Filter House

Filter
House

Short fiction
by
Nisi Shawl

Seattle

Aqueduct Press, PO Box 95787

Seattle, WA 98145-2787

www.aqueductpress.com

This book is fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

PUBLICATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“At the Huts of Ajala” first appeared in
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora,
Sheree R. Thomas, editor, New York, NY, July 2000, Warner Books.

“Wallamelon” first appeared on the website of
Aeon Speculative Fiction,
http://www.aeonmagazine.com, in
Aeon
3, May 2005.

“The Pragmatical Princess” first appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
New York, NY, January 1999.

“The Raineses´” first appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
New York, NY, April 1995.

“Maggies” first appeared in
Dark Matter: Reading the Bones,
Sheree R. Thomas, editor, New York, NY, January 2004, Warner Books.

“Momi Watu” first appeared on the website of
Strange Horizons,
http://strangehorizons.com, August 2003.

“Deep End” first appeared in
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy,
Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, editors, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2004, Arsenal Pulp Press.

“Little Horses” first appeared in
Detroit Noir,
New York, NY, November 2007, Akashic Books.

“Shiomah’s Land” first appeared in
Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine,
New York, NY, March 2001.

“But She’s Only a Dream” first appeared on the website of
Trabuco Road,
http://www.trabucoroad.com, March 2007.

“The Beads of Ku” first appeared in
Rosebud Magazine,
Cambridge, WI, Issue 23, April 2002, as Runner-Up in the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Imaginative Fiction.

Front Cover Photo by Per R. Flood © Bathybiologica.no

Author Photo (c) 2008 by Luke McGuff

Cover and Book Design by Kathryn Wilham

For my sisters,
Julie Anne and Gina Mari

Cover photograph of a filter house is by Norwegian Research Scientist Per R. Flood of the Bathybiologica A/S. Dr. Flood first described the structural characteristics of appendicularian feeding filters in a 1973 publication. Since then, he has made significant contributions to the understanding of appendicularian feeding house architecture and function, mucus production and histo-chemistry, and bioluminescence.

Appendicularians (Larvaceans) are filter feeders that primarily occupy the euphotic zone (upper sunlit portion of the ocean), but some species can be found in deeper waters. The morphology of larvaceans superficially resembles that of the tadpole larvae of most urochordates; they possess a discrete trunk and tail throughout adult life.

Like most urochordates, appendicularians feed by drawing particulate food matter into their pharyngo-branchial region, where food particles are trapped on a mucus mesh produced by the pharynx and drawn into the digestive tract. However, appendicularians have greatly improved the efficiency of food intake by producing a “house” of glycoproteins that surrounds the animal like a bubble and that contains a complicated arrangement of filters that allow food in the surrounding water to be brought in and concentrated 400 to 800 times prior to feeding. These houses are discarded and replaced regularly as the animal grows in size and the filters become clogged. Discarded appendicularian houses account for a significant fraction of organic material descending to the ocean deeps.

Modified from text at
http://www.answers.com/topic/larvacea-1?cat=technology

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the wonderful support given to me and my work by my mother, June Rose Jackson Rickman Cotton, my sisters Julie Anne Rickman and Gina Mari Rickman, and my father, Dennis Van de Leur Rickman. This book and the stories within it were made manifest by their help and the help of Ted Chiang, Octavia E. Butler, Elizabeth Finan, Andrew Scudder, Eileen Gunn, Cynthia Ward, Sara Ryan, Steve Lieber, Kate Schaefer, Glenn Hackney, Sabrina Chase, Victoria Elisabeth Garcia, John Aegard, Annette Taborn, Vonda McIntyre, Dave Linn, Sheree R. Thomas, Andrea Hairston, Luisah Teish, Nalo Hopkinson, L. Timmel Duchamp, Kathryn Wilham, Bob Brown, and Steve Barnes. Thank you all so much.

Filter House also came about in part with assistance from the following institutions: the Tiptree Fairy Godmother Award, the Untitled Writers Group, STEW, Clarion West, the Susan C. Petrey Scholarship, the Carl Brandon Society, Cottages at Hedgebrook, Ilé Orunmila Oshun, the Country Doctor Community Clinics, and the Starving Artist Fund.

