He, She and It
“AN ALLEGORICAL TOUR DE FORCE.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion, and innate feminism.”
A
DRIENNE
R
ICH
“A literary version of future shock … To read it is to be caught up in the sweep of Piercy’s mind, the range of her heart, the exuberance of her vision.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Although there is plenty of action in this novel, what Piercy gives us is more a philosophical romance, and the story she tells is at once new and old.… Vividly drawn … The value in Piercy’s book lies … in what happens to the people.”
Chicago Tribune
“Marge Piercy confronts large issues in this novel: the social consequences of creating anthropomorphic cyborgs, the dynamics of programming both humans and machines, the ethical question of our control of machines that might feel as well as think.”
The New York Times Book Review
“PIERCY DAZZLES.”
Booklist
“Exciting, intelligent and wonderfully well written … Elegantly constructed and thoroughly involving … Piercy is exploring the question of what makes humans human.”
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Marge Piercy has written what may be her best novel yet, and this is high praise indeed.… Her new book stretches a fictional tightrope between past and present, and is really two books in one: a novel set in the future and a tale of Prague in 1600. The interwoven, parallel stories are about the power of words to create a reality, and more specifically about the ancient human desire to create intelligent life in our own form.… It’s a touching love story and a gripping adventure tale.… Stories are important, and Piercy has written an important story.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Vivid, detailed and complex, the world Piercy has created for Shira is fascinating.… Succeeds as a brilliantly elaborate adventure.”
Detroit Free Press
“ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR …
Piercy adds family and religious values to the cyberpunk core of multinational corporations and information pirates.… Marvelous.”
The Denver Post
“[A] diverting tale … Piercy explores a world where information has become a commodity more precious than gold.… [Her] vivid future world remains transcendent.”
Publishers Weekly
“Gripping … A resonant evocation of love found and lost … An engaging story.”
The Kirkus
Reviews
“The plot zooms to a page-turning climax.”
Library Journal
By Marge Piercy:
Fiction
GOING DOWN FAST
*
DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP
*
SMALL CHANGES
*
WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
*
THE HIGH COST OF LIVING
*
VIDA
*
BRAIDED LIVES
*
FLY AWAY HOME
*
GONE TO SOLDIERS
*
SUMMER PEOPLE
*
HE, SHE AND IT
*
THE LONGINGS OF WOMEN
*
CITY OF DARKNESS, CITY OF LIGHT
STORM TIDE
THREE WOMEN
Poetry
BREAKING CAMP
HARD LOVING
4-TELLING (with Emma Jarrett, Dick Lourie, and Bob Hershon)
TO BE OF USE
LIVING IN THE OPEN
THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING
THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE
CIRCLES ON THE WATER: SELECTED POEMS
STONE, PAPER, KNIFE
MY MOTHER’S BODY
AVAILABLE LIGHT
MARS AND HER CHILDREN
WHAT ARE BIG GIRLS MADE OF?
EARLY GRRRL
COLORS PASSING THROUGH US
Play
THE LAST WHITE CLASS
(Coauthored with Ira Wood)
Essays
PARTI-COLORED BLOCKS FOR A QUILT
(Poets on Poetry Series)
*
Published by Fawcett Books
A Fawcett Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1991 by Middlemarsh, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Fawcett Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher,
Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-52726
eISBN: 978-0-307-77522-1
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
v3.1
to the memory of Primo Levi
His books were important to me.
I miss his presence in the world.
Contents
1 / Shira: In the Corporate Fortress
2 / Shira: The Color of Old Blood
3 / Malkah: Malkah Tells Yod a Bedtime Story
4 / Shira: Through the Burning Labyrinth
5 / Shira: Fifteen Years Before: The Day of Alef
6 / Shira: We Know Too Much and Too Little
8 / Shira: How Shall I Address You?
9 / Shira: Revising the Family Album
10 / Malkah: Was This a Good Thing to Do?
13 / Malkah: A Double Midwiving
14 / Shira: By the Light of the Unyellow Moon
17 / Shira: The Son of Frankenstein
18 / Shira: To Die in the Base
19 / Malkah: Malkah’s Bed Song
21 / Malkah: One Door Opens and One Door Closes
23 / Shira: Wine in the Middle of the Night
24 / Malkah: Vignettes in the Daily Life of a Golem
25 / Shira: Where the Elite Meet
27 / Malkah: A Burning Curiosity
28 / Shira: How Can We Tell the Dancer from the Dance?
29 / Shira: How Much Would You Mind?
