Nekropolis (2 page)

I look quickly, but I don’t see my mother. If my mother sees me with the
harni,
she’ll be upset. She is a poor woman, and she doesn’t like AI, and it would worry her that I had to live in a household with something like the
harni
. I hurry through the cemetery gate into the Nekropolis. I hope she’s not home, since Ayesha lives across the street.

The
harni
looks around, as curious as a child or a jackdaw.

I grew up inside the Nekropolis. We didn’t have running water. It was delivered every day in a big lorritank and people would go out and buy it by the liter, and we lived in three adjoining mausoleums instead of a flat, but other than that, it was a pretty normal childhood. I have a sister and two brothers. My mother sells paper funeral decorations. The Nekropolis is a very good place for her to live. No long train rides every day from the countryside. The part we lived in was old. Next to my bed were the dates for the person buried behind the wall, 2073 to 2144. All of the family was dead years ago. No one ever came to this death house to lay paper flowers and birds.

Our house always smelled of cinnamon and the perfume my mother used on her paper flowers and birds. In the middle death house there were funeral arrangements everywhere and when we ate we would clear a space on the floor and sit, surrounded. When I was a little girl, I learned the different uses of papers: how my mother used translucent tissue for carnations, stiff satiny brittle paper for roses, and strong paper with a grain like linen for arrogant falcons. As children we all smelled of perfume, and when I stayed the night with my friend Ayesha, she would wrap her arms around my waist and whisper in my neck, “You smell good.”

I’m not waiting for the
harni
. It has to follow, it has no credit for the train ride. If it isn’t paying attention and gets lost, it can walk home.

When I glance back a block and a half later, it’s following me, its long curly hair wild about its shoulders, its face turned artlessly toward the sun. Does it enjoy the feeling of sunlight on skin? Probably, that’s a basic biological pleasure. It must enjoy things like eating.

Ayesha comes out, running on light feet. “Hariba!” she calls. She still lives across from my mother, but now she has a husband and a pretty four-year-old daughter, a chubby child with clear skin the color of amber and black hair. Tariam, the little girl, stands clinging to the doorway, her thumb in her mouth. Ayesha grabs my wrists and her bracelets jingle. “Come out of the heat!” She glances past me and says, “Who’s this?”

The
harni
stands there, one hand on his hip, smiling.

Ayesha drops my wrists and pulls a little at her rose-colored veil. She’s startled, thinking of course that I’ve brought a handsome young man with me. Only a rich man can keep separate households for himself and his wife, but Ayesha is a modest person who wouldn’t go around unescorted with a young man who wasn’t her husband.

“It’s a
harni,
“ I say and laugh, shrill and nervous. “Mbarek-salah asked me to bring him.”

“A
harni
?” she asks, her voice doubtful.

I wave my hand. “You know the mistress, always wanting toys. He’s in charge of the men’s household.” “He” I say. I meant “it.” “It’s in charge.” But I don’t correct myself, not wanting to call attention to my error.

“I’m Akhmim,” it says smoothly. “You’re a friend of Hariba’s?”

I look across the street, but the door to my mother’s house is shut. She must not be home. Praise God. My little brother Nabil is never home in the day.

Here I am, standing on the street in front of my mother’s house, and the
harni
is pretending to be a man. It has no respect for my reputation.

“Ayesha,” I say, “let’s go.”

She looks at the
harni
a moment more, then goes back to her little girl, picks her up, and carries her inside. Normally I’d go inside with her, sit, and talk with her mother, Ena. I’d hold Tariam on my lap and wish I had a little girl with perfect tiny fingernails and such a clean, sweet milk smell. It’d be cool and dark inside and we’d eat pistachios and drink tea. Then I’d go across the street to see my mother and youngest brother, Nabil, who’s the only one who lives at home now.

The
harni
stands in the street, away from me, looking at the ground. It seems uncomfortable. It doesn’t look at me; at least it has the decency to make it appear we aren’t together.

Ayesha comes out, bracelets ringing. While we shop in the souk, she doesn’t refer to the
harni,
but as it follows us, she glances back a lot. I glance back and it flashes a white smile. It seems perfectly content to trail along, looking at the souk stalls with their red canopies like married women’s veils.

“Maybe we should let him walk with us,” Ayesha says as she stops at a jewelry stall. “It seems rude to ignore him.”