Contents

Introduction: Where Everything
Is a Bit Different by Eileen Gunn

At the Huts of Ajala

Wallamelon

The Pragmatical Princess

The Raineses’

Bird Day

Maggies

Momi Watu

Deep End

Good Boy

Little Horses

Shiomah’s Land

The Water Museum

But She’s Only a Dream

The Beads of Ku

Introduction
Where Everything Is
a Bit Different
by Eileen Gunn

One of the great delights of reading science fiction and fantasy stories is the feeling of being immersed in a world where everything is a bit different. Ordinary people—even children—have unusual abilities. The dangers are different, the power relationships are different, even “normal” is different, and the reader has to figure out this new world on the fly. Every word has potentially a different meaning than in the familiar work-a-day world. New words—made-up words, words you have never heard before—can indicate entirely new ways of thinking.

Samuel R. Delany, many years ago, mapped out the exhilaration of reading a sentence, word by word, that, because it is science fiction, can go anywhere and be anything. The door can dilate. The red sun can be high, and the blue one low. Delany’s essays in
The Jewel-hinged Jaw
make the very act of reading a science-fiction adventure, an experience in which the reader intellectually and emotionally participates in creating the book.

The stories in this book offer that level of exhilaration. They are not all science fiction: some are fantasy, and some are really quite arguably neither—just life, with all its ambiguities and spiritual mysteries. In every story, remarkable words and thoughts and characters carry the reader from one sentence to the next, building a story so naturally that it’s a surprise to realize that you’re caught up in it like a child. Is there such a thing as an eaves trough? What’s going to happen next?

The book is filled with voices, each one the voice of an individual in a particular place and time: someone of a particular age, a particular heritage and education. All are different: clamoring, wheedling, scolding, disagreeing, telling their stories, keeping their secrets. You can tell from their diction and vocabulary that the old lady’s from the country, that the woman is in service, that the girl absorbs knowledge like a sponge.

The personal is political here: everything means something, and it is not always what you think at first. A candle is not necessarily just a candle: it might also be a message from the dead. Or maybe it
is
just a candle: will we find out? A character might use a divination technique and at the same time view it as a superstition. The stories embody a very science-fictional way of reading, actually: they require the reader to distinguish what is different and meaningful from what is just different. (An eaves trough, since you ask, is merely a gutter. Isn’t it a wonderful phrase?) This shifting point of view, the experience of looking at the world from two perspectives at once, is a hallmark of reading science fiction.

Most of the stories examine the shifting of balances of power between men and women, adults and children, whites and blacks. Often the structure shifts internally without ever changing the balance: the poor get poorer and the rich get richer in a way that is all too similar to real life. In these stories, however, almost everyone has some sort of power, has control over something.

Which are my favorites? Maybe “Wallamelon,” for the total pleasure it gives, making the reader once again a mature ten-year-old learning to understand the world. Maybe “The Raineses´,” for all its remarkable characters, living and dead. (A bit of advice: Don’t read “The Raineses´” late at night, all alone in the house.) Maybe “Good Boy,” for its wacky verve, and simply because I’ve been trying to figure out a way to use
Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
in a story for nigh onto forty years, and Nisi beat me to it. Really, every story in the book is a potential favorite. “But She’s Only a Dream” is smokey and allusive. The folktale-like African story, “The Beads of Ku,” is remarkably satisfying aesthetically.

Okay, they’re all my favorites. Remarkably involving stories that pull you along a path of wonder, word by word, in worlds where everything is a bit different.

Eileen Gunn

Seattle

February 12, 2008

At The Huts of Ajala

They all keep calling her a “two-headed woman.” Loanna wants to know why, so after the morning callers leave, she decides on asking her Iya. When she was little, the other kids used to call her “four-eyes.” But this is different, said with respect by grown adults.

She finds the comb and hair-grease on the bureau in the room where she’s been sleeping. When she left Cleveland three days ago, it was winter. Now she steps out onto the wrought-iron balcony, and it’s spring. Her first visit, on her own, to the Crescent City, New Orleans, drowning home of her mother’s kin.

Iya sits in her wicker chair, waiting. She is a tall woman, even seated, and she’s dressed all in white: white headscarf, white blouse, white skirt with matching belt, white stockings and tennis shoes, and a white cardigan, too, which she removes now that the day has warmed. She shifts her feet apart, and Loanna drops to sit between them.

Certainly Loanna is old enough to do her own hair, but Iya knows different ways of braiding, French rolls and corn rows, special styles suitable for the special occasion of a visit to Mam’zelle La Veau’s grave. Besides, it’s nice to feel Iya’s hands, her long brown fingers, gently nimble, swiftly touching, rising along the length of Loanna’s wiry tresses and transforming them into neat, uniformly bumpy braids. Relaxed by the rhythm and intimacy, she asks, “Why all your friends call me that?”

