by Marge Piercy
“Of course she doesn’t hate you. She’s always been blunt and tactless. I think she’s honestly trying to get to know you, but she hasn’t a clue how. Try to go partway toward her, Shira. She’s no charmer, but she’s a hero to many.” Malkah came around and began to knead Shira’s shoulders, working the tension out. “She is your mother. Maybe I feel a little guilty that I replaced her so happily, that I never encouraged you to wonder about her.” Under Malkah’s hands, Shira relaxed, listening, trying to understand. “You and I are more suited, more harmonious. We’re two sensuous hearth-loving cats with our notions of exactly how things ought to be around here. She charges in like a porcupine. We’re the ones who have to make the communication and the affection happen—but she’s our flesh and blood too.”
Shira let her breath out in a long sigh of disappointment. “It feels a little late for me to have to prove myself to her. Mistakes I’ve made I’m still paying for. I don’t need her to judge me off the top of her head.”
Two nights later—for once at a reasonable time, before she had gone to bed—Yod called her in the normal way, through the com-con. “Can I come to you late tonight?”
“I’ll alert the house. Be especially quiet. We have two visitors.”
“I saw that in the com-con news file. I’ll be quiet.”
The house as usual woke her. It was one o’clock. She hopped out of bed and ran onto the balcony around the top of the courtyard, to wait. Then she heard Yod speak softly in the darkness. “Who is before me? What do you want?”
“What are you doing in here?” The voice was Nili’s.
“You’re holding a laser pistol on me. Why?”
“You have thirty seconds to answer my questions before I use it. And don’t doubt that I can see you.”
“I won’t permit violence,” the house said loudly. The lights came on in the courtyard, blinding them all.
“I’m Yod, Avram Stein’s assistant. The house admitted me according to instructions.” He was waiting just out from under the far balcony.
Nili was standing with both arms outstretched and joined on a laser pistol held before her. “Whose instructions?”
“Mine,” Shira said. “That’s my lover you’re holding at gunpoint.”
“Why do you lie? This is a machine.”
“You are part machine and part human yourself,” Yod said, sounding annoyed but also curious. “We obviously share some sensors. X-ray lasers, for instance.”
“He’s at least as human as you are,” Shira said. “If you don’t release him, I’ll wake my grandmother.”
“I’m awake,” Malkah said. “I’m sure everyone is. Put that gun down, Nili. House, deactivate all weapons in the courtyard.”
“Done,” the house said.
“Nili is protecting all of us. What’s this object anyhow?” Riva’s voice came from below. At some point she had crept silently down to assume a position behind Nili.
“My name is Yod—”
Shira ran down the steps. “As I said, he’s my lover. I invited him in. The house is programmed to admit him.” She made a wide swing around Nili and came to rest standing beside Yod. He motioned her behind him, but she ignored his gesture.
“I am ready to protect the machine and you,” the house said. “Malkah told me to protect Dalia and Nili also. I am in conflict. I require a hierarchy of priorities after protecting Shira and Malkah and the small felines. But I will not permit that pistol or the weapon Riva is holding to function. I have already deactivated them, but the subsonic field is unhealthy. They should put down the weapons so I can shut it off.”
“Protect Yod, Nili and Riva with equal attention,” Malkah said firmly. She came downstairs in her plum-colored robe, her slippers flapping on the tiles. “Simply disable any of them attempting to assault or injure any of the others. Why don’t we all sit down and have some wine? You’ve just stumbled on our biggest secret.”
Shira said to Malkah, “I’m sorry you should find out about our affair in such a stupid way. I wanted to tell you, but you were working around the clock.”
“I knew,” Malkah said. “I heard Yod coming and going. I approve.”
“How can you have an affair with a machine?” Riva asked, following them to the table under the peach tree. “That’s like speaking of a relationship with a dildo.”
Shira was too angry to answer. Yod was accessing his base in an effort to understand. Malkah said, “That will be enough. You’ve had affairs with hairy objects far less human than Yod. I met some of them. For a woman who had a baby with the help of a machine, I think you should behave yourself and pass no knee-jerk judgments.” Malkah marched off to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of wine and glasses.
