by Marge Piercy
As one who has been engaged in a secret project for the last two years, I identify with his hesitations. At any moment in history, certain directions are forbidden that lie open to the inquiring mind and the experimental hand. Not always is the knowledge forbidden because dangerous: governments will spend billions on weapons and forbid small sects the peyote of their ecstasy. What we are forbidden to know can be—or seem—what we most need to know.
Further, for a human being to make another is to usurp the power of ha-Shem, to risk frightening self-aggrandizement. It is to push yourself beyond the human. It is dangerous to the soul, dangerous to the world. As soon as the mind conceives of a possibility, it wants the possible to be actualized. It wants to be doing, no matter what the cost or the damage. The Maharal is preconsciously aware of human frailty. He does not sleep and scarcely drinks a little water. He cannot decide wherein lies the correct path: is his vision from ha-Shem or from his own ego, his desire to prove himself as learned, as holy, as powerful as the rabbis before him who had created golems?
The Maharal goes on debating inside himself for an entire week whether the vision that had come to him is a temptation or true instruction, a real mitzvah to be carried out. He wavers. Never before has such a febrile indecision burned him. He is afraid to act. He keeps finding reasons to preserve his skepticism.
Once years ago I met my daughter Riva secretly in the depths of the Glop, that jammed fetid slum where most people live. She spoke to me then, huddled in that loft full of damaged and abandoned machinery, about the temptation of danger: how sometimes the near impossibility of carrying out an action makes it irresistible. She must do it because she cannot do it, because it is both forbidden and held to be unachievable. That was when she began to move from pure data piracy toward something more political and even more dangerous. It was then she began her crusade of liberating information from the multis. The Maharal, lying awake as I lie awake, is fearful, as afraid of the remedy he imagines risking his life to carry out as he is afraid of the danger gathering for those who live in his care. Unable to decide, he lies supine to the night and the event, awaiting a further sign.
FOUR
Through the Burning Labyrinth
On April Fools’ Day, Shira, incongruous in her backless suit, joined the hundred thousand day laborers taking the eastbound tube. The escalators to the tube station were twelve across right outside the dome, where the blast of five o’clock heat leaned its scorching weight on her as she shuffled in line. She was wearing a white suit because she had had to check out of Y-S officially. Inbound night workers were lined up out in the still dangerous late sun to pass into the dome by palming the ID plates, but there was no ID required to leave. If you wanted to pass out of safety into hell, it was your business. No one could walk away into the Nebraska desert.
Shira was taking the tube across the country, jammed in a hot crowded car. She only hoped her luggage would arrive eventually, but the chances were, thieves would grab it en route. Her hands clutched the harness holding her into her seat. The tube car was windowless, as there was nothing whatsoever to see underground. She traveled for two hours before she changed at Chicago; she spent the night locked in an eight-by-six cube in the Chicago tube station, for she’d never make it safely across the Glop after dark.
The next morning she had two more hours to Boston. She did not want to think about Ari on a platform one third of the way to the moon with his father. Crying? Still wondering where she was, why she had not come, if she would ever come for him? She felt torn open. Would Josh watch out for early signs of ear infection? She had tried to call Pacifica, but Josh had refused a link.
She could not imagine what it would be like working with Avram, she could not imagine what it would be like returning to live with her grandmother. She had left home at seventeen, and a week was the longest she had visited since. Then she had been delivered from corporate enclave to free town by zipplane, from total fortress security to fragile peace in just over an hour, avoiding the densely inhabited slum of the Glop. Now her life felt like a crystalline structure shattered into bright dangerous shards that left her bleeding. Everything she had worked to create and sustain, everything into which she had poured her perhaps too abundant energy—her marriage, Ari, her work—was smashed or stolen from her. The temperature in the tube hovered near forty. She gasped for breath in the bad air.
