by Marge Piercy
Duffel—one’s usual sexual partner
Amie (pronounced to rhyme with Sammy)—friend, partner, comrade
Doke—friend, member of the same gang
Pop—someone superior to you in the gang (used for either sex)
Niño—someone below you in the gang (used for either sex)
Noids—the enemy, other gangs
Grud—(singular or plural) people who have sold themselves to multis
Cooker—a place where any drug is manufactured
Wire—a person equipped to interface directly with machine memory
Raw—very good, desirable
Done—bad, undesirable, unattractive
Roach—(verb) to steal, to pirate, to hijack
Nut—loot, something desirable to attain, riches, money
“What’s the use of trying to empty my mind of vocabulary?” Gadi demanded finally. “You may know the definitions, but you can’t sing the song.”
“At least we can understand your conversations,” Yod said pleasantly.
“You don’t trust me!” Gadi rolled his eyes high into his head.
“Why not say we’re all more comfortable when we know what’s happening to us,” Shira said. “This place is scary enough.”
“I have seen more people today than in all my previous life,” Nili said, watching through the slits in the armor.
“This is only a little piece of the Glop,” Shira said. “It stretches fourteen hundred kilometers to the south and two hundred to the west. It’s hot enough here, but down at the southern end, it’s tropical. They grow grapefruit and oranges near what was Atlanta.”
“I cannot begin to imagine that many humans.”
“Less than there were, don’t forget. Before the kisrami plague of ’22, the population was twice what it is now,” Shira said. She did not look out the slits. She was too afraid of being shot in the eye with a dart or hit with some chemical spray.
“Actually the kisrami virus was only responsible for 8,472,338 deaths in what was then still the United States,” Yod said gently. “The Great Famine of ’31 was responsible directly or indirectly for twice that many deaths, and the so-called parrot plagues that occurred in the third year of the famine had a far more lethal effect. The lowering of the birth rate through pesticides, toxic waste accumulations and radiation stockpiled in the groundwater and the food chain also bears on the population drop.”
There was a long silence after Yod’s lecture. No one could think of anything to say. They lurched along. Occasionally some kid threw a rock at the cab or shot a firestick at it—a little toy rocket that exploded. The Glop was full of kids missing fingers or hands or other body parts from the damned things. Y-S manufactured them, but they were forbidden in the enclave—and in Tikva too. Most of the gangs sold what they called a license to Y-S for their barrio, meaning that they got a fee. It was the same with the stimmie broadcasts, which theoretically could be blocked—if any gang was stupid enough to deny them to their people. Still, Uni-Par paid every gang a fee. The multis liked stable gang leadership in the Glop. It was good for business.
The cab screeched to a halt. “Border crossing,” the driver called. “Noid land. All you rods out. Okay, Duke. Here’s the rough.”
Gadi paid. When the driver looked at his screen—Gadi placed his palm on the dial and the machine recognized him after accessing the Net—he swore. “Stuff me like a cheese if I ever guessed. This is one big cooler. Nobody’s going to believe me back at my hook. Wait a minute, I want a holo with you. Strip your cover-up a minute. Come on, Gadi.”
The driver pulled a cheap little holo camera from a dashboard compartment and handed it to Yod. “Hey, Rodney, do us. Make it raw.”
Yod examined the camera briefly, raised it and took a holo of Gadi, who had obediently removed his cover-up and stood all in silver beside the driver, who wore under his own cover-up a winking eye-dazzling djellaba of Ram Blaster colors. The driver mugged for the camera, dancing around Gadi. Then they both put on their cover-ups, the driver jolted off in his fast tank, and they all filed through the checkpoint into Coyote barrio.
There were several small motocabs waiting at the checkpoint, but only one vehicle big enough to hold all of them, another fast tank. Gadi negotiated with the new driver to take them to the coordinates Nili had been given. They ground off in the can, with the familiar jolting and jouncing.
Gadi called attention to his usefulness. “None of you can even begin to talk to these people. You’d be lost without me. Besides, I’m a hero here.”
