He, She and It (14 page)

“Malkah told me about that,” Avram said. “It’s disgraceful. But it brought you here, didn’t it?”

“It brought me here.” In a moment of intense despair, she turned away from both of them. When she was growing up, Avram had never felt to her like a real parent, like the fathers of her friends, but rather he was brilliant, strange, armored. She had never had a father. She had been determined that her child should have both parents, in the old-fashioned way. So much for that fantasy. Now the two of them were regarding her with identical bright curiosity, cold, intense but remote: the gaze of a hunting hawk. Still, if Yod was one tenth as intelligent as Avram rashly claimed, her work might prove interesting for a while. It would pass the time; it would occupy her. When she was dug in a bit, she could start looking for real work, with a new multi. She had two years to endure; two years in which to reposition herself to fight for Ari when he came back to earth again.

NINE

Revising the Family Album

Shira was pleasantly surprised that Malkah welcomed her with a minimum of reproach. She had forgotten how many friends Malkah had, other women coming by with little presents, with stories, with problems, with gossip. She had thought of her grandmother as living alone, but Malkah was seldom alone unless she wished to be—and she did value her privacy. Malkah also engaged in elaborate group correspondences and played games inside the Net. Shira would see Malkah sitting in the filtered sun of the courtyard or under the peach tree in her favorite chair, eyes closed or half closed, and she would think the old woman was dozing until she realized Malkah was accessing the Net, was plugged in and roaming; or working in the Base, constructing the elaborate chimeras that were one of the export products of Tikva, sold to multi and town Bases for protection.

“I have all these flirtations going,” Malkah said. “No one can see me unless I want them to.”

“So you don’t tell them your age?”

“Some I tell one thing, some another. Most don’t ask. It’s the congress of minds, not bodies.”

“So you have mental boyfriends.”

“Girlfriends too. Have you never changed your sex, not even for an evening, Shira? I have a woman friend I court in Foxdale, who thinks I am a man of forty-two. She would kill me if she met me, enemy to enemy, but in the interstices of the Net, we play together.”

“With Ari, I played constantly. I was a child again.” Shira held herself across her breasts. “A mother without her child is a cart trying to run on three wheels,” she said to Malkah, who was sitting in her favorite deep chair, staring at Shira with a satisfied expression.

“So a three-wheeled cart is a wheelbarrow, and it works perfectly well. You’ll get your son back. We will beat them in the end. In the meantime, you have the precious family fertility. Have another.”

“I don’t want another.” She had tried again last night to reach him through the Net, but once again the call had been refused. “I want Ari.”

“Did you ever consider having a child with your dybbuk?”

Shira knew at once that Malkah meant Gadi. “Oh, is Gadi dead that his spirit should possess me?”

“He’s dead the same way you are, my Shira. He can’t commit to any woman, and you can’t really love any other man.”

Shira winced. Harsh words of denial filled her mouth, and then she swallowed them. “Maybe the worst fate for a woman is getting the man she wants too early. We couldn’t stay together—we were children. But I can’t belong to anybody else, not the way I was with him.”

“I never wanted to belong to anybody. I only wanted to borrow them for a while, for the fun of it, the tenderness, some laughs.”

“How many lovers have you had?”

Malkah’s eyes skimmed over. She was silent for a moment. “I don’t know. I haven’t counted them in years. I remember when I was much younger, I would go to sleep on nights when I had insomnia by counting them. And I would never finish because I would be trying to figure if that one I could barely remember was really my lover or not. I insisted I do it chronologically, so when I realized I had left someone out, I had to go back to the beginning. It always worked to put me to sleep.”

She stared at her grandmother, trying to read in the squat woman with the braids wound round her head, a few hairs escaping at the nape and over the ears, a femme fatale who could not count her lovers. “Malkah, I’ve only had five. Altogether.”

Malkah laughed and then covered her mouth, looking embarrassed. “I have to say, I had five before I was twenty. I always was curious about the taste of a new man, how he would be. I wanted to bite into him.”

She was startled and a little shocked that her grandmother was speaking to her so frankly. Perhaps now that she had been married and had a baby, Malkah viewed her more as an equal. “So how many were there?” she pressed. “Twenty? Thirty? Two hundred?”

“Around fifty, I would guess. I’d have to add them up. I still have insomnia, but now I tell myself stories instead of counting men.”

“But so many … Did you chase them? Did you go up and proposition them?”

Malkah laughed. “I was never a beauty. You’re far prettier than I ever was. But I had a good body and a roving eye. They always came after me when I wanted them to.… Avram was quite a layabout before he fell in love with Sara, you know. Before he went off with her to California.”

“Avram? I don’t believe it.” No, she couldn’t. Cold, driven.

“He was simply gorgeous as a young man. I have to say when I look at Gadi, I see Avram the way he was.”

“You never had anything to do with Avram, tell me you didn’t.”

“I can tell you I didn’t. But I did. For all of one summer we used to meet in the vineyard and spread a blanket hidden between the vines. After he met Sara, he fell violently in love with her. I don’t think he ever looked at another woman.”

He has looked at me, Shira thought with some distaste. He is always looking at my body.

“When things withered between them because of her illness, I think sex died within him. Some people go on wanting it as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out. I think they’re fools.” Malkah nodded vigorously for emphasis. “I’m full of joy that you’re home with me, Shira. It’s making me babble nonsense.”

“It’s going to be different between us now, isn’t it?”

“Why should everything remain the same?” Malkah dragged her chair closer and leaned toward Shira, her brows raised. “So what did you think of Yod?”

“Avram is making outlandish claims for its intelligence and capacities.”

