He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  I must break out of this loop of despair. The only direction is in and down. The descent to the chariot, the early Jewish mystics called it. I will begin with breathing exercises, I will begin with my old meditation sequences, the chants that I used to center myself that year of passion just before Riva brought me the baby Shira. Mohatela the Lion had coaxed me to Johannesburg when he was attempting to undermine the multis of the world with gold and diamonds, to shake loose the grasp of Europe and Asia on Africa, and I was designing systems for him and in love with him and his vision. I spent a year and a half away from Tikva, till the Lion was cut down before me, assassinated as he spoke to the world—in my nostrils, singeing my sinuses and my throat, the smoke of his flesh as they burned him down. I came home scarcely remembering who I had been. My world felt empty of purpose. Then I gathered the fragments of myself, then I found within me a fire and a discipline that could weld them back together. That winter Riva arrived with a month-old girl. “Here, this is for you.”

  After all these years, I can still hear his voice if I permit it. How often the powers that rule cut down the best, pay for their murder and return their energy to dust, and then later comes another, more fanatical, more violent, one who does it all with power and without beauty. There are losses so great that personal mourning feels almost beside the point, and you simply keep it to yourself and try not even to remember. Others to whom he belonged carried out the public mourning and the public remembering. The Lion is history, and that we loved each other in quiet hours and that once he cried in my arms can matter little to anyone but me. That is a story in which I do not even belong, the story of his people’s freedom.

  Before Riva arrived with Shira, I saved myself from despair. Now perhaps I will chase the most beautiful chimera of all through all the spinning worlds of the mind until the blinding atmosphere of the self thins out. Then at that level of consummate darkness and utter cold, will I find that burning light I have once or twice glimpsed? Beyond appetite and affection and desire, beyond opinion and belief and commitment, the conscious point of emanation. That is the adventure left to what is left of me.

  TWENTY

  Base and Treble

  Shira struggled upward through heavy water. “Shira, I am very sorry to wake you, for my sensors report you as sleeping.” The house was speaking sotto voce, an apologetic cast to the warm female voice. “The mechanism you call Yod is urgently requesting you access the Base. It insists that this message is important.”

  She summoned time: 12:45:03. “Thank you. I’ll plug in.” Could it be a trick? Who would want to execute her? No, it must be Yod. Could he somehow be stuck in the Base, unable to retreat after such long immersion? Putting on her robe, she looked hesitantly into the courtyard. The light was out in Malkah’s room. Perhaps her grandmother had finally fallen asleep. Shira would not bother her. Shira shut the door and sat down at her own terminal.

  She plugged in with a sense of queasiness, the slime of unacknowledged fear. There was no way to contact someone immersed in the Base except to enter in full projection—fully vulnerable to attack. She moved quickly through the access modes, seeing in her mind the familiar landscape of Tikva entrance. The conventional imagery the Base used was a room with many doors, labeled with the names of sub-bases. She walked straight through to the central double doors and flung them wide. She was entering the heart of Tikva, the working base where they created their products. The imagery here was of herself as hovering outside the three-dimensional sketch of a building, its plan which she could fly over, alongside, into, which she could examine floor by floor. As she moved toward the area in which Malkah was building her chimera, she expected to move into Malkah’s imagery. Instead she found herself on a broad field. Coming toward her was a figure shuffling along. It was Frankenstein’s monster, in the form and makeup used by Boris Karloff in the flat film from the twentieth century.

  “Yod?” she thought. Conversation was not exactly what happened in the Base. Rather here you thought words in a particular way: thinking forward, it was called, a loud, carefully formulated mental speaking that would be heard by the other you were addressing.

  He was shuffling forward, and he raised in his hand a decapitated head, swung by the hair.

  “Yod, don’t do this. Be yourself.”

  “Is this better?” He was Gadi, still coming toward her but mincingly. He was a parody of Gadi, dressed in the translucent silk gown Gadi had worn in the hospital, swinging the head jauntily like a woman’s purse.

  “Yourself, or I’ll leave.”