I laugh, full of nervousness. “It’s not human.”

“Does it have feelings?” Ayesha asks.

I shrug. “After a fashion. It’s AI.”

“It doesn’t look like a machine,” she says.

“It’s not a machine,” I say, irritated with her.

“How can it be AI if it isn’t a machine?” she presses.

“Because it’s manufactured. A technician’s creation. An artificial combination of genes, grown somewhere.”

“Human genes?”

“Probably,” I say. “Maybe some animal genes. Maybe some that they made up themselves, how would I know?” It’s ruining my afternoon. “I wish it would offer to go home.”

“Maybe he can’t,” Ayesha says. “If Mbarek-salah told him to come, he’d have to, wouldn’t he?”

I don’t really know anything about
harni
.

“It doesn’t seem fair,” Ayesha says. “
Harni,
“ she calls, “come here.”

He tilts his head, all alert. “Yes, mistress?”

“Are
harni
prescripted for taste?” she inquires.

“What do you mean, the taste of food?” he asks. “I can taste just like you do, although” -he smiles-“I personally am not overly fond of cherries.”

“No, no,” Ayesha says. “Colors, clothing. Are you capable of helping make choices? About earrings, for example?”

He comes to look at the jewelry, and selects a pair of gold and rose enamel teardrops and holds them up for her. “I think my taste is no better than the average person’s,” he says, “but I like these.”

She frowns, looks at him through her lashes. She’s got me thinking of it as “him.” And she’s flirting with him! Ayesha! A married woman!

“What do you think, Hariba?” she asks. She takes the earrings, holds one beside her face. “They’re pretty.”

“I think they’re gaudy.”

She’s hurt. Honestly, they suit her.

She frowns at me. “I’ll take them,” she says. The stallman names a price.

“No, no, no,” says the
harni,
“you shouldn’t buy them. This man’s a thief.” He reaches to touch her, as if he’d pull her away, and I hold my breath in shock-if the thing should touch her!

But the stallman interrupts with a lower price. The
harni
bargains. He’s a good bargainer, but he should be, he has no compassion, no concern for the stallkeeper. Charity is a human virtue. The Second Koran says, “A human in need becomes every man’s child.”

Interminable, this bargaining, but finally the earrings are Ayesha’s. “We should stop and have some tea,” she says.

“I have a headache,” I say. “I think I should go home.”

“If Hariba’s ill, we should go,” the
harni
says.

Ayesha looks at me, looks away, guilty. She should feel guilt.

* * *

I come down the hall to access the household AI and the
harni
‘s there. Apparently busy, but waiting for me. “I’ll be finished in a minute and out of your way,” it says. Beautiful fingers, wrist bones, beautiful face, and dark curling hair showing just where its shirt closes; it’s elegantly constructed. Lean and long-legged, like a hound. When the technician constructed it, did he know how it would look when it was grown? Are they designed with aesthetics in mind?

It takes the report and steps aside, but doesn’t go on with its work. I ignore it, doing my work as if it weren’t there, standing so it’s behind me.

“Why don’t you like me?” it finally asks.

I consider my answers. I could say it’s a thing, not something to like or dislike, but that isn’t true. I like my bed, my things. “Because of your arrogance,” I say to the system.

A startled hiss of indrawn breath. “My…arrogance?” it asks.

“Your presumption.” It’s hard to keep my voice steady. Every time I’m around the
harni,
I find myself hating the way I speak.

“I…I am sorry, Hariba,” it whispers. “I have little experience. I didn’t realize I’d insulted you.”

It sounds sad. I’m tempted to turn around and look at it, but I don’t. It doesn’t really feel pain, I remind myself. It’s a thing, it has no more feelings than a fish. Less.

“Please, tell me what I’ve done?”

“Your behavior. This conversation, here,” I say. “You’re always trying to make people think you’re human.”

Silence. Is it considering? Or would it be more accurate to say processing?

“You blame me for being what I am,” the
harni
says. It sighs. “I can’t help being what I am.”

I wait for it to say more, but it doesn’t. I turn around, but it’s gone.

  SPECIAL_IMAGE-clip_image002.jpg-REPLACE_ME

After that, every time it sees me, it makes some excuse to avoid me if it can. I don’t know if I’m grateful or not. I’m very uncomfortable.

