As much of the centre of the continent turned into desert, the mystique had intensified. The less that normal people could ever experience the out-of-doors unmediated by dome or wrap or sec skin, the more that art, both pop and high, dwelt on desert symbolism. The desert was the pure solitary place where the hero or heroine found his or her lost self, confronted or flouted or succumbed to destiny, met a god or a devil or true lover or the utter emptiness of existence. In college she had loved Lena Brown’s
Sand and Spirit,
about a woman who in the desert simplifies herself stage by stage until she turns into wind itself, very romantic. Shira grimaced at her earlier self.
Nili came from the desert. It took Shira until the moment of departing Omaha to realize that for all the number of times she had experienced ‘desert’ in stimmies and books and holos, she had never before actually ventured into it. She had crossed under it in tubes and over it in floaters and zips. But she had never really been in it before.
The fast-tank had its own solar-energy cooling system, or she would have cooked. Outside, it was fifty-two degrees. A fierce dry wind lashed at them. The sky was yellowish grey with blowing dust. In her mental image of the desert, the sky was a clear radiant blue. Here the sand roared against the metal of the fast-tank. There was little to see except a wall of sand around them and an occasional wreck looming out of the dust. It was exacerbatingly boring, lurching along inside a metal headache blasted by the wind as if a hundred brass scrub brushes were scouring the surface. It was noisy, it was stuffy, it was violently uncomfortable.
She put on headphones and listened to music until she couldn’t stand to listen to more. The selection provided with the fast-tank ran to West-Mex favourites and mournful wailing ballads about people dying in the desert, in tube accidents, of true, true love, of poisoned drugs under the artificial stars of some dome.
It was more bearable as the twilight came on. The wind died, and gradually the dust thinned. By the time it was dark, they could see the stars brilliant and huge over them. She asked Yod to stop for a while. Her kidneys felt battered. Her back and head ached. She wanted the noise to cease. She wanted to be outside now that the sun had set and the temperature was reading a balmy twenty-six degrees and cooling rapidly.
They ate real food they had bought in Omaha, tubed in from the north. Yellow summer apples and cheese called mizithra. Cheese, like all animal products, was hideously expensive, but Shira needed a treat. She did not know what would happen to them at Y-S, so why not eat real cheese? This might be their last meal. Sheep had turned out to be less sensitive to acid rain and UV radiation than cows or goats, so most cheese was made of their milk these days. Not that Shira had ever had cow’s milk to compare it with. Cheese was as dear as caviar had once been. Lots of fish farming went on, and sturgeon took well to it. Cheese and apples were far more costly than caviar.
Who else would do this for her? No one. She could not imagine another soul who would go with her to try to extract her stolen son. “Yod, I want you to know how grateful I am you’re willing to risk this with me.”
“Does this kind of selfishness pass for altruism among humans?” He smiled at her. “I want to keep you with me.”
“I can’t imagine a better way.” She leaned against him. “It’s beautiful here, just as it’s supposed to be.”
It was still. The wind had died. Perhaps the weather had cleared, or perhaps this was simply a different miniclimate in the desert. They had come almost three hundred kilometres. The sky was indigo, and the stars went on forever. It was extraordinary to see them.
“That’s Cassiopeia, the Queen’s Chair,” she said, pointing. “Malkah used to call it Queen Esther’s Throne.” The temperature was dropping tangibly.
“I can’t make out constellations well,” Yod said apologetically. “Too many stars are visible to my eyes that aren’t visible to human vision. I have trouble seeing only the ones you see.”
“Do you feel anything when you look at them?”
Yod was silent for a moment. “Yes I do …. A sense of great distance. The sweep of the visible universe, its extent and vastness, gives me a sense of scale that is exhilarating. Surely among those stars are many beings with different kinds of consciousness and mental and physical capacities. Isn’t it likely there are even other beings manufactured like myself?”
She smiled. “If you met a female cyborg, you wouldn’t be interested in me any longer.”
“I doubt attraction between cyborgs could occur. We would both yearn towards the type of being who made us — if these other cyborgs we are postulating also possess the ability to yearn.”
What she was sure they would also lack was the ability to tell when she was kidding. “Do you think your predecessors could yearn?”
