He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  Making love with Yod made her feel strong. Afterward, as they mixed the filtered water with their dried rations into a gruel, which they heated over a unit the size of a matchbox and then quickly ate, she wondered why. As they took the Omaha tube, strapped in side by side, with the sickening crush of acceleration flattening her into her dirty seat, she wondered further. He pleased her. She no longer ever doubted he would. She seemed to please him. He was not changeable. He would not tomorrow decide she was not good enough or that he wanted someone else instead. He had the reliability of a well-designed machine that, as long as it worked, would do what it was supposed to. But that was unfair, because he was far more sensitive to her desires and responses than any man she had been with, and most unmechanical in his lovemaking. She had never spoken of love with him. It seemed inappropriate. Yet she felt him to be loyal to her as no one except Malkah ever had been. His mind might be working out fourth-level equations while they were in bed, for all she knew, but he was not fantasizing about another woman. Although his strength was exponentially greater than hers, she could never imagine him hurting her. Neither intentionally nor unintentionally. He did not have a temper, and he moved with the grace of perfect function.

  Whenever she let herself slide into thinking of him as simply a machine, she would become aware he was actively pursuing an agenda of his own. Although his jealousy of Gadi had greatly diminished, nonetheless, if she were Gadi, she would not be careless in turning her back to Yod. She thought Yod often wished Gadi out of their lives, and she wondered if Yod was not capable of a violent resolution to a scenario in which he felt Gadi threatened his relationship with her—unless Yod’s fear of Avram restrained him.

  Yet being with Yod was not as exotic as she would have expected, for she had constantly suspected that first Gadi and then Josh were put together mentally as well as physically on some completely different principle than herself. She would be sitting with Josh in the living room. He would want a cup of coffee, a glass of wine or cold water, a dish of ice cream. Normally he would inform her, as if she were more capable of going out to the kitchen than he was. If she was completely occupied and he acknowledged that, he would get himself ice cream, but never would he think to ask her if she wanted some also. She could not imagine eating or drinking anything in front of him without asking him if he wanted some. It was a small thing, but it always reminded her of how differently they had been socialized—programmed—to exist with others. It was that way with everything from birthday gifts to ideas about food, mealtimes and care of clothing.

  But how could she take seriously a relationship with someone who belonged to somebody else? Not in the sense of being married, but in the sense of being the property of Avram. This is my boyfriend, the machine, the slave. When they returned, the issue must be confronted. She would line up her support: Malkah and, oddly enough, Gadi, because he viewed Yod as a pseudo son who put up with the same hard perfectionist overseeing he had endured.

  Beside her Yod sat motionless, still as the chair itself except when the tube car jolted them. We are all so sealed in our skins, she thought. Even if I can retrieve Ari, it will be years before I know what being used as a pawn in Y-S’s game has done to him. Perhaps I am only a true child of my age. Just as one of my earliest relationships was with the enhanced house computer, so here I am traveling to kidnap my son with a cyborg to whom I have bonded, who seems to assume that if we are successful, he will raise my son with me. And why not? Would Yod be a worse father than most? Than Josh? He would never abuse Ari. He has no temper. He has infinite patience. He would never confuse Ari with his own ego or become infuriated or disappointed because he felt Ari failed him. Ari would be even more a child of the age of information, because he would be raised by one human and one computer. I don’t think Yod would frighten him any more than the house frightened me.

  I was never a fearful child, although I remember one of Malkah’s men friends, a salvage diver, who seemed enormous and gruff to me. You could never say that Malkah had a type of man she went for. Thin, heavyset, tall, short, dark, fair; intellectuals, adventurers, scientists, captains, artists, musicians: they had to be able to talk, or she got bored, but otherwise she was always interested in trying something different. Whereas I bond hard and fast. Or try to. After all, I was the one who left Josh. If it had been clear to me I was thereby leaving Ari, I would have stuck it out with him no matter what sacrifice—even decapitation—that entailed.

