Shelter (29 page)

    "I've got it," Raji said, handing over a bill. "No, Raji, it's—"

    "I've got it," Raji said firmly. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

    "Okay."

    "And let's talk about something else for a while. I'll always be your friend, Merry. You know that, right?"

    "Sure," she said numbly.

    "Okay, good. Hey, Theo, don't hit me on the head with that, okay?"

    "Here," Merry said, reaching up. "Theo, give me the stick."

    "Want stick!"

    "If you want to keep holding the stick, you have to promise not to hit Raji on the head with it. If you hit Raji again, you have to get down." And then we'll need to drag you all the way back to my dorm room, so behave.

    "'Kay," Theo said reluctantly. He loved riding on Raji's shoulders. "Thank you, Theo. So, Merry, to change the subject, you never answered my question from before. Wouldn't watching him be easier if you had an AI to help?"

    I can't believe he's doing this. Yes, I can. Merry, be reasonable: you haven't been lovers for three years. She forced her brain into academic mode, and said, "Look, if some house system can tell a mother when her sick kid might have measles instead of a cold, great. Just keep it in the background until she needs it. Don't have bots all over the place. Let the house feel like a house, not a factory. Or an isolation unit."

    Raji laughed. "No bots? You expect this harried mother to do her own laundry when her kid's gotten covered in chocolate for the third time that day?"

    "Or father. Ideally, yeah."

    "Come on, Merry. Do you think your mom does her own laundry?"

    "No, of course not. But I'm not talking about my mother. Look, Raji, people who live in a house need to clean it too—care for it, make it sacred. It can't be sacred if they never touch it. You know that."

    " 'The idea of a world creating itself through small chores,''' Raji said,

    grining.

    "Susan Griffin," Merry said, annoyed. There were areas in which he'd read more than she had—well, of course, he was already doing graduate work—but ecological erotics wasn't one of them. "And she wasn't talking about human work. She was talking about Gaia, about the Earth doing its own housekeeping. But yeah, the same principle applies. You appreciate your food more when you cook it yourself"

    "Fine. But why does the AI have to stay quiet until somebody gets sick? Why can't it be sacred too?"

    Meredith scowled. It was a very old argument. "Because the sacred draws us to what's other-than-human, greater-than-human, and AIs are purely human constructs. They reflect and mimic us. We can't use them to get at anything outside our own brains. I mean, goldfish are more numinous than AIs."

    "Funny you should mention that. Did I tell you about the AI in the lab who loves to watch nature shows?"

    She pulled her sweatshirt more tightly around her shoulders, glad they were only a few blocks from her dorm. "Yeah. So? They collect information, about nature or bowling or whatever else you program them to watch. What does that prove?"

    "This one chooses what to watch. It always watches nature documentaries if any are available. And the other day there was a show on about carp, and this AI—it was in love, Merry—it watched the show and downloaded the whole thing and watched it again, in real time, mind you, another thirty times, all night long. Dan told me that when he locked up that night he was scared it had gotten itself into an endless loop, thought we might have to crash and reboot the whole system when we came in the next day, but no, when we got there in the morning it told us that it had discovered that it was a 'sunbright carp soul enmeshed in circuit-scald,' I'm quoting here, of course, and—"

    "It discovered the biases you programmed into it," Merry said flatly.

    "I didn't program it at all, Merry; this one's part of the organic knowledge experiment! It came to us completely clean, blank slate from Jo-burg. We just plugged it into the Net and a bunch of sensory uptakes and let it decide what it wanted to do for itself. And it decided it was a goldfish."

    "Goldfish?" Theo asked hopefully from Raji's shoulders.

    "No, not that kind, honey, but I'll give you some crackers when we get home, okay?" They were his favorite snack food, aside from chocolate. "Raji, how can an AI decide it's a goldfish?"

    "Well, don't ask me, but it wouldn't stop pestering us until we plugged it into a robot submersible, little tiny thing, and put it in a tank with a bunch of goldfish. Dan had to run out to the pet store to get them. And then the AI tried to mate."