“No. Malkah introduced that capacity.”
“Malkah has never turned over her log on her work with you.”
“Your curiosity’s like mine. I read novels as if they were the specs to your makeup. I study them to grasp the forces underlying your behaviour.”
She wondered if he saw her as a combination of Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Molly Bloom and Marina Kolovis? “At times like this, Yod, I wish we could take Ari and just keep going. Never return. Run away, hide.”
“Avram controls a self-destruct mechanism in me, wherever I am. He can bounce the signal off a satellite. I can’t run away, though I want to.”
She had to free him from Avram. If they got back safely, she would start discussing with Malkah how to proceed.
In an hour they climbed back in, heading for the rail line that brought supplies into Y-S. The trains operated on simple fusion reactors that required water every few hundred kilometres. The refuelling stop that Shira remembered was their goal. They had the fast-tank dig itself into the ground. Then they spread camouflage over it and walked the last two kilometres. They could see the salmon-coloured lights of the refuelling station ahead. They cut in below it to the line and waited there. Trains ran about every half hour. They were too slow and too hot for transporting people or perishables, but they were used for machinery, supplies, anything that could take the high temperatures of the desert without spoiling.
They had not long to wait before a train swooshed in. At once they began edging along. Every car was coded, but Yod could read Y-S code now. They found one containing hospital supplies, bed linens, nursing uniforms, bandages, disinfectant. Yod examined the lock and in two minutes had opened the compartment. Shira put her sec skin on with its coolant fully loaded. If they got stuck too long, if anything went wrong, she had no idea how high temperatures could rise inside the car. She was relieved when it jerked into motion and they went clattering through the night toward Y-S.
They were close enough now so that it was only a matter of an hour before they entered the dome. “We’ll head down to the lower level. There we’ll put on gardeners’ gear. In that we can pass anyplace, invisibly. Nobody looks at the yard workers. They’re day labourers, and they’re everyplace under the dome.”
The rails ran all through the utility complex ― hospital, school, repair shop, stores, food facility. Their car was shunted directly into the hospital. Yod listened carefully at the door and with his supersensitive hearing picked the time when they could slip out. They headed for the maintenance facility, where the green suits for yard personnel were heaped in carts from the laundry — between yellow for repair and brown for construction.
When Shira at last stood under the dome, it was just after dawn. That’s where I gave birth to Ari.” She pointed to a low building, called for reasons she had never been able to fathom the Long Pavilion.
“It looks entirely different from the birthing house at home.”
She paused to orient herself. “Not that way. That’s Paradise Park. I’ve only been allowed in there twice. It’s for the top levels. It’s full of sculpture parks, holo parks, botanical gardens and a zoo, a hill with perpetual snow. The president lives on a lake full of real water.”
They passed rapidly through the fancy shopping sector, which would not open till ten. In the windows, fantastic virons centred around beautiful models drinking, flirting, having sex with unicorns and lions and knights in full armour. It rather turned Shira’s stomach, but then she thought that there was no accounting for what a person might find attractive ― she with her cyborg, slipping past in the overalls of gardeners, carrying pruners and weeding hoes.
“What is all this?” Yod pointed at the stores even now winking at the street, empty except for day labourers hurrying to their posts ― shops blinking, glittering, sending out clouds of pheromones, singing seductively. “Lust will make you wanted, wanted, wanted. He will touch you there, there, and you’ll be wanted. Nothing is like being wanted. Lust, the perfume that gives you the power of desire. Lust: want me now!”
“We don’t have these sorts of stores in Tikva,” she offered.
“We have stores. Like the one where you bought shorts for me.”
“Ours are for things you need. These are for things no one needs. Therefore everything here is expensive beyond belief. Dresses that cost more than I earn in a year. Jewels that sing. A blouse that flashes transparent if you choose. Tooth implants that can detect some poisons. Enhanced jewels to be inserted in the cheek, the forehead, the nose, the navel. Choreographed sequences of scents, sounds and tastes for an evening’s entertaining.”
“Who buys these things?”
