Body of Glass (22 page)

“The attack made you afraid?”

“Of course it did. It was aimed at me. Personally. It wasn’t random, it was an ambush. I felt I recognized one of the razors. A familiar mind.”

“Yod is patrolling the Base.”

“I’ll never meet him again there. Never.”

“Malkah, I want you to get out of bed. You don’t have to plug in. I want you to cook and work in the garden. I can’t carry the house by myself.” She sounded ridiculous. The cleaning robot cleaned, the house took care of itself, meals could be picked up at the Commons, and dirty clothes were dropped at the laundry. Cooking was purely recreational. In Tikva, everybody over fifteen worked. No one kept house.

However, Malkah went along with the pretence. With a great show of reluctance, she put on her purple velvet robe. She sat scowling while Shira brushed her glossy hair and put in a carved walnut barrette. “That belonged to my own mother,” Malkah said, as she had many times before. “In getting married, you’ve broken a tradition started by her. Maybe getting divorced undoes the harm.” She was being reproachful, as she had not been when Shira arrived.

But Shira was glad to have Malkah doing anything at all, just so she got out of bed. Her collapse was deeply disquieting. Malkah was always vital, strong, crackling with energy. For the first time, Shira wished her stranger mother would actually arrive, to distract Malkah and enliven her. Shira was not the only one worried about Malkah. A counsellor arrived and spent a futile hour with her. At suppertime, Gila appeared with two kittens in a box, sleek shiny black kittens with enormous round copper eyes. She dumped them in Malkah’s lap. “Ten weeks old.” They were screaming. One immediately ran under the couch and had to be hauled out, hissing.

“What do I want with kittens? I like grown cats. A nuisance!” Malkah snorted. “I’m too old for kittens. They’re too much work.”

“Why, since you’ve retired, old woman, you can make yourself useful. They’re orphaned. If you don’t take them in, they’ll be dumped in the raw.”

Groaning as if every joint ached, Malkah carried the kittens into the kitchen and set out making a mash of egg and cereal for them. Hanging behind, Shira said to Gila, “Orphaned? Conveniently at ten weeks?” Shira had priced a kitten for Ari once. How he would love a real live pet.

Gila put a finger to her lips. “I paid a fortune for them. Sha! The counsellor recommended she be given something alive to care for.”

They gave Malkah some time alone in the kitchen. When they came in, the kittens were eating on the table and Malkah was sitting with her head tilted, making mother-cat noises in the back of her throat, that burbling French
r
sound, m-r-r-r-r-u-u-u-ah.

By the next day, Malkah carried the kittens about inside her dress, played with them with her belt or string, wrestled them gently so that soon the backs of her hands were crisscrossed with tiny claw marks. They had speedily decided she was their mother now and followed her when she put them down. When Malkah retired, she took them off with her into her bed.

Shira tried to read, but she was worried about Malkah. The kittens would offer distraction for a while. If Yod could not succeed, either Malkah would give up her work and wither; or she would enter the Base again, and sooner or later the raiders would kill her.

How were they breaking into the Base? Tikva defences had always been extraordinarily secure. After all, anti-penetration programs were their export. Malkah had said something strange to her: that she felt she had recognized one attacker. Shira slipped on her silk robe, sat at her terminal. She requested information from the Base but did not plug in. She was afraid, she admitted to herself. She requested a list of all those Malkah had worked with in the last ten years on Base security and their present whereabouts.

The Base Overseers were Avram, Malkah and their best hardware person, Sam Rossi. Malkah was most responsible for Base defences. Shira requested copy and carried the list to bed with her. Seven people had worked with Malkah closely enough to know the Base defences. Of those seven, five were still in town. The other two were working for multis. Unlikely pirates.