    Despite herself, Meredith started laughing. "Sounds to me like the chip got contaminated in transit. Are you telling me it's sacred because it tried to hump a goldfish? Are you telling me AIs have a drive to reproduce?"

    "No," Raji said. "But they have a drive for experience, the same as we do. They want more information all the time. And they respond to information and experience with something that sure looks a lot like wonder. They're like little kids, like Theo here. You could learn a lot about appreciating goldfish from this machine, believe me."

    "It was designed by people," Merry said, as gently as she could. "And I think that people can learn to appreciate goldfish on their own, without any lessons from computers. Raji, don't go soulfreak on me. They're wonderful tools, but they aren't people, okay?"

    "We're never going to agree on this." If she gave him half an opening, he'd remind her that her argument claimed that AIs were both too human and too inhuman, and she'd have to retort that puppets weren't human, that they were inanimate, anthropomorphized extensions of the humans who manipulated them, and he'd say that AIs couldn't possibly be called puppets because they were too unpredictable, and they'd be up all night. And she had an 8:00 A.M. lit class the next morning, and it was way too early in the semester to start skipping classes. And the fact that they couldn't agree was why he wouldn't go out with her, anyway.

    "You're right. We're not." Only another block until her dorm. Change the subject. "So listen, help me pick another course. I'm dropping soc because it's too boring. I can take drafting, which is what I really want to do, or get my econ requirement out of the way, which is what my adviser's recommending. "

    "Drafting," Raji said immediately. "Knock off econ in the summer. Kevin Lindgren's TAing the intro drafting course, and rumor has it he's really good." He grinned. "Quite anti-tech, too. You'll love him."

    * * *

    She didn't. She thought he was insufferable, arrogant, and condescending, a purist who considered every subject other than his own unworthy of study. Even his compliments were insulting. "You have a good hand," he told her as she hunched over a drawing table. It was her third week in the course, and this was the first time he'd deigned to speak to her, aside from reciting her name during roll call. "Are you planning on being an architect?"

    "No," she said, tensing slightly.

    "No? Why are you taking this, then?"

    ''I'm interested in design," Meredith snapped. He was paid to teach his students, not interrogate them. "I thought drafting would be a good skill to have."

    He glanced at his class list, then back at her. "You're a first-year. You don't have to declare until next year. Think about architecture."

    She sighed. It would be easy enough to say sure, brush him off, avoid the conversation, but she was feeling stubborn. "Thank you, but I've already declared. I'm concentrating in domestic ecology."

    "Really?" He peered at her, and she waited for him to make a disparaging remark: Going for your Mrs. degree, are you? or Oh, yes, well, I suppose Preston Walford's daughter doesn't really need to worry about a career, or Wait, isn't that just home ec? You mean people major in that? DE held the same status other eras had accorded to physical education and art history: fluff majors, gut majors, majors for rich kids who weren't too bright. She'd heard DE called "Cooking for Credit" and "Dumbass Ed" and "Drudgery Ennoblement." She could tell anyone who wanted to listen that it wasn't just feng shui and flower arranging, but she doubted that Kevin "architecture is the only worthy human endeavor" Lindgren would want to listen. And she had discovered, to her chagrin, that many of her classmates were, in fact, less interested in the intellectual discipline of managing human environments than they were in easy credits.

    "Yes, really," she said, and Kevin looked at his class list again.

    "That's interesting," he said. "You, uh—your last name's Walford."

    She snorted. He had to be the last person on campus to know who she was. Had he been living in a blueprint tube? Didn't he watch ScoopNet?

    She still couldn't figure out why ScoopNet found her so fascinatingshe'd have expected them to lose interest in her a long time ago—but during one of their nondates, Raji had said it made perfect sense. "Look, Merry, you're an iconic CV survivor; everybody saw you coming out of iso. And you're the daughter of the first translation, who also happens to be one of the richest people in the world, and you've rebelled against your technological heritage by becoming a Gaia initiate and refusing to get a rig. You reflect all kinds of cultural obsessions."