“Call you what, baby?” Iya’s voice is rough but soft, like a terrycloth towel. “Hand me up a bobby-pin.”

“Two-headed,” says Loanna. She lifts the whole card full of pins and feels the pressure as her Iya chooses one and pulls it free.

“Two-headed? It means like you got the second sight, sorta. Like Indian mystics be talkin about openin they third eye. Only more so.”

“But why say it like that?” Loanna asks, persisting. Some odd things have gone on since she got here: folks dropping on one knee, saying prayers in African to the dry, exacting sound of rattling gourds. Tearful entrances and laughing exits, gifts of honey, candles, and coconuts. Not every question gets her an answer, but she’s here to learn, so she always tries again. “Why call it two-headed, and why say that about me?”

“Oooh, now that’s a story.” Iya pauses for a moment, finishing off a row, and the murmur of a neighbor’s voice rises through slow rustling trees and over the courtyard wall, light and indistinct. Iya sections off another braid and repeats herself. “That is
truly
a
story,
baby. You wanna hear it now?”

Loanna nods, then winces from the pain of pulling her own hair. “Ow! I mean, yeah,” she says.

“Try
to sit still, then, so I can concentrate. Lessee. This story started before you were born, Loanna, ’bout fifteen years ago. The night before you were born, actually, to be exact. You remember that night?”

“Naww,” says Loanna, giggling.

“Your mama sure do. But she ain’t the only one. I was
there,
and what I can’t tell you ain’t nobody can. Here, shift yourself this way so I can reach the back. You comfortable?”

Loanna scoots the pillow forward. “Mmm-hmm.” She faces a peach stucco wall now, not so interesting as the view she had had of the garden. So Loanna closes her eyes, lets her Iya’s words form pictures in her mind. This is what she sees—

She sees herself. She sees Loanna-that-was, Loanna-to-come, Loanna-she-who-will-always-be. She can tell by her feet, large like her mama’s, by her strong, long legs. She can tell by her milk-and-honey skin. (How’d she get to be so fair? No white folks, counting back for five generations…but that’s another story.) She recognizes her flat butt that reminds her daddy of Aunt Fiona, and there’s the mark like two lips above it; Aunt Nono calls that an Angel’s Kiss. Her back looks funny; maybe that’s because she never really gets to see it. Her breasts look bigger. She can see them swaying in and out of sight as she walks away from her own disembodied point of view, down some sort of path.

But her breasts aren’t the
main
difference. The
main
difference is her head. Actually the lack of it; her head is not there. In its place are rays of shimmering light that stream down from a luminous ball floating nearly a foot above the stem of her graceful neck. The ball of light itself is colorless, but as Loanna’s viewpoint follows it she sees it sending flares of color in all directions. She understands from her Iya that this is her
ori,
which contains instructions and wisdom from the ancestors. With the guidance of her ori she has left the heavenly city, on her way to choose a head. It is a very important decision.

Coming too quickly around a turn in the path, she catches up with herself, suddenly merging with the ball of light. All at once, it is as if she has a thousand eyes. Each beam of light absorbs the significance of what it touches, in a depth and detail Loanna has difficulty handling. Images spin into her out of the formerly indistinguishable darkness: the stern trunks of trees stand in meaningful positions; their beckoning branches droop with leaves, each leaf a poem, waiting to fall with a sigh, reciting itself as it drifts free. But the piercing rays need not wait as they caress each layer of cellular structure, reading the secrets of greenness and sugar, tasting chlorophyll and acknowledging Loanna’s part in its manufacture, her gaseous contribution to its growth. Then there is the throb and rustle of waves of wind, then the shift to shooting through the soil beneath her feet, which is alive: warm and changing with worms, and damp and seething with nameless hungers that are hers, it’s all hers, all herself.

Somehow, she adjusts. She swims in the sea of the knowledge of everything around her. She wears an apron of fine cowrie shells
~caressing tides of food; soft, sucking feet~
, a skirt of grass
~dry whispers of a burning sun~
, a leather pouch—she tries to absorb it all. Directed by her
ori,
she even manages to move forward, toward her destiny. Wonders around her part and let her pass.

