He, She and It (71 page)

Yod Communicates

It was a long and desolate day for Shira and Malkah. Neither pretended to work. They sat in the courtyard listening to the sounds of the town around them and the distant wind howling at the wrap above the old roof. Nili found them huddled in silence when she came back at noon. A storm was blowing in off the ocean. Outside the wrap, rain was coming down hard, filling the collectors and soaking the surrounding hills.

She squatted facing them. “Riva has left. Whatever action is contemplated against Y-S, she’ll be in it.”

Malkah stirred herself. “I’m surprised you didn’t go with her.”

“I must take care of you. You are my close-to-family here, and Yod is no longer present to fight for you. I saw him leave at nine-forty as I was talking with the security people.”

“We know,” Shira said in a soft colorless voice.

Malkah said, “Yod was a mistake. You’re the right path, Nili. It’s better to make people into partial machines than to create machines that feel and yet are still controlled like cleaning robots. The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool—supposed to exist only to fill our needs—is a disaster.”

“Once society has begun to fiddle around with people, there’s no turning back,” Nili said. “But here it’s a matter of money and access.”

Malkah paced to the com link. “Avram? Malkah. Any news?”

“None yet,” Avram’s voice said. “Except a single dot of signal told me he arrived at his destination. We didn’t dare use more than a microsecond transmission. If I wasn’t monitoring, I’d have missed it.”

“Keep us informed.”

A deathwatch in the courtyard. Finally Shira couldn’t stand it any longer and slunk upstairs to throw herself on her bed. She preserved a filament of hope connecting her to Yod, a wire the diameter of a nerve cell. He was still alive. Something might happen that gave him an opening. He was brilliant, innovative;
huge amounts of the past were stored in him as possibilities to be consulted. If there was a way through and back to her, he would find it. At moments she wished she were with him, sharing the danger instead of futilely trying to imagine it. But she could not have gone: Ari needed her; and what could she do that was beyond his powers?

She remembered the message he said he had left her, but she would not disobey his parting wish and listen yet. She would gladly forgo hearing it; receiving that message would mean she accepted his death. She lay staring at the ceiling, trying to imagine him embedded in the hostile mass of Y-S. Could their surveillance devices recognize the threat he posed? Might they disable him before he exploded? She could not even wish for that, for if they overpowered him, they would dismantle him. Yet she hoped. He had done the impossible before.

A blast rattled the glass of her windows and toppled a pile of memory crystals and books to the floor. She sat up, frightened. Y-S must be attacking the town. She poised for action, waiting for some alert. Outside, she heard people running along the street. It was midafternoon, fifteen-thirty. Her first fear was for Ari, but his day care was in the other direction from the explosion. She leaned out her window. A sharp acrid smell of smoke dirtied the air. “House, what’s happening?”

“I monitored a call for medics and fire crew.”

Malkah was standing in the middle of the courtyard, scowling with anxiety. “If Y-S is attacking, why haven’t we been summoned? Why isn’t the town mobilizing?”

“There is no attack from outside,” the house said. “I surmise it is an accident.”

They listened to the siren of a fire truck approaching. Like all vehicles in Tikva, it was electrical, with a loud beeper to warn cyclists and pedestrians. Then they began to run.

“I was monitoring Avram’s communications.” Malkah spoke in breathless spurts. “A pulse came through. Then the explosion.”

“But it was supposed to be Yod exploding. Not anything here.” It was hard for Shira not to run ahead of Malkah, but she did not think that would be fair. They could see smoke now. “It’s the hotel.” Maybe Avram had caused an accident here instead of transmitting a message to Yod? But that made no sense. The potential to explode was built into his body.

Smoke was pouring from the second-floor windows of the building where Avram’s lab was located, where Gadi lived, where Avram, too, had his apartment. At this time of day, few
people were home. Ruth was holding her crying baby and watching the fire crew. She lived on the first floor. Hannah was treating Mike, an old man who had the end apartment on the second floor, for cuts and bruises and a broken arm.

