First of all, I want to thank the usual accomplices. My husband Ira Wood reads even the first drafts of my novels, so rough anyone else would think I had lost my mind as well as my way. He studied Czech with me and helped make our research jaunts delightful, even the day we walked twenty miles in the rain and could find no lunch. Claire Simmons of the Wellfleet Library as always put through those interlibrary loans I depend on. Gloria Nardin Watts, dear friend and indefatigable reader, helped me with the galleys.
I would particularly like to thank the head of the Research Department of the State Jewish Museum in Prague, Dr. Vladimir Sadek, who was extremely kind to me when I showed up for an appointment that turned out in a mysterious comedy of errors never to have existed. Above all, Jirina Sedinova of the Jewish Museum shared her time and research with me and was very helpful and warm, as well as fun to gossip with about Judah and David and company. I was in Prague in ’68 and in the course of writing this novel returned; like Malkah, I remain in love with that city.
I would like to thank a particular student at Loyola in Chicago, where I put in a week of residency one April shortly after I had started this novel. In the course of a lively conversation about science fiction, he told me that when he read Woman on the Edge of Time, he couldn’t believe the date of publication, because the alternate universe that Connie blunders into in Chapter 15 anticipated cyberpunk. What’s cyberpunk? I asked, and he started me off. I enjoy William Gibson very much, and I have freely borrowed from his inventions and those of other cyberpunk writers. I figure it’s all one playground. Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” was extremely suggestive also; Constance Penley of Camera Obscura was kind enough to send it to me.
I have found the newsletters and meetings of the Artificial Intelligence group of the Boston Computer Society stimulating. Lest anybody think that the experiences in the Net and Base in the novel are fantastic make-believe, be aware that even now companies are working on sensor nets that permit a person to “walk into” data and experience it as real objects in imaginary space. As for the destruction of the ozone layer and the results of global warming, your local library surely has this information, as mine did.
I would like to thank Arthur Waskow for suggesting to me, at a meeting of the Siddur Project of P’Nai Or on which we both worked, that I might find kabbalah valuable to study. I owe a debt, as does everyone interested in kabbalah or the Golem, to Gershom Scholem and, even more, to Moshe Idel and, in understanding Judah Loew, to André Neher. My interpretations, of course, are very much my own.
Finally I want to thank Lois Wallace, my agent and friend, for her vigorous efforts on behalf of my work; and Sonny Mehta, the editor of this novel, for his valuable tough reading and helpful hints for cyborg makers.
As always with the novels of mine I most enjoy writing, this has been a strange and instructive journey.
POETRY
Made in Detroit
The Hunger Moon: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2010
The Crooked Inheritance
Colors Passing Through Us
The Art of Blessing the Day
Early Grrrl
What Are Big Girls Made Of?
Mars and Her Children
Available Light
My Mother’s Body
Stone, Paper, Knife
Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy
The Moon Is Always Female
The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing
Living in the Open
To Be of Use
4-Telling (with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, and Dick Lourie)
Hard Loving
Breaking Camp
NOVELS
Sex Wars
The Third Child
Three Women
Storm Tide (with Ira Wood)
City of Darkness, City of Light
The Longings of Women
He, She and It
Summer People
Gone to Soldiers
Fly Away Home
Braided Lives
Vida
The High Cost of Living
Woman on the Edge of Time
Small Changes
Dance the Eagle to Sleep
Going Down Fast
OTHER
My Life, My Body (essays)
The Cost of Lunch, Etc.: Short Stories
Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and Personal Narrative (1st and 2nd editions, with Ira Wood)
The Last White Class: A Play (with Ira Wood)
Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir
Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (essays)
Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now (anthology editor)
MARGE PIERCY is the author of numerous novels, among them Woman on the Edge of Time, Vida, Braided Lives, Gone to Soldiers, and Summer People. Her fifteen collections of poetry include The Moon Is Always Female: Circles On The Water (her selected poems); Stone, Paper, Knife; My Mother’s Body; Available Light; and Mars and Her Children. She has coauthored a play, The Last White Class, with her husband Ira Wood, the novelist and screenwriter, with whom she lives on Cape Cod.
From the critically acclaimed author of Woman on the Edge of Time, comes another classic feminist speculative novel about artificial intelligence and what it means to be human.
In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed beyond recognition. Shira Shipman’s marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions – and the ability to kill…
WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie Ramos is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a utopian future of sexual and racial equality and environmental harmony.
