Body of Glass (48 page)

“Now that the air’s cleared out, try this.” He took her wrist and swabbed it. Then he tilted his head to look shrewdly at her. We’re not too jolly this afternoon either, are we, Ugi?”

“I’m rancid with everybody, thank you.”

“Then this is the place to come, darling. I’m the great alternative. Here I’ve been practically in storage waiting for your discontent to uncurl itself, grow and ripen at last.” He sketched luscious shapes in the air.

She glared. “You aren’t waiting for anyone. You’re thoroughly involved with a woman you can barely keep up with.”

“She doesn’t think I’m important,” Gadi said with real indignation. “All those fans creaming over my boots, and she thinks I’m a mildly amusing gigolo.”

Shira laughed. It felt good, a little of her tension discharged. She drew a deep breath. “By the way, slow down on the toys. You’re burying Ari. Let him break a few before you order more.”

“I never had enough toys as a child. What I always needed was some spoiling. A spoiled child is an indulged child, and an indulged child is what we should all be. Especially once we grow up.”

“Gadi, until the time your mother got sick, you were indulged. Things got bad when she couldn’t carry her end, and after a year or so, it was hard for her even to respond to you. That was the grim part. Then you had me.”

“Let’s have high tea. Look at the goodies Mala Tuni sent me. Everybody pities me, so they keep me supplied. Taste this … I’ve managed to never be without women since. Women are necessary. Necessary.”

She muttered, “Any woman … What is that? Delicious.”

“I’m quite fussy, Ugi. You should know that. It’s a cherry.”

She had read about them but never had one. He had a whole pile of the blackish-red fruit in a bowl. “In high school, you’d fuck anything with tits.”

“I was young and undiscriminating. Now I want only the best. Nili is most satisfactory. She has real talent and a body that if I could get it on stimmie would stop the show cold. She can bend metal with her hands. She can jump eight feet straight up. I could get her jobs, Ugi, I really could. A bit of cutting and pasting to give her the look of the year ―”

“I don’t doubt you. But Nili isn’t interested, is she?”

“She doesn’t even want to enter stimmies.” Gadi rose, started pacing. A hologram of a purple furry flying marmoset came to his shoulder, perched. “I’ve put on the electrodes fifty times. She enjoys it for maybe ten minutes. Then she gets bored. She says it isn’t real. I say of course it’s not: it’s more real than real. Piglet, you’ve finished the cherries!” He poured tea from a pot shaped like a dolphin’s head.

“They were great. But, Gadi, why should she want to enter some starlet’s sensory responses? She probably sees better, hears better, is certainly smarter, tougher, faster, stronger. She’s a superior human.”

“In some ways, Shira, in some ways. She’s not a genius like Avram. She’s bright, but aren’t we all?” He made a gesture, and the hologram of the purple creature flew off into a hologram of a scarlet tree.

“Is she really swimming in this storm? By herself in the ocean? Organ pirates are around — I know for a fact.”

Gadi shrugged. “She’s off at some meet with your crazy fat mother or some ape from Lazarus. She wouldn’t tell me. When I asked her where she was going, she said ‘swimming.’ She does as she pleases and expects me to wait around holding the bag.”

“Sounds exactly like what you need. No wonder you’re hooked.”

He stuck out his tongue at her and for a moment, in spite of all the surgery and enhancement, he looked like the fifteen-year-old seared into her memory. Her face must have revealed something, for he moved across the room suddenly, half pounce and half glide, and settled himself on the velvet couch beside her. “Look what I have.” From his inner pocket he drew a spike.

It contained everything needed for one interactive fantasy, centred on the nervous system of the user. Spikes relied on a combination of electronic imagery, direct sensory stimulation and drugs. She looked at the spike and shuddered. “You still play with those dangerous things?”

“This is the spike I had created. It cost me a hundred K credits, but it’s worth every penny.” He patted the spike gently against her arm. We’re in here. I dare you, Shira. I dare you to remember us as we were. I dare you to feel what we felt.”

She got up and stalked across the room. “Gadi, I’m scared. Y-S is going to attack us. They could destroy the town.”

“Then they wouldn’t get what they want, would they? Pointless. No, they have to scare you into giving them my plastic brother.”

“I’m frightened. All I can think of is, I have Ari back and I just want to live my life here. I just want to be quiet. I don’t want to go into the past we had. I don’t want anything spectacular. I just want to live with my son, with my family, and watch the peaches ripen and my son grow.”

