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
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.
“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.
The wives sussurated, chorused quotes from Verdi’s
“Don’t get your hopes up,” the Granny said. “I’ll take no tips from dead Italians. Or
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; hunters 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 (
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
