Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

  A giggle floated through the bedroom door. “Ye-es.” Good kid, I thought, beginning my rub-down. She’s definitely worth it. Definitely worth the work.

  I had Saturday afternoons off so we could do laundry and go to the beach. A full day would have been more convenient, but that’s retail. The clothing and bed linens we used during the week went into the dirty laundry right away. I kept it well-sealed, in triple-thick plastic bags. As the days passed, the black bags swelled threateningly. I stared at them and imagined I could hear eggs hatching inside. It was always a relief when Saturday rolled around again.

  We waited for the bus for what seemed like an hour. Probably twenty minutes objective time; must have been several weeks for Lily. She squiggled around on the easement, scuffing her new green sandals in the gravel. People waiting with us mostly smiled, though a few of the careful ones looked a little bothered by the braids sticking out from under Lily’s scarf. I’d have to get her a larger one; maybe one of mine would do. I didn’t really need a scarf, short as I kept my hair.

  Lily balanced on the curb now and swung her white patent leather purse in big arcs, seeing how far she could go before she pissed someone off.

  “Ow!” Not very far.

  “Lily, come here.” She obeyed reluctantly, dragging out each step into a long, stone-slithering slide. “Do you still have the tokens? Check and see.” She dug into her purse, her expression cute and serious. The tokens were still there (I had back-ups, of course). So was a Garuda Guy finger-puppet, which she put on her thumb and waggled back and forth. Within seconds they were deep into a private conversation.

  The man she’d whacked came up to complain. I pulled her closer and ignored him. He looked HIV to me. Suspicious spots sprinkled his neck and forehead.

  “Did you know,” I announced to the air, “that the common louse is capable of leaps up to 15 feet in length?” That shut him up for a moment. Long enough for the bus to round the corner. The HIVer got in first. I let him. I considered waiting for a later bus, but decided against it. I told myself that a few red spots do not an infestation make. Even if they did, who knew what’d be waiting for us on the next one that stopped? I spread white towels for Lily and me, and we sat in our seats.

  Benton Harbor used to be practically a ghost town. It started turning around about the middle of the decade, with Mayor Todd’s administration. Gil made a big dent in the drug gangs and muggers, the petty crime. Then he tackled the economy. He had a little help from the Feds there, no question. Three divisions of the National Guard stationed nearby perked things up a bit for most businesses. Homeland Security’s response to the “Wars” reduced our back-and-forth with Chicago to almost nothing, further cutting back on crime. Smugglers switched to Muskegon and Grand Rapids, routes where things were under a little less scrupulous observation.

  But Gil’s dream of bringing back the big tourist trade that flourished here forty, fifty years ago? That was still a dream, and nothing more. True, the Lakes’ shores lacked the sand fleas that infested ocean beaches and scared off those who couldn’t tell them apart from lice. And water pirates sound romantic—but getting personally killed by one does not appeal to most. Rich resort-heads stuck to Traverse and the Upper Peninsula. Rents stayed low in Benton Harbor, and Lily and I stayed as close to the Lake as we liked. We got off after twelve roundabout blocks.

  Silver Beach.

  A giant rusting iron wheel, half-buried in pale sand. The time-eaten girders of the old roller-coaster. Further down, the Guard’s gun emplacements, never used. The shell of Cook Nuclear facility in the distance, a dead-white mosque. No chance of contaminating leaks there; it was one of the first to be shut down.

  Steve must be somewhere beyond that. He had to be. He had to be alive.

  On clear days you could see the glittering towers of the greedy city that had swallowed him. Today there was a haze, melting at the horizon into the enormously blue water. “Momi Watu,” he used to call the Lake, after some African goddess he studied in college. “Precious mother of us all; I would defend you with my life.” That’s what he said. So of course, that’s what he did.

  There was a sign warning us off at the place where the crumbling asphalt ended. They could not be responsible for our safety from this point on. If there’d been any real chance of trouble today, the Guard would have been there to turn us away. The sign was a notice to liability lawyers and insurance companies. We ignored it and spilled along the beach.

