He, She and It Read online

  “AN ALLEGORICAL TOUR DE FORCE.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  “As always, Piercy writes with high intelligence, love for the world, ethical passion, and innate feminism.”

  ADRIENNE RICH

  “A literary version of future shock…To read it is to be caught up in the sweep of Piercy’s mind, the range of her heart, the exuberance of her vision.”

  Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Although there is plenty of action in this novel, what Piercy gives us is more a philosophical romance, and the story she tells is at once new and old…Vividly drawn…The value in Piercy’s book lies…in what happens to the people.”

  Chicago Tribune

  “Marge Piercy confronts large issues in this novel: the social consequences of creating anthropomorphic cyborgs, the dynamics of programming both humans and machines, the ethical question of our control of machines that might feel as well as think.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  “PIERCY DAZZLES.”

  Booklist

  “Exciting, intelligent and wonderfully well written…Elegantly constructed and thoroughly involving…Piercy is exploring the question of what makes humans human.”

  The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Marge Piercy has written what may be her best novel yet, and this is high praise indeed…Her new book stretches a fictional tightrope between past and present, and is really two books in one: a novel set in the future and a tale of Prague in 1600. The interwoven, parallel stories are about the power of words to create a reality, and more specifically about the ancient human desire to create intelligent life in our own form…It’s a touching love story and a gripping adventure tale…Stories are important, and Piercy has written an important story.”

  St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Vivid, detailed and complex, the world Piercy has created for Shira is fascinating…Succeeds as a brilliantly elaborate adventure.”

  Detroit Free Press

  “ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR…

  Piercy adds family and religious values to the cyberpunk core of multinational corporations and information pirates…Marvelous.”

  The Denver Post

  “[A] diverting tale…Piercy explores a world where information has become a commodity more precious than gold…[Her] vivid future world remains transcendent.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Gripping…A resonant evocation of love found and lost…An engaging story.”

  The Kirkus Reviews

  “The plot zooms to a page-turning climax.”

  Library Journal

  Also By Marge Piercy:

  Fiction

  GOING DOWN FAST*

  DANCE THE EAGLE TO SLEEP*

  SMALL CHANGES*

  WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME*

  THE HIGH COST OF LIVING*

  VIDA*

  BRAIDED LIVES*

  FLY AWAY HOME*

  GONE TO SOLDIERS*

  SUMMER PEOPLE*

  Poetry

  BREAKING CAMP

  HARD LOVING

  4-TELLING (with Emma Jarrett, Dick Lourie, and Bob Hershon)

  TO BE OF USE

  LIVING IN THE OPEN

  THE TWELVE-SPOKED WHEEL FLASHING

  THE MOON IS ALWAYS FEMALE

  CIRCLES ON THE WATER: SELECTED POEMS

  STONE, PAPER, KNIFE

  MY MOTHER’S BODY

  AVAILABLE LIGHT

  Other

  THE LAST WHITE CLASS: A PLAY

  (with Ira Wood)

  PARTI-COLORED BLOCKS FOR A QUILT: ESSAYS

  EARLY RIPENING: AMERICAN WOMEN’S POETRY NOW

  THE EARTH SHINES SEVRETLY: A BOOK OF DAYS (with paintings by Nell Blaine)

  * Published by Fawcett Books

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1991 by Middlemarsh, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-52726

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77522-1

  This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  v3.1

  to the memory of Primo Levi

  His books were important to me.

  I miss his presence in the world.

  Contents

  / Shira: In the Corporate Fortress

  / Shira: The Color of Old Blood

  / Malkah: Malkah Tells Yod a Bedtime Story

  / Shira: Through the Burning Labyrinth

  / Shira: Fifteen Years Before: The Day of Alef

  / Shira: We Know Too Much and Too Little

  / Malkah: Under No Moon

  / Shira: How Shall I Address You?

  / Shira: Revising the Family Album

  / Malkah: Was This a Good Thing to Do?

  / Shira: He, She and It

  / Shira: A Sea Change

  / Malkah: A Double Midwiving

  / Shira: By the Light of the Unyellow Moon

  / Shira: The Same as Me

  / Malkah: Little Girl Lost

  / Shira: The Son of Frankenstein

  / Shira: To Die in the Base

  / Malkah: Malkah’s Bed Song

  / Shira: Base and Treble

  / Malkah: One Door Opens and One Door Closes

  / Shira: The Present

  / Shira: Wine in the Middle of the Night

  / Malkah: Vignettes in the Daily Life of a Golem

  / Shira: Where the Elite Meet

  / Shira: I Never Knew Her

  / Malkah: A Burning Curiosity

  / Shira: How Can We Tell the Dancer from the Dance?

  / Shira: How Much Would You Mind?

