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.