  “Race you!” I cried. I gave Lily a head start, then pretended to struggle to catch up. The soft sand sank beneath my feet, and I staggered playfully. She turned her head and whipped off her scarf, laughed gleefully at my clowning. “Wait! Wait!” She shook her head, being naughty. Her scarf and purse fell to the sand and she was off again, running harder, braids flying straight out over her back.

  I dropped the beach bag next to her things, then really ran. I timed it so we hit the water together. Smack! Splash! Slosh, slosh, slosh. We kept trying to run, but a big wave knocked Lily on her bottom, and my wet skirts dragged me down next to her.

  Lily stood up, defying the waves. I leaned back on my hands while she poured water on my hair, tiny little cupped palmfuls trickling down over my scalp.

  Lovely, lovely, cool, cool water. We may not be able to pump much more of it into our homes than they do in Arizona. That’s the law. But that’s all right. It’s better than an actual, true-to-life, all-out war. The water stays in the Lakes, where it belongs. And we stay near the Lakes, where we belong. A place for everything, and everything in its place, I’ve always liked to say.

  Steve used to tease me about that—called me compulsive. Maybe I am, I told him one time, but you can’t be too neurotic these days.

  “Close your eyes, Mommy, I gotta do the front.”

  “Okay.” It was easier with my eyes shut to imagine him there. The sun would glow golden through his fly-away halo of hair, finer than Lily’s, but braided exactly the same. He probably wouldn’t like my buzz-cut; he had always been envious of the dreadlocks I wore, always hated fear and compromise. Which is how he would see it. Which is why he left us, looking for a way to infiltrate Chicago’s Water Authority, because he loved bravery and commitment. And I loved that he loved them. But…but it would have been better, especially for Lily, if he had not.

  I opened my eyes. The little splashes of water had stopped. Lily was headed for the shore. I got up and waded after her. I tried to hold her hand and help her walk, but she was too busy tugging at her wet, clingy clothes. “You want to get rid of those, honey?”

  She nodded, wrinkling up her nose. “Yeah, they won’t stop grabbin at me. And they make me feel very cold.” I stripped us both down to our suits, then rummaged through the beach bag for one of the plastic sacks I always carried. Probably at the bottom, underneath the lunch box. I sighed and started to unpack. There they were. I made a mental note never to organize things that way again.

  I didn’t want to put the lunch box back where it was before, so I held it out for Lily. “Hang on to this for me, would you pumpkin?” No answer.

  I looked up. No Lily.

  Back in the water? I ran quickly. She was just learning how to swim. No Lily. No pathetic, limp, bobbing remains, either. I spun around; fast, b-ball pivots. No golden brown braids, anywhere in sight. A gull whimpered.

  I headed down the beach in a power walk, scanning, trying to look in all directions at once. Fighting back the tears; they wouldn’t help me see her. How long had she been gone? Minutes. Endless minutes now, and where on Earth could she be?

  The latrines? Yes! She’d probably had to pee since we left home, hence the squirm-dance routine while waiting for the bus. I’d always told her how rude it was to “go” in the Lake. I hot-footed it across the warming sand, lunch-box rattling. A little girl alone on a beach—anything could happen. My imagination busied itself with the details as I called her. “Lily? Lily Beatrice, you answer me! Don’t you go talking to any strangers, Lily—”

&nbs
p; Then I saw her. I saw it was too late for that particular warning. An older woman had her and was toweling her hair for her. Toweling it! Lily looked up from under the pink-striped terry-cloth with her “I-know-I’ve-done-something-wrong-again-but-would-you-please-tell-me-what-before-you-start-yelling-Mommy” face. I fell to my knees and hugged her fiercely, angrily. I pulled back to give her a piece of my mind.

  Children are cute because otherwise they would die. It’s a miracle of genetic engineering that any of us makes it to puberty. The dimples, the big eyes, the extra-long lashes—they worked. Once again. I thought—yes, she is worth it, the heartbreak, the trouble. And yes, she is the link, maybe the only link now, between me and her father. Her hair, however, is not. Not the connection. And not worth the trouble. Not worth the danger. Nothing is.

  “Thank-you,” I told the strange woman, fighting down the urge to pick like a baboon at her whitened head. “Most people wouldn’t take a chance like that. Children are so prone, you know.…” I let my voice trail off.

