by Marge Piercy
The supervisor, Jane Forest, was noticeably cooler to her. “But, Shipman, a security assignee picked up Ari Rogovin eighteen minutes ago. We were informed this was proper. You are not authorized to pick up Ari Rogovin except on Wednesdays.”
“An ape took him? But why?”
“Request information from security central, please.”
Although Shira wanted to scream and argue, she was aware the supervisor would never alter orders given her; or Jane would no longer be a supervisor. Any protest Shira made would be ineffectual and recorded against her. She had to call her lawyer at once. Mostly she had a strong desire to call Malkah.
Even a month ago, she would have called her secretary, Rosario, for they had become close. But the low-level exec with whom Rosario had had a ten-year contract had not renewed their marriage. As was customary even for low-level talent, he had taken a new wife, twenty years younger. Rosario was forty-two, and Y-S let her go. Shira had protested that she needed Rosario, but she had no power. Women over forty who were not techies or supervisors or professionals or execs were let go if they were not the temporary property of a male grud. Female gruds were supposed to have the same privileges and, if they had enough position, often took young husbands.
Rosario had disappeared into the Glop. She might be tubed in and out of the enclave daily as a laborer, working in the laundry or cooking or doing any of the maintenance jobs not taken care of by robots, but Shira would never see her. Rosario had been pushed out of the safe fortress into the crowded violent festering warren of the half-starved Glop, where nine tenths of the people of Norika lived; if she was still alive, Shira would never know it. The Glop was slang for the Megalopolis that stretched south from what had been Boston to what had been Atlanta, and a term applied to other similar areas all over the continent and the world.
As soon as Shira reached the two-room apartment that was all she was entitled to by her own rating, one of the so-called bins for lower-level techies, she asked the apartment for messages. Every housing facility in the corporate enclave had a computer. Hers wasn’t a sophisticated system like the one she had grown up with, programmed by Malkah, but it functioned as a message service. It told her that Malkah had called fifty minutes before. Shira called first her lawyer and then Malkah. She did not bother plugging in for conversations—nobody did. She just spoke her instructions. Malkah’s round, slightly wizened face appeared, her hair, as black as Shira’s braided around her head. “Shira, you look upset.” Malkah had a deep resonant voice. Although she was Shira’s grandmother, she had raised her. That was the way of her family, bat Shipman, until Shira had broken the pattern.
“Are you eating?” Shira asked politely. It was an hour later in the free town Tikva on the Atlantic, where Malkah lived, where Shira had grown up.
“What’s wrong?” Malkah always came right to the point.
“Y-S awarded custody to Josh.”
“Those pigsuckers,” Malkah said. “Those poison belchers. I told you not to marry him. You’re the first in our family to marry in four generations. It’s a bad idea.”
“All right, all right. I thought Josh needed the security.”
“And could you give him security? Never mind. Come home.”
“I can’t just take off. Especially now. I’m lodging an appeal. I have to get Ari back. I have to.”
“What does Y-S want?”
“From me? Nothing. They hardly know I exist.”
“When you finished your graduate work at Edinburgh, six multis bid on you. And Y-S lets you sit and rot. It smells.”
“I think my work’s good, but nothing happens. Nobody here rates me as much.”
Malkah snorted. “Come home. I can use you. I’m not working with Avram any longer. I’m designing full time.”
“I thought that was an odd partnership.”
“What he’s doing is quite fascinating. But never mind. He’s mad at me. He’s a stubborn arrogant alter kaker, but he’s a genius in his field, no doubt about that.”
“Cybernetics has never drawn me…Malkah, I can’t stand to lose Ari. I miss him already.” Tears began coursing down Shira’s face.
“You should never have gone to work for those manipulators, Shira. You have a place here. You ran away. But Gadi’s not living here. He’s up in Veecee Beecee, making those elaborate worlds people play at living in instead of worrying about the one we’re all stuck with.”
“I made a lot of mistakes,” Shira said. “But Ari wasn’t one of them. He’s precious, Malkah, he’s life itself to me. I must have him back. He carries my heart in him.”
“Daughter of my soul, I wish you strength. But a multi always has its reasons. It may take you a while to figure theirs, and when you do, that may not help you get your son back.”
“So pray for me.”
“You know I don’t believe in personal petitions. All I can ever pray for is understanding.”
Shira had forgotten to pick up a meal. She ate crackers and dates. Then she sat down at her terminal again and plugged in, inserting the male coupler from the terminal into the little silver socket at her temple, just under the loop of hair that always fell there. Rosario had had no plug; it was a class distinction here, but in Tikva, every child was raised to be able to access directly, taught to project into the worldwide Net, into the local Base. She moved quickly from her own private base into the Y-S Base. Their logo greeted her, white and black double lightning against sky blue. The Y-S imagery of entering the Base was a road sign. She was standing on a crossroads branching in seven directions. Library access. She walked along the narrow white road. Of course she was sitting in her chair, but the projection felt real enough. A person could die in projection, attacked by raiders, information pirates who lifted from one base and peddled to another.
