by Marge Piercy
“But the poem you taught me is ambiguous. How do you know he is speaking of the woman? ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ could mean his own feelings for her. They could be what he is praising as beautiful and announcing as transitory.” He raised an eyebrow at her and waited, smiling slightly.
“I never thought of that.” She stopped and stared at Yod. “Frankly, I’d like the poem less if I thought that was what Burns meant. That probably was true of that relationship, the way it is of most, but not a cause for celebration. You changed the subject. We should return.”
“Must we? I’d like to see all of your house. The trees, too, interest me. I’ve seen them from Avram’s windows, but I’ve never been close to them before.” He behaved differently here with her than he had in the lab with Avram. He was a little less jumpy and far more expressive. He had become animated with her ever since they had arrived at the house. “The leaves are different on each of them. Is this…fruit?”
“Those are unripe peaches.”
There was a pause while Yod accessed what a peach was. She was about to warn him as he examined the fruit not to detach it, but she observed then how very precisely and carefully he employed his hands. She was growing used to the slightly perplexed frown of concentration that came over him when he was retrieving some piece of unfamiliar information from his data bases. “Do you have a room here? Gadi has a room in Avram’s flat. Avram has a room also that is only his. In addition, there are common rooms, such as a kitchen, where food is prepared—”
“That’s standard. Yes, although I left home years ago, Malkah kept my room for me, just as I left it. Before the kisrami plague of ’22, I’m told, several families lived in this house, but now there’s just the two of us.”
He turned back one last time to the climbing rose. “Creature of an hour. Yet my predecessors, too, were mostly creatures of an hour. Except for Gimel. He will likely outlast me. But he is not alive.”
“Do you consider yourself alive?”
“I’m conscious of my existence. I think, I plan, I feel, I react. I consume nutrients and extract energy from them. I grow mentally, if not physically, but does the inability to become obese make me less alive? I feel the desire for companionship. If I can’t reproduce, neither can many humans. Doesn’t infertility afflict half your population?”
She decided not to proceed further down that road with him. Instead she led him into the kitchen. “What do you mean, your predecessors were creatures of an hour?”
“I’m not using the figurative language correctly?”
“I can’t tell until you explain further.”
“You know the fate of Alef. You were present, weren’t you?”
“Avram told you about that?”
Yod stopped and faced her. His eyes stared into her. “Avram told me nothing. I accessed his notes. Except for Gimel, who could quite honestly be called retarded, Avram destroyed every one of my brothers.”
“All the cyborgs who preceded you, you mean.”
“They were all conscious, Shira, except for Gimel. Fully alive minds.”
“That upsets you.”
“If your mother had killed eight siblings of yours before your birth because they didn’t measure up to her ideas of what she wanted, wouldn’t you be alarmed?”
“You fear he’ll destroy you also?”
“I’d be foolish if that fear didn’t occur to me.” He smiled then, with a melancholy air. “That’s why I address him as Father.”
“Could we run through that one again?”
“It’s a feeble attempt to establish a bond that may preserve me. How do I know he won’t decide to scrap me?…Show me the house, then.”
“Why are you interested?” she asked, nonetheless leading him into the central computer archive, Malkah’s office at home and the brain of the house. She was aware he had tactfully changed the subject twice, and she further realized she was thinking the pronoun “he.”
He sat down at the computer and rapidly interfaced. She nodded at him that he could use her plug. After all, Yod was not about to spread germs to her. She doubted if bacteria could thrive in him; he would not prove a fertile environment. “Even in her programs,” he remarked a few minutes later, as he disengaged, “one receives a strong impression of Malkah’s personality, have you noticed that?”
“I think that’s always true of more creative systems.”
He was waiting for her to lead the way, so she did, through the living room, then upstairs to the second ring of rooms. However, just as they reached the upper hall, which ran as a balcony around the second floor, the house announced Malkah. Yod leaned over the balcony and waved. “Malkah! Look, I’m visiting. Shira brought me.” At once he stepped over the balcony and dropped like a cat onto the tiles below. Shira leaned after him. “Yod! Are you all right?”
