Filter House (15 page)

She never saw Doe again outside freespace. There’d still be two of them together—just not the two they’d assumed.

She had other attacks, some mild, some much stronger than the first. Massage helped, and keeping still, and moving. She met prisoners who had similar symptoms, and they traded tips and theories about what was wrong with them.

Doe kept telling her that if she wanted to be without pain, she should simply stay in freespace. After a while, Wayna did more and more virches and spent less and less time with her lovers.

Jubilee lay in Amends’ Northern latitudes, high on a curving peninsula, in the rain shadow of old, gentle mountains. Bright-skinned tree-dwelling amphibians inhabited the mountain passes, their trilling cries rising and falling like loud orgasms whenever Wayna took her favorite tour.

And then there were the instructional virches, building on what they’d learned in their freespace classes. Her specialty, fiber tech, became suddenly fascinating: baskets, nets, ropes, cloth, paper—so much to learn, so little time.

The day before planetfall she went for one last swim in the pool. It was deserted, awaiting the next settlement group. It would never be as full of prisoners again; Thad and Doe weren’t the only ones opting out of their downloads.

There was plenty of open freshwater on Amends: a large lake not far from Jubilee, and rivers even closer. She peered down past her dangling feet at the pool’s white bottom. Nothing to see there. Never had been; never would be.

She had lunch with Robeson, Unique, and Jawann. As Dr. Ops recommended, they skipped dinner.

She didn’t try to say goodbye. She didn’t sleep alone.

And then it was morning, and they were walking into one of
Psyche Moth’s
landing units, underbuckets held to the pool’s bottom, to its outside, by retractable bolts, and Dr. Ops unlocked them and they were free, flying, falling, down, down, down, out of the black and into the blue, the green, the thousand colors of their new home.

Good Boy

“As out of several hundreds of thousands of the substrate programs comes an adaptable changing set of thousands of metaprograms, so out of the metaprograms as substrate comes something else…. In a well-organized biocomputer, there is at least one such critical control metaprogram labeled I for acting on other metaprograms and labeled me when acted upon by other metaprograms. I say at least one advisedly….”

Feels like floatin. Wrong smells come under the right ones, like the last few times. She got the table polished with lemon oil, or somethin similar, but what
is
that? Stronger than before, what is it, fish? Also stinks like Fourth a July, after all the firecrackers set off. I look around but only thing burnin is the candles, big circle of em, waverin on the table in front a me.

Her daughter sittin on the other side, lookin damn near white even with them African beads and robes she wear. Wonder she don’t put a bone through her nose. I laugh at that picture, and the poor girl jump like I shot her. The music stops. It been playin soft in the background, but it cuts right off in the middle a Billy Strayhorn’s solo.

I remember what she named her daughter. “Kressi,” I say, “what you do to that record? Put it back on, girl, don’t you know that’s the Duke?”

“Sorry, ma’am.” She sets back up this little white box she knocked over with her elbow when I laughed. “Chelsea Bridge” picks up where it left off, and I get outta my chair for a look around.

Room always seem to have way too many walls, twelve sides or maybe more, and they don’t go straight up to a proper ceilin, but sorta curve themselves over. All plastic and glass and metal. I don’t like it much. Cold. Black outside; night, with no sign a the moon.

On a bed in one a the too many corners is a man, the reason why she brought me. Face almost black as the sky, and shinin with sweat. He got the covers all ruched up off his legs and twisted around his arms. Fever
and
chills, it look like. His eyes clear, though.

“Hello there, young man,” I say to him, bendin over. This body light, almost too easy to move. I like to throw myself on the bed with him. “What seems to be your problem?”

“Hey,” he says back, smilin tired. “You must be Miz Ivorene’s Great-Aunt Lona, yeah?” I nod. “Well, I hate to admit it, Miz Lona, but nobody seems to know exactly what the problem is. At first it was just tiredness, and they made sure I was getting a proper diet—”

I keep noddin while he talks, though a lotta the words he uses don’t tell me a thing. Words very seldom do, even at they best. It’s his cloud I’m interested in, his cloud a light. The light around his body, that should tell me what’s wrong with him and what he needs to fix it.

But I stare and stare at this man’s cloud, and I don’t see not one thing wrong. He ain’t sick.

But sweatin and in pain like that he ain’t well, either.

By the time I figure this much out, I have stayed long enough. The young man stopped talkin, and he and Kressi lookin at me, waitin for golden truths. All I know is I got no work to do here. Place starts gettin dimmer and I turn back to the table, to the candles, I go back to the light. As I’m leavin I think of somethin I maybe
could
tell them; it’s pretty obvious to me, but they so stuck in time, never know a thing until it’s already done happen to them. “Good Boy,” I say, on my partin breath. “Good Boy. Go deeper out. Get Good Boy.” And wonder like always if they’ll understand.

“Some kinds of material evoked from storage seem to have the property of passing back in time beyond the beginning of this brain to previous brains…”

Ivorene McKenna slumped forward in her chair. Her head lowered slowly toward the tabletop, narrowly avoiding setting fire to her short locks. Her daughter Kressi slipped a bota into Ivorene’s hand and cradled her shoulders as she sat back up, helping her guide the waterskin to her lips.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Edde Berkner had propped himself up on one wobbly arm. He peered anxiously through the gloom.

“Nothing. Lie down and rest. We have to play the session back and talk before we decide what to do.” Kressi did her best to sound cool and professional. Like the rest of the colonists of Renaissance, she placed a high value on the rational and the scientific. They called themselves “Neo-Negroes,” and they didn’t have much use for anything that couldn’t be quantified and repeated.

