He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  “Do you think I’ll ever get Ari back?”

  “I think you have to live as if you believe you will.”

  The Commons had originally meant a square in the middle of town that had existed long before the wrap had enclosed them, dating back to the founding of the town in 1688, when it had been a cow pasture and later a drill ground for the local militia. The Commons often referred now to the town food facility, where people could eat or pick up takeout. The square itself had once been half paved, but when the wrap was constructed, it had been dug up except for strips for walking, cycling and delivery vans. It was half intensely cultivated gardens and the rest trees and grass. It was that half, facing the Commons building, that Gadi had taken over for a party.

  The festival began at seven, but it took them a while to get organized. Even Yod was late coming to Malkah’s house, because for once he was accompanied by Avram. Avram had taken an hour to get ready, muttering complaints the entire time, Yod told Shira softly. Nili sat in the courtyard, watching them all with avid curiosity. She was dressed as she always was now, in her fatigues. She had dropped the role of nurse. She was just Malkah’s guest.

  Yod sat beside Nili, watching too. As Shira dressed, she glanced down from the balcony to check on them below. Her bed was a hill of tossed fabric. Malkah was wearing a purple caftan trimmed with iridescent streamers. She and Avram were arguing about something that had happened forty-odd years before Avram had married Sara and left Tikva for California. Shira could easily hear their raised excited voices batting at each other from below. Yet she did not think either of them could be described as annoyed; in fact they were having fun. They fought for the pleasure of it—part ritual, part agon, part fencing match.

  Everyone finally lined up and started bellowing at her. She was compelled to stop fussing and come down. “As far as I can see,” Nili said, “you looked better before you began.”

  “What do you think?” Shira asked Yod.

  He looked unhappy. “I can’t tell the difference. One set of clothing is like another to me. That doesn’t appear as comfortable.”

  “You look beautiful,” Avram said, bowing to her. “Never mind the rest of them. An attractive woman is allowed to take her time so that she can please us when she does appear.”

  Altogether she felt like an idiot. She was compelled to attempt to create a fine impression on Gadi; she could not help it. Her dress was one she had bought to celebrate when she had recovered her figure after pregnancy. It was cut close to the body and made of fishcloth—tiny glittering scales of changing color in the sea palette, looking metallic but actually silicon-enhanced silk. It had a demure high neck but two cutouts on the front so that half of each breast was exposed. The dress had been the proper modest midcalf length required at Y-S, but she had shortened it a couple of days before so that it stopped above the knee, in case she wanted to dance. Gadi had promised dancing.

  They arrived at the Commons. From the outside of the viron only the generators were visible and an area of opacity stretching up to the wrap, with a marked entrance blinking. They passed through into a world of silver palms tinkling, glittering, dropping an occasional tinsel frond. The floor and the sky were black streaked with silver, lit with arcs of light that met at the horizon. In the sky, silver snakes and angelfish swam, releasing glowing bubbles. Under the floor, bright rainbow fish darted. Every tenth tree was a speaker, pulsating waves of Afro-Indian rock.

  The dance floor was a spiral that flung out platforms. It had been constructed, or rather put together of ready-mades, yesterday. Shira had passed on her way to supper when they were locking the segments together. Most people on the spiral were dancing to the Afro-Indian group, but several of the platforms were bubbles with different music; she could tell from the rhythm of the dancers.

  Nili poked her in the arm. “What is the purpose of this?”

  “It’s just a party. Don’t your people ever have parties?”

  “We make music, we dance, we feast and drink our wine. We eat funny mushrooms that make us high. We act silly and tell bad jokes we think are uproarious. But this construction, this waste of energy, I find strange.”

  Malkah asked, “Does it offend you, as conspicuous consumption?”

  Nili scowled. “It’s so strange to me I mistrust my own reactions. In a way it’s sweet, all this effort spent on having a good time.”

  “Is that what we’re supposed to do?” Yod asked. He nodded at the dancers gyrating on the seven levels of the spiral. “Like that?”

