He, She and It (57 page)

Silently Yod passed her a nutrition bar to chew. She shook her head no. She would throw it up. It was always six forty-five. The sun had not yet cleared the roof of the shop across the way that sold toys and trikes. The streets were almost empty. A cleaning robot puttered along. A security ape trotted past without looking at the bushes. Why would he expect intruders in the hedge of the midlevel-tech day care center?

At last the first little girl was delivered, a pudgy four-year-old with flaxen braids tied with green polka-dot bows, dragging on her mother’s arm. Her mother was in a backless business suit, just like Shira when she used to drop Ari off on the way to work. A couple of minutes later, a boy younger than Ari was wheeled past in his stroller. More children arrived every minute.

Finally, at seven-forty, she saw him. He was walking by
himself, holding Josh’s hand. How nicely Ari walked now. He looked sturdy and serious, marching with a scowl. What was wrong? Was he upset? He was hunching his shoulders and muttering at his wrist. He was imitating the man who walked on the other side of him, wearing a side arm. “Security ape,” she mouthed to Yod. “Stay put.” The guard was six feet five or six, built like a massive door. Every time they came to an intersection, the ape spoke into his wrist-con, obviously checking in with security HQ. Great. His head was shaved, and he wore special fighting gloves, studded and armored.

Security delivered Ari to the door, where the supervisor Jane Forest herself took him inside. The guard assumed a position outside. Josh strode off down the street. They could not crawl out without danger of someone seeing them. They would have to remain crouched in the shrubbery as long as the guard was on duty. The last child was dropped off. No, here came a late mother, dragging her toddler along crying in protest. The mother had to ask the guard to step aside. He glared at her briefly and moved two steps, so that she had to sidle past him with her wailing daughter. The ape guarded the door, standing with his feet planted far apart. He wore an earbo, playing some kind of music directly into his ear, but he never stopped his deliberate survey of the street, one direction, then the other. They were stuck in the bushes. It seemed this would be the permanent situation.

Around ten, a pedicart came by. The guard had a cupcake and coffee brought to him at the door. But finally, half an hour later, he strolled around the corner of the day school. He must be relieving himself. Yod rose at once and slid from the hedge, as Shira wriggled after him. They ran around the other corner and along the street far enough to be sure the guard could not see them. “Okay. You cross past the ape—walk slowly. No day laborers ever hurry—and go to work two blocks up the road, where Ari and Josh emerged from the side street. Weed anything.”

“How will I know what to weed?”

“Nobody pays attention to what day labor does. Just look busy.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’m going to take the next road over and go where they came from. I’ll see if I can spot Josh’s number or anything I recognize in any of the houses. I’ll work my way up and down the streets until ten to noon. Then I’ll come find you. I used to
bring Ari home for lunch. I don’t know if Josh does that, or if he works through. We may have to wait until sixteen.”

“I can handle the ape, Shira. Easily. I can move before he gets his weapon out of its holster.”

“But not before he signals for help. He only has to press that wrist-con. You’d have to take him out before he knows what hit him. Or we have to wait to catch them without him. I bet he doesn’t sleep with Ari.”

“Any alarm systems I’m convinced I can disarm.”

“I’m sure they have good security on their house computer now, but I bet it’s nothing like Malkah’s.”

She set out walking. The four basic patterns of house alternated in a randomly generated design. All along the narrow roadway, where children would ride bikes and trikes and wheelies and where delivery pedicabs and occasional mototrucks traveled, flowers were planted in beds. Then on each side came a pedestrian walkway lined with trees and lawns. Many had hedges or low fences. What could be planted was strictly controlled. People in the lower and midtech and management areas were responsible for their yards, but the roadways were maintained by day laborers. They were always about, clipping, weeding, feeding, but they were essentially invisible. No one spoke to them or knew them. It was a service like the water that flowed from the tap or the cleaning robots that here as in Tikva shuffled around all day and all night.

Everybody was at work by now. Mostly she saw an occasional robot on the street, cleaning, replacing burned-out fighting. Once she saw a team of human laborers repairing underground pipes in an intersection. They paid no attention to her. Construction workers were better paid than gardeners. All of them rode in and out on the tubes. Interaction between day laborers in the enclave was severely discouraged. She passed the shop where she had used to pick up dinner most nights. Nothing touched her feelings except for the flashes of Ari that came to her: Her son staring at a red rose just at his eye level, face-to-face, with his lips parted. He lunged forward and put it in his mouth before she could stop him. Then he howled with disappointment. That same rosebush stood at the intersection, flanked with two uncomfortable cast-resin benches. She passed the house that had been theirs and managed to read the number, but it was not Josh’s.

She covered forty blocks. Every house had a number implanted in the door, which identified the employees who lived there, but she could hardly walk up to each door. If a spy-eye
was watching, that would be a tip-off. As it was, she stopped and worked regularly. She depended on recognizing something familiar—curtains, a toy—or on a hot flash of intuition. She found nothing. Even the midtech-level park where she had so often brought Ari to play in the sandbox seemed as devoid of nostalgia as a parking lot. At eleven-thirty, she turned back to meet Yod.

THIRTY-EIGHT

A Matter of Some Finality

Shira kept herself well down the street. Yod she placed nearer. Noon came. The children played in the yard of the day care center. It was fortunate the two of them had finally escaped the shrubbery, because the four- and five-year-olds ran in and out of the hedge, and would surely have discovered them.