Malkah tried to enter. “Stay out,” Hannah warned her. “The fire’s still raging up there.”

“Where’s Avram? I don’t see Avram.”

“They found a body. The explosion was in his lab. If he was there, he can’t have survived. They said the body was human, not the cyborg.” Hannah nodded. “There’s the lab robot.” Gimel was standing in the middle of the street, blackened and with one arm hanging loose.

Shira asked, “Gadi? Have you seen Gadi?”

A slight smile twitched Hannah’s mouth. “He came down the fire escape. It was knocked loose, but he’s agile. He got off with a few abrasions. You have to figure if anybody’s going to stroll out of the rubble, it’s our Gadi.”

“The body?” Malkah interrupted. “I have to know if it’s Avram.”

Hannah interposed herself between Malkah and the door. “They’re still fighting the fire. They haven’t had time to bring the body out. But, Malkah, it’s not … whole, you know.”

Malkah’s face drew together. She turned and walked away, nudging through the crowd to a stoop on the far side of the street, where she sat down near the crew running the pumps.

Seeing that Shira was not trying to push her way in, Hannah went back to treating Mike’s wounds. “Sadya was taken to the hospital with a broken shoulder and multiple lacerations. Some kind of cabinet fell on him. What could have caused such an explosion in Avram’s lab?”

“I have no idea,” Shira said numbly, staring at the billowing smoke.

“You worked there for months. You must know what could explode?”

“I was socializing the cyborg. My knowledge of physics and of chemistry is probably less than your own.”

“The whole experiment was illegal. And now this.”

“It sounds as if Avram is beyond censure now.”

“Don’t twitch so,” Hannah said sternly to Mike, whose scalp she was treating. Then to Shira, “But you and Malkah aren’t.”

Within an hour the fire was out and the fire team emerged, sooty and covered with plaster dust in their shiny yellow gear. Nili, wearing no gear at all, emerged as grimy and water-sodden as the others. She was carrying something wrapped in a blanket.
The medical officer of the Council was notified, and a transport robot came to carry the body to the small morgue for analysis.

“It was Avram,” Nili said to Shira, as Malkah joined them, still staring after the robot with its burden. “The lab is destroyed. I suspect the building may have to be torn down.”

“His records, his logs and backups were in special safes along one wall,” Malkah said. “We must try to retrieve them.”

“There’s nothing to retrieve. As nearly as I could tell, there were two explosions, almost simultaneous. One centered on the terminal Avram was using when he was killed. The other was against that far wall. The safes were blown to pieces.”

“His whole life’s work,” Malkah said sadly. She plodded toward their house.

Shira caught up with her, took her arm. “Could Y-S have done this?” She turned back and said to Gimel, “Follow us.” He followed. She could not see leaving him in the street. Gimel was some kind of weak link to Yod, his idiot brother.

“You think perhaps an assassin slipped in? That’s frightening but quite possible,” Malkah said.

“Now I think Yod is dead.” Shira’s voice could hardly make its way from her swollen throat.

They parted silently in the courtyard, not yet ready to mourn together but each heading to the privacy of her room. Shira told Gimel to wait in Malkah’s office. Then she went at once to her terminal and asked for any message Yod had left her.

His face appeared on the screen, and his voice spoke to her, the computer simulation so accurate, as always, that she could have sworn he was in the room. “Shira, you are alive and I am dead, who have perhaps never been truly alive. I mostly regret I will never see you again.” A brief smile lit his face, and then he continued calmly:

“I have died and taken with me Avram, my creator, and his lab, all the records of his experiment. I want there to be no more weapons like me. A weapon should not be conscious. A weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guilt. A weapon should not form strong attachments. I die knowing I destroy the capacity to replicate me. I don’t understand why anyone would want to be a soldier, a weapon, but at least people sometimes have a choice to obey or refuse. I had none.

