Filter House (26 page)

She contrived to have me conditioned into partial godhood while growing and then secretly disposing of the expected replacement. Immortality was given to me for as long as I can stand it, and the powers of the god machines were made mine.

The sins of my “mortal counterpart” were not visited upon the new Shiomah. Weyando’s eggson’s spermdaughter was again allowed into the circle of my influence. Others that I had alienated upon Amma’s instructions made me welcome in my new guise, with calls of congratulation and invitations to their estates. With all this obligatory gaiety, it was almost a year before we settled in again back on the island.

Amma became more and more attentive. She involved me in the details of her creations, seeking advice on costume and dialog for her daring depiction of a god in mortal disguise. I decided to have my rooms dismantled, as I spent nearly all my time in hers. Everything was packed away except the terminal when she came to me with her offer of marriage.

I stared at her across the wide, bare floor. She was colored all turquoise, with hair like ethereal jade. She clashed horribly with what was left of the decor.

“Well?” she asked, a little sharply. “Don’t you want to be my wife?”

“Oh yes, yes Amma,” I managed to reply. Since being deified I no longer referred to my mistress as “midam.” “I do, I’ll be so happy, I’ll make you so happy, only I am very much surprised.…” I trailed off. I came towards her, one eye on the terminal’s screen. I did love her, and it meant so much to me to please her. She kissed the top of my head and clasped me to her.

“You should be used to receiving surprises from me by now,” she said as she released me, smiling. “In time, you will grow accustomed to my ways, and come to find me quite boring, no doubt.”

I shook my locks in vigorous dissent. “Never, no, never, Amma.” I took her hands in mine and kissed each sea-colored fingertip, saying “You are so sweet, so generous, so full of precious secrets—” I came to one of the little silver circles with which she controlled her underlings.

“Oh, yes, that reminds me,” she said when I did not continue. “I almost forgot to tell you. I’m going to have those signals removed, those ones I told you about on the moon.” I met her eyes. They were dark, gravely serious in her expressive face.

“The ones you said could erase my memory or destroy my nervous system?”

She nodded. “So. Now that you’ve consented to engage yourself to me, there’s no danger of those circuits ever being engaged.” She grinned, suddenly in an impish mood, and I perceived the pun (no pun at all in mortal speech) almost at the same time as I saw the call light blink on the com screen. Pretending to be disgusted with the lowness of her humor, I managed to shove her playfully through the door before she noticed the flashing signal.

As I had expected, it was Nyglu. His warty face showed satisfaction to my trained eyes. “I have the body,” he reported, “and the other arrangements are under way.”

“Very good,” I told him. With the passage of time I had grown used to my deepening contact with Nyglu and the leverage it gave me. “Then you may count on my presence in your mudroom—” I hesitated. Amma had planned to leave for Nyglu’s estate this evening, but there was no telling when I’d be left alone there, now that we were betrothed. “Whenever I can come without Amma knowing,” I hastily amended. Nyglu looked like he wanted to protest, but to whom? Not to me. I switched off the screen and went looking for my mistress.

We were wed in a short but impressive ceremony aboard the ship Amma had been given by Weyando. I begged her to wear some form of clothing, and at last she compromised by causing her hair to cling to her nakedness, covering almost all the right places. By contrast, I was draped in fluttering, dune-colored fabrics designed to hide the tiny scars and other imperfections my body carried. True, we might have said that Amma had caused my replacement to be grown bearing these marks, but I desired to avoid explanations.

The wind sang in the rigging, our only choir. The sky, as ever in those latitudes, was a vaulted dome of blue. The child Lizore joined our hands as we pledged our love, “as long as its life continues.” After kissing one another’s eyelids, we turned to bestow our wedding gifts upon our guests, all of whom, at Amma’s insistence, were present.

As we passed among her friends and relatives, Amma made sketchy introductions to those I had not yet met. “Hayvre, Lizore’s eggmother,” she named one black, black woman who reached out to clasp my hand in one sporting two thumbs. “Elleefaw” was a tiny, shaggy, sexless looking god in spiked heels. I recognized the name as belonging to the deity of unpleasant truths.

“He makes the best monuments. We used the Hill of Glass in my last piece, Elleefaw,” she said to the short, red-furred god. “It was perfect, especially the way it opens and closes like an eye.” Elleefaw nodded his approval of this tribute, running his own sharp eye up and down my pudgy awkwardness. I felt uneasy in his presence, and I wasn’t made more comfortable by the remark he made as he walked way. “Now you’ll each find out what the other is really like,” he announced over his shoulder, clip-clopping off across the deck. But surely we had learned all that in over twenty years?