“He’s that important to you.” Gadi was staring at her. “I’ve never had the urge to breed, myself. I like creating worlds. Kids are too uncertain. I see with Avram how few of us turn out the way we’re supposed to. How much pleasure did I ever afford him? It’s always been war. Why start a new one?”

“I had Ari for the worst of reasons, to glue the cracked plate of my marriage. But I’d sacrifice anything to him.” And I have, she thought.

“You say that like a lioness yourself. Fierce as Nili.” He raised an eyebrow, surveying her. “This is a new side of you, Ugi. Who would have expected maternity to give you fangs and claws?”

“Believe it, Gadi. I’m not so gentle and long-suffering these days.”

He sighed, and when he opened his hand again the spike was gone. There was a little of the magician in him. “Once I was the focus of that passion, too callow to value it. Now it’s wasted on a child and a peripatetic computer. Nili’s never going to focus on me that way. I wonder if she’s that way with her own kid ―”

She plunked herself down, staring. “Nili’s not a mother.”

“Sure she is. She told me she has a daughter.”

“She must have been speaking metaphorically, Gadi. Impossible.”

“Here we are, two discontents, like two separated parentheses waiting to be joined into a perfect circle.” His arm slid round her waist, drawing her towards him.

She hopped up to pace again. “Gadi, do you feel guilty about that young girl in Azerbaijan?”

He looked genuinely surprised. ―Why should I? You don’t understand what those little stimmie hawks are like. They come on like a wall of fire. They chase you up trees and stairways. They swarm over your bed like locusts.”

“You don’t feel you were the aggressor?”

“Ugi, I don’t think I’ve seduced anybody since you. I respond to someone attractive wanting me. I am the seduced. I like to be loved.”

“Have you ever been violent with anyone? Even, say, in sex play?”

“That’s not my flavour, Ugi. I like it nice and sweet and as pretty as it can be. Life is full of nastiness.” He motioned at the elaborate basket from which he had just pulled a plum cake. “It’s true that I’m Mala’s favourite designer, but she keeps sending me goodies because she trusts me and misses me. You know, she’s vulnerable and she suffers a lot. She’s that way in stimmies, and she’s that way in what passes for real life. She was caught in a sex vise with Limbic, who directed four of her stims. He’s a sadistic bastard. The last time he directed her, we were on Nuevas Vegas, and on a satellite it’s hard to get away from anyone. They had a terminal fight ― I won’t go into the gory dets ― but she came to me. Essentially she moved into my room for the rest of the time on Vegas. She was weeping convulsively every night. We slept in that bed for three weeks, and I never gave her more than a brotherly kiss.”

“She’s very beautiful, Gadi.”

“Just so. But I’m not her type, because I don’t give pain. So she has written into all her contracts that I design the virons.”

“When you were a child, you hated when the other boys made you fight.” She remembered how when they had played pirates, Gadi insisted nobody die. “But, how can you be so attracted to Nili?” What was impressing itself upon her, so strongly that she sat down on a stool like a velvet rock, was that she had for twelve years assumed a position of moral superiority to Gadi that she suddenly found dubious. She was far more violent than Gadi, far more willing to get what she wanted by any means.

“Oh, Shira, you take her athletics too seriously. She comes from a coffee klatch of Jewish mamas. Don’t buy that martial arts prancing at face value. Every johnny in action stimmies can look like an assassin on tape. We’re all quite fierce in the mirror — but if we see a mouse, we scream and call security.”

She wasn’t about to tell Gadi that he was fooling himself, that she had seen Nili in action outside the Cybernaut enclave. He needed to believe Nili was only playing tough. “Gadi, I’m going. But we had a real conversation for once, and I enjoyed it. In some ways you’re a better person than I am.”

He rose and walked to the door with her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t say that! My reputation!” He called after her: “You’ll see. I’m engaged in making trouble for my old man. I’m the same bastard, I am!”

It was not quite time to pick up Ari, but she could stroll through the streets of her town while the storm beat on the wrap. She wondered if she would have been tempted by the spike when she first arrived here, feeling broken. Simply being back here had begun to heal her at once: here on the shores of the ravaged poisoned sea slowly cleansing itself of human waste, here people tried to live with minimal damage, making their choices together.

Zipporah was out in the street with a robot paver. Must be her day of town work. Chickens scratched under trees just beginning to colour. In the yards, tomatoes red as cartoon hearts swelled in the afternoon heat. She drifted among what was left in the world of freedom and choice. She had chosen this for Ari. One of Gadi’s gang skated past, carrying a large solar battery to install someplace. A smell of smoked fish wafted from the cure house. On the Commons a softball game was going on, while another group practised with the razor-sharp wires they must have got recently from Lazarus and company; a month before, that would never have been permitted. Life in wartime.

