My mother (who grew up mainstream and oh-so-proper on New Earth) thought only sluts slept clear. She couldn’t stop making remarks about her "exhibitionist" daughter; she was fair frantic-sure I pranced naked around my room, pretending people could peer in as easily as I could peer out.

That they could see me. That I wanted them to see.

Just my mother’s feverish imagination. The death-filled weeks of the plague had sent her spiraling into shrill neurosis, where she believed everything I did had some perverse sexual subtext. Truth was, I kept my dome one-way clear so I could tell if an Oolom crash-landed nearby. I hated the thought of a paralyzed body caught in the honey bushes outside my habitat. Not that I was stirred by concern for some poor person suffering… I just got the cold icks, worrying there might be a limp, corpselike thing lying unseen on the other side of my wall.

One morning, it happened: a gray drizzly dawn, with the rain beading and runneling down the dome, making a soft patter that keeps you in a fuzz between waking and sleep. Lovely. Dreamy. Then something slapped against the clear roof of my room.

The sound barely penetrated my doze. Gradually I became aware the timbre of the rain had changed, now spittering off wet-washed skin rather than the dome’s invisible structure field. I opened my eyes…

…and found myself staring up at an Oolom woman, plastered against the dome like a drenched sheet on glass. Her face was spread wide as if she were screaming.

I almost screamed myself. Not fear, just the jolt of being startled — the sudden sight of her, splashed five meters above me. Heaven knows, I’d seen enough Ooloms in the same condition: the drooping jaw, the eyes wide-open because the eyelid muscles could no longer blink. (All Divian species blink from the bottom lid up; the slackness of paralysis made Oolom eyes sag open under gravity’s pull.)