by Marge Piercy
“I’ll never understand how the nature of the divine or the duty of humankind toward each other is affected by how we think heavenly bodies rotate. We owe respect to our parents whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth.” David shakes his head sadly. “The forces of superstition are moving against my people right now.”
Joseph lets out his breath in a huge sigh. Finally. It has taken David two hours to get to the point. Joseph, however, has to admit that once launched, David proceeds gently but inexorably until he has a commitment from Brahe to intercede with Rudolf. He will write at once, this very evening, and Kepler will take the message and go to the court the next day.
“Rudolf always sees me,” Kepler boasts. “He finds our researches more exciting than the affairs of his ambassadors. He says contemplating the orderly motions of the heavens makes it easier to put into perspective all the quarrels between Catholics and Protestants. We are one of his pet projects. He lavishes the care on us another king would spend on mistresses.”
“He has been good to my people also. Therefore, please, go swiftly to him. Save us, Johannes, and I’ll get the Maharal to come quietly and we can have another session discussing the mystical questions that you find so engaging. I myself will continue your Hebrew lessons.”
David is promising a lot, because the Maharal remains extremely reluctant to share his ideas with Christians: it is too dangerous. Dangerous for them—witness Bruno’s eight years of imprisonment and burning for the crime of thinking and writing ideas that the Maharal found quite stimulating. Dangerous for him—because all Jews live on sufferance, while they live, and a violent death is always on tap. Now, the Maharal is a very old man but not yet ready to die, for his work is still consuming half his energies and the welfare of his people the other half. Every year he says to the angel of death, Not yet, not yet. I am not ready, but soon.
The price of Tycho’s promise is that they are to stay to supper and David is to work as Tycho’s assistant for the night. Tycho is shorthanded here and always in need of someone trained in astronomy. Joseph is impatient to be gone, to return to his master, but they are in for a long boisterous seven-course dinner. Tycho holds his own court in the huge vaulted hall. He has twelve assistants and their families, his wife, four sons and two daughters, the manager of the estate and two other visitors passing by. Squatting beside his chair like a mastiff is his fool, Jepp. Kepler, who is placed well down the table, with David and Joseph and the manager, tells them that Tycho once kept a pet elk. It would be here too, no doubt, but it got drunk and was injured on a stairway in his Danish castle. Tycho eats and drinks more than Joseph thought possible. Tycho’s common-law wife, a peasant woman from his estate, sits quietly with a wary eye on the commotion, but the rest of the family is loud at table, full of jokes and teasing, guffawing at Jepp’s slapstick.
The next morning Joseph paces and fumes. Finally, at noon, Tycho orders his carriage and sends them back to the city with Kepler, who carries a letter in a leather folio in his lap. David and Johannes, freed from the massive and ovewhelming presence of Tycho, sit with their heads close together, discussing mathematics, physics, astronomy. In spite of the twenty-five-year difference in their ages, they chatter, happy as schoolboys on vacation, jouncing along eating pie sent with them and bread and cheese and drinking ale. Joseph scowls out the window. He should have stayed in the ghetto. The Maharal created him to protect, and protect is what he must do.
Then Kepler begins to complain to David about Tycho, how even at supper he will not talk about his findings. “He treats me like an apprentice—me, to whom Galileo writes as an equal. He will not let us be collaborators. No, he must be the great lord. They say if his peasants on his island in Denmark were late in their rent, he put them in chains. The only reason he let me take on Mars, the most difficult planet, is because the assistant working on it quit—as they all do. As I will, if I can find another place!”
We all feel unappreciated by our masters, Joseph thinks. Me too.
TWENTY-EIGHT
How Can We Tell the Dancer from the Dance?
Shira had brought over Malkah’s cleaner, as it did not seem a great idea to borrow the cleaning robot from the lab; the less Avram was involved in Yod’s installing himself in the former janitor’s apartment downstairs, the smoother would be the move.
Yod’s possessions required only one trip to carry downstairs. Shira had managed to lose that ghastly outfit she had first seen him wearing. What he owned now were three pairs of shorts, two pairs of pants, several tees and a couple of shirts, a jacket, various scarves and Gadi’s old sec skin. That the skin probably no longer protected was irrelevant. He brought a terminal, his storage crystals and a set of tools for self-repair. The com-con link had been activated already, as had the link to the Base. His other possessions included a poetry anthology Malkah had given him, in which Shira discovered the rose she had cut the first time he had come to her house, against the Robert Burns poem she had been using to teach him metaphorical thinking; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; and a complete printout of his own specs.
The paucity moved her. Gadi was right: Avram should be paying Yod. She had no idea what Yod might want to buy, but he deserved to be able to have something he wanted. I don’t take good enough care of him, she thought, aware that in fact she spent little time on his upkeep. He did not require much, unlike a human male. In many respects, he was refreshingly undemanding. Even his clothes became dirty more slowly, as he did not sweat.
The last object he brought down was a chess set consisting of carved and painted pieces that were samurai, the emperor and empress, other Japanese historical figures. “Avram gave this to you?” she asked, astounded. “But you usually play with the computer.”
