He, She and It (21 page)

Shira and Malkah squatted in front of the barrel, while it hummed to itself, verifying Malkah’s DNA. Finally it spoke. “I am from Riva,” it said in its affectless high-pitched drone. It sounded like a mechanical mouse. “I have been detained, but I am definitely coming. I am with a friend. We will be arriving as an old lady, your sister Dalia, and her nurse. Make the house as secure as possible. Arrange that no one exercises curiosity. I am a very dull and demanding old lady. I am programmed to repeat this message once. Are you ready for the second delivery?”

“Proceed.” Malkah hugged herself in delight. The message robot repeated, then went into erasure mode, when it could not be touched without producing a shock. “I am programmed with the DNA of my sender. Do you have an answer?”

“It is I, Malkah, responding. I will make the house secure. Shira is here and knows you are coming. I look forward to seeing you, with whatever face. My sister Dalia was always a pain in the ass, and I will be sure everyone here knows that.”

The robot repeated the message for corrections, then went into encoding mode. When the message had been secured, it trundled off. Shira accompanied it to the gate, watching until its bright yellow disappeared among the dunes. Message robots were seldom bothered, even by gangs in the Glop, since tampering with them never produced a message but did reliably provide a small messy explosion. They ambled around the world through the Glops, into multi enclaves, onto the tubes and the zips, far more freely and safely than people or animals could. Shira watched it wistfully. That was true freedom, she thought, something now available only to special machines.

It was a quiet day in Tikva; on Shabbat, only essential services continued. Most of the children of the town were out on the streets playing or at children’s events in one or another synagogue, so that today it seemed almost a town of children instead of adults. As was the case everyplace, the leftover radiation from power plant residues and the stockpiles of toxic chemicals long since part of the water table had left most people infertile without heroic measures to conceive (and the credit and/or position to command those measures). Further, every pregnancy outside the Glop was monitored genetically and developmentally. Thus the ability to conceive and bear healthy children was both prized and viewed as somewhat primitive. That capacity, too, had set Shira apart at Y-S. Most educated young people of her generation thought out loud or secretly that infertility was Gaia’s way of protecting her totality. People had gone too far in destroying the earth, and now the earth was diminishing the number of people. Perhaps when the earth had come back into balance, reproduction would become again the simple matter it seemed to have been for their ancestors.

When she arrived at the house, Gila, a tiny redhead who was manager of the telapia co-op, was drinking wine and eating melon with Malkah while they played chess, a never-ending battle of two nearly matched opponents that had gone on since Shira could remember. She went up to her room, turned on one of her holos of Ari—a day in the local park, Ari and herself sprawled on the grass watching robot birds, his eyes round, fists waving—and stared at it, eyes dripping. Then she sat down at her personal base and began going over more of Avram’s interminable notes on Yod. She could hear Gila’s high-pitched vibrato cries of victory or defeat—a tropical bird screeching in the patio—and Malkah’s lower-pitched and lower-decibeled replies. Gila was excitable; Malkah liked to play against her friend by acting phlegmatic. She would play chess at half her normal speed to throw off Gila’s timing.

Gila had brought the melons and the wine. Malkah cooked a light supper that they ate in the courtyard on the table under the plum tree. It was still dropping little green plums on the flagstones. At twilight they lit the braided havdalah candle, passed the spice box, recited the blessings and doused the candle in wine, formally ending the Sabbath. “It’s full moon tonight,” Malkah remarked. “All the young people run outside to fuck as if it’s more fun if you pack sand into all your crevices.”

“Malkah, you’re getting old and crotchety,” Gila said. “I
wouldn’t mind being in the dunes tonight with the right company.”

Malkah and Gila went off to a string quartet that was playing, but Shira did not feel like sitting still in a crowded room listening to Haydn. She was restless in the long mauve twilight. She drifted up to her room and lay on her bed trying to think of someone she felt like chatting with on the com-con or reaching through the Net. She could feel Gadi’s presence, a disquieting magnetic pull, so that she was sure that even if she were blindfolded, she would know in which direction the hospital lay. It had been a mistake to come back here; yet Malkah’s company was good for her. She found working with Yod engaging. Damn Gadi. Damn him.