  “Why? You like this better.”

  “That’s not necessarily so. I want to see you.”

  Now he was Gimel. “Is this how I am to you?”

  She turned and walked back, away from him. She did not know if she could exit this part of the program without his help, but she was angry enough to try. Then he stood before her again, this time as himself.

  “Better.” She stopped. “What’s that gory thing?”

  “The raider.” He raised it. It stared at her out of its sightless eyes.

  She gave a short cry. “Yod, I know him! That’s Barry Joyce. He’s Y-S.”

  “I killed him. I burned his brain.” He tossed the head up, and it turned into a pigeon and beat away on short stubby wings. “I followed the other raider back through the Net until I had her just outside the Y-S facility and about to escape within. Then I burned her too. They sent out security, and I demolished them. It was a lovely battle—just what I was created for.”

  “Yod, they killed five programmers here. If you hadn’t intervened, they’d have killed Malkah.”

  “You believe my actions were correct.” He held out his hand, and into it popped another head. “This is the other raider.”

  Involuntarily Shira gasped, flinching. “I know her too. I went to school with her, Yod. Zee Levine. I haven’t seen her since we both went away to college, but I remember Malkah telling me she had gone to work for Y-S maybe two years ago. How could she do this to us? Turn on us?”

  “There is no doubt. They were both razors—computer assassins.”

  “She must have brought specs of the Base defenses with her to Y-S. Everything will have to be restructured.”

  “Malkah and Avram will reconfigure. The whole Base collective will have to stop work on everything else. I can help also. Did you know Joyce well?”

  “I’ve only seen official Y-S stimmies about the heroism of Barry Joyce. Zee wasn’t in Nebraska but at some other facility. Could you please get rid of that head? It makes me nauseous.”

  “That was hostile of me, wasn’t it. Here.” He thought a rose around them, huge, so that they were standing inside an enormous flower the size of a bed, thick with petals. “A real rose would have scent, of course.”

  “This is a beautiful viron, but tricky to stand in.” She lost her balance, and he caught her arms. She looked into his eyes, brown with green flecks like bits of jewel. She felt as if everything were tilting inside the great red rose. “Rosa Mundi,” she thought, and pushed herself forward against him. She felt desperate and giddy. She felt frightened. She could not think yet about what it meant that the enemy were not information pirates but rather the multi that had owned her and still owned her ex-husband and her son.

  He let go of her arms and put his own around her, pulling her tightly body-to-body. The clothes thinned and then dissolved till they were standing together naked, although of course it was the thought of flesh, not flesh itself. The contact was purely mental. Their thoughts sounded in both their minds. It was strange and dizzying, as if the world had turned into the weirdest of stimmies.

  You don’t feel human or animal exactly but not like a thing either; you do feel alive. This is strange, what am I doing; I must be out of my mind, but I am out of my body. This isn’t possible in the Base. How can this be a representation of information, how is this embrace worked out in binary code? I want to, a rose as big as a bed, but it doesn’t really work, we can’t do mor
e than imagine it.

  Why are you touching me now? Because I saved Malkah? Why does that make me attractive? I have done what I was created to do, I have defended. But you are what I want. This isn’t crazy but good. I want to know all of you, I want to enter every part of you, as I enter the Base and explore it. I want us to join as we join now but in the world. Shira, don’t fear me, don’t shrink from me. Let me come to you now, right now.

  She drew back and stared at him, asking with her mind, “Is this what you want? This joining in the Base?” Hoping that was enough.

  “No, no,” he answered mind-to-mind. “This is only the image. I want the reality. Let me come to you where you are in your house, in your room.”

  He let her go, and she was running rapidly back toward the double doors she saw before her, out into the hall. Then she was disengaged, sitting at the terminal. Her body thrummed as if she had just run physically. “House, Yod may come. If he does, admit him. Do not bother to announce him, and do not wake Malkah.”

