by Marge Piercy
She gave Ari Gimel as a playfellow. Gimel was her handyman. She had repaired its arm without difficulty. It was an unobtrusive presence, far more versatile and brighter than the standard run of cleaning and transport robots, whatever it might lack when compared with Avram’s intention and Yod himself. It was good at rote programming tasks, at debugging, at fixing or rebuilding machines. Ari rode it around the courtyard, playing horsey. It repaired the plumbing and the roof.
Malkah could not communicate directly with them, since Israel was not in the Net, but one day a recorded communication came through the Net, sent from Athens. Malkah was standing in front of what looked like a stone wall. “I have arrived at my journey’s destination. Things go well here.
“Hello, Ari, this is for you. This is your bubeh talking. I hope you are not forgetting me. Are you being good to Zayit and Leila? You have to play with them every day and let them sleep on your bed, or they will tell me when I come home. You have to pat them nicely on the head and stroke them and never pull their tails and never hit them. Otherwise they will run away and come and find me. So you must be good to your pussycats and good to your mother, who needs you. You must be cheerful and obey your mother and kiss her for me.
“Shira, I am having a great time here. The sun is bright, and I see everything clearly. Very clearly, Shira. Bear up, my sweet ones. In summer I’ll come home, if that is the will of ha-Shem. This is a clear dry place indeed. It’s a good place for this old woman. Take care of each other. I love you both. I am still a project under development. Till June, take care.”
There was no way to reply. Shira played the transmission for Ari whenever he demanded it, which was much too often for days afterward. Gadi was recalled from exile to replace a failed designer for Mala Tuni; he left in great haste. She felt mostly relief, that they did not have to try any longer. Her dybbuk had been exorcised.
Against expectations, Hannah and she became friends. They stopped peering at each other around Gadi. They often ate together, strolled around the town, sat chatting in the Commons. Hannah was pregnant after four years of trying, and she treated her body gingerly, as if it were a glass teapot that might crack or tip and spill its precious contents. Hannah thought the father might be Gadi, but she had requested at the gene scan not to find out. She wanted to be her daughter’s only parent.
Shira spent many evenings at the Commons, bringing Ari to eat with colleagues from her Base. She was working closely with a protégée of Malkah’s, Yudit, two years older than Shira and the mother of a little boy just a month younger than Ari. Shira was settling into the town, putting out long roots in all directions, anchoring herself firmly. She had an occasional flirtation with a fellow worker or somebody from the town, but she felt no inclination to try a bond warmer than friendship.
The truth was, she did not want Jonah or Saul, any more than she had wanted Gadi. She was for better or worse a woman who took on a strong impression of her lover, who, if she loved someone, was shaped to receive that loved one and perhaps only that one. It had taken her a decade to free herself from Gadi.
But Gadi had broken off with her when she was sixteen. He had wanted to be free of her. Yod had died in perfect loyalty. If she could revive him even now, he would want her as he had. He would be with her. That made the missing worse. He had not chosen to leave her, he had not chosen to withdraw from her. He had wanted her more single-mindedly, more obsessively, more purely than anyone ever had or ever could. She was truly a secret widow.
They had never talked of love, never, yet what was the love men offered—when they bothered to offer—in comparison with the devotion she had known? She would live out her life, she feared, in maternal love, in friendship, loving her grandmother, but without experiencing committed passion. With Yod she had come into her own sexually, and her mature sexuality had gone out of the world with him. She did not want anyone else; she could not; she was twenty-nine going on eighty.
It was late March, and she was doing a spurt of spring cleaning. Ari was at day care, and she was burned out on work for the day. She was tidying up Malkah’s office, which she had taken over in the meantime, when she ran across Avram’s logs. She had a brief desire to bury them, in lieu of a body. To plant them in the courtyard with her dear cat Hermes and Ari’s dead finch. On her palm she balanced a memory crystal, uncertain whether to toss it or keep it, tempted to load it on her terminal to see Yod again. Most of each cube was text, formulae, algorithms, but part of each consisted of spoken words and recorded images.
