Body of Glass (53 page)

In the dark room under the roof, littered with the pages and pages of worn-out siddurs, Judah goes apart from the three others to daven. He must concentrate. He must make ready. He must be sure. He is sure. What he has done, he must undo. For well or ill, he has brought something strange into the world, and he must remove it. Joseph has fulfilled his function. What he wants now he cannot have, for he is not a man, not a human being, not even an animal. He was not born and will not die, but the light and the breath will pass out of him, and he will be clay again. The others wait while Judah makes ready. To unmake a golem is a lesser task than to create one.

“Lie down, Joseph,” Judah says gently.

“Why?” Joseph remains standing, hunched forward. “What are you going to do? Why are we up here?”

“Joseph, lie down!” The Maharal’s voice could crack glass.

Joseph slowly sits on the floor. He does not lie as bidden. “What are you going to do to me?” He stares at the Maharal, then at each of the men in turn, trying to read their eyes. Yakov cannot look him in the eyes. Itzak, too, breaks his gaze and looks away. Only the Maharal looks at him — implacable, unflinching.

“Joseph, lie down.” The Maharal’s voice is quiet but not soft. It is hard and slick and dark. It scares Joseph.

Joseph folds his arms in protest. “What are you going to do to me? I haven’t done anything bad. I carried out what you wanted. I did it all.”

“Joseph, you have fulfilled your function. Now you can return to your previous existence. Whatever you are really, you can once again become.” The Maharal extends his arms and begins to chant.

“No! I want to live. I want to be a man!” Joseph tries to rise, but he cannot. The Maharal dances around and around him like a strange black crane stepping in the darkness, bearing the Torah. Inside the circle the Maharal has drawn, Joseph thrashes but cannot move. Slowly he slides back, until he is lying on the floor. He lies with his eyes open. His lips keep saying, “No, no,” chanting the refusal. He looks again at each of them. “Don’t let him do this to me! I deserve to live!” He struggles and struggles to sit up. His tremendous strength has left him. He is caught like Samson in Delilah’s hair; he is bound like the shorn Samson. “I fought for you! I saved you! I am a man too, I have my life as you have yours. My life is sweet to me.”

The Maharal goes on chanting, all the gates of the holy name and the alphabet running backwards now, a wheel of sound spinning around Joseph, tu tu tu tu tu, toh toh toh toh toh, from the end of the alphabet backward spiralling.

Now Joseph can no longer speak, but still his lips form the words. “No! No!” he mouths at them. His gaze will not leave them. His eyes will not stop pleading. Yakov feels sick, and his own eyes burn with pity.

“You must go backward, in the reverse order,” Judah tells Yakov and Itzak. The syllables they chanted three months before, they now must reverse. They must go backward and speak backward. Gradually Joseph’s mouth stops moving. His lips fall slack. His eyes glaze over. His head lolls. His features begin to blur. His hair begins to sink into his scalp. His nails recede. He looks as if he is melting. Gradually his face becomes smooth as a rock that has lain on a river bottom. His fingers become one lump. But there the process stops.

The Maharal draws a sheet over Joseph’s figure. “We will tell everyone Joseph was refused by Chava and has gone home to his mother.”

Yakov says, “But suppose someone comes up here and finds him?”

“We’ll announce there is a danger of fire if people go upstairs. We will lock and padlock the door. But you will know, and you will tell your children that the Golem sleeps here.”

Itzak says, “What do you mean, sleeps? Can he wake now?”

“Never by itself. But if knowledge and fearful need are joined, it can be roused to life.”

The men turn, gazing at the huge body shrouded under the sheet. It indeed looks as if it could rise and walk again. Then they lock and padlock the door and make their way down the narrow staircase.

“I am so very tired,” the Maharal says, leaning on Yakov. “It is time for the Jews of Prague to think who shall replace me. The angel is growing impatient.”

They know which angel he means.

Soon afterward, the Maharal died. Chava continued to edit his papers. In the meantime, Isaac Horowitz waited for her in Eretz Israel and perished there still waiting. Perl did not live the year and was buried side by side with Judah in the old cemetery under the same monument, where I used to leave a stone, sometimes on her side of the grave bed, sometimes on his.

Chava was considered too picky by the shadchens of the ghetto. What did she want anyway? She had turned down Isaac Horowitz, one of the finest scholars of his time. She had turned down the strongest man in all of Prague. She had turned down Yakov, who had fathered three sons with his first wife, may her memory be blessed, and then three more with his second. So who would be good enough for the Maharal’s granddaughter, if she didn’t want strength and she didn’t want brains and she didn’t want virility?

