Body of Glass (51 page)

Nili looked bleak for a moment, her face sagging. Then she said cheerfully, “Someday of course you will, if the One pleases.”

Ari had fallen in love with Nili and demanded she swing him. She spoke Hebrew to him, and he laughed and laughed, as if she were telling him jokes. “Hatul! Hatul!” he yelled at the cats. How could a child tell which words belonged to which language? Why didn’t multilingual children grow up talking an unintelligible mishmash? Why didn’t they say, ‘I mange et ha-tapuz ahora’? This child of hers was growing daily. She watched him for signs of trauma. Anything to do with daddies caused a shadow to pause on his face, but briefly. He had begun to go off eagerly to his day care. Even though she worked mostly at home, it was customary in Tikva to send children to day care to learn to be with other children. The strong social character of the local upbringing began early. Children must be taught cooperation. They must learn to work and solve problems together.

Yod asked if they should not tell Nili what Gadi had done, but Malkah shook her head vehemently. “Let lovers tell the truth to each other in their own time. It behoves us to hang back safely out of the way.”

Shira thought to herself that if she had done to a lover what Gadi had done to Nili, she would have picked her moment of revelation with care. However, Gadi had no sense of having trespassed. He was proud of himself. He could not wait to impart his news. As soon as the com-con informed him Nili was back, he rushed over and was scarcely in the courtyard when he crowed, “Nili, you don’t appreciate my position in the industry. I’ve got an offer for you that’s going to curl your hair.”

“What are you talking about? Slow down, calm down. What industry?”

“The industry. Stimmies. They’re interested in you. My bosses.” He rattled off a list of names and titles.

“Why would they be interested in me? I’m not interested in them,” Nili said reasonably. She was hefting Ari, who clung to her neck with his chubby arms. He was pounding on her, trying to usurp the attention she was paying to Gadi. Ari was rarely without some adult to amuse him, but Shira was trying to persuade him he must allow them to pay heed to one another as well.

Malkah seemed absorbed in deadheading chrysanthemums. Shira had a book on her lap she pretended to be reading. Only Yod stared openly. He had risen to watch.

“I taped you the other day ―” Gadi began.

“You what?” But Nili had heard. Gently she handed Ari over to Shira. He scowled in protest and tried a few cries, but clearly no one was looking at him. He fell silent in Shira’s lap. Nili stood very straight. “Where is this tape? It must be destroyed at once.”

“It’s not a serious tape, Nili. Don’t get into worrying about how you look. It was just designed to show my bosses a little about you. And they bit. Hard. They want you. They sent a contract through the Net ―”

Nili took a step towards him, stopped. “Exactly what was on the tape?”

“Your morning exercise routine.”

Yod moved quietly closer to them, throwing a glance of query towards Shira. He could not decide if he should defend Gadi if Nili attacked him. He was quivering in his alert state. Shira motioned for him to come to her. She took his hand to keep him from interfering. “The house will protect if necessary,” she murmured.

Nili picked up a brick. In her grip it crumbled. She let out her breath loudly. Drew in a deep breath, held it, let it out noisily. “You’ve committed a serious breach of security. I may have to return early.”

“Nili, what are you afraid of? Anybody seeing it would just think you’re surgically enhanced like a lot of apes and assassins,” Gadi said, coming close to her and speaking in his silkiest, most seductive tones. “You’re beautiful, Nili, and millions will want to share who you are.”

“Stop!” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m a guest here.”

Gadi stepped still closer. He put one hand on Nili’s shoulder. “You don’t understand. I’m talking an initial offer of forty-two K for a trial part in Nova Guards, third-string villain. They kill you off, but in such a way you can survive if fan reaction is hot. I’m acting as your agent, but if you’re not comfortable with that, I have someone good lined up who’ll take over the negotiations. I’m talking about a career that could net you a million by the end of two years if you’ve the potential I sense —”

“I don’t want to be a toy. I have my own goals and the aims of my people. I am well loved. I don’t need the love of strangers.” She looked at his hand, took it gingerly between two fingers and dropped it away from her body. With the flat of her palm she gave him a short hard push from her.

Shira wondered if that was why the life of a stimmie actress had little appeal for her too. Is it because Malkah gave me enough love? Gadi was starved for affection. Yet he no sooner captures a woman than he must be free of her. Perhaps that’s why he loves stimmies so passionately. You watch or buy or rent a stimmie and you enter that actor or actress. You feel what they feel. They’re yours. But you don’t belong to them. You are freed from the demands of reciprocity.

Everyone began to relax. They realized that Nili had made a conscious decision not to loose her anger. Perhaps she feared she would kill Gadi. Perhaps she simply felt she was a guest in an alien culture and should respond carefully. Malkah looked at Nili in open admiration, suggesting, “When Gadi informs his superiors you’re not available, perhaps the tape can be returned.”