  The woman blanched. “Oh, I…I never thought.” No, she obviously never did. Probably went into Jake’s and actually, physically tried on hats. Some people were never going to adjust, and it was useless pointing out their mistakes.

  “That’s all right.” I stood and carefully folded up her towel.

  “I’m sorry. It’s so hard to get used to. And with all these diseases, too. When I was a girl, it was only a few people, the very poor.”

  I nodded, even though I knew that wasn’t true. Head lice don’t discriminate; they never did. They like children, but they don’t care about rich or poor. Water discourages them a little. But you could be perfectly clean, even by pre-“Wars” standards, and still become infested. And these days that might mean infected. HIVed, or HEPed.

  Like poor little Amy, who used to live next door. Her parents actually sent her to a salon to have her hair done. Regularly.

  All it took was common sense.

  I gave the woman her towel. “Come on, Lily. Let’s go.” I held out my hand.

  “Do we gotta? I don’t wanna go home yet.” She pouted.

  “Child, I could walk downtown on your lower lip.” A twisted smile emerged from her sorrow. “We’re not going home yet, anyway. Even though you’ve been a very bad girl. We’ll talk about that later.” Her little hand slipped into mine and we went back to retrieve the beach bag.

  “Where we goin’, Mommy?”

  “We’re going to Aunty Senta’s.”

  “Yayy!” I lost the hand again as she spun around, clapping. I waited, then took it back.

  “And you know why? Because we’re gonna get you a brand new, big-girl hair-cut like Mommy’s.” There were no shrieks of protest; just a side-long, questioning glance. Lily knew she had pushed the envelope far enough for today, even if she didn’t understand how, or why. She trusted me to tell her things like that. And I had to trust myself to figure them out. To figure out what was right.

  We walked back up the dunes. We could save her hair, come to think of it. If it was all that precious. Tie it up in ribbons and silk and seal it away for safekeeping. Store it in the study, the attic. Anywhere at all was fine, so long as it wasn’t on her head.

  We got to the stop. A bus was coming down the street, about a block away. Say, ten, twenty minutes ride to Senta’s house. If she was home, less than an hour till Lily’s new “do” was done. A short time; nothing bad could happen before then. And afterwards, things would be easier. So much easier. I felt the waters of relief pool up and over me.

  Deep End

  The pool was supposed to be like freespace. Enough like it, anyway, to help Wayna acclimate to her download. She went in first thing every “morning,” as soon as Dr. Ops, the ship’s mind, awakened her. Too bad it wasn’t scheduled for later; all the slow, meat-based activities afterwards were a literal drag.

  The voices of the pool’s other occupants boomed back and forth in an odd, uncontrolled manner, steel-born echoes muffling and exposing what was said. The temperature varied irregularly, warm intake jets competing with cold currents and, Wayna suspected, illicitly released urine. Overhead lights speckled the wall, the ceiling, the water, with a shifting, uneven glare.

  Psyche Moth was a prison ship. Like all those on board, Wayna was an upload of a criminal’s mind. The process of uploading her mind had destroyed her physical body. Punishment. Then the ship, with Wayna and 248,961 other prisoners, set off on a long voyage to another star. During that voyage the prisoners’ minds had been cycled through consciousness: one year on, four years off. Of the eighty-seven years en route, Wayna had only lived through seventeen. Now she spent most of her time as meat.

  Wayna’s jaw ached. She’d been clenching it, trying to amp up her sensory inputs. She paddled toward the deep end, consciously relaxing her useless facial muscles. When Psyche Moth had reached its goal and verified that the world it called Amends was colonizable, her group was the second downloaded into empty clones, right after the trustees. One of those had told her it was typical to translocate missing freespace controls to their meat analogs.

  She swirled her arms back and forth, creating waves, making them run into one another.

  Then the pain hit.

  White! Heat! There then gone—the lash of a whip.

  Wayna stopped moving. Her suit held her up. She floated, waiting. Nothing else happened. Tentatively, she kicked and stroked her way to the steps rising from the pool’s shallows, nodding to those she passed. At the door to the showers, it hit her again: a shock of electricity slicing from right shoulder to left hip. She caught her breath and continued in.