My tasks aren’t complicated. I see to the cleaning machine and set it loose in the women’s household when it won’t inconvenience the mistress. I’m jessed to Mbarek, although I serve the mistress. I’m glad I’m not jessed to her; Fadina is and she has to put up with a great deal. I’m careful never to blame the mistress in front of Fadina. She knows that the mistress is unreasonable, but of course, emotionally she is bound to affection and duty.

On Friday mornings the mistress is usually in her rooms, preparing for her Sunday
bismek
. On Friday afternoons she goes out to play the Tiles with her friends and gossip about husbands and the wives who aren’t there. I clean on Friday afternoons. I call the cleaning machine and it follows me down the hallway like a dog, snuffling along the baseboards for dust.

I open the door and smell attar of roses. The room is different from the way it usually looks. Today there’s a white marble floor veined with gold and amethyst, covered with purple rugs. There are braziers, low couches, and huge open windows looking out on a pillared walkway, like some sheik’s palace, and beyond that vistas go down to a lavender sea. It’s the mistress’s current
bismek
setting. A young man is reading a letter on the walkway, a girl stands behind him, her face is tear-stained.

Interactive fantasies. The characters are generated from lists of traits, they’re projections controlled by whoever is game-mistress of the
bismek
and fleshed out by the household AI. Everyone else comes over and becomes characters in the setting. There are poisonings and love affairs. The mistress’s setting is in ancient times and seems to be quite popular. Some of her friends have two or three identities in the game.

Before this game, the
bismek
settings all came from her foreign soap operas-women who were as bold as men, and improbable clothing and kissing and immoral technology. The characters all had augmentation, which is forbidden, of course. There was technology everywhere, and people talking to each other through AI interfaces. It was fascinating, but I hated it. I hated living with the temptation, I hated the shallowness of it all. No one in those stories ever had to make a real decision about their lives, and they all had jobs creating simulations and beautiful clothes or were personalities in some sort of interface.

She usually turns it off when she goes out. The little cleaning machine stops in the doorway. It can read the difference between reality and the projection, but she has ordered it never to enter the projection because she says the sight of the thing snuffling through walls damages her sense of the alternate reality. I reach behind the screen and turn the projection off so I can clean. The scene disappears and all that’s left is the mistress’s rooms and their bare white walls-something no one ever sees except me. “Go ahead,” I tell the machine and start for the mistress’s room to pick up things for the laundry.

To my horror, the mistress steps out of her bedroom. Her hair is loose and long and disheveled and she is dressed in a day robe, obviously not intending to go out. She sees me in the hall and her face darkens, her beautiful, heavy eyebrows folding toward her nose, and I instinctively start to back up. “Oh, mistress,” I say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in, I’m sorry, let me get the cleaning machine and leave, I’ll just be out of here in a moment, I thought you had gone out to play the Tiles, I should have checked with Fadina, it is my fault, mistress-”

“Did you turn them off?” she demands. “You stupid girl.
Did you turn Zarin and Nisea off?
“

I nod mutely.

“O Holy One,” she says. “Ugly, incompetent girl! Are you completely lacking in sense? Did you think they would be there and I wouldn’t be here? It’s difficult enough to prepare without interference!”

“I’ll turn it back on,” I say.

“Don’t touch anything!” she shrieks. “FADINA!” Fadina is always explaining to me how difficult it is for the mistress to think up new scenarios for her friends’ participation.

I keep backing up, hissing at the cleaning machine, while the mistress follows me down the hall, shrieking, “FADINA!” and because I’m watching the mistress, I back into Fadina coming in the door.

“Didn’t you tell Hariba that I’d be in this afternoon?” the mistress says.

“Of course,” Fadina says.

I’m aghast. “You did not!” I say.

“I did, too,” Fadina says. “You were at the access. I distinctly told you and you said you would clean later.”

I start to defend myself and the mistress slaps me in the face. “Enough of you, girl,” she says. And then the mistress makes me stand there and berates me, reaching out now and then to grab my hair and yank it painfully because of course she believes Fadina when the girl is clearly lying to avoid punishment. I cannot believe that Fadina has done this to me; she is in terror of offending the mistress, but she has always been a good girl, and I’m innocent. My cheek stings, and my head aches from having my hair yanked, but, worse, I’m angry and very, very humiliated.