He, She and It (39 page)

“Your Dr. Rhodes is dead now,” Nili said sourly. “Whatever he came for, he didn’t get it.”

“We did successfully block them,” Shira said hopefully.

“Don’t you think they would gladly have paid with nine soldiers for the death of Riva?” Nili paced the lab, glaring.

“Dr. Rhodes was just as well regarded as Avram or Malkah, Nili. Y-S didn’t think they were risking anything when they let him attend. They wanted him on the spot, but everything happened too quickly. It was all over in five minutes.” She was still stunned when she thought of it. Meanwhile, connection after connection knit under her hands. The tools began to feel natural. She remembered that she had enjoyed building machines in college.

Yod let out a sigh as his speech capacity returned. “You are all right?” he asked Shira at once, trying to touch her bound wrist but still unable to control his hand. “Will it heal?” At her nod, he continued, to Nili, “Your enhancements make you an effective fighter. Without you, I might not have sufficed to protect.”

Nili glared at him out of her intense green eyes. Side by side with Yod, Nili actually looked more artificial. Her hair, her eyes were unnaturally vivid, and her musculature was far more pronounced. “I am the future.”

“You may well be right,” Yod said mildly. “I’m not a proselytizer for my kind. I am not persuaded I’m a good idea, frankly.”

“I spent my life creating you,” Avram said huffily. “Would you rather I turned you off?”

“I can well believe you built a switch into the model,” Gadi said from the doorway. “How often have you wished I had one? Hello, hello. Who are you?” He made straight for Nili, stopping before her and then circling her. “Seeing you has lifted this day from the dreary to the delicious.”

Nili stood very still, staring at him. She looked at him with as avid a curiosity and the same air of not quite believing her eyes as Gadi was aiming at her. “Who is this?”

“My annoying son.” Avram introduced them, glaring. “Gadi has arranged his life so he never has to grow up. You can learn a lot about our contemporary life from him. He represents the age at its most frivolous.”

“You do look like a plaything,” Nili said to him uncertainly.

“Ah, would you like to play with me?” Gadi could not resist a little glance at Shira to see if he was awaking her jealousy.

She was curious about that too, but nothing stirred. She was
too buffeted emotionally. Whenever she closed her eyes, she began to relive that blur of violence. She felt her wrist crack, she saw the assassin’s spine snap. She knew that Yod, too, was replaying the events, trying to figure out whether he had done everything he could. He was disturbed that he had permitted any of the party to be lost. Malkah was the most personally stricken. Shira felt a deep sense of confusion. She could not properly mourn the woman she had never known, but neither could she pretend she had not just lost her biological mother. Avram had been right. She had engaged in fatal wishing. Fantasizing about recovering Ari, she had gone eagerly to the meeting, ignoring the danger.

Yod was still checking out his circuitry, but his attention was primarily fixed on the odd couple in the center of the lab. He looked fascinated. “I don’t understand what you are,” Nili said uncertainly. “You are male?”

“Just so, lady of the blood-red hair, but I’ll be anything you like, to please you. I’ll crow or roar or whimper or sing and dance.”

“Gadi, get out. You make me bilious,” his father said.

“I’m Gadi Stein.” He waited, used to some reaction. Nili had none. “I design virons.…” By now people were usually excited. He hadn’t the fame of the stars into whose sensory experiences millions of people had passed, but he had the secondary and considerable renown of the most fashionable designers, ranking with musicians and sports heroes; further, the careers of designers spanned the meteoric arcs of generations of stars.

Shira was enjoying the tinkering. It felt intimate to be working on Yod under his gaze. She suspected she could effect most repairs to him without Avram’s help, particularly if she continued studying his records. “Are we ready to close now?” she asked Yod, who nodded. They smiled at each other.

“Virons?” Nili looked blank. “That’s something to do with entertainment, isn’t it?”

Gadi was rendered briefly speechless. Finally he asked, “Where are you from? How can you not know what a viron is? You’re turning me over, verdad?”

“I come from … a primitive place. We don’t have credit for stimmies.”

“Everybody has stimmies. Every slum in the world.”

“We live high in the mountains, where there is no transmission.”

“Satellite transmission reaches everyplace.”

Nili decided simply to look away with a shrug.

