by Marge Piercy
Malkah shuffled after her. “But, Shira, you’re going to get older too. We all do. We’ll see how sane you find attitudes toward aging women when you start to age…I didn’t use him up, did I?”
“He’s all yours now!” She ran down the steps.
“Shira, don’t be an ass. He’s entirely yours.” Malkah could not keep up and instead shouted after her, “I let Avram discover what was going on as a way to end it without hurting Yod’s feelings. I don’t have sufficient strength and energy to carry on with him, and that’s the simple truth. Don’t throw away something you’re finding good in your life just because you resent my being there first!”
“Malkah, you’re a liar and a letch, and I hate you!” Shira ran out into the street. Once outside, she slowed down at once. Where was she going? She would go to the lab, where Yod was working. She longed to scream at him also. When she stuck her head in, Yod and Avram were both plugged into the Base, oblivious. She walked around Gimel, who was debugging a new routine, something Avram had told her he did superbly, and marched out. Where should she go? Upstairs, of course. Up the narrow staircase to the old third floor.
If she confided would Nili understand her anger? She wanted to talk to a woman, but Nili had pitifully little experience of men. Shira had no idea what the norms of Nili’s culture were. Nili might not be able to sympathize with Shira’s shame and discomfort.
“Entrez.” Gadi’s voice. When she pushed through the portal, he was sitting at a console, programming scents. The sweet odor almost choked her. The room appeared to stretch away to an almost infinite horizon. Underfoot was a carpet of black grass, glistening under the light from many brilliant stars that were little spots aimed here and there. She stood in an apparent clearing in a forest of weeping, cascading scarlet trees that tinkled dryly, sadly, with a sound of shell or bamboo wind chimes. It reeked at the moment of overwhelming floral excess.
“Gadi, open a window.” She began to sneeze.
“Huh? I’m trying for an effect. But I guess my nose is weary.” He rose, stretching. “Fan, high. I need more light too, but I haven’t worked that out. Maybe a white aurora borealis on the left wall.”
“That’s better. Where’s Nili?”
“Gone swimming.”
“In this storm?”
“She likes the challenge. Maybe she’ll find another shark to wrestle.”
“You sound sour.” Shira could not decide whether to sit on the velvet couch printed with huge dark flowers, left over from the jungle scene he was busily replacing. But she could hardly charge back home again. She sat, but primly forward.
“Now that the air’s cleared out, try this.” He took her wrist and swabbed it. Then he tilted his head to look shrewdly at her. “We’re not too jolly this afternoon either, are we, Ugi?”
“I’m rancid with everybody, thank you.”
“Then this is the place to come, darling. I’m the great alternative. Here I’ve been practically in storage waiting for your discontent to uncurl itself, grow and ripen at last.” He sketched luscious shapes in the air.
She glared. “You aren’t waiting for anyone. You’re thoroughly involved with a woman you can barely keep up with.”
“She doesn’t think I’m important,” Gadi said with real indignation. “All those fans creaming over my boots, and she thinks I’m a mildly amusing gigolo.”
Shira laughed. It felt good, a little of her tension discharged. She drew a deep breath. “By the way, slow down on the toys. You’re burying Ari. Let him break a few before you order more.”
“I never had enough toys as a child. What I always needed was some spoiling. A spoiled child is an indulged child, and an indulged child is what we should all be. Especially once we grow up.”
“Gadi, until the time your mother got sick, you were indulged. Things got bad when she couldn’t carry her end, and after a year or so, it was hard for her even to respond to you. That was the grim part. Then you had me.”
“Let’s have high tea. Look at the goodies Mala Tuni sent me. Everybody pities me, so they keep me supplied. Taste this…I’ve managed to never be without women since. Women are necessary. Necessary.”
She muttered, “Any woman…What is that? Delicious.”
“I’m quite fussy, Ugi. You should know that. It’s a cherry.”
She had read about them but never had one. He had a whole pile of the blackish-red fruit in a bowl. “In high school, you’d fuck anything with tits.”