  / Malkah: The Robber’s Mistake

  / Shira: The Shape-Shifters

  / Shira: Flashes and Dangerous Structure

  / Malkah: Voices and Visions at Dawn

  / Shira: One Lazarus, Two Lazarus

  / Shira: Living with the Undead

  / Malkah: The Maharal Embattled

  / Shira: Desert Apples

  / Shira: A Matter of Some Finality

  / Malkah: The Battle at the Gates

  / Shira: In Which a Log Is Split

  / Shira: True Confessions and Public Turmoil

  / Malkah: The Work of the Shadchen

  / Shira: Bright Steadfast Star

  / Shira: Lover Come Back

  / Malkah: The Return of Joseph

  / Shira: The Task of Samson

  / Shira: Yod Communicates

  / Malkah: Following After Chava

  / Shira: Shira’s Choice

  ONE

  In the Corporate Fortress

  Josh, Shira’s ex-husband, sat immediately in front of her in the Hall of Domestic Justice as they faced the view screen, awaiting the verdict on the custody of Ari, their son. A bead of sweat slid down the furrow of his spine—he wore a backless business suit, white for the formality of the occasion, very like her own—and it was hard even now to keep from delicately brushing his back with her scarf to dry it. The Yakamura-Stichen dome in the Nebraska desert was conditioned, of course, or they would all be dead, but it was winter now and the temperature was allowed to rise naturally to thirty Celsius in the afternoon as the sun heated the immense dome enclosing the corporate enclave. Her hands were sweating too, but from nervousness. She had grown up in a natural place and retained the ability to endure more heat than most Y-S gruds. She kept telling herself she had nothing to fear, but her stomach was clenched hard and she caught herself licking her lips again and again. Every time she called up time on her
internal clock and read it in the corner of her cornea, it was at most a minute later than when last she had evoked it.

  The room glittered in black and white marble, higher than wide and engineered to intimidate, Shira knew from her psychoengineering background. Her field was the interface between people and the large artificial intelligences that formed the Base of each corporation and every other information-producing and information-eating entity in the world, as well as the information utility called the Network, which connected everyone. But she had enough psychological background to recognize the intent of the chamber where with their assigned lawyers they sat upright and rigid as tuning forks for the blow that would set them quivering into sound. Perched around them were similar groups in waiting: breaches of marriage contract, custody cases, complaints of noncompliance and abuse, each group staring at the blank view screen. From time to time a face appeared, one of those ideal, surgically created Y-S faces—blond hair, blue eyes with epicanthic folds, painted brows like Hokusai brush strokes, aquiline nose, dark golden complexion. It would announce a verdict, and then a group would swirl around itself, rise and go, some beaming, some grim-faced, some weeping.

  She should not be as frightened as she was. She was a techie like Josh, not a day laborer; she had rights. Her hands incubated damp patches on her thighs. She hoped their verdict would be announced soon. She had to pick up Ari at the midlevel-tech day care center in forty-five minutes, some twenty minutes’ glide from the official sector. She did not want him waiting, frightened. He was only two years and five months, and she simply could not make him understand: Don’t worry, Mommy may be a little late. It was her fault, insisting on the divorce in December, for ever since, Ari had been skittish; and Josh bitter, furious. Twice as alive. If he had loosed in their marriage the passion her leaving had provoked, they might have had a chance together. He fought her with full energy and intelligence, as she had wanted to be loved.

  Everything was her fault. She should never have married Josh. She had been passionately in love only once in her life, too young, and never again; but if she had not married Josh, she would not have had Ari. Oh, she felt guilty all right as she looked at Josh’s narrow back, the deep groove of his spine, vulnerable, bent slightly forward as if some chill wind blew only on him. She had promised to love him, she had tried to love him, but the relationship had felt thin and incomplete.

  During their courtship, she had thought he was beginning to learn to talk to her, to respond more sensually and directly. In the born-again Shintoism of Y-S, they were both marranos, a term borrowed from the Spanish Jews under the Inquisition who had pretended to be Christian to survive. Y-S followed a form of revivalist Shinto, Shinto grafted with Christian practices such as baptism and confession. Marranos in contemporary usage were Jews who worked for multis and went to church or mosque, paid lip service and practiced Judaism secretly at home. All multis had their official religion as part of the corporate culture, and all gruds had to go through the motions. Like Shira, Josh had the habit of lighting candles privately on Friday night, of saying the prayers, of keeping the holidays. It had seemed rational for them to marry. He had been at Y-S for ten years. She had come straight from graduate school, at twenty-three. Y-S had outbid the other multis for her in Edinburgh—like most of the brightest students in Norika, the area that had been the U.S. and Canada, she had gone to school in the affluent quadrant of Europa—so she had had no choice but to come here. She had been lonely, unused to the strict and protocol-hedged hierarchy of Y-S. She had grown up in the free town of Tikva, accustomed to warm friendships with women, to men who were her pals. Here she was desperately lonely and constantly in minor trouble. Often she wondered if her troubles were caused by the particular corporate culture of Y-S, or if it would be the same in any multi enclave. There were twenty-three great multis that divided the world among them, enclaves on every continent and on space platforms. Among them they wielded power and enforced the corporate peace: raids, assassinations, skirmishes, but no wars since the Two Week War in 2017.

