by Marge Piercy
Gimel led her through a set of security latches. When the door finally opened, a dark-haired man was standing on the other side, of medium height, with a solid compact build—obviously a security guard, as he was crouching just inside the door in a defensive stance, with his hands held to strike. She had been around enough wired-to-the-max, edgy security apes to come to a full stop, holding her breath involuntarily, keeping her hands completely still and visible. The last time she had faced an ape was when she had gone to complain about Ari’s being moved to Pacifica Platform. Dr. Yatsuko, the portly head of the Artificial Intelligence section, had seen her himself, for the first time since she arrived to work there. It was almost shocking to be brought before him, but she had been too crazed with grief to care. Two apes had flanked him during their four-minute exchange, as if her outraged mother love might cause her to attack him with her teeth and nails.
“Yod! There is no need to defend me.” Avram came toward her, rubbing his hands briskly together. His hair was entirely white and his eyes glittered as hard and bright as she remembered them. “Welcome, Shira.”
The guard backed up rapidly, moving to the wall. His eyes stayed on the door until it shut and the locks automatically reconnected. She sidled past him, still nervous. She hoped that Avram planned to dismiss the guard so that they could talk without his twitchy presence. Never had there been professional apes in Tikva when she was growing up. Most of the town stood guard duty, and the head of security was chosen at town meeting. She was disappointed that professional security had appeared here.
Avram took her elbow and steered her toward his desk. “Yakamura-Stichen’s loss is my gain. I do need your expertise, Shira. I’ll match what you were making there—I told you that.”
“But what can I do for you…Dr. Stein?” She thought of him as Avram, but if she was working for him, she could not call him that.
“I read your papers on the field density shock syndrome in projection and on the erosion of time sense in fused users. As for what you can do here, you’ve already met my project. Yod: come forward!”
The guard was staring at her openly. His curiosity was so obvious in his face that she wondered if he was a bit simple. His stare was open, intense, wondering. The irises of his eyes were dark brown, green flecked, set against unusually porcelain-appearing whites. His hair was almost as dark as her own; his complexion, olive. He was in no way unusual among the many physical types who lived in the little town. He looked vaguely Mediterranean in background.
Avram stood between them and off to the side. “Shira, this is Yod.”
“Yod? That’s an odd name—” she began, and then stopped because she understood. Yod was the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Alef, Bet, Gimel…Yod. “A cyborg?”
“The cyborg,” Avram corrected in a pleased tone. He gave Yod a slap on the back. “This is what I’ve been working toward. Finally. And just in time, as you’ll learn. Our situation here is deproving radically. Our Base is under attack from information pirates.”
She moved forward, leaning close to touch its cheek. The artificial skin felt warm, its surface very like human skin although drier. She could feel the cyborg tense under her fingers, which surprised her. It made her feel as if she were being rude, but that was absurd. You did not ask permission of a computer to log on; computers did not flinch when you touched them. “Are you going to sell it to Olivacon?”
Yod responded to this by turning to stare at Avram, looking shocked. Avram had done an excellent job building the equivalent of minute musculature into its face area, in order to deliver a simulacrum of human reactions. She was curious about the programming that enabled the cyborg to choose what reaction to produce in at least a semiappropriate manner. Malkah had been working with Avram; had this been the project? Obviously Avram had applied the elaborate technology of human implants and replacement organs and limbs to the creation of the cyborg, but he had gone beyond anything she was aware of. Of course with corporate secrecy, scientists could never know what was really going on in their field hidden away in another multi. Industrial espionage was an exceedingly lucrative career.
Avram took her arm firmly. “Yod is a secret project of my own. What does Olivacon need with him? They have their security, trigger-happy apes raised on steroids and adrenophine. Yod will be our security, our protector. If we can’t have weapons, now we have a one-man army.”
“But robots are programmed to self-destruct before they injure anyone. How can a robot fight?”
“Yod’s a cyborg, not a robot—a mix of biological and machine components. He’s programmed to protect us—our town, its inhabitants, our Base. That’s his primary duty. But to perform it he cannot be as naive and awkward as he now is. That’s where you come in.”
“Avram, all my work has been with corporate and public megabrains. I don’t really have any expertise to offer with less than human—”
“My storage capacity is in the range of the artificial brains you’ve worked with, and I interface with such computers far better than a human ever could,” Yod said, crossing its arms. “I, too, have read your papers available in the Net.” It had a pleasant moderately deep voice she doubted she could tell from a human voice. “Should I demonstrate my ability to interface now?”
“Later. Yod has extensive cybernetic, mathematical and systems analysis programming, probability theory, up-to-date scientific knowledge of an encyclopedic width. He’s also programmed with general history, forty languages, Torah, Talmud, halakic law—we can’t have security that offends people, after all. But you’ll no doubt make your way through his programming in the next weeks.”
