He, She and It (34 page)

“In your case too?”

“No. I conceived the ancient way and bore the baby to term. In fact I lost status with my co-workers because they felt it was a bit gross. One of the standard subjects for gossip among corporate women my age is exactly how you are trying to make a baby—comparing technologies.”

“Was it for some religious reason? Myself, I used every bit of technology. Couldn’t afford to hang around swollen up like a bilious elephant.”

“I conceived without difficulty. I carried the baby nine months because I didn’t want to give my child up to Y-S so early. I’m suspicious about the conditioning they use on preemies. It’s standard practice there to induce labor in the eighth month to avoid stretch marks.” She felt defensive, explaining and explaining, but she was trying to make some connection.

“How loyal do you feel to Y-S?”

“Are you being funny? They took my son away from me. They just tried to kill Malkah.” Shira turned away. Malkah sat beaming at Riva as if she were the sweetest sight in the world. Shira was aware of a pang of jealousy, a queasy wondering if Malkah preferred Riva to her.

“I’m not an affectionate person, Shira, not the cuddly type. I’m loyal to death to those who are loyal to me. But I’m a warrior, not a mother. Frankly, you were sort of my gift to Malkah, to make up for who I am.”

“You’re not so bad, kiddo,” Malkah said. “It was a second chance for me. I had you too young to do a decent job. I had a baby for all the wrong reasons, and I expected a sort of pet, a cute kitten who talked.”

“Oh, between us, Malkah, it was war, the two of us pulling at cross-purposes. You used to tell me I was born shouting
No.”
Riva gave her mother an affectionate cuff on the arm. “You made me the fighter I am.”

It was strange to hear Riva, sitting there apparently flabby and looking older than Malkah, describe herself as a fighter. But Riva had read her glance. “Appearing an old lady or as a baggy middle-aged woman of no social standing is my disguise. I don’t look dangerous. I’m close to invisible. I can go places other operatives can’t penetrate. You’ll see next Tuesday.”

Shira felt her heart contract. “What do you mean about Tuesday?”

Riva suddenly held a knife that glowed oddly. Then it was
spinning through the air straight at Nili, who was not even looking. Shira screamed, but as the sound left her mouth, Nili turned and plucked the knife from the air, tossed it up and flung it back at Riva, who stopped it with her arm. It stuck there quivering, but she did not flinch and did not bleed. She must be wearing armor under her baggy schmateh. “You’ll need backup,” Riva said. How much of the apparent flesh was protective gear?

“I’m not going alone, and how do you know about my meeting?”

“All things relate. The Net is real. We are all in the Net.”

Shira felt stung. Riva was patronizing her. “Don’t palm off cheap philosophy on me when I ask a real question. How do you know I’m meeting with Y-S next Tuesday? What else do you know?”

Riva finished the last of the bagels before saying, “Don’t take Malkah.”

Shira remained frightened. What was this woman preparing to do? “I’m not planning to. I’m taking Avram’s assistant. He’s security trained.”

“What they call security training here—nice kids who’ve had a few karate lessons. I could take any four of them out in seconds.” Riva was watching Nili with a satisfied smile, proprietary.

“Yod is security trained by anyone’s standards.”

Riva turned back to her, still smiling. “I want you to like me. But I’m not doing too well with you, am I? Learn to look through my facade. When others were taking rejuvenation treatments, I was doing the opposite. Never cared about being pretty or youthful-looking. Don’t need it—been offered more love than I’ve had the leisure to enjoy. Malkah says it’s time for you and me to get to know each other. We may not have another shot.”

“Why?” Shira wanted to prevent Riva from accompanying her to the meeting with Y-S, but she sensed she would be best off proceeding indirectly.

“We’re both here. May never happen again. I’m in a dangerous profession. The times are violent. You’re in a vulnerable place. That we’ll both survive is problematic.” Riva grinned, an expression that broke open her face, a flash of something bright and strong escaping from within. “You might say damned unlikely.”

“You steal information.”

“I liberate it. Information shouldn’t be a commodity. That’s
obscene. Information plus theology plus political bias is how we sculpt our view of reality.” Riva watched Nili padding toward the table.