I was glad to see Nyglu, preferring his familiar strangeness to these upsetting new acquaintances. Our encounters had been curtailed since the betrothal, and he was glad to stay by my side when I asked him to, as a sort of buffer.

“I don’t know why you couldn’t broadcast the ceremony like everyone else does,” he complained to us in a mildly fretful tone. “But I must admit that I am enjoying myself,” he added politely (and perhaps also to prevent Amma from detecting his morose jealousy).

My mistress hadn’t explained to me her reasons for an in-person celebration, but now she said, “This one isn’t for show.
This
one is going to last.” With a fond look she walked away from me, taking our glasses to be filled with the bright, frothy drink that was being served.

Still disturbed by Elleefaw’s pronouncement, I was silent until Nyglu wondered out loud if anything was wrong. “Do you think everything will change now?” I asked him. I expected denial. His precarious happiness, his treasured times with me, would work to keep him from accepting the possibility of a different course in our lives.

Instead, he shrugged, resigned. “Change,” Nyglu answered, “is Amma’s only constant.”

For several months after our marriage, all remained the same. I continued to work for Amma as before, to make furious or languid love with her, to study and transact my own business. I acquired islands, asteroids, and watersheds entirely my own, as well as other, less common commodities. Nyglu took care of this for me, with all the discretion I relied upon him for.

Then Amma decided that we were going to have a child. The new Shiomah might have asked upon deification how gods were born. Perhaps Amma attributed my lack of curiosity on the subject to habits formed in earlier days. I could hardly tell her of my source. Instead, I massaged her hands, pulling and stroking her pale violet fingers as she recited the possibilities to the tower’s open ceiling, full of stars.

“We can mate as mortals do,” she whispered, “or we can let machines do it for us. Two males can join genetic material, or two females. We can mate with ourselves or with those long dead. Just as soon as you’re ready,” she said, “we’ll start taking the enzymes that neutralize the sterilizing compounds.” She sighed as I dug into the fleshy mound beneath her thumb.

“And then?” I asked. But in answer Amma held her hand to my mouth and brought mine in turn to her delicately nipping teeth. Her excitement at the thought of conception made further details impossible to come by until dawn.

What Amma offered me was the opportunity to impose my genetic message over that of a microscopic animal. The animal would then be injected into a donated sperm cell, and the sperm cell would join with an egg of hers. This was fine with me; I leapt at the chance for another sort of immortality. Amma and I disagreed on only one important point; I wanted her to carry the baby in her own body. Even for just a short while. She would not; not even her innate love of the curious made pregnancy appealing to her.

I offered to bear the child within my own body. She pointed out that to do so would endanger the lie we lived. “Only a mortal would allow itself to be invaded in such a manner,” she declared hotly. Anyway, what did it matter that our wombs were empty; we would still be mothers as the gods saw things.

It mattered to me.

Weeks passed. I took to sulking in my old refuge, the brown and russet rooms I had occupied before our marriage. Gradually I brought the furnishings out of storage, determined to be comfortable in the midst of my self-imposed exile. I avoided Amma, keeping to my own apartments as much as possible.

Finally she came to me, persuasive and proud. I slouched on my couch seat, not looking up as she lowered herself beside me.

“Don’t pout, Shiomah,” she said, putting an arm around me. She laughed. “I could walk to Kimp Sinn on your lower lip.” That made me smile, but I quickly pretended that I never had.

“Our ways are better, you will see,” she continued, coaxingly. Pale blue, she rested like a piece of sky on the brown slopes of my shoulders.

I shook her arm off, standing up and walking away angrily. “Your ways? You have no ways. You do nothing except let things be done for you.” In the silence that followed I felt the presence of Elleefaw, happy that we did no better than he had expected.

“Oh, Amma,” I said remorsefully, turning back to her again.

“Why do you oppose my will?” She was displeased that I had a will, rather than a mere collection of childish whims, that I had walked away from her, that I stood and she sat. Seeing this, I knelt, thus allowing her to continue to be gracious.

“Have I not treated you well, my dear?” she asked. Her fingers sought my hair, toyed with my tangles. “Have I not given you everything you ever desired, and more?” No, I thought, for my mother is gone, and you refuse to take her place. Deaf to my inner voice, Amma continued to talk of how she had spoiled me, ignorant of my deepening resolve.