Shira was astonished but skeptical. Yod was an enormous breakthrough, but Avram was claiming for his cyborg far more than she considered credible. “You call the cyborg ‘he,’ I notice. Isn’t that anthropomorphizing? I would like us to agree to proceed objectively, not in terms of wish fulfillment.”
Yod spoke again. “How shall I address you?”
“I told you, her name is Shira,” Avram said. “It isn’t possible for you to forget.”
“I’ve noticed variant forms of address. She called you first Dr. Stein and then Avram. That leaves the question of how she wishes me to address her. I believe we should explain to her that referring to me as ‘him’ is correct. I am not a robot, as Gimel now is. I’m a fusion of machine and lab-created biological components—much as humans frequently are fusions of flesh and machine. One of us should also explain that I am anatomically male, as you created me.” The cyborg almost seemed to be addressing Avram in pique. It had turned away from her. She was going to have as much difficulty as Avram obviously did in remembering that human form did not make a human creature.
“Really? Why did you do that?” she asked Avram. In fact what did it mean to speak of a machine as having a sex at all? Surely it did not urinate through its penis, and what would it want to have sex with, presuming a machine could want, which she was not about to assume. Machines behaved with varying overrides and prerogatives. They had major and minor goals and would attempt to carry them out. But “want” was a word based in biology, in the need for food, water, sleep, the reproductive drive, the desire for sexual pleasure.
Avram looked slightly embarrassed. He did not look at Yod or at her but at the ceiling, his hands joining behind his back. “I felt the more closely he resembled a human being, the less likely he would be detected. It will be necessary for him to pass time with humans, and he must seem as much like them as possible. I frequently had to sacrifice efficiency to a convincing facade and behavior. I could see no reason to create him…mutilated.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Yod said. Its voice sounded offended.
“If we’re going to work together, you might as well call me Shira. That’s what my house calls me.”
“Shira. That means Song.”
“You have a knowledge of Hebrew?”
“Of course.” It said that exactly as Avram would have. His inflection.
“He’s left, then.” Shira felt the room grow suddenly more spacious. Perhaps the work might have some interest, at least to occupy her while she began negotiating, probably first with Olivacon and Cybernaut. She would give herself a month to relax, and then she would start job hunting.
“Two days ago.” Avram could not suppress a smile of relief. “I should be able to catch up on my contract work and still have a little time to spend working with Yod.”
“Gadi doesn’t know about the cyborg, then?”
“Of course not. Why should he need to know?”
“Who does know, then?”
“Malkah. I needed her help with the programming. She has a rare capacity for discretion, you know,” he said, as if letting Shira in on a great secret about her grandmother. “Malkah talks too much, but she doesn’t talk about what she doesn’t want you to know. That’s unusual in a woman.”
“I should think it’s unusual in a man. But what happened to David? Your assistant. He knows.”
“David had an accident. He’s no longer with us.”
While they talked, Yod looked from one to the other, its head rotating as though watching a tennis match. It had been provided with an expression at rest of nervous, high-strung curiosity. Yod’s features had been well and finely modeled. It did not resemble what she remembered of Gimel, when it had had a face, so she assumed Avram must have created a new mold at some point. It was dressed in loose hideous clothing of the sort worn by unathletic men when they decided to appear sporty or indicate they were on vacation, luridly colored in orange and chartreuse and dully shining. Whenever Yod moved, his pants made little rustling sounds, like a nest of mice. Perhaps the first thing she would do was pick out new clothes for it and teach it how to dress. She had had to do that for Josh. A cyborg could not have less clothes sense than her ex-husband. She wished she could have reprogrammed Josh.
“What happened to the models in between Gimel and this one?” She was assuming he had begun with Alef and worked his way through the Hebrew alphabet. Yod started at a sound from outside, leapt over the desk to the wall, pressed against it listening. Came slowly back, still listening. Yod’s jumpiness was going to be hard to take. She wondered if Avram couldn’t shut it off and turn down its energy source. A hyperactive cyborg. It reminded her of a young guard dog, an immature Doberman, except that it moved with surprising grace. It did not move like the other robot, Gimel, slowly and obviously following an algorithmic program for operating each finger. It moved like a huge cat, faster than human reaction but smoothly. That speed and grace was alarming in something mechanical, whatever components it was built from.
“They all malfunctioned,” Avram said. “Several were uncontrollably violent. That’s why I finally called in Malkah on the software. It was an expensive folly until I created Yod. So far he’s working out.”
Yod said, more softly than it had spoken before, “I am the first who can carry out the tasks of my father.”
“Your father?”
Avram shrugged, looking embarrassed. “Since Yod began to study human social organization, he sometimes refers to me in that way. I did make him, after all, and I did a better job with him than with Gadi, I have to say. Too bad Gadi doesn’t have one quarter Yod’s ability to concentrate and learn.”
“Well, I am not your mother,” Shira said bluntly. “I have a son.”