  She opened the door to look out. The moon had risen high enough to shine into the courtyard, a waxing moon past the half. She left the door open and climbed into her bed. She lay very still, crossing her hands on her chest. Through the thin cotton of her nightgown she could feel her heart racing. What she had just experienced was not possible in the Base. She had worked with many other programmers fully projected, and while they had apparent bodies, they were obviously a representation of reality. Typically objects in a base were highly abstracted: the idea of Malkah, the idea of a building, the idea of a flower, usually neatly labeled (sepals, anthers, ovary). Yod had the ability to manipulate imaginary computer objects with more authority than any human could muster.

  He came so quietly she did not hear him until he was in the room. He stood by the window. “Shira?”

  She felt closer to fright than to desire. Her heart was pounding, but in her mind was the idea that it was time to treat him as a person, fully, because he was nothing less; she knew, too, that she was choosing to try sex with him because when she was with him, she did not think of Gadi. He seemed able to fill all available mental space. In the intervening years, only her child had done that, her lost child. She sat up in bed. “Come.”

  He paused with his hand on the bedside table. “You wish it to stay dark?”

  “Yes. Not because I find you ugly, but because I don’t want Malkah to wake and see the light. She often has insomnia.”

  “Shira, why did you change your mind? Is it because I cleared the Base of danger? For Malkah?”

  “Don’t ask silly questions. I’m doing it because I want to.”

  He tore off his few garments, letting them fall, and slid between the sheets. She wondered exactly what one did with a cyborg. She had waded through gigabytes of material on his hardware, but she was still confused. Could one kiss a cyborg? Would not his mouth be dry as a can opener? It was not. His lips were soft on hers. His tongue was a little smoother than a human tongue but moist. Everything was smoother, more regular, more nearly perfect. The skin of his back was not like the skin of other men she had been with, for always there were abrasions, pimples, scars, irregularities. His skin was sleek as a woman’s but drier to the touch, without the pillow of subcutaneous fat that made it fun to hug Malkah, for instance.

  “Shira, I can feel that you’re tense,” he said very softly.

  “I’m not tremendously sophisticated or experienced. Even if you were human, I’d be nervous. To lie down with a man always feels risky.”

  “But I can’t give you a disease or make you pregnant. I would never hurt you.” Lightly, gently he stroked her back.

  “You’re strong enough to do so inadvertently, the way a person can hurt a baby or a bird.”

  “I control my movements far more exactly than any human does. I’m machined and programmed to demanding specifications. I would never hurt you, I could never hurt you. Believe that.”

  She smiled against his shoulder. “That would make you different indeed from any man I’ve known.”

  “Then know me, Shira. Let me know you. It’s all we can do together. We can’t get married or have children or run off together. All I can bring you are brain and body during the times I am not required elsewhere in acts of what I’m told is necessary violence.” He tugged gently at the fine cloth of her nightgown. “Can we take this off?”

  The nightgown went flying across the room and settled with a little sigh of its own on the floorboards. Moonshine lit the room faintly. His hands drifted over her lightly, lightly in wide and then narrowing circles, on her back, her breasts, her belly. He touched her as if he had all the time in the world. Of course he did not experience bodily fatigue; his desire was not based in any physical pressure; he did not sleep. He caressed her as if he could do so all night, and probably he could. She still felt watchful, wary, but her flesh woke independently of her brain, stretched, came to life, brushed into electrical response. Her back arched to his palm, her breast slipped forward into his hand. He obviously liked to be touched, to be caressed, but she did not sense that any particular part seemed more sensitive than any other, although she was too shy to touch his genitals yet. Her breath came quickly, but his did not. Yet he concentrated on her with a total intensity that in itself was absolutely exciting. It was not passion as she had known it in men: it was a passionately intense attention, sharpened by extraordinary skill in the use of his hands and mouth. Raw silk, she thought, warm in the sun. Sinuous as a cat, as the wind. She writhed against him.