A building stood before her, white marble with a colonnade. The library. She climbed the shallow steps quickly. She was looking for the law section. She intended to master relevant Y-S law on custody. That was why she had not simply accessed in reading or aural output. In full projected access, when she was plugged into a base, learning was far faster than in real time. She was going to challenge them on their own terms. She would win her son back.
In the morning she was standing outside the day care center when Josh arrived, with Ari in tow. She darted to kneel before Ari. “I just want to tell you that I’m going to pick you up today. Tonight you’ll be with me.”
Ari had his thumb in his mouth, and he looked as if he had been crying. His Diddlee Bear tee shirt was on backward. His eyes looked sticky.
Josh said, in a voice that sang like a hornet, “I’m lodging a protest.”
Indeed on her screen a security message appeared at thirteen hundred: “Shira Shipman is enjoined from interaction with the minor Ari Rogovin awarded to the custody of his father Joshua Rogovin except on the prescribed days and defined times of visitation. Any further breaches of this regulation will result in the cancellation of said privileges.”
Shira locked herself in a waste disposal cell before she wept.
TWO
The Color of Old Blood
Shira was up before Malcolm. It was the second night they had spent together, as she tried to put some distance between her ex-husband and herself. Every time she picked up Ari or brought him back, in the two months since the verdict, Josh and she clashed. Now Shira sat at her terminal going over the wording of her latest appeal, a little depressed about how long and leaden the evening had felt. As she was reworking an argument, the apartment computer told her she had a caller. It was a cheap model, not provided any personality, but she had given it a female voice that reminded her of the house of her grandmother Malkah. Most houses had female voices. “Put the incoming message on audio only.”
“Shira?” It was Gadi’s voice. “Put it on visual. I loathe talking to a blank wall. If you’re not dressed, damn it, do you think I don’t remember your body?”
As always when she heard his voice without warning, her heart c
ollapsed like a crushed egg. “My body ten years ago?” She tried to sound flippant. She glanced at the mirror to assure herself she was presentable, wishing she could feel indifferent to how she appeared to him. She was still in her dressing gown, of translucent shimmering silk. Her hair was tousled, a scattering of gold grains from the night before still glinting against the black. She looked a little too girlish, too waif-like, as she always did without makeup, but she could not stand the idea of painting her face at nine on a Sunday morning. She spoke. “Visual on. Good morning. Where are you?”
“Back in Tikva, visiting Avram. Ah, our daily duels, our refreshing bouts of mutual insult. The new stimmie I was working on with Tomas Raffia is done, and I’m on vacation. Why don’t you come home for a visit?” Gadi was dressed much as she was, in a translucent silk robe—from the mutated worms that were the rage. His was much more beautiful than hers, in colors that shifted as she watched. His face was gaunt but handsome as ever. He had dyed his hair a silver gray, not unlike his eyes. Only young people had gray hair nowadays. Most people looked dreadful that way, but it set off his face, dyed brown. He must look a little bizarre in Tikva, where everybody ran around in shorts or pants; but there he was an emissary of glamour from Vancouver, where the production of stimmies was centered. He was famous. People would expect him to look like a polished artifact. A designer of virons for stimmies was a star in his own right, able to move among the fans the way actors never could, their wired up and enhanced senses making them too vulnerable.
“How did the audience receive it?”
“Didn’t you enter my stimmie?” His voice arched in pained disbelief. “It was absolutely raw!”
“Gadi, I’ve been getting ready for court, meeting my lawyer every other day for the last three months. Josh has taken Ari from me. Why don’t you send me a crystal copy?” Then she would have to enter it. She hardly ever took the time to immerse herself in a stimmie, even now when she was living alone. She had lost the habit when Ari was born, for she could not cut herself off from him in that complete sensory overload, living out the exquisite sensations of some actress being pursued by cannibal dwarfs or balancing four lovers on Nuevas Vegas satellite, emotions pumped through her.
“Computer, note last request and fulfill…How could he take your kid?”
“They have patriarchal laws here. The boy is regarded as property of the father’s gene line—and, Gadi, you know I married him. Plus he has a higher tech rating than I do.”
“Why did you do that foolish thing?” Gadi grimaced. “I told you not to marry that caterpillar. Single marriage is old-fashioned and dreary.”
“You never tried to understand Josh…Actually things are mean between us, vicious. I hurt him terribly, Gadi.” It felt wonderful to talk. They always began with opening salvos and diplomatic couriers from their opposing forts, and then in five minutes they were exchanging confidences. They were still meshed in secret and subtle ways. Just last night she had thought of him as she was getting into bed with Malcolm, as she supposed she would for the rest of her life, and now this morning here they were chatting. “Gadi, in Y-S most people get married. There’s pressure to.”
“That man was born to be hurt—a moth who turned back into the worm he came from.”
“Josh is someone who has endured more than either of us can understand. He has no one at all left, no one. He survived by accident. Imagine, his native land is the Black Zone.” A large chunk of the Middle East was represented on maps as a uniform black, for it was uninhabitable and interdicted to all. A pestilent radioactive desert.
