Filter House (24 page)

A rain the color of peridots curtained the entrance to my mistress’s apartment. I stepped through. As sometimes happened, the rain failed to cease falling, and I was drenched.

The sun was at its zenith, and the iris of the tower’s ceiling had contracted to a slit. Below its short overhang, a long window curved continuously, circled by blue sky. Amma sat with her pale green legs curled beneath her, bent forward to look at a display board set in the floor. Raising her face to me, she seemed about to laugh at my wetness, but then a deliberate lack of expression smoothed away the beginnings of her dimples. I took a towel from a knob on the wall behind me and dried myself as I went to sit before her.

“You sent your serv to bring you your mother’s remains,” she half asked, half stated.

“Yes, midam.”

“You knew the task would be difficult. Did you know how difficult?”

“I thought that it could ask for assistance; take a carriage; make inquiries.”

“Inquiries of the gulls? Assistance from the herring? What do you suppose has become of your mother in all the time I have had you?” Her questions brought up that strange numbness in me, stronger than ever, a broad, flat humming that drowned out my answer as I formed it. I suppose I must have imagined the citizens of Kimp Sinn taking her away, burning her, urning her ashes. But the overwhelming nothing that I felt negated all possibilities. I hung my head in silence, ashamed of my speechlessness. How could I know that she had suggested this, had planted in my mind this bland substitute for grief?

“I will tell you what happened, my dear,” Amma said, perhaps moved to some sort of divine contrition by my dumbness. “She was removed and disintegrated by the road’s maintenance mechanisms. By now she is scattered far and wide, and still dispersing.”

She paused, her soft green fingers touching me under my chin, tilting my head upwards. “You were asking for all the birds of the air, all the fish in the sea, every blade of grass upon the dunes, every sandcrab on the beach.” She stopped again, holding my eyes with hers. “Why did you not ask me?”

The spell of numbness had passed at her touch, but still I couldn’t answer. It had come to me that Amma did not want me to have a mother, alive or dead. How could I tell a god she was jealous of a mortal?

“Why did you not take her up in your carriage, with me?” I asked, neglecting to use the honorific. Her eyes narrowed, measuring me closely.

“I thought you might be of use to me,” she replied, dropping her arm, “but I saw no need to carry around a corpse. Would it have been pleasant for you, in that dark, unfamiliar place, crowded in with your mother’s body? I wanted you in the best shape possible, confident, unbroken, trusting yourself against the unknown.” She stood suddenly, and raised me delicately with her fingertips. “Even in shock, your face seemed so dazzlingly young, yearning to see me through my window.… I thought you might be of use to me,” she repeated, “and it begins to look as though I was right.” Affirming her own good judgment, she nodded, smiling a small but brilliant smile.

To please her, I learned. I learned the shape of the world and the depth of the skies and their ways. I learned the gods’ habits and slow history. Sometimes I came upon obstacles in my search for knowledge: blank walls or steps built up into empty air. Amma approved of my frustration as a sign of my curiosity, helping me when she could and promising that in time I would know all.

Contrary to what my mother had taught me, I learned that individual gods do die. If they are not done in by one of their peers or by some accident during one of their frequent flirtations with death, they do themselves in. Five hundred years is the average lifespan. Many extend this several times, however, by being reborn.

But even this measure can only temporarily rescue a world-weary god. Sooner or later one particular copy will develop such a deeply ingrained disgust for the futile repetitions that the process is discontinued.

I discovered that the gods did not take such a deep interest in the affairs of mortals as was generally supposed. The interest was sporadic, shallow, a matter of fashion. During one of the periods when it was considered stylish to notice mortals, the causeway and the city of Kimp Sinn were built, the scattered foodholes installed about the land to supplement the crops, the Fertility Trials viewed avidly. But the divine population of the island had been steadily decreasing, the wonder of mortal ways having palled centuries ago for most.

The exception to this was the ancient river god, Nyglu, the aforementioned producer of the vee shows of Kimp Sinn. He was also the innovator of the ratskin-trading foodhole. Nyglu’s all-consuming passion was the study of mortals, by means of any and all disciplines. Considered by most a boring eccentric, Nyglu was included in Amma’s circle partly because of some obscure genetic relationship between the two and partly, I think, because of Amma’s taste for the odd and sensational.

Throughout their friendship she had humored his harmless pastimes, learning mortal speech at his insistence. Hearing of my acquisition, he had made her promise that I would be introduced to him at the first opportunity.

Amma held back on this for some time. She relieved me of some of my awe and fed my own good opinion of myself until she felt I was ready. It was her plan that I should confront Nyglu with at least an elementary knowledge of the gods’ languages and etiquettes, and with all my native audacity intact.

The meeting took place in my own quarters: familiar ground for me, new to my interviewer. He stared as though he would like to trap me on his sticky tongue. His eyes glittered beneath large, horny ridges. His skin was rough, wrinkled, and sprinkled with warts. He addressed me in First Speech, the one used with low-order mechanisms and bioservs. “Is it good that you are Amma’s Shiomah?”

“Couldn’t be cleaner,” I replied, using the latest Juvenile Swerve. I switched to Obligatory Contract. “I understand that the information I represent carries some value to you, Mr. Nyglu?”

He actually blinked. Then we got down to negotiations, which went very much, I thought, in my favor. Credit goes to Amma for coaching me in being able to read the face of one so—different. But Nyglu had never needed to be shrewd, as I and my mother had. It was like bargaining with soft wax.

Amma was delighted with the outcome. She rewound the contract and played it through after Nyglu had gone, chuckling at the extent of my boldness. “So he actually paid you for the recordings I made when I found you, before you first woke up? He might have gotten those as a gift from me, had he asked.”

“But I gave him no time to think of asking. And you said that I could offer them, midam.”

