Free He, She and It by Marge Piercy

forbidden, but they learned to watch out for the gaze of others, their jokes, their comments, their curiosity, sticky and soiling. Even those who meant well treated their bond as cute or transitory.
    For years they had concealed nothing more than that they liked to play cards together, to work on puzzles, to act out stories of heroism and rescue. It was not exactly forbidden again, but neither was it encouraged, to explore the hidden levels of the town, the old abandoned streets, the empty houses and basements, the forgotten upper stories. There they played out their dramas, their dreams, stories from the stimmies. For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi’s imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. Fear was a kind of background noise to growing up. They could not play in abandoned dwellings without remembering once there had been many more people in the world, too many, before the Famine, the plagues, local wars.
    They both had old sec skins they kept in a shed. Some days they rushed out into the raw, beyond the wrap that kept off thepoisonous rays of the sun, to walk with the thin coat of firmgel protecting them under the mustard sky. They would hike to the flooded city with its old-fashioned tall buildings, where the tide washed through marble lobbies and lapped at the broken elevators and the stairs that rose up and up. The wood and metal had been scavenged years ago. Their adventuring into the ruined city was truly forbidden and dangerous, because they never knew who or what they might meet there: roving gangs, organ scavengers who didn’t mind at all if the body they found was still moving. She loved the ocean. For years they had swum there, in spite of undertow and sharks, not always having the grease worn in the water in place of sec skins to protect against the sun’s radiation. They enjoyed undressing together, secretly, then slipping into the warm caress of the salt water. Shira swam well, and the sea braced and comforted her. In the water they were equally strong. Often she told Gadi they were both children of the sea. Gadi liked the idea of being anybody’s son except Avram’s. Gadi felt he couldn’t please his father, no matter what he did. Avram wanted a son more like himself: one with a scientific bent, disciplined, scholarly, brilliant in a narrow intense range. The more Gadi was himself, the more his father despaired of him. Gadi could only satisfy Avram by acting like somebody else, and that could never last.
    Today, after school—they were both just starting high school now, for Gadi was fourteen and Shira seven months and two days younger—they told their separate stories. Shira left a message with the house that she was studying for a history test with Zee. She would be sure to get home before Malkah; however, if she didn’t, Malkah could not stand Zee’s family and would never call them. Malkah sometimes worked at home and sometimes at the Base office. The Base was the gold mine of the town, where the systems were created that were the town’s main export. Both Malkah and Avram were Base Overseers, among the most respected scientists (or, as Malkah preferred to be called, designers) in their fields. The products and systems they developed for several multis were the foundation of the town’s independence.
    Sometimes when Shira lied to the house, she felt as if the computer could tell. Like most houses, it had a female voice and a warm affect. She had always imagined it as being perhaps ten years younger than Malkah. When she was little, very little, of course, she had thought of it as alive, and sometimes still it was hard not to, for it knew so much about her and it freely uttered opinions and judgments. Malkah had enhanced it beyond thecapabilities of the house computers of any of her friends. Shira did not know