Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (13 page)

“No, no,” Kari says. “Colors, clothing. Are you capable of helping make choices? About earrings for example?”

He comes to look at the choices, and selects a pair of gold and rose enamel teardrops and holds them up for her. “I think my taste is no better than that of the average person,” he says, “but I like these.”

She frowns, looks at him through her lashes. She has got me thinking of it as “him.” And she is flirting with him! Kari! A married woman!

“What do you think, Diyet?” she asks. She takes the earrings, holds one beside her face. “They are pretty.”

“I think they’re gaudy.”

She is hurt. In truth, they suit her.

She frowns at me. “I’ll take them,” she says. The stallman names a price.

“No, no, no,” says the harni, “you should not buy them, this man is a thief.” He reaches to touch her, as if he would pull her away, and I hold my breath in shock—as if the thing should touch her!

But the stallman interrupts with a lower price. The harni bargains. He is a good bargainer, but he should be, he has no compassion, no concern for the stallkeeper. Charity is a human virtue. The Second Koran says, “A human in need becomes every man’s child.”

Interminable, this bargaining, but finally, the earrings are Kari’s. “We should stop and have some tea,” she says.

“I have a headache,” I say, “I think I should go home.”

“If Diyet is ill, we should go,” the harni says.

Kari looks at me, looks away, guilty. She
should
feel guilt.

***

I come down the hall to access the Household AI and the harni is there. Apparently busy, but waiting for me. “I’ll be finished in a minute and out of your way,” it says. Beautiful fingers, wrist bones, beautiful face, and dark curling hair showing just where its shirt closes; it is constructed elegantly. Lean and long-legged, like a hound. When the technician constructed it, did he know how it would look when it was grown? Are they designed aesthetically?

It takes the report and steps aside, but does not go on with its work. I ignore it, doing my work as if it were not there, standing so it is behind me.

“Why don’t you like me?” it finally asks.

I consider my answers. I could say it is a thing, not something to like or dislike, but that isn’t true. I like my bed, my things. “Because of your arrogance,” I say to the system.

A startled hiss of indrawn breath. “My…arrogance?” it asks.

“Your presumption.” It is hard to keep my voice steady, every time I am around the harni I find myself hating the way I speak.

“I…I am sorry, Diyet,” it whispers. “I have so little experience. I didn’t realize I had insulted you.”

I am tempted to turn around and look at it, but I do not. It does not really feel pain, I remind myself. It is a thing, it has no more feelings than a fish. Less.

“Please, tell me what I have done?”

“Your behavior. This conversation, here,” I say. “You are always trying to make people think that you are human.”

Silence. Is it considering? Or would it be better to say processing?

“You blame me for being what I am,” the harni says. It sighs. “I cannot help being what I am.”

I wait for it to say more, but it doesn’t. I turn around, but it is gone.

***

After that, every time it sees me, if it can it makes some excuse to avoid me. I do not know if I am grateful or not. I am very uncomfortable.

My tasks are not complicated; I see to the cleaning machine, and set it loose in the women’s household when it will not inconvenience the mistress. I am jessed to Mardin, although I serve the mistress. I am glad I am not jessed to her; Fadina is, and she has to put up with a great deal. I am careful never to blame the mistress in front of her. Let her blame the stupid little dog for crapping on the rug. She knows that the mistress is unreasonable, but of course, emotionally, she is bound to affection and duty.

On Friday mornings, the mistress is usually in her rooms, preparing for her Sunday
bismek
. On Friday afternoons, she goes out to play the Tiles with her friends and gossip about husbands and wives who aren’t there. I clean on Friday afternoons. I call the cleaning machine and it follows me down the hallway like a dog, snuffling along the baseboards for dust.

I open the door and smell attar of roses. The room is different, white marble floor veined with gold and amethyst, covered with purple rugs. Braziers and huge open windows looking out on a pillared walkway, beyond that vistas down to a lavender sea. It’s the mistress’
bismek
setting. A young man is reading a letter on the walkway, a girl stands behind him, her face is tearstained.

Interactive fantasies. The characters are generated from lists of traits, they’re projections controlled by whoever is game-mistress of the
bismek
and fleshed out by the household AI. Everyone else comes over and becomes characters in the setting. There are poisonings and love affairs. The mistress’ setting is in ancient times and seems to be quite popular. Some of her friends have two or three identities in the game.

She usually turns it off when she goes out. The little cleaning machine stops. It can read the difference between reality and the projection, but she has ordered it never to enter the projection because she says the sight of the thing snuffling through walls damages her sense of the alternate reality. I reach behind the screen and turn the projection off so that I can clean. The scene disappears, even the usual projections, and there is the mistress’ rooms and their bare walls. “Go ahead,” I tell the machine and start for the mistress’ rooms to pick up things for the laundry.

To my horror, the mistress steps out of her bedroom. Her hair is loose and long and disheveled, and she is dressed in a day robe, obviously not intending to go out. She sees me in the hall and stops in astonishment. Then her face darkens, her beautiful, heavy eyebrows folding toward her nose, and I instinctively start to back up. “Oh, Mistress,” I say, “I am sorry, I didn’t know you were in, I’m sorry, let me get the cleaning machine and leave, I’ll just be out of here in a moment, I thought you had gone out to play the Tiles, I should have checked with Fadina, it is my fault, mistress—”

“Did you turn them off?” she demands. “You stupid girl,
did you turn Zarin and Nisea off
?”

I nod mutely.

“Oh Holy One,” she says. “Ugly, incompetent girl! Are you completely lacking in sense? Did you think they would be there and I wouldn’t be here? It’s difficult enough to prepare without interference!”

“I’ll turn it back on,” I say.