As a child on their outbound ship, Kressi had enjoyed the lessons on Benjamin Banneker, George McCoy, and technology’s other black pioneers. She’d wanted to
be
Ruth Fleurny, maverick member of the team that perfected the Bounce. It was because of Fleurny’s stubborn insistence on cheap access for all descendants of enslaved Africans as a condition of the “star drive’s” sale that the Neo-Negroes and a handful of similar expeditions had gotten off the ground.

In her daughter’s opinion Ivorene was as intelligent as Fleurny, and just as stubborn. Maybe misguided, though. Ivorene’s controversial theories, while couched in scientific terms, had a hard time finding acceptance among the Neo-Negroes. Sometimes Kressi wished she would just quit, right or wrong.

“That’s enough, sweetheart.” Kressi laid the bota on the table and picked up Ivorene’s arm by the elbow, walking with her as she took her shaky body to bed. It was always this way, afterwards.

Kressi set her player on “sound curtain,” and the rush of a waterfall filled the room. She aimed it towards Edde’s bed and then stepped behind it into her mother’s silence. The redbrown skin of Ivorene’s face seemed slack and lusterless. Her long-boned hands were clammy. Her daughter chafed them briefly to warm them.

“Well, Kressi, what did Aunt Lona have to say?”

“Nothing. Nothing much.” Kressi shrugged, trying not to show how much she hated having to act like anyone else besides her mom and Edde had been in the room. “I knocked the player over, and she scolded at me to put the music on again.”

“What about Edde?”

“She looked at him, but he did most of the talking. I can show you the—”

“No, save the record for later. If she didn’t say anything…. Who else can I ask?” Great-Aunt Lona, the New Orleans roots-woman, had been her only hope. Other
egun,
accessible ancestral spirits, were available. But none of them knew much on the subject of healing.

“When she was leaving—” Kressi broke off. “At first, you know, I thought it was just that weird way she talks.”

“Southern.”

“Right. So I wondered if maybe she meant ‘Good-bye,’ but what it sounded like was ‘Good
boy,’
so it had to be a compliment to Edde, I guess….”

Ivorene pushed her lower lip out, brought her eyebrows together. “‘Good Boy.’”

“She said it more than once.”

“How many times?”

“Three.”

“Aw, hell.” Ivorene raised a hand from Kressi’s clasp and flung one forearm across her eyes, fending off the inevitable. “I don’t want to have to figure out how to bring
him
up.”

“We have an ancestor named Good Boy?”

“No. Goddamit. Pardon my francais, sweetheart.” Ivorene sighed and let her hand fall to the quilt-covered bed. “But goddamit. Good Boy.”

“We know something of the radiation limits in which we can survive. We know something of the oxygen concentrations in the air that we breathe, we know something of the light levels within which we can function…. We are beginning to see how the environment interlocks with our computer and changes its functioning.”

Edde wanted to go home. Ivorene had told Dr. Thompson that they’d bring him back to the infirmary when they were through, though, so Kressi bundled him onto their flatbed cart with a stack of fresh sheets and extra blankets. He winced as she jolted the wheels over the ridge between the yurt’s foundation and the ramp down to the colony’s corridors.

“Sorry,” Kressi muttered, embarrassed. The ramp hissed grittily under the cart’s plastic wheels, and a fine white dust rose in their wake. Most of Renaissance City’s surfaces had been sealed with plastic spray shortly after its excavation, but some private passages remained natural.

Kressi held the cart one-handed; only a negligible amount of control was needed despite the tunnel’s 35° slope. With her other hand she fished in her robe’s pocket for her remote. As she found and fingered it, the blind at the ramp’s bottom rose.

At its bottom, the ramp leveled out. The wide cart made for a tight fit between the two bench-shaped blocks of likelime flanking the exit. Edde’s berry-dark face shone with sweat. He closed his eyes as she turned into the corridor; vertigo was another symptom on his growing list.

Also, sensitivity to light. The tunnels of Renaissance City were just about shadowless, with frequent fluorescent fixtures on the walls. Kressi saw how his eyelids tightened and threw a pillowcase over Edde’s face. He hadn’t been this bad on the trip to the McKenna’s from the infirmary. The pillowcase looked weird, but Edde thanked her, in a somewhat muffled voice. Another voice came from speakers set in the ceiling. Kressi listened for a moment.

“—Ship Seven concerns, Captain? As opposed to City-wide?”

Kressi withdrew her attention. She didn’t care much for politics. She knew she was in Ship Four, a non-geographical ward named for one of the ten colonizing vessels. She knew that Ivorene had once been active, been elected as the Ship’s Captain, and had lost her position due to her experiments in programming psychology. Renaissance Citizens studied and revered their ancestors but stopped short of desiring their actual presence. Ivorene’s clinical practice had dwindled to nearly nothing; her status in the City’s economy now rested solely on her position as an Investor.

Kressi headed into the main body of the ancient shallow sea from whose fossilized coral and sediment the city had been carved. As she wheeled her cart along, ramp openings and tunnel intersections became more common. Sometimes the ramps led upward, to storage areas and workshops. More often they led downward. Most Citizens preferred deeper dwellings. Though the atmosphere provided some protection from meteorites and radiation, it would be too thin to breathe comfortably for several generations.

As she approached the opening to one ramp in particular, Kressi’s shoulders hunched in anticipation. They relaxed a little when she came close enough to see its lowered blind, then went back up as the blind began to retract. Kressi might have been able to clear the entrance before the blind rose high enough for Captain Yancey to hail her down. But the Captain would be offended to see Kressi speeding away along the corridor in an obvious attempt to avoid conversation. Besides, she couldn’t race off with poor Edde on the cart. She stopped and waited for her least favorite neighbor to appear.