Gadi was visibly recovering his moxie. “I can show you a couple of simple little virons upstairs. Come.”

Nili took a step after him. Then she shocked Shira by turning on her heel. “Shira, come with me? Wouldn’t you like to see them also?”

Could Nili be nervous about being alone with Gadi? Shira realized that men were exotic to Nili; she had never been alone with any man. Perhaps she had been raised on horror stories of rape and molestation. But surely Nili would have a sense she could handle herself. Physically, no doubt; perhaps, like Yod, she had primitive social skills. “Avram may need me to test Yod.”

“Oh, go with them,” Avram said with a dismissing wave. “Yod will finish testing himself in half the time if you all clear out. We need to review his defense performance in detail. This was his first trial in the field.”

Her inner landscape was ravaged by fire storm. She wanted to hold Malkah. Malkah was off with Rabbi Patar, trying to explain to her why the woman who had died was not Dalia, her sister, for they had all decided Riva was to be buried under her own name. Nili insisted that had been Riva’s strong wish. If they dared take the time to sit shiva, maybe they would draw together and comfort each other. In the meantime Shira might as well accompany Nili. Gadi was waiting, standing on one foot like a flamingo watching for an unwary flash of fish.

“Nili and I are blood relatives,” she said to Gadi. “Did you know that?”

“Just like Yod and I are cousins, right?”

“That is not possible,” Nili said. “But the former is true. My grandfather is her father. We are not sure exactly what that makes us, but likely I am her niece.”

Gadi had been shepherding them upstairs. Now he stopped, just before his outer door. He had left the old door at the foot of the steps, but when they reached the third-floor hall, a new door blocked the hall toward the left. It was silver and throbbed in a random pattern of sparkles and bubbles and dashes, suggesting the motion of water. “You never knew your father. Not even who he was,” he said to Shira, looking into her eyes.

“I asked my mother, Riva. She told me last week.”

“Riva who was Dalia, Malkah’s sister who just became her dead daughter. Your mother, therefore. Your family is certainly convoluted.”

“You’re not sympathetic,” Nili said. “Do you dislike Shira,
or is it your nature to be cold? We’re speaking of the death of her mother, a brave woman and a great fighter.”

Yet Shira quietly thought that Nili was not as grieved as she might have expected, considering they had been lovers. She spoke of sorrow, but unlike Malkah, she did not exude it. Right now she gave off mostly an aura of intense wary curiosity.

“Of course I care about Shira. I just like to tease her. We grew up together; we’re old, old friends. Come into my parlor, dear pretty flies.”

The door was not solid but a field they passed through after Gadi had keyed them in. They were standing in what Shira could only think of as a velvet jungle. The walls were disguised as a dense wall of foliage in which parrots flew and screeched, in which small furry monkeys chased each other among brilliant and fragile orchids. The chairs were enormous purple and bronze flowers. The scent was sweet, thick, wet. Silk butterflies wavered like banners through the languid air. Nili glanced around, strode over and gingerly took a seat on the biggest purple flower. “This is your home?”

“Just one of the simple room virons I’ve designed here. I change them all the time. It would be too boring to be stuck in any of them, but they amuse me. Don’t you like it?”

“He means the room, Nili. It isn’t ordinary.”

Nili glanced around. “All your rooms are strange to me. It seems … pleasant. The only room I find familiar here is the lab downstairs. We have similar facilities. And the Commons. We eat together also.”

“This is just a room to you?” Gadi asked incredulously.

“It’s very nice,” Nili said stubbornly. “This chair is a little soft for me. I’m used to hard chairs or to squatting on rugs.”

“So this doesn’t seem … special to you?” Gadi insisted. He began playing with the arm of his chair, and silvery rain fell in a dense curtain. Of course it was illusion, a hologram. Then the sun came out through a fine mist, creating a perfect circle of rainbow. A jaguar flashed across the clearing, pausing to look over its shoulder, growl and then vanish into the imaginary vegetation, where a great metallic spider sat clinking and muttering.

“It reminds me of the house of Malkah. All the green plants and little trees inside.” Nili’s hand passed through a tree trunk. “But it’s real there.” She sounded disappointed.

“It’s for pleasure,” Gadi explained.

Nili looked at him blankly. “What kind of pleasure?”