“I was young and undiscriminating. Now I want only the best. Nili is most satisfactory. She has real talent and a body that if I could get it on stimmie would stop the show cold. She can bend metal with her hands. She can jump eight feet straight up. I could get her jobs, Ugi, I really could. A bit of cutting and pasting to give her the look of the year—”
“I don’t doubt you. But Nili isn’t interested, is she?”
“She doesn’t even want to enter stimmies.” Gadi rose, started pacing. A hologram of a purple furry flying marmoset came to his shoulder, perched. “I’ve put on the electrodes fifty times. She enjoys it for maybe ten minutes. Then she gets bored. She says it isn’t real. I say of course it’s not: it’s more real than real. Piglet, you’ve finished the cherries!” He poured tea from a pot shaped like a dolphin’s head.
“They were great. But, Gadi, why should she want to enter some starlet’s sensory responses? She probably sees better, hears better, is certainly smarter, tougher, faster, stronger. She’s a superior human.”
“In some ways, Shira, in some ways. She’s not a genius like Avram. She’s bright, but aren’t we all?” He made a gesture, and the hologram of the purple creature flew off into a hologram of a scarlet tree.
“Is she really swimming in this storm? By herself in the ocean? Organ pirates are around—I know for a fact.”
Gadi shrugged. “She’s off at some meet with your crazy fat mother or some ape from Lazarus. She wouldn’t tell me. When I asked her where she was going, she said ‘swimming.’ She does as she pleases and expects me to wait around holding the bag.”
“Sounds exactly like what you need. No wonder you’re hooked.”
He stuck out his tongue at her and for a moment, in spite of all the surgery and enhancement, he looked like the fifteen-year-old seared into her memory. Her face must have revealed something, for he moved across the room suddenly, half pounce and half glide, and settled himself on the velvet couch beside her. “Look what I have.” From his inner pocket he drew a spike.
It contained everything needed for one interactive fantasy, centered on the nervous system of the user. Spikes relied on a combination of electronic imagery, direct sensory stimulation and drugs. She looked at the spike and shuddered. “You still play with those dangerous things?”
“This is the spike I had created. It cost me a hundred K credits, but it’s worth every penny.” He tapped the spike gently against her arm. “We’re in here. I dare you, Shira. I dare you to remember us as we were. I dare you to feel what we felt.”
She got up and stalked across the room. “Gadi, I’m scared. Y-S is going to attack us. They could destroy the town.”
“Then they wouldn’t get what they want, would they? Pointless. No, they have to scare you into giving them my plastic brother.”
“I’m frightened. All I can think of is, I have Ari back and I just want to live my life here. I just want to be quiet. I don’t want to go into the past we had. I don’t want anything spectacular. I just want to live with my son, with my family, and watch the peaches ripen and my son grow.”
“He’s that important to you.” Gadi was staring at her. “I’ve never had the urge to breed, myself. I like creating worlds. Kids are too uncertain. I see with Avram how few of us turn out the way we’re supposed to. How much pleasure did I ever afford him? It’s always been war. Why start a new one?”
“I had Ari for the worst of reasons, to glue the cracked plate of my marriage. But I’d sacrifice anything to him.” And I have, she thought.
“You say that like a lioness yourself. Fierce as Nili.” He raised an eyebrow, surveying her. “This is a new side of you, Ugi. Who would have expected maternity to give you fangs and claws?”
“Believe it, Gadi. I’m not so gentle and long-suffering these days.”
He sighed, and when he opened his hand again the spike was gone. There was a little of the magician in him. “Once I was the focus of that passion, too callow to value it. Now it’s wasted on a child and a peripatetic computer. Nili’s never going to focus on me that way. I wonder if she’s that way with her own kid—”
She plunked herself down, staring. “Nili’s not a mother.”
“Sure she is. She told me she has a daughter.”
“She must have been speaking metaphorically, Gadi. Impossible.”
“Here we are, two discontents, like two separated parentheses waiting to be joined into a perfect circle.” His arm slid round her waist, drawing her toward him.