By now Malkah would have communicated with Yod. Shira would come home to their distressed observant faces. Good, let them worry a bit. She could not help pardoning them, because they had saved her life. Yod had offered her a relationship that yielded far more pleasure and far more sense of control than she could ever experience with Gadi; then he had returned her son to her. Malkah had given her not only her home but Yod himself. They were hers, and she loved them.

Time to pick up Ari. Tova was coming towards her with her toddler, Ethan, hanging on one arm, as she tugged her five-year-old, Liz, all three engaged at top decibels in an argument about supper and cookies.

Shira deserved to be punished because of Josh. She had known the danger. Yod had simply carried out his programming. Once she had been as truly gentle as Gadi still was; but no more. She felt more comfortable when she thought of him than she ever had. She had to admit as she entered the courtyard of the children’s centre that Malkah and Yod had more offended her sense of propriety and aesthetics than her moral scruples. She did not seriously doubt their loyalty to her, and she had not begun paying for the death of Josh. None the less she would be glad to see Malkah and Yod around the table with Ari, in his place at last, her weird but fulfilling family.

forty-one

Shira

Instead Nili was slumped in a chair with her long legs sprawled, wearing dirty fatigues, her red hair plastered down with sweat. She was drinking glass after glass of water while telling Malkah a story. When Shira leaned forward to listen, Nili saw her and waved. “Come join us.”

“Did you just get back?” Shira called as she descended. She had put Ari to bed and was looking forward to seeing Yod once he got off duty. He was patrolling the Base twelve hours a day and then guarding the perimeter of Tikva one eight-hour shift. That left him only four hours in between. Shortly after her return with Ari, Avram had announced that her work with Yod was finished. Yod was now able to carry out his tasks and needed no more coaching. Immediately the Base collective requested she join them.

It was startling how much more boldly she proceeded now. Discovering that her work was actually highly original and that only Y-S corporate politics had kept her pinned in position, she found herself taking her own ideas far more seriously. She had a brisk confidence that expressed itself in a new level of mastery. She was after all the granddaughter of one of the pioneers of the chimeras that now were used to obfuscate all vital bases, the daughter of one of the most successful data pirates of the era. The chimeras for Cybernaut were demanding, but she enjoyed the work as she had not since her early days at Y-S. Still, she was lonely for Yod.

Missing him was no different than missing any other person. She had grown used to spending most of her waking hours with him. Avram was sure that Y-S was about to attack. He demanded that Yod be almost everywhere at once to protect the town. Yod himself wanted to be with her more now, not less, while her own hours were far less flexible since she was working on the Base and taking care of Ari. Their time together was snatched, brief, compacted.

Nili was describing a journey with Leesha, the right-hand woman of Lazarus, from turf to turf. Out of the welter of drug and slash gangs, a network was springing up of those who wanted to organize the Glop into more than meat territories. They could parley because the argot was common and most people growing up there spoke at least English, Spanish and something else ― Vietnamese, Russian, Chinese, whatever. Nobody could function with just one lingo. Even kids who couldn’t read or write could bargain with you in six languages for their sexual services.

“One advantage that machine of yours has over me, and one of the only ones, is that he can plug in a language and be speaking it the next day. I have to learn it like everybody else.” Nili was sipping her water as if it were a fine wine. In the Glop she had been drinking reprocessed water, the same stuff that had been through the population thirty times already. Here they still had a bit of an aquifer as well as rain-catchers. “But plugging in, I learn quicker. I grew up quadrilingual, so I pick up fast.”

“Hebrew, Arabic, English and what? Yiddish?” Malkah asked.

“Russian. We had some Russian-born scientists who’d emigrated just before the Two Week War. You hear the weirdest hybrid languages in the Glop, not just Spanglish, but Chino-English, Mung-Japanese, Turko-Spanish. I don’t know what’ll happen to language in the end, but it sure is cooking in there.”

Nili saw the Glop differently than Shira always had. Shira realized she had been trained automatically by her culture, especially by corporate culture, to treat the Glop as an unimportant place where nothing consequential happened. Nothing that mattered to the real, the significant, people could originate there. But Nili turned to the New Gangs for answers. In people living off the garbage of the preceding century, Nili found much to study and admire. Shira would have to mull it over. Gadi, too, looked to the Glop, for styles, for music, for what he called heat.

“You saw Riva?” Malkah asked her. “She’s really all right?”