“If they understood, they’d kill you,” Nili said. “Your multi sells them sensation in place of knowledge—somebody else’s sensations. An animal can learn from sensations, at least what to go for and what to avoid, but only if they’re authentic. You replace real knowledge with false sensory data.”
“What has life got to offer them? If they go for stimmies and even if they get into spikes, it’s escape. If you had to live here, what would you want but escape? I help make hard lives bearable.”
They passed a street carnival: more fire dancers; performing horses and dogs and a mangy tiger; a belly dancer; a couple of cheap virons, one of dinosaurs and jungles, one of the old wild West, sputtering gunfire and whooping Indians; a strong smell of barbecued something and burnt caramel.
They were turning through a maze of narrow streets, past a row of shops that repaired and cannibalized all kinds of machines, from floaters and fast-tanks to stimmie players and laser splatters. Then, with a great shuddering thump, the fast tank came to an abrupt and violent halt, tossing them against the metal walls. Yod reacted instantaneously, throwing his arms around Shira to keep her from injury. Nili was probably protected by the light body armor she was wearing. Gadi was the worst shaken and bruised. Yod knelt to peer through the slats. “We are caught in a metal net. Aluminum alloy.”
“We’ve arrived,” Nili said with satisfaction, helping Gadi up. “Riva warned me. These people use many low-tech devices that are quite effective in ordinary defense. She thought I would find them interesting to study.”
Shira wondered again at how casually Nili could mention Riva. She herself tried not to speak of her. She had not assimilated either the facts of her mother’s life or the fact of her death. Shira felt as if she had taken a spiny ball into her body which remained in her tissues, giving an occasional sharp twinge.
“Okay, niños, out!” Someone was banging on the metal of the cab.
“Hey, pop,” the driver said. He had climbed out. The net was cranked off, since the cab was surrounded by armed warriors dressed in black. “Don’t beat on my track. Let the gruds pay me, and I’ll zip.”
Gadi again paid, and the cab shot off. Nili came forward and flung back the head of her cover-up. “I’ve come a long way to see Lazarus. The one you know as the gray pirate sent me. There are no trees in hell.”
“Not a bad-looking nook. Think I’ll barb you first. Take off that sack, and let me see if I should bother…” The warrior had pulled a knife and moved forward, starting to slit the cover-up.
Nili swung the loose garment out over him. As the cover-up settled, she kicked his knife from his hand and then threw him. “You and five others. I came in good faith. I want to see Lazarus, and I think he wants to see me.”
Yod moved up to stand at her shoulder. “We’ll fight you if we have to, but we didn’t come to fight.”
One of the women warriors had communicated their arrival, for another phalanx of warriors marched out. “Lazarus says bring them in.”
They were paraded into a large storefront that Shira imagined from the moldering decor had once been a restaurant. In the multi enclaves, restaurants still existed, but during the Great Famine, when the breadbaskets of the Great Plains and the Steppes had dried up and blown away, when temperate-zone regions that had grown grains became too arid to grow much but grass, when a hefty percentage of the rice-growing regions of Asia had been drowned by rising waters, restaurants disappeared from the Glop
. They were replaced over time by vat-food dispensaries and food stalls that sold unregulated food at restaurant prices, all buying protection from the local gang.
On the crumbling stucco, happy peasants frolicked among giant representations of bunches of grapes. Someone had added some large spiders and pythons. Many of the grapes had faces. Some of the original tables remained, with an assortment of chairs, crates and stools. Along the old marble-top bar, some teenagers practiced how to break and reassemble and clean laser rifles, how to load energy packs into them. On a trestle table, a crew seemed to be studying the manufacture of bombs. At a collection of the old wooden tables, a teacher worked with a mixed-age group on reading skills. On the far wall, a row of children sat plugged into computers under a new mural depicting Shango wielding the weapons of the lightning and standing astride the Glop on the shoulders of a small black man, rendered realistically. Most of the people were black- or brown-skinned, but almost every combination was represented: red hair, brown eyes and black skin; light skin, black hair, blue eyes; and other permutations. Most people in the Glop were of mixed race nowadays. Nili was noticing everything, as Shira was, and smiled broadly. Only Nili’s expressions could be seen, as the rest of them were still wearing their cover-ups. Shira was in no hurry to remove her own. It gave her a false feeling of security to have her body covered. She stayed close to Yod.