“I admired it,” he said simply. “It’s my…prize possession. Like me, the samurai were programmed to protect, to fight.”
She nodded, a little shaken. Gadi had lusted after that set from the time he was seven. He had spent his childhood always secretly stealing pieces from it and being forced by his father to put them back. Yet now Avram had given it to Yod. Perhaps Avram did in his way care for the cyborg.
The apartment was dark, with only a few high windows. It might be chilly in winter, but it was pleasantly cool now. Although an old man and woman had lived here in Shira’s childhood, it had stood empty since.
The furniture was close to antique—pieces covered with real wood veneer in light streaky colors, a table made of plastic attempting to imitate stone. Those were still functional, although badly built, but the bed needed replacing. Its sagging, almost convoluted shape suggested that not two but perhaps a dozen people had died there slowly, in convulsions. Several of the chairs had once been overstuffed with matter that had since disintegrated. When she sat in them, she began to sneeze. Yod carried them straight to the recycler, but the woman on duty was afraid to take them. They could contain toxic materials—so many things from that era had. It was decided simply to cycle them through the fusion plant: it produced energy from sea water but had the capacity to use some solid trash.
Malkah gave Yod a great pile of pillows and a couple of straight chairs. In the cupboard they found old milk and meat dishes, which Shira boiled and scrubbed and scrubbed. “Today we’ve made hundreds of spiders homeless,” she said to Yod, who was putting the dishes back on the scoured shelves. She found herself singing, songs that had been popular when she was in college.
Hear them crying in the alley
nursing on bottles of dust
the armies of the dying dance in my head
the armies of flying bones
we are the last of the last
the water has all gone dry
we are the end.
They had boogied to that at all-night parties, singing the chorus while they danced with their heads thrown back, convinced of apocalypse but defiant and cheery. Then they all went off to work for multis and tried to make babies.
She sang:
You filled my sky and burned me like the sun.
My skin is gone to powder. Blood boiled dry.
In the clean acid of the desert, gonna die.
“You’re enjoying yourself. Why is that? This work is neither creative nor interesting. We’re assisting a cleaning robot.” Yod looked into her face with that quizzical smile she thought one of his most attractive expressions. “The songs you sing are grim, but you sound joyful.”
“I want you settled in your own place. It’ll be better for us.”
“Does it feel almost as if I were human? Am I imitating behavior I can never match? Is Avram right, that the lab is more suited to me than this place with all the facilities humans require? I don’t sleep, can extract energy from almost anything. Am I pretending at something I’ll always fail?”
“Yod, there’s no culture of cyborgs for you to fit into. The only society is human. You have to pass. And we want someplace to meet.”
“How much do I disappoint you?”
“Since I don’t expect you to be human, but rather yourself, why should I be disappointed?” She was not at all sure how truthful she was being. After all, she spoke of the relationship to Gadi and to Malkah as temporary. What would it mean to make more of a commitment to a machine?
“I’m asking if you’re happy because I seem momentarily human.”
“No doubt there’s always an element of playing house in settling any lover into an apartment. Humans pretend at things all through childhood. Little girls still play house nowadays, long after any adult woman could be wasted doing what they used to call in the old days, keeping house. Moving you in is soothing. It’s mindless and easy. It’s safe. We haven’t had much of that lately.”
“I was designed to fight, so this pleases me and makes me uneasy at once.”
She touched his face. “My programming is scientific and nurturing. What happened with Y-S is a nightmare to me, insane, outside my life.”
Gently he put his hands on her shoulders. “This is your life. They’re after you. They know something of what we’re doing here. It won’t stop.”
“No! I want a small life, a quiet life. I want to do my work and have the little pleasures other women know.”
“Then run, Shira, run from me, from Avram and Malkah. Run now.”
“I can’t do that, and you know it.” She sank into a kitchen chair. “Even if I left the only people besides my lost son that I care about, the only thing Y-S wants with me is to empty my brain of what I know about you and the work here. That’s all any multi would want with me now—to empty me out even if they destroy half my brain cells in the process. There’s no place for me to go.”
He knelt before her, gripping her knee. “I can only fight for you. I can only try to protect and defend.”
It felt quite natural now to touch him, the most normal gesture she could imagine. Yet her hand was resting on imitation skin laid over neural processors, gel chip technology, a skeleton strong enough to support a high-rise building. Again, when she touched a man, did she think she was caressing the liver, the spleen, the large intestine? Surfaces sought friction, and in that friction, pleasure. It was like being in a zip and asking suddenly, What’s holding us up? Most of life was bizarre when she stopped to examine it.
This moment was a long, long way from a woman dressed in skins picking a banana off a tree to eat and squatting to shit in the bushes, toting her baby in a carrying sack along with roots she had dug and leaves she had plucked. Yet such a woman could lose her child too, to a predator swift in the grass, to a sudden fever for which she knew no remedy, to a scratch that didn’t heal but stole up the chubby leg in an angry red line streaking arrowlike for the heart. Such a woman sought comfort in the embrace of a being like and unlike herself, as men were unlike women, intimate strangers surely just as exotic and peculiar to Shira as this machine in the form of a man who knelt before her, wanting at least to please. Gadi had kept the room in which they had met secretly, as if it were a museum case containing love. Yod kept the rose. She was more moved by the withered rose.
