He, She and It (66 page)

“We took out their facility,” Nili said briskly. “They’ve been raiding the Glop. Lazarus and his raiders, the Ram Blasters and theirs.” She stalked away from Gadi, her eyes still narrowed in anger. “I don’t sell or rent my body, by the organ or by the moment.”

He grimaced. For a moment he looked all of fourteen and furious at the adults who had thwarted him. Then his face masked over, as he had learned to do during the intervening years. Shira doubted he accepted Nili’s decision, but she did not doubt that Nili would make him do so. If she bothered.

Nili said flatly, “I’m very tired. My ribs are taped, and I’m covered with bruises. I need sleep. I’ll see you all tomorrow.” She turned and went upstairs. When Gadi started to follow her, she swung and stopped him. “No.”

However, fifteen minutes after he left, she came back downstairs to sit with Malkah. By that time Shira was putting Ari to bed, and she and Yod were looking forward to chewing over the day together. Much, much later, when Shira was ready to
go to sleep and looked in on Ari—a compulsion to see him sleeping, in spite of knowing that the house watched him constantly and would alert her to any problem—she heard their voices still wafting up. Malkah and Nili were talking in the courtyard. Only the Japanese lanterns illuminated the table where they sat drinking wine and eating melon, a vase of white spider chrysanthemums ghostly between them. Shira leaned forward to hear what they were talking about. Nanotechnology applied to health problems, particularly vision repair.

Talking so intently that for once she was not aware of Shira, Nili was describing some operation her group had pioneered, a reknitting of the optic nerve. Malkah was asking details. They were completely absorbed. The moment of tension had passed.

She wondered if Nili would forgive Gadi as she realized she herself finally had. Going softly back from her sleeping son to her inhuman, her better, dearer than human lover, she felt as if that painful radiant time had finally dimmed into ordinary memory. She was free of Gadi as he seemed at last free of her. They had become merely friends; not the best, not the worst. Gadi was losing a lover he wished to hold; she meant to keep hers. Yod was a part of her now, her real mate.

FORTY-FOUR

Lover Come Back

Shira was on her way from the Base center, where her new work group had just been holding its Friday afternoon meeting. Every Monday morning all twenty of them met together face-to-face to plot out the week’s work. Friday at fourteen they exchanged news on their progress. In between, Shira might come into the old frame house that served as an office perhaps once and might run into a couple of the others. More often she would pass images of her fellow workers in the Base. But at the beginning and end of every work week they all sat around a conference table to discuss their work.

Shira was still learning about these people. In late October, when it was her group’s turn to go by halves to plant trees, she would come to know whichever nine went with her very well
indeed. Everybody in town put in an annual week planting trees in a deforested area. It was one of the only hopes in the world that the warming could be slowed down and eventually subside. Shira had not been camping since she was in college, and the coming trip aroused both curiosity and apprehension. She did not like the idea of having to leave Ari for a week so soon after she had got him back, but reforestation was a duty that could not be put off. She was walking along on automatic pilot like a floater and almost bumped into Gadi before she noticed him.

“She walks through me as if I were air, she who used to say I was the sun and the moon.” He blocked her path playfully. “Come on, you’re drafted for a walk-on. Everybody has a part.”

She looked around the Commons and realized it had become a large stage setting. Almost a hundred people were gathered, many in costumes meant to suggest forty years before. “What’s going on?”

“The Council has me making ‘The Founding of Tikva’ to educate the kiddies. I had Tomas Raffia zip me in a whole trash heap of stock footage on the Troubles. You know, Jew-hunting mobs, burning houses, montages of news shows, all that nasty stuff that followed the Two Week War. Or why we needed Tikva, in two easy lessons. In danger, we all like a bit of patriotic propaganda, right?” He was entirely changed, she realized, dressed in green and bronze. His tight-fitting sleeveless tunic flitted with leaf shapes, shimmering as if just under the surface. His tights were metallic bronze. His high-heeled shoes were emerald and made little sparks as he hustled her toward a pile of old clothes and a changing cubicle. “Put this on. You’re going to run for your life, so start getting into a terrified frame of mind.”

