by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
He crossed the road, his feet leading him; they had their own memory, crossing the road from the grand doors of Central Station to the Neve Sha’anan pedestrian street, the heart of the old neighborhood, and it was so much smaller than he remembered as a child—it was a world and now it had shrunk—
Crowds of people, solar tuk-tuks buzzing along the road, tourists gawking, a memcordist checking her feed stats as everything she saw and felt and smelled was broadcast live across the networks, capturing Boris in a glance that went out to millions of indifferent viewers across the solar system—
Pickpockets, bored CS Security keeping an eye out, a begging robotnik with a missing eye and bad patches of rust on his chest, dark-suited Mormons sweating in the heat, handing out leaflets while on the other side of the road Elronites did the same—
Light rain falling.
From the nearby market the shouts of sellers promising the freshest pomegranates, melons, grapes, bananas; in a café ahead old men playing backgammon, drinking small china cups of bitter black coffee, smoking narghiles—sheesha pipes—R. Patch-It walking slowly amidst the chaos, the robot an oasis of calm in the mass of noisy, sweaty humanity—
Looking, smelling, listening, remembering so intensely he didn’t at first see them, the woman and the child, on the other side of the road, until he almost ran into them—
Or they into him. The boy, dark-skinned, with extraordinary blue eyes—the woman familiar, somehow, it made him instantly uneasy, and the boy said, with hope in his voice, “Are you my daddy?”
Boris Chong breathed deeply. The woman said, “Kranki!” in an angry, worried tone. Boris took it for the boy’s name, or nickname—kranki in Asteroid Pidgin meaning grumpy, or crazy, or strange….
Boris knelt beside the boy, the ceaseless movement of people around them forgotten. He looked into those eyes. “It’s possible,” he said. “I know that blue. It was popular three decades ago. We hacked an open source version out of the trademarked Armani code….”
He was waffling, he thought. Why was he doing that? The woman, her familiarity disturbed him. A buzzing as of invisible mosquitoes, in his mind, a reshaping of his vision came flooding him out of his aug, the boy frozen beside him, smiling now, a large and bewildering and knowing smile—
The woman was shouting, he could hear it distantly, “Stop it! What are you doing to him?”
The boy was interfacing with his aug, he realized. The words coming in a rush, he said, “You had no parents,” to the boy. Recollection and shame mingling together. “You were labbed, right here, hacked together out of public property genomes and bits of black market nodes.” The boy’s hold on his mind slackened. Boris breathed, straightened up. “Nakaimas,” he said, and took a step back, suddenly frightened.
The woman looked terrified and angry. “Stop it,” she said. “He’s not—”
Boris was suddenly ashamed. “I know,” he said. He felt confused, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.” This mix of emotions, coming so rapidly they blended into each other, wasn’t natural. Somehow the boy had interfaced with the aug, and the aug, in turn, was feeding into Boris’s mind. He tried to focus. He looked at the woman. Somehow it was important to him that she would understand. He said, “He can speak to my aug. Without an interface.” Then, remembering the clinics, remembering his own work before he left to go to space, he said, quietly, “I must have done a better job than I thought, back then.”
The boy looked up at him with guileless, deep blue eyes. Boris remembered children like him, he had birthed many, so many—the clinics of Central Station were said to be on par with those of Yunan, even. But he had not expected this, this interference, though he had heard stories, on the asteroids and in Tong Yun, the whispered word that used to mean black magic: nakaimas.
The woman was looking at him, and her eyes, he knew her eyes—
Something passed between them, something that needed no node, no digital encoding, something earlier, more human and more primitive, like a shock, and she said, “Boris? Boris Chong?”
He recognized her at the same time she did him, wonder replacing worry, wonder, too, at how he failed to recognize her, this woman of indeterminate years suddenly resolving, like two bodies occupying the same space, into the young woman he had loved, when the world was young.
“Miriam?” he said.
“It’s me,” she said.