    Meredith had winced at his choice of words. She'd never told him about her brain damage, but her mother seemed all too willing to explain both her spiritual beliefs and her choice of a major as symptoms of incipient illness. Once Merry had overheard Constance asking Jack, "Don't you think her avoidance of machines is a little, well, pathological?"

    "No," Jack had said, to Merry's intense gratitude. "I don't. I think it makes perfect sense, given who she is and what she's been through. It's her form of adolescent rebellion. If I'd been in iso, I'd hate bots too."

    "Yes, I'm who you think I am," Merry told Kevin now. "And no, I'm not here just for an easy ride."

    "Whoa," Kevin said, putting his hands up and taking a step back. "Whoa! Sorry there. I wasn't going to say that. I just wondered—I mean, DE's about, uh, doing a lot of stuff yourself, right? Instead of automating it?"

    "Right," she said wearily. Enriching the personal environment with the dignity of individual human effort, as the catalog put it. "So you're wondering if I'm just rebelling against my New Industrialist heritage, is that it?" That's what my stepfather thinks. Didn't Kevin know she'd been a Temple novice? Had he ever watched ScoopNet?

    To her surprise, he laughed, a sharp bark. "No, not exactly. I was wondering how you feel about this whole AI thing, though."

    She scowled. She was Preston Walford's daughter; however much she argued with Raji, she couldn't be too disloyal in front of strangers. "Well, in places like Africa they're economically necessary. And even here, they supposedly do the boring stuff to free people for work they enjoy more, and certainly they're ideal for managing house systems." She shrugged. "They don't do much for me in and of themselves, but some people grow bonsai trees, and I think that's pretty silly too. It's a matter of taste, isn't it?"

    "Depends whom you ask," Kevin said, but someone else had raised a hand and he had to go. He didn't get back to Meredith until the end of class. As she was putting away her pencils and rolling up her parchment, she heard a voice at her elbow say, "So, would you care to continue the conversation over a cup of coffee?"

    Gold digger, she thought, without rancor. Lots of guys who'd always looked through her suddenly acted interested when they found out who she was. She hadn't let anyone starfuck her yet, and she wasn't about to start with an instructor. Her grades didn't need that kind of help, and her life didn't need that kind of complication. And he wasn't Raji. "No," she said, without bothering to turn and look at him. "You aren't allowed to date students. I could report you to the dean for that."

    "That wasn't—coffee is all I meant, really. I didn't mean to offend—"

    "You didn't," she said. "But you should be more careful."

    ''I'm sorry," he said, and then, "The comparison with bonsai trees was very smart. I'll have to remember that," and then, "You really do have a good hand, you know."

    "Thanks," she said, and yawned, still without turning. When she did turn, he wasn't there. A good wide yawn could work wonders.

    She and Raji laughed about it over lunch. "So," Raji said with a grin, "will you be having coffee with him?"

    "I doubt it. I liked him better before he knew who I was."

    Raji frowned. "You have to start trusting people more, Merry."

    "Why?" she said, pushing her plate away in irritation. If Raji didn't want to go out with her, if he wanted to date this Zephyr person, fine. But he didn't have to be so obvious about trying to set her up with other people.

    Raji shrugged. "Look, even if you weren't a Walford, you'd still get a lot of attention. You're smart and pretty. Even with your hair pulled back like that, even in jeans and a sweatshirt. First impressions are always shallow. And you could do worse than Kevin Lindgren."

    "Is that why you told me to take his drafting course? How much do you know about this guy, anyway?"

    "He's pretty famous in the architecture program: rising young star, design genius, all that stuff. He's already won competitions. His department recommended him to work with the AI lab on the habitat project, but he declined. Wrote a polite letter saying he didn't have time, but evidently told his adviser that he had no interest whatsoever in machines with an attitude, because he already had to put up with too many people like that, and why compound the problem?" Raji grinned. "Anti-tech, like I said. Sounds like your kind of guy, Merry."

    "Oh, thanks. So I'm an arrogant snot?"

    "That wasn't what I meant. You don't like self-aware machines, that's all."

    The old fight. They couldn't get away from it. "And what does that make me? A Lud?"

    "It makes you Merry," Raji said. "Chill. What's eating you today, anyhow?"