“Avram does also,” Yod said. “Besides me. But I am not allowed to meet Gadi. Will I meet your son?” It was constantly surveying the room, acting as if it expected a chair to spring at them and attack.
“I wish it could be so,” she said. “He’s been taken from me.”
“Malkah told me about that,” Avram said. “It’s disgraceful. But it brought you here, didn’t it?”
“It brought me here.” In a moment of intense despair, she turned away from both of them. When she was growing up, Avram had never felt to her like a real parent, like the fathers of her friends, but rather he was brilliant, strange, armored. She had never had a father. She had been determined that her child should have both parents, in the old-fashioned way. So much for that fantasy. Now the two of them were regarding her with identical bright curiosity, cold, intense but remote: the gaze of a hunting hawk. Still, if Yod was one tenth as intelligent as Avram rashly claimed, her work might prove interesting for a while. It would pass the time; it would occupy her. When she was dug in a bit, she could start looking for real work, with a new multi. She had two years to endure; two years in which to reposition herself to fight for Ari when he came back to earth again.
NINE
Revising the Family Album
Shira was pleasantly surprised that Malkah welcomed her with a minimum of reproach. She had forgotten how many friends Malkah had, other women coming by with little presents, with stories, with problems, with gossip. She had thought of her grandmother as living alone, but Malkah was seldom alone unless she wished to be—and she did value her privacy. Malkah also engaged in elaborate group correspondences and played games inside the Net. Shira would see Malkah sitting in the filtered sun of the courtyard or under the peach tree in her favorite chair, eyes closed or half closed, and she would think the old woman was dozing until she realized Malkah was accessing the Net, was plugged in and roaming; or working in the Base, constructing the elaborate chimeras that were one of the export products of Tikva, sold to multi and town Bases for protection.
“I have all these flirtations going,” Malkah said. “No one can see me unless I want them to.”
“So you don’t tell them your age?”
“Some I tell one thing, some another. Most don’t ask. It’s the congress of minds, not bodies.”
“So you have mental boyfriends.”
“Girlfriends too. Have you never changed your sex, not even for an evening, Shira? I have a woman friend I court in Foxdale, who thinks I am a man of forty-two. She would kill me if she met me, enemy to enemy, but in the interstices of the Net, we play together.”
“With Ari, I played constantly. I was a child again.” Shira held herself across her breasts. “A mother without her child is a cart trying to run on three wheels,” she said to Malkah, who was sitting in her favorite deep chair, staring at Shira with a satisfied expression.
“So a three-wheeled cart is a wheelbarrow, and it works perfectly well. You’ll get your son back. We will beat them in the end. In the meantime, you have the precious family fertility. Have another.”
“I don’t want another.” She had tried again last night to reach him through the Net, but once again the call had been refused. “I want Ari.”
“Did you ever consider having a child with your dybbuk?”
Shira knew at once that Malkah meant Gadi. “Oh, is Gadi dead that his spirit should possess me?”
“He’s dead the same way you are, my Shira. He can’t commit to any woman, and you can’t really love any other man.”
Shira winced. Harsh words of denial filled her mouth, and then she swallowed them. “Maybe the worst fate for a woman is getting the man she wants too early. We couldn’t stay together—we were children. But I can’t belong to anybody else, not the way I was with him.”
“I never wanted to belong to anybody. I only wanted to borrow them for a while, for the fun of it, the tenderness, some laughs.”
“How many lovers have you had?”
Malkah’s eyes skimmed over. She was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I haven’t counted them in years. I remember when I was much younger, I would go to sleep on nights when I had
insomnia by counting them. And I would never finish because I would be trying to figure if that one I could barely remember was really my lover or not. I insisted I do it chronologically, so when I realized I had left someone out, I had to go back to the beginning. It always worked to put me to sleep.”
She stared at her grandmother, trying to read in the squat woman with the braids wound round her head, a few hairs escaping at the nape and over the ears, a femme fatale who could not count her lovers. “Malkah, I’ve only had five. Altogether.”
Malkah laughed and then covered her mouth, looking embarrassed. “I have to say, I had five before I was twenty. I always was curious about the taste of a new man, how he would be. I wanted to bite into him.”
She was startled and a little shocked that her grandmother was speaking to her so frankly. Perhaps now that she had been married and had a baby, Malkah viewed her more as an equal. “So how many were there?” she pressed. “Twenty? Thirty? Two hundred?”
“Around fifty, I would guess. I’d have to add them up. I still have insomnia, but now I tell myself stories instead of counting men.”
“But so many…Did you chase them? Did you go up and proposition them?”
Malkah laughed. “I was never a beauty. You’re far prettier than I ever was. But I had a good body and a roving eye. They always came after me when I wanted them to…Avram was quite a layabout before he fell in love with Sara, you know. Before he went off with her to California.”
“Avram? I don’t believe it.” No, she couldn’t. Cold, driven.
“He was simply gorgeous as a young man. I have to say when I look at Gadi, I see Avram the way he was.”