But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a dystopian society of grotesque exploitation. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow…
The classic feminist science fiction novel – reissued on its 40th anniversary with a new introduction by the author. Harrowing and prescient – and often compared to The Handmaid’s Tale – Woman on the Edge of Time will speak to a new generation of readers.
Available from Del Rey
FIND ME
By Laura van den Berg
Things I will never forget: my name, my made-up birthday … The dark of the Hospital at night. My mother’s face, when she was young.
Things other people will forget: where they come from, how old they are, the faces of the people they love. The right words for bowl and sunshine … What is a beginning and what is an end.
Joy spends her days working the graveyard shift at a store outside Boston and nursing an addiction to cough syrup, an attempt to suppress her troubled past. But when a sickness that begins with silver blisters and memory loss and ends with death sweeps the country, Joy, for the first time in her life, seems to have an advantage: she is immune.
At once a hauntingly beautiful portrayal of a dystopian future and a powerful exploration of loneliness
THE BEAR AND THE NIGHTINGALE
By Katherine Arden
A young woman’s family is threatened by forces both real and fantastical in this debut novel inspired by Russian fairy tales.
In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, a stranger with piercing blue eyes presents a new father with a gift – a precious jewel on a delicate chain, intended for his young daughter. Uncertain of its meaning, the father hides the gift away and his daughter, Vasya, grows up a wild, wilful girl, to the chagrin of her family. But when mysterious forces threaten the happiness of their village, Vasya discovers that, armed only with the necklace, she may be the only one who can keep the darkness at bay.
Atmospheric and enchanting, with an engrossing adventure at its core, The Bear and the Nightingale is perfect for readers of Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus and Neil Gaiman.
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.
Josh had been born to an Israeli couple, survivors of the Two Week War a terrorist had launched with a nuclear device that had burned Jerusalem off the map, a conflagration of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that had set the oilfields aflame and destroyed the entire region. He had been orphaned at ten, wandering without a country in the period Jews called the Troubles, when the whole world blamed them for the disasters that put an end to oil dependence in a maelstrom of economic chaos. Nothing had come easy to him in his life. The more he opened to her and told her, the more precious he seemed to her, in that fervid courtship, and the more she felt herself absolutely necessary to him. She was astonished that at first she had thought him cold. How he had suffered! He needed her like air itself.
He had seemed to be opening. Shortly after the marriage he had insisted upon, he began changing back. He acted happy. He seemed delighted with her; but from a distance. As for getting to know her better, as for sharing his inner life or taking an interest in hers, those pastimes seemed uninteresting to him, lacking in urgency. Ari was supposed to mend that breach. Since the birth of their son, all Josh’s after-work energy focused on Ari. She often suspected that if they did not have Ari, they would have nothing to talk about. Their silence roared in her ears. Soon she was boiling with resentments. They fought forty skirmishes a day about nothing. As her grandmother Malkah had warned her when she married Josh, she had made a costly mistake. Living together combined for them the worst aspects of living alone and living with a stranger. Their major activity together was disagreeing. She had grown up in a benign household, for Malkah was feisty and opinionated but also loving and funny. People did not have to live unremitting desperate wars. Shira had summoned her energy and left him.
She called up the time on her cornea. Only four minutes had passed since she had last asked. Finally the long-skulled face appeared and spoke, in its uninflected way, their names: Joshua Rogovin and Shira Shipman, re the custody of child Ari Rogovin. Even in Y-S, with its male dominance, women did not change their names. Marriages were on the basis of five- or ten-year contracts, and name changing without purpose was inefficient. Still, Shira felt an odd chill as she heard Ari’s surname given as his father’s. That was not how she had registered him at birth, but Y-S had ignored her preference.
“In regard to this matter the judgment of the panel is to award custody to the father, Joshua Rogovin, status T12A, the mother, Shira Shipman, status T10B, to have visitation privileges twice weekly, Wednesdays and Sundays. This verdict rendered 28 January 2059, automatic review on 28 January 2061. Verdict recorded. Out.”
Josh turned in his seat and glared at her. His lawyer was beaming and slapping his shoulder. “What did I tell you? In the bag.”
“They can’t do this!” Shira said. “They can’t take Ari!”
Josh grimaced, almost a smile. “He’s mine now. He’s my son, he’s a Rogovin.” His light eyes, somewhere between gray and blue, seemed to read her pain and dismiss it.