“But you—”
“I never left,” she said. “You did.”
He wanted to go to her now. The world was awake, and Boris was alone on the roof of the old apartment building, alone and free, but for the memories. He didn’t know what he would do about his father. He remembered holding his hand, once, when he was small, and Vlad had seemed so big, so confident and sure, and full of life. They had gone to the beach that day; it was a summer’s day, and in Menashiya Jews and Arabs and Filipinos all mingled together, the Muslim women in their long, dark clothes and the children running shrieking in their underwear; Tel Aviv girls in tiny bikinis, sunbathing placidly; someone smoking a joint, and the strong smell of it wafting in the sea air; the lifeguard in his tower calling out trilingual instructions—“Keep to the marked area! Did anyone lose a child? Please come to the lifeguards now! You with the boat, head towards the Tel Aviv harbor and away from the swimming area!”—the words getting lost in the chatter; someone had parked their car and was blaring out beats from the stereo; Somali refugees were cooking a barbecue on the promenade’s grassy area; a dreadlocked white guy was playing a guitar, and Vlad held Boris’s hand as they went into the water, strong and safe, and Boris knew nothing would ever happen to him—that his father would always be there to protect him, no matter what happened.
The Slows
Gail Hareven
The news of the decision to close the Preserves was undoubtedly the worst I had ever received. I’d known for months that it was liable to happen, but I’d deluded myself into thinking that I had more time. There had always been controversy about the need for maintaining Preserves (see B. L. Sanders, Z. Goroshovski, and Cohen and Cohen), but from this remote region I was simply unable to keep abreast of all the political ups and downs. Information got through, but to evaluate its importance, to register the emerging trends, without hearing what people were actually saying in the corridors of power was impossible. So I can’t blame myself if the final decision came as a shock.
The axe fell suddenly. At six in the evening, when I got out of the shower, I found the announcement on my computer. It was just four lines long. I stood there, with a towel wrapped around my waist, reading the words that destroyed my future, that tossed away a professional investment of more than fifteen years. I can’t say that I’d never envisioned this possibility when I chose to study the Slows. I can’t say that it hadn’t occurred to me that this might happen. But I believed that I was doing something important for the human race, and, mistakenly, I thought that the authorities felt the same way. After all, they had subsidized my research for years. Eliminating the Preserves at this stage was a loss I could barely conceive of, a loss not only for me and for my future—clearly I couldn’t avoid thinking about myself—but for humanity and its very ability to understand itself. Politicians like to refer to the Slows as being deviant. I won’t argue with that, but as hard as it is, as repulsive and distressing, we have to remember that our forefathers were all deviants of this kind.
I confess that I passed the rest of the evening with a bottle of whiskey. Self-pity is inevitable in situations like this, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. The whiskey made it easier for me to get through the first few hours and fall asleep, but it certainly didn’t make it any easier to get up in the morning. As if to spite me, the sky was blue, and the light was too brilliant. As often happens in this season, the revolting smell of yellow flowers went straight to my temples. When I pulled myself out of bed, I discovered that the sugar jar was empty, and I’d have to go to the office for my first cup of coffee. I knew that at some point during the day I wo
uld have to start packing up, but first I needed my coffee. I had no choice. With an aching head and a nauseating taste in my mouth, I dragged myself to the office shed. I opened the door and found a Slow woman sitting in my chair.
Despite the security guards’ repeated instructions, I tended to forget to lock doors. Our camp was fenced in, we all knew one another, and the savages entered only during working hours, and then only with permission. How had she sneaked in?
Years of fieldwork had taught me how to cope with all sorts of situations. “Good morning,” I said to her. I didn’t even consider reaching for the button to call the guards. True, there had been occasional attacks in other camps, but for all sorts of reasons there had been none in ours to date. Besides, as I always said, the people most likely to be attacked were the policemen and the missionaries, not me, so I had a logical justification for bending the rules a little.
