The woman launched herself on Shira, seizing her by the right hand. Shira drew the resin knife left-handed, but the woman’s long leg, like the limb of a steel spider, darted out and kicked her wrist. She could feel the bone snap, and the knife went flying, right through the wall of the wrap. She tried to fumble for her necklace, but the woman was on her. She crashed to the earth. As her broken wrist bent, she blacked out. She came to as the weight of the woman lifted off her and the assassin arched backward unnaturally, bending until her spine snapped and Yod dropped her. He had a great rent in his side, exposing his biochips, through which colorless fluid leaked copiously, but the second ape lay mangled over the body of Tenori Bell.
Outside, someone screamed. She could smell cooked flesh and burning plastic. She dragged herself up, pulling with her functional hand on the pole and starting for the open flap. She had to see what was happening outside. Behind her Yod and the assassin were tangling. The assassin was flung back but twisted in the air and righted himself. Shira slipped past them. She saw Riva hit the ground outside, still firing, and then her mother vanished in a burst of fire from the fast tank.
Shira cried out, turning back. The surviving assassin came at Yod with a razor gun, a palm-sized weapon that projected a wire. Yod plucked it from the air, although it slashed his palm deeply. He did not bleed but leaked more fluids, and his circuitry lay bare. It was oddly mesmerizing. She heard laser fire behind her, and someone screamed. An explosion shook the earth, knocking her to her knees. She crawled out of the way of the struggle, grasping her broken wrist and looking for some weapon to use. Acrid smoke wafted in. Nili appeared at the door. She was covered with a dull brown paint that had scraped off in several places. Sighting with a laser pistol as if carelessly, she shot the assassin in the center of his back.
“Out of here now. Put this on.” Nili held out a sec skin.
“I can’t use my wrist.”
Yod helped Shira into the skin. He asked Nili, “Did you dispatch the two outside guards?”
“Sure. We garroted them. But the driver saw us when we came round to join in.” Nili was leading the way at a brisk trot. Shira was in great pain. She kept feeling as if she were going to faint. She realized she was bleeding from a cut in her thigh she had not felt. “Riva is dead,” Nili added. “The driver got her before I got him.”
Shira glanced around for Riva’s body, but the fast tank had created a huge smoking hole when it exploded. “Shouldn’t we use the float car?”
“They’ll shoot it down. I have an air bike in the bush. We had it delivered last night, and we camouflaged it before dawn. Faster.”
Yod picked up Shira and carried her. One of his hands was out of commission. He was still leaking and only partially functional. He traveled in a fast shuffling trot after Nili, the only one of them uninjured. They labored up a hill and down the other side, where Nili pulled off a layer of dirt over a thin covering. Under it was a two-wheeled device on gel treads. “Get on. Move. We’re being followed already.”
Yod placed Shira on the riding column and mounted behind her, holding her around the waist against him. She felt herself slipping into darkness, tried to shake herself loose and then went under. The wild rocking of the bike shook her back into consciousness. Nili was driving full tilt, and it bucked and tossed. Her brown paint continued to flake in the fierce wind of their speed. “What’s that paint?” Yod asked. “What’s its function?” Although he was wounded and Shira assumed he felt pain, his voice had little inflection.
“It prevents registering on sensors. It makes you invisible to surveillance devices—except the naked eye. I’m surprised you can’t tell.”
Yod took up a fleck of the paint with his functional hand and slid it into a pocket. All that while he held Shira with his injured hand, although it would not close. “Half my sensors are dysfunctional. I am failing.”
“Can Avram repair you?” Shira asked nervously.
“I believe so, probably with Gimel’s help. The only emergency is replacing my fluids quickly. My level of fluid is too low for me to continue to function. I am already experiencing shutdown of several systems.”
A bolt of laser fire struck near them, close enough for her to feel the scorch on her face and be blinded momentarily. “I’m taking your pistol,” Yod said calmly to Nili and then swung around in his seat and fired behind them. She heard something crash.
Shira fumbled at her com link. “Tikva, we’re coming in, emergency. Shira, Yod, Dalia’s nurse. Stand ready to admit us at once.”
“Cover yourself up, robot,” Nili said over her shoulder. “Your parts are leaking. Hide your hand and your body unless you mean to announce your nature through the streets.”
