The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012

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 Chicago-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.

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.