She was worried, but the house would look after him. When had he last gone swimming? Could he even swim?
Her mother was walking along the water’s edge and something was swimming along parallel to her. Was it the husband? It didn’t move like him. It swam in closer and her mother stopped, pulled something out of her pocket, and fed it. It was a selkie. It lay in the surf, not changing. It was bigger than her mother but the Granny could tell it was at her mother’s beck and call. How unsurprising. Her mother drove the Granny out of her mind.
The Granny stamped away from her family, keeping her head down, watching her feet. The hill mosses were fighting the reeds. Something flashed in front of her feet and she slowed her perception to see a tiny grass snake trying to get away. She picked it up behind its neck. It wriggled in her hands and she was fascinated. She hadn’t seen one since she’d married into the house. Her mother was calling from the beach and then the house was breaking in with a call, too. The Granny dropped the snake in her pocket but she wasn’t thinking about it anymore. She was running toward the water and she couldn’t think of anything.
The Granny put the gun down. She picked up her embroidery, told the house, “Let’s move.” She kickstarted her rocking chair as she felt the baby kicking inside. The carpet was soaking up the mess her mother’s body was making. The rest of the family wives muttered as the house trembled, withdrew its roots from England’s northernmost tip, checked for clearance, and slowly took off. It was the Granny’s turn at embodiment, at being the children’s mother; so, horrified and disconcerted as they were, the wives didn’t complain.
“Don’t wake the husband,” she told the house.
The house said, “You left instructions to wake him when the latest bother was over. . . . ”
One of the wives murmured, “That’s probably now.”
“You know the husband hates change,” said the Granny. “Besides, he wasn’t talking about my be-damned mother, he was talking about the Hague.”
Which reminded her: part of her was still at work. Her embroidery hardly needed more than a look now and then, so she put in a call for lenience at the trial of the latest Georgian Dictator in the Republique Hague.
The Granny’s mother whispered, “Sarah, you misplaced that stitch.”
The Granny hefted her gun and shot her mother again. The Granny’s heads-up display pinpointed her mother’s body’s moment of physical death and red-flagged the fractal pattern of her mother’s consciousness-uploads jolting into action. The Granny activated a confinement shell around the still-leaking body. When her mother’s dead-woman switch engaged, the explosion spattered the remains all over the inside of a molybdenum box.
The Granny sniffed and the wives fell silent. She told the house to move her mother’s coffin into the basement. She should have gotten rid of her mother last month when the old hag insisted on going ashore to help a stranded selkie back into the sea. The Granny had been distracted: first by the husband, out rock collecting; then she’d caught a grass snake. She hadn’t seen a live one in twenty years. She’d taken it in and nursed it back to health. There was something else, the Granny thought, but she couldn’t think what it was.
Two minutes ago her mother had breezed in and thanked the Granny for at least keeping a tiny bit of fresh meat in the house even though “reptile was rarely anyone’s first choice. Or even their third, really.”
The wives were disturbed. Disembodied, they flowed through everything in the room: rattling the coffee table, spinning the old paper embroidery patterns, knocking the Granny’s walking stick against the back of her high-backed wooden rocker. She could hear them whispering to one another. “Where did she get a gun?” “Will we all go to prison?” “I’m glad she did it.” “What are we going to do?”
“You should sleep,” one said to the Granny. “This is taking it out of you.”
“Your mother released spores when . . . It’s in your lungs,” said another. “She gave you a flu.”
The Granny ignored them. She was annoyed she hadn’t cloned the snake but on the other hand she didn’t want to open the molybdenum coffin to pick through her mother’s remains to find some snake DNA. She could bet her mother’s nanos were working away at reassembling the body. If the Granny opened the shell, one of her mother’s uploads might access her mother’s body and she would be back and even more annoying than ever.
“I should be OK. I haven’t been outside,” the Granny said. “But, you never can tell. Replace my blood. And organs,” she told the house. “And maybe it’s time to take out the baby.”
The baby spoke underneath only to the Granny: “Not until we’re both ready, thank you.”
The house used her chair to attach tubes to the Granny’s arms and legs. Some nasty things began to happen below her waist but she applied a professional level of distraction and ignored them. The itch in her belly could be scratched after the house had put her fully back together.
She was embroidering a cape for her baby.
At the Hague, the next case was up. The Great Year Caucus had found the recent Dictator of the Righteous and Godly Democracy of the Southern American States guilty by popular consensus and was auctioning tickets for the lynch mob to carry out his sentence. The Granny filed her objection and applied her day’s funds to finance court security for herself for the next two hours.
She turned the cape in her hands. It was conch shell pink. Girls ran in the family—but they did everywhere now.
The house had leveled off at five thousand meters and asked for a destination. The Granny thought there was one person with the gumption to help out with a problem the size and shape of her mother’s dead body.
Malik.
“House,” she said. “Let’s go to Bute.”
The Island of Bute used to lie off the west coast of Scotland. During the Stupidity an ancient and corrupt gliderbomb (looking for the long-defunct U.S. Navy base miles away in Dunoon) had taken out the largest town, Rothesay. But the rest of the island had been quietly dyked up before the Greenland melt floods so that, although it was now below sea level, most of it survived.