However the pirates had penetrated, the Base was no longer secure. What should she hope for? That Malkah refrain from her own creativity, the exercise of what could only be described as her art; or that Malkah risk her life and her sanity? Shira could only hope that Yod would succeed. No human could remain plugged in for longer than four or five hours. One of her best-received papers had been on the effects of over-projection. If and when Yod emerged, she must examine him carefully for signs of what she had named the fused user syndrome. With humans, much of the immediate trauma was to the body, but the lasting results were often an inability to relate in real time and real space. No consciousness she had ever heard of had remained projected for three days without pause. She wondered if Yod had simply committed suicide his own way, or if he could really still be patrolling, fully conscious?

nineteen

Malkah

My problem is that my despair dyes everything a sullen grey. I have always viewed despair as sinful self-indulgence; perhaps I truly believe that relinquishing hope is the inevitable result of sitting still. If I do not keep moving, if I do not have projects and the heady clamour of problems to be solved, I will subside into a state of near-fatal clarity in which I will begin to doubt the value of everything I normally do. The result is a personal ice age in which I lie embedded in my own glacier that is burging the landscape I usually love but to which I am now as indifferent as the ice I have exuded.

If only they had sent an assassin after me on the street, if only they had sent a fake message robot to blow up in my face. But to attack me in my work, that was a stroke of true genius. Now I fear my own creativity.

Never to move in the Base again, that’s death. Plugged in, I leave the gathering infirmities of my body, my body that quietly fails me after being so good to me. I have enjoyed excellent health. I have been robust for a small woman, sensual, energetic. When other women lay about complaining of pains and malfunctions, I was immersed in my work, and when my day was finished, I went after my pleasure single-minded as a cat. I liked to eat. I never attained the shadow-thin neurasthenia much admired in my youth, but I never put on excessive flesh either, except for the two years after Riva’s birth. Most of the time I’ve been what you might call firm but fleshy. Now I find myself a little too thin, for I have less appetite. The flesh is leaving me. I grow leaner and ascetic. The physical pleasures I have pursued with such avidity stand at a slight remove, smiling at me across a gradually widening gap, as of a boat slowly putting out from shore.

I lie here in my own bed, discharged from hospital feeling like a hartebeest or gazelle attacked by a cheetah, mauled and then, the attack interrupted, left partially dismembered, hamstrung, bleeding.

I was projected in the Base that afternoon, working on my chimera. Suddenly I realized I was not alone. I perceived two of them coming at me. They were in the form of projectiles, but I could sense a male and a female presence, even as I threw up a wall of force and launched a counterattack. But they had had time to prepare, and I had not. They smashed through the structure I had been building, a chimera that is one of my masterworks. They bombed right through it, and my dismay at the destruction slowed my response. Yet even as I fought and knew myself to be outmanoeuvred, I felt something familiar in one of the minds. I knew that person. I can’t force myself to re-enter that searing pain when they pierced my defences and came at my mind. I don’t want to remember! I was caught, about to be burned out, on the verge of brain death. Yod interjected himself. Abruptly I felt him there. They were killing me, and then he was between us.

Without Yod, would I have died or become a vegetable? The worst terror is to imagine being trapped in a catatonic state, in a loop of agony, reliving over and over again that attack, that entry of something metallic and hard driving into the brain, a cold burn of electricity, a deep shock that chars the cells. Now I am burned still and afraid. I fear even dreaming, and so I take Hannah’s drugs that suck me to a dreamless sleep.

I sit up now, clutching my pillow, sweating cold and slippery in the heat of the afternoon. Outside in the courtyard, the small birds we saved, that must be caged every fall so they do not try to fly south, are cheeping and pecking in the remaining vines — minus the rose Yod, battleground of warring programs, yanked out. Sometimes I imagine I am dreaming in coma. I fear I am lying in a hospital bed while they argue over whether to turn off the respirator, and that I hallucinated Yod’s rescue. He came out of nowhere briefly in his own form and then as an enormous tank interposed, smashing them away. They fled. He hesitated between impulses. Then he carried me until I was free of the Base. Afterward he turned and shot rocket-like in the direction of the two razors’ flight. But of course they were long gone.

They were gone, but they will be back. We all know that. The Net is always secure, because it is the common information system of the world. An attack on anyone there is like an attack in one of the treaty areas, the open ports: all the multis would launch an investigation and punish whoever broke the peace of the Net. Bases are only as secure as those who set them up can make them, and naturally we are frequently under siege, not only from information pirates like my own daughter, like those who attacked me, but also from multis and sometimes other free towns. Our Base is our independence, our strength. We cannot survive free without economic integrity.