  Josh had been born to an Israeli couple, survivors of the Two Week War a terrorist had launched with a nuclear device that had burned Jerusalem off the map, a conflagration of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that had set the oilfields aflame and destroyed the entire region. He had been orphaned at ten, wandering without a country in the period Jews called the Troubles, when the whole world blamed them for the disasters that put an end to oil dependence in a maelstrom of economic chaos. Nothing had come easy to him in his life. The more he opened to her and told her, the more precious he seemed to her, in that fervid courtship, and the more she felt herself absolutely necessary to him. She was astonished that at first she had thought him cold. How he had suffered! He needed her like air itself.

  He had seemed to be opening. Shortly after the marriage he had insisted upon, he began changing back. He acted happy. He seemed delighted with her; but from a distance. As for getting to know her better, as for sharing his inner life or taking an interest in hers, those pastimes seemed uninteresting to him, lacking in urgency. Ari was supposed to mend that breach. Since the birth of their son, all Josh’s after-work energy focused on Ari. She often suspected that if they did not have Ari, they would have nothing to talk about. Their silence roared in her ears. Soon she was boiling with resentments. They fought forty skirmishes a day about nothing. As her grandmother Malkah had warned her when she married Josh, she had made a costly mistake. Living together combined for them the worst aspects of living alone and living with a stranger. Their major activity together was disagreeing. She had grown up in a benign household, for Malkah was feisty and opinionated but also loving and funny. People did not have to live unremitting desperate wars. Shira had summoned her energy and left him.

  She called up the time on her cornea. Only four minutes had passed since she had last asked. Finally the long-skulled face appeared and spoke, in its uninflected way, their names: Joshua Rogovin and Shira Shipman, re the custody of child Ari Rogovin. Even in Y-S, with its male dominance, women did not change their names. Marriages were on the basis of five- or ten-year contracts, and name changing without purpose was inefficient. Still, Shira felt an odd chill as she heard Ari’s surname given as his father’s. That was not how she had registered him at birth, but Y-S had ignored her preference.

  “In regard to this matter the judgment of the panel is to award custody to the father, Joshua Rogovin, status T12A, the mother, Shira Shipman, status T10B, to have visitation privileges twice weekly, Wednesdays and Sundays. This verdict rendered 28 January 2059, automatic review on 28 January 2061. Verdict recorded. Out.”

  Josh turned in his seat and glared at her. His lawyer was beaming and slapping his shoulder. “What did I tell you? In the bag.”

  “They can’t do this!” Shira said. “They can’t take Ari!”

  Josh grimaced, almost a smile. “He’s mine now. He’s my son, he’s a Rogovin.” His light eyes, somewhere between gray and blue, seemed to read her pain and dismiss it.

  “Your ex-husband has a higher tech rating than you do,” her lawyer said. “I warned you they would take that into account. You’ve been stuck in the same grade for three years.”

  “I’ll appeal. Ari needs me.” And I need him, she thought.

  “It’s your choice, but you’re throwing away your credit, in my opinion. Of course I’ll represent you if you choose to retain me.”

  Josh and his lawyer had already swept out. Shira’s lawyer stood over her, impatiently tapping his foot. “I have another client to see. You think about the appeal. I can start the process tomorrow if you choose.”

  Suddenly she rose and rushed out, realizing she was late to pick up Ari. “Start the appeal,” she called over her shoulder. “I won’t let him go.”

  She hopped the express lane on the moving sidewalk, nimbly jumping from track to track. It was considered poor form for gruds—Glop slang for professional and technical personnel of multis—to do that, although day labor
ers did it all the time, but she did not care. She was desperate to reach Ari. She sped past the gossamer structures of the official district. Since there was no weather under the dome, and since no structure could be taller than six stories, the prevailing style was long parabolic curves, fanciful spirals and labyrinthine grids of glittering translucent filigree. Almost everything was black, white or blue, like the backless business suits that came to mid-calf or lower, which all gruds wore. Almost every exec, male or female, had been under the knife to resemble the Y-S ideal, faces as much like the one on the view screen as each could afford.

  The teenies flashing past on the movers looked far more diverse, but they, too, dressed in suits of acceptable colors. People of the same rank greeted each other with ritual gestures, a bob of the head. Those farther down the hierarchy they usually ignored. Passing those above them, they awaited recognition and bowed deeply. How many times had she slipped into trouble by talking so intently she had inadvertently neglected to greet properly an equal or a superior? The day laborers wore overalls or uniforms in yellows, browns, greens: color coded for their jobs. If they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it would be immediately evident. She leapt from track to track, never mind who saw her—who might report her—as undignified, lacking in proper Y-S decorum. She always felt too physical here, too loud, too female, too Jewish, too dark, too exuberant, too emotional.

  The day care for the children of middle-level techies was just ahead now, behind a hedge of tall brightly colored crotons, the blue and white and black Y-S flag drooping over the entrance. She was not impossibly late, because she saw a few straggling mothers and one father as she ran the three blocks from the nearest mover. She realized she never saw an adult run on these streets. Everyone was too conscious of being observed, of being judged. This was the middle-tech compound of little houses, each in its yard. With Josh, she had lived in one of them. Four styles of house for this rank, with the same acceptable shrubs and manicured lawns, but a free choice of color. Nobody chose red or purple. The only vehicles that moved down the median strips were official: delivery trucks, repair and emergency vans, security apes, all battery-powered rigs that monotonously beeped.