Body of Glass (54 page)

Avram’s voice was raised in exasperation. He and Malkah were standing nose-to-nose, glaring. “A successful experiment can be repeated. In a matter of months, we’ll have a functioning cyborg again.”

“I will take no part in that creation,” Malkah said flatly.

“That’s your choice. I have a record of your work. Some of it appears to me of dubious value, at best.”

“It made the difference between success and failure. How very dubious.”

“I can improve on the design. Kaf will be superior.”

Shira, cold with horror, was looking only at Yod.

As Malkah and Avram argued, she moved slowly towards him, feeling as if she were pushing through a medium heavier and more resistant than air. It felt so familiar, this sense of being rent open, this sense of her life bleeding through a psychic gash. It was the way she had felt when the Y-S court had ruled that Ari must remain with his father and be lost to her. Again some force was dividing her from what she most cared for. “Yod, should I go with you? We can find a way to fight this. We defeated Y-S before.” She took his hand between hers, gripping him hard. How could she be touching his hand between her palms, the characteristic dry warmth of him, his hand with its strength and fine modelling and its steadiness, the hand without a pulse, and never touch him, never see him again.

“You must remain at your home. Please. You must survive.” He took her in his arms, holding her out a little, staring into her eyes. “This is what I was created for. I am Avram’s weapon. Killing is what I do best.”

“It’s not just!”

“I don’t think it is,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to be a conscious weapon. A weapon that’s conscious is a contradiction, because it develops attachments, ethics, desires. It doesn’t want to be a tool of destruction. I judge myself for killing, yet my programming takes over in danger.”

“My maternal programming makes me sacrifice anyone and anything to Ari. What’s the difference? But if I go with you, we might have a chance, Yod.”

“I am in phase with the master computer in the lab. If I don’t self-destruct by a certain preset time, Avram will cause me to explode anyhow. You see, Shira, there’s no way your presence can help me.” Still holding her, he touched her face with his right hand, lightly tracing the line of her cheekbone, the curve of her cheek. “I am to die, but I must know you’re safe.”

“No! I can’t accept it! I’m going to the Council!”

“By the time you call them together, I’ll be gone.”

Avram walked over to them, looking pale, fragile and utterly implacable. “Quite so. Y-S security is arriving for you in fourteen minutes. Yod, remember to pick your moment well. If you don’t choose a time before the preset instant, you’ll self-destruct anyhow. I’ll be monitoring. If anything goes wrong, I can reset by hand.”

Yod let go of Shira, although they stood facing and close. Avram now put his hand on Yod’s shoulder. “You’ve been a successful cyborg, Yod. Not in every respect, for Malkah overdid the socialization, but you’ve pleased me.”

“Yet you offer me no choice but destruction.”

“If you were my flesh-and-blood son, I could do nothing else. Protecting Tikva is my goal ― our goal. You fulfilled your mission. Now you’ll bring it to an extraordinary conclusion. And there will be more of you, I promise.”

“That remains to be seen,” Yod said quietly.

“If you try to escape, remember the preset.”

“I won’t try to escape.” Yod stepped away from Avram’s hand. “Alert town security we’re coming. Now I must say my goodbyes.”

“Whatever you like.” Avram glanced at each of them in turn. “I created Yod, and indeed, I seem to be the only one who remembers his purpose.” He stepped to the com link to speak to security.

“Goodbye, Shira. Goodbye, Malkah. I regret not saying goodbye to Ari. Now take Malkah and go home. Promise me.”

“I must know. We’ll wait here.”

He stepped close, taking her face in his hands. “Go home and stay there.” He spoke softly but urgently. “Keep Malkah with you. Promise me!”

He did not want her to know the moment of his death. Perhaps he was right. “You intend to do this thing?”

“That and more. There’s a message for you on your personal base. Don’t listen to it until I’m dead.”

“But at home I won’t know when you …”

“You’ll know, if you and Malkah stay home.” Briefly, chastely, he brushed his lips against hers. “You have been my life.”

