Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

  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.

  Captain Yancey had a build like a gas tank. While not precisely cylindrical, she was tall, round-shouldered, and solid. Her floor-length robes, usually of dull silver, enhanced the illusion. She accepted Kressi’s respectful greeting as her due, with a nod. Edde pulled off his pillow case, opened his eyes, groaned, and closed them again.

  “Young man!”

  “Edde’s feeling real bad,” Kressi explained. “I’m taking him over to the infirmary.”

  Captain Yancey’s jaw relaxed a bit. “Dr. Thompson just told me how his beds were starting to fill up.”

  Kressi didn’t wonder why the infirmary’s Head should bother to inform Captain Yancey how things stood there. The infirmary wasn’t her responsibility, or any other Captain’s. But everyone told Captain Yancey everything.

  “What are people getting sick from?” The planet Renaissance itself was supposed to be sterile, and the colonists had been well-screened and quarantined, then inoculated with benign “placeholder” microbes designed to discourage harmful ones that could cause diseases. Only 140 beds in the infirmary, and they’d never needed more than a fifth of them for the 3500-plus people. There was plenty of room for any who succumbed to illnesses caused by the placeholders’ genetic drift.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on,” Captain Yancey complained. “Dr. Thompson said he didn’t have much time to talk. But as far as he could tell it wasn’t anything catching, more like an allergy. Though how thirty people came to be all of a sudden afflicted with the same allergy he didn’t bother to explain.”

  “Maybe I’d be better off at my place,” Edde said in a worried voice.

  “No, I’m bringing you back like we promised,” said Kressi. With a polite smile she steered to Captain Yancey’s right.

  The Captain shifted so she still blocked Kressi’s way. “Young lady, your mother hasn’t been practicing any of her necromantic mumbo-jumbo on this poor boy, has she?”

  Kressi’s hands gripped the cart’s handle tightly. Maybe she wasn’t so sure how legitimate her mother’s work was, but she didn’t have to listen to other people put it down. Not even Captain Yancey. “That’s not the way we prefer to think of it, Ma’am. Dr. Thompson referred Edde to us because he thought a psychological approach—”

  “Call it what you want to, I say it’s a disgraceful set of superstitions we ought to have left behind us in Africa. I always thought that your mother was a bright enough researcher, but I fail to understand why she has to clutter up our brand new paradigm with that sort—”

  The conversation ended abruptly as Edde succumbed to a fit of coughing (yet another symptom). Captain Yancey retreated back down her ramp, saying over her shoulder that she was sure it couldn’t be contagious, Dr. Thompson had sworn, but just to be on the safe side—

  The ramp’s descending blind cut her off.

  In Renaissance City’s core, the tunnel widened. Citizens sat in small, companionable groups on likelime benches outside ramp entrances.

  Kressi greeted the people she knew by name, those from her Ship and several others. More knew her than vice versa. She’d been one of twenty kids on Ship Four. Twenty of 350 passengers. And the other nine Ships had carried even fewer children. Kressi and the rest were celebrities by simple virtue of their age. A seven-year gap, the length of the voyage, separated them from the generation born here on Renaissance.

  Of course Kressi knew all her peers, from whichever Ship. Edde was more popular than she was, and as she wheeled him through the City’s center, they accumulated a small entourage.

  Passela recognized him first. “Edde!” she crooned. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked Kressi accusingly.

  “He’s sick.” Kressi didn’t like Passela much. She made too big a deal of her position as the oldest of the hundred-odd ship kids, and she had an irritating way of over-emphasizing every other word.

  But Fanfan, Passela’s cousin, was cool. “Can I help you with that?” he asked. “You’re headed for the infirmary, right?” Kressi let him put one hand on the cart’s handle, though she could manage well enough on her own. They picked up speed. Passela and her sidekick Maryann stuck with them.

  The infirmary lay on the far side of the core’s white tunnels. Here the likelime took on a bluish tinge, legacy of the coral species that had burgeoned in this area of the slowly evaporating sea. The wall outside the infirmary’s ramp housed the delicate remains of a huge, semi-shelled vertebrate. Kressi let Fanfan steer the cart down the ramp as she fondly stroked the fossil’s curving, polished case and lightly brushed her fingertips along the arching trail of its skeletal extension. How had it felt, dying in the drying mud? Had it called upon its ancestors to save it from the sky’s invading vacuum?

  Kressi’s lingering communion with the fossil lasted long enough that by the time she got inside the infirmary, Passela had taken over Edde’s case. “He won’t be any trouble, really, he won’t; I’ll nurse him with my own two hands,” she told Ali, the staffer at the admitting console.

  “Oh, good,” said Ali. “I was afraid you’d ask to borrow a spare pair.”

  “What? Oh, you’re putting me on, we don’t grow limbs for that kind of stuff.”

  “I can go home,” Edde offered. “I’m not so—” He interrupted his own protests with another painful-sounding coughing fit. That brought Dr. Thompson from behind the console’s screen.

  “Who’s that? Edde Berkner? It’s about time you checked yourself back in here, young man. Seems you’ve started some sort of psychosomatic epidemic. Half the symptoms showing up here this shift are the same as yours. I want you under observation.”

  “But, doctor, we don’t have the staff—” Ali protested.

  “I’m bringing in some contingents. And Anna Sloan’s been malingering here long enough. Nothing much wrong with her.” Dr. Thompson reached out one-handed and tapped at the console with barely a glance at its screen. “There. I’m releasing her. Pack up a couple of cold/hot compresses. I’ll go break the news.”

  He turned to Passela and smiled. “You come help me get Miz Sloan out of Cot Twenty so you can strip and change it.”

  Passela gaped at Dr. Thompson as if she wer
e a fish on an empty seabed and he were a hurtling black meteor headed her way. Kressi stepped between them. “Well, actually—”

  “Kressi?” The doctor appeared to notice her for the first time. “Of course. You show her what to do,” he said, dismissing both of them from his mind.

  “And who are all these others? Patients? No? More volunteers? Train them or get them out of here, Ali.” With an apologetic shrug, Kressi wheeled Edde around the side of the console in Dr. Thompson’s wake. Passela made no move to follow them.

  The infirmary was mostly one big, high-ceilinged ward, with honeycombed screens between the beds for a bit of privacy. Dr. Thompson had gone ahead of her to the cubicle containing Cot Twenty. A high, sharp voice cut through the honeycombing. “My feet, you haven’t done nothin about my feet—”

  Kressi hesitated at the doorway of the small space. There was barely room for her in there, let alone the cart with Edde. Miz Sloan was someone she’d never met before, but that didn’t matter. “I know you,” declared the woman on the bed. “You’re that crazy Ivorene McKenna’s daughter. You turnin me out for a mental case, doctor?”

  “My mom’s not crazy,” said Kressi. She felt an angry flush creep up her pale cheeks, felt it deepen in her embarrassment at being able to flush so visibly. “Miz Sloan,” she added, a tardy sign of respect for her elder.

  Miz Sloan’s feet stuck out from the near end of Cot Twenty. They seemed normal, neither swollen nor discolored, the soles a fairly even pink, but she winced as she swung them around off the side of the bed and lowered them into the see-through slippers sitting on the floor.

  “Kressi’s here to help you home, Anna,” Dr. Thompson told Miz Sloan.

  Miz Sloan lived close in; still, by the time Kressi had delivered her to the rooms she shared with two sisters, a niece and nephew, and the half-brother of her ex-husband, and listened to a rambling explanation of how Ivorene was crazy, but not pure-D crazy, and everyone knew she meant no harm with her attempts at talking to spirits, going home seemed pointless.