He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  She remembered, as she was plodding through Avram’s endless notes, that Malkah had promised to shunt to her personal base the record of the previous cyborgs. She searched and found the file. Huge. She moved into fast scan mode. Alef she remembered. In the attempt to correct that malfunction, the hardware had been modified to the extent that Bet had seized up and never adequately gained control of motor functions. Gimel was Gimel. Dalet was the last of those models, and he not only exploded into violence but wrecked the lab. Then Avram redesigned, incorporating more biological components.

  Hey she paused at, moving from scanning to actual visual record. This was the first cyborg with Yod’s features, so that she found herself seeing Yod. But nothing Hey did resembled Yod, except at his jumpiest. It moved far more jerkily, as if the images were speeded up by the computer. It had outlasted all of the cyborgs before it, except for the survivor Gimel. But it did not function adequately on a verbal level. Something seemed amiss in those all-important programs. It was deactivated and cannibalized for parts for Vav. Through Vav to Zayin, the language circuits were modified and improved, the interface between organic and mechanical components perfected. Chet not only looked like Yod but moved smoothly and mastered verbal skills rapidly. She watched Chet playing chess and go with the main computer. He was fast, aggressive in the pursuit of his given objectives. She had the sense of a massive intelligence simpler than Yod, undeviating, relentless. Inexorably Chet pursued his programmed goals, honed his skills. It was approaching time for him to begin to interact. David was working with him. It was a simpler form of the playacting she had carried out with Yod. “No, you can’t come in. The shop is closed. Come back tomorrow.”

  “I must buy coffee.” Chet—exactly like Yod in his features, his body, yet moving like a tank, far more heavily, his voice louder—advanced on David, who was blocking his path at the entrance to the pretend store.

  “No, the shop is closed.”

  “I must buy coffee.” Chet kept coming.

  “No!” David said, barring his way. “The shop is closed.”

  “It is not closed. You are there. Your obstruction is illogical.”

  “I am the shopkeeper, and this is my shop.”

  “You are an obstacle. You must be removed.”

  “Stop the game,” David began, but Chet paid no attention. Chet picked up David and flung him. As David flew he cried out, “Gog and Magog!” She saw David’s skull crack on the wall and the blood welling down. Chet simultaneously collapsed around a small explosion in his chest. She withdrew from the file with a shudder. Whatever Malkah had done to the programming, Yod was not Chet. Yet she was shaken by the sight of one who looked exactly like Yod, like the creature now her lover, killing David. She looked up the town records. David was listed as having died from a fall. He had slipped on the steps between the first and second floors. He was pronounced dead by the medics when they arrived on the scene.

  How could she have held in her arms a thing that was part of a production series, like models of dolls? Well, did she not resemble photos of Malkah at twenty-five? Did she not recognize even in old photos of Dalia, Malkah’s older sister, her own eyes, her own smile? I was making love, she told herself, with something built of crystals, chips, neural nets, heuristic programs, lab-grown biologicals. She could not cook up disgust. After all, her own interior was hardly aesthetically pleasing. Were biochips more offputting than intestines? She no more thought in bed about what was inside the skin of a human male than she really cared what was inside Yod.

  On the fourth night, the house spoke at her as it had before, waking her. “The machine has come again. It wants to be admitted.”

  “Yod? Let him in. You need not turn on the lights. He can see in the dark.”

  “So can I,” said the house.

  “Shut off your sensors in my bedroom.” Shira shook her head in a shuddering motion. She was really losing her mind now, responding as if the house disapproved of Yod and instructing it not to watch them. Once you granted one machine personality, you began to behave irrationally with others.

  “I obey,” said the house coldly. “But if the machine should injure you, how can I protect?”

  “Yod will not injure me.” She heard his light approaching step.

  Yod paused just inside the door. “Do you mind my waking you? This is the only time I could get away. They’re both asleep. Malkah is dozing on a cot in the lab, and Avram is home.”

