Body of Glass (11 page)

At last the Maharal is satisfied they have dug enough clay, and he lays down the wooden form. They see it is shaped like a man. They begin to pack the clay over the shape, to mould it into a body. Again, over the head of the muttering rabbi, Itzak and Yakov exchange glances of wonder and fear. Has the Maharal gone crazy? Is he suddenly senile? The death of his only son cast him into a deep depression, but this is madness. What are they doing, illegally out of the ghetto, prancing around the riverbank at the new moon, making a huge mud pie in the shape of a man?

The form the Maharal has laid down on the soil is larger than a normal man, as tall and broad as the strongest soldier. The Maharal stoops and works on the features of the clay doll. He moulds the hair, the face, the organs. The huge clay doll lies there naked and ominous. Then the Maharal begins to pray, with his arms raised over his head. The wind has slithered away, and mist is rising from the silvered blackness of the river. His arms outspread, he begins to pray louder, rocking, davening, chanting. The hair rises on the nape of Itzak, and he turns to Yakov for comfort, but Yakov’s mouth has fallen open and he, too, is praying strange words that seem to coalesce in the air between the men like a cloud of oily smoke.

The face of the Maharal is pale with ecstasy. He feels the power coming through him. It is the power of creation. It is always dangerous, it is lightning striking the tower and the world set on end. It is always the entrance of the Word into Matter and everything is born again. He feels the energy of something strange and new and terrible and focused to a spear piercing through him and into the clay before him. He sees his own hands shining with a blue-white radiance. His hands are crackling. His hair stands up with electricity.

All the combinations of letters and vowels he chants, and the hidden names of G-d he speaks, and the sacred numbers that built the atoms of the universe. He has become transparent with power that is pouring through him. His flesh is blackened like glass that has stood in a fire. His eyes are silver as the moon, without pupils or iris. He knows in that moment more than he has ever known in his life and more than he will know in five minutes.

Blue fire crackles over the clay doll as if rivulets of mercury ran over the surface and then sank inside. The clay begins to smoke and to heat dull red and then brighter and brighter. It is red as a heart ripped open when arterial blood spurts out; now it is orange and now burning yellow and now a white they cannot stare at. Itzak and Yakov shrink back. They are blinded. When their eyes stop tearing and they rub at their lids and then hope they can see again, the doll is cooling from orange to red and then dulling to almost the colour of their skin. It is no longer clay but flesh at which they stare.

Now from the raised arms of the Maharal rises a fresh cold wind bearing rain. Right on their heads a small storm descends, the wind whipping at their garments and their hair and beards, rattling then breaking off the bare branches of the trees. For a moment the rain is everything, a solid wall of water, a drenching in which they almost cannot breathe. Then the rain subsides, the wind falls and the doll lies there, a man of flesh who now sprouts hair of a dull reddish colour and reddish pubic hair about the flaccid organ that lolls against a massive thigh, who has new nails and eyelashes and ruddy lips, who is, although huge, as perfectly formed as any of them.

Itzak looks at Yakov, and Yakov looks back at him. Itzak mouths, “A golem?” and Yakov nods, his mouth still open. They are soaked to the skin and shivering with fear. They clutch hands, and each knows the other, too, would like to bolt.

Now the Maharal turns to Yakov and whispers in his ear what he is to chant and sends him marching seven times left to right around the body. He whispers to Itzak and compels him also, chanting and circling, a solemn dance round and round, then he begins chanting, his beard and head hairs all bristling and bright, his eyes silvery, round and round, chanting in a voice as sonorous and uncanny as the howling of a wolf. As the Maharal circles, the chest of the Golem begins to heave slowly. His lips part. A breath that is a deep long groan issues from him and then another, and the man of clay begins to stir. The eyes flick open, but they are glazed, unseeing, the Maharal seizes the Torah scroll he has brought, and seven times he circles, dancing as if it were Simchat Torah. Breath shudders faster through the frame of the Golem. He moans loudly. He blinks his grey eyes and now he sees, he looks and sees them. He stares all around, lifting his head and looking from side to side like a big snapping turtle putting its head out of the river. He is alive, he is a living man, and yet there is something massive, inert, prehistoric in him. He is a lizard-man, Itzak thinks, he is a man of shale.

Itzak and Yakov instinctively draw back from him, frightened. The Maharal flinches back also, but then he gathers himself and comes forward to stand over the man who had been clay, the man he has made.