“So you must understand,” she concluded, “that it will be best for both of us if you yield to me in this.”

“No,” I said, and her hand ceased fondling my locks. “If you make a child this way, it will be without my consent. You will have to kill me then, to keep me from confessing our crime.”

She stood, pushing me away from her. Her celestial face paled, a touch of cirrus in the sky. “You can’t mean it,” she said, quietly appalled. Bestowing immortality directly upon a mortal, as she had done, was inconceivable; the punishment for our deception would be of a kind with it. The gods are jealous.

“But I do mean it,” I said, rising and meeting her eyes without wavering. “No machine or half-animal is going to carry our child, Amma, not while I live.”

She stared until she saw that I was in earnest. Then, for the first time in my life I experienced divine wrath. She stamped the floor with one lovely foot and clenched her fists in front of her angrily heaving breast. “You fool!” she shouted, purple smudging her pale blue cheeks. She laughed harshly, metallically, an untuned gamelon. “You funny, funny fool.” Then she activated the first of the three circuits she had shown me years ago as we orbited the moon and had, of course, never disabled.

My mother’s name is gone, removed from my mind and all my records. And the erasure is permanent and self-reinforcing. Even if someone told me what my mother was called, I would forget the sounds as soon as they were said. Even if I wrote her name here as it was spoken, I would forget it as soon as it was read.

Amma is a capricious god, but thorough.

But shrewd as I am, I had made my preparations. Even as she was proving her remorse by destroying her other controls, I left and fled here.

I do not know if she was fooled by the death of my double. Nyglu was careful, but perhaps she will discover that he hid it for me when she thought she’d had it destroyed.

Perhaps she will not be deceived. Perhaps she will come and test my defenses. For all I can tell, though, she is even now working on another Shiomah, perhaps one just a little less hard-headed. I left her plenty of tissue samples.

It was foresight that made me search out this corner of the world, rich in plant life and rare minerals. It is mine through my efforts, and I have stocked it with my treasures. My horses and cattle and machines and Fertility Manna. My plunder and purchases.

And the men and women, my mortals. I will take very tender care of my little mortals. And they will bless the land in my name.

The Water Museum

When I saw the hitchhiker standing by the sign for the Water Museum, I knew he had been sent to assassinate me. First off, that’s what the dogs were saying as I slowed to pick him up. Girlfriend, with her sharp, little, agitated bark, was quite explicit. Buddy was silently trying to dig a hole under the back seat, seeking refuge in the trunk. I stopped anyway.

Second off, the man as much as told me so his own self. He opened up the passenger door of my midnight-blue ’62 Mercury and piled in with his duffel bag, and his jeans and white tee, and his curly brown hair tucked under a baseball cap. “Where you going?” I asked, as soon as he was all settled and the door shut.

“Water Museum,” he said. “Got an interview for a job there.” That was confirmation, cause I wasn’t hiring just then. Way too early in the year for that; things don’t pick up here till much later in the spring. Even then, my girls and me handle most of whatever work comes up. Even after Albinia, my oldest, took herself off ten years ago, I never hired no more than a couple locals to tide us over the weekends. And this guy wasn’t no local. So he was headed where he had no business to be going, and I could think of only the one reason why.

But I played right along. “What part?” I asked him, pulling back out on the smooth one-lane blacktop.

It took him a second to hear my question. “What do you mean, what part? They got different entrances or something?”

“I mean the Water Museum is three, four miles long,” I told him. Three point two miles, if you want to be exact, but I didn’t. “You tell me where you want to go there, and I’ll get you as close as I can.”

I twisted around to get a good look at the dogs. Buddy had given up on his tunnel to the trunk. He was lying on the floor, panting like a giant, asthmatic weight-lifter. His harness jingled softly with every whuffling breath. Girlfriend was nowhere in sight.

The hitchhiker twisted in his seat, too. “Nice animal,” he said uneasily, taking in Buddy’s shiny, tusky-looking teeth. “Sheepdog?”

“Nope. Otterhound. Lotta people make that mistake, though. They do look alike, but otterhound’s got a finer bone structure, little different coloring.”

“Oh.”

We started the long curve down to the shore. I put her in neutral and let us glide, enjoying the early morning light. It dappled my face through the baby beech leaves like butter and honey on a warm biscuit.