Shira stumbled out of the tube exhausted and suffering from lack of oxygen. The small of her back hurt, and her sinuses burned. She had a headache that blistered her skull. Here she was in the Glop and there was no time to worry about small pain if she was to stay alive and intact. She pulled over her backless business suit the thin black covering almost all women and old people and many men wore in the streets. It covered age, class, sex, and made all look roughly the same size. She had not worn it in her years at Y-S, for there were no gangs in the multi enclaves. She pulled on metal woven gloves to cover her hands, though she was perfectly aware that although they might discourage a casual slasher with only a sticker, any real hand-hacker could laser right through the protective mesh. If only she could wear a sign indicating how low her credit was, she would be safe. Her hand was almost worthless today. Malkah would have transferred enough to help her home; otherwise she was flat.
Day workers and gang niños and the unemployed lived in the Glop—the great majority of people on the continent. Most of the remainder were citizens of some multi enclave. The free towns were exceptions, as were Rural Zones. Most people who lived in free towns like the one she had grown up in could have sold themselves to a multi directly, instead of contracting for specific jobs, but elected to stay outside the enclaves because of some personal choice: a minority religion, a sexual preference not condoned by a particular multi, perhaps simply an archaic desire for freedom.
The garment smelled stale as it billowed about her. It had deteriorated during its years of lying folded in the bottom of a storage cube, but she felt immediately safer in it as she joined the crowd on the movers, most wearing black cover-ups so they appeared like sinister nuns. She fumbled for her filter mask as she reached the upper levels of the station. Goggles, mask, cover-up, cooler: she had everything she needed to make herself ready for the street, helped by an edge of amphetamine from the capsule she stopped to buy from a vendor and popped as the mover chugged her along, once she had checked its content with her pocket scanner. It honed her paranoia enough to help her navigate the labyrinthine station where hundreds camped and slept in the filthy decaying passages that mumbled day and night of distant voices, muffled screams, drumming, zak music, running sewage, the hiss of leaking coolant. In some of the passages stores sold clothing, vat food, fast food, stimmies and spikes. Spikes were outlawed in the Y-S enclave. They were more vivid than stimmies. Instead of experiencing what an actor saw, felt, touched, was touched by, the user was projected into the drama and the sensations were more powerful—so she had heard. People told of kids found dead who had replayed favorite adventure or porn scenes until they starved to death.
Few multis permitted recreational drugs, unless issued by the company. In the Glop, every invented drug was sold by street vendors. In other corridors, vendors were hawking all the jetsam of the times: trash carted from the enclaves, junk of the last century turned into furniture, clothing, weapons, the wired-up skeletons of extinct exotica like robins and warblers, cannibalized parts built into makeshift robots. She noticed a knife made of an organic-based resin that would not show up on detection devices.
“How much betty for the sticker?”
“For you, duke?” Behind the metal mask, bloodshot eyes glittered. She winced. Duke was someone with money. She could not talk the Glop talk, and at once they identified her as a grud, a multi employee. “Cuarenta dos. Forty-two. This a sticker don’t cry under rays.”
“Treinta. Thirty.” She let the knife drop back into the display.
They bargained ritually for another five minutes. She paid thirty-six. He had a regular
credit box. Stripping the glove, she inserted her hand gingerly. He had his box rigged so that instead of just the amount and approval, her balance appeared.
“Hey, duke, hard times, eh? Flat, blat like a squashed cat. You sound como young meat. I run a good clean cheese shop—”
She slid the knife into the deep seam of her sleeve and strode on. Hot, it was hot, it was hot. Her brain was melting with the toxic fumes. She was both hungry and thirsty. She still had some water, and that would have to last her. She had no idea what diseases were running through the Glop at the moment, but there were always new types of typhoid and hepatitis, new viral scourges still colonizing from the tropics. She would simply have to endure her hunger. It did not do to imagine what the burgers or sushi were made of, animal, vegetable, mineral. Whether they had been alive in their previous incarnations or not, they were now surely swarming with local protozoa and bacteria. The smells of the cooking made her salivate, but she never slowed her pace. Walk fast but never trot. Old street rule. Some of the food was being charbroiled on hibachis or barbecue grills, some was being cooked on laser burners, some was simply turning over a fire built on the floor of the ancient building complex, the tunnels that had once been a subway system. Parts of the old system were flooded; the rest was occupied.