Then the idea smote her as if sunlight had pierced the cave of her brain. She cried out, a shriek of exhilaration, bringing both cats at a run to the doorway sniffing for danger, ears laid back. She stood in Malkah’s office with the crystal in her hand, realizing she had all the software that had created Yod, what Avram had programmed, what Malkah had programmed, and all of Avram’s hardware specs. Oh, it would be a long haul. She would have to master hardware as well as modify the software. She had never been responsible for hardware, all by herself. But she had Gimel. She had its perfect ability to follow directions. The project would be a stretch, but so what? She had some of the tools she needed, and she would start ordering the others.
Yod had said it himself: it was immoral to create a conscious weapon. She vehemently agreed. No, she would not create a cyborg to suffer from Yod’s dilemma. She was not intending to build a golem; she was going to build a mate. It might take her two years, it might take her five, but then she would have her lover. She would have Yod, but not a Yod who belonged to Avram: no, a Yod who belonged only to her. He would look just like Yod; he would be just like Yod, minus all those problems with violence.
“Gimel,” she shouted. The robot carefully put down the shovel with which it was preparing a bed in the courtyard and came shambling toward her.
“I am ready.”
“Find Yod’s self-repair tool kit. It’s in one of the storage areas. Start with the basement and work upward in the house. When you find it, bring it to me.”
She felt as if she were centered about a flame in her chest that did not burn but shone out from her, illuminating all life. How had she been so foolish as not to have realized she had almost everything she needed to rebuild Yod? For a moment she understood Avram as she never had, his apparent arrogance, his obsession. He had made a person; but then, as a mother, so had she. Ultimately, they both had the courage to violate a law that had outlived its time. What Avram had created, the best of it, would not perish after all, for she would carry the work forward.
How to prepare Ari? She would figure it out over time. There had never been a body. There was only the terrible absence at the core of their lives. She would give Ari the father he needed, the male figure of gentleness and strength and competence. He had loved Yod immediately.
She must begin at once, at once, so that she would be well launched before Malkah returned. Some of Avram’s tools had survived the twin blasts. She had to remember where Gadi had put them. Probably in that little house, to which she had a key. If anyone noticed she was ordering tools and parts, she would explain she needed them to repair Gimel. Or even that she was attempting to assemble another robot like Gimel; that was legal and not terribly interesting to anyone.
She could construct Yod the second, starting right now. Let men make weapons. She would make herself happiness. She would manufacture a being to love her as she wanted to be loved. She would create for herself a being who belonged to her alone, as she had dreamed since adolescence, as she had belonged body and soul to Gadi until he had ripped himself from her. She would set to work this afternoon. She could feel Yod’s dry hand in hers, his unblinking eyes fixed upon her darkly, sweetly.
She grabbed her jacket and headed for Gadi’s oyster shack. She bolted down the street, adrenaline coursing through her. At the corner where the hotel had stood was a gap between buildings, obvious as a missing front tooth. The ruin had been dismantled, the components reused. She found herself stopped dead and staring at the
space the hotel had occupied long before she had been born. The most powerful connections of her life seemed attached to that space. Avram had a grave, but Yod didn’t; that was his memorial, what he had left to them: a violent absence. She imagined she could still smell something burnt, perhaps the soil itself or small fragments of combusted wood or plaster. She walked slowly forward to the vacant lot, just beginning to sprout a growth of weeds. The old basement had been filled in to prevent accidents. She squatted and took a handful of the sandy soil between her hands. She was right; particles of burnt material lay gritty on her palm. Yod’s ashes, in a sense. The ashes of his act.
“I have died and taken with me Avram, my creator, and his lab, all the records of his experiment…I die knowing I destroy the capacity to replicate me…” She could hear Yod speaking. But he hadn’t destroyed that capacity, not at all, because he had trusted her. He had taken care to save Malkah and herself from the explosion, never guessing she would undo his last act. She could see his face projected in her room. “Kaf must not come to be…I have done one good thing with my death. I have made sure there will be no others like me.”
He died convinced he had accomplished a goal that made his death palatable to him. Thus had he salvaged something for himself out of Avram’s fatal orders. Could she wipe out that sacrifice? He thought he had ended the line of cyborgs. If he could know she planned to reverse his act, would he not feel betrayed? She imagined Yod’s eyes fixed on her. The new cyborg would look just like him, and she would always expect it to say, “Shira, why? Why did you re-create me against my dying wishes?”
