He, She and It

by Marge Piercy

  “You’ll do,” Nili says. “You’re stronger than you think you are. And we’ll fix you up once we arrive.”

  Shira scolds me constantly. “This trip would be dangerous for anyone. But at your age. You haven’t been well.”

  It’s been a hard winter for me. Our winters are milder than when I was a girl, but nor’easters still blast in, laden with snow. People say we don’t get as much snow; certainly thaws come sooner and the ground pokes through. But this winter we have been a household of deep depression and surface cheeriness, romps and little fetes for Ari. My ebbing vision begins to make life difficult. In the Base, in the Net, I can function, but crossing my room, I trip over a toy wagon Ari has left there. Navigating the streets of town is increasingly arduous. The world dims, and I long for light with a hunger that hollows out my bones. Nili has been gone for three months with Riva in the Glop, but she returns now to collect me for the tricky journey we embark on.

  The Glop is organizing rapidly. A general strike was called. The multis withheld food. Those who had built vat facilities, like Lazarus, were able to feed people in their sectors and export food into the rest of the Glop. Finally, with their day labor force gone, the multis were forced to negotiate. Everything is in flux.

  “I’ve never made my journey to Israel. It’s time,” I tell Shira.

  “Nobody does that any longer, Malkah, and you know it. It’s too dangerous.” Shira is overanxious these days, hovering over Ari and me as if we might at any moment self-destruct, as Yod did.

  “It was always dangerous, from the time the Romans exiled us for one too many rebellions. Nili came out through the quarantine patrols; she can get back in. The Shekinah alone knows why she’s willing to take me along.”

  “For the same reason I want to keep you,” Shira said, glaring. “You’re a lovable crone, you chimera witch. We all want you.”

  “You just want my help with Ari,” I grumble. Truly I am a little old for a three-year-old. Mainly my problem is that I cannot endure to be constantly explaining that I can no longer see; nor can a little child understand what I am complaining about.

  “Don’t you want to be with him? He’s yours too.”

  “He’ll still be mine when I return. And I’ll be stronger. I’ll be able to keep up with him.”

  Nili has promised me I will be augmented. I’m an old house about to be remodeled. New eyes, a new heart, that’s what I need, to feed and keep up with my hungry brain. I do not dare reveal to Shira or even to Nili how the hope that they can give me back light and color and vision sustains me. I am an old battered moth flapping madly toward the pure flame of light, willing to undergo any risk to see again.

  “Shira, it’s now or never for me. I’ve had all the operations here that can be done. I’ll have eyes like a great cat. Above all, I will meet Nili’s people, the strongest women in the world. I want to live among women for a while, Shira. Come with me!”

  But I know she cannot go. I will find comfort in thinking of her in my house, our house, here where I hope to come back—but if I don’t, Shira and Ari will be just fine. Since Yod is destroyed and Avram’s lab obliterated, Tikva is of no interest to what remains of Y-S. They lost most of their leadership, and they are fighting to survive incursions from other multis. Shira has assumed more and more authority in the Base. She will flourish, with me or without me.

  Shira and I are joined in grieving for Yod. I miss Avram more than she does, because while we were often antagonists, we were also collaborators. For the last twenty years we were colleagues who helped to direct and shape our community. I also feel guilty about Yod. My programming made him more useful, because it brought him far closer to the human than any of Avram’s unsuccessful cyborgs, but it also made him vulnerable to desires and aspirations that had nothing to do with his central programming or his function. I gave him the flexibility that enabled him to overcome his fundamental commandment to protect and defend Avram, as well as the town. What Avram and I did was deeply wrong. Robots are fine and useful, machine intelligence carrying out specific tasks, but an artificial person created as a tool is a painful contradiction.