“Gadi, I have to pick up Ari. Can’t I take part another time? I won’t come across scared, I’ll come across irritated.”

“Nili won’t play either.” He swung around and shouted over his shoulder. “All right, Hannah, you’re the quarry. Okay, mob, get ready. Hannah, I want terror. Mob: fury, blood lust. You have your tapes. Plug in, grab that emotion, and we’ll start in five minutes.”

Shira started to slip past when he leaned close, demanding she look him in the eyes. “Is Nili crazy? I thought she’d get excited when she saw this happening, that she’d get caught up in it like everybody else. All I want is to make her rich and powerful, and she slams the door.”

“What’s powerful about becoming a public nervous system?
They poll the fans, and one week she gets barbed by Kaj Bolden, and the week after, it’s into a pit of rattlesnakes. After a few years, her senses start to dull, and then it’s goodbye.”

“Goodbye if you’re smart with money enough to shake the dust of earth from your feet and rocket up to Nuevas Vegas. To live beyond pollution, beyond contamination, with the best radiation seal ever built, life in the most secure and the most gorgeously decadent city ever dreamed into existence.”

“You want her to spend five years as a public body and brain so that she can retire up to a place where stars live to be safe from their fans?”

Gadi shrugged eloquently. “Look, nowadays in this gutted world, only fools want to live life. The rest of us want something sweeter. We can imagine far prettier than ruins and trash. You’d love the floating gardens—floating in space, Shira. Think of dancing in three dimensions instead of two. It’s people’s dreams we sell them back, what might have been.”

His crew were yelling at him that they were ready. She watched for a few minutes, then ran, already late to fetch Ari.

When she got home, Malkah, Avram and Yod were waiting for her in the courtyard. It was not, she saw at once, a social occasion. She put them off while she fed Ari and then settled him with a robot dog from Gadi.

Avram led off at once. “I’ve had a message from Y-S. They summon us to a conference and accuse us of harboring a murderer. Since we have extradition treaties with every major multi, they can surely get an order.”

“Me or Yod?”

“Yod.”

Her eyes met his. He was standing at attention, following their conversation, watching Shira carefully to see if she was angry. “They just want to disassemble him to learn how he’s made. Or to use him themselves.”

“Of course,” Avram said, grimacing. “But your damned fool excursion for your infant is costing us dearly. I have said we will conference only in the Net. The Net is safe ground, and no multi would dare attack there.”

“What do we get out of meeting with them at all?” Malkah asked. “Why not stonewall them—force them to make the next move?”

“We buy time, and we find out exactly what they want. We see if we can make a deal.” Avram paced, tangling one hand in his white mane.
“This time we tell the Council,” Malkah said. “Enough clandestine activity.”

“This is for us to settle. We did it, we must bear the consequences.” Avram frowned at her, his pale eyes narrowed and brooding.

“Everyone bears the consequences, I’m afraid,” Malkah said. “We must keep them informed. We have all acted irresponsibly. Even Yod.”

“That is a meaningless accusation. Yod is programmed to obey. The responsibility is ours.” Avram glanced coldly at Shira.

“And our responsibility is to let the Council know what we’re getting ourselves and everybody else into,” Malkah said in a tone of quiet authority. “I’m talking to them.” There was no more argument.

The council set up the meeting in the Net for Sunday. Shira found herself frightened. She did not actually think Y-S would dare to attack them in the public Net as opposed to the frequent attacks in private bases. Y-S had agreed to meet there only after protracted attempts to shift the meeting elsewhere. There had been just one assassination in the Net in Shira’s lifetime, and the response of all other users to that violation of mutual treaty space had prevented another. A joint expedition had obliterated the entire assassin enclave held responsible. No wildcard killings by madmen were possible, because only a mind in conscious control could project into the Net. Someone simply accessing the Net without projection could not harm anyone inside.