She hopped up to pace again. “Gadi, do you feel guilty about that young girl in Azerbaijan?”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Why should I? You don’t understand what those little stimmie hawks are like. They come on like a wall of fire. They chase you up trees and stairways. They swarm over your bed like locusts.”
“You don’t feel you were the aggressor?”
“Ugi, I don’t think I’ve seduced anybody since you. I respond to someone attractive wanting me. I am the seduced. I like to be loved.”
“Have you ever been violent with anyone? Even, say, in sex play?”
“That’s not my flavor, Ugi. I like it nice and sweet and as pretty as it can be. Life is full of nastiness.” He motioned at the elaborate basket from which he had just pulled a plum cake. “It’s true that I’m Mala’s favorite designer, but she keeps sending me goodies because she trusts me and misses me. You know, she’s vulnerable and she suffers a lot. She’s that way in stimmies, and she’s that way in what passes for real life. She was caught in a sex vise with Limbic, who directed four of her stims. He’s a sadistic bastard. The last time he directed her, we were on Nuevas Vegas, and on a satellite it’s hard to get away from anyone. They had a terminal fight—I won’t go into the gory dets—but she came to me. Essentially she moved into my room for the rest of the time on Vegas. She was weeping convulsively every night. We slept in that bed for three weeks, and I never gave her more than a brotherly kiss.”
“She’s very beautiful, Gadi.”
“Just so. But I’m not her type, because I don’t give pain. So she has written into all her contracts that I design the virons.”
“When you were a child, you hated when the other boys made you fight.” She remembered how when they had played pirates, Gadi insisted nobody die. “But, how can you be so attracted to Nili?” What was impressing itself upon her, so strongly that she sat down on a stool like a velvet rock, was that she had for twelve years assumed a position of moral superiority to Gadi that she suddenly found dubious. She was far more violent than Gadi, far more willing to get what she wanted by any means.
“Oh, Shira, you take her athletics too seriously. She comes from a coffee klatch of Jewish mamas. Don’t buy that martial arts prancing at face value. Every johnny in action stimmies can look like an assassin on tape. We’re all quite fierce in the mirror—but if we see a mouse, we scream and call security.”
She wasn’t about to tell Gadi that he was fooling himself, that she had seen Nili in action outside the Cybernaut enclave. He needed to believe Nili was only playing tough. “Gadi, I’m going. But we had a real conversation for once, and I enjoyed it. In some ways you’re a better person than I am.”
He rose and walked to the door with her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t say that! My reputation!” He called after her: “You’ll see. I’m engaged in making trouble for my old man. I’m the same bastard, I am!”
It was not quite time to pick up Ari, but she could stroll through the streets of her town while the storm beat on the wrap. She wondered if she would have been tempted by the spike when she first arrived here, feeling broken. Simply being back here had begun to heal her at once: here on the shores of the ravaged poisoned sea slowly cleansing itself of human waste, here people tried to live with minimal damage, making their choices together.
Zipporah was out in the street with a robot paver. Must be her day of town work. Chickens scratched under trees just beginning to color. In the yards, tomatoes red as cartoon hearts swelled in the afternoon heat. She drifted among what was left in the world of freedom and choice. She had chosen this for Ari. One of Gadi’s gang skated past, carrying a large solar battery to install someplace. A smell of smoked fish wafted from the cure house. On the Commons a softball game was going on, while another group practiced with the razor-sharp wires they must have got recently from Lazarus and company; a month before, that would never have been permitted. Life in wartime.
By now Malkah would have communicated with Yod. Shira would come home to their distressed observant faces. Good, let them worry a bit. She could not help pardoning them, because they had saved her life. Yod had offered her a relationship that yielded far more pleasure and far more sense of control than she could ever experience with Gadi; then he had returned her son to her. Malkah had given her not only her home but Yod himself. They were hers, and she loved them.
Time to pick up Ari. Tova was coming toward her with her toddler, Ethan, hanging on one arm, as she tugged her five-year-old, Liz, all three engaged at top decibels in an argument about supper and cookies.
