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 offence and defence 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.
Gadi… Gadi glared at her. “Are you spying on me?”
She could not speak. Her throat closed. She could not cry out or breathe. Instead she stumbled down the hall, rebounding off walls, down the steps like a box falling, slipping and sliding, breaking into pieces. She must have made so much noise that Avram heard her, for he stood in the hall. “Quiet,” he said, taking her arm hard. “Who is he up there with?”
“Hannah Leibling,” she choked out and pulled free of him.
“I won’t have anyone else up there,” Avram said, shoving his hands in the pockets of his smock. He seemed to be trying to comfort her. “I’ll get rid of her for you, little Shira.” She began to cry then, the tears choking her. “Then you go to a good university and forget my useless son. He’s not worth your care, Shira. The best universities are in Europa. Go and enjoy.”
She was sobbing too hard to breathe. She could not stand for anyone to see her. She ran past him and down the steps to the street.
After her Avram called, his voice sharp with concern, “Shira, be calm! Be calm! It doesn’t mean anything to him.”
She ran on to the shed where they kept their old sec skins. Pulling hers on, she headed out into the raw. She did not go far. She climbed a dune and fell on the warm sand. On one side the vast shallow bay stretched, the ruins of the destroyed city poking from the eddies of the waves. Turning south, she could see over the robot desalinization plant to the sea beyond. The cooler in her sec skin hummed on. She could read the little red line in the corner of her face plate that gave her the temperature. It was twenty-eight degrees centigrade, a slow oven, a typical late May day in New England.
She thought perhaps she had died, for a great numbness overcame her. But it was only the trough of the wave of pain that slammed her a moment later. She did not know what to do with herself. She felt like a mangled thing, a rabbit that had run into a fan.
How could Gadi make love to that vulgar twit? They had always laughed at Hannah. Hannah had been making eyes at Gadi for years. Shira could hear her loud giggle, a glottal stop like water sucking down a drain. How could Gadi? She wanted to feel anger at him, but the pain drowned it utterly.
She would take off her sec suit and expose herself to the murderous sun, whose radiation would kill her. She would die, and Gadi would understand how much she had loved him and how his betrayal had wounded her. She saw herself lying peacefully on a board. She saw the simple cairn that would mark her grave. Gadi would come to mourn there.
That was a slow death, heat and dehydration. Radiation took months to kill. She would not remove her suit, no matter how much she felt like dying. Malkah had made her too pragmatic. Moreover, she could not stand the idea of Hannah telling the other girls, Oh, don’t you know, I feel so terrible. Shira killed herself over Gadi and me. He just couldn’t stay away from me, and the poor girl was consumed with jealousy. Shira rose to her knees, then to her feet. Jealousy was ugly, embarrassing, disgusting. She stumbled back. The wrap glittered like false hope floating over the town.
She went home without remembering as she spoke to the door how she got there. Hermes was lying in the courtyard, sunning himself ― the sun that came through the wrap was filtered, safe, warm but not searing. He was in middle age now, twelve years old and as big as ever, not fat but hefty, more serious and more placid than he had been. She flung herself down on the warm tiles, pillowing her face in his hot brown flank, and freely wept.
“Are you in pain, Shira?” the house asked gently. “Should I call Malkah? Do you need assistance?”
“I want to be left alone!”
“Tell me. You know I keep your secrets. What’s wrong?” The house knew how to coax. It had been her other mother. Did it really keep secrets from Malkah, who had programmed it?
“Just leave me alone!”
She did not hear Malkah come in, becoming aware of her only when Malkah said very softly, squatting on her heels, “I’m making schav, little one. Sometimes something so sour can help.”
For a moment she was pierced by the suspicion that Malkah knew, everyone knew; then her pragmatism won, and she realized that her position gave away her state. “I’m not hungry.”
“So eat to please me. A little soup, how hungry do you have to be?”
Sensing the indignity of her sprawl face down on the tiles, Shira sat up. Malkah called her ‘little one’ but was the same size, except a few pounds fleshier. They had the same dark hair, black in lamplight, red-tinted in the sun; the same large very dark eyes, big in their heart-shaped faces; but Malkah of course was an old woman, sixty-one years old. She wore her dark hair braided around her head and fixed on top with a silver ornament in the form of a dolphin. A salvage diver had given it to her. Only recently had Shira realized he had probably been Malkah’s lover. Shira had been too young to understand then, nine, then ten; and Malkah had been discreet. No man had ever lived in this house. Malkah had never married. If you married and a man hurt you, Shira realized, you had no place to run home to, no place to hide and nurse your pain.
Malkah handed her a big handkerchief. “I have to go see to my soup. Did you feed your friend there?”
“Not yet.” She had forgotten, and Hermes had not reminded her. Now he rose, stretched, stretched again and started for the kitchen, looking back for her expectantly.
She daubed at her face. How could she live with so much pain? She could not imagine how she would continue.
She did eat the soup. Malkah was right: it was soothing in a minor way. She was glad Malkah had decided to cook tonight. Most evenings one of them picked up supper at the Commons; sometimes they ate there with half the town. Other nights Malkah cooked, and once in a while she would have the house ask Shira to cook that night. Malkah sometimes did that when she knew Gadi was coming to supper. Another part of Shira’s life laid waste, as spoiled as the vast tracts of dead trees that had been maples on the mountains before acid rain, before the climate got too warm for them. Would Hannah take him home to supper now? How could he choose Hannah?
“Didn’t your auction results come today?”
“Oh.” Shira blinked hard. “What did I do with them? I had them with me when I … I’ll get them. I dropped them in the courtyard.” She rose from the table and ran to look for the printout.
Malkah took it from her, scanned it. “Obviously this is not what upset you.”
Shira looked into her empty soup bowl. “I’m fine now.”
“Your young man, then.”
“He isn’t mine! Not any more.”
“Shira, you’re too young to be plastered together for life. You’ve never listened to me about Gadi, and you’re not about to start now, I’m sure. I couldn’t stop you. No one can stop children in love unless by exile. But you’ll never grow up if you don’t let go of each other.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Shira rose. “I’ll clear now if you’re finished eating.”
“Still, we must talk at some point.” Malkah fixed her with her dark gaze, like a beam of energy and will. “We must also decide about this auction.”
“What do I care about that any more?”
“Gadi was never going to get into the same universities you’re sought by, Shira. You’ll be paid to go. Avram will have to pay for him.”
“He’s bright! He’s as smart as I am.”
“But lazier. And scattered.”
“But he’s more talented than any of us … No, I don’t want to defend him any more, I don’t want to explain him. I hate him!” Shira began clearing.
“You love too hard. It occupies the centre and squeezes out your strength. If you work in the centre and love to the side, you will love better in the long run, Shira. You will give more gracefully, without counting, and what you get, you will enjoy.”
Malkah did not know what love was. Shira refused to argue.
After supper the two of them sat in silence in the late ivory twilight of the court. Malkah was accessing the Net, plugged in in full projection. Everyone in Tikva was equipped with interface. They did not have the lavish stimmie spectacles other towns went in for, they did not have fast foils or wind cars, but every child born to the town was equipped to access the Net directly, heir to all the knowledge of the ages.
The Net was a public utility to which communities, multis, towns, even individuals subscribed. It contained the mutual information of the world, living languages and many dead ones. It indexed available libraries and offered either the complete text or precis of books and articles. It was the standard way people communicated, accepting visuals, code or voice. It was also a playing field, a maze of games and nodes of special interest, a great clubhouse with thousands of rooms, a place where people met without ever seeing one another unless they chose to present a visible image — which might or might not be how they actually looked.