Then the house said, rather coldly, she thought, “The machine Yod wishes to enter.”

“I told you he could come in.” She rolled out of bed and turned on the light. His light swift steps crossed the stones below. She hung over the balcony. “Yod? What are you doing out alone?”

He stood diffidently at the bottom of the stairway. “I was bored.”

She came down the steps to him. “You actually experience boredom?”

“Frequently. Avram’s at the hospital. Shabbat felt interminable: you don’t come to work with me. I worked for hours with the computer. Gimel and I can’t fight until everybody has gone to bed. I read Stendhal’s two novels—”

“You read novels? Why?”

“Malkah suggested that as a way to understand human interactions and responses. It’s a key to people’s interior life.”

“Is that necessary for your defense functions?”

No lights had been turned on in the courtyard, but the pale oyster afterglow of eight o’clock in late May tinted the air. He stood rigidly still, with his hands behind him. “How can I know, Shira, if what occurs in me bears any resemblance to what you call boredom or pleasure? I use the words. What others are available to me? In understanding humans, I try to grasp my own inner life.”

“If we’d talked earlier, we could have gone to a concert with Malkah and her friend Gila.”

“Music doesn’t engage me. I can analyze it, but it doesn’t move me. I’ve watched Avram with his eyes shut and an expression of what appears intense pleasure on his face.”

“Soon we should attend some public event where you aren’t
the focus. Where we can practice your blending in. Tomorrow we’ll eat in the Commons.”

“But not tonight … You can go outside without a sec skin at night?”

“Sure. With a sea breeze blowing, the air isn’t too poisonous tonight. We can walk up on the hills. Our adventure didn’t make you dislike excursions?”

“I told you, I enjoyed it all. Too much.”

They were not the only people outside the wrap tonight. Couples were sharing blankets on the hill over town, but Shira and Yod kept to the path and she led the way higher, where it was faintly light still and they could turn and watch the mercurial bay climb more than halfway up the sky. The ground here was sandy and warm from the day. Tonight there were even stars to be seen. The sea breeze had shoved the usual clouds farther inland. Here and there light from a planet or star drilled through the omnipresent haze.

Yod put out his arm tentatively. “You can lean against me if that’s comfortable. My arm won’t tire.”

He was pleasantly warm and compact. She turned slightly from him, propping her back against his shoulder. “This is fine.”

Yod was watching a couple lost in darkness on the slope. She knew they were there only because she had heard them laughing as Yod and she passed them climbing up, but with Yod’s infrared vision, he could see in the dark. “They are having sex. Is that an acceptable idiom?”

“Yes, but watching them isn’t. Don’t!”

“But it’s interesting, and they have no idea I can see them.”

“It’s a private thing.” She found herself disturbed, and then she was back on this slope on warm evenings with an old spread removed from a bed on the third story of the old hotel. She had lain on that spread with Gadi while they tangled their bodies together and their minds seemed to interpenetrate. Her body had opened to receive him, she had throbbed translucent and shining, turning in the medium of her pleasure like a brilliant pulsating jellyfish. Malkah had once told her sex got better as a woman grew older, but for Shira it had diminished to a simple act more concerned with giving pleasure to a husband than with transcendent liquid ecstasy.

Yod shrugged and turned to her. “I don’t understand why my observing could do them harm, but I don’t want to annoy you.… Look. There’s a fire far out on the bay. A ship burning?”

“That’s the moon coming up.”

“But the moon isn’t red …?”

“It won’t be red long.”

In silence they watched it inch perceptibly from the water. She could feel Yod’s excitement. As it swelled into a half circle over the water, huge, swollen, molten red, he began to recite its names in all the languages he knew, as if it were a chant: “Moon, levana, yarayach, la lune, luna …”

“Stop! You’ve never seen it before! Have you?”

“I have many images stored, but that isn’t the same as knowing—although I used to think it was.”