Yod nodded. He did not seem able to speak. He sat unnaturally rigid behind Shira, and now she had to hold on with her good hand. Fortunately they were approaching Tikva wrap. She thought for a moment they would collide, but Nili brought them up just at the gate with a great screech. With Nili’s help, Shira yanked off the sec skin and pulled it over Yod just as two guards charged out to see what was wrong. More supporting Yod than supported by him, she stumbled inside. Her stranger mother was dead; the hope for getting Ari back was just as dead. They had suspicions about Yod. She was an official enemy. Riva had been killed for nothing.
The medics came running, shouting, “Casualties?”
“Only me,” Shira said. To Nili she said, “Get him to Avram at once!”
The medics took her off in a glide chair. She felt helpless and guilty. She wept from shock and from an enormous unfocused sense of loss.
TWENTY-SIX
I Never Knew Her
“How could they know about Yod? They were simply keeping an eye on him because he was the security,” Avram asserted, as if speaking louder than usual could make his words more powerful, more convincing—to himself or me? Shira wondered. Her wrist was in a light cast, after a set of injections of fast-mend, but she found herself still in a state of aftershock. Avram insisted she help him repair Yod, who lay barely conscious, connected to a unit that kept his brain functional while they worked on him. “Edinburgh is famous for insisting every computer student learn hardware and software. You had the equivalent of what would have been an engineering degree. It’ll come back to you. It’s only your left wrist, and you can still use your fingers.”
She was awkward, for no matter how light the cast, it was still a cast, and her wrist had been shot full of nerve-number, but Avram was right: her training came back to her fingers. They were replacing damaged chips, seared and slashed connections, dead biochips, reinfusing the lubricant and nutrient fluids that had bled, while Nili paced or glumly watched. Avram found it difficult to stand that long, and preferred monitoring Shira from a stool. She asked, “So what was Dr. Rhodes doing there at all? He wasn’t my boss. Yod was his focus.”
Yod’s eyes opened. He tried to speak but could not yet. Avram said, “That’s pure speculation.”
“They were expecting something,” Shira said adamantly. “Dr. Rhodes wasn’t there to embrace me back into the bosom of Y-S.” She wished Malkah were present, to bring her intelligence to bear on the confusion; but Malkah was making preparations for Riva’s memorial service at sunset. Nili had returned in the night to search for Riva’s body, but the charred remains had been carried off already, probably by Y-S for attempted identification. She had found only a burned fragment, probably a foot, and fused plugs, which she had brought back for burial. Malkah was disturbed by the lack of a body. It was as if she could not mourn properly, could not focus her sense of loss.
“Your Dr. Rhodes is dead now,” Nili said sourly. “Whatever he came for, he didn’t get it.”
“We did successfully block them,” Shira said hopefully.
“Don’t you think they would gladly have paid with nine soldiers for the death of Riva?” Nili paced the lab, glaring.
“Dr. Rhodes was just as well regarded as Avram or Malkah, Nili. Y-S didn’t think they were risking anything whe
n they let him attend. They wanted him on the spot, but everything happened too quickly. It was all over in five minutes.” She was still stunned when she thought of it. Meanwhile, connection after connection knit under her hands. The tools began to feel natural. She remembered that she had enjoyed building machines in college.
Yod let out a sigh as his speech capacity returned. “You are all right?” he asked Shira at once, trying to touch her bound wrist but still unable to control his hand. “Will it heal?” At her nod, he continued, to Nili, “Your enhancements make you an effective fighter. Without you, I might not have sufficed to protect.”
Nili glared at him out of her intense green eyes. Side by side with Yod, Nili actually looked more artificial. Her hair, her eyes were unnaturally vivid, and her musculature was far more pronounced. “I am the future.”
“You may well be right,” Yod said mildly. “I’m not a proselytizer for my kind. I am not persuaded I’m a good idea, frankly.”
“I spent my life creating you,” Avram said huffily. “Would you rather I turned you off?”
“I can well believe you built a switch into the model,” Gadi said from the doorway. “How often have you wished I had one? Hello, hello. Who are you?” He made straight for Nili, stopping before her and then circling her. “Seeing you has lifted this day from the dreary to the delicious.”