“Yod is surprising. But naive. Oy, really naive. Your job is to teach him how to function with people. With his strength and intellect, he could do a great deal of damage without meaning to if he’s not properly educated. I’m responsible for his interpersonal programming, but he’s had no opportunity to try out those capacities.”

“Educating a machine is not a concept that makes a great deal of sense to me. His— Now you’ve got me doing it. Call it ‘he.’ ”

“He is a person, Shira. Not a human person, but a person.”

“After a lifetime of working with artificial intelligence, how can you anthropomorphize a cyborg? You might as well believe the house is really a woman, the way little kids do. Or name your cleaning robot and talk to it. It’s appropriate for a little boy like Ari to think his koala robot is a live pet and form an emotional attachment to it, but we’re supposed to be adults.”

“The great whales—we had just about killed off the last of them before we began to translate their epic and lyric poetry. Were they people? Were the apes who learned to communicate in sign language intelligent beings? Was Hermes a real presence?”

“He had a personality, certainly. A strong one. I felt so bad when you wrote me about him dying.”

“He was an old cat, Shira. He lived to be twenty. In the end he had a brain tumor and he was too weak to operate on again.”

“Malkah, you’ve worked with computers all your life. A good heuristical program can enable an artificial intelligence to make valid plans and plot strategy and tactics, but to modify goals or behavior, you must change the programming.”

“With the Net and Base AIs, the type of programming and the extent of independence permitted are strictly limited. Avram has gone beyond that, and so, my dear one, have I. I consider Yod a person. I enjoy his company.” Malkah gave her such a wicked grin that Shira was sure that her grandmother was putting her on. “Now that I am no longer a responsible adult raising a child, I can be reckless and wanton. There are some wild cards in his programming. Some even Avram has no idea are there.”

“Malkah, you’re trying to trick me into doing this job. Why? Why don’t you socialize it yourself?” Shira’s forehead crinkled with suspicion.

“I’ve given Yod what I have to give him. Moreover, I’ve given you everything I had to give, Shira.” Malkah sighed, resting her hands on her knees. She looked almost grim. “Now that you are grown and have suffered a few blows, it may be your mother has something to give you.”

“My mother? Riva?” Shira was startled and a little resentful. “I haven’t seen her since I went to college. We don’t even talk on the Net.”

“She may be coming here. Unclear as yet but possible.”

“Isn’t she with Alharadek? Why would they send her here?”

“She’s not with them.” Malkah spoke with an irritating air of evasion.

“Is she coming because she expects to get Ari? Or to blame me for him?”

“No, no! I suspect you might find her an interesting woman, Shira. But let’s see what happens. Don’t talk about it to anyone.”

“Why not? What’s the mystery? Afraid another multi will kidnap her?”

“Oh, she’s wanted all right. But not for hiring.”

“You sound as if there’s a price on her head.”

Malkah nodded. “Riva is an information pirate, Shira. She finds hidden knowledge and liberates it.”

“Riva?” Shira’s memories of her mother were few. When she was little, her mother had come often. Then when she was bought by Alhadarek, she was transferred to Cape Town and they saw her only once a year, on Shira’s or on Malkah’s birthday. Her mother had sent regrets to her wedding. Shira had not seen Riva in ten years. Riva was a few inches taller than they were, but basically Shira remembered her as a fussy, rather fuzzy woman who always came with many presents, never wrapped, secreted in her luggage. That such a woman could be an information pirate was not credible. A certain amount of industrial espionage was part of the system, multi vs. multi, but the pirates were total outsiders, renegades, the standard villains in stimmies. First the cyborg was a person, and now this! Malkah was either teasing her or growing senile and no longer able to distinguish fantasy from reality.

Malkah grinned. “I’m not crazy, Shira. Look, I’ll show you.”

Shira followed her grandmother to the main terminal. Everyone in town took turns at guard duty, and in time of trouble, everyone bore, illegally, what few arms they had. Security information was open to all. Anyone could access that Net file, and Malkah did. While Shira was still brooding over Malkah’s mental condition, a brief synopsis of the crimes of Riva Shipman appeared on the screen along with a warning about the dangers she posed to the established corporate order. She had infiltrated and pillaged the Bases of half the great multis. She was held responsible for the failure of the allevium market: allevium had proved effective against the newest form of the kisrami plague—the disease that had killed Malkah’s own mother. Riva apparently had stolen the drug formula and inserted it in the Net for anyone to use. Every little region had begun manufacturing its own remedy.

“How long have you known about my mother?”

“I’ve known her since she was born, you know,” Malkah said with the same wicked teasing grin. “I’ve been aware of what she was doing for years.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“How would it have helped you to know?”

“How did it help me not to know?”

“It made you feel safer. It gave you leave to choose your own way.”

“Now I’ll always wonder if one of the reasons Y-S devalued me was because Riva is considered a dangerous criminal.”

“Not unlikely. Although we never have open contact between us. I suspect we might not even recognize her when she comes—if she comes.”

“Why do you think she might come now? Did she mean to come because she wanted Ari?”

“No, love, she was never going to take Ari. Her life is too dangerous for any child to run with her. When you were a child, I made up that little myth about our family to explain to you why you were being raised by me instead of your mother. So you wouldn’t ask questions. Your mother is a political fugitive, and she lives by her wits and her connections.”

Shira found herself staring with slack jaw. “Are you telling me you weren’t raised by your grandmother, back to the tenth generation?”

“It was a good story, wasn’t it?” Malkah said proudly. “I thought you enjoyed it.”

But Shira felt as if all the rooms of her childhood had suddenly changed place. She was annoyed, even angry with Malkah for having lied to her, for making her feel foolish. In storybooks, bubehs made cookies and knitted; her grandmother danced like a prima ballerina through the webs of artificial intelligence and counted herself to sleep with worry beads of old lovers.