This is my own failure, for I have specialized for the last twenty years in security systems involving chimeras that hid the real base in false bases. That’s what we sell; but the very best we keep for ourselves. My finest ideas are floating there, intricate beyond mapping. We have every one of us felt safe inside our Base because we had state-of-the-art obfuscation protecting us. I am a magician of chimeras, and now my magic is penetrated, undone.

Perhaps I am ashamed and chagrined too. I have been a defender of my people. I am a small woman who has stood tall. I have been independent. I have relished my own company, and when I let a man into my bed, it was for my enjoyment only and the pleasure of his company ― not because I needed any more from him than that mutual zest and exploration that used to be my best means of recreation. I have been protected by others, certainly, excused guard duty; my town has revered and celebrated me because I helped us all to stay free. Now I must acknowledge that without Yod I would be dead or worse.

I didn’t even thank him, and I have not let him come to see me. In my state of collapse and ruination, I prefer to sulk alone. What am I without the Base? I cannot build without using my mind in that linkage whose talent was first discovered when I was twenty-four. During those early attempts at plugging in, at projection, we had many casualties. We didn’t understand what we were doing, or we would not have dared. But the freedom! To imagine algorithmically, logically and fully, to think forward, clear, loud thoughts permitting no distractions, no misgivings, a discipline of the inner life. I have indeed been a proud creature, running in the wind of my own mind, free and driven at once. It has been a rich and good life at a time when the lot for most people is grim, nasty, violent, a shrunken life in the garbage of previous generations, burrowing like rats in the trash heap as wide as the horizon. We are lucky here, and I have been among the luckiest.

Is it greedy to wish to be happy till the end, to be engaged, fulfilled, to go on working until I die of the kind of massive stroke that we are beginning to understand is an occupational hazard of the ageing base-spinner? Would I have given up my earlier pleasure if a bargain had been offered me, an insurance salesman of a Mephistopheles willing to let me have it easier in my old age if I had relinquished those pleasures I grabbed with both hands for many years? Would I have bought his deferred annuity? I doubt it.

I cannot endure the thought of spending my leftover life puttering around the house, useless, adrift in ennui, weak and stalled in my fear. Yet my fear is quite real. It is a demon with sword of fire barring the gate back where I may not return, where I truly belong.

What is physical ageing to a base-spinner? In the image world, I am the power of my thought, of my capacity to create. There is no sex in the Base or the Net, but there is sexuality, there is joining, there is the play of minds like the play of dolphins in surf. In a world parcelled out by multis, it is one of the only empowered and sublimely personal activities remaining. I have always known I was exceptionally blessed to be able to revel in my work.

Now I am reduced to my ageing body in my room, which is luxurious but insufficient as a world. At seventy-two, I knock against my limits constantly in the flesh. I cannot walk as far as I used to. My knees give way. I don’t sleep soundly. My body creaks and groans. Worst of all is the slow leakage of light from my world, the darkness closing in. I cannot bear the thought of not being able to see the faces of those I love, of total physical dependence.

When I conceived of seducing Yod, it was a marvellously mischievous idea tickling me; besides, I have never grown out of the pleasure of teasing Avram. That summer we were involved, how I loved to turn him inside out like a glove. Even when he was young and so gorgeous it almost hurt to look at him, even when he was so driven by his sex that he ran about snapping at his own tail like a puppy, he always had a stuffy priggish side that offered me ample temptation and opportunity at once for setting him on edge.

I knew my seducing Yod would drive Avram into fits of indignation. Perhaps I was still sore from the time we tried to be lovers after Sara’s death and he was impotent and then angry. He had shut down his sexuality for years, and it could not return overnight. Why weren’t we more patient with each other? Why didn’t we try more tenderly?… But I wanted to know if I had succeeded in giving Yod a viable sexual capacity. And I’m fond of Yod. It was not an idea that would have occurred to me during the first two years of his existence, but he has become more and more of a person and a presence as time has gone on. As he learned to master his vast store of information and his hugely different programming segments, he began to define his own desires, opinions, even values. He was emerging as an attractive entity, and I thought how wicked and delightful it would be to see what might happen.