Nili stood very still, staring at him. She looked at him with as avid a curiosity and the same air of not quite believing her eyes as Gadi was aiming at her. “Who is this?”
“My annoying son.” Avram introduced them, glaring. “Gadi has arranged his life so he never has to grow up. You can learn a lot about our contemporary life from him. He represents the age at its most frivolous.”
“You do look like a plaything,” Nili said to him uncertainly.
“Ah, would you like to play with me?” Gadi could not resist a little glance at Shira to see if he was awaking her jealousy.
She was curious about that too, but nothing stirred. She was too buffeted emotionally. Whenever she closed her eyes, she began to relive that blur of violence. She felt her wrist crack, she saw the assassin’s spine snap. She knew that Yod, too, was replaying the events, trying to figure out whether he had done everything he could. He was disturbed that he had permitted any of the party to be lost. Malkah was the most personally stricken. Shira felt a deep sense of confusion. She could not properly mourn the woman she had never known, but neither could she pretend she had not just lost her biological mother. Avram had been right. She had engaged in fatal wishing. Fantasizing about recovering Ari, she had gone eagerly to the meeting, ignoring the danger.
Yod was still checking out his circuitry, but his attention was primarily fixed on the odd couple in the center of the lab. He looked fascinated. “I don’t understand what you are,” Nili said uncertainly. “You are male?”
“Just so, lady of the blood-red hair, but I’ll be anything you like, to please you. I’ll crow or roar or whimper or sing and dance.”
“Gadi, get out. You make me bilious,” his father said.
“I’m Gadi Stein.” He waited, used to some reaction. Nili had none. “I design virons…” By now people were usually excited. He hadn’t the fame of the stars into whose sensory experiences millions of people had passed, but he had the secondary and considerable renown of the most fashionable designers, ranking with musicians and sports heroes; further, the careers of designers spanned the meteoric arcs of generations of stars.
Shira was enjoying the tinkering. It felt intimate to be working on Yod under his gaze. She suspected she could effect most repairs to him without Avram’s help, particularly if she continued studying his records. “Are we ready to close now?” she asked Yod, who nodded. They smiled at each other.
“Virons?” Nili looked blank. “That’s something to do with entertainment, isn’t it?”
Gadi was rendered briefly speechless. Finally he asked, “Where are you from? How can you not know what a viron is? You’re turning me over, verdad?”
“I come from…a primitive place. We don’t have credit for stimmies.”
“Everybody has stimmies. Every slum in the world.”
“We live high in the mountains, where there is no transmission.”
“Satellite transmission reaches everyplace.”
Nili decided simply to look away with a shrug.
Gadi was visibly recovering his moxie. “I can show you a couple of simple little virons upstairs. Come.”
Nili took a step after him. Then she shocked Shira by turning on her heel. “Shira, come with me? Wouldn’t you like to see them also?”
Could Nili be nervous about being alone with Gadi? Shira realized that men were exotic to Nili; she had never been alone with any man. Perhaps she had been raised on horror stories of rape and molestation. But surely Nili would have a sense she could handle herself. Physically, no doubt; perhaps, like Yod, she had primitive social skills. “Avram may need me to test Yod.”
“Oh, go with them,” Avram said with a dismissing wave. “Yod will finish testing himself in half the time if you all clear out. We need to review his defense performance in detail. This was his first trial in the field.”
Her inner landscape was ravaged by fire storm. She wanted to hold Malkah. Malkah was off with Rabbi Patar, trying to explain to her why the woman who had died was not Dalia, her sister, for they had all decided Riva was to be buried under her own name. Nili insisted that had been Riva’s strong wish. If they dared take the time to sit shiva, maybe they would draw together and comfort each other. In the meantime Shira might as well accompany Nili. Gadi was waiting, standing on one foot like a flamingo watching for an unwary flash of fish.
“Nili and I are blood relatives,” she said to Gadi. “Did you know that?”
“Just like Yod and I are cousins, right?”
“That is not possible,” Nili said. “But the former is true. My grandfather is her father. We are not sure exactly what that makes us, but likely I am her niece.”