“You are armed,” a woman well over six feet tall and muscled like a bodybuilder said to Nili. “We don’t permit that.” She spoke formally, slowly and clearly, as if in a foreign language.
“We’re only stopping here. We need our arms to survive, and you haven’t been exactly friendly to us,” Nili said, standing poised as if for battle.
“You’ll disarm, or we’ll kill you now.” The woman blew on a whistle from around her neck, like a school coach. Everyone in the room dropped flat or crawled under tables. The warriors formed a square around the newcomers, laser rifles targeting each of them.
“I have my finger on the trigger of a sonic weapon. We’d be dead, but so would all of you. I have it set on kill,” Nili said. “I could have used it already, before your soldiers got into position, if we were enemies.”
“I am expendable,” the woman said. “You would not survive.”
“I have the capacity to cause an explosion that would remove most of this facility,” Yod said gently. “I have no desire to die, and I wish to protect my friends, but if I see no alternative—”
“It’s raw, Leesha. Everybody up.” The man was small and dark, dressed in black without insignia, none of the mock epaulets or metallic sashes or gaudy designs of the other gangs. He was the man in the mural. “Take off your cover-ups and let us see you so we can match descriptions.”
They obeyed, watching him carefully.
“It’s them, Lazarus. I told you.” A woman’s voice. Riva’s voice, but it couldn’t be.
“I thought you might be here. Were you waiting for me?” Nili said, apparently without surprise. She strode forward to embrace the woman who came through the door.
“I never wait for anybody,” Riva said, “You know that. Welcome to the fortress of my amie Lazarus.”
“But you died! I saw you die,” Shira cried out. Yod was staring at the woman with a frown.
Riva dressed all in black here. She looked like an ordinary forty-five- or fifty-year-old woman, not the old woman she had appeared to be in Tikva. She also looked fifty pounds lighter. Here she walked with a bit of a swagger but kept two paces behind Lazarus and to his left. “Oh, it takes more than a few noids to slab me. I’m still with the living.”
“It is the woman we knew as Riva, your mother,” Yod said.
“How could you make us think you died? We buried you. I said kaddish for you every day!”
“Now you can stop. Besides, it’s a nice prayer. Come on, Shira, you hardly know me. I surely didn’t make a great hole in your life with my passing. I’m more nuisance alive.”
“Does Malkah know?”
“No. You can tell her when you go back. But be sure no one else finds out. Be sure you’re secure.”
“That was unfair!”
Lazarus stepped between them. “Nooks, savage each other later. We have business to conduct. Who’s the leader? You the pop?” He looked at Yod.
“I am,” Nili said calmly. None of them contradicted her.
The woman who had greeted them said suddenly, “Hey, aren’t you Gadi? For real? Killer raw!”
The kids came crowding around, out of control. “Rod, you know Mala Tuni herself? Do you know her?”
“You’re an unruly bunch. You come in here, threaten my warriors, and now all the niños are crazy.” Lazarus shook his head, motioning to the woman and an armed man. “You’re trouble, and if I didn’t have the rawest op of this popanook here, the gray pirate, I’d slab you all. Now we zip upstairs to my hook, and then we parley. Who are you, who am I, the whole hopper. Move!”
Obediently they followed him through a food factory and upstairs, Riva coming behind them with the tall woman, Leesha. Shira walked close to Yod, still frightened and very confused, glad to hold his arm tight in her hand.
THIRTY-FIVE
Living with the Undead
Guilt shivered through Shira for her anger with her mother, but she felt emotionally abused. She could hardly complain to Riva about her being alive, for if she herself were a warmer, more caring daughter, she would be overjoyed at her mother’s reappearance. Instead she felt muddled. She felt like shrieking and banging her fists on the wall. It had been difficult to adjust to the sudden presence of a mother she had never really known and about whom all her previous ideas turned out to be fabrications. It had been hard to accept the death of a woman who felt artificially rather than naturally important to her, an imposed intimacy without content, given suddenly and as suddenly snatched away. It was nearly impossible to accept Riva’s resurrection in altered physical form.
