He, She and It (17 page)

“How do you know the rose is beautiful?”

“My base tells me it’s so regarded by humans: that flowers are beautiful, although it seems, too, that humans often disagree about who or what is beautiful and that every era has different opinions. Beauty isn’t a concept I find useful. I don’t understand what it means, except as elegance in design.”

“There’s more implied in the poem. Do you know how long roses last?”

“No.” Yod cocked its head and waited.

“Flowers are mostly creatures of a moment. That rose is already beginning to wilt. If you put its stem in water, it will last a couple of days.”

“Therefore a flower comparison implies short duration.”

“Correct.”

It frowned. “Then it’s a sad poem.”

“Not exactly. But there’s an undertone of mortality. With us there is often an undertone of mortality.”

“I am mortal too, Shira. I can be turned off, decommissioned, destroyed.”

“And you can feel pain, which surprises me. But how fragile are you?”

“I am not fragile at all. Humans are surprisingly fragile, if I understand your specs correctly.”

“Now, the idea of design specifications for humans is metaphorical language, Yod, since we are not engineered or built but rather born.”

“I am trying to understand the bonding created by the birthing process. It’s quite strong?”

“There’s no stronger bond.”

“I can tell from your face that my reference to motherhood upset you.”

“It’s not a topic I can deal with at all objectively, not yet, perhaps never. I’m trying all the time not to think about my son.”

“I want to express sympathy—is that the right phrase?—but I don’t know how to do so without reminding you further of what you want to forget.”

“I’m not about to forget, Yod, but thank you.” Why was she telling a machine about her pain? It was like crying to the house when she was a very little girl and did not understand the house was not alive. “We should return to the lab.”

“But the poem you taught me is ambiguous. How do you know he is speaking of the woman? ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ could mean his own feelings for her. They could be what he is praising as beautiful and announcing as transitory.” He raised an eyebrow at her and waited, smiling slightly.

“I never thought of that.” She stopped and stared at Yod. “Frankly, I’d like the poem less if I thought that was what Burns meant. That probably was true of that relationship, the way it is of most, but not a cause for celebration. You changed the subject. We should return.”

“Must we? I’d like to see all of your house. The trees, too, interest me. I’ve seen them from Avram’s windows, but I’ve never been close to them before.” He behaved differently here with her than he had in the lab with Avram. He was a little less jumpy and far more expressive. He had become animated with her ever since they had arrived at the house. “The leaves are different on each of them. Is this … fruit?”

“Those are unripe peaches.”

There was a pause while Yod accessed what a peach was. She was about to warn him as he examined the fruit not to detach it, but she observed then how very precisely and carefully he employed his hands. She was growing used to the slightly perplexed frown of concentration that came over him when he was retrieving some piece of unfamiliar information from his data bases. “Do you have a room here? Gadi has a room in Avram’s flat. Avram has a room also that is only his. In addition, there are common rooms, such as a kitchen, where food is prepared—”

“That’s standard. Yes, although I left home years ago, Malkah kept my room for me, just as I left it. Before the kisrami plague of ’22, I’m told, several families lived in this house, but now there’s just the two of us.”

He turned back one last time to the climbing rose. “Creature of an hour. Yet my predecessors, too, were mostly creatures of an hour. Except for Gimel. He will likely outlast me. But he is not alive.”

“Do you consider yourself alive?”

“I’m conscious of my existence. I think, I plan, I feel, I react. I consume nutrients and extract energy from them. I grow mentally, if not physically, but does the inability to become obese make me less alive? I feel the desire for companionship. If I can’t reproduce, neither can many humans. Doesn’t infertility afflict half your population?”

She decided not to proceed further down that road with him. Instead she led him into the kitchen. “What do you mean, your predecessors were creatures of an hour?”

“I’m not using the figurative language correctly?”

“I can’t tell until you explain further.”

“You know the fate of Alef. You were present, weren’t you?”

“Avram told you about that?”

Yod stopped and faced her. His eyes stared into her. “Avram told me nothing. I accessed his notes. Except for Gimel, who could quite honestly be called retarded, Avram destroyed every one of my brothers.”

“All the cyborgs who preceded you, you mean.”

“They were all conscious, Shira, except for Gimel. Fully alive minds.”

“That upsets you.”

“If your mother had killed eight siblings of yours before your birth because they didn’t measure up to her ideas of what she wanted, wouldn’t you be alarmed?”

“You fear he’ll destroy you also?”

“I’d be foolish if that fear didn’t occur to me.” He smiled then, with a melancholy air. “That’s why I address him as
Father.”

“Could we run through that one again?”

“It’s a feeble attempt to establish a bond that may preserve me. How do I know he won’t decide to scrap me? … Show me the house, then.”

“Why are you interested?” she asked, nonetheless leading him into the central computer archive, Malkah’s office at home and the brain of the house. She was aware he had tactfully changed the subject twice, and she further realized she was thinking the pronoun “he.”

He sat down at the computer and rapidly interfaced. She nodded at him that he could use her plug. After all, Yod was
not about to spread germs to her. She doubted if bacteria could thrive in him; he would not prove a fertile environment. “Even in her programs,” he remarked a few minutes later, as he disengaged, “one receives a strong impression of Malkah’s personality, have you noticed that?”

“I think that’s always true of more creative systems.”

He was waiting for her to lead the way, so she did, through the living room, then upstairs to the second ring of rooms. However, just as they reached the upper hall, which ran as a balcony around the second floor, the house announced Malkah. Yod leaned over the balcony and waved. “Malkah! Look, I’m visiting. Shira brought me.” At once he stepped over the balcony and dropped like a cat onto the tiles below. Shira leaned after him. “Yod! Are you all right?”