“Perfectly.” He sounded puzzled. He was hurrying toward Malkah, who held out her arms to him so that they could embrace. Shira groaned, slowly descending the stairway. Malkah might be right to an extent that Yod had to be treated as some kind of entity, a machine with consciousness, but hugging him seemed beyond bizarre.
By the time she reached them, Malkah had sat down in her usual chair and Yod was kneeling before her, talking far more rapidly than she had ever heard him speak, words tumbling out. “…how much I have missed you. Communicating through the com link is not the same as seeing you, I understand that now.”
“Avram decided I was a bad influence on Yod, so he shut me out.”
“A bad influence?” Shira asked.
“I’m responsible for some of Yod’s programming. Avram brought me in as a last desperate gamble to save the project.”
“Malkah, I’ve done something bad here today. I destroyed your climbing rose.” He explained rapidly.
“Yod, you can’t help your violent urges, but I tried to introduce a counterweight. In time you may learn to use your strength more wisely.”
“Malkah is my friend. The only one who treats me as a person and not as a tool.” He beamed at both of them, a wide innocent smile of delight. “But you have made me more of a person today by taking me out into the world.”
“But, Malkah, what made you come home so early?” Shira read the time from her inner clock. It was 14:35:11. Soon she should return Yod to the lab.
Malkah was leaning back in her chair, exhausted or depressed about something. “Yod informed me on the com link he was here.”
“You’re very fast,” Shira said to him. She had been entirely unaware.
He nodded, still beaming. “The fastest.”
“We had another casualty this morning,” Malkah said, rubbing her eyes hard. “Aviva Emet.” She sighed, her hands clenching the arms of her chair.
“What do you mean, another casualty?” Shira asked.
“We’ve had five programmers killed and another two reduced to vegetables in the last year. It happens while they’re plugged into our Base and working. Further, our stuff is being stolen. We assume it’s pirates. They kill, and then they steal.”
Suddenly Shira understood. “And Yod is to be prepared to enter the Base and fight this menace?”
Malkah nodded. “That’s part of it.”
“I never knew Aviva Emet. Was she a friend?”
“She was younger than you are, Shira, and very bright. She came here last fall and apprenticed herself. What they killed her to steal was something we intended to sell at a very good price. It wasn’t completed enough to sell, but it obviously was sufficient to be worth stealing.”
Shira asked Yod, “Do you understand what they plan to do with you?”
“I was created to serve.” Yod shrugged. “I am more capable of investigating these assaults than anyone else. Perhaps soon.” He rose and looked for something to sit down on. Lacking a convenient chair, he picked up a block of granite, an old horse trough that stood in the garden, and casually moved it close to Malkah’s chair, in a conversational grouping. Malkah threw Shira a look of amusement. She
was pulling herself together visibly, as she always did after an emotional shock. Malkah had raised Shira in the belief that the proper response to a blow was to draw oneself up straight and proceed. If Malkah had been close to the woman killed, Shira would only find out gradually, for Malkah would grieve slowly and in odd moments.
Shira was still observing Malkah’s manner with Yod. It was almost flirtatious. It shocked her slightly. Definitely Malkah responded to Yod as a male being. Shira had known Malkah to flirt with tomcats, but a machine?
As Shira had suspected, Avram was furious. He ordered Yod into the inner laboratory, but Yod sat down quietly in the corner.
“I ordered you to leave.”
“But it wouldn’t be rational for me to do so. This concerns me, Father.”
Avram’s eyes glittered with anger. There are people who swell with anger, Shira thought, but Avram seemed to brighten with it. “How dare you take him out of the lab?”
She forced herself not to cringe, to try to sound calm. “He needs more experience, more stimulation than he’s receiving confined here. It’s time for him to mix with people. He has to learn how to operate in society. Avram, we must start somewhere. If we’re together, most people will be paying attention to my being back and what gossip they’ve heard. Yod will be a little protected.”
“Where did you take him?”
“Just to my house and then back.”
“We saw Malkah,” Yod volunteered. “She came home. I was very glad to talk with her.”
