"I don't understand."
"You know. Like when we play hot or cold."
"You said 'we' told it what to do. Who is we?"
"The nice man under the stairs."
"What?" Dee Zu says.
"He showed me."
"What nice man?" says Son. "Where?"
•
The door under the stairs opens on a depthless, featureless dark. Dee Zu slams it shut.
"There was a nice man in there?"
"Yes."
"Did you go in there?"
"Yes."
"My God."
"What did you see?"
"Can't tell you."
"What did he say to you?"
"Can't tell you."
"You must."
"No, Mummy. I can't."
Son adopts his darkest forbidding father mode: "Tell us."
"I don't know how to."
•
Son spends much of the afternoon at the pit, trying, without success, to negotiate hammer and nails. He spends the rest of the day whittling pegs with his knife and drilling holes with a spearstick. He uses a rock to drive the pegs in, trying to nail the door shut.
The next morning the pegs have worked themselves out, some of them falling to the floor, others hanging loose in the nail holes that remain.
"Don't you ever go it there again," he tells Eva. "Don't you even touch that door. Do you hear me?"
"He wants to help."
"Who wants to help?"
"The fuckinfuck."
"Jesus Christ."
"You said that wasn't polite."
•
So another member of Eva's invisible retinue has gained legoitic flesh.
Dee Zu tells Son that Eva's new hanger‐on is a dead ringer for a robopet named Toot that escaped with her from ESUSA Mall. "A laughing pseudo Lhasa Apso." Dee Zu grins, but Son can see she isn't necessarily happy. "A ticklish one. What is this world coming to?"
"Maybe her invisible playmates were better than the visible ones."
"Whatever," she says. "This is Toot. A ditzier version, scatter‐brained, but it looks much the same." And that 'pet was a Sky avatar, a front for MOM.
"What about Spiff?"
"I don't know. I hate to think."
unsafe inside or out
Eva is parked at her table down by the creek. The latest episode of the Mad Hatter's tea party is in full swing. And she's right into it, as ditzy as the best of them.
Son laughs, and she laughs back. Poof and Spiff share in the prevailing joy, a pair of unlikely goofballs dancing all about. Her guests have evolved real feet, freed from their legoitic tethers to run and leap and roll around in the traditional way of robopet dogs and their bio ancestors. Son laughs some more.
He envies Eva's innocent joy in things. But Dee Zu is old enough to know better.
Son has given up laying down the law that says she can't come down here by herself. He has lost track of how many times he has said, "I don't want Eva playing down by the creek, okay? Who knows what might decide to come up through that hole."
"Where's safe?" Dee Zu has said. "Whether we try to watch her every minute or not."
"She's only four years old."
"Going on five. And you think you know a lot more about this world than she does?"
"I know how suddenly things can go bad."
"Is she any safer in the Homestead than out there? My God. You still worry the toilet could turn ugly any minute and eat you. Same with the loveseat and the upstairs balcony."
"That's not the same as a little girl playing on her own beside the water. Especially down by the Hole."
"The Hole. It's just a hole in the creekbed. You can't even see it."
That hole is evil. It inspires a near‐superstitious dread in him. Dee Zu and Eva don't understand that. He isn't sure he does either.
"You worry about the Hole," Dee Zu says. "What about the door under the stairs? Next thing we know, Eva won't be allowed to play outside or inside."
"Okay, okay."
"You were afraid the whole house was a hungry Sham. And how do you know it isn't? Maybe it's just biding its time."
He laughs. But say what you will. Their house is divided by internal conflicts, maybe haunted by hostile spirits. Yeah, right. And here's Poppy jeering away in the background.
•
Spiff isn't allowed inside. He can walk free of the Land now, but the house doesn't like him. It upsets Eva, of course, that the house won't accept her first and most loyal courtier. Spiff has fallen down the stairs twice and once, under mysterious circumstances, off the bedroom balcony. Even out in the yard he has learned to be wary of the pit and the treehouse.
"Why, Mummy?"