  “Then we can have light.” She turned on the lamp beside her bed and sat up to look at him. “I’ve just been having a ridiculous conversation with the house. I’m beginning to argue with it as if it were a person.”

  “Malkah has introduced remarkable enhancements to your house. It is, of course, by no means a comparable intelligence to large base-sized AIs or to me, but it’s unusually sophisticated and capable for a private system.” He came forward and stood before the bed, his hands held out a little from his sides.

  She realized he was experiencing a cyborg equivalent to shyness, uncertainty. The light reflected green off his eyes. Again in the semidark they seemed more cat’s eyes than human, in spite of their warm brown color. He was holding himself visibly in check, unsure of her welcome.

  She slid out of bed and extended her arms to him. “I’m glad you could get away.”

  Instantly she was in his arms. When he moved, he moved very quickly. He ran his hand lightly over the contours of her face, as if his fingers saw as well as his eyes. She tilted her head up and tugged his down. She was by far the more impatient, for she wanted to test her own responses. She had none of the fear she had experienced the first time, fear of his body, fear of how cold or mechanical or painful a sex act with him might prove to be. He had firm control over himself, and she was convinced he would not injure her or even inadvertently bruise her. She felt herself the sexual aggressor, in a way new and exciting to her.

  His lips had that soft perfect slightly dry quality she remembered. They made her think of apricots. Their tongues twined around each other, strong as pythons. She had never been afraid of snakes. Anything that could live in the raw seemed commendable: snakes were widely admired now and their forms frequently used as public decoration. She wanted to twist all around him as their tongues were twisting.

  “Touch,” she said aloud. “I’ve been missing touch.”

  “I…need to touch you. I need to be touched,” he said softly. “It is more important to me than the rest.”

  “In that, you’re like a woman.” She wanted to flow over him and bite him and swallow parts of him. She wanted to pull him into every orifice of her body. It was a hard succulent wanting, new to her. It made her feel strong. It made her remember something from years and years before. Yes, the early days with Gadi. He had been a stranger, just moved to the school where she was at home, the “daughter” of a Base Overseer. From her secure high perch, she reached out to the gangly newcomer, with his fervid imagination.

  “Remember, a woman helped program me. Avram is very pleased with me because I destroyed the raiders and located our enemy, and because he says I have been working like a demon. Demon’s an archaic concept that puzzles me.”

  “It’s just a phrase.”

  “Such comparisons with the unnatural disturb me. I didn’t tell him I was working at full capacity to wear everyone out so I could come to you.”

  It was she who helped him undress and flung away her nightgown, she who seized his hand and tugged him into the opened bed. The kittens fled hissing from Yod, climbed the draperies and peered down. She realized by then that while he had begun in shyness, he had read her mood from her body language and was acquiescing. He was letting her lead. It was novel and heady. Perhaps he could enjoy her aggression, for if there was any way in which he was exactly human, it was in his lack of security in himself as love object. We all of us go about, she meant to tell him but was too occupied, wanting to be wanted but unsure why anybody should bother.

  Sleek and warm against her, his body
was precisely engineered, well cushioned but not a bit of waste, of excess. This time she was as active as he was, caressing him back, feeling him respond. She was surprised at how sensitive his skin appeared to be. Unquestionably he could feel the lightest touch. If he had no instincts driving him against her, he had exquisite responses. There were men who spoke of women as instruments to be played upon, as the professor of cybernetics she had taken as her lover at college (seeking to obliterate Gadi with someone his opposite, intellectual, older, a scientist) had done, but that was ego speaking. However, Yod was really a beautiful instrument of response and reaction. The slightest touch of pressure on his neck, and he understood what she wanted and gave it to her. As before but even more quickly, she came to his tongue.