“Your ex-husband has a higher tech rating than you do,” her lawyer said. “I warned you they would take that into account. You’ve been stuck in the same grade for three years.”
“I’ll appeal. Ari needs me.” And I need him, she thought.
“It’s your choice, but you’re throwing away your credit, in my opinion. Of course I’ll represent you if you choose to retain me.”
Josh and his lawyer had already swept out. Shira’s lawyer stood over her, impatiently tapping his foot. “I have another client to see. You think about the appeal. I can start the process tomorrow if you choose.”
Suddenly she rose and rushed out, realizing she was late to pick up Ari. “Start the appeal,” she called over her shoulder. “I won’t let him go.”
She hopped the express lane on the moving sidewalk, nimbly jumping from track to track. It was considered poor form for gruds—Glop slang for professional and technical personnel of multis—to do that, although day laborers did it all the time, but she did not care. She was desperate to reach Ari. She sped past the gossamer structures of the official district. Since there was no weather under the dome, and since no structure could be taller than six stories, the prevailing style was long parabolic curves, fanciful spirals and labyrinthine grids of glittering translucent filigree. Almost everything was black, white or blue, like the backless business suits that came to mid-calf or lower, which all gruds wore. Almost every exec, male or female, had been under the knife to resemble the Y-S ideal, faces as much like the one on the view screen as each could afford.
The techies flashing past on the movers looked far more diverse, but they, too, dressed in suits of acceptable colors. People of the same rank greeted each other with ritual gestures, a bob of the head. Those farther down the hierarchy they usually ignored. Passing those above them, they awaited recognition and bowed deeply. How many times had she slipped into trouble by talking so intently she had inadvertently neglected to greet properly an equal or a superior? The day laborers wore overalls or uniforms in yellows, browns, greens: color coded for their jobs. If they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be immediately evident. She leapt from track to track, never mind who saw her—who might report her—as undignified, lacking in proper Y-S decorum. She always felt too physical here, too loud, too female, too Jewish, too dark, too exuberant, too emotional.
The day care for the children of middle-level techies was just ahead now, behind a hedge of tall brightly colored crotons, the blue and white and black Y-S flag drooping over the entrance. She was not impossibly late, because she saw a few straggling mothers and one father as she ran the three blocks from the nearest mover. She realized she never saw an adult run on these streets. Everyone was too conscious of being observed, of being judged. This was the middle-tech compound of little houses, each in its yard. With Josh, she had lived in one of them. Four styles of house for this rank, with the same acceptable shrubs and manicured lawns, but a free choice of color. Nobody chose red or purple. The only vehicles that moved down the median strips were official: delivery trucks, repair and emergency vans, security apes, all battery-powered rigs that monotonously beeped.
The supervisor, Jane Forest, was noticeably cooler to her. “But, Shipman, a security assignee picked up Ari Rogovin eighteen minutes ago. We were informed this was proper. You are not authorized to pick up Ari Rogovin except on Wednesdays.”
“An ape took him? But why?”
“Request information from security central, please.”
Although Shira wanted to scream and argue, she was aware the supervisor would never alter orders given her; or Jane would no longer be a supervisor. Any protest Shira made would be ineffectual and recorded against her. She had to call her lawyer at once. Mostly she had a strong desire to call Malkah.
Even a month ago, she would have called her secretary, Rosario, for they had become close. But the low-level exec with whom Rosario had had a ten-year contract had not renewed their marriage. As was customary even for low-level talent, he had taken a new wife, twenty years younger. Rosario was forty-two, and Y-S let her go. Shira had protested that she needed Rosario, but she had no power. Women over forty who were not techies or supervisors or professionals or execs were let go if they were not the temporary property of a male grud. Female gruds were supposed to have the same privileges and, if they had enough position, often took young husbands.
Rosario had disappeared into the Glop. She might be tubed in and out of the enclave daily as a laborer, working in the laundry or cooking or doing any of the maintenance jobs not taken care of by robots, but Shira would never see her. Rosario had been pushed out of the safe fortress into the crowded, violent festering warren of the half-starved Glop, where nine tenths of the people of Norika lived; if she was still alive, Shira would never know it. The Glop was slang for the Megalopolis that stretched south from what had been Boston to what had been Atlanta, and a term applied to other similar areas all over the continent and the world.
