Filter House by Nisi Shawl Page B

course since the rebellion, they’d maintained a strict embargo on visual broadcasts from their Habs. And from Quarters, too, it seemed. “Your father knows that you’re here?” she asked.
    “Well, not really.” He might, if he’d noticed that I was gone.
    “Your presence equals a desire for what?”
    I had no answer to that but an honest one. “I want—to—I want to way with you.”
    Tata had adopted that bit of solar slang almost as soon as she heard it from me. Using one word to denote a deliberate interdependency of time and space and attention was apparently a very maggie concept. But a short silence followed my statement, as if she hadn’t understood me. “Here? This would not be in alignment with the highest good of all involved.”
    In other words, no.
    “Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say. I reached out to close down the connection. Maybe I could get home before Dad noticed the scooter missing.
    “Wait.”
    My hand hovered. My arm began aching.
    “My task here is to be rapidly accomplished. Then I can return with you. Would this carry adequate compensation?”
    I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant. Compensation for what? For being unable to enter a space forbidden to non-engineered humans for the last one hundred and fifty Years?
    “Not complete compensation, of course, I understand. But in adequate amount?”
    “Okay,” I repeated. “Yeah. All right.”
    Waying with Tata through the Nassea was much more than all right. The background itself was boring, dead, a waste of water populated only by muddy motes. But Tata’s presence charmed the empty scene to life. And the facemask gave her a faintly silly sadness, instead of the menacing air I’d expected.
    I wished I was able to hear her singing, the sonar she used to navigate. I couldn’t hear the music, but I watched her, and I saw the dance.
    Switching between infrared and a cone of visible, I followed her homeward, entranced by the strength and delicacy of her movements. For a while I tried to get the scooter to imitate them, swooping and halting clumsily. But sliding back and forth on the cushions interfered with my view.
    Even though I knew practically nothing of the language at that point, I understood some of what she signed: big, small, honor of your trust, straight to the heart. These things sound so abstract, but they seemed extremely solid when she showed them to me. Her long limbs stretched, swept, gathered softly together.
    I wish now I’d saved a recording of at least part of her performance. Maggies have wonderfully expressive faces, but the fine muscles of the alveolocks are, we’re told, even more minutely controlled. Within their skins, maggies are able to communicate multiple messages simultaneously, with ironic, historical, and critical commentaries layered in over several levels. So the scholars say.
    I couldn’t swear to the truth of that. There was only one other time Tata wore her skin while speaking to me.
    Because of course my father knew I’d taken his scooter. No more trips out into the Nassea for Kayley. Not for at least a Year. I wasn’t even allowed to poke around in my lousy little inflatable.
    I told my father this was an overly repressive reaction typical of reformed criminals. He smiled. “Good. I wouldn’t want to do anything abnormal. Think of the psychic scars you’d have to bear.”
    Tata’s infrequent trips to Quarters continued after this, naturally. I begrudged them; I didn’t see why she couldn’t just stay and way with me. Didn’t she know how much I missed her, how the loneliness curdled up in my throat as she swam out of sight, out of the misty particulate light shining such a short way into the water?
    I think she did.
    Tata always made it a point, on her return, to give me some treasure found on her excursions. Something interesting, something different, with a story behind it. This must have been hard for her. Far off, over invisible horizons, maggies spread corals around other