He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  “I reprogrammed it. I can have any cast that comes through.”

  “Do I feel as good as those actresses?”

  He laughed. “Only you know how you feel. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “It’s not serious pain. Do you want to try again?”

  He had pushed about halfway in and they were kissing passionately when a loud noise broke them apart, startled. “What is it?” she asked softly.

  “Shh! Someone in the hall?” He leapt up and began dressing. After listening sharply—no one seemed to be up here, that wasn’t what had scared them—she jumped out of bed and reached for her things.

  Then they heard it again, someone screaming below. A great crash followed and then, unmistakably, the sound of an illegal laser weapon. Gadi flung open the door and ran for the stairway, never minding concealment now. She stopped only to get her shoes on, then chased after him still buttoning her shirt, closing the fly on her pants.

  No one was in the hall when Gadi opened the door from the attic. As he rushed toward the lab, she took the time to close it. She did not want Avram guessing how often Gadi and she used the top floor. Should she follow him or just slip out? Then she heard Gadi shout from down the hall and began to run to him. She remembered the sound of the weapon. She called out his name and ran faster. It had been relatively peaceful lately. She could remember learning in school about the last nasty little local war, in which almost a quarter of the town had been killed before Cybernaut imposed peace on the warring free towns, several of which supplied it with fish, seaweed, programs, chimeras, medicines from the sea. The multis insisted on peace.

  Gadi was not in the outer room, but had passed inside. Avram was working on a project for a multi, Olivacon. Unlike Malkah, who dealt with misinformation, pseudoprograms, falsified data, the creation of the structures that protected Bases by misdirection and were called as a class chimera (a term Malkah herself had invented thirty years before), Avram worked with artificial intelligence. He built defense systems to defeat penetration into a multi or town base; corporations were always raiding each other, and information pirates stole and sold data and systems. The easiest way to assassinate anyone was to catch them plugged in and burn them brain dead. However, what she saw when she ran toward Gadi’s voice through the next two rooms, to a part of the lab she had never entered, was Avram bending over his assistant, David, who was crumpled against the far wall. Another body lay on the floor, someone she had never seen before. David seemed to be unconscious, although his lids were fluttering. Gadi leaned uncertainly over his father, who was holding David, speaking to him. A bench and a rack of tools had been overturned and scattered amid madly blinking and buzzing instruments.

  She stopped over the body. He was dead, obviously. No. She stared. Part of his head had been shot open, but she saw no blood, no brains. It was a machine. It had been shot twice, once through the body, in the area of the human chest, and once through the head. A milky fluid leaked from it instead of blood. It seemed to be part machine and part created biological construct.

  David groaned and opened his eyes. Avram noticed Gadi and Shira for the first time. “What are you kids doing here?”

  “We heard screaming. And laser noise,” Gadi said. “Who is this guy?”

  “It’s a robot,” Shira said. She was shocked, because robots were always obviously mechanical, in the form of the machines they were replacing. Artificial intelligence was the province of bodiless computers, not of the robots that labored everywhere. Computer intelligences were vast, but robots had only enough intelligence to be programmed for simple functions: cleaning, repairing, mining, manufacturing.

  Avram let David droop against the wall and jumped to his feet, grabbing her arm. He was hurting her, but she was too frightened to complain. Avram had a shock of hair kept blazingly white. His fierce pale blue eyes glittered like chips of broken glass. “You didn’t see it.”

  “What’s going on?” Gadi said, stepping close to his father. “Shira didn’t do anything wrong. We heard the weapon. Where did you get it?”

  “That isn’t either of your business. None of this is. It’s simply an unsuccessful experiment. We’ll all forget about it.”

  “What’s wrong?” Shira frowned, trying to free her arm surreptitiously. Robots cleaned streets and the houses of those who could afford them, fixed everything from pipes to vehicles, did the general dirty work. Middle-class kids grew up with at least one toy robot, and rich kids had fancy ones to ride on or play with, but this was a strange humanoid robot.