As soon as Shira reached the two-room apartment that was all she was entitled to by her own rating, one of the so-called bins for lower-level techies, she asked the apartment for messages. Every housing facility in the corporate enclave had a computer. Hers wasn’t a sophisticated system like the one she had grown up with, programmed by Malkah, but it functioned as a message service. It told her that Malkah had called fifty minutes before. Shira called first her lawyer and then Malkah. She did not bother plugging in for conversations—nobody did. She just spoke her instructions. Malkah’s round, slightly wizened face appeared, her hair, as black as Shira’s braided around her head. “Shira, you look upset.” Malkah had a deep resonant voice. Although she was Shira’s grandmother, she had raised her. That was the way of her family, bat Shipman, until Shira had broken the pattern.
“Are you eating?” Shira asked politely. It was an hour later in the free town Tikva on the Atlantic, where Malkah lived, where Shira had grown up.
“What’s wrong?” Malkah always came right to the point. “Y-S awarded custody to Josh.”
“Those pigsuckers,” Malkah said. “Those poison belchers. I told you not to marry him. You’re the first in our family to marry in four generations. It’s a bad idea.”
“All right, all right. I thought Josh needed the security.”
“And could you give him security? Never mind. Come home.”
“I can’t just take off. Especially now. I’m lodging an appeal. I have to get Ari back. I have to.”
“What does Y-S want?”
“From me? Nothing. They hardly know I exist.”
“When you finished your graduate work at Edinburgh, six multis bid on you. And Y-S lets you sit and rot. It smells.”
“I think my work’s good, but nothing happens. Nobody here rates me as much.”
Malkah snorted. “Come home. I can use you. I’m not working with Avram any longer. I’m designing full time.”
“I thought that was an odd partnership.”
“What he’s doing is quite fascinating. But never mind. He’s mad at me. He’s a stubborn arrogant alter kaker, but he’s a genius in his field, no doubt about that.”
“Cybernetics has never drawn me … Malkah, I can’t stand to lose Ari. I miss him already.” Tears began coursing down Shira’s face.
“You should never have gone to work for those manipulators, Shira. You have a place here. You ran away. But Gadi’s not living here. He’s up in Veecee Beecee, making those elaborate worlds people play at living in instead of worrying about the one we’re all stuck with.”
“I made a lot of mistakes,” Shira said. “But Ari wasn’t one of them. He’s precious, Malkah, he’s life itself to me. I must have him back. He carries my heart in him.”
“Daughter of my soul, I wish you strength. But a multi always has its reasons. It may take you a while to figure theirs, and when you do, that may not help you get your son back.”
“So pray for me.”
“You know I don’t believe in personal petitions. All I can ever pray for is understanding.”
Shira had forgotten to pick up a meal. She ate crackers and dates. Then she sat down at her terminal again and plugged in, inserting the male coupler from the terminal into the little silver socket at her temple, just under the loop of hair that always fell there. Rosario had had no plug; it was a class distinction here, but in Tikva, every child was raised to be able to access directly, taught to project into the worldwide Net, into the local Base. She moved quickly from her own private base into the Y-S Base. Their logo greeted her, white and black double lightning against sky blue. The Y-S imagery of entering the Base was a road sign. She was standing on a crossroads branching in seven directions. Library access. She walked along the narrow white road. Of course she was sitting in her chair, but the projection felt real enough. A person could die in projection, attacked by raiders, information pirates who lifted from one base and peddled to another.
A building stood before her, white marble with a colonnade. The library. She climbed the shallow steps quickly. She was looking for the law section. She intended to master relevant Y-S law on custody. That was why she had not simply accessed in reading or aural output. In full projected access, when she was plugged into a base, learning was far faster than in real time. She was going to challenge them on their own terms. She would win her son back.
In the morning she was standing outside the day-care center when Josh arrived, with Ari in tow. She darted to kneel before Ari. “I just want to tell you that I’m going to pick you up today. Tonight you’ll be with me.”
Ari had his thumb in his mouth, and he looked as if he had been crying. His Diddlee Bear tee shirt was on backward. His eyes looked sticky.
Josh said, in a voice that sang like a hornet, “I’m lodging a protest.”
Indeed, on her screen a security message appeared at thirteen hundred: “Shira Shipman is enjoined from interaction with the minor Ari Rogovin awarded to the custody of his father Joshua Rogovin except on the prescribed days and defined times of visitation. Any further breaches of this regulation will result in the cancellation of said privileges.”
Shira locked herself in a waste-disposal cell before she wept.
