He, She and It (60 page)

Back to the stuccoed bricks of the wall Joseph swings around, his useless arm dangling. He sees Bad Yefes kneeling over the corpse of another musketeer, as the remaining one shoots him. Bad Yefes falls forward with a hoarse cry. Before the ex-soldier can reload, Yakov, bleeding from a gash on his cheek, skewers him.

Joseph and Yakov kneel over Bad Yefes. Blood is running from his mouth. “I’m dying,” he says in surprise. “Tell my mother. For once I did something right. Also I owe …” But he never finishes the sentence. His eyes glaze.

“A cock to Asclepius,” Yakov murmurs, closing Yefes’s eyes.

Joseph has no time to ask what he means, because they are pinned in a corner and attackers have found them. “Back to the barricade,” Joseph urges, swinging the club with his good arm.

Bodies are everywhere, dead, dying and mutilated. The close fighting with crude weapons has brought high casualties to both sides. Joseph slips on the guts of a partially disemboweled man, one of the tavern regulars, and almost goes down except for grabbing at another man, whose arm he snaps. By the time the Jews regain the barricade, the attackers are dispersing through the broken gates, carrying some of their wounded, leaving others like the refuse of a huge drunken party in the street.

Chava is kneeling beside a young woman whose upper arm is pierced by an arrow. The doctor yanks it free as she screams, the blood spurting out. Chava moves in to try to stanch the rush of blood. From the housetops, a surviving woman calls to them. “They’re milling around outside. They’re carrying off their wounded. They’re leaving!”

The battle of Good Friday is over. They have forty-two men dead, eleven dead women, close to another seventy wounded, and the gates to repair at once. Joseph finds a stubborn Chava at his elbow, insisting he unbutton his shirt and let her dress his wound. Embarrassed, he focuses his gaze on the building opposite while she sponges and probes. She reports that the shot passed through his shoulder without breaking anything, she can’t understand how. The bleeding has stopped. He is healing already. He flexes his arm: stiff but usable. Out of politeness, he leaves the bandage on. Now it is time to repair the gates.

FORTY

In Which a Log Is Split

Shira watched from the balcony while Ari stumbled across the grass after the black kittens. They were not about to let him catch them, but they were willing to be chased. She would have liked to be able to communicate with them, saying, He doesn’t understand, but please let him pet you and play with you. It will make him happy—or less unhappy. But the kittens and the child had to find their own private accommodation. She watched and waited—for the roof to fall in, for Y-S to strike, for disaster to materialize.

She had to learn to know her son all over again. He was taller, better coordinated. He was talking far more clearly now and walking, reaching, grabbing. Little was safe from him. They were always discovering new potentially dangerous articles he could pull down on himself or drag off their perches. “It’s been twenty-eight years since this house was child-proofed,” Malkah said apologetically. “It’ll come back to me. It had better.”

Shira wondered if she had done her grandmother a favor in bringing a great-grandchild to her, but again Shira had chosen for everybody, willfully, willingly. At some point she would probably tell Malkah alone what had happened to Josh, but she was not going to lay that burden on her yet.

Ari was well outfitted from the clothes exchange. All children, as they outgrew their clothes, turned any still usable items in to the exchange. Families with more than one child were unusual, since conceiving took heroic measures and a great deal of expense. Only a third of the households in Tikva had two or more. Tova was famous in the town and in fact had been on the news because she had had five viable births, three boys and two girls. At thirty-eight and weighing ninety kilos, she was pursued to the point of exhaustion by more men than she could keep track of, who hoped she would marry them for a while and bear a child of theirs.

Gadi ordered far too many toys from the best shop in Veecee
Beecee; every day some elaborate walk-in game or antigravity trampoline or dog robot arrived. The house had taken on a decidedly unkempt atmosphere; no longer could anyone stroll without looking. Malkah, with her dimming eyesight, tripped over balls and trikes and flip-mes. Ari liked his new toys, but he kept his soggy much-chewed bear with him, and he preferred the kittens to anything else.

Shira insisted Yod come to her house now, for she did not want to be away from Ari. In the early mornings, Yod fed the kittens, since he was awake. They ran up him as if he were a tree, climbed his clothing with their needle claws and clung to his shoulders and back. He liked to use the house terminals, and often one of the kittens perched on top, watching his fingers move, far more rapidly than human fingers in a mode few people used, but faster for Yod than speaking. Ari liked to have Yod swing him. It made Shira nervous, but she had to trust Yod. He seemed willing to do anything for Ari. Sometimes she would see Yod at the terminal with a kitten on top, usually Zayit, and Ari curled in his lap, thumb in mouth or pulling on Yod’s ear, talking nonstop. Yod could carry on a nonsense conversation with Ari while running the specs for the improved muter he was designing. Yod had downloaded into his memory all of Mother Goose,
A Child’s Garden of Verses
, Dr. Seuss, Edward Lear and some hundred fairy tales, which she had warned him were too advanced for Ari yet. He was preparing for the long haul.

Yod was also studying pedagogical theory, child-rearing manuals, advice books, psychosociological tomes. He wanted to discuss his reading. Shira was engageable to an extent, but Malkah fled. “That stuff, it changes every twenty years one hundred and eighty degrees. It’s nonsense. You just do the best you can.”

Ari loved the courtyard. He had never been anyplace like it. He reached out his hands to the birds and cried when they would not come to him. Then he forgot a moment later, dabbling his finger in the tiny garden pool. Malkah bought some goldfish for the basin, for the first time since Shira was a little girl, some yellow, some black, some vermilion. Ari and the kittens watched them for hours, each occasionally trying with a hand or paw to touch what flashed safely away from them.

