He, She and It (31 page)

“But we see each other now face-to-face.… I’ll continue. I promise.”

Yod smiled wistfully. “His story is meaningful to me. I’m glad we can see each other again. Every day I missed you. Time does not make my memories less intense, and thus they evoke the same reactions each time I access them.”

I stood in the courtyard in the darkness, hearing rather than seeing him leave. I had a desire to call him back. This was the real letting go, this night, far more ultimate than when I had permitted Avram to guess and thus cut off our liaison. I wanted to be younger, I wanted to be stronger, I wanted back the body that had for so many years of my life been equal to that hard driven dance, that sensual twisting and turning, that rich passionate descent into the tips and the roots of the senses. Yod was my true last lover. After him, I would desire none other. I had created him to be all I might want, and now I had truly let him go. My body and my mind mourned him.

Suddenly I had a genuine pang of appetite. The kittens, too, had wakened hungry. I picked at a medley of leftovers from meals I had not enjoyed. Standing in the kitchen tasting them—with the kittens nibbling gruel on the counter before me—me eating everything cold and with the same fork, I enjoyed food as I hadn’t since the attack. I had thought Shira might be too conventional and too sexually timid to acknowledge an attraction to Yod. I was surprised by her boldness. Somehow he had wormed his way through her defenses. She was desperate to interpose someone between Gadi and herself. How would she feel in the morning? Ashamed? Guilty? I hoped she had the courage of her pleasure. I hoped I had been able to give her that.

Now goodbye to the noisy hot surface clatter of the intimate life and on to the problem of restructuring the defenses of our Base. It would be a fierce keen pleasure to bang my mind against Avram’s again, to strike our ideas on each other’s stubborn steel. Whenever we’ve been able to force ourselves to work together, what wonders we have performed—when we do not act like a snake with two heads, one straining east while the head on the far end pulls west.

Now we knew our enemy, and it was a deadly one. Yakamura-Stichen was one of the ten most powerful multis in the world, and the world included the satellites. They were coming after us for some reason, and they would not stop.

When I left, Shira was still sleeping. I asked the house to tell her to go see Zee’s mother and break the news to her. She used to spend after-school time at Zee’s house, I vaguely remembered, so she might have some rapport.

I realized in midmorning as I rose for air, making coffee to excuse the break in concentration, that I was once again enjoying my life, that I was in full possession of myself, my faculties, that I was—more than happy—joyous. I like a good hard job that matters. I like that push of anxiety bearing on creation. Maybe I’m just an adrenaline addict. That morning I almost loved Avram. Sometimes he irritates me so much I forget how bright he is, how extraordinary a mind he has, how imaginative he is in his science. Sometimes I have to admit he’s as good as I am—that good.

At noon, while we were eating a pickup lunch, Gadi bombed in on us. “Why is access to the Base closed? How am I supposed to manage?”

The Base of course was not entirely shut down. The master computers had to maintain the wrap, regulate temperature, circulate water, monitor air quality, clean the waste water, run the external surveillance gadgets and screen their output, operate the fusion plant, desalinate and remove toxins. Internal com-con was functional, so we could talk to each other and so we had a means, not as good as direct, but usable, to access the Net. But aside from security, which has secondary status after life-support systems, nothing else was operational. We were down until we had re-created our defenses.

“Didn’t you hear it’s a holiday?” I said cheerfully. “Yom Yod.” Yod Day. “He killed the razors who slashed me.”

“Where’s Shira?”

“Off telling a mother her daughter tried to murder me and is now dead. Want to join her? I’m sure she could use the help.”

The truth of the matter is, I like Gadi. I’ve liked him since he was a gawky lonely miserable child. I think he’s found his art the way I found mine, and I like people who plunge into the work they want to spend themselves on. However, his influence on Shira is another matter. They did each other in, and I vastly prefer her involved with a cyborg than with a man-boy stuck at age fifteen sexually and emotionally. It’s a great advantage to him in his work: he has his head into adolescent fantasy and spins it into riches. I’m a greater believer in sexual satisfaction than in emotional angst, and I don’t give a damn whether she can persuade herself she loves Yod or not, so long as she has the sense to spend what free time she has with him instead of Gadi.