The Granny directed the house to the northeast end of the island near an old submerged ferry ramp where it landed softly on the wet bracken, sending its stabilizers deep into the earth.
The house told the Granny her mother’s nanos had re-assembled her corpse and it was monitoring the corpse for personality re-uploads. The Granny certainly wasn’t going to bring her mother back. If her mother found a way back, the Granny would deal with her. She would argue she hadn’t technically killed her mother. She’d just removed her mother from her body and removed the opportunity for her mother to regain access to her body. Crossing the water to Western Scotland was a problem, but staying back in the Federated Northern English Islands—where the current authorities might not agree with the Granny’s liberal interpretation of her own behavior—could only have been worse.
“Don’t wake the husband yet,” she told the house. “But let’s do something he likes. Maybe California bungalow, but glass-in the porch.”
It was August, hot and steamy; outside, the rain beat down and the house air filters couldn’t completely remove the smell of sheep shit. Despite the heat it was still below the husband’s recommended temperature range. Anyway, she thought, we won’t be here long.
The wives sussurated, chorused quotes from Verdi’s Macbeth.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” the Granny said. “I’ll take no tips from dead Italians. Or les rosbifs.”
The house said, “The Free Island of Bute is requesting poll tax registration. We have forty-three minutes until the free hour expires.”
The Granny swore. “Send out hunters and farmers. I don’t care what they find, we need inventory. And pay the tax at fifty-nine minutes.”
The house knew better than to reply.
The hunters and farmers, somewhat malleable robots with a small degree of autonomy, scattered out from the cellar door, farmers moving slowly; hunt
ers quickly disappearing from sight.
Blood replaced, the Granny put her embroidery down. She levered herself out of her rocker. She kicked her mother’s coffin on her way to the door. “I’m going to visit the children,” she said.
The children’s playroom, all soft sea green walls and bouncy rock-painted floor, was empty. It was the Granny’s fault. And her mother’s, of course, for distracting her. The poor children couldn’t be blamed: their mother had died long ago and none of the other wives could be said to be particularly motherly. Especially the heavily pregnant Granny. Granny only to her own children lost long before she ever came to this house.
The Granny scolded the house anyway.
The house showed her the children’s escape: Ariadne, the eldest, had tied up Perce, the youngest, and the only boy, then melted his eye with a button-laser. Perce’s nannynanos couldn’t rebuild the eye fast enough so the house had brought in a mechanonurse. Ariadne had claimed to be in shock. It took less than a minute from the untying of Perce’s restraints to the three children’s scrambling of the house’s tracking system and their subsequent disappearance. The house showed her its latest satellite pic of the three children. Perce was riding the ’nurse; the three of them had stopped to change into camo suits. They’d be nearly untrackable soon.
The Granny asked the house for an outdoor suit. She stopped in the hall on her way out to touch up her hair, clean off the wives’ target acquisition software, kick the cat.
“Tell me if Malik contacts you or if the husband wakes himself,” she told the house. The house indicated that it had an emergency message for the Granny but she ignored it. She was going out. Whatever it was could wait.
The flus had killed off more men than women and for certain the remaining men had become a little full of themselves. She did love living with one in a family. His angularity of body, the pure reek of him. She didn’t count Perce, yet. It would be decades before he could even vaguely be considered an adult.
The house flapped the letterbox at her. She aimed a kick at it, too. Missed on purpose. She loved the house more than she should. “Otherwise I don’t want to hear from you unless the little shits come back before me.”
But when she went outside she realized she couldn’t walk across the island.
“I need some wheels,” she told the house. A cellar door sprang open and a hovercar appeared. She whipped out her gun and shot at it, but it dodged back into the house.
“Wheels,” said the house, as the door opened again. The Granny refused to acknowledge that the house might know her needs better than she did.
She sat on the eight-wheeled buggy and it encapsulated around her. Perhaps she was too old for this kind of direct action. Maybe she and the husband should be pottering in the orchid room together and the house could send something out to round up the children.
The buggy told her Bute was overrun with wild dogs. The dogs survived off rabbits, sheep, a number of species of tiny burrowing mammals (moles? the Granny wondered), and even birds if the dogs couldn’t catch anything else. The house’s farmers scorned the birds—their economics knew that with the ever-mutating pandemics still going round only the most desperate would eat avians. And the house couldn’t make money feeding the desperate. Instead they were blast-freezing the pheromone-drawn rabbits and dogs.
The Granny was pleased. Gamey protein stretched a long way.
She tapped into a farmer’s skillset and used it to pick out an ugly, snappish dog that, despite being tempted and crazed by the scents, had so far avoided the farmers’ advances. She was tired already. Her old bones wanted to be sitting on her couch with the Sunday papers spread around her and a brandy-enhanced samovar steaming within arm’s reach.
The baby kept up her barrage of ridiculousness. “I’d like some brandy, too. Where’s my father? Why can’t I read? What’s a dog?” The Granny ignored her.