Shira was up before Malcolm. It was the second night they had spent together, as she tried to put some distance between her ex-husband and herself. Every time she picked up Ari or brought him back, in the two months since the verdict, Josh and she clashed. Now Shira sat at her terminal going over the wording of her latest appeal, a little depressed about how long and leaden the evening had felt. As she was reworking an argument, the apartment computer told her she had a caller. It was a cheap model, not provided any personality, but she had given it a female voice that reminded her of the house of her grandmother Malkah. Most houses had female voices. “Put the incoming message on audio only.”
“Shira?” It was Gadi’s voice. “Put it on visual. I loathe talking to a blank wall. If you’re not dressed, damn it, do you think I don’t remember your body?”
As always when she heard his voice without warning, her heart collapsed like a crushed egg. “My body ten years ago?” She tried to sound flippant. She glanced at the mirror to assure herself she was presentable, wishing she could feel indifferent to how she appeared to him. She was still in her dressing gown, of translucent shimmering silk. Her hair was tousled, a scattering of gold grains from the night before still glinting against the black. She looked a little too girlish, too waif-like, as she always did without makeup, but she could not stand the idea of painting her face at nine on a Sunday morning. She spoke. “Visual on. Good morning. Where are you?”
“Back in Tikva, visiting Avram. Ah, our daily duels, our refreshing bouts of mutual insult. The new stimmie I was working on with Tomas Raffia is done, and I’m on vacation. Why don’t you come home for a visit?” Gadi was dressed much as she was, in a translucent silk robe—from the mutated worms that were the rage. His was much more beautiful than hers, in colors that shifted as she watched. His face was gaunt but handsome as ever. He had dyed his hair a silver gray, not unlike his eyes. Only young people had gray hair nowadays. Most people looked dreadful that way, but it set off his face, dyed brown. He must look a little bizarre in Tikva, where everybody ran around in shorts or pants; but there he was an emissary of glamour from Vancouver, where the production of stimmies was centered. He was famous. People would expect him to look like a polished artifact. A designer of virons for stimmies was a star in his own right, able to move among the fans the way actors never could, their wired up and enhanced senses making them too vulnerable.
“How did the audience receive it?”
“Didn’t you enter my stimmie?” His voice arched in pained disbelief. “It was absolutely raw!”
“Gadi, I’ve been getting ready for court, meeting my lawyer every other day for the last three months. Josh has taken Ari from me. Why don’t you send me a crystal copy?” Then she would have to enter it. She hardly ever took the time to immerse herself in a stimmie, even now when she was living alone. She had lost the habit when Ari was born, for she could not cut herself off from him in that complete sensory overload, living out the exquisite sensations of some actress being pursued by cannibal dwarfs or balancing four lovers on Nuevas Vegas satellite, emotions pumped through her.
“Computer, note last request and fulfill… How could he take your kid?”
“They have patriarchal laws here. The boy is regarded as property of the father’s gene line—and, Gadi, you know I married him. Plus he has a higher tech rating than I do.”
“Why did you do that foolish thing?” Gadi grimaced. “I told you not to marry that caterpillar. Single marriage is old-fashioned and dreary.”
“You never tried to understand Josh… Actually things are mean between us, vicious. I hurt him terribly, Gadi.” It felt wonderful to talk. They always began with opening salvos and diplomatic couriers from their opposing forts, and then in five minutes they were exchanging confidences. They were still meshed in secret and subtle ways. Just last night she had thought of him as she was getting into bed with Malcolm, as she supposed she would for the rest of her life, and now this morning here they were chatting. “Gadi, in Y-S most people get married. There’s pressure to.”
“That man was born to be hurt—a moth who turned back into the worm he came from.”
“Josh is someone who has endured more than either of us can understand. He has no one at all left, no one. He survived by accident. Imagine, his native land is the Black Zone.” A large chunk of the Middle East was represented on maps as a uniform black, for it was uninhabitable and interdicted to all. A pestilent radioactive desert.
“You don’t marry a man because he’s bleeding on your foot.”
Shira winced, the taste of salt in her mouth. “I thought I could make him happy.”
Gadi snorted. “That’s what women are always trying to do to me, and what does it get them? A sore ass from landing on it.”
She decided to change the subject. “Your father has offered me a job, do you believe it?”
“Why you?” His forehead accordioned. “What does Avram want with you?”
“Gadi, I am very good at what I do, although Y-S doesn’t appreciate me.”
“Working for Avram is out of the question, but I’d love it if you were in Tikva. Then I’d see you when I skulk back here.”