“You don’t marry a man because he’s bleeding on your foot.”
Shira winced, the taste of salt in her mouth. “I thought I could make him happy.”
Gadi snorted. “That’s what women are always trying to do to me, and what does it get them? A sore ass from landing on it.”
She decided to change the subject. “Your father has offered me a job, do you believe it?”
“Why you?” His forehead accordioned. “What does Avram want with you?”
“Gadi, I am very good at what I do, although Y-S doesn’t appreciate me.”
“Working for Avram is out of the question, but I’d love it if you were in Tikva. Then I’d see you when I skulk back here.”
“Until my appeal is decided, I’m not going anyplace. I won’t give up Ari. I was so stupid. I got married instead of giving my child to my mother. Now I wish I had. I broke our family line, and now I’ve lost him!”
“You sound as if you’re feeling guilty, Shira. Why?”
“If I hadn’t gone and married Josh, if I’d given my mother Riva my child, the way I’m supposed to, if I had only listened to Malkah, I’d have my child in my own family. It’s my fault. I thought I was so smart, so in control.”
“We all piss it out, Shira. Are you sure your mother wanted him? I’ve only met her twice in my life. I can barely remember what she looks like.”
“She’s a stranger to me. She works for Alharadek, that’s all I know.”
“It’s hard for me to picture you with a kid anyhow, Shira. You’re still a kid to me. I think you made up this imaginary Ari.”
A tear rolled out of her eye, and she snorted in anger. “Don’t be a complete turd, Gadi. He’s more real to me than anyone in the world is—” She became suddenly aware Malcolm was standing just inside her bedroom, listening. Now he moved behind her so that his image would be transmitted.
Gadi looked amused. “You should have told me you had company. We can gossip any old time.”
With Malcolm at her elbow, she could not say the truth: that she had forgotten him in the immediacy of her connection with Gadi. It was awkward all the way around as she signed off.
Breakfast was decidedly bumpy. “I didn’t know you had another man in link.” Malcolm scowled. He was as tall as Gadi but more solidly built, with thatchy brown hair and thick commanding brows, a habit of holding his chin jutted out as if commanding a charge.
“It’s not that way. He’s an old friend. We grew up together.”
“You kept laughing when you were talking to him. It didn’t sound like someone who’s merely a friend.”
“I never think of friends as merely anything. Friends are precious.”
“The right word for him. Good-looking if you like the precioso type.”
“He creates virons for Uni-Par.”
“I never sink into those things,” Malcolm said, which was the going line in Y-S unless it was an official program, but the corners of his mouth sagged. “I don’t even own a helmet to go all the way in. I just use grungy old electrodes…That wasn’t Gadi Stein?”
Shira found herself irritated, which she politely attempted to cover by asking him about his sand sailing. It was a night sport but still dangerous. It would have been much pleasanter to go on gossiping with Gadi. She had not had time to ask about his father, Avram, about all their old friends, about the complicated relationships in Tikva, the newest political flap, the latest crazes. It was effortless to talk with Gadi and laborious to carry on the tedious, painstaking spadework of getting to know this man, who seemed less sympathetic by the moment. He was definitely sulking, whipping his coffee round and round, his spoon standing up in the cup like a pole, as if to punish it for his disappointment in her. She did not want to quarrel with him—she did not need yet another feud at work—so she would simply get through breakfast and ease him out. She herself was the problem.
“I thought you’d be…softer. You have this look sometimes like a little kid, so innocent,” Malcolm said as if accusingly. His chin was thrust at her, his brows beetled.
She felt like telling him it was simply the neotonic effect: large dark eyes in a thin face provoked in mammals including humans the inborn reaction toward infants—the fawn, the kitten, the puppy, and the Shira. In college she had frowned a lot in order to compel those around her to take her seriously. She was not girlish, shy, innocent, blithe, and she often wished she did not present a f
acade that seemed to lure only men who wanted a child-woman. She was bleaker, thornier. And the truth was, she was too involved now in her efforts to get her son back to try hard with any man. She felt like apologizing to Malcolm for wasting his time. She was a mirage.
Today she would see Josh, one reason she had felt the need for pretending she had a real new relationship. She must simply go and confront Josh and try to reason with him. Then she would have Ari to herself for an entire twenty hours, from noon till eight a.m. tomorrow.
As soon as Malcolm left, she began preparing psychologically, in her dress and her manner, for the battle to come. Josh had been full of nasty games since she left him, but she knew they were just an expression of his pain. It was not that Josh had loved her passionately, although he would have insisted he did. Rather he had formed a conventional attachment, but one that was central to his personal economy of survival. He simply counted on her to be there.
No more postmortems. What she most wanted was to create a perfect day for Ari. She hoped he still liked fluffy omelets with the egg whites whipped separately. She had managed to buy three real eggs. She would ask him if he wanted to eat a cloud. Unfortunately the day was dark, the artificial light orangey. Probably a sandstorm was raging outside the dome. She had planned to take him to the park. She kept a few toys here, but spending all her credit on legal fees, she could not afford much.