  “It’s all silliness,” Avram said. “In our youth we didn’t need to immerse ourselves in fantasies to enjoy life.”

  “Oh, come on, Avram. I remember you and me going to Green Ziggy’s concert at Foxboro Stadium—do you remember, before it fell down? Sixty thousand screaming fans, a sound system loud enough to deafen us all for a week, a galaxy-class light show. Flying tigers, demon wrestlers, a dragon. The lead singer shot up in a rocket. Remember?”

  “The summer we were both nineteen.” He sighed. “You were so beautiful then.”

  “I’m just as beautiful now.” Malkah stuck out her tongue at him. “It’s your eyes and your appetite that are failing, not my beauty.”

  Shira was looking cautiously around for Gadi. Yod stayed at her side. She asked, “You really don’t think this dress is attractive? Just a little sexy?”

  “Shira, I don’t understand the concept.”

  “Yod, you must understand attraction, since you’re attracted to me.”

  “But not because you look any particular way.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t have any standard by which to judge human appearance. I wasn’t programmed for that. I like the way you look, but then I like the way Malkah looks too. I find most people interesting to watch.”

  She drew back, offended. She was astonished that her feelings could be hurt by what he had said, and yet at the same time, she recognized a bright side to his ignorance. He thought Malkah equally attractive. Never would she have to worry about her appearance, because he seemed incapable of distinguishing her best days from her worst, any more than the kittens would ever judge her by her facade. So often she found that with Yod, when she moved into her usual behavior with men, she was playing by herself. Whole sets of male-female behavior simply did not apply. They would never struggle about clothing, what he found sexy, what she found degrading to wear or not to wear, whether she was too fat or too thin, whether she should wear her hair one way or another. Small pleasures, small anxieties, sources of friction and seduction, all were equally stripped out of the picture.

  “But you look at me a lot when we’re together. Why?”

  “I like to look at you. From small changes in posture and gesture and expression, I try to read your feelings and your reactions. I find it…pleasant to look at you because you are Shira, my Shira. I’ve been pondering what that phrase means and how it can apply to a cyborg. What someone who doesn’t possess himself can do with a sense of me and mine.”

  She was touched by what he said, about to answer, when Gadi stepped out of a huge tree trunk. “Ah, there you people are. About time. Why aren’t you dancing?” He put his arm possessively about Shira, touching her bare back, tracing the line of her spine.

  “It’s beautiful,” Shira said. “It’s amazing what you did here.”

  “Isn’t it, with only two decent generators and one from the Dark Ages. It’s thrown together, but I must say myself, it’s thrown together nicely. I wanted to give everyone a lift.” His hand dropped briefly on Yod’s shoulder. “My battery-pack brother, welcome. And I can’t believe it: Aveinu, welcome indeed.” Gadi made as if to touch his father but did not. Shira could not remember them ever embracing. “I can’t believe you agreed to visit my wee installation. I hope you’ll condescend to let it amuse you a little.”

  Avram looked uncomfortable. “I was curious, I’ll admit. I wanted to see what you do.”

  “I make butterflies—pretty eph
emeral things that make people happy. There’s too little pleasant in this nasty dying world. We all need to remember how to play, how to be children together for a little while.”

  “Being entertained is not the same as being happy,” Nili said.

  “Hello, lioness. I could have lent you a gown for tonight. Not that you don’t look gorgeous anyhow.”

  “Why should I care whether others look at me? The pleasure is in the looking, no?”

  “Have you no vanity, Nili? I have tribes of it.”

  “I have vanity,” she said. “About certain things I can do, I’m shockingly vain. So, silver man, do you dance?”

  “Of course. Very well. Can you do these dances?”

  “Any dances that anyone can do, I can do,” Nili said. “That’s my vanity speaking. There is no motion of which I am not physically capable.”

  Gadi extended his arm in a courtly gesture. Nili stared as if wondering what he wanted her to do with it. Then she seized him by the wrist and yanked him swiftly, roughly toward the spiral.