Chava delivered all the babies of the ghetto. She was an honorary aunt to everyone, a woman who liked middle age better than she had liked being young, who felt a sense of relief as wrinkles fissured her face and her brown hair streaked with grey. She liked to read, she liked to eat, and she did not mind caring for her elderly mother, Vogele. She carried on an elaborate correspondence with scholars on two continents, some of whom had no idea she was a woman. If she ever thought of Joseph, we have no record; but then she left as a memorial her grandfather’s books and her own scholarly correspondence, not a diary or personal missives. It is reported only that on Joseph’s yahrtzeit, the anniversary of his disappearance, every year she lit a candle for him as for a dear relative. Outside the locked door of the attic, there used to be visible the dried remains of flowers.

Finally Chava set forth, making her aliyah to Eretz Israel. It was a long and hard journey for a woman alone, one she never completed. Chava died in Sofia, of food poisoning from a tainted meal. Her life was a learning and a journeying, but Chava never arrived. Unlike her grandfather, she did not hear the angel stopping for her. Dying filled her with brief vivid surprise.

Stories are still related about the attic of the Altneushul. Students told them to each other at the university there when I was young. There are surely times, when the Jews of Prague were being packed off to die of slow poison under the gas nozzles or even more slowly of being worked to death for the German corporations, eighteen hours starving, the ideal factory workers of all time, we could have used Joseph. But no one has known how to wake him. The need has risen, but the knowledge had been lost. Till now. Thus, Yod, ends the story of Joseph the Golem, which I promised to tell you. Close file. Computer off.

Now Avram and I share with the Maharal the glory and the guilt of having raised the Golem to walk on the earth with men and women, to resemble but never to be, human. That last sentence I speak only to myself. My story for Yod is complete. I await his response.

forty-six

Shira

In the Council room, this time Shira sat in the first row between Malkah and Yod, so that she had to spend half her time twisted around in her seat to look at whoever was talking. Today the Council must rule whether Yod was the property of Avram or of the town, or whether he was a citizen. By now people were yelling instead of speaking normally. The temperature in the room had risen alarmingly, both actually and emotionally. The committee set up to make a recommendation on Yod’s status had split down the middle, unable to agree. Half considered him no different except in degree from their office computer; the other half felt that a conscious being had rights no matter whether that entity was made of flesh or circuits or ectoplasm. Thus the ground had been set for the kind of brouhaha that had occupied the town every few months since Shira was old enough to notice. There was nothing people liked so much as a good political fight about principles or ecological correctness or the constant nurturing of true equality. Partners and siblings could scream at each other. Everybody could take sides, persuade, entreat, scheme, manipulate, all in the name of some higher goal. Eventually some dim consensus would be patted together and the peace of utter fatigue would descend. It was one of the major sports of the free town.

Here politics was still a participatory rather than a spectator sport. Every last voter expected to voice her or his opinion at some length and to be courted or denounced. The right to stand up and make a speech for the guaranteed three minutes on any point was a birthright of all: the right to bore your neighbours, the right to spout utter nonsense while all around you openly groaned, the right to hiss and boo other speakers, to get red in the face and mutter, to demand a recount on any voice vote, to pull out obscure rules and execute fancy manoeuvres while everyone glared.

Tonight the town voters were frustrated, because no sooner had they really launched into a wonderfully polemical discussion of Yod’s status, which promised to pull in everybody to one or another faction, than Avram got the floor and announced the Y-S ultimatum. It took people a few minutes to react fully, because speakers had already quoted the Mishnah, Rabbi Loew, Marx and the Marx Brothers, Freud, Robert Burns, Schopenhauer, Plato, Ben Rah, Gertrude Stein, Krazy Kat and Rabbi Nachman. The discussion was so acrimonious and delicious, no one wanted to accept that Y-S was threatening them. But gradually the room cooled with a sense of mutual sadness, as of a tryst interrupted.

Shira thought that Yod would finally win if the discussion continued, for the foundation of Tikva was libertarian socialism with a strong admixture of anarcho-feminism, reconstructionist Judaism (although there were six temples, each representing a different Jewishness) and greeners. They would almost always choose the option that seemed to offer the largest degree of freedom. Yod had prepared a speech, but Zipporah ruled he could not deliver it until the committee appointed to study him had made its report, on which it could not yet agree. No report from the committee, no vote, no ringing defence of himself by Yod.

Y-S was a hierarchy with a head. Tikva was a town meeting, a full and active democracy. They were accustomed to deciding every detail of town policy and budget openly and at whatever length it took to reach agreement. The threat from Y-S slid through the collective consciousness of the town, leaving a strong disquiet, but no outside danger could abort the process of political discussion already engaged.

Finally Zipporah gavelled the meeting to quiet and called for the town to meet again the next night. They would continue every night till they reached agreement. That was how town meeting ran every spring, and that was how this decision would be reached. The motion was passed by close to unanimous voice vote, as Avram shouted his opposition with perhaps fifteen others who thought the Y-S threat was not being taken seriously enough.