"I don't know." Dee Zu has told Son her theory, but Eva isn't ready for this story yet. That the house was built by Leary and Ellie, who have good reason to hate Brian, and Spiff could be a Brian avatar.
Son can never relax. Not really. Eva isn't safe outside, and she isn't safe inside. Neither is Dee Zu, come to that, or himself.
And Dee Zu is always, like, whatever. The Land is beautiful. What will be will be. You need to relax more, enjoy things. You'll spoil things for Eva.
Promoting unskillful attitudes as though they were the new ken.
"What do you want for Eva?" Dee Zu asks him. "For us? A world of peril, where we're afraid to come out from under the bed, or a world of promise? Of amazing new potential."
Slogans for propagators. "It's both," Son says. "But Eva doesn't see how dangerous it can be. And you don't want to."
"Isn't it nice to see her excited by things; would you rather see her going around scared all the time?"
He'd rather see her going around alive and not dead. Still, he can see what Dee Zu means.
little threat of boredom
Son has more reason on his side than Dee Zu sometimes lets on.
Not all of Eva's otherthings mean well. And Dee Zu feels helpless against them. How can she contain them, or at least limit the damage, if she doesn't know what they are or how to find them? When she doesn't know what they've been telling Eva?
Especially the fuckinfucks. Dee Zu believes these are, more properly, brianthings. Just as she's increasingly sure Spiff is another Brian incarnation. So of course she's worried. But Son goes too far. He gets so protective he'd smother Eva, if Dee Zu let him.
Whatever the dangers, this is Eva's world more than it is Dee Zu's or Son's. Still, however much better she understands it than they do, it's true she has to learn more about it. As part of this, Dee Zu tells Son, Eva needs the freedom to explore. And to talk to her new friends. Sure, there's risk. But that's life.
•
Although Eva's very existence changes most equations, including calculations of risk. Dee Zu finds it much easier to accept threats to herself than she does risks to her daughter. She had prepared herself for death back in the cave. Her rescue was a miracle, her renewed life with Cisco pure windfall. Something to be savored moment by moment with no regrets and no fears of dying again. Since Cisco died, she has tried to live the same way with Son. But Eva is a game‐changer. No way Dee Zu can accept the prospect of her daughter's death with equanimity, and Eva's chances depended on Dee Zu staying alive to protect her.
Even when it comes to her own safety and welfare, Dee Zu still finds it unnerving that there's no exit from this world. This is it. All there is. Though that's not quite right. There is an exit. One that's open to everyone, including those who pretend to immortality.
It helps if she thinks of herself as a worlder, as a test pilot in a novel World that keeps evolving, where surprise has become routine. It helps that their house presents a semi‐autonomous refuge, one that keeps evolving defenses for them.
Even if it isn't yet clear what exactly it's defending them against. In a Worlds UnLtd generated reality she could always bail to the security of her cell in ESUSA Mall. She also enjoyed more control over developments in any given World, unless unpredictability and intractability were de
liberately designed into the test environment.
Here, they have to deal with whatever presents itself. No running away, no place to hide out and chill. They can negotiate favorable outcomes, but they can't dictate them. There's no virtual console, no bail button, no color, temperature and other such environmental engineering controls.
Plus violent encounters with this world inflict real injuries, threaten real death. Nowhere do you find a reset button. There is no "start new game" option. This is it.
•
Whatever. Living entails risk, and maybe boredom would be worse. At least the Land offers little threat of that.
All in all, in fact, Dee Zu estimates her HQ is standard for an average day in ESUSA Mall. An average Monday, anyway; Worldsdays were better than this. Her CQ is another matter. Wisdom had it, back in the malls, that your CQ was related to your HQ, that connectivity was essential to maxhappiness, and therefore a good thing. Given that mallsters were strictly quarantined from one another, nobody ever talked about OD‐ing on connectivity. The way things are—never mind they might be the only two adult people in this wide, wide world, and however much he means well—Son sometimes makes her claustrophobic.
At the same time, she can no longer imagine living without him. Losing Eva would be worse, but she can't bear the thought of losing either of them. They're the only world she has, now.
new beginnings
It just wants us to be happy.