“The pleasure of luxury. Of an experience out of the ordinary.”

“An imaginary jungle is luxurious? Then why not go to the real thing?”

“The real thing has mostly been destroyed,” Shira said. She wondered if she could simply slip out and leave them to their miscommunication in peace. Perhaps never had two more ill-matched people sat staring at each other in equal parts of fascination and incomprehension.

“The real jungle is full of things that bite, make you itch, scare you, give you diseases, rot your crotch, want to eat you for lunch.” He touched his chair arm. A flight of parrots converged, began a dogfight. Brilliant feathers drifted. Birds shattered like piñatas exploding into flowers.

“So danger is not part of your pleasure.”

“I didn’t say that,” Gadi said, sitting up very straight.

I should be jealous, Shira thought, but she was too deeply shaken to muster any jealousy. She wished she could escape her chaperon role, but she lacked the energy to break free. She watched them from a numb trance, wishing she were asleep in her bed. She had not slept more than an hour the night before her meeting. Images of violence floated on the back of her eyes. She was weary of attempting to function with the sense of being both mauled and guilty. She wanted to put her arms around Malkah and rock together in mutual comfort. She wanted to lie in Yod’s arms. How quickly she had come to depend on him. She imagined his presence quieter than a human’s demands. An enormous python was devouring a monkey over Gadi’s head. Then it began to sing Villa-Lobos. Shira broke into the conversation to ask, “Where’s your terminal? I need to talk to my house.”

Gadi waved her toward the foliage. “I’ll show you.”

He followed her through the image into the next room, which was in process. Its walls were visible, the hologram generators in place but the construction only half completed. “What will this be?” she asked politely.

“Anemones and cockleshells. When it’s done, I’ll show you.” He grasped her arm. “Who is she? What is she? Where the hell is she from?”

“You must ask her. What she wants to tell you, she’ll tell you.”

He did not let go. “I’m telling you, she’s unique. If I could show her to my boss, I bet they’d cut three months off my exile.
What a bad guy she’d make, maybe for the Nova Guards. That’s my first take on it.”

She reached the house. “Is Malkah back?”

“Hello, Shira. Malkah is expected within ten minutes. She has left Rabbi Patar’s house to walk home. She intends to stop en route to see if the box is ready for the burial. She asked that you come home as soon as you can. Ilana from the khevrah kaddisah is waiting for her, performing as if there were a body.”

“I’m on my way,” Shira said, yanking her arm from Gadi’s grip. She started out.

“I must go too,” Nili said. “These are arrangements we should share.”

They walked quickly together down the block. “You knew her even less than I did,” Nili said questioningly.

“I only met my mother nine times. I can’t say truthfully that I loved her, because I never knew her well enough.”

“We were physically intimate but not emotionally close. I admired her, but I never learned to read her clearly. She kept a distance.”

“She warned me that this might be our only time together. I feel guilty, as if I didn’t try hard enough.” Shira rubbed her sore eyes.

Nili shrugged. “How does it matter now? She lived the life she chose.”

As they climbed the steps of the house, Shira saw Malkah turn the corner. Both women stopped to wait for her. Malkah came rushing along the block, her chin sunk against her chest. Her gaze was cast down, and she was frowning. Halfway to the house, she became aware of them. Shira could tell that Malkah could not see who they were until she had come almost to them. Malkah must have an operation, but Shira hated to bully her into it. Malkah’s vision was clouding.

“Ah, good, you’re both here. We must sit down and make last plans. At sunset we’ll bury the few remains Nili found. It’s all we have.” Malkah’s face contorted for a moment, as if she might weep. “Danny is making a box for her, but it isn’t finished yet.”

“What can I do to help?” Nili asked.

“Maybe dig the grave? Ask Ilana,” Malkah said. They had no undertakers in the town but rather a burial society that laid out the body correctly; however, there was no body, only one charred bone and a few pieces of metal. Still, the burial society had ritually washed the remains and put them into a shroud on a pallet on the floor. Ilana was sitting with the remains, doing
beadwork. She was a maker of exquisite jewelry. Shira had three pairs of her earrings, but most of her work was exported to corporate enclaves.

Finally they could sit down at the kitchen table face-to-face. “Malkah, I hardly knew her. You’re my real mother. But she was your only daughter.”