“Besides their wives, who work for Y-S too, men of the upper levels have toys ― women who are cosmetically recreated, very beautiful. While the men work, they do nothing but shop.” Only on rare occasions had Shira encountered such women, and then they had seemed scarcely human. She remembered a pair of them when she was shopping for a special gown for a big Y-S awards ceremony. They had appeared to her as flamingos or egrets — beautiful plumage and harsh empty cries, as devoid of thought as those holos of women fucked by lobsters. Even their nails and teeth had been replaced by bright gleaming inserts. In the zone of expensive shops, every window promised sex, every message crooned desire, and yet sex was a regimented commodity in the enclave. Which persons you might make love to was as defined by your place in the hierarchy as the people to whom you bowed and the people who bowed to you. Sexual privileges depended upon your place and rank.
Now they were in the midlevel sector: occasional apartment buildings, rows and rows of little houses; at the major intersections, food dispensers, laundries, utilitarian shops. They hid themselves in the shrubbery outside the daycare centre for midlevel techies. The hedge around the centre was planted with rubbery bushes of lurid vermilion and purplish leaves that Shira remembered. She assumed that Ari would be back in his old day care centre. It would be unlike Y-S to place him elsewhere. There was always and only one correct place for personnel or the offspring of personnel of a particular grade and type.
Yod waited stolidly. She was so nervous she had to urinate twice. She kept imagining she might throw up. Her stomach was a small hard rubber ball in her chest. The minutes went by with the speed of a mountain eroding. Whenever she read the time internally, it was the same plus a few seconds. Ari would not come. Josh would not let go of him. How could she grab Ari? If only she knew where they were housed, but since all the semi-level dwellings were virtually interchangeable, she had no way to guess which house was theirs. Midlevel-tech housing stretched for kilometres in one of the largest of all the Y-S residential sectors.
Silently Yod passed her a nutrition bar to chew. She shook her head no. She would throw it up. It was always six forty-five. The sun had not yet cleared the roof of the shop across the way that sold toys and hikes. The streets were almost empty. A cleaning robot puttered along. A security ape trooped past without looking at the bushes. Why would he expect intruders in the hedge of the midlevel-tech day care centre?
At last the first little girl was delivered, a pudgy four-year-old with flaxen braids tied with green polka-dot bows, dragging on her mother’s arm. Her mother was in a backless business suit, just like Shira when she used to drop Ari off on the way to work. A couple of minutes later, a boy younger than Ari was wheeled past in his stroller. More children arrived every minute.
Finally, at seven-forty, she saw him. He was walking by himself, holding Josh’s hand. How nicely Ari walked now. He looked sturdy and serious, marching with a scowl. What was wrong? Was he upset? He was hunching his shoulders and muttering at his wrist. He was imitating the man who walked on the other side of him, wearing a side arm. “Security ape,” she mouthed to Yod. “Stay put.” The guard was six feet five or six, built like a massive door. Every time they came to an intersection, the ape spoke to his wrist-con, obviously checking in with security HQ. Great. His head was shaved, and he wore special fighting gloves, studded and armoured.
Security delivered Ari to the door, where the supervisor Jane Forest herself took him inside. The guard assumed a position outside. Josh strode off down the street. They could not crawl out without danger of someone seeing them. They would have to remain crouched in the shrubbery as long as the guard was on duty. The last child was dropped off. No, here came a late mother, dragging her toddler along crying in protest. The mother had to ask the guard to step aside. He glared at her briefly and moved two steps, so that she had to sidle past him with her wailing daughter. The ape guarded the door, standing with his feet planted far apart. He wore an earbo, playing some kind of music directly into his ear, but he never stopped his deliberate survey of the street, one direction, then the other. They were stuck in the bushes. It seemed this would be the permanent situation.
Around ten, a pedicart came by. The guard had a cupcake and coffee brought to him at the door. But finally, half an hour later, he strolled around the corner of the day school. He must be relieving himself. Yod rose at once and slid from the hedge, as Shira wriggled after him. They ran around the other corner and along the street far enough to be sure the guard could not see them. “Okay. You cross past the ape ― walk slowly. No day labourers ever hurry ― and go to work two blocks up the road, where Ari and Josh emerged from the side street. Weed anything.”