  “Nothing,” Avram said. “This one cannot be fixed.”

  “Why did you destroy it?” Gadi asked. “Where did you get a weapon?”

  Only corporate security and the eco-police had legal weapons. Anybody else had to get arms on the extensive black market or seize them in raids.

  “David fell and hurt himself. It’s more important to get a medical team here than to stand around gossiping.” But what Avram did was to motion to Gadi and Shira to help him lift the robot onto the table, where he began rapidly dismantling it. It was much heavier than a person would have been. She had never seen a robot shaped like a person. It was illegal to make one that way, just as it was illegal to create robots with human-level intelligence. The top of the face had been crushed, but it had a human chin. Its surface felt like skin but drier. It was dead. No, a machine couldn’t die. Machines simply broke.

  Avram snapped off the left arm at the elbow and then at the shoulder, did the same to the right arm. “I’m sorry I sounded cross with you, Shira, but this is very important to me.”

  “I won’t tell anybody.” She was always trying to make Avram like her. Sometimes she thought he did, and sometimes he seemed to look right through her. Sometimes her very presence struck him into irritated anger.

  “Gadi, go for help now. Tell them David fell off a ladder and hit his head. Shira, you should leave. Malkah will be coming home. I want you to promise me you won’t tell any of this to Malkah.” His light eyes stared into hers.

  “I promise! I won’t say a word.”

  He swung back to fix her with a glare. “Good. Because if I hear that you’ve told this to Malkah or anyone else, you’re in trouble with me. I’ll make sure you and Gadi have nothing to do with each other, and I mean nothing. I’ll send him away to school.” Avram ushered them to the stairs down.

  Avram was always threatening to send Gadi to a strict school that was supposed to teach him discipline. Shira nodded her head fervently to signal agreement. When Avram went on glaring, she said, “I won’t say a word to anyone, I promise. I don’t understand anyhow.”

  “Of course you don’t…Sara! What are you doing out of bed?”

  She was standing at the foot of the stairs, thin, girlish in her blue robe with her long brown hair loose. “I heard…screaming. Laser fire. I was afraid for you.” She stumbled, and Avram flung himself down the steps to take her in his arms and guide her into their apartment.

  “It was nothing, nothing,” he said. “Don’t be disturbed.” He shut the door behind them.

  Outside in the street, she said to Gadi, “Avram could have summoned a medic on the com-con. Sending us is a waste of time.”

  “He’s going to hide that thing away. What kind of a robot could injure a person? They’re all programmed to self-destruct before they hurt anyone.” Gadi shook his head. “Something really strange is going on.”

  “How could it hurt David? Maybe your father and David had a fight.”

  “With a laser rifle?” Gadi rolled his eyes up.

  “It makes no sense.”

  “It has to,” Gadi said. “Father always makes sense, even if he’s wrong. He doesn’t get into random fights. Don’t you tell Malkah.” Gadi stopped just before the street that led to the clinic and seized her by the shoulders. “He will send me away, Shira, he will.”

  “I won’t tell her anything. I told the house I was going to be with Zee. Malkah hates when I lie—I mean, when she catches me.”
>
  She left him at the corner and went on to her house, at the end of the row and just across an old lane. She hoped Malkah would not be home yet, before she had had time to brood about what had just happened. Then she remembered that she was no longer a virgin, and that made her smile for a moment, uncertainly, as she lingered before identifying herself. It was not a big thing, but it was something, like her bat mitzvah, both rites of becoming a woman. She had not bled, but she was sore. She put her hand to the plate, and the door swung open as the house greeted her: “Come in, Shira. Malkah is not home yet. She wants you to go and pick up supper at the Commons. Then make a salad from the garden.”

  She shut the door without answering, but instead of going to the kitchen, she went slowly to her room to look in her mirror. “I love Gadi,” she told her mirror, as she had hundreds of times before.

