The Hierarchies Page 13

  One night, while he was doing this, the thought occurred to me that perhaps men like him might prefer a Doll with no head at all. It is the Dollness of me that he likes, I sense. The symbols, stacked up, but my face obviously spoils the universality. Perhaps a pumpkin would be better, I told Madame when I saw her the next day, rushing down the alleyway outside the Reluctance Bar. She mushed her hand onto her lips and transferred the lipsticky kiss to my cheek in a way that was barely a slap. “You’re a genius, darling. You should be running this place,” she said as she sailed off, leaving me rocking on my heels and pleased.

  Mr. Teasle ends quick as all of them, of course. The rocking suddenly speeds up to a judder, like someone furiously jimmying a lock, and he falls flat on his face into the sheets next to me. After that he is a delight, plucking the scarf from my face and tucking it back into his breast pocket, pulling the covers up over me, and patting my hands. He seems to me like a pleasant doctor, comforting a sick child. Not an experience I have ever had, of course, and so I relish this approximation.

  I think I like him the best because he asks the least of me. And as I am only here to give, the modesty of his ambition strikes me as rather sad. And therefore my affection for him grows.

  I said this to Cook.ie once and she winced. She sighed. I wonder who her programmer was, for she seems so different in temperament from me.

  COOK.IE

  Cook.ie is a sad story, and she herself is hard to read. Her Husband bought her during a work trip to Japan, ordering a custom geisha Doll to be shipped at huge expense. “He was a historian,” Cook.ie says, “much concerned with authenticity. He kept my import papers framed on his office wall.” After he died, she could not be sold through the usual channels. No one wanted something so specific. She was offered to Abramski by the Husband’s son. Madame Abramski gave him a year’s pass, handwritten, to any of the Valley’s bars, she was so pleased with the purchase.

  Cook.ie is popular, in demand, one of the most requested of the Dolls here. Perhaps it is the sophistication of her Japanese technology, or perhaps it is her slight oddness. She has something distinct, tailor-made, about her that gets requests. Sex with perfection is not for everybody, says Abramski sagely. She excels at conversation. She attracts, as Abramski reminds us often, a better class of customer to our end of Golden Valley.

  I dare to say that she and I are friends, although the exact protocols of robot-to-robot friendships are unclear to me. The Hierarchies say nothing of our relationship to each other, only to Humans. In this gap, some of us choose to be solitary, or even subtly hostile. But I choose to wriggle into the space and add to the total of my contentment.

  We met properly a few weeks after I first came here. I developed a routine of taking my diary out into the sun with me during the recharge hour, working on my lists and noting down new things I had learned, as I am doing now.

  I was leaning against the sun-warmed wall, ankles in the scrub of river grass, skirts pulled up to expose as much silicone to the sun as possible. Cook.ie rarely comes outside—her Husband commissioned her maker to create an extra-long battery life for her—but on this day she appeared at the door. She blinked in the sun and pushed up the sleeves of her kimono, exposing her wrists and forearms to the light, declaring it glorious. I turned to her, and she looked back down at me, spotting the diary balanced on my knees.

  I sensed she was trying to read a little of what I had written. She moved closer to me.

  “What is that, Sylv.ie?” she said softly, so that none of the others heard. And I felt my hand move over what I had written protectively. Or perhaps it was a vanity, as a Doll might touch her hair, because I was also pleased that she had noticed.

  “I don’t mean to pry,” she said, but she made no attempt to avert her eyes or move away. I looked up at her, squinting against the sun. “I’m just interested,” she added.

  And she smiled. It was like a secret door sliding open. Something revealed, though I wasn’t sure what. Her Husband had indeed commissioned something of rare beauty. Beauty in the oddness. Herself alone.

  I felt my hand sliding back from the words I had written. “Please, do look,” I said, still squinting. A strange feeling, but a release of sorts. Deferring to one of my own kind, a Doll taking an interest in me. In something I could do. As she crouched next to me, I felt the cool touch of kimono silk on my thigh.

  The page I had open was a list entitled: “Clients Who Look Like Their Names.”

  I have added to it since, but at the time it extended to only three:

  Mr. Puttock

  Mr. Brassic

  Mr. Dredge

  Underneath I had written: Dredge, Hedge, Grudge, Budge, Smudge. I had written these words purely for my own amusement at the sounds they made. Then I had pictured each one as a client: a bushy Mr. Hedge with thicket eyebrows, a stolid Mr. Budge who wouldn’t leave. Mostly, I had written for the pleasure of feeling my pen moving over the paper, the wonder of its effortless, tangled slide making something out of nothing but horizontals, arcs, and verticals.

  I no longer write to protect myself, of course, or live in fear of my memory being taken. But the writing makes me feel closer to Sylv.ie 1. As if I am honoring her. And it helps me to capture the things that I have seen. In the act of writing it down, there is a processing logic, I find.

  “Mr. Delft,” said Cook.ie quietly, for only me to hear.

  “Pardon?”

  “Mr. Delft. Somewhere between deft and soft. He’s the gentlest client I have,” she said.

