Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

  “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.

  “No doubt these facts had a bearing on the defeat of the drive for our extermination, midam.” She nodded, eyes and hands suddenly intent upon disentangling some snarl in my hair. I continued my conjectures silently for a moment as we skimmed over the still sea.

  I myself could see the advantages of maintaining some sort of gene pool. I asked her whether there were any mortals who had been made into gods. I had in mind those who had been “taken up” before me, and of whom I had never heard or seen anything during my time with the gods.

  She answered me with irritating equivocation. “Yes. Well, no, not really, although in a way, yes.” I begged saucily for her to be more explicit.

  “You know how we grow ourselves again, after we are dead?” I did. “Well, sometimes that is done with mortal flesh, and we turn them into a god that way.” I thought it a rather crooked path to immortality, but I could not disapprove of it when I reflected upon the sort of god that Obelk the rat-trader would make.

  I thought again of the foodholes and those who held command over them when I went for the first time to one of Nyglu’s mudrooms. At all his homes he had these moist, dark retreats.

  While reviewing here what he had written (more material was available for my scrutiny now that Amma had made the mortal origins of the gods explicit), I asked him his opinion of Kimp Sinn.

  He seemed unsure at first of how to answer. “It works well enough, I think,” he equivocated, paddling his webbed feet in a dark pond.

  “Well enough at what?” I asked impatiently. I sat cross-legged atop a table of long stone slabs, the driest spot I could find. “What is this city of the gods supposed to do?”

  “It—you see, it provides a goal for the ambitious, and even for the less motivated an example—” he broke off and glanced up at me shyly “—of the beauty of our relationship.”

  “Our relationship?” I asked incredulously. We spoke Modal Society, but business still formed the main basis of our intercourse, as far as I was concerned.

  “I speak generally, of course,” Nyglu hastened to assure me. “Of the relationship between mortals and the gods, the gentle mentoring, the poignant reminder of our slower yet always inevitable decline, experienced in miniature before our eyes by your own people.”

  “Oh.” From the divine vantage, all our petty strivings, Obelk’s and my mother’s and those of me myself must look equally vain, foolish and pointless, and harmless on the whole. “How old are you, Nyglu?” Another of my tactless questions, with a wholly unexpected answer.

  Nyglu flopped down on his knees before me. “What matters the difference in our years, charming child? My love for you is ageless.”

  I felt lost. Was this a scene from some play in my repertoire? My lines, what were they? Cautiously, I extended my hands. It took a moment for the god to look up from his submissive pose. Then he seized my palms in his slippery grip and touched them several times with his sticky tongue. I withdrew quickly, disguising my disgust.

  “Amma,” I managed to pant out in my fright and confusion. “She must not discover us.” And I felt this to be true, no mere excuse for separating myself from him.

  “Oh, sweetness, surely not,” he said, his voice sad with longing at the loss of contact. “I can conceal our involvement from her. Trust me. Trust in my powers. Oh, Shiomah, we could make each other so happy.” I didn’t t
hink so. But I let him touch me, just a little. Just a little more.

  It was not too long after this that I progressed to the point where Amma felt I was of some use to her in her dramas. I played first for her the role of Juusli, a young god who rebels against the ennui of immortality by refusing to behave in a socially responsible manner. Among Juusli’s foibles was a refusal to allow her body to age into puberty. The piece was years in the making, so Amma had my growth temporarily halted.

  Weyando came back to play the part of Jez, a more conventionally minded contemporary of Juusli’s. No mention was made of the way that I had provoked Lizore’s speculative outburst, but he did not bring his eggson’s eggwife’s daughter to play with me again.

  The part of Jez’s spouse, whom Juusli spends much of the piece trying to seduce, was filled by a beautiful bioserv that Amma referred to as a dryad. Amma spent much time with this pale and lovely creature, giving it detailed instructions covering every nuance of its role. The dryad would try to follow her directions exactly, and if the results were not desirable, Amma would once more go over the entire action, changing it if necessary.

  Sometimes I believed that the dryad performed poorly on purpose, simply to deprive me of my mistress’s time. Professional pride kept me from following its example.

  We spun around the globe, recording different parts of the story in different areas: ruins, deserts, the homes of friends, jungles, lakes, glaciers…. I saw that the sea was large, that mortals counted for nothing against the world’s immensity. And that though outnumbered six-hundred-to-one, the divine five thousand leave more of a mark upon the earth than the mortal three million, because they are more able to work on the world’s scale.

  There was a valley along a dead, dry river. All soil had been stripped from the land by some bored deity, and the bedrock had then been chiseled into tunnels and spires, a maze for the wind. Low, shuddering groans and high sounds that yearned to become music played around us there. Haunting murmurs and keening whistles accompanied every scene. It was easy to portray Juusli’s essential loneliness in this land that mourned for itself.