I lie in my high antique bed hearing the unfamiliar sounds of Shira in her room, finally, finally, back with me. It is a precious ingathering. She suffers the loss of her son and perhaps even the loss of her useless husband, but she is returned to me. She used to object at this point in the story: how could a man of clay come alive? She has always been on the literal side in her thinking. Like you, in fact, my dear Yod. You should communicate well on the level. She will learn quickly to reach you, wait and see.

I remember that I spoke to her about the power of naming. What we cannot name, I said, we cannot talk about. When we give a name to something in our lives, we may empower that something, as when we call an itch love, or when we call our envy righteousness; or we may empower ourselves because now we can think about and talk about what is hurting us, we may come together with others who have felt this same pain, and thus we can begin to try to do something about it.

But I was talking in that partial way one does to children. The stage of life is full of little truths that do not quite fit together. I know what the Maharal felt, for in all creation, in science and in art, and in the fields like mine where science and art meet and blend, in the creating of chimeras of pseudodata, interior worlds of fantasy and disinformation, there is a real making new. We partake in creation with ha-Shem, the Name, the Word that speaks us, the breath that sings life through us. We are tool and vessel and will. We connect with powers beyond our own fractional consciousness to the rest of the living being we all make up together. The power flows through us just as it does through the tiger and through the oak and through the river breaking over its rocks, and we know in our core the fire that fuels the sun.

I understand what Avram, my old lover, felt when he created a person in his laboratory as truly as when he put his prick into Sara and they made Gadi together. As truly as when I gave birth to Riva and she lay beside me real and red and screaming. Every life is new. Every word is constantly speaking itself for the first time: birth, love, pain, want, loss. Every mother shapes clay into Caesar or Madame Curie or Jack the Ripper, unknowing, in blind hope. But every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.

I have stood on Rosh Hodesh in the darkness of the wood by the whispering river, and I have called powers through me to blast into life what has never before been. That is what I should honestly have told Gadi and Shira when they sat at my feet in the courtyard by the blooming peach with its pink blossoms and I told them this story. I should have said I am the Maharal and I make the Golem with my whole life’s best and most potent moments, and so does Avram, and so, perhaps, my darlings, may you. Creation is always perilous, for it gives true life to what has been inchoate and voice to what has been dumb. It makes known what has been unknown, that perhaps we were more comfortable not knowing. The new is necessarily dangerous. You, too, must come to accept that of your nature, Yod, for you are truly new under the sun.

eight

Shira

A standard service robot, walking upright but with a face plate and four metallic hands, let her in. “I am Gimel. Follow, please.” The voice was affectless as an elevator or a food dispenser. Gimel was the dim-witted robot Avram had built her last year home. His face and hands were no longer covered in artificial skin. Perhaps Avram had given up building illegal cyborgs that resembled people. She was kept waiting in the outer lab while Gimel communicated with the locked inner lab.

Gimel led her through a set of security latches. When the door finally opened, a dark-haired man was standing on the other side, of medium height, with a solid compact build ― obviously a security guard, as he was crouching just inside the door in a defensive stance, with his hands held to strike. She had been around enough wired-to-the-max, edgy security apes to come to a full stop, holding her breath involuntarily, keeping her hands completely still and visible. The last time she had faced an ape was when she had gone to complain about Ari’s being moved to Pacifica Platform. Dr Yatsuko, the portly head of the Artificial Intelligence section, had seen her himself, for the first time since she arrived to work there. It was almost shocking to be brought before him, but she had been too crazed with grief to care. Two apes had flanked him during their four-minute exchange, as if her outraged mother love might cause her to attack him with her teeth and nails.

“Yod! There is no need to defend me.” Avram came towards her, rubbing his hands briskly together. His hair was entirely white and his eyes glittered as hard and bright as she remembered them. “Welcome, Shira.”

The guard backed up rapidly, moving to the wall. His eyes stayed on the door until it shut and the locks automatically reconnected. She sidled past him, still nervous. She hoped that Avram planned to dismiss the guard so that they could talk without his twitchy presence. Never had there been professional apes in Tikva when she was growing up. Most of the town stood guard duty, and the head of security was chosen at town meeting. She was disappointed that professional security had appeared here.

Avram took her elbow and steered her towards his desk. “Yakamura-Stichen’s loss is my gain. I do need your expertise, Shira. I’ll match what you were making there ― I told you that.”