Gadi did not ask further where Shira was. Yod had heard none of this, as he was interfaced programming the details on the first structures we designed. Gadi went off in a crowd of those kids who hang around him now, imitating his gestures, intonation, style. When Shira ran in, he had long gone.

“Malkah, I stopped by the house. There was a secured message for me from Y-S asking for a meeting. They say my appeal on the custody of Ari had been reconsidered. What should I do?”

“They have your son,” I said. I felt cold all through. A new offensive. They were planning something. “How can you trust them enough for a meeting?”

“They aren’t about to gun me down, are they? I have to go. I have to see what they want Maybe the attack on the Base comes from an entirely different arm of Y-S than who decides about children’s custody. Why assume they’re related?”

“Don’t let them in here,” Avram said. “Meet them outside.”

“Take Yod with you,” I said. I was thinking that he could record the entire meeting. They would never permit taping, but Yod would produce a perfect record we could go over later. He might be able to protect Shira, in case her confidence was misplaced. The old rules had been broken, and no suspicions seemed truly paranoid.

“Do you want to come along?” Shira asked me. “We’ll pick some neutral meeting place.”

Yod, who had pulled out of the machine when Shira arrived, stood now. “I want to go. I must go with you.”

Shira paced, one hand tangled in her hair. She had that fey deer look she often has, but I could feel her resolve. She turned to Avram and me, looking back and forth between our faces. “I could ask Cybernaut to provide space and security. They’re not likely to be in Y-S’s pocket, are they?”

“A canny idea,” I said. “Play off the juggernauts against each other. Still, I will not go. I’ll rely on Yod.”

“I haven’t decided if Yod should be permitted to leave the town,” Avram said, “although this might provide an opportunity to test his physical defense functions. We need such a shakedown, and he’s had no opportunity yet.”

I said, “In any event, this isn’t your decision to make alone, Shira, Avram. Y-S attacked Tikva. It would seem suspicious if Shira, a former employee, were to confer with them on her own now. We need to take the matter before the Town Council Monday night and see if a meeting feels safe to the town. I’ll gladly present the matter.”

“Fine,” Avram said. “But Yod need not appear. I’m not ready for the Council to meet him.”

“At some point they’ll have to, Avram. Secrecy never works, because nothing ever stays a secret long.”

“It is not yet time,” was all he said, staring at me from his ice-blue eyes, which still can make my spine radiate under his gaze. Ah, Avram: too bad we can’t meet once again ardent, sweet, in some vineyard of the soul. But my very tone of being rasps on your nerve ends. What a pity for us, old angel.

TWENTY-TWO

The Present

The morning after, Tikva was shaken up like a handful of dice, and everything fell differently. The Base was closed, and all work on regular projects halted. The Base Overseers met with the other members of the Town Council, and everybody tried to assimilate the news that one of the largest multis in the world was their enemy. Zee’s mother collapsed and was hospitalized. The Council commended Yod and questioned Shira about Y-S intentions; however, she could be of little assistance, having spent her time there at such a low grade. All agreed the restoration of defenses was paramount. As for Shira’s meeting with Y-S, they decided she should use the negotiations to try to buy time and to find out, if possible, what Y-S wanted from the town.

Malkah hit the ground running. Shira saw Malkah only at an occasional mealtime and sometimes first thing in the morning. Shira was inessential this week. Her skills would come into play further along in the process. All Yod’s time was usurped by the need to fortify the Base, as was Malkah’s, Avram’s, and the energies of twenty-plus other designers. Therefore the question of seeing Yod or dealing with what had happened could not even arise. Shira dickered with Y-S, and a meeting was set up for the following week in the Cybernaut facility 22.6 kilometers away, for ten a.m. on a Tuesday. She read on through Yod’s specs. She still did not have Malkah’s notes. Since the timing for pursuing the matter seemed poor, she would have to wait.