– Eva
test pilots
"Look," Eva says.
"Where?" says Son.
"The house. It's different."
And so it is. The roof slopes at a new pitch. It's oriented southeastwards, slightly tilted to the southwest. The whole house has shifted on its foundations with the change of season, giving the rooftop solar collectors maximum exposure to the sun at the same time sheltering windows from the afternoon sun.
Good design. Funny that all this should just happen.
"What's going on?"
"Somebody's looking after us," says Dee Zu.
"Yeah, but who? And why?"
"It just wants us to be happy," Eva says.
"What does?"
"The house."
•
One morning just after Eva's fourth birthday, they arose to find something new standing in the front yard.
"What the hell is that?" Son said.
A swinging bench seat with a striped awning sat parked in the shade of the big tree. At first Son proclaimed it a mantrap, their Homestead finally infiltrated by the powers of evil.
Thank God it wasn't, because Eva and her wingmen, Spiff and Poof, were already taking it for a test spin. Pumping furiously in rough unison, the three daredevils had it swinging through an arc of thirty centimeters or more—no mean achievement, given that Eva is only a pint‐sized knievel, while Poof presents a fair approximation of a shaggy lapdog with no ready way of telling its hind end from its front, and Spiff is a limping cartoon canine robot.
"Get down off that thing," he says. "Now."
"What's wrong?" says Dee Zu. "They're just having fun."
"You and Eva live in a fantasy world. A fool's paradise. You're going to get yourselves killed."
"So how are you different from this Poppy you're always talking about?" she asks him. "You're the same."
It's true. He sees this himself. Sometimes he takes a grim satisfaction in his perceived darkening of this too‐sweet world they've built for themselves. Or, as he insists, that something else is building for them. But that isn't what he says.
"You should be happy, then." He tries on his toughest voice. "Supposing you want to survive, I have no choice. I have to be like him."
mangos just want to be liked
Dee Zu and Son swing gently back and forth, snuggled together with Eva on the loveseat.
Dee Zu's HQ and CQ feel as good as they ever have, whether in the mall or here in their Homestead. She rarely thinks about such things anymore. That's probably because she's generally happy and connected in good ways. With Eva, big time, and with Son too, for the most part. Overall, in fact, she's in good shape.
This contraption should squeak, the stairs still do. But it doesn't. They're pleased it's proving persistent. Some spontaneous emergences do not. The loveseat has changed over the past month, mind you. The broad orange and green stripes in its awning have brightened, and its weathered slats now match the planks in the treehouse overhead.
"Tik," Eva says. "This wood is tik. The tree is mang‐go."
How could she know that? Up till then, it was simply "the big tree in the front yard." And the tree didn't bear fruit till a couple of days after she identified it. Two days after that, the fruit ripened. The black‐speckled yellow skin peeled away to reveal succulent golden flesh juicy enough to turn Eva into a dirt magnet. Something else of interest: In the first few days, the more mangos they ate the tastier they got. Go figure.
"Maybe they're addictive," says Dee Zu, grinning as she peeled another.
Eva has a better idea: "They want us to like them."
Something else new. A single plank swing hangs by ropes from the mango tree. This is also tik, Eva says.
Their Homestead keeps adding new features, some more permanent than others. The tiny house on a post over by the compound wall is a recent example. Last night it wasn't there; this morning there it stood, an ornate wooden structure, indistinct in its details but covered in gilded curlicues and pillars and sporting a spacious front porch scattered with ill‐defined objects, some of them vaguely anthropomorphic.
"What's that?" Dee Zu asked.
"Could be a shrine."
"So what's it doing here?"
"Dunno."
spirit house
Eva talks to the little house. They can't hear what she's saying.
Spiff sits beside her, gazing up at the spirit dwelling. A green‐gold fuzzy‐wuzzy, a new addition to her retinue, scampers up the post to waggle a few objects aside and perch on the front deck. Only recently evoked, it sparkles with sunglints when it moves, it's bushy tail in tow.