“But what can I do for you… Dr Stein?” She thought of him as Avram, but if she was working for him, she could not call him that.

“I read your papers on the field density shock syndrome in projection and on the erosion of time sense in fused users. As for what you can do here, you’ve already met my project. Yod: come forward!”

The guard was staring at her openly. His curiosity was so obvious in his face that she wondered if he was a bit simple. His stare was open, intense, wondering. The irises of his eyes were dark brown, green flecked, set against unusually porcelain-appearing whites. His hair was almost as dark as her own; his complexion, olive. He was in no way unusual among the many physical types who lived in the little town. He looked vaguely Mediterranean in background.

Avram stood between them and off to the side. “Shira, this is Yod.”

“Yod? That’s an odd name ―” she began, and then stopped because she understood. Yod was the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Alef, Bet, Gimel… Yod. “A cyborg?”

“The
cyborg,” Avram corrected in a pleased tone. He gave Yod a slap on the back. This is what I’ve been working towards. Finally. And just in time, as you’ll learn. Our situation here is deproving radically. Our Base is under attack from information pirates.”

She moved forward, leaning close to touch its cheek. The artificial skin felt warm, its surface very like human skin although drier. She could feel the cyborg tense under her fingers, which surprised her. It made her feel as if she were being rude, but that was absurd. You did not ask permission of a computer to log on; computers did not flinch when you touched them. Are you going to sell it to Olivacon?”

Yod responded to this by turning to stare at Avram, looking shocked. Avram had done an excellent job building the equivalent of minute musculature into its face area, in order to deliver a simulacrum of human reactions. She was curious about the programming that enabled the cyborg to choose what reaction to produce in at least a semi-appropriate manner. Malkah had been working with Avram; had this been the project? Obviously Avram had applied the elaborate technology of human implants and replacement organs and limbs to the creation of the cyborg, but he had gone beyond anything she was aware of. Of course with corporate secrecy, scientists could never know what was really going on in their field hidden away in another multi. Industrial espionage was an exceedingly lucrative career.

Avram took her arm firmly. “Yod is a secret project of my own. What does Olivacon need with him? They have their security, trigger-happy apes raised on steroids and adrenophine. Yod will be our security, our protector. If we can’t have weapons, now we have a one-man army.”

“But robots are programmed to self-destruct before they injure anyone. How can a robot fight?”

“Yod’s a cyborg, not a robot ― a mix of biological and machine components. He’s programmed to protect us ― our town, its inhabitants, our Base. That’s his primary duty. But to perform it he cannot be as naive and awkward as he now is. That’s where you come in.”

“Avram, all my work has been with corporate and public megabrains. I don’t really have any expertise to offer with less than human ―”

“My storage capacity is in the range of the artificial brains you’ve worked with, and I interface with such computers far better than a human ever could,” Yod said, crossing its arms. “I, too, have read your papers available in the Net.” It had a pleasant moderately deep voice she doubted she could tell from a human voice. “Should I demonstrate my ability to interface now?”

“Later. Yod has extensive cybernetic, mathematical and systems analysis programming, probability theory, up-to-date scientific knowledge of an encyclopedic width. He’s also programmed with general history, forty languages, Torah, Talmud, halakic law ― we can’t have security that offends people, after all. But you’ll no doubt make your way through his programming in the next weeks.”

Shira was astonished but sceptical. Yod was an enormous breakthrough, but Avram was claiming for his cyborg far more than she considered credible. You call the cyborg “he”, I notice. Isn’t that anthropomorphizing? I would like us to agree to proceed objectively, not in terms of wish fulfilment.”

Yod spoke again. “How shall I address you?”

“I told you, her name is Shira,” Avram said. “It isn’t possible for you to forget.”

“I’ve noticed variant forms of address. She called you first Dr Stein and then Avram. That leaves the question of how she wishes me to address her. I believe we should explain to her that referring to me as “him” is correct. I am not a robot, as Gimel now is. I’m a fusion of machine and lab-created biological components — much as humans frequently are fusions of flesh and machine. One of us should also explain that I am anatomically male, as you created me.” The cyborg almost seemed to be addressing Avram in pique. It had turned away from her. She was going to have as much difficulty as Avram obviously did in remembering that human form did not make a human creature.

“Really? Why did you do that?” she asked Avram. In fact what did it mean to speak of a machine as having a sex at all? Surely it did not urinate through its penis, and what would it want to have sex with, presuming a machine could want, which she was not about to assume. Machines behaved with varying overrides and prerogatives. They had major and minor goals and would attempt to carry them out. But “want” was a word based in biology, in the need for food, water, sleep, the reproductive drive, the desire for sexual pleasure.