“If I wanted a human mate, Yod, the town is full of men. I’m with you because I want to be with you. Some things work between us and others don’t—for what couple isn’t that the way? But does it ever bother you I’m so messy and biological, that I’m an animal? I bleed, I sweat, I get tired. Sometimes I feel embarrassed before you since you’re so much neater. Don’t I seem rather gross to you, always putting stuff in or letting it out?”
“My sense of smell is more analytical than sensual. I am not programmed to find some smells pleasant and others unpleasant. What bothers me is altogether different—that I failed you: I didn’t protect your mother.”
“I asked her not to come. She and Nili chose to. It isn’t your fault, and one cyborg can’t defend the entire town.”
“I think, however, I’m supposed to.”
A message came over the Net from Y-S, saying that her former boss, Dr. Yatsuko, regretted that pirates had attacked the previous meeting and hoped that she was in good health. He said that Y-S was interested in regaining her services with a promotion by one and one half grades that perhaps had been discussed in the aborted meeting. In the meantime she might be interested to know that her son was now with her ex-husband in the Y-S enclave in the Nebraska desert, where they had lived together.
She and Malkah asked for copy and studied the transmission intently, each with a page before her as they sat over coffee at the kitchen table.
“They have no record of the meeting. The wrap baffles sufficed to dampen their recorders as well as their sensing devices,” Malkah said.
“So they don’t know what happened. They may suspect the trouble started when I rejected the offer, but they don’t know. And they probably don’t know the size of the attacking party, since they had no survivors and the camera on the fast-tank was blown up.”
Malkah put her elbows on the table, frowning. When she frowned, Shira was reminded of Riva—although she would never know what Riva had really looked like. Malkah asked sternly, “Do you believe this stuff about Ari? That they’ve brought him back from the space platform with Josh?”
“As bait?”
“Bait or bribe. Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know. But I have an idea how to find out. I’ll send a message robot to Ari personally, to wish him Happy Birthday. His birthday is in twelve days. I’ll order one only for Nebraska Y-S station and return. If Ari isn’t there, it won’t deliver its message to anyone else or anywhere else but will simply return. If it doesn’t return, then I’ll know they destroyed it and they’re lying.”
“Let me pay for it. He’s my only great-grandchild.”
Imagining Ari only two thousand miles away instead of vanished from the planet made Shira restless. If only she could find out what they were planning to do with Ari, what great game they were playing with her son as sacrificial pawn. But she had never been a good chess player. Josh was a fine player. Sometimes before Ari was born, on interminable evenings when they ran out of small talk and small tasks, when neither had enough brought-home work for screening, then they had played chess or go or other games associated in her mind now with the feeling of hours and hours of time that must be passed through together. They could of course have escaped each other in a stimmie; that was what poor bastards in the Glop did; that and drug out. Log too much stimmie time, and a Y-S counselor would be asking you gently what was wrong. Like the continual blood and urine testing, it was a fact of corporate existence; too great a reliance on manufactured fantasies could reduce your edge, your efficiency. Every aspect of life was monitored in the enclaves.
“Ari feels more important to me now that Riva is dead,” Malkah said quietly. “I know that’s absurd, but it’s true.”
“Her life was the opposite of yours and of mine. Did she actually live anyplace?”
“She had what she called a hidey-hole on an island off Georgia; that’s all I know. Nili may know more, but I wouldn’t bet
on it.”
“Now that she’s dead, I find myself thinking of her far more than I ever did when she was alive. I find myself wondering about her—what her private life was really like.”
“I don’t think Riva had what you and I might think of as a private life. She had time off. Rest. But what mattered to her was the dangerous work she did. The rest was just…filling in.” Malkah sighed heavily.
“Why do you and I care so much about our attachments to others?”
Malkah rubbed her eyes. “I used to wonder what I did wrong. But now I think that unless you grossly mistreat a child or spoil her or let her be injured, basically there’s a given element in all of us, something from genes or the moment. From birth on, a child follows her own path. She learns, but she also unfolds from within.”
“Ari was himself almost from the first. He had a personality. He had a special gentleness, unlike other boy babies the women around us had. He also had a fearfulness—a capacity to be startled—that worried me. I would wonder if I was too anxious and I was infecting him.”
“Show me a mother who isn’t anxious, and I’ll show you a happy idiot.”
“Malkah, did you really want another baby when you were forty-five? Didn’t you have some resentment at having a kid dropped on you?”
“No, Shira, I’ve told you the truth. You were her gift to me. Maybe if I was living with a man or stuck in a permanent relationship I might have hesitated. But I’d raised Riva, she was gone, and I felt a little at loose ends. I’d had enough time alone to think how much better a job I could do now I was so much smarter and kinder.” She laughed sharply.
“And you didn’t feel overburdened?”
“Sometimes, sure.” Malkah smiled. “But I think I was better at hiding it. And you were dessert in my life.”