Therefore rationally she did not fear they would be attacked, but she feared what Y-S would demand, what offensive they were planning to mount. She could not escape the sense that her group was walking into a trap. This time Avram would enter with the rest of them, while Sam and a team from the Base monitored from outside. She would be with Yod, who was a master of cyberspace. Still, she was afraid.

She kissed Ari goodbye, trying to act and sound normal, even banal, as she left instructions for the day with Nili. Standing with her arms folded, clutching herself, she reminded Nili what time he must be fed and have his nap, assuming she might not be out yet. Fearing she might never be back. It was not right that both she and Malkah should go to this rendezvous; but each was required. Even Malkah was reticent. Her instructions to Nili concerned the kittens and the house.

Yod had not disappeared at five thirty-five to patrol the Base this morning. He was sitting in the courtyard, staring up into the long yellow leaves of the peach tree. In the courtyard, where no wind stirred, the sere leaves fell slowly, one by one. “I have grown fond of this place,” Yod said quietly, looking up into her face. He sat neatly in yoga fashion, on the grass under the tree, his back knife straight, a slight smile on his lips.

“I’ve always loved it. I used to be seized with a longing for this house when I was away at school, when I was in the Y-S enclave.”

“I never understood homesickness, but now I begin to. If you’ve been happy in a place, it seems unique. Radiant.” He caught a leaf as it drifted down and looked at it on his palm.

“It’s time to go,” Malkah said. “Yod, I’m shocked. You’re procrastinating. You continue to show the capacity for generating new types of behavior never foreseen by Avram or by me.”

He still did not stand, but he smiled at Malkah. “Such as?”

“You were given a capacity for sexual performance, but I’m sure I never imagined you would create yourself a family.”

“Given loneliness, a family is a rational construct for any conscious being.” Finally he rose. “However, I don’t fear this meeting. Rather I can’t help but look forward to confronting our enemies. Cyberspace, the interior of the great AI minds, is my natural environment. There I have an advantage over humans, no matter how enhanced. It could be … entertaining.”

Little rituals of entering the Net or the Base. Even though only the plugs of the first generation had used the ears—plugs that none but Avram and Malkah of those present had ever seen—Shira did not know a single woman or man who did not remove earrings when sitting down to project into deep access. Some people also removed rings. Shira wore no jewelry this morning, but Malkah always wore at least studs in her ears. She insisted that her lobes closed up in a week if she forgot. Now Malkah removed the two small garnets and placed them like red eyes before her. She washed her hands together in her lap, another gesture Shira had often noticed in others about to connect.

Shira herself always sat very still before connecting. She had been taught the common disciplines to quiet her mind before projection, as had every child in Tikva, but she wondered how many, like herself, still consciously sought that stage of alert calm and held it a moment before connecting. She had been away at college before she had stopped doing the full set of breathing exercises and meditation techniques from kabbalistic
tradition she had been taught at age six. Perhaps she had continued them long after she had outgrown the need simply because they felt good.

Inside the Base, she headed for the door to the Net, passed through and waited for her group. Yod and Malkah were already there, Yod looking as he always did, while Malkah looked twenty years younger. Then Avram bounded through the doors. He, too, looked more youthful than outside, and furthermore he was six centimeters taller. He saw himself as more imposing than he had appeared to Shira since she was a little girl. She wondered if her own appearance seemed as incongruous to the others. She had no idea what she projected; for a moment her concentration wavered, and she felt that sharp sense of nausea that a failure of projection produced. She caught herself at once, hoping none of the others had observed. It was rank amateurism to waver in deep projection, as well as dangerous. In projection, one must use what in kabbalah was called the adult mind, not the child mind: the mind that minded itself carefully and in full clear concentration.