Zipporah announced the meeting would reconvene the next night at nineteen-thirty. They were all to try to think hard about the issue of Yod’s citizenship. Now a circle formed around Yod. The speech he had prepared so carefully was undelivered, and he was looking downcast. None the less he attempted to answer clearly all the questions thrown at him. After last Monday’s meeting, people had hung back from him, shocked at the revelation. By tonight, many of them had worked up considerable curiosity.

“Can you tell if I touch your hand?”

“What does your skin feel like? Oh …”

“Does your hair grow?”

“How fast is your processing speed?”

“Do you remember being created?”

“Do you like people?”

“What do you want from us?”

“Can you die?”

“Do you consider yourself a Jew?”

When Yod answered this last question in the affirmative, Zipporah decided that she had to set up a second committee, of all six of the local rabbis, to reach a decision as to whether a machine could be a Jew. The rabbis all brightened considerably and went off together, two men and four women ranging in age from twenty-nine to eighty-three, arguing, gesticulating, quoting. Zipporah had just made six people extremely happy.

Shira was hopeful. Rabbi Patar would be in Yod’s corner because he had been attending her services for weeks whenever he was free. No rabbi was going to rule that one of her congregation isn’t a Jew.

“Why do you want to be a Jew?” Sam persisted.

“I was created as a Jew,” Yod said. “I was programmed for halacha, with the need to carry out mitzvot. As with yourself, I want to fulfil my nature.”

“I’ve had the impression,” Hannah said to Shira but also to everyone in earshot, “that you and he or it or whatever had a relationship. But that can’t be. Why did you give that impression?”

Yod stopped talking and turned to hear her answer. Shira had a very interested audience. She had agonized beforehand; but since the proceedings in the Council had never approached her personal life, she had begun to think her worries frivolous.

“I obviously believe Yod to be a person, since I have a close relationship with him — as you observed.”

“How close?” Hannah persisted. “What does it mean to be close with a machine?”

“Just what it means to be close to a human animal,” Shira said coolly, but she felt exposed.

“I wish citizenship,” Yod said, “because I want to live with Shira and help raise her son. I want to be registered as a partnership. I can’t do that if you don’t think I’m a real person.”

“I can see that,” Zipporah said noncommittally. “Does the kid relate to you?”

Yod nodded. “We get along very well.”

“But kids like machines,” Sam said. “My own daughter would rather talk to the house than to me any day. Suppose my house asked for citizenship?”

“That your remark sounds funny means there’s a difference, because nobody’s laughing at Yod.” Zipporah squeezed Yod’s arm.

Avram was talking intensely with the head of security, who had voted with him. So had the second in command. All three of them had their heads together and were speaking quietly and fast, without smiling, without gesturing.

The next morning when Shira came down for breakfast, Riva was sitting in the courtyard talking with Malkah and Nili. Shira settled Ari into his high chair before greeting her mother. “When did you arrive?” she asked Riva, and, “Open your mouth wide. Wider. Let’s gobble it up,” she said to Ari.

“I slipped through last night. I wanted to see how effective your patrol is. Not bad, but a good Y-S assassin could wriggle through also. You must let Nili talk them into upgrading procedures. She knows how to maintain a tight perimeter.”

Riva was still wearing Lazarus’s colours. She had cut her hair very short and was in her lean form, undisguised. “No one needs to know I’m here,” she went on. “I’ll slip back out tonight. No one beyond you people and Avram.”

“Yod will be by tonight. He lives here now,” Shira said.

“Yod is more secure than any of you. No one could even torture him to talk, because he can simply shut himself down.” Riva sounded jealous. She swung back to address Nili. “With that film at Veecee, you need to vanish. You should slip out with me tonight.”

“Riva, I can’t leave with these people in danger. They took me in. I must help them until this crisis has passed.”

Riva looked slightly amused, one eyebrow cocked. She tilted the chair to and fro. “Would your own people agree with you?”

“Probably not. A group is only real to you when you’ve made friends and put faces on some of them ― unfortunately for us as a race. But, Riva, this isn’t a committee decision. I’m on my own here. You can hardly object: I’m staying to protect your family.”

Riva grimaced. “I’ve spent my life eradicating those reactions.”

Nili came and knelt before Riva. “I’ve said before that you’re a kind of saint ―”

Riva guffawed. “Some nasty saint! I’m a tool of the future that wants to be. That’s all. I make myself useful, and I do okay by it.”

“But personal ties are important to me. Where I come from, everything is social, communal. I’ve made a connection with these people.”

Shira did not urge Nili to save herself, for she thought they needed all the help they could get. “I’ll go with you to security to persuade them they must let you improve the perimeter.”