  Perhaps I journey on my dangerous aliyah to make amends. As it is wrong to give birth to a child believing that child will fulfill your own inner aspirations, will have a particular talent or career, so is it equally wrong to create a being subject to your will and control. Domestic animals have basic rights now, how they may be kept, how they may be treated; it was inexcusable to create a sentient being for any other reason than to live its own life. In the myth of Pygmalion, we assume that she would love her sculptor, but Shaw knew better. Each one of us wants to possess ourself; only fools willingly give themselves away. Slavery produces the slave revolt. Avram and Yod killed each other. Yod could love me, or whatever simulacrum of attachment he felt, because I had let go. I had set him free of me. And Shira had no power over him except what he gave her.

  I have presents to bring to Israel too, for my skills are not theirs. They must enter the Net. It is time, with the Glop rising, for them to emerge from hiding. If I go to Nili’s people to be remade, I also travel to remake them. To open them to the world is my little task. Like Rabbi Loew, I am not excused from labor in my old age but rallied to work harder. If I go, an old lady, to have myself refitted like an ambitious young assassin (but not of course in the same ways), I like to think it is not ego but simply the recognition that I am required to remain in harness but cannot without some help keep pulling more than my weight.

  I find Nili stimulating. I like to flirt with her, I like to argue with her, I like to watch her. Her expectations of herself are unlimited. She is strong without excuses or apologies. I long for a community, a town, a principality of Nilis, although she insists her people are even more different one from another than we are. I go to encounter the new that has come to be under the murderous sun of our century. I go to teach and to learn from women who will lift me up, wash me as if for burial and then give me renewed strength, rededicated life and the light I crave.

  I go in mischief, in the pursuit of pleasure and knowledge, in religious duty and exaltation, in the long study and exploration of holiness that has previously been revealed to me in the sea, in prayer and meditation, in my long life’s work, but which I now go to encounter in the womb of religion, the sacred desert, the cave of dancing women.

  It is the New Year of the Trees tomorrow. When I was a little girl, that seemed a poor joke in New England, for it usually falls in the month of February, when snow used to choke the ground. Now the ground is bare and indeed the first buds are beginning to swell, although it will turn cold later this week. By then Nili and I will be making our way toward the place where it is the season of tree planting. As Chava went, so I go, casting myself on the wind in hope, traveling toward the hidden light I pray will soon be shining into me, a fountain of light into which I can plunge myself.

  We are in the port of Saloniki, waiting for a crazy caique with a female crew to carry us off the map. This is my last chance to talk to Shira in the Net. In the hotel, we face each other on the screen. She seems nervous and harried, full of little tidbits of life in Tikva that to the traveler are precious indeed. Ari bounds up and down, shouting as if to make his voice carry across a big room. He has been told I am far away. It makes me think of my mother, who always shouted on long distance, so you could hear her across the ocean. Lately I have been remembering her often. We try to remain inconspicuous here, although Nili is striking in any context. A fishing boat of no interest that darts from island to island is our only chance. Nili says it is painted with an eye on the prow, which seems to me a good omen.

  I have just taped a message for Shira. The letter will be taken out and then sent through the Net from some legal place, when it can be managed. I dare say little, but I want her to know I’ve arrived and I’m preparing for the operation. Here is as strange a place as I imagine a satellite must be. The women live mostly in a city of caves, but life is not bleak. The caves a
re thick with rugs they weave. There are animals and computers everywhere, sheep, cats, goats, camels, and more children than I have seen in a long time. They have adapted themselves and their animals to the high UV, but all young must be protected under disguised wraps. Many are dark-skinned, for the black Jews from Ethiopia had a higher survival rate in the catastrophe than any other group. They remembered how to manage in utter disaster.

  It is beautiful here, as something destroyed can come into its own new form. Glass cast in the fire can have a strange subtle beauty of fused colors. This desert seems totally inhospitable to life, yet here is this community flourishing, and much animal and plant life has come back. Lately they have been getting seasonal rains. Nearby is an oasis where I saw butterflies—the first I have seen in years, yellow and white as daisies.