She had plenty of time to contemplate what had occurred, to run rings around it until her memory blurred from too much handling. She recognized a certain chagrin in herself, an embarrassment that she had responded so strongly on a sexual level to a mechanical device. Sexual level. That was handling it with tongs. Better to admit she had fallen open like an old book, like Malkah’s antique atlas, all the way to the spine. It had been so many years since she had lost control sexually, since she had responded more than tepidly, that her excitement shook her sense of herself.

Her deep and almost violent sexual pleasure not only disturbed but confused her. She had imagined that it was her love for Gadi, that early emotional bonding, that had made the sex with him much more satisfying and engaging than anything in her life since. But what she was responding to in Yod was simply technique. He had been programmed to satisfy, and he satisfied. She had to admit she was perhaps a little disappointed in herself that she could indeed be pleased by what was programmed to do just that.

Yet struggling with injured pride for mastery, she experienced, too, a powerful sense of freedom. If that depth of sexual response was not necessarily and permanently tied to Gadi, then she was not married to him in her very synapses, as she had believed since they had parted as lovers. If Yod could rouse her fiercely and she could break into storms of orgasm, then she could also do so eventually with someone to whom she could pledge herself and whom she could love passionately. Gadi had not ruined her irreparably for loving. The myth that had governed her emotional life for the last ten years was peeling off like an old mural of two burning children impaled on their love, and the bricks beneath the chipping paint emerged unweathered.

She was deeply confused. She wanted to go and see Gadi to test herself, but she was afraid. She wanted to see Yod again; she was no longer pleased that the crisis had removed him from her ken.

She was the cat mother by default, and the kittens squirmed in her lap, climbed her legs mewling, chasing each other and then falling asleep everyplace from the kitchen counter to the top of the terminal. Every night they ran to Malkah’s bed and screamed until Shira collected them into hers. She spent hours petting them while she contemplated her emotions. For years she had not found her interior life quite so fascinating: perhaps not since adolescence. Malkah had named the kittens Leila (night) and Zayit (olive); Malkah could tell them apart from across the room, although her eyesight was obviously failing. Shira could not tell which was which. Both were female, so lifting their tails did not help her.

She remembered, as she was plodding through Avram’s endless notes, that Malkah had promised to shunt to her personal base the record of the previous cyborgs. She searched and found the file. Huge. She moved into fast scan mode. Alef she remembered. In the attempt to correct that malfunction, the hardware had been modified to the extent that Bet had seized up and never adequately gained control of motor functions. Gimel was Gimel. Dalet was the last of those models, and he not only exploded into violence but wrecked the lab. Then Avram redesigned, incorporating more biological components.

Hey she paused at, moving from scanning to actual visual record. This was the first cyborg with Yod’s features, so that she found herself seeing Yod. But nothing Hey did resembled Yod, except at his jumpiest. It moved far more jerkily, as if the images were speeded up by the computer. It had outlasted all of the cyborgs before it, except for the survivor Gimel. But it did not function adequately on a verbal level. Something seemed amiss in those all-important programs. It was deactivated and cannibalized for parts for Vav. Through Vav to Zayin, the language circuits were modified and improved, the interface between organic and mechanical components perfected. Chet not only looked like Yod but moved smoothly and mastered verbal skills rapidly. She watched Chet playing chess and go with the main computer. He was fast, aggressive in the pursuit of his given objectives. She had the sense of a massive intelligence simpler than Yod, undeviating, relentless. Inexorably Chet pursued his programmed goals, honed his skills. It was approaching time for him to begin to interact. David was working
with him. It was a simpler form of the playacting she had carried out with Yod. “No, you can’t come in. The shop is closed. Come back tomorrow.”