“After being copied,” Nili said. “I should like them told that I was seized by organ bandits while swimming.”

Malkah sat up straight. “Is that where the explosion occurred?”

“We took out their facility,” Nili said briskly. “They’ve been raiding the Glop. Lazarus and his raiders, the Ram Blasters and theirs.” She stalked away from Gadi, her eyes still narrowed in anger. “I don’t sell or rent my body, by the organ or by the moment.”

He grimaced. For a moment he looked all of fourteen and furious at the adults who had thwarted him. Then his face masked over, as he had learned to do during the intervening years. Shira doubted he accepted Nili’s decision, but she did not doubt that Nili would make him do so. If she bothered.

Nili said flatly, “I’m very tired. My ribs are taped, and I’m covered with bruises. I need sleep. I’ll see you all tomorrow.” She turned and went upstairs. When Gadi started to follow her, she swung and stopped him. “No.”

However, fifteen minutes after he left, she came back downstairs to sit with Malkah. By that time Shira was putting Ari to bed, and she and Yod were looking forward to chewing over the day together. Much, much later, when Shira was ready to go to sleep and looked in on Ari ― a compulsion to see him sleeping, in spite of knowing that the house watched him constantly and would alert her to any problem ― she heard their voices still wafting up. Malkah and Nili were talking in the courtyard. Only the Japanese lanterns illuminated the table where they sat drinking wine and eating melon, a vase of white spider chrysanthemums ghostly between them. Shira leaned forward to hear what they were talking about. Nanotechnology applied to health problems, particularly vision repair.

Talking so intently that for once she was not aware of Shira, Nili was describing some operation her group had pioneered, a reknitting of the optic nerve. Malkah was asking details. They were completely absorbed. The moment of tension had passed.

She wondered if Nili would forgive Gadi as she realized she herself finally had. Going softly back from her sleeping son to her inhuman, her better, dearer than human lover, she felt as if that painful radiant time had finally dimmed into ordinary memory. She was free of Gadi as he seemed at last free of her. They had become merely friends; not the best, not the worst. Gadi was losing a lover he wished to hold; she meant to keep hers. Yod was a part of her now, her real mate.

forty-four

Shira

Shira was still learning about these people. In late October, when it was her group’s turn to go by halves to plant trees, she would come to know whichever nine went with her very well indeed. Everybody in town put in an annual week planting trees in a deforested area. It was one of the only hopes in the world that the warming could be slowed down and eventually subside. Shira had not been camping since she was in college, and the coming trip aroused both curiosity and apprehension. She did not like the idea of having to leave Ari for a week so soon after she had got him back, but reforestation was a duty that could not be put off. She was walking along on automatic pilot like a floater and almost bumped into Gadi before she noticed him.

“She walks through me as if I were air, she who used to say I was the sun and the moon.” He blocked her path playfully. “Come on, you’re drafted for a walk-on. Everybody has a part.”

She looked around the Commons and realized it had become a large stage setting. Almost a hundred people were gathered, many in costumes meant to suggest forty years before. “What’s going on?”

“The Council has me making ‘The Founding of Tikva’ to educate the kiddies. I had Tomas Raffia zip me in a whole trash heap of stock footage on the Troubles. You know, Jew-hunting mobs, burning houses, montages of news shows, all that nasty stuff that followed the Two Week War. Or why we needed Tikva, in two easy lessons. In danger, we all like a bit of patriotic propaganda, right?” He was entirely changed, she realized, dressed in green and bronze. His tight-fitting sleeveless tunic flitted with leaf shapes, shimmering as if just under the surface. His tights were metallic bronze. His high-heeled shoes were emerald and made little sparks as he hustled her towards a pile of old clothes and a changing cubicle. “Put this on. You’re going to run for your life, so start getting into a terrified frame of mind.”

“Gadi, I have to pick up Ari. Can’t I take part another time? I won’t come across scared, I’ll come across irritated.”

“Nili won’t play either.” He swung around and shouted over his shoulder. “All right, Hannah, you’re the quarry. Okay, mob, get ready. Hannah, I want terror. Mob: fury, blood lust. You have your tapes. Plug in, grab that emotion, and we’ll start in five minutes.”

Shira started to slip past when he leaned close, demanding she look him in the eyes. “Is Nili crazy? I thought she’d get excited when she saw this happening, that she’d get caught up in it like everybody else. All I want is to make her rich and powerful, and she slams the door.”

“What’s powerful about becoming a public nervous system? They poll the fans, and one week she gets barbed by Kaj Bolden, and the week after, it’s into a pit of rattlesnakes. After a few years, her senses start to dull, and then it’s goodbye.”

“Goodbye if you’re smart with money enough to shake the dust of earth from your feet and rocket up to Nuevas Vegas. To live beyond pollution, beyond contamination, with the best radiation seal ever built, life in the most secure and the most gorgeously decadent city ever dreamed into existence.”