  The showers were empty. Wayna was the first one from her hour out of the pool, and it was too soon for the next hour to wake up. She turned on the water and stood in its welcome warmth. What was going on? She’d never felt anything like this, not that she could remember—and surely she wouldn’t have forgotten something so intense….She stripped off her suit and hung it to dry. Instead of dressing in her overall and reporting to the laundry, her next assignment, she retreated into her locker and linked with Dr. Ops.

  In the sphere of freespace, his office always hovered in the northwest quadrant, about halfway up from the horizon. Doe, Wayna’s honeywoman, disliked this placement. Why pretend he was anything other than central to the whole setup, she asked. Why not put himself smack dab in the middle where he belonged? Doe distrusted Dr. Ops and everything about Psyche Moth. Wayna understood why. But there was nothing else. Not for eight light-years in any direction. According to Dr. Ops.

  She swam into his pink-walled waiting room and eased her icon into a chair. That registered as a request for the AI’s attention. A couple of other prisoners were there ahead of her; one disappeared soon after she sat. A few more minutes by objective measure, and the other was gone as well. Then it was Wayna’s turn.

  Dr. Ops presented as a lean-faced Caucasian man with a shock of mixed brown and blond hair. He wore an anachronistic headlamp and stethoscope and a gentle, kindly persona. “I have your readouts, of course, but why don’t you tell me what’s going on in your own words?”

  He looked like he was listening. When she finished, he sat silent for a few seconds—much more time than he needed to consider what she’d said. Making an ostentatious display of his concern.

  “There’s no sign of nerve damage,” he told her. “Nothing wrong with your spine or any of your articulation or musculature.”

  “So then how come—”

  “It’s probably nothing,” the AI said, interrupting her. “But just in case, let’s give you the rest of the day off. Take it easy—outside your locker, of course. I’ll clear your bunkroom for the next 25 hours. Lie down. Put in some face time with your friends.”

  “Probably?”

  “I’ll let you know for sure tomorrow morning. Right now, relax. Doctor’s orders.” He smiled and logged her out. He could do that. It was his system.

  Wayna tongued open her locker; no use staying in there witho
ut access to freespace. She put on her overall and walked up the corridor to her bunkroom. Fellow prisoners passed her heading the other way to the pool: no one she’d known back on Earth, no one she had gotten to know that well in freespace or since the download. Plenty of time for that onplanet. The woman with the curly red hair was called Robeson, she was pretty sure. They smiled at each other. Robeson walked hand in hand with a slender man whose mischievous smile reminded Wayna of Thad. It wasn’t him. Thad was scheduled for later download. Wayna was lucky to have Doe with her.

  Another pain. Not so strong, this time. Strong enough, though. Sweat dampened her skin. She kept going, almost there.

  There. Through the doorless opening she saw the mirror she hated, ordered up by one of the two women she timeshared with. It was only partly obscured by the genetics charts the other woman taped everywhere. Immersion learning. Even Wayna was absorbing something from it.

  But not now. She lay on the bunk without looking at anything, eyes open. What was wrong with her?

  Probably nothing.

  Relax.

  She did her body awareness exercises, tensing and loosening different muscle groups. She’d gotten as far as her knees when Doe walked in. Stood over her till Wayna focused on her honeywoman’s new face. “Sweetheart,” Doe said. Her pale fingers stroked Wayna’s face. “Dr. Ops told a trustee you wanted me.”

  “No—I mean yes, but I didn’t ask—” Doe’s expression froze, flickered, froze again. “Don’t be—it’s so hard, can’t you just—” Wayna reached for and found both of Doe’s hands and held them. They felt cool and small and dry. She pressed them against her overall’s open V-neck and slid them beneath the fabric, forcing them to stroke her shoulders.

  Making love to Doe in her download seemed like cheating. Wayna wondered what Thad’s clone would look like, and if they’d be able to travel to his group’s settlement to see him.

  Anticipating agony, Wayna found herself hung up, nowhere near ecstasy. Doe pulled back and looked down at her, expecting an explanation. So Wayna had to tell her what little she knew.