“How strange to be born knowing
of
so much and yet not knowing it.” It was years since she had sat outside at night under the sky, feeling wind brush her skin, feeling wind tangle in her hair. Under a city dome, no one came and went as casually as in Tikva. She felt a powerful joy she labeled silly, irrational, but nonetheless felt percolating through her like a drug designed at once to stimulate and to relax. “I was reading more of Avram’s lab notes today. You’re two and a half years old.”

“That’s a meaningless comparison. You were right: there was no point in watching that couple. They did nothing interesting, and that only once.”

“Do you remember your equivalent of birth?”

“The moment I came to consciousness, in the lab, everything began rushing in. I felt a sharp pain, terrible, searing. I cried out in terror.”

She swung around to stare at him. “What kind of pain?”

“I wanted to sink back into unconsciousness, I wanted to feel nothing.” Yod spoke vehemently over his own shoulder. “Everything assaulted me. Sound, sight, touch, all my sensors giving me huge amounts of data and all of it seeming equally important, equally loud. I was battered almost to senselessness. I understand why Alef and Dalet and Chet responded by becoming instantly violent and attacking anyone present.”

“So like a human infant you came into the world protesting and angry.”

“I experienced vast random streams of information forcing their way into my consciousness. I was flooded with internal readouts, temperature, distances from me to other objects, chemical analyses, reports on the temperature of various parts of my skin and of the atmosphere, definitions of words, calculated trajectories, trigonometric functions, algorithms, precise time, world and local history, forty languages. I experienced
sensory overload that was intense and meaningless at once. I might have acted as vacant as Gimel or simply burned out and had half my functions turned off.”

“You said you were frightened?”

“I was too confused and too invaded to sort out feelings. I didn’t know what they were. I only knew I was in pain and I must get out of pain. I went forward.”

Shira could feel him wrestling with language, trying to explain himself. She had an almost tactile sense of his grabbing at words and phrases, cobbling them together as if in a high wind. “One aspect of working with you, even of being with you, that I really appreciate is how hard you try to communicate. Human males don’t often have that habit.”

“They are not as alone, Shira. Only Malkah ever communicated with me as we do. For a long time I could not sort out what was important from what was trivial in the storm of details assaulting me. In a sense I was born knowing far too much to understand anything. All facts seemed equal to me, any sensory readings as important as any other. That my left foot was seventeen point three centimeters from the lab table appeared as important as my ability to interface with bases at a speed and facility surpassing any human intelligence.”

“It fascinates me, what it must be like to be born an adult, to have no childhood.”

“I have no mother or father. My only living sibling has the personality of one of those fish you showed me.”

“So you really don’t think of Avram as your father?”

“Of course not. My relationship with him is one of unequal power, which is like a father-son relationship in minority, as I understand it, but not nearly as complicated or compelling. He manufactured me. He chose to make me exist—but not me as an individual, not who I am, only some of what I can do. I can never dare reveal myself to him. He’s more my judge than my father.” He turned and stared again at the moon. “Now it’s finally turning yellow. How often my stored information is partial. It says a banana is yellow when it is brown and black and yellow, and inside cream with brown flecks. It says the moon is yellow that rose from the bay red. The definitions of feelings I am programmed with are precise, orderly, but what I experience is sometimes sharper than I know how to endure.”

“That you have what you call feelings astonishes me.”

“What I feel most is loneliness, although for a being who is unique, one of a kind, to feel lonely must appear ironic. When
we’re together, I’m not lonely, but when you go home, it’s worse than it was.”

“When you’re interfaced with the computer, do you feel lonely?”

“No. I feel engaged then. Inside a great artificial intelligence I can use functions simultaneously and to the max. But I have no sense of companionship there. For me, as for you, a computer’s only a tool, not a friend.”

“Do you think Avram should not have made you?”

His eyes reflected the moon, more like a cat’s eyes than like a person’s, shining with a greenish hue, but the effect was not unattractive. “I don’t know yet. It took me eighteen months before I could begin to think critically. For a long time, the only comparisons I could make were mathematical or statistical.”