There is sand beneath her feet
~silica, each grain a window in a castle on another world~
and a curtain of vines before her
~twisting, the eternal spiral up, and drinking from a hidden well~
when she reaches the place to which she has been led. She peers through the leaves and
sees
a firelit clearing
~the shape of a spicy scent in the wood burning, a curl of smoke—the eternal spiral up~.
Over the fire hangs a kettle
~the song of its making rings like a silent gong in the play of her vision~
filled with bubbling stew
~reluctant roots dug and diced apart, farewells from the nervous forager which gave its body, its blood~.

Ajala, the maker of heads, enters the clearing. He is like a man. A drunken man, Loanna perceives. A mean drunk. He has lost, gambling. Lost to the King, a spirit of swords and justice. The cowries clicked and fell, clicked and fell, all day, till he was without a shell to pay. This is all Loanna can tell from a single “glance.” Another ray streams out in his direction—and Ajala seizes it as it lands! He is no man, but a god! He pulls her forward by the ray of her perception.

She stands in front of Ajala. He is dark and crooked
~the better to become lost in~
and not at
all
in a happy mood
~a woman wrapped her goods in white cloth and walked away~.
He
speaks
to her, laying heavy slabs of speech upon her mind. He gives her anger, wet and cynically cold, which would mean this in words: “Ha, you come too late! You seek a head? I have ceased to make heads. What is the use, when they will all eventually belong to the King? Not even those already made will I sell to you, for with the rise of the sun all will belong to him, to Kabio Sile. And I am too drunk to bring you to them now. Besides, I want my stew. You are welcome to join me—except, of course, you have no mouth!”

Unkind laughter fills the clearing. Loanna turns to go, switching her hips angrily, which causes her cowrie shell apron to clatter. Ajala stops her with one hand on her shoulder and swings her back around.

“But what is this?” says Ajala. “You are
very rich!
With these beautiful shells I could cancel my debt! Very well, I will take you. But just to the F hut, no further.”

The F hut…this is where he stores those heads barely worthy of the name. Loanna is sure the ancestors have provided her with enough goods for a C, the next grade up. But even an F is better than nothing, she figures. So she removes the apron, and he receives it, and they are off.

Stars have appeared above them. The ori touches their colors with its own and brings to Loanna their distance, their magnificently pure combustion, and their blazing bravery of the void. Then she is at the F hut, and it is time to choose.

These heads are made of mud, and they are really pretty bad. Some of them aren’t even dry yet. The features are all rough and mostly irregular in size and shape. As she squats to turn the mud heads over and pick the best, the leather pouch swings out on its cord, then bangs against her belly. It sobs of lost herdmates, of running open-nosed, into the wind—but what’s within?

Curious, she pulls it open, puts in her fingers and draws out a pinch of salt
~longing for the cresting waves, shh, the hissing of the sea, exposed before the sun now, but once, what is it that lies at the bottom of the ocean?~
. Ah, here is the rest of her fortune! Perhaps she can obtain a C head after all.

Ajala waits impatiently for her decision—too impatiently, it seems to Loanna. She picks an F at random, lifts it, makes as though to put it on. There is an angle, a hidden aspect to Ajala’s waiting that is somehow wrong. His eyes are growing strangely larger as he watches her lower the head. They are almost all he has now for a face: huge eyes watching as she lowers the head over her ori. But what is this terrible blankness descending upon her mind? The telling colors cannot penetrate the thick mud of her head—it is a trap! Quickly she raises the F back up and sets it to the side. Ajala leans over her, silent yet threatening. She throws her hands up in defense, and two grains of salt fly from her fingers to his face. Of course they land in his enormous eyes. Tears spill from them and fall upon the ground. Ajala cries
~no love, alone, alone, no one, no love~
. When he is finished he sighs wistfully. His sigh says, “It is too long since I’ve had the salt to spare for tears. Is there more?”

Loanna shows him the pouchful. Good. In exchange for the salt, he will take her to choose a C head. Through the songs of insects
~brief, brief, but sharp and fleet is our short leap, bright, sweet, the glittering of our span~
and the heavy dew they go, to come at last to the C hut.

These heads are made of woven wood. There is a certain uniformity of feature. They’re better than the F heads, but there’s nothing spectacularly exciting about any of them. Because she sees no real differences, Loanna chooses quickly. Before putting on her C head she checks out Ajala. He is withdrawn, brooding over his many ancient wrongs and sorrows. No trick this time, it seems. The head fits smoothly into place.