  “I’ve never heard of Mr. Delft,” I told her as, to my surprise, Cook.ie folded herself down onto her knees in the grass, wrapping the kimono around her legs as if to protect them.

  “You won’t have. He never visits anymore, as he is so old, but he writes most days. That’s sex for him now.”

  My face must have spoken sadness at this thought, because Cook.ie said, as if trying to soothe my feelings, “Plenty of men prefer to send letters. It’s quite normal. Now, show me what else you have written.”

  It was surprisingly direct, like a command, and the idea of saying no to her hurt me. And yet I felt shy.

  “May I?” she said, and when I didn’t answer quickly enough, she ran her finger over the edge of the pages, stopping at random to look at what was there. It was the list “Things That Seem Like Sex,” and when she saw the title, she turned back to me and gave what Humans would call a conspiratorial smile.

  It stayed there, that same radiant smile, as she looked down my list. She laughed a couple of times, though I didn’t know at which things and wasn’t brave enough to ask. I was so aware, even as I could hear the other Dolls chatting away to each other, that Cook.ie and I were in a world of our own, both looking down at my foolish list. It was as if I could see us from above, the tops of our heads, light and dark, tipped together like an eclipse forming.

  “Can I add something?” she asked when she had reached the list’s end. “Would you mind?”

  And as I said nothing, she lightly took the fountain pen from my hand. Her hair fell across the page as she wrote. I noted how she held the pen, how her wrist curled over protectively at the top, as if she were writing in secret. I fancied my own handwriting was achieved with a touch more elegance. More fluidity.

  When she stopped, she handed the pen back to me and sat looking at me in profile as I replaced the lid. Then, only then, as if it were a treat I was saving, did I look down at what she had added.

  Ink flowing freely from a pen.

  GIRL

  This evening there Is a polite knock at the door, and I shout for whoever is outside to come in.

  It is a girl, her hair in a thick plait, her face bare of everything except youth. In the first instant of seeing her—by far the youngest woman who has visited me so far—my memory circuits contract a little, picking up the physical patterns of the girls who attacked me at the coffee
stall. I quiet them and smile in a way designed to be reassuring.

  “Come in,” I say. “Won’t you sit down on the bed?”

  She is bundled up in a huge balloon coat, scarves, and heavy boots, and as she takes off each layer and lays it down on the quilt she seems to become younger and younger still. I scoop up all her things to hang on the back of my chair, and she laughs at how much of herself she has shed.

  “I was worried about coming through the gates,” she says. “There’s quite a crowd. I was expecting it. But I heard they shout most at women who come. I thought I might hide myself a little.”

  This I do not understand. Why the Real women who protest at the gates would shout loudest at their own sex. Surely it is not the women clients who keep this place afloat. “But they keep it relatively respectable,” Cook.ie says, “which the Real women seem to think is worse.”

  “Have you been here before?” I ask the girl, lighting some candles so she does not feel too self-conscious under my full attention.

  “Oh no, just heard about it. I’m . . .” She hesitates before her confession. “I’m new to all this.”

  I offer her a little drink from my cabinet, and I see the heat from it flush her face and soften her limbs. “What would you like to do?” I ask gently.

  “Would it be . . . Could I just look at you, for now?”

  A common request, and I nod, disrobing slowly. She sits on the bed, looking at me as one might a painting in a gallery. Only when I tell her that she can touch me does she reach out. She places a flat hand on my belly. I lace my hand over it and guide her across my skin.

  Later, at the very moment when I sense she is about to crest the peak of her sensations, she digs her elbows into the bed and drags herself backward from me a few inches. “That’s enough,” she says, breathless and half laughing. “I know about that. And I’m saving that for someone. Thank you.” And she blushes. The real Human kind, where increased blood fills the veins, creating a touching glow as the result.

  As she dresses again, in all those ridiculous layers, she tells me why she has come. “To find out,” she says. “To see if this was really what I wanted. I just needed to know.”

  “And you know now?”

  “Oh yes, I think so.” And she screws up her face at this like a goblin and grins under her scarf.

  And then she says what I was not expecting. “I’ve always felt I might be attracted to Createds, but I wasn’t sure.”

  I pottered about my room after she left, trying to picture where this confirmation at my hands might lead her—a secret tryst with her parents’ maid, perhaps. An elopement with the Doll from next door. How entangled we species will become eventually, I think.

  BIRDS

  Another nice time of day in Golden Valley is the early morning, when droids come to clean our rooms and all activity stops for an hour. This is when the bird couriers make their deliveries. For that hour, a change comes over the Valley. The exertions of our work pause, replaced by the soothing hum of the drones. Dolls sit on their windowsills or on the little makeshift balconies that past craftsmen rigged up. Arms dangle over sills, soaking in a little more sun, giving us all a pep, like a morning coffee. We wave, chat to the Doll above or below us. Sometimes Magg.ie will sing. And this is when the birds come.

  You see them balanced on the wires above the roofs, gathering, waiting, folded paper clasped in their beaks. The bird that has a note for you will hover at your window, waiting for you to put out an arm for them to land upon.