“Perfectly.” He sounded puzzled. He was hurrying toward Malkah, who held out her arms to him so that they could embrace. Shira groaned, slowly descending the stairway. Malkah might be right to an extent that Yod had to be treated as some kind of entity, a machine with consciousness, but hugging him seemed beyond bizarre.

By the time she reached them, Malkah had sat down in her usual chair and Yod was kneeling before her, talking far more rapidly than she had ever heard him speak, words tumbling out. “… how much I have missed you. Communicating through the com link is not the same as seeing you, I understand that now.”

“Avram decided I was a bad influence on Yod, so he shut me out.”

“A bad influence?” Shira asked.

“I’m responsible for some of Yod’s programming. Avram brought me in as a last desperate gamble to save the project.”

“Malkah, I’ve done something bad here today. I destroyed your climbing rose.” He explained rapidly.

“Yod, you can’t help your violent urges, but I tried to introduce a counterweight. In time you may learn to use your strength more wisely.”

“Malkah is my friend. The only one who treats me as a person and not as a tool.” He beamed at both of them, a wide innocent smile of delight. “But you have made me more of a person today by taking me out into the world.”

“But, Malkah, what made you come home so early?” Shira read the time from her inner clock. It was 14:35:11. Soon she should return Yod to the lab.

Malkah was leaning back in her chair, exhausted or depressed
about something. “Yod informed me on the com link he was here.”

“You’re very fast,” Shira said to him. She had been entirely unaware.

He nodded, still beaming. “The fastest.”

“We had another casualty this morning,” Malkah said, rubbing her eyes hard. “Aviva Emet.” She sighed, her hands clenching the arms of her chair.

“What do you mean, another casualty?” Shira asked.

“We’ve had five programmers killed and another two reduced to vegetables in the last year. It happens while they’re plugged into our Base and working. Further, our stuff is being stolen. We assume it’s pirates. They kill, and then they steal.”

Suddenly Shira understood. “And Yod is to be prepared to enter the Base and fight this menace?”

Malkah nodded. “That’s part of it.”

“I never knew Aviva Emet. Was she a friend?”

“She was younger than you are, Shira, and very bright. She came here last fall and apprenticed herself. What they killed her to steal was something we intended to sell at a very good price. It wasn’t completed enough to sell, but it obviously was sufficient to be worth stealing.”

Shira asked Yod, “Do you understand what they plan to do with you?”

“I was created to serve.” Yod shrugged. “I am more capable of investigating these assaults than anyone else. Perhaps soon.” He rose and looked for something to sit down on. Lacking a convenient chair, he picked up a block of granite, an old horse trough that stood in the garden, and casually moved it close to Malkah’s chair, in a conversational grouping. Malkah threw Shira a look of amusement. She was pulling herself together visibly, as she always did after an emotional shock. Malkah had raised Shira in the belief that the proper response to a blow was to draw oneself up straight and proceed. If Malkah had been close to the woman killed, Shira would only find out gradually, for Malkah would grieve slowly and in odd moments.

Shira was still observing Malkah’s manner with Yod. It was almost flirtatious. It shocked her slightly. Definitely Malkah responded to Yod as a male being. Shira had known Malkah to flirt with tomcats, but a machine?

As Shira had suspected, Avram was furious. He ordered Yod into the inner laboratory, but Yod sat down quietly in the corner.

“I ordered you to leave.”

“But it wouldn’t be rational for me to do so. This concerns me, Father.”

Avram’s eyes glittered with anger. There are people who swell with anger, Shira thought, but Avram seemed to brighten with it. “How dare you take him out of the lab?”

She forced herself not to cringe, to try to sound calm. “He needs more experience, more stimulation than he’s receiving confined here. It’s time for him to mix with people. He has to learn how to operate in society. Avram, we must start somewhere. If we’re together, most people will be paying attention to my being back and what gossip they’ve heard. Yod will be a little protected.”

“Where did you take him?”

“Just to my house and then back.”

“We saw Malkah,” Yod volunteered. “She came home. I was very glad to talk with her.”

Shira noticed that he did not mention that he had summoned Malkah.

Avram swung back to her. “Did you leave them alone?”

“No,” she said. “I was with Yod the entire time. What are you afraid of?”

“Just don’t leave them alone together. I don’t trust Malkah.”

“I do,” Yod said softly. “She’s my friend.”

Avram snorted. “However, I agree that already he’s improving. But be extremely careful. Don’t let him talk with anyone yet, and don’t give complicated explanations. Shall we agree on a cover story? We’ll say he’s my cousin, as you suggested, and he has come to work as my lab assistant. Everybody knows I haven’t had one since David’s accident.”

She was relieved that Avram’s anger had been mollified. It made her feel more confident that she could work with him. Behind Avram’s back, Yod inscribed on the air the Hebrew letter
chet:
the nature of David’s fatal accident.

TWELVE

A Sea Change

Shira stood in the lab, about a foot from Yod, who shot her a look she could read only as complicity. They shared a sense of alarm. She was no longer surprised that she credited him with reactions: they might be simulacra of human emotions, but something went on in him that was analogous to her own responses, and making the constant distinction was a waste of energy.

Before them Avram was pacing. With the back of his hand he swept a pile of books and memory crystals to the floor. Automatically Gimel slipped past and was darting in and back restoring order as Avram paced. “Is he really my son? I wonder sometimes! Oh, I know Sara was faithful to me, but in the hospital, they could have made a mistake. You hear of it. If you don’t check the gene print. But I did. Something went wrong. Something went awry, and I swear he should be scrapped the way you scrap an experiment that you have poured years and credit into and finally you cut your losses!”