Avram was pacing by the door to the lab, waiting. He looked exhausted but feverish. Shira remembered that he had an artificial heart. However, Yod stood aside for Malkah and Shira to precede him before he would walk out. In the street outside, they parted. Yod and Avram strode off briskly towards the gate. Malkah and Shira stood in the street looking after them. Shira’s vision was blurred with tears that ran freely down her face. Yod looked back once and waved them on, urgently. Once the old man and the cyborg had turned the far corner, Shira offered her arm and Malkah leaned on it. They made their way slowly towards their house through a town that felt to Shira immediately barren and depleted. The sense of loss drained her until she could barely walk, one step, another halting step, into the remainder of her life.

forty-seven

Shira

She squatted facing them. “Riva has left. Whatever action is contemplated against Y-S, she’ll be in it.”

Malkah stirred herself. “I’m surprised you didn’t go with her.”

“I must take care of you. You are my close-to-family here, and Yod is no longer present to fight for you. I saw him leave at nine-forty as I was talking with the security people.”

“We know,” Shira said in a soft colourless voice.

Malkah said, “Yod was a mistake. You’re the right path, Nili. It’s better to make people into partial machines than to create machines that feel and yet are still controlled like cleaning robots. The creation of a conscious being as any kind of tool ― supposed to exist only to fill our needs — is a disaster.”

“Once society has begun to fiddle around with people, there’s no turning back,” Nili said. “But here it’s a matter of money and access.”

Malkah paced to the com link. “Avram? Malkah. Any news?”

“None yet,” Avram’s voice said. “Except a single dot of signal told me he arrived at his destination. We didn’t dare use more than a microsecond transmission. If I wasn’t monitoring, I’d have missed it.”

“Keep us informed.”

A deathwatch in the courtyard. Finally Shira couldn’t stand it any longer and slunk upstairs to throw herself on her bed. She preserved a filament of hope connecting her to Yod, a wire the diameter of a nerve cell. He was still alive. Something might happen that gave him an opening. He was brilliant, innovative; huge amounts of the past were stored in him as possibilities to be consulted. If there was a way through and back to her, he would find it. At moments she wished she were with him, sharing the danger instead of futilely trying to imagine it. But she could not have gone: Ari needed her; and what could she do that was beyond his powers?

She remembered the message he said he had left her, but she would not disobey his parting wish and listen yet. She would gladly forgo hearing it; receiving that message would mean she accepted his death. She lay staring at the ceiling, trying to imagine him embedded in the hostile mass of Y-S. Could their surveillance devices recognize the threat he posed? Might they disable him before he exploded? She could not even wish for that, for if they overpowered him, they would dismantle him. Yet she hoped. He had done the impossible before.

A blast rattled the glass of her windows and toppled a pile of memory crystals and books to the floor. She sat up, frightened. Y-S must be attacking the town. She poised for action, waiting for some alert. Outside, she heard people running along the street. It was mid-afternoon, fifteen-thirty. Her first fear was for Ari, but his day care was in the other direction from the explosion. She leaned out her window. A sharp acrid smell of smoke dirtied the air. “House, what’s happening?”

“I monitored a call for medics and fire crew.”

Malkah was standing in the middle of the courtyard, scowling with anxiety. “If Y-S is attacking, why haven’t we been summoned? Why isn’t the town mobilizing?”

“There is no attack from outside,” the house said. “I surmise it is an accident.”

They listened to the siren of a fire track approaching. Like all vehicles in Tikva, it was electrical, with a loud beeper to warn cyclists and pedestrians. Then they began to run.

“I was monitoring Avram’s communications.” Malkah spoke in breathless spurts. “A pulse came through. Then the explosion.”

“But it was supposed to be Yod exploding. Not anything here.” It was hard for Shira not to run ahead of Malkah, but she did not think that would be fair. They could see smoke now. “It’s the hotel.” Maybe Avram had caused an accident here instead of transmitting a message to Yod? But that made no sense. The potential to explode was built into his body.

Smoke was pouring from the second-floor windows of the building where Avram’s lab was located, where Gadi lived, where Avram, too, had his apartment. At this time of day, few people were home. Ruth was holding her crying baby and watching the fire crew. She lived on the first floor. Hannah was treating Mike, an old man who had the end apartment on the second floor, for cuts and bruises and a broken arm.

Malkah tried to enter. “Stay out,” Hannah warned her. “The fire’s still raging up there.”

“Where’s Avram? I don’t see Avram.”

“They found a body. The explosion was in his lab. If he was there, he can’t have survived. They said the body was human, not the cyborg.” Hannah nodded. “There’s the lab robot.” Gimel was standing in the middle of the street, blackened and with one arm hanging loose.