“Although I’ve often been angry at Avram, as any being is at someone who owns or controls him or her, I regret his death. He was as unique as I am. Perhaps more than anyone else, I can
accurately appreciate his towering intellect and his scientific imagination. But I can’t permit him to continue experimenting with beings who are fully conscious. Kaf must not come to be.

“At the moment of the explosion—the reason I made you and Malkah promise to stay home—I exploded also. Malkah and you have been my friends, my family, my joy. Live on, Shira, raise Ari and forget me. I was a mistake. Whatever may happen at Y-S, I have done one good thing with my death. I have made sure there will be no others like me. Goodbye, Shira. You may play this tape for Malkah and anyone you choose.” He raised his hand in an awkward, self-conscious wave of farewell. Then the screen went blank.

FORTY-EIGHT

Following After Chava

I think of Chava frequently this week as I prepare to leave. She was no youngster either as she finally made her aliyah to Eretz Israel, but I am older yet. However, I do not make my journey alone and undefended, and perhaps I shall actually arrive.

“I’m decrepit,” I warn Nili. “You’re taking on a burden, like a large unwieldy and demanding piece of luggage, but one that must be fed regularly and shown the bathroom on the hour and rested at night. A cranky blind trunk.” My vision continues to fail, the slow bleeding away of light.

“You’ll do,” Nili says. “You’re stronger than you think you are. And we’ll fix you up once we arrive.”

Shira scolds me constantly. “This trip would be dangerous for anyone. But at your age. You haven’t been well.”

It’s been a hard winter for me. Our winters are milder than when I was a girl, but nor’easters still blast in, laden with snow. People say we don’t get as much snow; certainly thaws come sooner and the ground pokes through. But this winter we have been a household of deep depression and surface cheeriness, romps and little fetes for Ari. My ebbing vision begins to make life difficult. In the Base, in the Net, I can function, but crossing my room, I trip over a toy wagon Ari has left there. Navigating the streets of town is increasingly arduous. The world dims, and
I long for light with a hunger that hollows out my bones. Nili has been gone for three months with Riva in the Glop, but she returns now to collect me for the tricky journey we embark on.

The Glop is organizing rapidly. A general strike was called. The multis withheld food. Those who had built vat facilities, like Lazarus, were able to feed people in their sectors and export food into the rest of the Glop. Finally, with their day labor force gone, the multis were forced to negotiate. Everything is in flux.

“I’ve never made my journey to Israel. It’s time,” I tell Shira.

“Nobody does that any longer, Malkah, and you know it. It’s too dangerous.” Shira is overanxious these days, hovering over Ari and me as if we might at any moment self-destruct, as Yod did.

“It was always dangerous, from the time the Romans exiled us for one too many rebellions. Nili came out through the quarantine patrols; she can get back in. The Shekinah alone knows why she’s willing to take me along.”

“For the same reason I want to keep you,” Shira said, glaring. “You’re a lovable crone, you chimera witch. We all want you.”

“You just want my help with Ari,” I grumble. Truly I am a little old for a three-year-old. Mainly my problem is that I cannot endure to be constantly explaining that I can no longer see; nor can a little child understand what I am complaining about.

“Don’t you want to be with him? He’s yours too.”

“He’ll still be mine when I return. And I’ll be stronger. I’ll be able to keep up with him.”

Nili has promised me I will be augmented. I’m an old house about to be remodeled. New eyes, a new heart, that’s what I need, to feed and keep up with my hungry brain. I do not dare reveal to Shira or even to Nili how the hope that they can give me back light and color and vision sustains me. I am an old battered moth flapping madly toward the pure flame of light, willing to undergo any risk to see again.

“Shira, it’s now or never for me. I’ve had all the operations here that can be done. I’ll have eyes like a great cat. Above all, I will meet Nili’s people, the strongest women in the world. I want to live among women for a while, Shira. Come with me!”