The wives sussurated, chorused quotes from Verdi’s Macbeth.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” the Granny said. “I’ll take no tips from dead Italians. Or les rosbifs.”
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 (moles? the Granny wondered), and even birds if the dogs couldn’t catch anything else. The house’s farmers scorned the birds—their economics knew that with the ever-mutating pandemics still going round only the most desperate would eat avians. And the house couldn’t make money feeding the desperate. Instead they were blast-freezing the pheromone-drawn rabbits and dogs.
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 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.