Most of the vendors, too, squatted in black cover-ups, although gang members distinguished themselves by their uniforms, paint, tattoos, by daring to show their arms, their legs, their faces and chests. They wore weapons visibly, everything from knives to laser rifles; officially weapons were outlawed, but the only laws that held here were turf laws of the gangs who controlled a piece of the Glop. The gangs met in raids, in treaty powwows, uneasily in public markets and common areas such as the tube stations, the clinics.
Sharp smell of urine and shit. A body. No, he was still alive. Around the body with its chest torn open and the arterial blood spurting out, stood a chanting circle of gang niños, all wearing cutoff jackets in purple and gold with a snarling rat emblazoned on the back, lightning shooting from his eyes, body pulsating, in constant movement caught in midleap, over and over again. They were chanting their killing song. She paused, kept moving. She could be lying there five minutes later. Everywhere the signs of two gangs warred, lasered into the pavement, splashed on the walls. Disputed turf was dangerous territory, a war zone.
She saw a stairway ahead. A toll had been set up across it, manned by a group dressed like the downed kid. They had an old jury-rigged hand box, and the line shuffled past it. She read off the stairway tolls and passed through their security, paid and climbed out into the raw. Parts of the Glop were under domes, but the system had not been completed before government stopped functioning. There were still elections, every two years, but they were just highly bet-on sporting events. All politicians did was run for office. Every quadrant was managed by the remains of the old UN, the eco-police. After the two billion died in the Great Famine and the plagues, they had authority over earth, water, air outside domes and wraps. Otherwise the multis ruled their enclaves, the free towns defended themselves as they could, and the Glop rotted under the poisonous sky, ruled by feuding gangs and overlords.
Outside, she adjusted her goggles and looked for transport. Short-distance pedicabs would not get her out of the Glop. She was near the northern fade-out. She needed a float car for hire. She heard a warning high pitch and threw herself into a building mouth before the flotilla of dust riders came tearing through the plaza in a blur of speed and flashing metal. Not everyone was quick enough. Blood sprayed out of the dust cloud. When they had passed, parts of two bodies were strewn across the broken pavement. She made her way past a gang fight of dogs quarreling over the flesh, toward the float cars tethered at the north end of the plaza. A cargo hold had pulled up on the east end of the plaza, and a recorded voice was calling for harvesters and vat boys. Out of the crumbling buildings, densely occupied to the last cubicle, a crowd of unemployed pushed toward the hold.
At the float car enclosure she put her hand into the box, and the monitor let her enter. The car boss set the coordinates. If she tried to change them, the car would simply land. When she arrived, it would automatically return. She paid in advance. Her credit was running low, but she hoped to be home in an hour. The float car ran on a cushion of air, following the old broken roads. It could fly for brief periods at a low altitude, frequently necessary to cross a river or a ravine where a bridge had collapsed. It was solar powered, quiet and not particularly fast. It could also move over water, which was important because when you had not taken a route in a while, you never knew how the ocean and estuaries might have advanced over the land, flooding low-lying sections. What had been terra firma three years before might be under the waves, for with the polar caps rapidly melting, the oceans rose and rose. Float cars were vehicles of the multi gruds and the free towns. Fast tanks moved as well over broken terrain, and they were armored. Corporate travel was usually by zip.
Driving a hired float car was undemanding. She need not do anything except steer it around or over obstacles. It had the coordinates of her destination and proceeded on its own. Overhead a vast helix of vultures circled. They had evolved to withstand UV radiation. They could live in the raw, as could most bugs, as could gulls and rats and raccoons. Not people. Not songbirds, all dead, so the insects flourished and moved in waves over the land, eating the hills to desert. The hills were deeply eroded. Scrub trees like pitch pine, wild cherry and bear oak had replaced sugar maples and white pines. Brambles and multiflora rose grew in impenetrable thickets she detoured around.