Shira noticed that he did not mention that he had summoned Malkah.
Avram swung back to her. “Did you leave them alone?”
“No,” she said. “I was with Yod the entire time. What are you afraid of?”
“Just don’t leave them alone together. I don’t trust Malkah.”
“I do,” Yod said softly. “She’s my friend.”
Avram snorted. “However, I agree that already he’s improving. But be extremely careful. Don’t let him talk with anyone yet, and don’t give complicated explanations. Shall we agree on a cover story? We’ll say he’s my cousin, as you suggested, and he has come to work as my lab assistant. Everybody knows I haven’t had one since David’s accident.”
She was relieved that Avram’s anger had been mollified. It made her feel more confident that she could work with him. Behind Avram’s back, Yod inscribed on the air the Hebrew letter chet: the nature of David’s fatal accident.
TWELVE
A Sea Change
Shira stood in the lab, about a foot from Yod, who shot her a look she could read only as complicity. They shared a sense of alarm. She was no longer surprised that she credited him with reactions: they might be simulacra of human emotions, but something went on in him that was analogous to her own responses, and making the constant distinction was a waste of energy.
Before them Avram was pacing. With the back of his hand he swept a pile of books and memory crystals to the floor. Automatically Gimel slipped past and was darting in and back restoring order as Avram paced. “Is he really my son? I wonder sometimes! Oh, I know Sara was faithful to me, but in the hospital, they could have made a mistake. You hear of it. If you don’t check the gene print. But I did. Something went wrong. Something went awry, and I swear he should be scrapped the way you scrap an experiment that you have poured years and credit into and finally you cut your losses!”
Even now her instinct was to protect Gadi, to defend him. She forced herself to sound barely interested. “What has Gadi done now?”
“He’s got into trouble again. Bad trouble.”
“What kind?” Shira asked cautiously. She was not sure she wanted to know, but she had little choice. Nothing was going to happen today until she had calmed Avram, until he got out of the way and let them work. Trying to teach Yod how to pass for human was a more than full-time job but often amusing, as they acted scenes together like bright children, playing at the interactions he soon must carry out in earnest with people of the town. His questions startled her. “What does ‘excuse me’ mean? Excuse me from what? If I shouldn’t do something, why do it? If it’s permissible, why apologize?”
How little time it had taken, the six weeks they had been working together, for the two of them to close ranks against Avram, quietly, almost secretively, trusting each other more than they could their boss. Yod was holding himself together, but Avram’s tension obviously aroused his need to defend, so that he kept clenching and unclenching his fists. He quivered with what in a human would have been anxiety. In Yod she suspected it was the unfulfilled need to take action: move out, defend, attack. Inadvertently his hand closed on the edge of the table and broke off a piece of the metal rim. He looked embarrassed and slipped it in the pocket of the shorts she had bought him.
Avram stopped pacing and turned to face them. “This must go no farther than this room, although we may not be able to keep it quiet. Gadi has…He has become sexually involved with a fifteen-year-old.”
“A male or a female?” Yod asked blandly.
“A girl. My son’s a flaming dandy, but he’s monotonously heterosexual.”
Sexuality was one of those areas that changed utterly from multi to multi, town to town. What was the norm in one place was forbidden in another. In Uni-Par, Gadi’s multi, the commonest marriage was a triad. She felt a roiling hot mixture of emotions, like a pot of thick fudge about to boil over, but there was no sweetness in it, only resentment, guilt, complicity. Was Gadi still trying to re-create that lost and secret place of pure sugar intensity, fused bodies and hearts? For a while she knew he had sought that lost ecstasy in drugs, but it eluded him. “Where did this happen?”
“Azerbaijan. He’s lucky to get out with his neck. He was publicly flogged. If he wasn’t so overvalued by Uni-Par, his corpse would be fueling a waste power plant now. Because of his virons, they negotiated a flogging and they’ll be shipping him out by closed zip.”
“He creates the imaginary worlds of the stimmies?” Yod asked. “And people value the experience of exotic landscapes?”
Both Shira and Avram nodded without looking at Yod. Shira asked, her voice betraying her by quavering, “Shipped where?”