“You want her to spend five years as a public body and brain so that she can retire up to a place where stars live to be safe from their fans?”

Gadi shrugged eloquently. “Look, nowadays in this gutted world, only fools want to live life. The rest of us want something sweeter. We can imagine far prettier than ruins and trash. You’d love the floating gardens — floating in space, Shira. Think of dancing in three dimensions instead of two. It’s people’s dreams we sell them back, what might have been.”

His crew were yelling at him that they were ready. She watched for a few minutes, then ran, already late to fetch Ari.

When she got home, Malkah, Avram and Yod were waiting for her in the courtyard. It was not, she saw at once, a social occasion. She put them off while she fed Ari and then settled him with a robot dog from Gadi.

Avram led off at once. “I’ve had a message from Y-S. They summon us to a conference and accuse us of harbouring a murderer. Since we have extradition treaties with every major multi, they can surely get an order.”

“Me or Yod?”

“Yod.”

Her eyes met his. He was standing at attention, following their conversation, watching Shira carefully to see if she was angry. “They just want to disassemble him to learn how he’s made. Or to use him themselves.”

“Of course,” Avram said, grimacing. “But your damned fool excursion for your infant is costing us dearly. I have said we will conference only in the Net. The Net is safe ground, and no multi would dare attack there.”

“What do we get out of meeting with them at all?” Malkah asked. “Why not stonewall them ― force them to make the next move?”

“We buy time, and we find out exactly what they want. We see if we can make a deal.” Avram paced, tangling one hand in his white mane.

“This time we tell the Council,” Malkah said. “Enough clandestine activity.”

“This is for us to settle. We did it, we must bear the consequences.” Avram frowned at her, his pale eyes narrowed and brooding.

“Everyone bears the consequences, I’m afraid,” Malkah said. We must keep them informed. We have all acted irresponsibly. Even Yod.”

“That is a meaningless accusation. Yod is programmed to obey. The responsibility is ours.” Avram glanced coldly at Shira.

“And our responsibility is to let the Council know what we’re getting ourselves and everybody else into,” Malkah said in a tone of quiet authority. “I’m talking to them.” There was no more argument.

The council set up the meeting in the Net for Sunday. Shira found herself frightened. She did not actually think Y-S would dare to attack them in the public Net as opposed to the frequent attacks in private bases. Y-S had agreed to meet there only after protracted attempts to shift the meeting elsewhere. There had been just one assassination in the Net in Shira’s lifetime, and the response of all other users to that violation of mutual treaty space had prevented another. A joint expedition had obliterated the entire assassin enclave held responsible. No wild-card killings by madmen were possible, because only a mind in conscious control could project into the Net. Someone simply accessing the Net without projection could not harm anyone inside.

Therefore rationally she did not fear they would be attacked, but she feared what Y-S would demand, what offensive they were planning to mount. She could not escape the sense that her group was walking into a trap. This time Avram would enter with the rest of them, while Sam and a team from the Base monitored from outside. She would be with Yod, who was a master of cyberspace. Still, she was afraid.

She kissed Ari goodbye, trying to act and sound normal, even banal, as she left instructions for the day with Nili. Standing with her arms folded, clutching herself, she reminded Nili what time he must be fed and have his nap, assuming she might not be out yet. Fearing she might never be back. It was not right that both she and Malkah should go to this rendezvous; but each was required. Even Malkah was reticent. Her instructions to Nili concerned the kittens and the house.

Yod had not disappeared at five thirty-five to patrol the Base this morning. He was sitting in the courtyard, staring up into the long yellow leaves of the peach tree. In the courtyard, where no wind stirred, the sere leaves fell slowly, one by one. “I have grown fond of this place,” Yod said quietly, looking up into her face. He sat neatly in yoga fashion, on the grass under the tree, his back knife straight, a slight smile on his lips.

“I’ve always loved it. I used to be seized with a longing for this house when I was away at school, when I was in the Y-S enclave.”

“I never understood homesickness, but now I begin to. If you’ve been happy in a place, it seems unique. Radiant.” He caught a leaf as it drifted down and looked at it on his palm.

“It’s time to go,” Malkah said. “Yod, I’m shocked. You’re procrastinating. You continue to show the capacity for generating new types of behaviour never foreseen by Avram or by me.”

He still did not stand, but he smiled at Malkah. “Such as?”

“You were given a capacity for sexual performance, but I’m sure I never imagined you would create yourself a family.”

“Given loneliness, a family is a rational construct for any conscious being.” Finally he rose. “However, I don’t fear this meeting. Rather I can’t help but look forward to confronting our enemies. Cyberspace, the interior of the great AI minds, is my natural environment. There I have an advantage over humans, no matter how enhanced. It could be … entertaining.”

