Because you’re programmed to please, do you ever feel used when we have sex?” she asked him, remembering sex by rote with Josh.

“Aren’t you programmed too? Isn’t that what socializing a child is? I enjoy, Shira, never doubt that. If I’ve been programmed to find your pleasure important and fulfilling, don’t women try to reprogram their men that way?”

Making love with Yod made her feel strong. Afterward, as they mixed the filtered water with their dried rations into a gruel, which they heated over a unit the size of a matchbox and then quickly ate, she wondered why. As they took the Omaha tube, strapped in side by side, with the sickening crush of acceleration flattening her into her dirty seat, she wondered further. He pleased her. She no longer ever doubted he would. She seemed to please him. He was not changeable. He would not tomorrow decide she was not good enough or that he wanted someone else instead. He had the reliability of a well-designed machine that, as long as it worked, would do what it was supposed to. But that was unfair, because he was far more sensitive to her desires and responses than any man she had been with, and most unmechanical in his lovemaking. She had never spoken of love with him. It seemed inappropriate. Yet she felt him to be loyal to her as no one except Malkah ever had been. His mind might be working out fourth-level equations while they were in bed, for all she knew, but he was not fantasizing about another woman. Although his strength was exponentially greater than hers, she could never imagine him hurting her. Neither intentionally nor unintentionally. He did not have a temper, and he moved with the grace of perfect function.

Whenever she let herself slide into thinking of him as simply a machine, she would become aware he was actively pursuing an agenda of his own. Although his jealousy of Gadi had greatly diminished, nonetheless, if she were Gadi, she would not be careless in turning her back to Yod. She thought Yod often wished Gadi out of their lives, and she wondered if Yod was not capable of a violent resolution to a scenario in which he felt Gadi threatened his relationship with her—unless Yod’s fear of Avram restrained him.

Yet being with Yod was not as exotic as she would have expected, for she had constantly suspected that first Gadi and then Josh were put together mentally as well as physically on some completely different principle than herself. She would be sitting with Josh in the living room. He would want a cup of coffee, a glass of wine or cold water, a dish of ice cream. Normally he would inform her, as if she were more capable of going out to the kitchen than he was. If she was completely occupied and he acknowledged that, he would get himself ice
cream, but never would he think to ask her if she wanted some also. She could not imagine eating or drinking anything in front of him without asking him if he wanted some. It was a small thing, but it always reminded her of how differently they had been socialized—programmed—to exist with others. It was that way with everything from birthday gifts to ideas about food, mealtimes and care of clothing.

But how could she take seriously a relationship with someone who belonged to somebody else? Not in the sense of being married, but in the sense of being the property of Avram. This is my boyfriend, the machine, the slave. When they returned, the issue must be confronted. She would line up her support: Malkah and, oddly enough, Gadi, because he viewed Yod as a pseudo son who put up with the same hard perfectionist overseeing he had endured.

Beside her Yod sat motionless, still as the chair itself except when the tube car jolted them. We are all so sealed in our skins, she thought. Even if I can retrieve Ari, it will be years before I know what being used as a pawn in Y-S’s game has done to him. Perhaps I am only a true child of my age. Just as one of my earliest relationships was with the enhanced house computer, so here I am traveling to kidnap my son with a cyborg to whom I have bonded, who seems to assume that if we are successful, he will raise my son with me. And why not? Would Yod be a worse father than most? Than Josh? He would never abuse Ari. He has no temper. He has infinite patience. He would never confuse Ari with his own ego or become infuriated or disappointed because he felt Ari failed him. Ari would be even more a child of the age of information, because he would be raised by one human and one computer. I don’t think Yod would frighten him any more than the house frightened me.