Parents, mostly mothers, came and took their children for lunch. Josh did not appear. When she realized that he was not coming, she walked slowly down the street on the far sidewalk. Ari, wearing green-and-yellow rompers that looked none too clean, was playing with two little girls in a sandbox. He still had that way of tossing the sand up and laughing when it fell. She did not dare look any longer or harder. The guard was lounging on the grass, eating a lunch brought him by pedicab. She longed to run across the street and snatch Ari in her arms. Her hands closed on air. She kept going. She went to work on another flower bed.

Obviously the guard was remaining on duty. Josh would appear at sixteen hundred and collect Ari when the center closed. She motioned to Yod, and they went off to sit on a bench in the next intersection. The curved resin benches were honey-colored and slippery, designed to be looked at rather than sat on. Around them yellow and maroon chrysanthemums were planted in a double knot, the ground between the plants carpeted with glaring white pebbles. She ate the remains of the cheese and apples, keeping the food under cover. No day laborer would have real food. Yod did not bother with lunch.

“I hadn’t considered that your ex-husband would be with the boy,” Yod said. “How will he respond?”

“He’ll be as furious and as frightened as I was. It’s not fair to him to steal Ari. But he didn’t hesitate to take Ari from me. He began the war.”

“But once you loved each other.”

Shira chewed the last of the cheese without tasting it. “Truthfully, I don’t think I ever felt as close to him as I do to you. I thought I should get married. I thought Josh needed me. All self-delusion. A sad mistake all around, Yod.”

“They’re taking the children back in.”

She squinted, watching Ari and a girl from the sandbox pushing and shoving at each other, doubling over with giggles. Then Ari shoved too hard, and the little girl hit him and began to cry. It was agonizing to be kept at a distance, unable to speak, to touch him. She felt as if she were bleeding from a great rent in her side. She would rather die here, violently and at once, than leave him again.

“The guard is assuming his stance outside,” Yod reported.

“In a week it will be Rosh Hashanah. I imagine us home with Ari. We give him a toy shofar to blow. He blows it in the courtyard again and again and drives us all crazy. We are deliriously happy.”

“This year I’ll attend services with you. Avram wouldn’t allow me in public in previous years.”

They explored the streets of the city, looking for exit routes. Once they had Ari, what would they do? Could they slip out in a train, as they had come in? But where would they end up? This was not a manufacturing facility. Y-S plants were in China and South Africa. Empty cars might sit in the desert for days. They could not pass out through the communications channels from Base to Net, as once they had mentally.

“We can wrap Ari in your sec skin, since you don’t need it. If we’re seen, we’ve had it anyhow.”

Yod frowned. “But we can hardly walk across the desert.”

“We can’t go out by train. They won’t stop at the first refueling station. They only use that in this direction.”

“If I could steal a floater, we could head straight for where we left the fast-tank, blow up the floater so it can’t be tracked. Or go all the way to Omaha on the floater. I can reprogram it to bypass the controlling mechanism.”

“Or we could just pass out with the flow. If we grab Ari quickly enough between sixteen and seventeen, we can take the tube with the workers. They don’t check prints leaving. They
move everybody out as fast as possible.… But a child—what would he be doing with the day laborers?”

“There’s no day care here for the laborers’ children?”

“I never thought about that. I guess they leave their children where they live.”

“You took tranks along. We can put him to sleep and carry him out in an equipment bag.”

She had a container of shots, each the size of a straight pin, that could put Ari to sleep. “Yod, we must come up with some plan. The worst thing we can do is grab him and then get caught.”

“I don’t think the actual abduction will represent much of a problem, once we’ve located their residence. Getting out—we should devote the time we have remaining to that problem.”

The water was filtered and recirculated. Trash was used to generate power. What could be recycled was compacted here and shipped to another plant, but those cars were open and solidly packed. They could not hope to ride with the compacted trash. What passed out of the enclave every day were the laborers. After as much exploration as they dared, they were left at sixteen hundred with the same ideas they had begun the afternoon with: If they could grab Ari fast enough, they could pass out with the workers. If they had to wait, they would need to steal a floater, reprogram it and escape across the desert to the hidden fast-tank. All they accomplished was to work out two means for getting from the dome to the floater field outside.

As sixteen approached, Shira took a position around the corner, so that she could no longer see the center but could still watch Yod. Finally he nodded to her, rose from his weeding and began strolling. Keeping her distance but maintaining him in view, she followed. The streets were filling, and Yod speeded up to stay within sight of Josh and Ari. In the crowd, she hurried and caught up to Yod. Now Josh and Ari were only a block ahead, the guard beside them. Yod and she pursued, a loose procession among the others flooding the walkways, spilling over into the narrow vehicle tracks. On the busier streets, moving sidewalks sped people and packages along. Josh picked up Ari, who clung to him, and, followed by the guard, used a mover to jump the next forty blocks. No wonder she had had no luck finding their residence.

Their three quarries exited the moving sidewalk and strolled down a side street. Nervous about chasing them on a block with little traffic, Shira and Yod lingered at the corner. Halfway along the block, Josh turned off at a house, identical to the one
in which she had lived her married life. Layout, paint job, even the shrubs in the yard were the same. The guard saw them into the house, turned and came back. She and Yod scurried up the main street. People were getting in line for picking up their laundry.

The guard mounted the moving sidewalk and sped off. Yod and Shira at once headed for the house. They were all right for the next forty-five minutes. Day laborers worked till five, so that they did not get in the way of management and technical workers coming home or changing shifts. Her heart was pounding, and she could not draw a breath deep enough to relieve the crushed feeling in her chest. They would be caught. Yod would be dissected, and she would be rendered autistic by mnemosine. She would be a turnip stored in a mental ward; or they would quietly sell her to an organ bank.