And what was her reason for hurrying? So that she would be started beyond stopping by the time Malkah returned; because Malkah, too, would tell her that the choice to make another Yod was immoral. Would the cyborg really be Yod? Yod was the product of tensions between Avram and Malkah and their disparate aims as well as the product of their software and hardware. If a cyborg created as a soldier balked and wanted to be a lover, might not a cyborg created as a lover long to be a celibate or an assassin? She remembered all the cyborgs who had looked just like Yod; Chet, who had killed David; all the autistic or violent offspring of Avram’s experiments.
She could not be Avram. She could not manufacture a being to serve her, even in love. Very slowly she walked back along the block to the house built around the courtyard. There in Malkah’s office she loaded the crystals into a backpack. She took all the records of Yod’s hardware and software, and she walked to the recycling plant.
Outside, she paused again. She stood in the old road, turning one way and then the other. These crystals are his real body. But if I do not destroy the capability, I will succumb. When I am especially lonely and I miss him even more strongly than usual, the temptation will recur. Another afternoon like this one, I will talk myself into the lightness of the attempt. First I will just look at him, watch him. Then I will want him. Then I will decide I cannot do without him. Like Avram, I will feel empowered to make a living being who belongs to me as a child never does and never should.
She carried her backpack into the recycling plant and emptied the crystals into the proper chute. The little cubes that were all that was left of Yod slid away into the fusion chamber and became energy. She had set him free.
Acknowledgments
First of all, I want to thank the usual accomplices. My husband Ira Wood reads even the first drafts of my novels, so rough anyone else would think I had lost my mind as well as my way. He studied Czech with me and helped make our research jaunts delightful, even the day we walked twenty miles in the rain and could find no lunch. Claire Simmons of the Wellfleet Library as always put through those interlibrary loans I depend on. Gloria Nardin Watts, dear friend and indefatigable reader, helped me with the galleys.
I would particularly like to thank the head of the Research Department of the State Jewish Museum in Prague, Dr. Vladimir Sadek, who was extremely kind to me when I showed up for an appointment that turned out in a mysterious comedy of errors never to have existed. Above all, Jirina Sedinova of the Jewish Museum shared her time and research with me and was very helpful and warm, as well as fun to gossip with about Judah and David and company. I was in Prague in ’68 and in the course of writing this novel returned; like Malkah, I remain in love with that city.
I would like to thank a particular student at Loyola in Chicago, where I put in a week of residency one April shortly after I had started this novel. In the course of a lively conversation about science fiction, he told me that when he read Woman on the Edge of Time, he couldn’t believe the date of publication, because the alternate universe that Connie blunders into in Chapter 15 anticipated cyberpunk. What’s cyberpunk? I asked, and he started me off. I enjoy William Gibson very much, and I have freely borrowed from his inventions and those of other cyberpunk writers. I figure it’s all one playground. Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was extremely suggestive also; Constance Penley of Camera Obscura was kind enough to send it to me.
I have found the newsletters and meetings of the Artificial Intelligence group of the Boston Computer Society stimulating. Lest anybody think that the experiences in the Net and Base in the novel are fantastic make-believe, be aware that even now companies are working on sensor nets that permit a person to “walk into” data and experience it as real objects in imaginary space. As for the destruction of the ozone layer and the results of global warming, your local library surely has this information, as mine did.
I would like to thank Arthur Waskow for suggesting to me, at a meeting of the Siddur Project of P’Nai Or on which we both worked, that I might find kabbalah valuable to study. I owe a debt, as does everyone interested in kabbalah or the Golem, to Gershom Scholem and, even more, to Moshe Idel and, in understanding Judah Loew, to André Neher. My interpretations, of course, are very much my own.
Finally I want to thank Lois Wallace, my agent and friend, for her vigorous efforts on behalf of my work; and Sonny Mehta, the editor of this novel, for his valuable tough reading and helpful hints for cyborg makers.
As always with the novels of mine I most enjoy writing, this has been a strange and instructive journey.
About the Author
Marge Piercy is the author of numerous novels, among them Woman on the Edge of Time, Vida, Braided Lives, Gone to Soldiers, and Summer People. Her fifteen collections of poetry include The Moon Is Always Female: Circles on the Water (her selected poems); Stone, Paper, Knife; My Mother’s Body; Available Light; and Mars and Her Children. She has coauthored a play, The Last White Class, with her husband Ira Wood, the novelist and screenwriter, with whom she lives on Cape Cod.