“I am not programmed primarily for sexual pleasure but for defense,” Yod said pleasantly. He had accessed “dildo.” “Given that I’m a machine, what are you?” He was addressing Nili. “Half and half?”
“For one thing, I’m as illegal as you are. So we’re even,” Nili said. The pistol had disappeared to whatever part of her black pajamas she carried it in. Shira imagined that Nili slept with a knife and a gun always on her person. Did she take them off in the shower? “You’re really a cyborg? My eyes and my sensors contradict each other. You look human.”
“So do you,” Shira said. “But what are you? I asked Riva earlier, but she wouldn’t tell me.”
An electric jolt sped around the table; Shira realized she had used Riva’s own name. “Everything seems to be coming out of the can tonight,” Malkah said. “Yod, this woman is officially Dalia. And Nili is officially her entirely human nurse. Say nothing to Avram.”
“How can he lie?” Riva asked. “Can we remove that memory?”
“I can lie as well as you can,” Yod said. “I simply require a good reason for that behavior as for any other. And my memory is as inaccessible to alteration as yours—perhaps better protected against chemical tampering.”
“I’m responsible for maybe a third of Yod’s programming, and frankly I view him as a friend and trust him completely.”
“Mother,” Riva said in high exasperation, “presumably whoever programmed the other two thirds can turn him inside out.”
“No.” Yod plunked his elbows on the table. “He doesn’t even know Shira and I are lovers. He doesn’t know I leave the lab many nights.”
“I notice nobody has answered my question. What is Nili? What exactly are you, and what are you doing here?” Shira was furious with herself for breaking their security, but she was equally angry at having her questions ignored while they all talked around and about and over Yod as if he were a piece of furniture.
“You can start by asking me where I’m from.” Nili sipped her wine.
“Where are you from?” Yod asked agreeably. He was watching them all, tightly coiled in his chair. Shira was sure he had noted where Nili had put away her pistol and what weapon Riva had carried as well as its current whereabouts. Having perfect recall, he could simply replay the scene until he was sure.
“Safed.”
Shira snorted in disbelief. “Safed? In Israel? No one lives in that whole interdicted sector. It has lethal levels of radiation and plague.”
“I can walk in the raw without protection. I can tolerate levels of bombardment that would kill you. We live in the hills—inside them, that is. We are a joint community of the descendants of Israeli and Palestinian women who survived. We each keep our religion, observe each other’s holidays and fast days. We have no men. We clone and engineer genes. After birth we undergo additional alteration. We have created ourselves to endure, to survive, to hold our land. Soon we will begin rebuilding Yerushalaim.”
Shira felt her mouth sagging open. She could not have been more shocked if Nili had announced herself a representative of whatever distant race had sent the message no one on earth could yet decode. Shira had grown up with a black patch on the maps for the destroyed area, the interdicted zone of the Middle East where the last great Two Week War had been
fought, set off by a zealot with a nuclear device who had blown up Jerusalem. When it was over, all the countries involved were wastelands, and the very ground was uninhabitable. Most of the oilfields of the region were aflame and useless. No more oil would ever be pumped from them. It was truly no-man’s-land.
“Why are you here?” Malkah asked. “What’s your mission?”
“We live in extreme isolation. We have a highly developed technology for our needs, but we don’t tie into the Net. I’m a spy and a scout—”
“You said you were an assassin,” Shira interrupted. “You told me that.” Beside her, Yod was sitting silent. Together afterward they would go over every word Nili and Riva had uttered and analyze it. A companion with perfect recall has definite advantages in postmortems.
“That was my little joke. I could be—I’m well-equipped. No, I am sent like the dove or maybe the raven from Noah’s ark to find out if the world is ready for us, and also if there’s anything out here we might want.”