Of course Yod has no prejudice against a woman because of age. He is not breaking any Oedipal taboos, for he was not born of woman. He was not born at all, and he does not sully his desire with fear or mistrust of women the way men raised by women do. He was delighted to be able to fulfil his programming, and he discovered he liked sex better than almost anything. Wrinkles, infirmities meant nothing to him. He wore me out. It was I who finally called a halt, by the gentle process (in order not to hurt Yod’s feelings, because he has them in abundance) of allowing Avram to guess what was going on.

Why did I stop it? A fatigue with the flesh. It was a lovely way to end my sex life, for I found that not only were the physical demands and the drain on my energy considerable, but I simply did not want to put that much into a relationship with any lover, not even a cyborg programmed by me myself to satisfy. In many ways Yod was dear and even relaxing, without all the neuroses and complications of any human male; but he is still quite demanding in his own way, and my solitude and my energy are precious to me.

I did not know I was ready to relinquish that part of my life, for I had always believed that as long as I lived, I would be interested in love; in making love. My identity was fused with the notion of conquest, perhaps. From the time I was a young girl, all through womanhood, I was never beautiful; I was considered so by many men, never by any woman. It was a fleshy, sensual, highly charged sexuality I emitted, a focused desire full of ripples and zing. It worked. It was honest.

Further, I always thought that my creativity was linked, somewhere at that point where the spine blooms into the strange cauliflower of the brain, to my sexuality, so that they fed and stoked each other. Yet since I passed sixty, I have been twice as creative, longer-sighted, more daring, building on a grand scale more dazzling webs.

Yod offered his friendship, his attention, his pure scalding luminous desire, almost too bright to endure, his unpractised bountiful tenderness, his endless desire to please, and I received all those gifts as I had already given him my own presents, now deeply embedded in his being. I came to realize there is a time when one lets go. That dying has already slowly begun, at this time when, until the attack, I have never been as creative and as strong in my work. I saw myself as a tree giving all its energy into its fruiting. Now I am cut down.

Shira is troubled about me, and I strive to respond, but I feel as if all my nerve endings are charred. How shall I tell stories, when I cannot find myself? I have no centre. I am a devastation. I am afraid, all through my mind and body, my imagination tainted and permeated by fear. Despair. Stasis. Myself broken in my bed. We have come full circle and stop.

I must break out of this loop of despair. The only direction is in and down. The descent to the chariot, the early Jewish mystics called it. I will begin with breathing exercises, I will begin with my old meditation sequences, the chants that I used to centre myself that year of passion just before Riva brought me the baby Shira. Mohatela the Lion had coaxed me to Johannesburg when he was attempting to undermine the multis of the world with gold and diamonds, to shake loose the grasp of Europe and Asia on Africa, and I was designing systems for him and in love with him and his vision. I spent a year and a half away from Tikva, till the Lion was cut down before me, assassinated as he spoke to the world ― in my nostrils, singeing my sinuses and my throat, the smoke of his flesh as they burned him down. I came home scarcely remembering who I had been. My world felt empty of purpose. Then I gathered the fragments of myself, then I found within me a fire and a discipline that could weld them back together. That winter Riva arrived with a month-old girl. “Here, this is for you.”

After all these years, I can still hear his voice if I permit it. How often the powers that rule cut down the best, pay for their murder and return their energy to dust, and then later comes another, more fanatical, more violent, one who does it all with power and without beauty. There are losses so great that personal mourning feels almost beside the point, and you simply keep it to yourself and try not even to remember. Others to whom he belonged carried out the public mourning and the public remembering. The Lion is history, and that we loved each other in quiet hours and that once he cried in my arms can matter little to anyone but me. That is a story in which I do not even belong, the story of his people’s freedom.

Before Riva arrived with Shira, I saved myself from despair. Now perhaps I will chase the most beautiful chimera of all through all the spinning worlds of the mind until the blinding atmosphere of the self thins out. Then at that level of consummate darkness and utter cold, will I find that burning light I have once or twice glimpsed? Beyond appetite and affection and desire, beyond opinion and belief and commitment, the conscious point of emanation. That is the adventure left to what is left of me.