Avram looked slightly embarrassed. He did not look at Yod or at her but at the ceiling, his hands joining behind his back. “I felt the more closely he resembled a human being, the less likely he would be detected. It will be necessary for him to pass time with humans, and he must seem as much like them as possible. I frequently had to sacrifice efficiency to a convincing facade and behaviour. I could see no reason to create him … mutilated.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Yod said. Its voice sounded offended.

“If we’re going to work together, you might as well call me Shira. That’s what my house calls me.” “Shira. That means Song.” You have a knowledge of Hebrew?”

“Of course.” It said that exactly as Avram would have. His inflection.

“It is that very point,” Avram said, stepping between them, “that I need your help with. He needs to be educated in how to speak to humans, how to behave socially, how to handle his functions. He must be able to pass, do you understand? I’m already desperately behind on my contract work for Cybernaut. I can work with him at most two or three hours a day. He doesn’t sleep, and he must be put to work all the time, learning. When Gadi was here, I couldn’t bring him downstairs at all ―”

“He’s left, then.” Shira felt the room grow suddenly more spacious. Perhaps the work might have some interest, at least to occupy her while she began negotiating, probably first with Olivacon and Cybernaut. She would give herself a month to relax, and then she would start job hunting.

“Two days ago.” Avram could not suppress a smile of relief. “I should be able to catch up on my contract work and still have a little time to spend working with Yod.”

“Gadi doesn’t know about the cyborg, then?”

“Of course not. Why should he need to know?”

“Who does know, then?”

“Malkah. I needed her help with the programming. She has a rare capacity for discretion, you know,” he said, as if letting Shira in on a great secret about her grandmother. “Malkah talks too much, but she doesn’t talk about what she doesn’t want you to know. That’s unusual in a woman.”

“I should think it’s unusual in a man. But what happened to David? Your assistant. He knows.”

“David had an accident. He’s no longer with us.”

While they talked, Yod looked from one to the other, its head rotating as though watching a tennis match. It had been provided with an expression at rest of nervous, high-strung curiosity. Yod’s features had been well and finely modelled. It did not resemble what she remembered of Gimel, when it had had a face, so she assumed Avram must have created a new mould at some point. It was dressed in loose hideous clothing of the sort worn by unathletic men when they decided to appear sporty or indicate they were on vacation, luridly coloured in orange and chartreuse and dully shining. Whenever Yod moved, its pants made little rustling sounds, like a nest of mice. Perhaps the first thing she would do was pick out new clothes for it and teach it how to dress. She had had to do that for Josh. A cyborg could not have less clothes sense than her ex-husband. She wished she could have reprogrammed Josh.

“What happened to the models in between Gimel and this one?” She was assuming he had begun with Alef and worked his way through the Hebrew alphabet. Yod started at a sound from outside, leapt over the desk to the wall, pressed against it listening. Came slowly back, still listening. Yod’s jumpiness was going to be hard to take. She wondered if Avram couldn’t shut it off and turn down its energy source. A hyperactive cyborg. It reminded her of a young guard dog, an immature Doberman, except that it moved with surprising grace. It did not move like the other robot, Gimel, slowly and obviously following an algorithmic program for operating each finger. It moved like a huge cat, faster than human reaction but smoothly. That speed and grace was alarming in something mechanical, whatever components it was built from.

“They all malfunctioned,” Avram said. “Several were uncontrollably violent. That’s why I finally called in Malkah on the software. It was an expensive folly until I created Yod. So far he’s working out.”

Yod said, more softly than it had spoken before, “I am the first who can carry out the tasks of my father.”

“Your father?”

Avram shrugged, looking embarrassed. “Since Yod began to study human social organization, he sometimes refers to me in that way. I did make him, after all, and I did a better job with him than with Gadi, I have to say. Too bad Gadi doesn’t have one quarter Yod’s ability to concentrate and learn.”

“Well, I am not your mother,” Shira said bluntly. “I have a son.”

Avram does also,” Yod said. “Besides me. But I am not allowed to meet Gadi. Will I meet your son?” It was constantly surveying the room, acting as if it expected a chair to spring at them and attack.

“I wish it could be so,” she said. “He’s been taken from me.”

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

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

nine

Shira