Riva rose with them. “I found out why Y-S is in a hurry. They want Yod at that top-dog meeting. It starts today and continues tomorrow, my best intelligence says. Roger Krupp is being elevated to second in command. I have a layout of the island and its defences. They want to present Yod at Krupp’s coronation.”

After Shira had brought Nili together with the head of security and his second, she did not go to work, but rather some instinct for trouble brought her to Avram’s lab. Riva was there already, sitting in close conversation with Avram. Shira was surprised to find Yod standing against one wall listening, rather than plugged in. “Shouldn’t Yod be patrolling the Base? We had an attack yesterday.”

“The Overseers have closed it down until after tonight’s meeting. We’re about to miss Y-S’s deadline,” Avram said. He was seated at his desk. We can’t take that risk. Yod must go to Y-S.”

“No!” Shira said. “They’ll dissect him.”

“Not exactly,” Yod said in a very quiet voice. “Avram doesn’t intend to let them. Instead I’m to self-destruct, taking as many of their top people as possible with me.” What most frightened her after the idea itself was the flat calm with which Yod spoke of his own death. Was he faking resignation? Did his programming force him to obey? He had to resist.

“You’re murdering him.” She addressed Avram.

“I made him, and I can unmake him. This is an opportunity to deal an amazing blow to Y-S.”

“Com-con is still functioning, I assume?” She called the house. “Malkah, come to Avram’s lab. At once.”

“Yod was created to protect and to defend us.” Avram rose to face her, unsmiling but calm also. “An attack on Y-S at this point is absolutely essential for our survival.” He spoke in a strong level voice, but he looked grey with fatigue, his eyelids swollen with sleepless nights. “If we don’t show we can hurt them back by assassination for assassination, we’re doomed.”

“You can’t let them get their hands on him. You can’t destroy him. It’s murder.”

“It’s not murder, it’s just war.” Riva checked her watch and stood up. “We’ll attack from outside, at the same time. Yod’s a soldier, and this is a crucial battle. I’ll be there too. We’ll send in Lazarus’s best assassins.”

Shira planted herself in front of her mother. “You’ll have a chance. You choose to go. He’s expected to commit suicide with no choice.”

Yod took a tentative half-step towards her, putting his hands out, palms up in a gesture of resignation. “If I don’t go, Y-S will destroy the town, Shira. They’ll kill you and Malkah, and they’ll kill Ari or take him.”

She could not answer that. It was true.

Malkah burst in, out of breath, and Shira filled her in, tersely. “Riva, did you suggest this?” Malkah demanded in a voice roughened with fury. She ranged herself shoulder-to-shoulder with Shira, between Riva, lined up with Avram, and Yod, rigid against the wall.

“Mother, Y-S is demanding the cyborg,” Riva said, shrinking back slightly. Why not give them what they want with a vengeance?”

“They’re also demanding Shira. Do you suggest we offer her up too? And her son ― your grandson?”

“They’ll waive Shira,” Avram said. “I told them she refuses. I’ve assured them that Yod will bond with any trainer, that they can provide one of their own people to handle him.”

Malkah took a deep breath and spoke sweetly. “Avram, how can you let go of your life’s work? As you said recently, Yod is the culmination of two decades of your research.”

“Don’t you see, I can manufacture another. Y-S is paying generously in instant credits the moment Yod is in their hands. With the credit, I can manufacture another exactly the same, starting tomorrow.”

Riva strode by them to clap Yod on the shoulder. “You’ll go down like Samson. It’s not the worst way to die. It’s what I’d choose. This is a good battle in a war we have to fight.”

“But you have a choice,” Yod said. “It’s true the idea of facing them excites me, but I don’t fall willingly. I asked Avram to let me go in without the automatic destruct because I think I could take them out anyhow, and being on the spot, I could choose the optimum moment. They see me as far more passive and controllable than I am. He fears they might deactivate me before I can mount my attack.”

“Soldiers don’t choose their battles. Only generals have a say. I’ve spent my life trying to avoid the kind of attachments you pursue, cyborg. It’s foolishness.” Riva looked at him once more with her head cocked, as if taking a final survey. Then she turned towards Malkah and Shira, not meeting their gazes. “Take care, Shira, Mother. I’ll slip out before Y-S arrives. I need to see Lazarus right now.” Riva trotted quietly from the lab.

Watching her go, Shira thought of a coyote. Coyotes had survived all the poison, the radiation, the acid rain and lethal ultraviolet. They were smaller than they had been, grey and fleet, sometimes standing on the dunes in plain sight watching Tikva cannily. Then, at the first human movement, they slipped into the brush and the shadows. They were mangy, omnivorous and swift. Nothing daunted them on their predators’ rounds.