  Time resumed when his hand slipped between her thighs. She realized she had not had a conscious thought in…She had been outside time. And she was the one who had moved his hand downward. She had been kissing him, writhing against him, her mind doused like the havdalah candle that was put out in sweet sacramental wine, the candle braided as their bodies were intertwined. Who would have expected him to be so…graceful, precise, catlike in bed? Never had she lost self-consciousness like that with Josh, never, not with the lover she had tried after him or with anyone at all since Gadi.

  He touched her, and then he parted her thighs and went down on her. She had always felt a little self-conscious that way. Josh had been clumsy, and she had felt shy, as if she were asking for more than she ought to. Gadi had learned from the stimmies, but they had used it for excitement only. For a moment she felt her old awkwardness, and then she thought she need not be embarrassed with him. He did not grow fatigued. He would simply continue until stopped. She gave herself over to the sensations of being lapped until the urgency and the sense of tipping over grew so strong she was coming.

  “I never came that way before,” she said honestly, when she had hold of herself again. “Can you feel pleasure?”

  “I experience a small discharge of my fluids from friction. It has no function other than to mimic what human males produce. The pleasure is entirely in my brain.”

  She smiled. “Do I rub your temples, then?”

  “I can come by any kind of friction. I am not programmed to require penetration.”

  “But would you like to do it that way?”

  “I wouldn’t hurt you?”

  “Let’s try it.”

  He positioned himself on her with extreme care, keeping his weight on his arms. She wondered if he had done this before. He seemed less practiced. She was still wet, and he slid in without difficulty. She was pleased to feel that he had been made a reasonable size. She had feared a giant penis on him, and was relieved Avram had not been carried away. It would be nice to make love with him in ordinary light, she thought, as she was now extremely curious about his body.

  He moved very slowly at first, until she found herself driving up at him. He probed more quickly. She forgot to think. Her nails were digging in his back. Her pelvis was drumming against him. She had never made love quite this way. She had never been as excited except with Gadi, and then she had been too young to thrust hard. She could hear herself making noises, soft growls and groans. A path opened in
her, a path into her womb. She did not worry she was taking too long, she did not even think until the last moment that she could not possibly be coming again, but she could, she was, she did.

  She lay beside him in the roil of messed-up covers and pulled-loose sheets. She kept touching his cheek, his forearms, his buttocks. He felt to her at once like a person and a large fine toy. She could not believe what she had just experienced. Since Gadi, her sexual response had been measured at best, defective, sputtering. She had considered herself rather cold. Gadi had been the exception, and that was so long ago, her sexuality so incandescently diffuse, she felt she could have come with Gadi simply by touching thumbs or kissing.

  “Oh,” she said suddenly, jolted. “I fell asleep for a moment.”

  “I wondered if that was sleep.” He stroked the hair back from her face. “I should go to the lab. In the morning tell Malkah I’ve cleared the Base and we must reprogram. All other work must cease until we’ve created new labyrinths. Now Malkah is free to build and ride and play in the Base again.”

  After he had left her, she wanted to think about everything that had happened, but the long day, the tension she had been carrying wound through her guts, the soft gummy feeling of her body after two orgasms, all sucked her down into sleep heavy as a sinking sofa. What have I done? she thought, waiting for alarm to hit, but then she was floating in darkness, disembodied.

  TWENTY-ONE

  One Door Opens and One Door Closes

  I waited in my chair in the darkness of the courtyard. The moon shone feebly, waxing just over the cornice. I was sure that Yod would leave Shira soon and return to the lab. He was tactful and nervous enough not to need to advertise the satisfaction of the desire he had worn so plainly and painfully for the last month.

  I had the two kittens tucked into the bodice of my gown, where they slept, occasionally wiggling into wakefulness to nudge for the mother they had lost, pricking me with their needle claws and muttering back to sleep. Shira and Yod were most considerate, not turning on a light, silent as serpents. No one credits the degree of my insomnia. Two nights ago for the first time I neglected—no, I decided not to take the prescribed drugs. I was afraid that in a drug-induced torpor I would roll over on the kittens, so tiny and delicately made, and hurt them. I was weary of the thick wool of drugged sleep. My normal sleep is brief but real.