“Until my appeal is decided, I’m not going anyplace. I won’t give up Ari. I was so stupid. I got married instead of giving my child to my mother. Now I wish I had. I broke our family line, and now I’ve lost him!”
“You sound as if you’re feeling guilty, Shira. Why?”
“If I hadn’t gone and married Josh, if I’d given my mother Riva my child, the way I’m supposed to, if I had only listened to Malkah, I’d have my child in my own family. It’s my fault. I thought I was so smart, so in control.”
“We all piss it out, Shira. Are you sure your mother wanted him? I’ve only met her twice in my life. I can barely remember what she looks like.”
“She’s a stranger to me. She works for Alharadek, that’s all I know.”
“It’s hard for me to picture you with a kid anyhow, Shira. You’re still a kid to me. I think you made up this imaginary Ari.”
A tear rolled out of her eye, and she snorted in anger. “Don’t be a complete turd, Gadi. He’s more real to me than anyone in the world is—” She became suddenly aware Malcolm was standing just inside her bedroom, listening. Now he moved behind her so that his image would be transmitted.
Gadi looked amused. “You should have told me you had company. We can gossip any old time.”
With Malcolm at her elbow, she could not say the truth: that she had forgotten him in the immediacy of her connection with Gadi. It was awkward all the way around as she signed off.
Breakfast was decidedly bumpy. “I didn’t know you had another man in link.” Malcolm scowled. He was as tall as Gadi but more solidly built, with thatchy brown hair and thick commanding brows, a habit of holding his chin jutted out as if commanding a charge.
“It’s not that way. He’s an old friend. We grew up together.”
“You kept laughing when you were talking to him. It didn’t sound like someone who’s merely a friend.”
“I never think of friends as merely anything. Friends are precious.”
“The right word for him. Good-looking if you like the precioso type.”
“He creates virons for Uni-Par.”
“I never sink into those things,” Malcolm said, which was the going line in Y-S unless it was an official program, but the corners of his mouth sagged. “I don’t even own a helmet to go all the way in. I just use grungy old electrodes… That wasn’t Gadi Stein?”
Shira found herself irritated, which she politely attempted to cover by asking him about his sand sailing. It was a night sport but still dangerous. It would have been much pleasanter to go on gossiping with Gadi. She had not had time to ask about his father, Avram, about all their old friends, about the complicated relationships in Tikva, the newest political flap, the latest crazes. It was effortless to talk with Gadi and laborious to carry on the tedious, painstaking spadework of getting to know this man, who seemed less sympathetic by the moment. He was definitely sulking, whipping his coffee round and round, his spoon standing up in the cup like a pole, as if to punish it for his disappointment in her. She did not want to quarrel with him—she did not need yet another feud at work—so she would simply get through breakfast and ease him out. She herself was the problem.
“I thought you’d be … softer. You have this look sometimes like a little kid, so innocent,” Malcolm said as if accusingly. His chin was thrust at her, his brows beetled.
She felt like telling him it was simply the neotonic effect: large dark eyes in a thin face provoked in mammals including humans the inborn reaction toward infants—the fawn, the kitten, the puppy, and the Shira. In college she had frowned a lot in order to compel those around her to take her seriously. She was not girlish, shy, innocent, blithe, and she often wished she did not present a facade that seemed to lure only men who wanted a child-woman. She was bleaker, thornier. And the truth was, she was too involved now in her efforts to get her son back to try hard with any man. She felt like apologizing to Malcolm for wasting his time. She was a mirage.
Today she would see Josh, one reason she had felt the need for pretending she had a real new relationship. She must simply go and confront Josh and try to reason with him. Then she would have Ari to herself for an entire twenty hours, from noon till eight a.m. tomorrow.
As soon as Malcolm left, she began preparing psychologically, in her dress and her manner, for the battle to come. Josh had been full of nasty games since she left him, but she knew they were just an expression of his pain. It was not that Josh had loved her passionately, although he would have insisted he did. Rather he had formed a conventional attachment, but one that was central to his personal economy of survival. He simply counted on her to be there.
No more postmortems. What she most wanted was to create a perfect day for Ari. She hoped he still liked fluffy omelets with the egg whites whipped separately. She had managed to buy three real eggs. She would ask him if he wanted to eat a cloud. Unfortunately the day was dark, the artificial light orangey. Probably a sandstorm was raging outside the dome. She had planned to take him to the park. She kept a few toys here, but spending all her credit on legal fees, she could not afford much.