The car automatically cut east, toward the ocean, to miss the near corner of the Cybernaut enclave. Multis did not permit private or hired cars to pass through. Once the car had detoured the enclave with its green parklands under the dome, its coruscating city, she came into the area of free towns bordering the ocean. The road she was following ran straight into the sea, for low-lying coastal towns had been destroyed in the Great Hurricane of ’29. The wrap on St. Marystown glistened under the amber sun. She was close enough to the waves to smell petroleum and salt. Now she could see rising from the waters the hill on which her own town, Tikva, was built, its wrap floating over it on its supports like a shining cloud. She steered the car ashore and up the hill toward Tikva. She put down before the gate that faced the sea, got out and let the car turn and veer off.
She stood with her pack outside the gate and only then remembered to take off the black cover-up. Nothing remained but to return where she had been nurtured as a child. Would it serve as a safe haven? Gadi might still be here. They were friends by electronic transmission, but Gadi in the flesh was more than she wanted to face. She could probably slip into town, as she used to do with Gadi when she was growing up, but she had no reason to. Slowly she approached the monitor. Would it still recognize her hand print? It did. The male voice that was the town computer greeted her by name. “Shira, Malkah Shipman expects you. Avram Stein expects you. Welcome.”
She was embarrassed to find her eyes flushed with tears as she stuffed the cover-up into her shoulder pack. She was glad a moment later she had not tried to slip in, because she met two young people on guard duty. As official security, they bore dart guns with paralyzing capability. They had heard the monitor greet her and nodded her by. This must be a tense period, for there to be human guards on the perimeter. The free towns were not supposed to be able to buy laser weapons, although from the black market they sometimes did. They relied on shock or tranquilizers mostly, or on sonic weapons.
Walking under a wrap was different from being under a dome. The wrap was more permeable to light and weather; basically it shielded from UV. Inside temperature was only a little higher than outside. The perimeters were monitored by computer; a person crossing the barrier would set off an alarm. The gates, with recognition plates, faced each cardinal direction. When a hurricane struck, as it often did nowadays, the wrap could be furled to protect it. Basically the free towns had sprung up along the ocean be
cause such a location was vulnerable and considered dangerous; no multi would risk inundation. The free towns flourished on that unclaimed margin.
Shira loitered through the streets. The buildings were all different, although none could be higher than four stories here. Some houses were made of wood, some of brick, some of the new resins, some of polymers, some of stone. She was tickled by the consonances and dissonances—little Spanish haciendas, stern Greek Revival houses, shingled saltboxes, an imitation of Fernandez’ famous dancing house on its pedestal, jostled shoulders on the same block. After the uniformity of the Y-S enclave, the colors, the textures, the sounds and smells provoked her into a state of ecstasy until she found herself walking more and more slowly, her head whipping around like an idiot. Why had she ever left?
It was strange, too, to see things that were old, cracked, worn, houses that needed paint, a boarded-up window, a broken railing. People here carried out their own repairs in their own good time. Anarchic little plots of tulips and baby tomato plants, bean seedlings about to mount their poles lined the streets. At fourteen-thirty, almost everyone was at work. A robot cleaner puttered along the street, picking up the occasional bit of trash and sweeping madly. The sound of someone practicing violin, playing over and over a passage of Wieniawski, came through an open window. She wondered why that seemed startling until she realized that in Y-S, windows were not usually opened. The occasional passerby was casually dressed: open-throated shirts, pants, a full skirt, shorts, for the day was seasonably mild. She felt like a freak in her standard Y-S suit, now streaked with grime and soot. A couple passed her arguing loudly about somebody’s mother, their voices raised unself-consciously. Behind a hedge, a dog was barking at a rabbit in a hutch. In little yards, chickens were stalking about, and in one, speckled turkeys strutted. Ari would be crazy with excitement to see live animals. The smells assaulted her: animal smells, vegetable smells, the scent of yellow tulips, the heavier scent of narcissus, cooking odors, a tang of manure, the salty breath of the sea. Everything felt…unregulated. How unstimulated her senses had been all those Y-S years. How cold and inert that corporate Shira seemed as she felt herself loosening.