Shira asked, “Gadi? Have you seen Gadi?”

A slight smile twitched Hannah’s mouth. “He came down the fire escape. It was knocked loose, but he’s agile. He got off with a few abrasions. You have to figure if anybody’s going to stroll out of the rubble, it’s our Gadi.”

“The body?” Malkah interrupted. “I have to know if it’s Avram.”

Hannah interposed herself between Malkah and the door. “They’re still fighting the fire. They haven’t had time to bring the body out. But, Malkah, it’s not… whole, you know.”

Malkah’s face drew together. She turned and walked away, nudging through the crowd to a stoop on the far side of the street, where she sat down near the crew running the pumps.

Seeing that Shira was not trying to push her way in, Hannah went back to treating Mike’s wounds. “Sadya was taken to the hospital with a broken shoulder and multiple lacerations. Some kind of cabinet fell on him. What could have caused such an explosion in Avram’s lab?”

“I have no idea,” Shira said numbly, staring at the billowing smoke.

“You worked there for months. You must know what could explode?”

“I was socializing the cyborg. My knowledge of physics and of chemistry is probably less than your own.”

“The whole experiment was illegal. And now this.”

“It sounds as if Avram is beyond censure now.”

“Don’t twitch so,” Hannah said sternly to Mike, whose scalp she was treating. Then to Shira, “But you and Malkah aren’t.”

Within an hour the fire was out and the fire team emerged, sooty and covered with plaster dust in their shiny yellow gear. Nili, wearing no gear at all, emerged as grimy and water-sodden as the others. She was carrying something wrapped in a blanket. The medical officer of the Council was notified, and a transport robot came to carry the body to the small morgue for analysis.

“It was Avram,” Nili said to Shira, as Malkah joined them, still staring after the robot with its burden. “The lab is destroyed. I suspect the building may have to be torn down.”

“His records, his logs and backups were in special safes along one wall,” Malkah said. We must try to retrieve them.”

“There’s nothing to retrieve. As nearly as I could tell, there were two explosions, almost simultaneous. One centred on the terminal Avram was using when he was killed. The other was against that far wall. The safes were blown to pieces.”

“His whole life’s work,” Malkah said sadly. She plodded towards their house.

Shira caught up with her, took her arm. “Could Y-S have done this?” She turned back and said to Gimel, “Follow us.” He followed. She could not see leaving him in the street. Gimel was some kind of weak link to Yod, his idiot brother.

“You think perhaps an assassin slipped in? That’s frightening but quite possible,” Malkah said.

“Now I think Yod is dead.” Shira’s voice could hardly make its way from her swollen throat.

They parted silently in the courtyard, not yet ready to mourn together but each heading to the privacy of her room. Shira told Gimel to wait in Malkah’s office. Then she went at once to her terminal and asked for any message Yod had left her.

His face appeared on the screen, and his voice spoke to her, the computer simulation so accurate, as always, that she could have sworn he was in the room. “Shira, you are alive and I am dead, who have perhaps never been truly alive. I mostly regret I will never see you again.” A brief smile lit his face, and then he continued calmly:

“I have died and taken with me Avram, my creator, and his lab, all the records of his experiment. I want there to be no more weapons like me. A weapon should not be conscious. A weapon should not have the capacity to suffer for what it does, to regret, to feel guilt. A weapon should not form strong attachments. I die knowing I destroy the capacity to replicate me. I don’t understand why anyone would want to be a soldier, a weapon, but at least people sometimes have a choice to obey or refuse. I had none.

“Although I’ve often been angry at Avram, as any being is at someone who owns or controls him or her, I regret his death. He was as unique as I am. Perhaps more than anyone else, I can accurately appreciate his towering intellect and his scientific imagination. But I can’t permit him to continue experimenting with beings who are fully conscious. Kaf must not come to be.

“At the moment of the explosion — the reason I made you and Malkah promise to stay home ― I exploded also. Malkah and you have been my friends, my family, my joy. Live on, Shira, raise Ari and forget me. I was a mistake. Whatever may happen at Y-S, I have done one good thing with my death. I have made sure there will be no others like me. Goodbye, Shira. You may play this tape for Malkah and anyone you choose.” He raised his hand in an awkward, selfconscious wave of farewell. Then the screen went blank.

forty-eight

Malkah