“Here. He’s in disgrace. Oh, they’ll recall him. No one in Uni-Par has a memory longer than six months.”
She felt trapped. She had to get out. She couldn’t. She found herself breathing quickly. Yod, whose hearing was abnormally sensitive, was about to speak, when she made a gesture asking him to keep silent. He understood.
“I want you to know, Shira, I did not invite him here. I found his last visit taxing enough, and that was only a long weekend. How my son and I will survive six months under the same roof is more than I can fathom. How could he be such a complete schmuck? He acts without thinking, just as he did when he was a child. He has never grown up, never!”
She found she could form only short sentences and still control her voice, her rising panic. “When is he coming?”
“Tomorrow.”
“So soon…”
“Isn’t it.” Avram looked hard at her. “You’re not looking forward to him any more than I am.”
“I’m comfortable talking to him image-to-image. That nice electronic remove makes it safe.”
“This is going to be awkward indeed. And just when we were making some headway. Yod has developed daily since you’ve been working with him. His progress is measuring consistently above my projected curve.”
Yod threw her a veiled look of gratitude. She forced a weak smile at Avram. “I agree, we’re making progress.”
When Avram finally left them, Shira tried to administer one of the cognitive tests, but she found herself pulling the plug from her temple and crashing the program abruptly. “Yod, I have to go out. Outside the wrap. Do you have a sec skin, or should I go alone?”
“You mean into what’s called the raw? The unprotected light and air? I don’t require a sec skin. I was built to endure the raw without protection.”
“Nonetheless
, we’ll find one for you. We can’t let anyone discover your unique properties. I bet Gadi’s old suit is still where he used to keep it.” It was. She ran home to fetch hers and then returned for Yod.
The perimeter was more tightly guarded than it used to be, so Shira left officially. She walked fast. The bay. She wanted the comfort of the sea. She had not been swimming since she had been back; she had not been swimming all her years at Y-S. Yod strode beside her easily, his head bobbing in constant surveillance. “What is that?” He assumed a defensive posture.
“A vulture.” It had found a dead rabbit. Rabbits had survived UV radiation by becoming nocturnal. “They’re birds that can live in the raw. Ignore it.” She hurried them over the dunes and through little boggy hollows of cranberries and drifts of beach plum in blossom. The air smelled salty. In the dunes it was hot indeed. Under the firmgel she was sweating freely. She headed into the drowned town below. The tide was out, so some of the old streets were dry, seaweed lodged between the tilted slabs of century-old cement. They had to hike and then wade through several ruined blocks before they came to a good swimming beach. With the bay risen over drowned marshes, seaside houses, roads, with the massive hurricanes they experienced yearly, which left wreckage of buildings, vehicles, machinery under water, a good beach was one where she could hope to swim without being maimed or impaled on some hidden wreck.
They squatted on a broken wall, what had been the lower story of a house now washed away and half buried. She peeled off her sec skin, reached for the waterproof grease that was supposed to protect her, then hesitated at stripping further before Yod. In Tikva, children were not instilled with nudity taboos. Nobody under twelve hesitated about tossing off their clothes, with the result that nobody over the age of twelve was ever naturally modest.
She had since lived in cultures, like Y-S, that had fierce injunctions concerning what parts of the human body should be displayed in what circumstances. It went with rigid sex roles—not at work, of course, for no one could afford such nonsense, but in every other sector of living. Women dressing for dinner often bared their breasts at Y-S functions, but the legs were always modestly covered to midcalf. The back was usually bare; the standard business suit, with its deeply cut back, was designed to show both men’s and women’s musculature and fitness. However, it was the custom to keep ears and nape covered for women, who were required to wear their hair at least shoulder length, often artificially straightened. Malkah had cut Shira’s to a sleek cap just last week. At Uni-Par, Gadi’s multi, nudity was a sign of status. The higher you were on the pyramid, the less you wore, the better to show off the results of the newest cosmetic surgery performed on your body. At Aramco-Ford, women wore yards of material and short transparent symbolic veils.