  Nili has taken me around and introduced me to everyone, including the two surgeons who will work on me with their nanites—teams of medical robots smaller than cells—but my real host is a geneticist my age, Karmia. She told me the first evening that she had dreamed my coming and was waiting for me. She is a small woman, intense, very strong (enhanced as they all are). At my request, Nili has described her as having copper skin and copper hair and pale brown eyes, eyes of maple sugar. Instead of seeing a face, when I say her name, I hear her voice, milk chocolate with a little rum in it. We immediately began talking—from the top and bottom at once. I mean we started explaining our work to each other, straining to grasp, each of us, started talking politics and religion, and also started telling each other our lives, and so it has gone since. I hold back a little because I fear the operation and its outcome. She is only four years younger than I am, but she is far more vigorous. I don’t know if she will be my friend, my lover, or only my support here, but already we talk about her returning to Tikva with me. Her mind excites and delights me. She is extraordinarily intelligent, and her life, too, has been a twisted rope of many colors.

  Tonight is my last night before the operation, and I am afraid. With my dim sight, nonetheless I see shadows, shapes, I can move about with care. I dread the moment I go under, and more, I dread the moment the bandages come off and I am totally blind or I see. As so often, tonight I cannot sleep, but this night, Karmia sits up with me.

  “You’ve met Riva, then,” I say to her.

  We are sitting very close on a pile of heaped cushions, Oriental rugs on the floor and softening the walls, so that we speak inside a richly patterned box.

  “Oh, yes,” Karmia says. “She’s been here with us twice, each time for a month. I can see the resemblance in your eyes, the shape of your bones.”

  I don’t know why it pleases me strongly when someone speaks of our resemblance, perhaps because I am accustomed to people saying how unlike we are. I find myself talking of Shira, and she speaks of her two daughters, whom I have met. She had three, but one was killed in an accident while scavenging one of the contaminated cities.

  Then I tell her the story of Yod. Illegal experiments are nothing here; this whole place is an illegal experiment.

  “Do you regret taking part?”

  “How can I regret someone I truly loved? I feel guilty. I understand the crime we committed against him by the very act of programming him for our purposes. But I cannot regret knowing him. Do you find that shocking?”

  “Only hatred shocks me. If we can love a date palm or a puppy or a cyborg, perhaps we can love each other better also.”

  No one who did not know him can understand how thoroughly he was a person, although not a human one. Through the long dense night we talk together. She understands that I cannot sleep, and forgoes it herself, although toward four she dozes off and we are quiet together. Her fine mind has distracted me for hours from my fear. Now I face it.

  Tomorrow my life is cast like dice on the table of this burning desert.

  FORTY-NINE

  Shira’s Choice

  Inevitably Shira and Gadi spent an increasing amount of time together that winter. When Gadi could not produce the amazon he had enticed them with, Uni-Par treated him with contempt. They assumed he had faked the footage in hopes of getting his exile shortened. He would sit in Tikva until his sentence was up, and then perhaps they would bring him back.

  Gadi did not believe they would leave him in exile indefinitely, but he did not enjoy being branded a liar, as he complained at great length to Shira and Malkah. He busied himself with a series of dramas featuring local talent or would-bes, but he was plainly bored. From a professional creator of state-of-the-art virons, he was reduced to amateur theatrics and running a school for dimly talented kiddies, he said.

  Still, Gadi and Shira were decent company for each other, if only because both were deeply depressed and grieving, and both were trying hard to behave in a way that concealed their unhappiness—she for Ari’s sake, he for the sake of his conception of himself. His father’s death gave Gadi a role that he made an effort to play. Every morning he went to say Kaddish in the synagogue of water, in the garden of birds. He did everything correctly, but he confessed he felt oddly off balance.

  “I was used to the old man,” he said to Shira. “I still think of things I’m about to do as going to irritate him.”

  He tried sporadically to get Shira into bed with him, but she easily put him off. In the daytime she was working; in the evenings she had Ari and Malkah. But the week after Malkah’s departure, he caught her on the street as she was clearing her head with a stroll. “You haven’t scanned my new hook. Tell me what you think.”

  He had had to move after the fire. Now he stayed in a little wooden house near the edge of the wrap, only one room downstairs and one up, but both with a view of the bay. “I’m told this was once an oyster shack. I can’t imagine oysters lived here, so I assume they were hunters of the wild oyster. Cozy, that’s what you’re supposed to say.”