On this kind of bright, sunshiny spring morning, I found it hard to credit that a bunch of men I didn’t even know were bent on my destruction. Despite the evidence to the contrary sitting right there next to me on the plaid, woven vinyl seat cushion, it just did not make sense. What were they so het up about? Their lawns? Browned-off golf courses, which shouldn’ta oughta been there in the first place? Ranches dried to dust and blowing away.… Yeah, I could see how it would disturb folks to find the land they thought they owned up and left without em. I just did not agree with their particular manner of settling the matter.

I drove quietly with these thoughts of mine awhile, and my killer sat there just as quiet with his. Then we came to that sweet little dip, and the turn under the old viaduct, and we were almost there. “You figured out yet where you’re headed?” I asked.

“Uhh, no, ma’am. Just drop me off by the offices, I guess….”

“Offices ain’t gonna be open this early,” I told him. “Not till noon, between Labor Day and Memorial Weekend. C’mon, I got nothing better to do, I’ll give you a tour.”

“Well, uhh, that’s nice, ma’am, but I, uh, but don’t go out of your way or anything.…”

I looked at him, cocked my chin, and grinned my best country-girl grin, the one that makes my cheeks dimple up and my eyelashes flutter. “Why, it’d be a pleasure to show you around the place!” By this time we were to the parking lot. I pulled in and cut the ignition, and before he could speak another word I had opened my door. “Let’s go.”

The hitchhiker hesitated. Buddy whined and lumbered to his feet, and that must have decided him. With what I would call alacrity he sprang out on his side of the car onto the gravel. Ahh, youth.

I let Buddy out the back. Instead of his usual sniff and pee routine, he stuck close to me. Girlfriend was still nowhere in sight. The hitchhiker was looking confusedly around the clearing. At first glance the steps are hard to pick out, and the trail up into the dunes is faint and overgrown.

I grabbed my wool ruana and flung it on over my shoulders, rearranging my neckerchiefs and headscarves. “You got a jacket, young man?” I asked him. “Shirtsleeves’re all right here, but we’re gonna catch us a nice breeze down by the Lake.”

“Um, yeah, in my—” He bent over the front seat and tugged at something on the floor. “In my duffel, but I guess it’s stuck under here or something.”

Came a low, unmistakable growl, and he jumped back. I went around to his side. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it out for you,” I said. “Girlfriend!” I bent over and grabbed one green canvas corner of my assassin’s duffel bag and pulled. This is Girlfriend’s favorite game. We tussled away for a few minutes. “She’s small, but she’s fierce,” I commented as I took a quick break. “You got any food in there, a sandwich or something?”

“No. Why?”

“I just noticed she had the zipper open some.”

The hitchhiker got a little pale and wispy-looking when he heard that. He stayed that way till I retrieved his duffel and gave it to him to rummage through. He took a while finding his jean jacket, and by the time he’d dug it out and put it on he looked more solid and reassured.

So now I knew where his gun was. Should I let him keep it? He’d be a lot easier to handle without a pistol in his fist. Then again, the thing might not even be loaded, depending on how soon he’d been planning on meeting up with me; simpler for him to explain an empty gun to any cops stopped him hitching rides. And I’d be able to get him relaxed faster if he was armed.

He threw the bag over his shoulder, and I locked the car. Girlfriend had already started up the trail. Of course he wanted me to walk ahead of him, but Buddy just looked at him with his dark, suspicious eyes and Mr. Man decided it would be okay if this time he was the one to go first.

I love the dance I chose when I made this path, the wending and winding of the way. As we climbed, we left the beech trees behind and ascended into the realm of grass and cherries, of white-backed poplar leaves, soft as angel fuzz. Poison ivy shone waxily, warningly, colored like rich, red wine.

We walked right past my offices. They look like part of the dune crest, coming at em from this side. I cast em that way, wound em round with roots, bound em with stems and sprinkled pebbles lightly over the top. The windows are disguised as burrows, with overhangs and grass growing down like shaggy eyebrows.

My assassin’s Nikes made soft little drumming sounds on the boardwalk, following the click of Girlfriend’s nails round to the blow-out and the observation deck. The promised breeze sprang up, ruffling our fur and hair. I watched my killer’s reaction to his first sight of the Museum.

His shoulders straightened and relaxed, though I hadn’t noticed they were crooked before that. He walked up and leaned against the wooden rail. “All that water…” he said.

I came up and joined him. “Yes,” I said. “All that water.” From the deck you can see it, as much as can be seen from down here on the Earth. Shadows still hung beneath us, but further out the Great Lake sparkled splendidly. Waves were dancing playfully, like little girls practicing ballet. They whirled and leapt and tumbled to rest just beyond the short terminal dunes five hundred feet below where we stood. “All that water. And all of it is sweet.”