Shira deserved to be punished because of Josh. She had known the danger. Yod had simply carried out his programming. Once she had been as truly gentle as Gadi still was; but no more. She felt more comfortable when she thought of him than she ever had. She had to admit as she entered the courtyard of the children’s center that Malkah and Yod had more offended her sense of propriety and aesthetics than her moral scruples. She did not seriously doubt their loyalty to her, and she had not begun paying for the death of Josh. Nonetheless she would be glad to see Malkah and Yod around the table with Ari, in his place at last, her weird but fulfilling family.
FORTY-ONE
True Confessions and Public Turmoil
Shira heard Malkah laughing in the courtyard, a full-throated, full-bodied amusement that made Shira come to the balcony and look down. She had to find out who was with Malkah. That laugh: she expected to see a man. She would not have been surprised, given her recent discovery, to see Yod. That laugh was almost flirtation, for it had an aroma of sensuality and it came from deep in the body to expand in the chest and in the eyes too.
Instead Nili was slumped in a chair with her long legs sprawled, wearing dirty fatigues, her red hair plastered down with sweat. She was drinking glass after glass of water while telling Malkah a story. When Shira leaned forward to listen, Nili saw her and waved. “Come join us.”
“Did you just get back?” Shira called as she descended. She had put Ari to bed and was looking forward to seeing Yod once he got off duty. He was patrolling the Base twelve hours a day and then guarding the perimeter of Tikva one eight-hour shift. That left him only four hours in between. Shortly after her return with Ari, Avram had announced that her work with Yod was finished. Yod was now able to carry out his tasks and needed no more coaching. Immediately the Base collective requested she join them.
It was startling how much more boldly she proceeded now. Discovering that her work was actually highly original and that only Y-S corporate politics had kept her pinned in position, she found herself taking her own ideas far more seriously. She had a brisk confidence that expressed itself in a new level of mastery. She was after all the granddaughter of one of the pioneers of the chimeras that now were used to obfuscate all vital bases, the daughter of one of the most successful data pirates of the era. The chimeras for Cybernaut were demanding, but she enjoyed the work as she had not since her early days at Y-S. Still, she was lonely for Yod.
Missing him was
no different from missing any other person. She had grown used to spending most of her waking hours with him. Avram was sure that Y-S was about to attack. He demanded that Yod be almost everywhere at once to protect the town. Yod himself wanted to be with her more now, not less, while her own hours were far less flexible since she was working on the Base and taking care of Ari. Their time together was snatched, brief, compacted.
Nili was describing a journey with Leesha, the right-hand woman of Lazarus, from turf to turf. Out of the welter of drug and slash gangs, a network was springing up of those who wanted to organize the Glop into more than meat territories. They could parley because the argot was common and most people growing up there spoke at least English, Spanish and something else—Vietnamese, Russian, Chinese, whatever. Nobody could function with just one lingo. Even kids who couldn’t read or write could bargain with you in six languages for their sexual services.
“One advantage that machine of yours has over me, and one of the only ones, is that he can plug in a language and be speaking it the next day. I have to learn it like everybody else.” Nili was sipping her water as if it were a fine wine. In the Glop she had been drinking reprocessed water, the same stuff that had been through the population thirty times already. Here they still had a bit of an aquifer as well as rain-catchers. “But plugging in, I learn quicker. I grew up quadrilingual, so I pick up fast.”
“Hebrew, Arabic, English and what? Yiddish?” Malkah asked.
“Russian. We had some Russian-born scientists who’d emigrated just before the Two Week War. You hear the weirdest hybrid languages in the Glop, not just Spanglish, but Chino-English, Mung-Japanese, Turko-Spanish. I don’t know what’ll happen to language in the end, but it sure is cooking in there.”
Nili saw the Glop differently than Shira always had. Shira realized she had been trained automatically by her culture, especially by corporate culture, to treat the Glop as an unimportant place where nothing consequential happened. Nothing that mattered to the real, the significant, people could originate there. But Nili turned to the New Gangs for answers. In people living off the garbage of the preceding century, Nili found much to study and admire. Shira would have to mull it over. Gadi, too, looked to the Glop, for styles, for music, for what he called heat.