  “If you want to dance, I’m sure I can imitate those motions also,” Yod said softly to Shira. “Would you find that pleasant?”

  She nodded vigorously. She caught a glimpse of Malkah attempting to lure Avram toward the dancers. Gadi and she had used to dance; in college the computer students had their own dance bar where they hung out in the old city. Since then, Josh had not been willing to loosen his dignity in dancing, nor had Y-S parties tended to encourage or even allow it. They were marts for affirming or improving social status, places where gossip could be created or exchanged. She had not danced since Edinburgh.

  Yod had obviously been watching the dancers while the rest of them talked, because he had already selected a set of gestures and movements. Above them on the next turn of the spiral she could see Nili leaping high and at one point raising Gadi straight up over her head. They were a sensational pair as they more or less managed to coordinate their initiatives and dance in the same general manner. Gadi had always been a supple and energetic dancer. Nili danced like a demon. Precisely. Superhuman energy and strength, totally enraptured by her own movements and the music.

  Yod began stiffly. Shira urged him to loosen up, exaggerate the gestures, move with the rhythm he could surely feel. He attempted to obey her. “Human relaxations are frequently more effort than their work activities.”

  “The harder we work physically, the more we want simply to collapse afterward. The harder we work mentally, the more we want to leap around, flexing the muscles and straightening the spine. Look. We can pass gestures and movements back and forth between us. Watch Danny with his lover, Roy. See how they play as they dance?”

  “Nili and Gadi seem to have trouble communicating with each other, yet they seek each other out.”

  “Attraction isn’t logical. It just happens.”

  “All events are caused, Shira.”

  “But the causes of attractions and repulsions can lie in something long buried in infancy or childhood, something we don’t even recognize as triggering a desire or a fear.”

  “I had no infancy.” He was moving more easily now, with that totally efficient grace. “What I want is quite logical.”

  How she loved watching him at moments like this, when his elegance of motion was displayed, almost exaggerated. To watch him was to want to envelop him. “Yod, your desire is no more logical than Gadi’s. It only feels so because we work together and we communicate well, although that isn’t entirely logical either. It’s a small miracle.” She considered it miraculous, too, that they could dance so well together, so seamlessly now it felt like a form of lovemaking. She watched him try out the moves of dancers around them, discard what felt awkward. “You may not have a sense of what’s beautiful in other people, but you have a sense of aesthetics about how you move.”

  He was silent for some minutes, contemplating what she had said. “I understand elegance in algorithms, in motions, in equations, in systems design. That I can grasp.”

  My hunger got horns and a tail

  Goodbye hook, goodbye sleep

  Gotta jack, gotta rock

  Gonna fly my bat tonight.

  Malkah must have given up on Avram, for she danced now with Gila and several other friends in a large circle down on the first level. “This is the old ladies’ level,” she heard Gila hoot at a young couple. “You go upstairs with the other wet ones.” Shira thought that perhaps before she had lived in the Y-S enclave, she had never appreciated Tikva as she did now, its tolerance of human variety, of age, size, sexual typology.

  Nili had started to strip off her shirt—she was sweating and hot—and Gadi was arguing with her. Avram was nowhere to be seen. She assumed he had left, an observation she offered to Yod as they slithered and twisted together. “No,” Yod said. “He has climbed to the very top, and he is watching everyone, but especially Gadi and especially us.”

  As if casually, she threw back her head and saw Avram, observing as Yod had said. She waved to him, and he turned away. He looked lost above the maelstrom of dancers. It was not age. Besides the group around Malkah, many older people were dancing. In some corporate enclaves, rigid age segregation was considered normal, but here people tended to mix. Without class distinctions, perhaps age did not seem as important.

  Hannah cut in on them. When Shira looked around, Ilana, who had sat with Riva’s remains, was beckoning to her, and they danced together. Then Gadi appeared, as she had been half afraid he would and half afraid he would not. The entire party was a fantasy garment swirling around him as the centerpiece. His metallic eyelids caught the flashing lights. His eyes were gleaming mercury. He wore reflective black, slashed tunic and slit pants. Past him people were shooting the slides from the top, whipping out over the crowd on trapezes and double swings like crescent moons.