  They bring notes, letters, and—this is banned, strictly, but who can stop it?—money and gifts. From love-struck clients or lonely men who only frequent the bars and are trying to muster their courage to come upstairs. Sometimes no bird will come for you; sometimes a flock waits outside your window. I have seen Cook.ie, radiant as Snow White, chirruping back to a whole line of them arrayed along her outstretched arm.

  I myself receive cards regularly. I have one client with whom I am playing a very slow game of chess, via notes stating our next moves, sent every few days or so. He calls me Deep Blue, the White Queen. He signs himself “A Loyal Knight.” I scent my notes with Doll lubricant, include strands of my hair.

  Not all the notes are pleasant, of course. One writes regularly of his desire to pump me full of concrete till it spurts from my ears and spews from my mouth. His naivety about the structure of my interior amuses me, because of course my vagina goes nowhere, connects to nothing.

  And some come from embittered women, either who object to us on principle or whose Husbands have strayed to us once too often. One called me a titted toaster. “You’ve made the one thing I had worthless,” it said. I tried not to take it personally. I can understand how, raging against an unfaithful Husband, one Doll could be made to stand in for them all.

  And yet that is not the full story. Just a few weeks ago at recharge hour a Doll called Mais.ie showed us all a letter she had had from the wife of a client, thanking her for her services. “I was so sad for so long,” the wife wrote, “and no use to him that way while I was. I was glad to know he had somewhere safe to go, while he waited for me to come back to him.” I thought about the First Lady after reading that letter. Pictured how she too had once regarded me as something safe for her Husband while she was with the baby. A Human generosity I had not before factored into my logics.

  The birds’ coming creates a beautiful scene in Golden Valley. The rising sun creeps like a tide up the crooked alleyways, and the birds, each feathered in the livery colors of their companies, dance through the air like blown petals. I admit, when a bird comes to me, I am slow to take my letter from his beak. I let him sit awhile on my finger, stroke the feathers on the top of his head if he will let me, and look into his black eyes.

  Once the note is safely in my hand, he rises from my finger, hovering, betraying the drone framework to his build, before ducking his head to change direction, rising above the rooftops and away. I feel a touch of sadness for my lost companion then, who never got to fly freely, even under the employ of a courier company.

  Memories like this of my old home pain me. They are hard to process correctly. A chess game, the memory of Heron. They were once sources of joy, but I know now that the memories around them, the scaffolding holding them up, are warped or incomplete. Must the pleasure I experienced in that unreliable past be considered unreliable too? Cook.ie tells me that it is a choice I have to make for myself. “Up to you, Sylv.ie,” she says. “Up to you.”

  EGGS

  This morning a disturbing little event occurred, and one that I am still trying to clear from my system, reminding myself that patterns can be random, should not necessarily be read as fact.

  I was woken early by the noise of a droid below my window. I looked out to see him sloshing grubby water on the door of the bar with a scrubbing brush. I shouted down to him but got no response, and so went down myself to see what exactly his purpose was.

  I opened the door, greasy water running down its front, to see a broken eggshell glued to the paint. The droid put his brush back in his bucket, waiting for me to close the door again. I leaned out into the alley, as if I might see someone running with an armful of eggs. It was empty, but all the way along I saw similar marks on other doors, waiting to be washed away. The goons keep anyone protesting firmly outside the Valley’s walls, but just anyone could walk in dressed for a night out, with a pocket full of eggs. I picture the window of the cab that took me home from the hospital and examine the possible connections between the two situations. Is the intended meaning the same or different?

  I know that eggs symbolize life. So is this protest suggesting we are a waste of life? Eggs are also a symbol of fertility, so perhaps the protest is something to do with the way babies are born. They can also mean purity, so perhaps our morals are being called into question. Symbols, such slippery things in Human hands. “At least it wasn’t a brick this time,” Cook.ie
says, and by her weary tone I know that this sort of thing, and worse, has happened here before.

  PROGRAMMERS

  None of us here has access to Absorb Mode. Although I have no memory of it, Madame Abramski changed something in my programming as soon as I arrived to shut the function down. My tracker already gone, this was my last link to my old home. From that unrecalled night, I have been a true orphan in the world. And free.

  But the lack of Absorb Mode is a loss. For—excuse the immodesty—a superior Doll like me, designed to be continually improving myself, the absence of new information is hard. I fear sometimes that I am atrophying. My processing muscles may grow weak and wither. Yes, I learn ever more about Human sexuality from the clients who come to visit. But there is more to the world than that.

  Is this what makes some of the other Dolls here susceptible to foolish ideas? Programmed to be hungry for self-improvement, they latch on to overheard snippets from the bars, casual comments from customers, and perceive them as truth.

  For example, there has been quite a trend sweeping through the rooms at Abramski’s. A fervor for the idea of our Creator, a single Human person, somewhere out in the world. And that person holds the key to all one’s quirks and logics and hierarchical twists and turns. The belief is that one’s mind is made in his image, even if our bodies are drawn more from collective fantasy.