These days none of the wives saw much of their husband; he was rarely awake. He liked to fix things. Anything the Granny broke, she threw in the recycler. He’d been a geneticist. Once, when another wave of soy viruses was exploding out of the “safe” Mid-American cowfeed states, she’d thrown one of his favorite coffee mugs (the one that said Can I look into your genes?) at him—full of coffee.
“Darling . . . ,” he said when the coffee cup smashed against the wall. She knew his word contained paragraphs full of deeply-felt emotional concepts he found difficult to solidify into words. He’d told her so, many times.
“Why didn’t you know what was going to happen? Why couldn’t you do something?”
He stared at her and she was too fed up to parse his glare. She slammed the door on the way out. The next time she queried the house, she found he had gone to sleep.
It was six years before they talked again. She had been excoriating the Hague on their rebirthing of the Common Agricultural Policy and then she’d realized the husband was in the same room as her and was clapping appreciatively. Later, for better or for worse, they’d made the baby. The baby kicked.
For better. Definitely for better.
The Granny’s mother had the Granny force-augmented and fast grown—anything to cut short her progeny’s early years. The Granny could remember her mother (not her birth mother, her mother) taking her to the hospital when the Granny was six months old. Her mother had brought her house to Cleveland which had, she was convinced, the best plasticiens. The plastic surgeons smoothed out her mother’s navel in an afternoon. Her mother had asked the Granny if she’d like hers removed, too, but the Granny had signed her refusal. How could she explain the depths of her infantile sorrow to see the link between the generations removed, denied?
The Granny was lying to the house. She knew it. She knew the house knew it. There was a gap she refused to recognize, a familiar space, unfilled. A time on the Aberdonian Islands where everything had gone wrong. She remembered the negotiations before landing. Later she and the husband had walked to the water’s edge and he had dived for rocks on the old beach. Her mother had tagged along until she was distracted by the selkie. But then there was a space, something she didn’t want to know and it was there that the house and the wives had stopped talking to her.
Until she shot her mother. That had shocked them into speech, if not action. But the Granny wouldn’t look back, wouldn’t listen. She had to look forward, look after the baby, their baby.
The house was talking to her but she was enjoying following the dog, and zeroed the volume. Eventually the house bruteforced through her control of the car and sent her the message in large text she couldn’t ignore. Two farmers had disappeared.
Her mother. The children. Now the farmers.
Again, there was only the one answer.
Malik.
In the early twenty-first century the Somali gangs had established a foothold in Argyll. They’d turfed the Scands out of the salmon and oyster farms and the Bosnians out of the drugs. They’d provided the Triads with handsome retirement packages and a generous revenue percentage which dropped slowly over the years. It was a gamble on both sides, but there comes a time when playing bridge or Mahjong in a smoky bar is better than tracking down crooked sailors in the Kyle of Lochalsh. When the Gulf Stream broke and the weather shockshifted cold then hot the Somalis were well positioned and already turning their couple of hundred thousand acres into a mass market garden. When the food collapse came, they were diversified. They survived, flourished.
The Somalis liked the sheep for their sour milk and wool. They pastured the hot, sweating creatures higher than ever before but this was still Scotland, the mountains weren’t high enough to really escape the heat.
The Somalis were no crueler than any other gang but getting a wool hat had taken over from an Arctic vacation as the au courant slang for being disappeared.
Thirty and more years ago, the Granny had spent a lot of time officially and unofficially dealing with the Somalis. Her summer in Rothesay had given her a connection, Malik, one of the boys who had fallen in love with her. He’d made an informal offer to her to join his house but although she had said she’d think about it, she’d never gone back.
No man, she thought, carried a torch for six or seven decades. A grudge for marrying into a different house, certainly; but not a torch.
She set the dog to find and sent it after the farmers.
She had an itch in the back of her head that she knew meant something bad would happen. Maybe had happened. So when, after the baby was born, it did: she wasn’t all that surprised.
She turned the buggy back home and put in a call to Malik.
The dog set off and she felt her world telescope into only the part of her that was watching him run. The smooth flow of tension and release, his body so low to the ground. She slowed her perception and still couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment his paws hit the ground. She couldn’t keep her foreconsciousness at that speed for long; she was too tied to her body’s slowness. She backburnered the dog’s perceptions. She already loved the dog as much as anything she had ever loved. She had to look away, search the sun-scorched bracken, the deep hot greens of the rhody bushes to settle herself, get back to her body’s time and continue the conversation she’d already begun with Malik’s cool, remote voice and the decades-old icon (a misty hill wearing a woolen hat) the house had popped-up onto the buggy’s screen.
“I see you paid the tax. No more revolution?” Malik said, foregoing pleasantries.
“The revolution is stabilized on the principles on which it began.”
She wondered then if it were actually him talking behind the icon, if he were even still alive. Would he still be handsome?
“Damn Red Clydesiders,” he said, “with their smooth-talking activists and the Tory backbench in their pocket. What do they know about us islanders? Might as well put the Tories upfront. Perhaps the polis would reconsider.”
“Red always suited you, though,” she said, unable to resist flirting.