  Round and round, from A to B and back to Ari. I can’t think of anything else for longer than five minutes. At this time I used to be giving him his breakfast and putting on his blue parka with the walking duck on it, to take him to day care. The last time was a darkly overcast day in late March with the wind scuttling over the high dome like a sand spider. He was babbling doggy noises from a stimmie the night before. He had understood none of it but the doggy. She remembered that as she came up to the center, she had been embarrassed in front of the other mothers because he was barking and tugging on her. Her last words to him had been “Stop that, Ari!”

  The tube arrived in Omaha Station. This was an outpost on the edge of the vast Central Desert, a frontier town built from scrap of the former city. A dome arched over the presently inhabited area. Beyond were old streets of scavenged ruins, surrounded by scrubby brush. The trees as they died had been chopped down for wood, a precious commodity. The dome was a cover clamped over the streets at the height of a six-story building. Anything taller—old buildings—stuck up through it vanishing. They were deserted above the safe level.

  “We need a fast-tank. We should be able to rent one here.”

  They got under way at fifteen hundred. The fast-tank Yod simply drove. There was no learning process, no time of experimenting. Avram had programmed in a number of vehicles he thought Yod might need to operate. All the information for controlling the fast-tank was inside him; he sat at the controls and strapped himself in as if he had been doing so all his life. He plugged into the dash to control its computer more quickly than he could by voice or hand. They were off, lurching and thumping. She was always learning new abilities of Yod’s—or was it rather how much foresight Avram had shown?

  In spite of the danger from the sun, people came to this jumping-off place, and off they jumped. The desert had a strong appeal, partly because of its danger, partly because there was still a lot of salvage out there from all the years of famine and disaster, partly because if you came from the Glop or someplace similar, here was the chance to be utterly alone. It was the sparse place, as opposed to the crowded place. It drew people into it, some for fortune, some for adventure and some for death. It was considered an elegant way to die, to vanish into the desert.

  As much of the center of the continent turned into desert, the mystique had intensified. The less that normal people could ever experience the out-of-doors unmediated by dome or wrap or sec skin, the more that art, both pop and high, dwelt on desert symbolism. The desert was the pure solitary place where the hero or heroine found his or her lost self, confronted or flouted or succumbed to destiny, met a god or a devil or true love or the utter emptiness of existence. In college she had loved Lena Brown’s Sand and Spirit, about a woman who in the desert simplifies herself stage by stage until she turns into wind itself, very romantic. Shira grimaced at her earlier self.

  Nili came from the desert. It took Shira until the moment of departing Omaha to realize that for all the number of times she had experienced “desert” in stimmies and books and holos, she had never before actually ventured into it. She had crossed under it in tubes and over it in floaters and zips. But she had never really been in it before.

  The fast-tank had its own solar-energy cooling system, or she would have cooked. Outside, it was fifty-two degrees. A fierce dry wind lashed at them. The sky was yellowish gray with blowing dust. In her mental image of the desert, the sky was a clear radiant blue. Here the sand roared against the metal of the fast-tank. There was little to see except a wall of sand around th
em and an occasional wreck looming out of the dust. It was exacerbatingly boring, lurching along inside a metal headache blasted by the wind as if a hundred brass scrub brushes were scouring the surface. It was noisy, it was stuffy, it was violently uncomfortable.

  She put on headphones and listened to music until she couldn’t stand to listen to more. The selection provided with the fast-tank ran to West-Mex favorites and mournful wailing ballads about people dying in the desert, in tube accidents, of true, true love, of poisoned drugs under the artificial stars of some dome.

  It was more bearable as the twilight came on. The wind died, and gradually the dust thinned. By the time it was dark, they could see the stars brilliant and huge over them. She asked Yod to stop for a while. Her kidneys felt battered. Her back and head ached. She wanted the noise to cease. She wanted to be outside now that the sun had set and the temperature was reading a balmy twenty-six degrees and cooling rapidly.