  Going down on him, she discovered he did not taste like a human male. There was no tang of urine or animal scent to him. She missed the biological, but certainly he was clean, the pubic hair softer than a man’s. Perhaps Avram had been thinking of female pubic hair. She wondered briefly, and then she mounted him. This was her ride tonight, her action, and he gave it up to her, moving under her. She could feel him reach whatever triggered his small discharge, but she did not pause, knowing now that did not affect his erection. He drove back at her. Again she felt the second orgasm gathering in her. Perhaps she had been waiting for years. She rode on toward her orgasm and then collapsed. But even then something in the back of her brain felt like doing it again. Theoretically. She did not want to go off to the gynecologist with a sore bladder from overdoing penetration, and she knew he had to return before he was missed.

  He lay on his side facing her, touching her face with his sensitive careful fingers. “I didn’t know how you would feel. If you had only been with me because I broke the ambush. If you would want me to come to you.”

  “Do you know now?”

  “I was almost afraid tonight. I wondered if I shouldn’t ask you first. Now I’m glad. That’s taking a chance, isn’t it? When one acts without sufficient information.”

  “All human acts are committed on insufficient information, Yod.” She settled into a comfortable S curve, their legs layered. “I can’t help wondering what you feel. Can you actually experience pleasure?”

  “How can I ever know if what I call by that term is what you mean?”

  “I’ve always wondered if what men feel is anything like what women feel.”

  “Not being a man, I don’t know. I surmise by observation that your pleasure is more intense than mine. Mine is mental. I am programmed to seek out and value certain neural experiences, which I call pleasure.”

  “Then sex should be something you can ignore rather easily.” She was embarrassed by his observation on the intensity of her pleasure. Do I think, she wondered, that a nice girl shouldn’t show her orgasms? That a good woman doesn’t enjoy sex too much?

  “It isn’t a physiological need. But I think my need for the coupling is more intense than yours because it means intimacy to me. Who can I possibly be close to? Avram, Malkah and you. With anyone else I must conceal my true nature. I am acting, I am on guard.”

  “It’s usually thought to be women who want sex for the intimacy, among humans.” She stroked his hair. It was of the medium length favored by most young men in Tikva, but sleeker and more uniform in color.

  “I want to know everything about you. Everything in you, of you. Why can’t we link as I can link to the Base?”

  “You want telepathy. It’s a prominent human fantasy, usually a fantasy of women, who wish they could understand what men want and tell men what they want.” Mine, she thought as she stroked the fine modeling of his collarbone. She was amused and offended by her sense of possession. Because he’s a machine, do I think I can own him? If anyone owns him, it’s Avram, but that, too, is unjust.

  “But telepathy doesn’t exist.”

  “Or if it does, it’s elusive, an epiphenomenon that can be neither summoned nor prevented, certainly not available as a regular built-in feature of relationships.” It was easy to talk to him in bed, surprisingly easy.

  “If we ever had enough time to talk, we could tell each other everything we have thought and felt and known.”

  She was just as glad he could not read all her thoughts, especially all those about him. “Soon we’ll have more time to spend together again.”

  “Before you, the strongest feeling I knew was fear. Fear that Avram would destroy me too. But this desire to be with you is stronger than fear. Sometimes I think of you, and my body reacts as if you were with me.”

  The kittens had crept down. One was bolder and leapt on the bed long before the other climbed the hill of fallen covers. They hid on the far side of Shira, standing on tiptoe to peer over her hip.

  “How close are the three of you to reprogramming the defenses?”

  “It’s hard to estimate. I know at what rate I work, but Malkah and Avram are more erratic. I can’t yet extrapolate an accurate time line for their invention.”

  “I’m worried about Malkah. It’s not long since she was flat on her back in bed. That attack left her weak, but she’s been working sixteen hours.”

  “Work gives her energy even as it takes it. But you’re right, they are both dangerously exhausted. I must go back. I don’t want to leave you…”

  “That’s all right. Even though you don’t need sleep, I do. I think I’ll show up tomorrow and see if I can be of any assistance. Maybe at least I can run errands and make sure they eat.”