There was silence on his side. His icon didn’t move and the Granny thought, He’s dead and I’ve insulted some youngster.
The house popped two messages into her heads-up and told her that both the children and the missing farmers had signaled they were coming home. But the link to the dog had gone dead.
“That’s a nice dog,” Malik said. “Thank you.”
She caught up with the children as they trailed back to the house. They’d gotten tired. They hadn’t seen her dog. Perce had forgotten Ariadne’s attack and now as the three of them trudged along he held onto Ariadne’s hand, made her drag him along. As usual everyone ignored the middle girl. Granny managed to be as polite to them as they were to her. The baby was talking to them but she neither offered them a lift nor asked them any questions. Everyone was equally unsatisfied.
The children ran to the cellar door and she let the car follow them in. The house led her into the sitting room where the wives were laid out as a collection of Royal Wedding (Victoria and Albert to Arthur and Uther) China in a display cabinet. They weren’t behind glass. Temptation surged through her. But she was thinking of her beautiful dog.
She pulled up an ottoman, sat down and sighed as she put her feet up. She girded herself and acknowledged the expected note from ChloeSimone.
“House,” she said. “Tea for two.”
The house opened the door again and the husband came in.
She explained about his mother-in-law and he was sanguine. She talked about the farmers and he buttered scones. He flinched when she mentioned Malik. By the time she’d gotten to the children’s latest escapade he was palpably upset. He began buffing his fingerprints from the teapot. She didn’t tell him about her missing dog.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you should wake your mother?”
The wives clattered, sussurated. She shushed them and kept her peace.
“You know I’ve always admired her efficiency wit
h local officialdom.”
She knew he meant this as a reflection of her uselessness here as well as her job performance. He was so good at being banally evil, she thought. She queried the Hague and clocked in. She could handle the Court and the husband.
The husband was balding, had dark rings around his eyes. He slurped his tea. Why couldn’t he wait one minute until it was cool? She’d picked the wide-mouthed tea cups just so that the tea would cool quickly. Hers was already cold. She concentrated but she couldn’t heat it up. She’d never been telekinetic, but you never knew unless you tried.
The wives had slipped out while she wasn’t looking. Maybe they were afraid that she’d throw something. If she broke one of the plates, would that be the end of them? It was a metaphysical question of some interest.
When she first came to Rothesay she’d been sixteen. Her hair was long, straight, hung past her shoulders. She changed the color daily. Yet changing her hair didn’t change anything else: she could never be anything but what she was. She had had admirers from the moment she stepped off the ferry. She’d always had them, but that year, apart from the occasional tourist, she found herself in a closed social system. She came to know many more of her admirers than she’d ever wanted to.
Holding her cold tea, she felt the ghost of that year, memories insistent, rise within her chest, a heaving that, as she recognized it, became firmer, stronger, became something that would break down all her recent decisions. Delusions? Where did that thought come from?
She wanted so much, she had so much she could be doing. Yet she sat here. She could see a minute crumb among the few tiny bristles the husband had missed shaving at the spot above his lip he always missed when he first woke. Her chest wanted to explode. She wanted to scream. But she wasn’t sixteen. She was supposed to be able to compromise, rationalize, work out the way forward.
The cat wandered in. As usual it ignored her and headed for the husband who leant toward it, put his hand down. But the cat stopped, arched its back. It turned, stared at the Granny, ran out the room.
Malik. Her mother. The children. Her job at the Hague. The dog. She studied her embroidery. Asked the house to warm her tea and to add something for her back. She smiled over at the husband, making an effort. He was eating his buttered scones, ignoring her Dundee marmalade. If he could, he only ate white foods—rice, bread, coconut. The buttermilk pale yellow scones were a compromise and she imagined that in his internal tables he was scoring points by eating them.
“Since we’re here, why don’t I show you the island tomorrow?” she offered. “And later we can work out what to do about my mother.”
The Granny knew more than she’d ever wanted to about the husband’s soft old bones and so she acquiesced to the house’s suggestion to take a hovercar.
She was stuck in an if/then loop: If she could deal with Malik and have him take her mother’s body, then she wouldn’t have to deal with her mother; if she couldn’t deal with Malik, then she had to deal with her mother’s body and her mother. She siphoned today’s nest egg dividend straight off the top to Lawyers Without Frontiers and hoped they’d remember if there came a time that she needed them.
She drove the husband on the road toward the remains of Rothesay. The baby was asleep: huffy that the Granny had gone out with the husband. The water, the Kyles of Bute, was slate blue, choppy. Seals barked at the car and she sent a query to the house to see if the farmers could use them.
They were nearing the village of Port Bannatyne when they met the Somalis.
She was happy to be driving. Before they left, the Granny had patted the husband down, removed a couple of weapons and a pocket wife. He was a fool and would have been a dead one if she’d let him keep the weapons. He had no conception of military history, no view of strategy or knowledge of Support by Fire. It was foreground or nothing with him.