  The house, listening as usual, responded to her. “Love is important, Shira, in its place in a balanced life, but at your age, the love of your family is most important. You don’t want to annoy Malkah by failing to pick up supper and make that salad.”

  Now a computer was giving her advice on love: a bodiless computer, or rather one whose body she inhabited, whose body was the house itself. “Now more than ever we belong to each other,” she said to the mirror but silently, so the house would not ask her to explain what she meant by “belonging” to another person. Instead she asked out loud, “Why is it a worldwide covenant that robots not resemble people? I’ve heard that since I started school. Why do robots have to be simpleminded machines?”

  “When robots were created with sufficient artificial intelligence to carry out complex tasks, a movement started in opposition, Shira, circa 2040. Malkah has instructed me that people found the first humanoid robots cute, fascinating and then quickly disturbing. Riots and Luddite outbreaks of machine bashing occurred. People were afraid that machines would replace them, not in dangerous jobs but in well-paid and comfortable jobs. Robots were sabotaged, and destructive riots broke out even in the corporate enclaves—”

  “I understand. But I think it’s silly.” She smiled into the mirror.

  “People sometimes fear intelligent machines, Shira, particularly people who have not grown up with a sophisticated computer. Or they don’t mind a stationary computer but are afraid of one that has a body and can move around. I consider such laws important to make people feel secure.”

  “But, house, what happens to someone who breaks that law?”

  “It’s not exactly law, Shira, but a corporate covenant with more than the force of law. Artificial intelligence of a high order is confined to the Net and Bases, to stationary computers such as myself. Mobile robots are to be obviously identifiable as machines and supplied only with sufficient intelligence for their rote tasks. The penalty is immediate blacklisting and death.”

  “Death?” Shira swung around, thinking of Avram’s rifle. “Are you sure?” That was a silly thing to ask a computer. “I mean, death, I can hardly believe that. Who would kill you if you built an illegal robot that was very smart and shaped like a person? The eco-police?”

  “That isn’t under their jurisdiction. Professional assassins work in the security corps of multis, Shira. There also exist highly paid free-lancers, operating from the megalopolis or from offshore free towns. Does this information pertain to your schoolwork? Do you wish me to bring up on your terminal a chart of the location of the offshore free towns that are pirate or assassin enclaves? I am programmed with details of corporate covenants and of the history of the cyber-riot period in question, if you would like to study any aspect of those events.” The computer sounded hopeful. “I also can offer instruction in elementary robotics.”

  “Don’t bother. I was just curious,” Shira said, wondering what it all meant. “It’s one of those things people say all the time: Robots can’t be shaped like humans—and then one day you wonder why.”

  “If I were mobile, I could cook and run errands for you, but now you understand why this is quite impossible. Isn’t it time for you to go and pick up supper from the Commons?”

  SIX

  We Know Too Much and Too Little

  Two days before her seventeenth birthday, the house told Shira she had a barred message waiting—coded only for her. It was Regional Edcom, announcing the results of her auction. Students who passed the Grand Exam in the highest two percentiles were bid for by universities. Fourteen schools had offered for her. Right away she edited out all those she wouldn’t attend no matter what they paid her. Then she printed out the list and leapt up to find Gadi. He must have been sent his results too. General acceptances went out at the same time as auction results. They had to coordinate their choices.

  He had told her he had to help Avram. Since they had accidentally stumbled into the first cyborg experiment, Alef, who had proved violent, Avram trusted them to keep his secrets and called on them when he needed help. Bet had been the cyborg equivalent of autistic and had been dismantled. Gimel was functioning in the lab, but Avram found it short on intelligence.