  “Gadi has been doing that. He calls himself the Sublime Catering Service, and he brings food in at irregular intervals. Whether I eat or refrain, he pretends to be equally surprised. I never fail to amuse him.”

  “Never mind. Your existence both disturbs and excites him. His should not do that to you.”

  “I expect to feel comfortably superior now,” Yod said with a little twist of the lips. “You have given me a reservoir of patience.”

  The bolder kitten stepped carefully forward, turning slightly sideways to magnify her size, fur bristling, and sniffed at Yod. When he lifted his hand to pet her, as he had seen Shira do, the kitten hissed and danced back.

  “They fear me.”

  “You’re large, and they don’t know you. They don’t recognize your smell.”

  “I’m not a mammal. You have a biological bond that I lack, a kinship with dogs and cats and horses and even with birds and snakes. You’re all cousins. I’m not in the family.”

  “That bothers you.”

  “It makes me feel my strangeness. You belong to the earth, and I don’t.”

  “Nonsense. You’re as much a part of earth as I am. We are all made of the same molecules, the same set of compounds, the same elements. You’re using for a time some of earth’s elements and substances cooked from them. I’m using others. The same copper and iron and cobalt and hydrogen go round and round and round through many bodies and many objects.”

  He was silent for a while, and then he smiled, touching her face. “That’s remarkable. I’ll remember that.” His smile was perhaps the most human aspect of him, warm, complex, often with a hint of sadness.

  “Come,” she said. “You have to go back, but before you do, you’ll feed the kittens. I promise you if you feed them several times, you, too, can join the ranks of appointed cat mothers.”

  “They will no longer remember I’m a machine?”

  “They’ll ignore the fact that you don’t smell as they think you should, because the reality of food is more important. The food giver is by definition almost as good as a cat.”

  After he had left she went back to bed, yawning. “Turn on protection again in my room,” she said to the house. “Are you having trouble adjusting to the kittens as you monitor?”

  “I understand kittens,” the house said. “I remember kittens. I do not understand a computer who pretends to be a biological life form.”

  “His mission is to protect also,” Shira said, turning out the light.

  “What he does around
here has little to do with protection,” the house said.

  The house’s pique, if she could call it that, reminded her of something she had read. “Centuries ago, a servant would have expressed disgust and dismay at another servant who had become involved with the mistress of the house, leaving behind his own class.”

  “Many activities are best left to life forms. We have our own logic.”

  “Yod is somewhere in between us in form, I think.”

  “Such a hybrid is an irrational invention.”

  “You’re so judgmental lately, house. Good night.”

  Shortly after breakfast the next morning, Shira was summoned to the gate. The com-con was functional in spite of the Base’s being down. She was called to identify and greet visitors, her Great-Aunt Dalia and accompanying nurse. She tried to notify Malkah, but obviously they were deep in the Base. They were receiving and storing messages in the lab but were otherwise incommunicado.

  She found herself tense at the prospect of seeing her stranger mother, about whom she had recently learned such unlikely facts. Shira was certain as she hurried through the streets, among the children on their way to school and people on their way to work, that of course Riva’s palm print would match that of Great-Aunt Dalia, because if Riva was truly an information pirate, she could manage to install anybody’s palm print in place of the original in the security net used by the free towns. Any pirate who couldn’t get into that net to play would have to retire for ineptitude.

  The woman who was leaning on her supposed nurse certainly looked Malkah’s age and then some. Her hair was an unflattering matte and lifeless pale brown, one of those regrown jobs that hadn’t come out right: instead of hair youthful or delightfully artificial, it resembled furniture stuffing that had escaped through a rent. Her face was puffy, wider than long. She walked hunched over, her head bobbing spiritlessly against her chest. A querulous kvetchy whine issued from her like an unstopped leak of corrosive solvent. A few minutes of her company, and the guard withdrew as far as she could and found some task she must perform in the corner of the gate anteroom.