  They ate real food they had bought in Omaha, tubed in from the north. Yellow summer apples and cheese called mizithra. Cheese, like all animal products, was hideously expensive, but Shira needed a treat. She did not know what would happen to them at Y-S, so why not eat real cheese? This might be their last meal. Sheep had turned out to be less sensitive to acid rain and UV radiation than cows or goats, so most cheese was made of their milk these days. Not that Shira had ever had cow’s milk to compare it with. Cheese was as dear as caviar had once been. Lots of fish farming went on, and sturgeon took well to it. Cheese and apples were far more costly than caviar.

  Who else would do this for her? No one. She could not imagine another soul who would go with her to try to extract her stolen son. “Yod, I want you to know how grateful I am you’re willing to risk this with me.”

  “Does this kind of selfishness pass for altruism among humans?” He smiled at her. “I want to keep you with me.”

  “I can’t imagine a better way.” She leaned against him. “It’s beautiful here, just as it’s supposed to be.”

  It was still. The wind had died. Perhaps the weather had cleared, or perhaps this was simply a different miniclimate in the desert. They had come almost three hundred kilometers. The sky was indigo, and the stars went on forever. It was extraordinary to see them.

  “That’s Cassiopeia, the Queen’s Chair,” she said, pointing. “Malkah used to call it Queen Esther’s Throne.” The temperature was dropping tangibly.

  “I can’t make out constellations well,” Yod said apologetically. “Too many stars are visible to my eyes that aren’t visible to human vision. I have trouble seeing only the ones you see.”

  “Do you feel anything when you look at them?”

  Yod was silent for a moment. “Yes. I do…A sense of great distance. The sweep of the visible universe, its extent and vastness, gives me a sense of scale that is exhilarating. Surely among those stars are many beings with different kinds of consciousness and mental and physical capacities. Isn’t it likely there are even other beings manufactured like myself?”

  She smiled. “If you met a female cyborg, you wouldn’t be interested in me any longer.”

  “I doubt attraction between cyborgs could occur. We would both yearn toward the type of being who made us—if these other cyborgs we are postulating also possess the ability to yearn.”

  What she was sure they would also lack was the ability to tell when she was kidding. “Do you think your predecessors could yearn?”

  “No. Malkah introduced that capacity.”

  “Malkah has never turned over her log on her work with you.”

  “Your curiosity’s like mine. I read novels as if they were the specs to your makeup. I study them to grasp the forces underlying your behavior.”

  She wondered if he saw her as a combination of Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Molly Bloom and Marina Kolovis? “At times like this, Yod, I wish we could take Ari and just keep going. Never return. Run away, hide.”

  “Avram controls a self-destruct mechanism in me, wherever I am. He can bounce the signal off a satellite. I can’t run away, though I want to.”

  She had to free him from Avram. If they got back safely, she would start discussing with Malkah how to proceed.

  In an hour they climbed back in, heading for the rail line that brought supplies into Y-S. The trains operated on simple fusion reactors that required water every few hundred kilometers. The refueling stop that Shira remembered was their goal. They had the fast-tank dig itself into the ground. Then they spread camouflage over it and walked the last two kilometers. They could see the salmon-colored lights of the refueling station ahead. They cut in below it to the line and waited there. Trains ran about every half hour. They were too slow and too hot for transporting people or perishables, but they were used for machinery, supplies, anything that could take the high temperatures of the desert without spoiling.

  They had not long to wait before a train swooshed in. At once they began edging along. Every car was coded, but Yod could read Y-S code now. They found one containing hospital supplies, bed linens, nursing uniforms, bandages, disinfectant. Yod examined the lock and in two minutes had opened the compartment. Shira put her sec skin on with its coolant fully loaded. If they got stuck too long, if anything went wrong, she had no idea how high temperatures could rise inside the car. She was relieved when it jerked into motion and they went clattering through the night toward Y-S.

  They were close enough now so that it was only a matter of an hour before they entered the dome. “We’ll head down to the lower level. There we’ll put on gardeners’ gear. In that we can pass anyplace, invisibly. Nobody looks at the yard workers. They’re day laborers, and they’re everyplace under the dome.”