  Identifying herself to the newly enhanced lab door, which announced her to Avram and then, obviously at his command, admitted her, she saw Gimel sitting on a lab stool, stiffly upright. If it had been a real person, she would have said it had a broom up its ass, like her Portuguese teacher. Gimel had the same bland amiable features that Bet and Alef had shared. So far Avram had not had to destroy Gimel. It appeared docile, the cyborg equivalent of slow. “I have finished the connections in the right knee joint,” it said in a deep male voice with less affect than her own house voice. “So connect the left joint,” Avram snapped. She waited for Avram to look up from the shell of an arm, in which he was building a network of sensors. She knew better than to interrupt him. She wished for a moment he would ask her to work on the knee with Gimel or on the arm with him. She liked the work of the lab. In school this year she had built a robot diver. Gadi hated to work closely with Avram, but she actually enjoyed it when Avram commandeered their assistance.

  Finally Avram turned to her. His eyes fixed on the tunic she had worn to school. “Little Shira,” he said, smiling. “If you’re looking for Gadi, he’s upstairs. Why do you put up with my demanding son?”

  “Gadi’s…wonderful, sir. He’s bright and—”

  “If he’s bright, why doesn’t he demonstrate it in school, where it counts? The results came out today, didn’t they? How many colleges are bidding for you?”

  She showed him the list. “Good girl. I wish you were my daughter, Shira. Malkah spits pride when she talks about you.”

  “She does?” She couldn’t imagine Malkah making that kind of fuss.

  Thanking him, she ran out, with Gimel following to secure the door behind her. Gadi must be studying upstairs. Avram had long ago figured out that Gadi and she used the old staff bedrooms, but Shira felt an unspoken agreement. Avram would pretend he did not know what they were doing, and they would never mention to anyone his illegal work with human-featured cyborgs. Avram was a man in a hurry always, a driven man, but she was aware that he had come to like her. Perhaps he considered her a steadying influence on Gadi. She wished she were.

  As she climbed, she moved ever more slowly. She hoped, she prayed, as she crept up the steps that Gadi would have been bid on (or at least accepted to) at least one college she could consider. He had not prepared as she had. He was fighting with Avram. Since Sara’s death, the house had disintegrated. Of course they took meals at the Commons, and a cleaning robot that looked like a cross between a dachshund and an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner kept the house usable, but their flat had the air of a maintained but impersonal public room, a hotel or rest quarters. Over Sara’s dying body, father and son had assumed postures of mutual recrimination; now, a year later, they could not relinquish those poses of offense and defense just because the excuse had been buried. The house was strange, a sort of museum of antique toys that Avram had begun to collect recently. Machines ate obsolete coins, and you pushed a ball around
a blinking maze; in hand-held games, tiny silver balls floated over holes on cartoon faces and scenes. Little pieces assembled to make paintings. It was as if Sara’s death had freed Avram for a second sedate childhood of games.

  Gadi was restless, irritable. Bored. He charmed their female teachers and he got on with a couple of the younger men, but he was at war with the older male faculty, in whom he saw Avram replicated. She knew him as well as she knew her own body, her own room with the climbing rose dividing around her window, but that did not mean she could help him. She drifted along the hall in a haze of uncertainty, the printout of schools clutched in her left hand. The silence of the hotel, their old habit of being quiet and secretive up here, kept her from calling out his name.

  Then she heard his voice from their blue room. Why was he talking to himself? He must be studying: good. He had trouble with languages, for he hated feeling like a child, unable to express himself. He might be studying Chinese or Portuguese, for he needed a high pass in both of them. More likely he was working at his computer. In design class he had been creating dazzling airy bridges of thin metals, spiderwebs of light and space. He stole time away from other studies to work on them. She could scarcely blame him. They were beautiful. They stilled the mind to contemplation.

  At the door she knocked softly, that brush against the door each of them used with the other, and then she immediately opened it. “Gadi?” She stopped two steps into the room, staring. For a moment she felt nothing at all, because she simply did not believe what she saw. It was impossible. It was not even the stuff of nightmare, because she had never imagined this scene.

  Gadi was naked on the cot where they had lain together hundreds of times, but twined with him was another body instead of her own, which she almost expected to see there, because with Gadi must be Shira. No, the naked girl sprawled under him was Hannah, who gave a sharp outcry like cloth tearing, and then began, as she always did, to giggle.