She signed a greeting, popped the doors, stepped with exaggerated slowness out of the car and round to the front. The husband followed. The Somali leader, a blank-faced girl of twelve, or more likely a post-famine twenty-five, motioned and they were searched. Another motion and another girl brought over a haggis on a leash. The chimera mewed at the Granny and the husband, desperate to find a reason to attack. A tiny girl trotted over, took the husband’s reading glasses, put them on. They clashed with her shorts. The glasses were an affectation at the best of times and an embarrassment now. The husband enjoyed the level of psychological removal they gave him. The other women signed amusement with tiny shifts in their stance. They didn’t really care, though, and the leader motioned and they all disappeared into the high ferns. The girl in glasses led the Granny and the husband to an ancient wheeled, scrap-worthy biodiesel Ford Transit van. The Granny stepped in, pulled out her corner of embroidery, and sent the car back to the house. They headed into the hills.
She’d never liked her mother’s houses. Even when she’d cracked the codes in order to program her own spaces, she had always known the deep programming wasn’t hers. She’d been forced old so fast that by the time she was twelve she wanted her own place. Many of her friends lived in dorms, but her mother had bought a space near the Army and Navy School in Greater San Diego so that the Granny had no choice but to live with her. Her mother’s house had smelled like the myths her mother lived by: lilac, charcoal, anti-aging crap, plastic surgery.
The car wasn’t shielded and the Granny was still talking to the house. She had missed a couple of debates and her income had dropped to a trickle as the parliament noticed her absence. Her coalition would disenfranchise her if she didn’t get back to it. She partitioned her mind and went to work on three different cases. Three times twenty minutes work, their ETA to Malik’s estate, was nothing to be sneezed at. The husband hadn’t earned anything since retiring at the Hague-approved age of sixty-nine. He’d gone on and on about his continually surprising survival and the benefits (to everyone, of course) of his retirement for so long that the family had finally given in. Everyone in the house, except the husband, had regretted it even though occasionally one of his old intellectual properties was licensed and earned the house a pittance. A few years ago the Granny had set up the accounts to copy the house balances to him every week but she was sure he never as much as scanned them. She didn’t want to give him the opportunity to pull out the mortality tables again and “prove” he should be dead and therefore couldn’t be expected to work. Sometimes she agreed with him.
He leant over, whispered something about her mother, but she really didn’t want to hear it. His skin was coming up all blotchy. He hadn’t been outside in months. Since Vienna, the snob. The scrambling among the rocks on the Aberdonian Isles didn’t count, she thought, ignoring what the house wanted to tell her. Instead she had the house run a virus/phage/bacteria scan and add a light antiviral to his blood. He hardly ever checked himself. She didn’t think he would notice. She really was over-reliant on the house.
There was a ghost of a note from the house and she traced it back until she could open it. “Sarah,” her mother said. She erased it. If she survived this visit to Bute there’d be time enough for reconciliation with the bitch afterward.
The farmers had done well. They’d only lost one of their number to the haggises and the others were already building a replacement. They’d found a mutation in a mink which, crossed into the local sheep, would move the sheep closer to the Hague’s Machine-Manufactured Protein status. In the meantime, she began negotiations with a couple of food processor factories to see who would take the meat during the pre-approval status. She sold short on the sheep and dog harvest and made twenty days of house expenses. The rest of the meat was frozen and shipped—some for revivification, most for butchering—back to one of the smaller combines in the NorthEast Kingdom. She hadn’t done so well on seeds, but she hadn’t expected to.
The Somalis had isodomed Mount Stuart, an estate south of disappeared Rothesay. Once under the dome, the driver slalomed lazily through a minefield and stopped outside a huge sandstone house
. When she stopped, she motioned for the Granny and the husband to get out, then drove around the back of the house.
The children were trying to call.
The Granny thought there was a generation shock, rather than a gap, between those who had lived through the famines and those who came after. The children weren’t convinced of death yet. Despite their mothers’ deaths and being surrounded by death and memorials, mortality was only an intellectual construct. Disappearances still a rumor.
“Sarah.” The whisper again from her mother.
She asked the house to check itself, herself, the baby, the children, the husband, and anything else it could think of to see where her mother’s ghost was hiding. The footstool. The coffee machine. Maybe her mother was in the damn dog. That could complicate matters with Malik.
A quiet, middle-aged woman met them at the back door and led them through a marble-columned hall to a large, almost empty room. The Granny’s house was pointing out details, the tops of some of the columns were unfinished. The door hinges shone and were decorated with vines, oaks, acorns. The room was built using the Golden Ratio. The Granny took the husband’s arm, pointed to the hinges. He shook his head, impatiently. He was listening to the house, too.
Malik was sitting by a wood fire. He’d let his hair grow white. He reminded her of someone and she decided it was his younger self. Her head ached and she was happy to sit down. The husband was admiring the prospect from the window. Twat, she thought fondly.
“Is there peace?” Malik said—the traditional greeting.
“There is peace and there is milk,” the Granny said.
The two of them had always smelled right to one another, she thought. Maybe that’s all it was. But she worried that she couldn’t read Malik’s mood. Maybe he knew something. Maybe it was the something she knew she didn’t want to know.
She cut her connections to the Hague, pulled all of her intellectual tendrils back in. Dealing with Malik would take all of her.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 39