“Yes, but it was your idea. And so was this performance you scheduled. I suppose you will need to use a bioserv for at least part of it.”

“If I may.”

She glanced at me from the corner of one mirthful eye. “Of course you may. I wouldn’t miss it for an asteroid.” She returned to scanning the contract. “Very good, especially this last part.”

“The consultant clause?”

“Yes. Nyglu has never been able to get anyone to wade through his material before, so you flatter him, even at this price.”

It bothered me for a while that I had not asked for a higher fee to review his work, but as my mother always said, it does no harm to have your customer feel he’s gotten the best of the deal. And I certainly did well with what I had won.

The gods lived in weary anarchy, most having rubbed away the edges of their more troublesome desires by way of fulfillment, long ago. Aesthetic and social pressures exercised the only control. Any serious problems that developed (usually with the younger deities) were dealt with by somewhat interested parties, informal groups with as much license to punish the offenders as their own level of annoyance allowed.

Under Amma’s protection I had just about any rights she chose to give me. She bestowed upon me all the privileges and powers she thought I could grasp. I set out to increase my earthly store with an earnest intensity that my protectress found amusing. To the gods, wealth is no more than a diversion. I was a bottomless coinpurse, an everladen tablecloth, for Amma.

She adored the havoc my childish temper and unconventional questions wreaked upon her circle of acquaintances. These occurrences were a little like my earlier effects upon the servs, but for some reason she found them much less irritating.

For instance, once she brought me with her to try out a new toy, a boat a lover had just given her. The lover, a minor god without physical affectations, was called Weyando. He was on board to demonstrate the boat’s principles of operation, as he was the engineer of both the hull and the living sail. Also present was a certain young Lizore, related somehow to Weyando, and apparently to be my charge should Amma and Weyando find themselves too busy to attend to her.

Had she been a mortal I would have judged Lizore to be about four years of age. Actually she had just turned twenty-five, though she was still considered a child by divine standards. Although she appeared properly aloof in the presence of Weyando, her eyes took on a more interested expression the moment she was left in my care.

“Hurry, show me,” she asked at once. “Are your genitals like mine?”

“Somewhat,” I admitted. “Would you like to look at them, midam?”

“Yes, I just said so,” she snapped. “I suppose you will want to see mine? All right, then.” She reached for the hem of her shift.

“No,” I said, “just tell me something, please. Answer a question.”

“A question you shouldn’t ask?” I nodded. “All right.”

“What relation are you to Weyando?” Even I was astounded by my daring. Held distinct from sexual practices, the reproductive secrets of the gods are exactly that. Secrets. This was one of the topics upon which Amma had adamantly insisted that I remain uneducated. Any bioserv that became precocious enough to be coaxed into speculation upon the subject promptly disappeared.

Lizore’s steely eyes glinted with new respect as she answered me. “His eggson is my spermfather.” She looked up at me expectantly, and I nodded in a show of understanding, lifting my hem to her examination.

“We are very nearly identical,” she reported, in a disappointed voice.

I was quite as dissatisfied with my end of the bargain, until Amma explained Lizore’s terms and others just as confusing. But that was much later, when she asked me to have her child.

Weyando’s gift was a success. The water foamed and hissed away below us, constantly changing into itself, showing all the colors of my mistress’s moods. The sun warmed the sail, which turned itself constantly to the heat, a billowing net filled with a wind of light. At night soft breezes pushed against its unfurled membranes, sailing us through the phosphorescent dark.

Day or night, Amma and Weyando were together: guiding the ship, gazing into one another’s eyes, satisfying themselves with one another’s sight, or sound, or smell, or touch, or taste.

Lizore and I were much in each other’s company. Five days after our first encounter, I posed a question with an impact that far outweighed that of the first one I had asked. As Lizore and I silvered ourselves with glittering scales from the hull, she laughed at some witless pun I made. “Really, Shiomah,” she giggled, “you’re not at all boring. I find it hard to believe you are a mortal.” She said it to praise me, so I tried to hide my offended pride, but my reply came sharply.

“If we mortals are so boring, midam, why did you gods bother to create us? If we
are
inferior, we are your work.” The paradox struck Lizore just as if I had slapped her baby-fat cheeks. Mortals, she had been taught, were tacky. Stupid, clumsy, disease-ridden—they were all this, and a great deal more that was anything but necessary.

“Come,” she ordered, heading for the stern. At our approach, her spermfather’s eggfather locked the controls and turned to her trouble-filled face. Amma lifted herself up from the deck on one elbow, watching with the expression of one about to be entertained. “Weyando,” Lizore asked, “why do we need mortals? What did we make them for?” A short but devastated silence followed.

Amma rose from her languid pose. “I’ll call the copter,” she said.

“But why did…” Lizore started again querulously.

“Later,” Weyando told her, with a quelling and emphatic glance in my direction.

After her guests left, Amma began to laugh aloud, tickling my ribs till I joined her. Her voice sounded like a wind-chime, the separate notes hanging in the air and striking one another like strung shells, soft yet clear.

When we had calmed down a bit, she made me sit with her on a little wooden bench. Then she took me by both hands and explained at length why my question had caused such discomfort.

“The gods do not
need
mortals at all. For
any
reason.” At times, she said, there had even been crusades to have them wiped out. “But that’s not at all fashionable now,” Amma reassured me.

“And—” I coaxed her, knowing there must be more.

“Yes. Go ahead.”

“And the gods did not make the mortals.”

She nodded, pleased at my quickness. “The gods—
were
mortals, at one time.”

“It is not general knowledge. Especially not among children. But, yes, our remote ancestors and yours are one, the same.” Her cheeks dimpled; she was fond of the unorthodox, and I piqued her with my impertinence.