The savage woman didn’t answer me. She leaned over to pick something up from the other side of the desk, and immediately I became afraid. The fear spread rapidly from my legs to my chest, but my brain kept working. So the rumor was true: they had got their hands on a cache of old weapons. To them, perhaps we were all alike after all—policeman or scientist, it didn’t matter much from their point of view. But then the woman turned back to me: she was holding a human larva strapped into a carrier, which she laid on the table.
“You promised you wouldn’t take our babies from us,” she said in the angry, agitated voice so typical of the Slows. As my adrenaline level fell, it was hard for me to steady my legs. The savage woman fixed me with her black eyes and seemed to see this. “You pledged that you wouldn’t take them. There are treaties, and you signed them,” she spat out impatiently. I was always amazed by how fast news reached the Slows. It was clear to anybody who worked with them that they were hiding computers somewhere, and perhaps they also had collaborators on the political level. The nearest settlement of Slows was a half-hour flight away. They weren’t allowed to keep hoverers, and there were no tracks in the region, so to get to our camp she had to have set out the evening before. It seemed that she had known about the decision to close the Preserves even before I did.
“Those treaties were signed many generations ago. Things change,” I said, though I knew that it was silly to get into an argument with one of them.
“My grandmother signed them.”
“Is it your baby?” I asked, making a point of using their term, as I gestured at the human larva on my desk.
“It’s mine.” Luckily, the larva was asleep. Fifteen years of work had more or less inured me, but at that hour of the morning, and in my condition, I knew that my stomach wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of a squirming pinkish creature.
“Do you have others?”
“Maybe.” The female Slows don’t usually give birth to more than three or four offspring. Given the way they are accustomed to raising offspring, even that many is hard work. This savage woman was young, as far as I could judge. She might have concealed another larva somewhere before coming here. There was no way of knowing.
“You can’t break the agreements,” she said, cutting into my thoughts. “No. Listen to me. You’ve violated almost every clause. Every few years you renege on something. When you forced us into the Preserves, you promised us autonomy, and since then you’ve gradually stolen everything from us. From hard experience we’ve learned not to trust you. Like sheep, we kept quiet and let you push us farther and farther into a corner. But now I’m warning you. Just warning you: don’t you dare touch the children!”
Many people will think this strange, but over the years I’ve learned to see a kind of beauty in the Slow women. If you ignore the swollen protrusions on their chests and the general swelling of their bodies, if you ignore their tendency to twist their faces wildly, with some experience you can distinguish between the ugly ones and the pretty ones, and this one would definitely have been considered pretty. If her grandmother had really signed the treaties, as she said, she might have been one of their aristocrats, the descendant of a ruling dynasty. It was evident that she could express herself.
“Will you agree to have some coffee with me?” Fieldwork often involves long hours of conversation. With time I had got used to the physical proximity of the Slows, and sometimes, when their suspicions subsided—when they accepted that I wasn’t a missionary in disguise—they told me important things. The new decree had put an end to my research, but I might still be able to write something about the reaction of the savages to the development. Attentiveness had become a habit with me, and, besides, I was not yet capable of packing up the office.
“Coffee,” I repeated. “Can I make some for you?” Since she didn’t answer and just stared at me with a blurred face, I said, “You’ve certainly come a long way. It wouldn’t hurt me to have a cup, either. Wait a minute, and I’ll make some for both of us.” The Slows had grown used to harsh treatment, and when they encountered one of us who treated them courteously they tended to get flustered. Indeed, this dark-eyed woman seemed confused, and she kept her mouth shut while I operated the beverage machine.