  It was iridescent, pearly inside except for the thick blue carpeting. He had not bothered programming holos this time. “It’s pretty, Gadi. You have a strong nest-building instinct.”

  “If you’re trying to rile me, you won’t succeed, because I don’t want to be put off any longer, Ugi.” He slid his hand under the fall of her hair and caressed her neck lightly, electrically.

  She felt something, and that made her hopeful. For the last four months, she had experienced nothing but grief except when she was working or with Ari. She did not pull away. Gadi could read her hesitation and put his arms around her. It was easier than she would have imagined to kiss him, to undress, to slide into the blue-green bed in the form of a scallop shell, cast in the town shop out of some algae-based plasticene. He was taller, harder-bodied, more deliberate than he had been. His body did not arouse the fierce nostalgia she had feared. His body was a stranger, but he was not. They were gentle, not particularly passionate, patient. It all felt a little removed.

  She was with him because she could no longer recall why she shouldn’t be. She was weary of remembering Yod constantly, of missing him daily, nightly, of thinking of him in a way that felt like mental hemorrhaging. Her own grief bored her. Finally she went to bed with Gadi simply to quiet him and to silence her loneliness. But the loneliness was specific, not general. They were polite to each other in bed, but she had the feeling that Gadi, too, was searching through her body for someone else. He was looking for the Shira of sixteen; he was in pursuit of Nili. She was groping for a lover not even human. It was hopeless but not unpleasant. Only somewhat hollow.

  They were each a little disappointed but too polite to let on. Perhaps he hoped the next time would be better. He tried to involve her in his stimmie making. He insisted on recording her, and she suffered it, because they were trying to be intimate. She remembered him explaining that she lacked the necessary projection. Moreover, she found the sight of herself disturbing. She was used to looking in the mirror to see if her hair was parted straight and combed slick. She looked for dirt smudges and bits of Ari’s food stuck to her blouse.

  When she saw herself thro
ugh the camera eye, she found a woman smaller than she liked to think of herself. That fey creature with the enormous eyes, that fawn-woman was not Shira’s self-image, and she wanted to turn from it. She was increasingly involved in running the Base. As soon as Malkah took an extended leave, Shira had been asked by the Council to fill her grandmother’s seat as a Base Overseer. She found in herself a swelling power, an intensifying concentrated energy for work. No, the last role that appealed to her was to be an object caressed or nibbled by the senses of strangers, valued for the appearance of a helplessness she had outgrown. Her time with Yod had taught her she was not defenseless. She too could scheme; could fight; could kill. With Yod she had been able to ask for what she wanted. She had come to value that directness.

  At the inquest after the explosion, Malkah and Shira had played Yod’s last message, and the inquiry concluded that Yod had murdered Avram. No censure had been voted against either of the women. Y-S, still crippled, was fighting off hungry competitors, and Tikva seemed at peace. Yod and Lazarus’s assassins, five of whom had been killed on the island, had left Y-S crippled by internecine warfare, with most of the upper echelon dead.

  Sometimes she was forced to recall Josh by Ari’s hands, by his ears, by a way of shrugging, a tone of voice, the very way he’d say, “I didn’t do it!” Then she remembered her ex-husband with a dry guilt-tinged regret. Never would Ari find out, she hoped. She was not given to confession. She was not given to burdening him with more than the statement that his father had died in an accident at Y-S and that his father had loved him. Yod, she told him, had died to protect them all. About Avram Ari never asked, for he had scarcely known him. But Ari was much obsessed with death. He found a bird that had broken its neck on a window and asked endless questions. He was very upset when Malkah left. Shira felt that she was not giving him the stability and the continuity he desperately needed. Every day she reassured him she was not going away, that she was not going to die suddenly. “Bubeh will be back. She will come back with brand-new eyes, and she’ll stay with us then,” she said, hoping she was right. She said it as a charm. She would not allow herself to contemplate losing Malkah too. She kept strict limits with Gadi; she would not spend the night away from Ari, and Gadi could not sleep at the house.