  After the first dance, he touched his wrist, and slow music throbbed sinuously from the forest of speakers. He gathered her into his arms. The slither of the material against her with its dozens of slits through which she felt the warmth of his skin, the scent of his perfume loaded with pheromones rising to her nostrils, made her breath catch in her throat as if turned to fur. Her skin prickled. She longed to scratch herself nervously. She longed to take a deep breath but could not. “Does Nili respond to pheromones?” she asked.

  For answer he drew her closer. The multiplied voices sang siren-like:

  I take you in my mouth like sweet red wine.

  I take you in me and you make me shine.

  “Are you just a little jealous, Ugi? Greening around the edges?”

  “I’m curious. She fascinates me as much as she fascinates you—although in a different way. I don’t find her attractive.”

  “Perhaps she’s too challenging. With the walking vibrator, you’re safe.”

  “You’re telling me that you wouldn’t rather have a woman with an Off switch? A mechanical geisha is the ideal woman, and we all know it. But Yod is real and quirky, and he wasn’t created as a sex toy.”

  “No, that seems to have been your idea.”

  “Wrong again. It was his.”

  He took a deep breath, holding her out at arm’s length. “We’re doing it again. Forget the terminal man, and let’s enjoy each other’s company. How are you enduring working for my father?”

  She glanced up at Avram, watching the two of them with cold intensity, as she had half expected. “Why can’t he enjoy himself?”

  “I think he dealt with the pain of Mother’s slow dying by denying himself any respite except work. He got to the point where when she was finally dead, he had learned to enjoy abstention. He gets more fun out of refusing to overindulge, refusing sex, refusing pleasure, than us messy types get from wallowing in our passions. Literally, he looks down on us.” Gadi sighed. “Sometimes I almost admire him. If he wasn’t my father, maybe I could. But we’re so locked into our little duels and pin-sticking contests.”

  “He said to me once he had given up a normal life for the cyb
orgs. As if he could only create life if he gave up loving and living.”

  “Okay, so you can give up loving and living—but to give up sex?” Gadi laughed. “How many years has it been since we danced?”

  “You made me dance with you once at our graduation, in front of everyone, where I couldn’t refuse. You were with Hannah.” She flinched at the sound of her own voice, the pain and anger suddenly trembling there.

  “You came alone. Very touching. I knew at least three boys had asked you, so I assumed you’d done it to make me feel guilty.”

  “I felt I’d be giving false encouragement, since I wasn’t interested in any of them. I thought you were cruel to ask me to dance.”

  “Cruel? Ugi, I couldn’t stand not to touch you. I was free, and I hated it. I couldn’t bear for us to stay on different sides of the room all night.”

  “I can remember that night so vividly. When I wept, the tears made little marks on my blue dress. I thought I’d never care for another man.”

  He tilted her chin up. “Weren’t you right?”

  “Gadi, we can crawl out of it. We can. It’s a myth we’ve both clung to, used to keep ourselves from the risk of being really hurt by anyone.”

  “If you think that, you’ve forgotten what it was like.” His voice was no longer silkily mocking but serrated. “I can’t forget. I’ll never forget. I could take you back there, Shira.”

  She could not look away from his silver eyes. “We’re not the same people, Gadi. There is no back.”

  He held her closer and spoke into her ear. “I have friends, Shira. They made a spike for me. I use it when I need to. When I can’t live without it.”

  “A spike?” Why was she suddenly afraid, as if someone had jammed a needle into her spine and were injecting a cold dangerous liquid? It was in her mouth to say that spikes were illegal, when she realized that in Gadi’s world, nothing was truly illegal. They manufactured and exported sensations for money. Nothing was out of bounds. Just sometimes, when their needs conflicted with other powerful subworlds, they might brush against taboos, laws, alien customs, and, like Gadi, be briefly punished. “What kind of a spike?”