No doubt the savages were a riddle that science had not yet managed to solve, and, the way things seemed now, it never would be solved. According to the laws of nature, every species should seek to multiply and expand, but for some reason this one appeared to aspire to wipe itself out. Actually, not only itself but also the whole human race. Slowness was an ideology, but not only an ideology. As strange as it sounds, it was a culture, a culture similar to that of our forefathers. People don’t know, or perhaps they forget, that when the technique for Accelerated Offspring Growth (AOG) was developed it wasn’t immediately put to use. Until the first colonies were established on the planets, the UN Charter prohibited AOG. It’s not pleasant to think about it now, but the famous Miller, German, and Yaddo were subjected to quite a bit of condemnation for their early work on the technique, all of it on ethical grounds. In a society that had not yet conquered space, AOG was viewed as a catastrophe that, within ten years, was liable to cause a population explosion on Earth, which would exterminate life through hunger and disease. The morality of the Slows had an undeniably rational basis under those conditions. We may be revolted by the thought, but the fact is that Miller, German, and Yaddo had all spent the first years of their lives as human larvae, not unlike the one that was now lying on my desk; they, too, had been slowly reared by savage females, just like the one who was waiting beside me for her coffee.
“We have to talk,” she said as I placed the cup on the desk and glanced for just a split second at the creature sleeping in the carrier. “There’s no reason for you to use power. There’s no point, because you have all the power anyway. We’re no threat to you.”
I knew something that she didn’t know, because it was a secret that hadn’t been publicized on the networks: in one of the colonies on Gamma, far from the Preserves, there had been an outbreak of Slowness. This was probably why the decision had been made to close all the Preserves at once—to eliminate any possibility of the infection spreading.
“It’s possible to compromise on all sorts of clauses,” the savage woman said, “so why not compromise with us? We’ll die out on our own in a few generations anyway. There are less than ten thousand of us left.”
The problem isn’t one of numbers, I thought, but I didn’t say it to her. The problem is that in many people’s eyes you are not a remnant but a gangrene that could spread and rot the entire body of humankind. Even I, with my interest in your way of life, can’t say for certain that the politicians are wrong about this.
“We’ve thought of all kinds of possibilities,” she said. “Since we have no choice, we’ll agree to let your missionaries into our settlements. We’ll guarantee their safety and give them complete freedom to talk to whomever they wish. We’ll agree that one parent’s consent is enough in order for a baby to be surrendered for accelerated growth, and we’ll make sure that parents obey that rule. What else do
you want? What else can you demand? In the end, without wasting any more energy on us, you’ll get everything you want anyway.”
“Not this one,” I interjected, pointing at her larva. A tremor twisted her face and made it ugly. I drank the coffee and noticed that the larva had opened its eyes. The coffee was sour. The machine was apparently not working properly again. But there was no point in calling in a serviceman when I had only a few more days to spend here.
“Don’t take them away from us,” she whispered, and her voice shook. “I need at least a few years. You must allow us that. Why do you hate us so?”
The ardent possessiveness that savage parents—especially the mothers—display toward their offspring is the key to understanding the Slows’ culture. It’s clear that they don’t love their offspring the way we love ours. They make do with so few, and, at the rate they rear them, at best they get to know only their children’s children. Whereas even I—who have spent years away from civilization in barren camps like this one—have managed to produce seventeen sons and daughters and a lineage of at least forty generations. Still, they talk constantly about their love for their offspring, and its glory.
“Hate?” I said to her. “Hate is a strong word.”
The human larva turned its head and gaze toward the savage woman. Her eyes clung to it, and her chin quivered. She had pretty eyes. She had put on black and green makeup in my honor. A week or two of body formation would have made a good-looking woman of her, in anyone’s opinion. She trusted me, apparently, knowing who I was, having heard about me or made inquiries, and perhaps she hoped that, as a researcher, I would agree to represent her side. She had put herself in jeopardy by sneaking into my office in this way. Someone else in my place might have panicked, and an unnecessary accident might have taken place. Through her grimaces you could see a face that wasn’t at all stupid. She had certainly taken my well-known curiosity into account, and my composure. She knew that all I had to do was reach out and press a button, and they would come, chase her away, and take the larva from her. I wasn’t about to do that, but sooner or later, no matter where she hid, it would be taken.