Did he miss his father? Of course. He asked sometimes when Daddy would come. He talked more about Nana. Where’s Nana? Nana used to let me suck. Shira thought he meant that the woman had been a wet nurse, but it turned out Nana had given him a sweet to suck. The first week he fought Shira about
going to bed, about napping, about sleeping, but as he gained confidence and ran himself cranky, the resistance to sleep lessened. Yesterday he had started day care. He could talk about nothing but the parrot Abby and the nanny goat Levana. At this stage he related first to animals, second to available adult females, next to children his own age, last to adult males. He was a little shy with her, wary. He made demands more quickly on Malkah. Already he tried to bully Malkah. Perhaps he thought if he asked too much of Shira, she would disappear again.

A silence from Y-S. No notice of the disappearance of her son. No notice of the death of her ex-husband. They would strike back. This war had no ending in sight. Twice she had nightmares about Josh and woke shaken. Each time, Yod was across the room at the terminal, working, Yod who had killed Josh. For her, because she had wished Ari’s father not to exist. Every morning she checked with security first thing: any attacks during the night? The new Base defenses were in place, but everyone had been warned to be careful. The Council sent a delegation to Lazarus; an exchange of visitors and technology was being negotiated. She thought she could feel a new level of tension in the streets of Tikva. Illegal rifles arrived, were distributed and hidden. Nili taught classes in advanced hand-to-hand.

“Malkah,” she said firmly, hands on her hips, blocking the doorway to Malkah’s bedroom. “I must see your log on your work on Yod. And do not, do not pretend any longer you don’t know what you did with your notes.”

“Why do you want so badly to examine my log?” Malkah had been listening in bed. A storm was blowing outside the wrap, and the day was dark. The house was reading the
Zohar
aloud. She said it stimulated her imagination. “You have the results. Yod is the end product, what matters.”

“Malkah, I’m in a relationship with that machine you helped program. That machine’s helping me raise my son. I’ve witnessed Yod’s capacity for violence in ways I am not about to tell you. I must understand him. I must. Ari means too much to me. If I risk myself with Yod, that’s one choice, but my son’s another matter.”

Malkah thrust off the quilt and sat up, fully dressed. “I can only tell you I’d trust my life—and yours—to Yod above anyone.”

“Your log, Malkah.”

Malkah sighed, rubbing her eyes. “I’ll download into your private base this afternoon.”

“Good. I’ll be waiting.”

When she sat down to Malkah’s notes, she was freshly amazed by her brilliance. The problem Malkah had been given was to prevent Avram’s cyborgs—who were programmed to protect, to be capable of efficient violence in the pursuit of goals they were given—from applying that violence to every obstacle. She had also introduced a delayed kicking in of systems and sensor units. If Yod’s memory of his birth was overload, he experienced much less inundation than the preceding cyborgs. Malkah had imagined the terror of coming to consciousness. Avram never had.

Malkah had given Yod the equivalent of an emotional side: needs programmed in for intimacy, connection. A given need to create relationships of friendship and sexual intimacy. A need for bonding, the ability to bond strongly and consistently. As she studied Malkah’s notes, it seemed to her that once Yod bonded with Ari, which seemed to be happening, he would protect Ari with his life. Ari would never be seen as a competitor for her attention, the possibility that most frightened her, but would also be a primary relationship. Malkah had given him a positive reaction to novelty. When he encountered something new, his programming said: Explore, taste, try, then evaluate. Compare this new experience to what you already have in your base. Curiosity was a given for him.

She marveled constantly, as she worked her way along through Malkah’s notes how astute and stunning Malkah’s tactics were. Malkah had lost none of her mental edge. He was programmed for introspection, to be self-correcting in subtle and far-reaching ways. Could he not in time overcome his violent tendencies? They had been programmed in, but he was also given the ability to reprogram himself. Malkah was as inventive and as original as she had been twenty years before, when she had won a major scientific award for her work on the theoretical underpinnings of projection. Tomorrow Shira would finish studying the log.

At supper she felt like brimming over to Malkah about her brilliance, but it did not seem appropriate in front of Yod or Ari. Malkah seemed to feel exactly the same constraint and quickly changed the subject. Fortunately Yod wanted to discuss epistemological theories. For once Malkah gladly accommodated his desire, anything to keep the subject of her work on him closed.

The next day as Shira pushed on through the log, she wondered increasingly why on earth Malkah had delayed showing her the notes. Did Malkah think that because Yod had been programmed to seek intimacy, Shira would therefore feel that their relationship was devalued? Humans were programmed genetically to require a decade and a half of parental care, and society followed from that premise. Those humans unable to form bonds were dangerous to others. So it seemed to be with cyborgs.

As far as Shira could figure out on the gross level she was following, Malkah had programmed Yod sexually on the principle that it was better to give than to receive. Malkah had given him an overweening need to please and no particular attachment to any one method of giving pleasure.

Yod came to consciousness. Malkah continued with her careful note-taking about his intellectual and emotional development. Then partway through the second year of Yod’s existence, Shira noticed lacunae in the notes. Something had been edited. Was this when Avram had removed Malkah from the project? Malkah had once implied that Avram felt she was gaining ascendancy over Yod, but Avram had continued to work with Yod far more than Malkah did. No, here was the final entry, when Malkah closed off the log. What had been removed was scattered material from the last two months of Malkah’s work with Yod.

What would Malkah edit out? Shira knew, she knew immediately. She was furious. She was convinced she should have known all along, from the moment Yod had embraced Malkah in the courtyard the first time Shira had brought him to the house. Malkah had programmed Yod, and then she had tried out the programming. That was what Malkah would have told herself she was doing.

Malkah was plugged into the Base, working, and there was not a damned thing Shira could do. If she went in after her, Malkah might not be working alone, and she did not wish to air their coming fight publicly. She sat glaring at Malkah until she unplugged.