“Is that what you tell yourself? But then you sell the commodity to another multi.”

“Depends on what we find. Some we sell. Medical stuff, real science, we give to the stripped countries. The places where the multis cut down the rain forest, deep and strip mined, drove the peasants off the land and raised cash crops till the soil gave out.” Riva came into a sharper focus, and her voice was serrated, magnetic. “The distant tropical backdrops where they fought little counterinsurgency wars. Left the people robbed of their tribal identities, with a taste for sugar, tobacco and gadgets, with a countryside starving and vast slum cities seething.”

“The ability to access information is power,” Nili said with her slight accent in her husky voice. Her dark skin glistened with sweat. Her exercise garb was soaked. In fact she reeked. “The ability to read and write belonged to the Church except for heretics and Jews. We are people of the book. We have always considered getting knowledge part of being human. With the invention of the printing press, literacy spread. With mass literacy, any person no matter how poor could learn how the society operated, could share visions of how things might be different. Now few read.”

Riva said, “Most folks press the diodes of stimmies against their temples and experience some twit’s tears and orgasms, while the few plug in and access information on a scale never before available. The many know less and less and the few more and more.” Riva fanned her hand in front of her face. “Go shower. You smell like a horse.”

“Should I smell like a rose? You’ve been smelling of medicines lately that you pour on your clothing.”

“I’ll shower too. Sorry.” Riva stood.

Shira said, “You say you want us to get along, yet I don’t find you particularly … friendly. I feel like you’re goading me.”

“I guess I’m having trouble figuring out who you are. Pretty girl, got married, worked for a multi, had a baby. Conventional and timid choices. Don’t see much of myself in you.” Riva bounded over to stride up the steps two at a time behind Nili. Certainly Riva could move fast when she chose to.

“I don’t want them along Tuesday,” Shira said bluntly to Malkah. “Does she hate me? This meeting may have nothing to do with the razors in the Base but rather with my appeal of the ruling on Ari. I have to find out.”

“Of course she doesn’t hate you. She’s always been blunt and tactless. I think she’s honestly trying to get to know you, but she hasn’t a clue how. Try to go partway toward her, Shira. She’s no charmer, but she’s a hero to many.” Malkah came around and began to knead Shira’s shoulders, working the tension out. “She is your mother. Maybe I feel a little guilty that I replaced her so happily, that I never encouraged you to wonder about her.” Under Malkah’s hands, Shira relaxed, listening, trying to understand. “You and I are more suited, more harmonious. We’re two sensuous hearth-loving cats with our notions of exactly how things ought to be around here. She charges in like a porcupine. We’re the ones who have to make the communication and the affection happen—but she’s our flesh and blood too.”

Shira let her breath out in a long sigh of disappointment. “It feels a little late for me to have to prove myself to her. Mistakes I’ve made I’m still paying for. I don’t need her to judge me off the top of her head.”

Two nights later—for once at a reasonable time, before she had gone to bed—Yod called her in the normal way, through the com-con. “Can I come to you late tonight?”

“I’ll alert the house. Be especially quiet. We have two visitors.”

“I saw that in the com-con news file. I’ll be quiet.”

The house as usual woke her. It was one o’clock. She hopped out of bed and ran onto the balcony around the top of the courtyard, to wait. Then she heard Yod speak softly in the darkness. “Who is before me? What do you want?”

“What are you doing in here?” The voice was Nili’s.

“You’re holding a laser pistol on me. Why?”

“You have thirty seconds to answer my questions before I use it. And don’t doubt that I can see you.”

“I won’t permit violence,” the house said loudly. The lights came on in the courtyard, blinding them all.

“I’m Yod, Avram Stein’s assistant. The house admitted me according to instructions.” He was waiting just out from under the far balcony.

Nili was standing with both arms outstretched and joined on a laser pistol held before her. “Whose instructions?”

“Mine,” Shira said. “That’s my lover you’re holding at gunpoint.”

“Why do you lie? This is a machine.”

“You are part machine and part human yourself,” Yod said,
sounding annoyed but also curious. “We obviously share some sensors. X-ray lasers, for instance.”

“He’s at least as human as you are,” Shira said. “If you don’t release him, I’ll wake my grandmother.”