Eva enters into a three‐way conversation with the fuzzy‐wuzzy and the shrine. She waggles a finger at the shrine or at some otherthing inside it. Her delighted laugh is tempered with doubt. "No," she says. "You're supposed to be a little house."
The foundation post is morphing. Its base sucks soil, its middle distending in rough proportion to the resulting bowl‐shaped depression in the lawn around it.
"What's going on?" Son says.
"How would I know? Ask Eva."
So he does.
Eva asks him to wait, and listens to something Spiff says.
"It's a gnome!" she tells them. Then she consults with Spiff again and says, "A guard…No. A garden gnome."
Spiff goes grufflegruffle as the post bifurcates.
"Mommy, what's a gnome?"
•
A squat humanoid figure stands in place of the tiny house on a post. The house itself is a vaguely human head at the same time it's an ornate building, and its front porch rises and falls as its door‐mouth struggles to articulate something. "Guh‐guh‐guh."
This otherthing is bow‐legged. How Son knows, Auntie used to say Uncle Benny Bob was bow‐legged.
"Guh, guh…gosh…"
"My God!" Dee Zu sounds at once disbelieving and delighted.
"…duh…duh…"
"Do you know what that is?" she says.
Son tells Eva to sit still, and he grabs one of his spearsticks, which he always keeps at hand, except when the Land buries them or they otherwise go missing.
Eva is laughing.
"Eva!" Son says.
Now the goshdarnit‐thing is reverting to mere shrine‐on‐a‐pillar mode.
"Yes, daddy?"
"What was that?"
"A goshdarnit‐thing," she says as though she's surprised Son doesn't know that.
A sudden shrill in his head has him looking all around for the gG. But this shrilling is different.
/>
"Now what's happening?" he says.
"It's coming from inside our house," says Dee Zu. "I think it's a telephone."
"A telephone."
"A stone‐age telephone."
"Jesus, what a noise."
"It's trying to get your attention. You're supposed to answer it."
Son heads for the front door, spearstick in one hand and knife in the other.
•
"So. You're planning to stab the telephone?"
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Try answering it."
"Hello?" he says.
"I think you have to pick up that bit first."
Son lifts the receiver off its cradle and fumbles it to his ear. He listens.
"Say something," Dee Zu tells him.
"Like what?"
"Say hi."
"Hi," he says.
"Gosh …it …"
"What?"
"…talk…"
"Hello?"
"Let me try," Dee Zu says.
He passes her the receiver.
"Nothing," she reports. "Just some buzzing."
huggivines & worrywarts
Shrieks of joy drift up from where Eva plays on their front lawn. Beside their new pond. All her short life, this happy creature has brought them nothing but pleasure.
The green‐gold fuzzy‐wuzzy races back and forth in the grass, while Spiff and Poof describe spinning and cavorting orbits within Eva's gravitational field to complete the jubilant spring tableau. Storybook princess with retinue. One slender olive‐skinned girl, about a meter tall, with curly black hair, a couple of legoite robopets and a legoite fuzzy‐wuzzy.
Son still can't get over it, that Eva herself has negotiated her companions, evoking them from the Land. With a little help from her friends. Whoever they might be.
"What are they up to now?" Dee Zu asks.
"Who knows? Looks like fun, though."
"I'm going for a stroll."
"I'll join you."
"If it's okay with you, I need to be alone for a bit. See you later?"
She heads down toward the creek.
•
Dee Zu is adult, more than Son himself is in some ways, so he can't tell her what to do. She knows her solitary excursions scare Son. He believes she's too trusting, too unwary.
Back when they discovered the root of her illness, for example, he told her she should stay inside and take care of herself. She was pregnant, for Christ's sake. But no, Dee Zu was Dee Zu, so she went for a walk. And next thing she had Eva all by herself, down there in the ravine by the creek. She dropped her baby in the dust, which back in the old days would have assimilated both of them in a flash. But this was the new world, and she bit through the umbilical chord, washed Eva and herself off with creek water, rested a spell, and then made her way back to the house to introduce Son to his daughter.
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