I took my killer gently by the arm and led him to the river side. That’s where the work I’ve done is easiest to take in: the floating bridges over Smallbird Marsh, the tanks and dioramas and such. “Where you from, kid?” We started down the steps.

“Colorado.”

“Pretty?”

“It used to be. When I was little, back before the drought got bad.”

I stopped at a landing and waited for Buddy to catch up. He’s all right on a hillside, but this set of stairs is steep and made out of slats. They give under his weight a bit, and that makes him take them slow and cautious, ears flapping solemnly with every step.

I smiled at my assassin and he smiled shyly back. It occurred to me then that he might not know who I am. I mean, I do present a pretty imposing figure, being a six-six strawberry blonde and not exactly overweight, but on the fluffy side. I’d say I’m fairly easy to spot from a description. But maybe they hadn’t bothered to give him one.

I dropped his arm and motioned him on ahead. “By the bye,” I called out, once he was well on his way. “I don’t believe I caught your name. Mine’s Granita. Granita Bone.”

He sorta stopped there for a sec and put his hand out, grabbing for a railing I’d never had installed. Well, I thought, at least they told the poor boy that much.

“Jasper Smith,” he said, then turned around to see how I took it.

I nodded down at him approvingly. Jasper rang a nice change on Granita, and the Smith part kinda balanced out its oddness. “Pleased to meet you, Jasper.” Girlfriend barked up at us from the foot of the stairs. “All right,” I shouted down at her, “I’m a-coming, I’m a-coming.”

“Sheltie,” I explained to my killer. “Herding animal. Makes her nervous to see us spread out like this.” By that time Buddy had caught up and passed me. He knew this walk. I followed him down.

At the bottom, I chose the inland path, past pools of iridescent black blooming with bright marsh marigold. Stabilizing cedars gave way to somber hemlock, still adrip with the morning’s dew.

“Water Music,” I told Jasper, just before our first stop.

“I don’t—”

“Hush up, then, and you will.” Even the dogs knew to keep quiet here. It fell constantly, a bit more hesitant than rain. Notes in a spatter, a gentle jingle, a high and solitary ping! ping! ping! Liquid runs and hollow drums grew louder and louder until we reached the clearing and stood still, surrounded.

It was the tank and windmill that drew him first, though there’s nothing so special about them. I went over with him and undid the lock so the blades could catch the morning’s breeze. The tank’s got a capacity of about four hundred gallons; small, but it usually lasts me a day or two.

With the pump going, the pipe up from the river started in to sing. It’s baffled and pierced; totally inefficient, but gorgeous to my ears. From the other pipes and the web of hose overhead, drops of water continued to gather and fall—on glass and shells, in bowls and bottles, overflowing or always empty, on tin and through bamboo, falling, always falling.

Adding to the symphony, Girlfriend lapped up a drink from a tray of lotuses.

“Wow, Granita, this is really, uh, elaborate,” said Jasper when he’d pretty much done looking around.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“Yeah, but isn’t it kinda, umm, kinda wasteful?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But like my mama always said, ‘You don’t never know the usefulness of a useless thing.’” Right then I just about washed my hands of good ole Jasper. But he hadn’t even seen any of the other exhibits, so I decided I’d better postpone judgment. My assassins did tend to have a wide stripe of utilitarianism to em. At least at first. Couldn’t seem to help it.

Buddy stood where the trail began again, panting and whining and wagging his whole hind end. He was looking forward to the next stop, hoping to catch him a crawdad. The fish factory’s never been one of my favorite features of the place, but Buddy loved it, and it turned out to be a big hit with Jasper, too. He took a long, long look at the half-glazed ponds that terraced down the dune. Me and some of the girls had fixed up burnt wood signs by the path, explaining the contents of each one, but Jasper had to climb up all the ladders and see for himself. He disappointed me by flashing right past all my pretty koi. Can you believe it was the catfish that caught his fresh little fancy? He must have spent twenty minutes to check out those mean, ugly suckers. Though, to give him his credit, he dallied a fair while with Yertle and that clan, too.

Meanwhile, me and the dogs kept waiting on my killer to make his move.

We looped under the deserted highway and came back by Summer Spring Falls and the Seven Cauldrons, then started across the marsh over the floating bridges, which Buddy doesn’t like anymore than the stairs. Maybe it’s the way the wicker that I wove em from sorta sags, or the dark breezes stirring up between the chinks, or the gaps you have to hop over going from one section to the next.