“I’m awake,” Malkah said. “I’m sure everyone is. Put that gun down, Nili. House, deactivate all weapons in the courtyard.”

“Done,” the house said.

“Nili is protecting all of us. What’s this object anyhow?” Riva’s voice came from below. At some point she had crept silently down to assume a position behind Nili.

“My name is Yod—”

Shira ran down the steps. “As I said, he’s my lover. I invited him in. The house is programmed to admit him.” She made a wide swing around Nili and came to rest standing beside Yod. He motioned her behind him, but she ignored his gesture.

“I am ready to protect the machine and you,” the house said. “Malkah told me to protect Dalia and Nili also. I am in conflict. I require a hierarchy of priorities after protecting Shira and Malkah and the small felines. But I will not permit that pistol or the weapon Riva is holding to function. I have already deactivated them, but the subsonic field is unhealthy. They should put down the weapons so I can shut it off.”

“Protect Yod, Nili and Riva with equal attention,” Malkah said firmly. She came downstairs in her plum-colored robe, her slippers flapping on the tiles. “Simply disable any of them attempting to assault or injure any of the others. Why don’t we all sit down and have some wine? You’ve just stumbled on our biggest secret.”

Shira said to Malkah, “I’m sorry you should find out about our affair in such a stupid way. I wanted to tell you, but you were working around the clock.”

“I knew,” Malkah said. “I heard Yod coming and going. I approve.”

“How can you have an affair with a machine?” Riva asked, following them to the table under the peach tree. “That’s like speaking of a relationship with a dildo.”

Shira was too angry to answer. Yod was accessing his base in an effort to understand. Malkah said, “That will be enough. You’ve had affairs with hairy objects far less human than Yod. I met some of them. For a woman who had a baby with the help of a machine, I think you should behave yourself and pass no knee-jerk judgments.” Malkah marched off to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of wine and glasses.

“I am not programmed primarily for sexual pleasure but for defense,” Yod said pleasantly. He had accessed “dildo.” “Given that I’m a machine, what are you?” He was addressing Nili. “Half and half?”

“For one thing, I’m as illegal as you are. So we’re even,” Nili said. The pistol had disappeared to whatever part of her black pajamas she carried it in. Shira imagined that Nili slept with a knife and a gun always on her person. Did she take them off in the shower? “You’re really a cyborg? My eyes and my sensors contradict each other. You look human.”

“So do you,” Shira said. “But what are you? I asked Riva earlier, but she wouldn’t tell me.”

An electric jolt sped around the table; Shira realized she had used Riva’s own name. “Everything seems to be coming out of the can tonight,” Malkah said. “Yod, this woman is officially Dalia. And Nili is officially her entirely human nurse. Say nothing to Avram.”

“How can he lie?” Riva asked. “Can we remove that memory?”

“I can lie as well as you can,” Yod said. “I simply require a good reason for that behavior as for any other. And my memory is as inaccessible to alteration as yours—perhaps better protected against chemical tampering.”

“I’m responsible for maybe a third of Yod’s programming, and frankly I view him as a friend and trust him completely.”

“Mother,” Riva said in high exasperation, “presumably whoever programmed the other two thirds can turn him inside out.”

“No.” Yod plunked his elbows on the table. “He doesn’t even know Shira and I are lovers. He doesn’t know I leave the lab many nights.”

“I notice nobody has answered my question. What is Nili? What exactly are you, and what are you doing here?” Shira was furious with herself for breaking their security, but she was equally angry at having her questions ignored while they all talked around and about and over Yod as if he were a piece of furniture.

“You can start by asking me where I’m from.” Nili sipped her wine.

“Where are you from?” Yod asked agreeably. He was watching them all, tightly coiled in his chair. Shira was sure he had noted where Nili had put away her pistol and what weapon Riva had carried as well as its current whereabouts. Having perfect recall, he could simply replay the scene until he was sure.

“Safed.”

Shira snorted in disbelief. “Safed? In Israel? No one lives in that whole interdicted sector. It has lethal levels of radiation and plague.”

“I can walk in the raw without protection. I can tolerate levels of bombardment that would kill you. We live in the hills—inside them, that is. We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days. We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.”