Little rituals of entering the Net or the Base. Even though only the plugs of the first generation had used the ears ― plugs that none but Avram and Malkah of those present had ever seen — Shira did not know a single woman or man who did not remove earrings when sitting down to project into deep access. Some people also removed rings. Shira wore no jewellery this morning, but Malkah always wore at least studs in her ears. She insisted that her lobes closed up in a week if she forgot. Now Malkah removed the two small garnets and placed them like red eyes before her. She washed her hands together in her lap, another gesture Shira had often noticed in others about to connect.

Shira herself always sat very still before connecting. She had been taught the common disciplines to quiet her mind before projection, as had every child in Tikva, but she wondered how many, like herself, still consciously sought that stage of alert calm and held it a moment before connecting. She had been away at college before she had stopped doing the full set of breathing exercises and meditation techniques from kabbalistic tradition she had been taught at age six. Perhaps she had continued them long after she had outgrown the need simply because they felt good.

Inside the Base, she headed for the door to the Net, passed through and waited for her group. Yod and Malkah were already there, Yod looking as he always did, while Malkah looked twenty years younger. Then Avram bounded through the doors. He, too, looked more youthful than outside, and furthermore he was six centimetres taller. He saw himself as more imposing than he had appeared to Shira since she was a little girl. She wondered if her own appearance seemed as incongruous to the others. She had no idea what she projected; for a moment her concentration wavered, and she felt that sharp sense of nausea that a failure of projection produced. She caught herself at once, hoping none of the others had observed. It was rank amateurism to waver in deep projection, as well as dangerous. In projection, one must use what in kabbalah was called the adult mind, not the child mind: the mind that minded itself carefully and in full clear concentration.

They had been given a conference room by the Net computer. In the spatial metaphor that was the Net, they requested coordinates at the entrance map, and their conference room was highlighted. Moving about in the Net used different controlling imagery at different times. Lately the Net had been using escalators and moving walkways, so they mounted and moved swiftly into position. They dismounted in an area marked Conference Room 147 Z-18. What they saw was a room. Inside double doors stood a doughnut-shaped table with chairs all about it. No one was there. They sat down. They waited. After ten minutes of waiting, Shira began to fret. Perhaps this was a trick. Perhaps their bodies were being kidnapped while they sat waiting in the Net. To waste ten minutes of Net conference time — since Y-S of course was paying for the time — was a potlatch of resources.

“How long should we wait?” Shira finally asked.

“Five minutes more,” Malkah said. “That’s quite sufficient.” She was frowning, tapping a drumbeat on the table. Shira had been struck since she was a child by the way objects in the Net felt solid. You could bang on a table. Presumably you could run into one, although she never had.

At exactly fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds after they had begun waiting, the double doors opened again and the party from Y-S filed in one at a time. Dr Upman, one of their cyberneticists, entered first; all except Yod recognized him at once. His trademark was a head of Einsteinian bushy hair, allowed like Avram’s to turn white. Avram greeted him by name, as did Malkah. A polite exchange of formal salutations. The same with the next to enter, Dr Vogt, a needle-thin woman of fifty who had done the basic design on the robots that ran the Pacifica Platform. Again, greetings, warmer toward Avram. Then Shira remembered. Before coming to Tikva, Avram had taught out in California, and Barbara Vogt had been his graduate student. When Gadi was seven, Avram returned to Tikva.

Next in was Dr Yatsuko, portly head of the AI section, her former boss. All big guns. As each appeared, Shira pronounced the names for the benefit of Yod. He could access information on them, and she wanted him to understand what they were facing. Dr Yatsuko was tall for a Japanese, massive. He was reputed to be absolutely loaded with circuitry, including an artificial heart, pancreas, eyes and additional sensors. Indeed his eyes, like Yod’s, were too perfect to be real. He stared at Yod, his pupils expanding and then contracting rhythmically.

Then Roger Krupp entered, flanked by assistants. None of her party had ever met him, for he was the subdirector of Y-S, the tactical genius, it was reputed. He did not speak to them or acknowledge their presence but took a seat at the table, flanked by assistants, one male, one female, apparently twins but presumably cut-and-paste jobs. Everyone sat. One empty chair remained on the Y-S side. Finally the last person entered: her ex-husband, Josh.

She felt an immense sense of relief. He was not dead. But she had seen him lying on the floor with his neck broken and his eyes glazed. Experimental procedures were constantly being employed, but brain death was still irreversible. Suppose she had been mistaken? He might not be dead, only crippled. He would not project himself paralyzed. He stared at her with an expression she could not read but that frightened her with its intensity. She was the only person he addressed himself to. She could scarcely look away from him. Her guilt was bubbling in her, guilt for leaving him, guilt for stealing back her son, guilt for his death ― but he was not dead. Why had he come? What did he want? He would demand Ari back. They would negotiate Ari away from her.