30 / Malkah: The Robber’s Mistake
31 / Shira: The Shape-Shifters
32 / Shira: Flashes and Dangerous Structure
33 / Malkah: Voices and Visions at Dawn
34 / Shira: One Lazarus, Two Lazarus
35 / Shira: Living with the Undead
36 / Malkah: The Maharal Embattled
38 / Shira: A Matter of Some Finality
39 / Malkah: The Battle at the Gates
40 / Shira: In Which a Log Is Split
41 / Shira: True Confessions and Public Turmoil
42 / Malkah: The Work of the Shadchen
43 / Shira: Bright Steadfast Star
45 / Malkah: The Return of Joseph
46 / Shira: The Task of Samson
48 / Malkah: Following After Chava
ONE
In the Corporate Fortress
Josh, Shira’s ex-husband, sat immediately in front of her in the Hall of Domestic Justice as they faced the view screen, awaiting the verdict on the custody of Ari, their son. A bead of sweat slid down the furrow of his spine—he wore a backless business suit, white for the formality of the occasion, very like her own—and it was hard even now to keep from delicately brushing his back with her scarf to dry it. The Yakamura-Stichen dome in the Nebraska desert was conditioned, of course, or they would all be dead, but it was winter now and the temperature was allowed to rise naturally to thirty Celsius in the afternoon as the sun heated the immense dome enclosing the corporate enclave. Her hands were sweating too, but from nervousness. She had grown up in a natural place and retained the ability to endure more heat than most Y-S gruds. She kept telling herself she had nothing to fear, but her stomach was clenched hard and she caught herself licking her lips again and again. Every time she called up time on her internal clock and read it in the corner of her cornea, it was at most a minute later than when last she had evoked it.
The room glittered in black and white marble, higher than wide and engineered to intimidate, Shira knew from her psychoengineering background. Her field was the interface between people and the large artificial intelligences that formed the Base of each corporation and every other information-producing and information-eating entity in the world, as well as the information utility called the Network, which connected everyone. But she had enough psychological background to recognize the intent of the chamber where with their assigned lawyers they sat upright and rigid as tuning forks for the blow that would set them quivering into sound. Perched around them were similar groups in waiting: breaches of marriage contract, custody cases, complaints of noncompliance and abuse, each group staring at the blank view screen. From time to time a face appeared, one of those ideal, surgically created Y-S faces—blond hair, blue eyes with epicanthic folds, painted
brows like Hokusai brush strokes, aquiline nose, dark golden complexion. It would announce a verdict, and then a group would swirl around itself, rise and go, some beaming, some grim-faced, some weeping.
She should not be as frightened as she was. She was a techie like Josh, not a day laborer; she had rights. Her hands incubated damp patches on her thighs. She hoped their verdict would be announced soon. She had to pick up Ari at the midlevel-tech day care center in forty-five minutes, some twenty minutes’ glide from the official sector. She did not want him waiting, frightened. He was only two years and five months, and she simply could not make him understand: Don’t worry, Mommy may be a little late. It was her fault, insisting on the divorce in December, for ever since, Ari had been skittish; and Josh bitter, furious. Twice as alive. If he had loosed in their marriage the passion her leaving had provoked, they might have had a chance together. He fought her with full energy and intelligence, as she had wanted to be loved.
Everything was her fault. She should never have married Josh. She had been passionately in love only once in her life, too young, and never again; but if she had not married Josh, she would not have had Ari. Oh, she felt guilty all right as she looked at Josh’s narrow back, the deep groove of his spine, vulnerable, bent slightly forward as if some chill wind blew only on him. She had promised to love him, she had tried to love him, but the relationship had felt thin and incomplete.
During their courtship, she had thought he was beginning to learn to talk to her, to respond more sensually and directly. In the born-again Shintoism of Y-S, they were both marranos, a term borrowed from the Spanish Jews under the Inquisition who had pretended to be Christian to survive. Y-S followed a form of revivalist Shinto, Shinto grafted with Christian practices such as baptism and confession. Marranos in contemporary usage were Jews who worked for multis and went to church or mosque, paid lip service and practiced Judaism secretly at home. All multis had their official religion as part of the corporate culture, and all gruds had to go through the motions. Like Shira, Josh had the habit of lighting candles privately on Friday night, of saying the prayers, of keeping the holidays. It had seemed rational for them to marry. He had been at Y-S for ten years. She had come straight from graduate school, at twenty-three. Y-S had outbid the other multis for her in Edinburgh—like most of the brightest students in Norika, the area that had been the U.S. and Canada, she had gone to
school in the affluent quadrant of Europa—so she had had no choice but to come here. She had been lonely, unused to the strict and protocol-hedged hierarchy of Y-S. She had grown up in the free town of Tikva, accustomed to warm friendships with women, to men who were her pals. Here she was desperately lonely and constantly in minor trouble. Often she wondered if her troubles were caused by the particular corporate culture of Y-S, or if it would be the same in any multi enclave. There were twenty-three great multis that divided the world among them, enclaves on every continent and on space platforms. Among them they wielded power and enforced the corporate peace: raids, assassinations, skirmishes, but no wars since the Two Week War in 2017.