“Been in contact with Nili’s group for years. I volunteered to escort her across Europa and take her someplace she could comfortably live over here, studying us.” Riva patted Nili’s hand. “Got to move on after Tuesday, but she’ll stay with you through fall if you’re willing. She could be useful in your state of semisiege.”
“How do you read our present situation?” Malkah asked Riva, her fingers steepled before her.
Riva leaned back in her seat, looking at each of them in turn with narrowed eyes as if gauging their readiness or abilities. “Well, let’s put it this way: you’re not digested yet, but you’re between the teeth and they’ve had a few good chomps.”
“Y-S? Why? We don’t even do our primary business with them.”
“They’re moving on Olivacon. They think there are too many multis and the free towns are a nuisance. One world, one corp. That’s their line. Aramco-Ford is in this with them for starters. But as to why you’re a hot target, you’ll have to answer that.”
“Then these incursions into our Base are part of a larger strategy?”
“One that likely includes kidnapping, assassination, maybe invasion.”
Shira looked at Malkah, listening raptly. In Malkah’s uncharacteristic rumpled frown, Shira could see a resemblance to Riva. “How do you know all this?” Malkah asked slowly, her eyes narrowed.
“Contacts. Traces in their system.”
“What kind of contacts?”
“You don’t expect me to answer that, Malkah.”
Malkah and Riva were staring at each other, a certain distance and wariness in each. Shira turned to Yod. “What do you believe?” he asked her, his voice low.
“I don’t know. We’ll talk about it later.” Was Riva exaggerating their danger for some purpose of her own? It was even possible that the razor Zee Levine had been acting on some weird private motivations. Shira yawned suddenly, her fatigue rising in her like a soporific drug. “Is there any other place we can meet?” she asked him softly. By now she was just about too tired to make love, but still the idea drew her. His hands on the table had a precise chiseled shape she studied with pleasure. His eyes seemed more intense, more seeing than human eyes, fixed on her.
“I requested my own room, but Avram hasn’t obliged.” He replied in a murmur even softer than hers.
“Ask Gadi. He’s taken over the third floor,” she whispered back. “This house is too crowded.”
He nodded glumly. “If all else fails, maybe I can get away after dark and we can go outside, up on the dune.”
Nili turned toward them, obviously listening, so they both fell silent. Under the table Shira rested her hand gently on his thigh as a way of emphasizing their intimacy, reassuring him. He is as real a person as I am, she thought, anger hardening her against Riva. I’m supposed to think you’re better than Yod because you’re mostly flesh? I’d rather depend on him any day or night, and I feel far closer to him than to you, my supposed mother. You say you want us to be friends, but you prejudge me, dismiss me. If you wanted a daughter like Nili, you should have kept me with you and trained me yourself; but I’m glad you didn’t. I am Malkah’s daughter, not yours.
TWENTY-FOUR
Vignettes in the Daily Life of a Golem
“You have a good mind,” Chava says to Joseph. “You’re trying to learn three languages simultaneously, and you’re succeeding.”
“I don’t feel smart. I feel stupid.”
“Why, Joseph? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Whatever little I learn, there’s far more I don’t understand. Life is a foreign country to me.”
“Whatever upbringing you were given that didn’t include even reading and writing makes it hard for you…That is, if you had parents?”
That is the closest Chava has come to asking a personal question of Joseph, and he sits mute. He does not want to lie to her. She knows the story the Maharal put out. Finally her eyes waiting on him make him answer something. “No parents.”
“An orphan?”
“No parents.”
“Yet I have heard you call my grandfather ‘Father.’ He doesn’t like you to do that, but he doesn’t seem surprised either.”
“It’s just a term of respect.”
“Joseph, are you a man?”
“I’m not a woman, obviously.”
“I told you you were clever. Maybe you didn’t study your letters, but you sound to me like you’ve studied pilpul—that awful quibbling they teach the boys, to split logic into splinters. Joseph, perhaps you’re an angel captured into a strong body.”
“Perhaps I’m a demon captured.”
“Is that what my grandfather thinks?”
“Who am I to ask him what he thinks about me?”