“Don’t touch anything!” she shrieks. “FADINA!” The mistress has a very popular
bismek
and Fadina is always explaining to me how difficult it is for the mistress to think up new and interesting scenarios for her friends’ participation.

I keep backing up, hissing at the cleaning machine, while the mistress follows me down the hall shrieking “FADINA!” and because I am watching the mistress I back into Fadina coming in the door.

“Didn’t you tell Diyet that I’d be in this afternoon?” the mistress says.

“Of course,” Fadina says.

I am aghast. “You did not!” I say.

“I did, too,” Fadina says. “You were at the access. I distinctly told you and you said you would clean later.”

I start to defend myself and the mistress slaps me in the face. “Enough of you, girl,” she says. And then the mistress makes me stand there and berates me, reaching out now and then to grab my hair and yank it painfully, because of course she believes Fadina when the girl is clearly lying to avoid punishment. I cannot believe that Fadina has done this to me; she is in terror of offending the mistress, but she has always been a good girl, and I am innocent. My cheek stings, and my head aches from having my hair yanked, but, worse, I am so angry and so, so humiliated.

Finally we are allowed to leave. I know I should give Fadina a piece of my mind, but I just want to escape. Out in the hall, Fadina grabs me so hard that her nails bite into the soft part under my arm. “I told you she was in an absolute frenzy about Saturday,” she whispers. “I can’t believe you did that! And now she’ll be in a terrible mood all evening and I’m the one who will suffer for it!”

“Fadina,” I protest.

“Don’t you ‘Fadina’ me, Diyet! If I don’t get a slap out of this, it will be the intervention of the Holy One!”

I have already gotten a slap, and it wasn’t even my fault. I pull my arm away from Fadina and try to walk down the hall without losing my dignity. My face is hot and I am about to cry. Everything blurs in tears, so I duck into the linens and sit down on a hamper. I want to leave this place, I don’t want to work for that old woman. I realize that my only friend in the world is Kari and now we are so far apart, and I feel so hurt and lonely that I just sob.

The door to the linens opens and I turn my back thinking, “Go away, whoever you are.”

“Oh, excuse me,” the harni says.

At least
it
will go away. But the thought that the only thing around is the harni makes me feel even lonelier. I cannot stop myself from sobbing.

“Diyet,” it says hesitantly, “are you all right?”

I can’t answer. I want it to go away, and I don’t.

After a moment, it says from right behind me, “Diyet, are you ill?”

I shake my head.

I can feel it standing there, perplexed, but I don’t know what to do and I can’t stop crying and I feel so foolish. I want my mother. Not that she would do anything other than remind me that the world is not fair. My mother believes in facing reality. Be strong, she always says. And that makes me cry harder.

After a minute, I hear the harni leave, and awash in self-pity, I even cry over that. My feelings of foolishness are beginning to outweigh my feelings of unhappiness, but perversely enough I realize that I am enjoying my cry. That it has been inside me, building stronger and stronger, and I didn’t even know it.

Then someone comes in again, and I straighten my back again, and pretend to be checking towels. The only person it could be is Fadina.

It is the harni, with a box of tissues. He crouches beside me, his face full of concern. “Here,” he says.

Embarrassed, I take one. If you didn’t know, you would think he was a regular human. He even smells of clean man-scent. Like my brothers.

I blow my nose, wondering if harni ever cry. “Thank you,” I say.

“I was afraid you were ill,” he says.

I shake my head. “No, I am just angry.”

“You cry when you are angry?” he asks.

“The mistress is upset at me and it’s Fadina’s fault, but I had to take the blame.” That makes me start to cry again, but the harni is patient and he just crouches next to me in among the linens, holding the box of tissues. By the time I collect myself, there is a little crumpled pile of tissues and some have tumbled to the floor. I take two tissues and start folding them into a flower, like my mother makes.

“Why are you so nice to me when I am so mean to you?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Because you do not want to be mean to me,” he says. “It makes you suffer. I am sorry that I make you so uncomfortable.”

“But you can’t help being what you are,” I say. My eyes are probably red. Harni never cry, I am certain. They are too perfect. I keep my eyes on the flower.

“Neither can you,” he says. “When Mardin-salah made you take me with you on your day off, you were not even free to be angry with him. I knew that was why you were angry with me.” He has eyes like Fhassin, my brother (who had long eyelashes like a girl, just like the harni).

Thinking about Mardin-salah makes my head ache a little and I think of something else. I remember and cover my mouth in horror. “Oh no.”

“What is it?” he asks.

“I think…I think Fadina
did
tell me that the mistress would be in, but I was, was thinking of something else, and I didn’t pay attention.” I was standing at the access, wondering if the harni was around, since that was where I was most likely to run into him.

“It is natural enough,” he says, unnatural thing that he is. “If Fadina weren’t jessed, she would probably be more understanding.”

He is prescripted to be kind, I remind myself. I should not ascribe human motives to an AI. But I haven’t been fair to him, and he is the only one in the whole household sitting here among the linens with a box of tissues. I fluff out the folds of the flower and put it among the linens. A white tissue flower, a funeral flower.

“Thank you…Akhmim.” It is hard to say his name.

He smiles. “Do not be sad, Diyet.”

***

I am careful and avoid the eye of the mistress as much as I can. Fadina is civil to me, but not friendly. She says hello to me, politely, and goes on with whatever she is doing.

It is Akhmim the harni, who stops me one evening and says, “The mistress wants us for
bismek
tomorrow.” It’s not the first time I’ve been asked to stand in, but usually it’s Fadina who lets me know and tells me what I’m supposed to do. Lately, however, I have tried to be kind to Akhmim. He is easy to talk to, and like me he is alone in the household.