The buggy started out after her targeted dog—something with the head of a hyena and the body of a Dalmatian. The Granny suspected it would be a right little bastard. She tried not to give in to its charms immediately.
The Granny took off her helmet. She felt heavy. This was the last time she’d carry a baby to term. Next time the house could incubate one itself. The baby’s due date was a week today and the Granny had already caught her planning trouble with the children. She hadn’t known how to discipline it without hurting herself. She explained to the baby the other children were just family children whereas she, the baby, was a direct child and she should listen to the Granny. The baby swore she was on the Granny’s side.
The buggy caught and immobilized the dog. The Granny inserted a mental link, told it to find the children. The dog barked at the door of the buggy and the Granny wanted to drop it where it danced.
“The other children,” she said. “The already born.” The dog was getting some of her anger, some of her depression (which had been encroaching since she’d married into this house). It alternated between mad barking and rolling on the ground. She shut down her side of the link, sent the dog out. The children would undoubtedly eat the poor thing before she could catch up with them. Damn her mother’s death for distracting her.
The Granny had spent a long, wet, adolescent year on this island, Bute. She would have preferred Bad Marienbad but her mother had found her a room and a waitressing job in a cheap waterfront hotel in Rothesay and given her a ticket back to San Diego postdated a year and a day. Her mother was occasionally poetic.
The Granny remembered feeling at home in Rothesay although she wasn’t sure how trustworthy those memories were. She had been comforted by the old brick houses that sat behind the storm wall and had survived the freak tornadoes and pre-War near-catastrophic floods.
Her mother, whether knowingly or not, had given the Granny a place that suited her interior feelings. She was as alien in Rothesay as she had always felt at home. Her old friends’ pix and journals were strange missives from a lost home. The language, clothes, and stances here were foreign but slowly those from home became the same. She had come to know herself as an outsider, settled into the role, and been able to carry it on and with her ever after. She had never told her mother, but she had always been grateful for what she had learned that year.
Rothesay was gone and the handful of survivors had been repatriated into Western Scottish mainland. Malik’s family ruled what was left of the “Free Island.”
As the buggy chugged on, the Granny looked across the short draft of water to the old mainland coast. There was meant to be a village half-submerged there but the house had detected neither life nor noise, light nor masking procedures. There were still sheep, but the farmers calculated that the poisons and the traps—never mind the wolves, the buzzards, and the haggises—made the harvest too risky.
The Granny wants to retire but her mother won’t let her go. The Granny doesn’t understand the family children and she would like a break from the husband and the wives. When she was young, she loved political movements that practiced direct manipulation, alliteration, cohesion/discrepancy variants. She glasses her memories every ten years so that she can go back and check if she is remembering events the way she originally remembered them. The children love to compare the differences between her decades.
The children were both the hard and the easy part. They were all growing up shorter than the Granny. She had grown up in the Totally Free State—aka the Totalitarian Fascist Syndicate—where surplus economies, soygenerators, and liquid sun battery packs had killed the profit motive. Then 2.25 billion people died during the flus, the fuel and famine wars: the Great Stupidity. The husband used to hark back to the pre-War years but even discounting nostalgia, the Granny never expected life to be the same again.
The Granny was 197cm tall and, at her prime, a good forty years ago, had weighed in at just under a hundred kilos. She never pretended to be still in her prime. The surplus hadn’t lasted. The Granny had been a postdoc studying the history of Skinner Box Behaviorism at the University of Chi
cago-Metro when the unknowable black box of her mother descended back into her life and whisked her away to the Faeroe Islands.
The Granny’s mother had frozen all her eggs at sixteen and stopped her menses soon after. She’d used surrogates to birth and raise her children. For years she had seduced birth fathers in best Roald Dahl-approved style.
The Granny’s mother had been one of those expecting trouble. She hadn’t been standing on street corners shooting information-sound bombs into passersbys’ heads, but she had good instincts backed up by fantastic systems analysis. Once she picked up the early signs of famine hitting the developed world, she moved into catastrophe mode. At first, in the Faeroes, the Granny hadn’t noticed any difference in her mother’s blast-frozen expression. But then she had seen a tic, a tenth of a second blankness in her mother’s continuous environmental scan. The Granny thought that something had come undone inside her mother, something that couldn’t be fixed. Neither of them ever brought it up.
The husband had once told the Granny “You were born filled with regret” and she agreed that at some point she had regretted every choice she had ever made, but she regretted those years in the Faeroes least of all. The Granny, grateful for a moment, considered letting her mother get back to her body. But that would open her up to a different level of regret. She’d wait a little yet.
The Granny had grown up hoping to meet someone and feel the direct interior shock of recognition. Love. The spark that would blow everything else aside. As the years passed, she’d kept a weather eye out for it. She didn’t think of herself as fussy, but it hadn’t happened.
The husband had once told her she was the love of his life. She’d warmed to him slowly. The Granny had married because she’d recognized a good deal—and a power vacuum in his house. She’d also married Maria, Lenkya, Sophia, ChloeSimone, K-K, and a few other loves of his life. They were resigned to the situation. The Granny was the least content, the most volatile.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 38