“Are you an angel or a demon, then?”
“I remember nothing before my birth, the same as you, Chava. Why are you playing games with me?”
“I’m interested in everything about you, Joseph. I’m trying to understand you. You’re my friend. We have to understand our friends.”
“Do I understand you? No. But you’re my friend. I would die for you.”
“You found the lost girl when no one else could. You never sleep.”
“I just don’t need much sleep; that’s why it seems that way.”
“Nonsense, Joseph.” She smiles at him. “Lesson done today. Study the verbs I gave you. I have to work on editing Grandfather’s new critique of the education system. His constant efforts to reform ghetto life have kept him in trouble since long before I was born. Were you born, Joseph?”
“I came into the world one night, as you did.”
“Not as I did, Joseph. Not as I did.”
David Gans, too, is interested in Joseph. He wants to measure his strength scientifically. He weighs barrels full of different substances—water, wine, earth—and has Joseph lift them. They are working in the courtyard in the narrow space between David’s little house and the house of the Maharal and his family. Joseph is obediently straining and lifting the barrels, when he looks up and sees every window of the surrounding houses crowded with faces. Bubehs are muttering, young women are fascinated, men are exchanging bets. The Maharal is holding court, or he would have stopped this scene before now, Joseph realizes. Once again Joseph has gone too far.
When he comes to the keg of nails, he pretends to strain and then fall. He pretends he cannot lift the keg. When David has emptied half the nails, he lifts the keg, miming difficulty. A limit to his strength has been established. “You must be the strongest man in Prague,” David says admiringly. “Perhaps in Bohemia.”
But still within the bounds of what a man can conceivably do. Joseph feels giddy with relief. He stopped in time. Barely in time. Chava has been watching too. Now she melts back into the door, returning to the rabbi’s study. Why does he think she knows exactly what he did?
He is the Bull they all send for when they need brute strength. “You can’t move that chest? You need that bed carried up four flights? Joseph t
he Shamash will do it. He’s the strongest man in Bohemia!” Everybody repeats that now, as if it were written in stone. He is a source of local pride. They call him Samson. He runs to Chava to ask her who Samson was, and she gives him the story to read in a children’s version before she reads him the story from Nevi’im—Judges.
Joseph is insulted. “I am as strong as Samson, but I am a better man. A woman tempted me too, but I resisted her. My strength is not in my hair. My strength is in me.”
“Our strength is in each other and in the eternal one, Joseph.”
He kneels before her, resting his great head on her knee like a mastiff. “I spoke without thinking. My weakness is my ignorance. My weakness is my foolishness.”
“You’re not so foolish as all that. Get up and make yourself useful. Come, we’ll go help my mother scour the house and throw out the chometz—what isn’t kosher for Passover. Tonight at twilight Pesach begins.”
Joseph is given a new shirt for Pesach, and he sits at the table with everyone else. During the reading of the Haggadah, the book is passed around the table. It is a handsome bound book published right here in Prague, full of fine illustrations. Some pictures come directly from the text, like the wicked child depicted as a soldier; others are simply illustrative of the life and feelings of the local Jews, such as the drawings of hares being pursued, hunted by large ravening hounds, hares forever running and hiding for their lives. Chava has coaxed him through the service three times, and when the book is handed to him, he reads his passage. The Maharal stares, seems about to speak; then lets the moment go. Chava beams at Joseph, who is brooding about the Exodus. They were slaves in Egypt, laboring under an overseer, making bricks from clay. He too is made from clay. He is a walking brick. He is a slave.
He does what he is told. He cleans and makes neat the Altneushul. He lays fires and trims the candles and carries in the wood. At night he patrols the ghetto. Day and night he works. He is created to serve, but must he serve always? Other men work their ten hours or so, and then they throw themselves down and rest. They sit in the street and kibitz their neighbors. They drink wine or beer and play cards. They sing, they saw on a violin. They throw sticks for a dog to chase. They whistle to a pet bird. They climb in bed with their wives. He obeys. He serves and obeys.