“I didn’t see her this trip, but I hear she’s fine. You guys are the heroes of the moment, by the way, for the way you’re taking on Y-S.”

“Great,” Shira said. “They can all dance at our funeral.” Sooner or later in talking with Nili, Shira began speculating about what went on between Nili and Gadi. Nili was overwhelmingly physical, reeking, streaked with dirt, a fresh burn on her arm just showing under the pushed-up sleeves, covered with a translucent web of healer to regrow skin. How could Shira be anywhere near her loud physical presence without wondering? Shira imagined that Nili must pick up Gadi like a macho man in the old romances and carry him off. She could see Nili accidentally breaking Gadi’s arm simply by squeezing too hard. Yet Nili did not look like a man. She was a busty woman, with broad hips and a tight waist.

“Nili,” she said suddenly. “Can you bear children?”

Nili blinked in surprise. “Sure. We don’t usually do it quite that way — that is, we go in for implants after genetic altering and all that funny lab stuff first. But if I want to get pregnant, I can.”

“How do you know? It’s a problem for women most everyplace.”

“I’ve borne a daughter already,” Nili said.

So Gadi was right. She had not believed him. “Is she like you?”

“She’s only six.” Nili grinned. “She has red hair like me, but brown eyes. And my dark skin. And my temper. And my strength.”

“How can you leave her for months on end?”

“The little ones are raised by several mothers. I was chosen for this quest. I’m the best equipped. But I miss her. Every day three or four times I sit and meditate on her image, but I know it’s out of date.” Nili shrugged. We all have to pay for our choices and our situation. Don’t you?”

She was fascinated by the idea of Nili as a mother. It must be as painful for Nili to be away from her daughter as separation from Ari had been for Shira. Where was Yod? She called up time on her cornea. Damn it. It was eight. At ten he had to report for guard duty. What was holding him up? The house had informed her that Yod would not be there for supper, but no message had come through since. Because the house disapproved of him so strongly she wondered sometimes if an occasional message did not get lost. “House, any communications from Yod?”

“That machine has not been in contact with me since eighteen hundred four point fifteen hours.”

“Give me any message at once, please.”

“Tomorrow I’ll get back to training your people again.” Nili cracked her knuckles sensually. “I’m enjoying it, in a sadistic way. Yet I don’t think you’ll be invaded. It would break the rules you all operate under. Assassins seem likelier.”

“Taking us out individually as warning?” Malkah shrugged. “Everybody in town is speculating when and how the next attack will come. I noticed even the kids playing war with Y-S. We’re not panicked, but we’re all on edge.”

“Nili, can I see the holo of your daughter?”

Without a word, Nili went to fetch it. She came back with it sitting on her palm, her gaze fixed on it. She passed it carefully to Shira. “They call her Varuda.”

“She is like a rose. I’d love to have a daughter too,” Shira said. She remembered that when she had learned the baby she was carrying was male, she had felt a pang of betrayal, because she had expected to birth a daughter, as Riva and Malkah had. But Ari had vanquished that wish at once. Nili’s daughter did look something like her already, but she had a quirky crooked smile that charmed Shira, one incisor missing.

Perhaps five minutes later, the house announced, “That machine is approaching along the street. Should I admit it?”

“House, I’ve told you twenty times, let Yod in whenever he comes,” Malkah said in a voice of silky reproof. “Is your memory malfunctioning?”

“I obey,” the house said as if glumly.

“I wanted an intelligent house,” Malkah said to Nili, “but sometimes I think I overdid it. Are you listening, house? I think house doesn’t have enough to occupy all that intelligence. If it doesn’t mind its manners, I’ll set it to generating Fermat numbers for the next century.”

The house made a rude noise. A moment later Yod came in, greeted everyone with his customary politeness, then added, “Something abnormal happened just now. Instead of waiting for me to identify myself, as it should, the house opened the door and kept it swinging back and forth all the while I was walking along the block.”

“Come upstairs,” Shira said. We have to talk.”

“There’s something I must tell everyone first… Avram is going before the Council to explain to them what I am.” The Council was composed of five adults drawn by lot, plus the three Base Overseers ― Malkah, Avram and Sam Rossi — and the head of security.

“After all this secrecy? Why?” Shira was immediately frightened. Also she could not help imagining the gossip and even ridicule that would focus on her when everyone learned that her lover was a machine.

“I wish he had been willing to be open from the beginning.” Malkah rose. She paced, tossing her head with that gesture she used when she was annoyed, as if her hair were in her eyes. It made Shira remember when Malkah had worn her hair long and loose, floating like a satin cape ― when Shira was little. “Here we are sitting on the Council, and we’re going to confess we’ve been lying for two years. It’s going to cause a storm.”

