He, She and It (3 page)

The Color of Old Blood

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.