She hurried through the neat, ever new and ever clean city of the enclave. Above the serrated rows of low-tech bins, the silver dome stretched. Three hundred thousand people lived here; as many tubed in and out daily from the Glop. Under the dome it was spring, and the climate was set for what it had probably been like here fifty years before, but the streetlights were on.
A crocodile of children in their Sunday blue uniforms marked with the Y-S logo marched past. She could tell they were children of management rather than of techies, because they had already been worked on surgically to resemble the Y-S ideal face and body. They were singing one of the corporate hymns, a security ape leading them and one bringing up the rear. The apes moved as heavily as robots, although robots were forbidden to be made in human form since the cyber-riots; apes were simply people altered chemically and surgically and by special implants for inhuman strength and speed. These were high-level children being escorted through the midlevel-tech shopping district to some special event. Normally they would not venture out of Paradise Park, the enclave within the enclave, built behind walls around a real lake of water. A tall elegant woman on a horsicle—a horse robot shining golden and lifting each cobalt hoof high into the air in a mincing gait—rode beside them. Teacher? More likely, from the horsicle—which cost a fortune—and her hair, braided with jewels, one of the mothers.
She thought of her own mother, Riva, as she had not in years. She had seldom met Riva. The last occasion had been when she was seventeen and about to go off to college. Her mother was a dowdy, prematurely middle-aged woman, your typical bureaucrat or middle-level analyst—Shira had never quite grasped what her mother did, but obviously nothing important. The talent that made Malkah recognized worldwide as a genius and that had until recently secured Shira her choice of schools and projects seemed to have skipped Riva. Had Riva ever missed her as she was already missing Ari? She doubted it. Insofar as Shira could visualize her, she saw a fussy woman rubbing her hands together nervously. Riva had turned her over to Malkah with evident relief, Malkah had raised her, and everybody had been happy. No, Shira had not been able to take seriously the family tradition that she give her child to her mother. Her impression was that Riva would have been overburdened raising a gerbil.
Shira had grown up with cats and birds, but here only high-level techies and execs were permitted real animals. Everyone else made do with robots, but the good ones cost far too much for her. Ari’s little koala was the best she and Josh could do. Ari was crazy about it, Wawa Bear, but Josh had forbidden her to take it along with Ari, saying it was too expensive to drag around.
Their street was like a hundred others, their house one of the four types for Josh’s rating. Shira grimaced, standing outside the door, which no longer opened at her touch. The house computer had been reprogrammed to treat her like any other stranger. Recently when she picked up Ari, she waited outside for him. The last time she had been inside the house they shared, she had found the living room and kitchen ostentatiously unclean, food containers everywhere, unwashed crockery. The house had screamed neglect: look what you did to us! All Josh had to do was let the cleaning robot at its job. But he had chosen to say with the filth: this is what I have been reduced to. His anger was a stench in her nostrils. She had written a description of the incident in her latest appeal, citing the atmosphere in his household as unsuitable and unhealthy for a toddler. Two could fight with old food.
The house opened the door. “Come in. There is a message for you.” The voice had been reprogrammed. Actually it sounded as if the house were on neutral, as if no one lived here. The voice was clearly a machine voice, no longer female, no longer familiar.
“Isn’t Josh at home? Where’s Ari?”
“Josh is not here. Ari is not here. Please receive the message left for Shira Shipman.”
She walked through the foyer. Most of the furniture was in place, but personal things had disappeared, the photographs of Josh’s family. He would never remove the pictures of his slaughtered parents and brothers while he occupied this house. They were officially listed as dead in a plague, but they had died fighting. The twisted and half-melted menorah recovered from the ruins was gone from its place. She ran quickly to the terminal. It was not the enhanced one they had always used. It was a minimal terminal, set to run the house, take messages, answer simple questions, control a cleaning robot. It was the caretaker type that lacked even a protect function. She felt as if her chest were filling with cold mud. She felt heavy, formless, chilled through. What was going on? She sank into the chair before the terminal and identified herself.
Josh’s face appeared on the screen, his lips drawn thin. “I presume you have come here to argue with me. Any further appeals are useless. You left us, and now we have left earth. Yakamura-Stichen has transferred me to Pacifica Platform. I’m taking my assistant Barbra and Ari. I have the full permission of Y-S to take Ari with me. Unless you can get clearance to Pacifica, you’ll have to wait till we return to earth at the end of our tour of duty. The standard two years. Josh Rogovin out.”