“Well, Shira, we decided it was a good time to kill me off officially.”
“But the Y-S troops all died. You forget, there was no one to report your death.”
“Didn’t you ever look up? They had one of their spy-eyes overhead to record what happened. That is, what was visible. The wrap was opaque to it.”
“That’s why we didn’t take it out,” Nili said. She was sprawled against the wall, cleaning a laser pistol. They had been fed and were now in storage, waiting for Lazarus to reappear.
Yod closed his eyes for a moment, presumably replaying the scene. Then his eyes flicked open. “I should have recognized the spy-eye. Its significance did not register on my consciousness. A lapse.”
“So who died?” Shira asked. She wished she could sound more gracious.
“We brought a body with us. We asked for a body of a woman around fifty who had died of anything that wouldn’t register at the cellular level. We knew the body would be cooked. We prepared beforehand.” Riva sounded as if she were describing preparations for a dinner party. “I was there long enough to register. We had blasted out a small underground chamber, shielded and safe for up to thirty-six hours. In fact I crawled out right after sundown. When the fighting heated up, I slipped in and Nili flung the body into the line of fire. I had to pry them off my case. I need more maneuvering room than they were giving me.”
“And Malkah doesn’t know?”
“I thought you’d have a more convincing funeral that way.”
Shira found it intolerable that Malkah should be grieving at this moment. She longed to get out of this hideous place and rush back home to give Malkah the news that would lift the weight of mourning from her. But sensibly, she knew she could not return. They must conclude their business here, and then she had Yod’s promise that they would attempt to find and somehow carry off Ari, no matter what the danger to either of them.
Riva was never going to understand how disturbing her little drama of death had been. She was glad to see them, presumably especially glad to see Nili. Yet Shira felt as if
there were more emotional communication going on between Yod and herself than between Nili and Riva. The tall dark woman Leesha was sitting against the far wall, her eyes never leaving Riva’s face. She looked at Riva as if Riva were the most beautiful and desirable creature in the world. Her eyes shone, her lips curled into a silly small smile, an inadvertent smirk of pleasure while she tried to look tough and mean.
Gadi was nervous. Of all of them, he had been most at ease, until the moment Riva had revealed herself. He was not his usual insouciant glittering self, asking with glee and persistence the questions that would most embarrass. He was watching. He stayed close to Nili. Not only did he fear the bond between Nili and Riva; Riva did not fit into his diagram of the social universe.
In his world, only poor women looked like Riva, and there were few enough of those. Cleaning robots did what such women would once have done for him and his colleagues. Old ladies still fitted costumes, carried out the delicate work done by hand—beading, embroidery—women who lived in the local equivalents of the Glop: the barrios, the slums, the Deek, for decayed quarter, the Casbah, Le Vieux Quartier. Here was somebody who looked as if she should sew fish skin into sheaths for Mala Tuni, at just enough an hour to keep her in vat food and a hook the size of a narrow bed and folding table. But Riva walked in like a general reviewing his best razors. She swaggered, she looked every man and woman straight on in the eyes. Here Gadi and the others were on sufferance. Riva was the reason they had not been killed. She was their passport into the stronghold of Lazarus. Riva enjoyed some kind of local celebrity, of the sort Gadi was accustomed to wherever he went.
Gadi’s discomfiture soothed Shira a little. She stayed close to Yod on the floor, feeling his presence, silent, alert and always, always aware of her and for her. She slid her hand toward him. After an instant his hand covered hers lightly, its dry warmth radiating into her. Her hand was cold with nervousness and fatigue. She was swept by a wish to be alone with him. It was a desire not for sex, except for the comfort and the warmth of the embrace, but for their own intimacy. Of late, she had grown used to real conversation. After she had left college and the friendship of her roommates and colleagues, she had not lived a life examined with accomplices.