Gadi had been shepherding them upstairs. Now he stopped, just before his outer door. He had left the old door at the foot of the steps, but when they reached the third-floor hall, a new door blocked the hall toward the left. It was silver and throbbed in a random pattern of sparkles and bubbles and dashes, suggesting the motion of water. “You never knew your father. Not even who he was,” he said to Shira, looking into her eyes.
“I asked my mother, Riva. She told me last week.”
“Riva who was Dalia, Malkah’s sister who just became her dead daughter. Your mother, therefore. Your family is certainly convoluted.”
“You’re not sympathetic,” Nili said. “Do you dislike Shira, or is it your nature to be cold? We’re speaking of the death of her mother, a brave woman and a great fighter.”
Yet Shira quietly thought that Nili was not as grieved as she might have expected, considering they had been lovers. She spoke of sorrow, but unlike Malkah, she did not exude it. Right now she gave off mostly an aura of intense wary curiosity.
“Of course I care about Shira. I just like to tease her. We grew up together; we’re old, old friends. Come into my parlor, dear pretty flies.”
The door was not solid but a field they passed through after Gadi had keyed them in. They were standing in what Shira could only think of as a velvet jungle. The walls were disguised as a dense wall of foliage in which parrots flew and screeched, in which small furry monkeys chased each other among brilliant and fragile orchids. The chairs were enormous purple and bronze flowers. The scent was sweet, thick, wet. Silk butterflies wavered like banners through the languid air. Nili glanced around, strode over and gingerly took a seat on the biggest purple flower. “This is your home?”
“Just one of the simple room virons I’ve designed here. I change them all the time. It would be too boring to be stuck in any of them, but they amuse me. Don’t you like it?”
“He means the room, Nili. It isn’t ordinary.”
Nili glanced aroun
d. “All your rooms are strange to me. It seems…pleasant. The only room I find familiar here is the lab downstairs. We have similar facilities. And the Commons. We eat together also.”
“This is just a room to you?” Gadi asked incredulously.
“It’s very nice,” Nili said stubbornly. “This chair is a little soft for me. I’m used to hard chairs or to squatting on rugs.”
“So this doesn’t seem…special to you?” Gadi insisted. He began playing with the arm of his chair, and silvery rain fell in a dense curtain. Of course it was illusion, a hologram. Then the sun came out through a fine mist, creating a perfect circle of rainbow. A jaguar flashed across the clearing, pausing to look over its shoulder, growl and then vanish into the imaginary vegetation, where a great metallic spider sat clinking and muttering.
“It reminds me of the house of Malkah. All the green plants and little trees inside.” Nili’s hand passed through a tree trunk. “But it’s real there.” She sounded disappointed.
“It’s for pleasure,” Gadi explained.
Nili looked at him blankly. “What kind of pleasure?”
“The pleasure of luxury. Of an experience out of the ordinary.”
“An imaginary jungle is luxurious? Then why not go to the real thing?”
“The real thing has mostly been destroyed,” Shira said. She wondered if she could simply slip out and leave them to their miscommunication in peace. Perhaps never had two more ill-matched people sat staring at each other in equal parts of fascination and incomprehension.
“The real jungle is full of things that bite, make you itch, scare you, give you diseases, rot your crotch, want to eat you for lunch.” He touched his chair arm. A flight of parrots converged, began a dogfight. Brilliant feathers drifted. Birds shattered like piñatas exploding into flowers.
“So danger is not part of your pleasure.”
“I didn’t say that,” Gadi said, sitting up very straight.
I should be jealous, Shira thought, but she was too deeply shaken to muster any jealousy. She wished she could escape her chaperon role, but she lacked the energy to break free. She watched them from a numb trance, wishing she were asleep in her bed. She had not slept more than an hour the night before her meeting. Images of violence floated on the back of her eyes. She was weary of attempting to function with the sense of being both mauled and guilty. She wanted to put her arms around Malkah and rock together in mutual comfort. She wanted to lie in Yod’s arms. How quickly she had come to depend on him. She imagined his presence quieter than a human’s demands. An enormous python was devouring a monkey over Gadi’s head. Then it began to sing Villa-Lobos. Shira broke into the conversation to ask, “Where’s your terminal? I need to talk to my house.”