Yod stood still as a stone beside the peach tree. His head hung forward, only his dark hair visible. He looked frankly miserable. Shira had been thinking about ridicule and scandal, Malkah was worrying about losing credibility with her confreres, but Yod would be on trial. “What will this mean for you?”

“I don’t know,” he said frankly, “but I worry about how people will respond to me now.”

Nili rose. I’m going to shower. But it does seem strange to me that after going to such lengths to conceal your nature, he’s going to announce it to the entire town.”

Yod turned his palms up, giving them all a sad little smile. “Gadi went to the Council, telling them I’m not being paid. Since I’m to be discussed, Avram feels the time has come to explain what I am. He believes it his duty to explain the danger. Since we now know Y-S’s interest is related to Avram’s work and hence to myself, he believes my nature can no longer be concealed….”

Malkah said. “We have a complaint about an exploited worker on the agenda next Monday. Is that you?”

He nodded. “Me.”

Malkah sank into her chair. “Ah … I must think. I must work out a plan of attack for myself.”

“Use me as a sounding board,” Nili said as she strode upstairs two steps at a time. “I have immense experience in arguing about experiments with collectives. I think I’ve spent half my life in meetings. At home we’re born into a meeting and our funerals are meetings.”

“Furthermore” ― Yod resumed his exposition ― “several people noticed that I patrol the Base during the day and the perimeter at night. They put in a complaint of overwork on my behalf.”

“So you’re already the subject of gossip and astonishment,” Malkah said.

Shira felt overwhelmed, under attack. She moved to stand before Yod, taking his hand. He reacted at once by starting to move towards the stairway. “I must leave soon for my night patrol.”

Malkah waved them on. “Go on upstairs. I have to think.”

When Shira closed the door of her room, she burst out, “I wish I could shut out the whole world just like that! Now I’m the one who sounds like a spoiled adolescent. But I’m emotionally exhausted. I just wish we could have a little quiet time together.”

He came at once to her and held her against him tightly. “I was beginning to understand a little what humans mean by happiness. I had never been happy. I had been only fully engaged or bored. I had been puzzled. I had been frightened. I had been angry.” He was grasping her so tightly she could not draw a deep breath, but she wanted to be as close as possible. Only that felt safe. “But I had never been happy until we came back here with Ari and you told him I was his stepfather. Then I knew you truly accept me into your life.”

She felt a little guilty, because she had suffered for two days figuring what to say to Ari, but something had to be said. Malkah was Grandma. House was House. House was smarter, more personal than any house he had met, but he was a very little boy and would not think twice about House. He was a privileged child who always had a house to speak to: Turn on the lights. Close the window. Sing to me. But how to introduce Yod? Then she had taken a blind leap forward into what she prayed would be a future. This is your stepfather. Let Ari gradually observe the nature of Yod as time passed. Let him grow up thinking men were rational, benign, gentle, infinitely patient and vastly intelligent and strong. Why should he need to know that Yod was also a weapon? Yod would never use violence against Ari, of that she was sure.

Yod had always been sensitive as a lover, beyond competence into finesse, but tonight as they made love in her bed, for the first time she felt in him something like passion. He was desperately aware of the brevity of their time together. He was driven not only by his immense desire to please but by a new need within him to be secure in his possession. He was hungry for proof of their connection.

“I must leave you so quickly, I want everything at once,” he said when they lay still. “I want to keep making love and I want to be talking. I’ve always missed you during the time we aren’t together, but we were together at least nine hours every day.”

“Maybe the Council meeting will work out in our favour. I’ll go, of course.”

“You aren’t ashamed?”

“I’m afraid. But I’m hoping they’ll decide that Avram can’t make you work twenty hours a day.”

“Perhaps they’ll judge he can do anything he likes with me, since he made me … It isn’t that I can’t replay any of our times together in my mind, but it isn’t enough. Now, when I want more than ever to be with you and I want to be part of our son’s life, I am forbidden.”

She still flinched when he said ‘our son’, but she kept it within. She was ashamed of that meanness. He had given her Ari as truly as Josh had. Josh whom Yod had killed. “I miss you also. When Nili leaves, I think you should move in. Malkah would be pleased.”

“I’d like that, Shira. I don’t need a whole room. I don’t need a bed. We can make love in your bed as we do now. I need only a closet and somewhere to put my terminal and equipment. Has Nili said when she’s leaving?”