  The rails ran all through the utility complex—hospital, school, repair shop, stores, food facility. Their car was shunted directly into the hospital. Yod listened carefully at the door and with his supersensitive hearing picked the time when they could slip out. They headed for the maintenance facility, where the green suits for yard personnel were heaped in carts from the laundry—between yellow for repair and brown for construction.

  When Shira at last stood under the dome, it was just after dawn. “That’s where I gave birth to Ari.” She pointed to a low building, called for reasons she had never been able to fathom the Long Pavilion.

  “It looks entirely different from the birthing house at home.”

  She paused to orient herself. “Not that way. That’s Paradise Park. I’ve only been allowed in there twice. It’s for the top levels. It’s full of sculpture parks, holo parks, botanical gardens and a zoo, a hill with perpetual snow. The president lives on a lake full of real water.”

  They passed rapidly through the fancy shopping sector, which would not open till ten. In the windows, fantastic virons centered around beautiful models drinking, flirting, having sex with unicorns and lions and knights in full armor. It rather turned Shira’s stomach, but then she thought that there was no accounting for what a person might find attractive—she with her cyborg, slipping past in the overalls of gardeners, carrying pruners and weeding hoes.

  “What is all this?” Yod pointed at the stores even now winking at the street, empty except for day laborers hurrying to their posts—shops blinking, glittering, sending out clouds of pheromones, singing seductively. “Lust will make you wanted, wanted, wanted. He will touch you there, there, and you’ll be wanted. Nothing is like being wanted. Lust, the perfume that gives you the power of desire. Lust: want me now!”

  “We don’t have these sorts of stores in Tikva,” she offered.

  “We have stores. Like the one where you bought shorts for me.”

  “Ours are for things you need. These are for things no one needs. Therefore everything here is expensive beyond belief. Dresses that cost more than I earn in a year. Jewels that sing. A blouse that flashes transparent if you choose. Tooth implants that can detect some poisons. Enhanced jewels to be inserted in the cheek, the forehead, the nose, the navel. Choreographed sequences o
f scents, sounds and tastes for an evening’s entertaining.”

  “Who buys these things?”

  “Besides their wives, who work for Y-S too, men of the upper levels have toys—women who are cosmetically re-created, very beautiful. While the men work, they do nothing but shop.” Only on rare occasions had Shira encountered such women, and then they had seemed scarcely human. She remembered a pair of them when she was shopping for a special gown for a big Y-S awards ceremony. They had appeared to her as flamingos or egrets—beautiful plumage and harsh empty cries, as devoid of thought as those holos of women fucked by lobsters. Even their nails and teeth had been replaced by bright gleaming inserts. In the zone of expensive shops, every window promised sex, every message crooned desire, and yet sex was a regimented commodity in the enclave. Which persons you might make love to was as defined by your place in the hierarchy as the people to whom you bowed and the people who bowed to you. Sexual privileges depended upon your place and rank.

  Now they were in the midlevel sector: occasional apartment buildings, rows and rows of little houses; at the major intersections, food dispensers, laundries, utilitarian shops. They hid themselves in the shrubbery outside the day care center for midlevel techies. The hedge around the center was planted with rubbery bushes of lurid vermilion and purplish leaves that Shira remembered. She assumed that Ari would be back in his old day care center. It would be unlike Y-S to place him elsewhere. There was always and only one correct place for personnel or the offspring of personnel of a particular grade and type.

  Yod waited stolidly. She was so nervous she had to urinate twice. She kept imagining she might throw up. Her stomach was a small hard rubber ball in her chest. The minutes went by with the speed of a mountain eroding. Whenever she read the time internally, it was the same plus a few seconds. Ari would not come. Josh would not let go of him. How could she grab Ari? If only she knew where they were housed, but since all the same-level dwellings were virtually interchangeable, she had no way to guess which house was theirs. Midlevel-tech housing stretched for kilometers in one of the largest of all the Y-S residential sectors.