She sat stunned. Then she ran upstairs to Ari’s room. It was stripped. Y-S must have let Josh move Ari’s little bed, his play desk, his toys, his koala robot. She ran through the house, calling hopelessly, futilely. Then she flung herself at the terminal and replayed Josh’s message.
“You really took revenge on me. You really did,” she said to his face, frozen on the screen at message’s end. She went on sitting there while the room darkened. Lights here would not turn on unless she requested it, and she made no request. How dingy and small the house felt around her, devoid of any traces of their marriage beyond wear and tear on the furniture, an occasional stain not yet cleared from the wall. Ari was gone. He was not even on earth.
It all came down to the simple fact that Josh’s skills were more valuable to Y-S than hers. They had been trying to transfer plasma state physicists to Pacifica Platform, but according to the rights of Y-S citizens, no one could be relocated off-earth without consent. Everyone suspected that there was more hard radiation on Pacifica than the multi was letting on. Josh had never been interested in working in space. Life on a platform was claustrophobia fully realized. Josh had no right to take Ari to spend his childhood in such a place. He had done it to punish her. There was nothing, absolutely nothing she could do.
She hated Y-S. Her boss had not fought for her hard enough. She had been sacrificed to the need of the multi for scientists willing to spend two years in a large tin can. Two years. The tears slipped down her face. She did not want to cry in this abandoned house that had witnessed the last phase of her stupid misbegotten marriage. She blew her nose hard and went home.
For what it was worth, she logged a formal protest to Y-S. Then quite openly she sent a message to Avram. She did not speak to him but sent it through the Net, the public information and communication utility that served the entire world. She told him she would accept the position in his lab. As soon as she could clean up her affairs here, she would be with him and go to work at once. She had squandered her accumulated credit on legal battles.
She had no idea why Avram wanted her to work with him, but a temporary job in Tikva would give her time to think which way to jump, time to negotiate with multis, time to heal. It would be a pleasure to be home again, where Malkah would light the Sabbath candles and they would say the ancient blessings, where she would be free to be who she was. How grim to be returning torn from her child, whom she had so often imagined bringing to Tikva. She anticipated no trouble in resigning. Had Y-S wanted to keep her services, they would have ruled she might share custody of Ari. Had they wanted her as badly as they wanted a plasma physicist on Pacifica, she would have sole custody. Company justice. She was going home.
Once upon a time is how stories begin. Half artist, half scientist, I know that much. A mother and a grandmother, I have been telling stories for fifty years. As the children grow, so do the tales, from line drawings in motion to the full range of colors and shadings, layered thickly as plaster or blood. Some moral tales belong to kindergarten, the age of being afraid of the dark, the age of venturing from the house alone for a short distance, admonitory fables in primary crayons. But other tales are always with us. We tell them to ourselves in midlife and in old age, different each time, accreting as stalactites press toward earth, heavier with each drop and its burden of secret dissolved rock and minerals, the many salts of the planet.
Thus, dear Yod, the story I am about to leave you in the Base is not the way I told it to my child Riva or to my child Shira or to Shira and Gadi when they would sit on their haunches like little frogs, all bug eyes and appetite. I am recording this story just for you in the nights of my ash-gray insomnia, when my life feels like an attic full of boxes I have put away, things once precious and now dusty and half forgotten but still a set of demands that I put it, all of it, in order and deal with it, as bequests, as trash, as museum to set open to the family or the world. This is a time of beginnings and endings, of large risks and dangers, of sudden death by mental assassination. It is also the time my sight is failing again, and this time it cannot be repaired. The darkness of night apes the darkness I dread, and sleep is the lover I fear perhaps more than I truly desire his soft warm weight on me.
This is the story, then, of the Golem: not you, my own little Golem I call little although you are taller than me by the same measure as a tall man (like Razi, my second-to-last lover) and stronger than me by a factor too large to bother guessing. You can lift a block of marble over your head. No, little as an affectionate term, the way so many languages attach suffixes of endearment that diminish in size as they enlarge in affect. Avram has forbidden me to see you, but we can still communicate through the Base, and there I create my bubeh maisehs for you. I am not at all sure to what extent I am guilty of great folly and overweening ambition for my role in your programming, or to what degree I am instead that figure of Strength on the Tarot deck, the woman who tames the lion, who taught you to temper your violence with human connection. A task Avram interrupted.