She’d never liked her mother’s houses. Even when she’d cracked the codes in order to program her own spaces, she had always known the deep programming wasn’t hers. She’d been forced old so fast that by the time she was twelve she wanted her own place. Many of her friends lived in dorms, but her mother had bought a space near the Army and Navy School in Greater San Diego so that the Granny had no choice but to live with her. Her mother’s house had smelled like the myths her mother lived by: lilac, charcoal, anti-aging crap, plastic surgery.
The car wasn’t shielded and the Granny was still talking to the house. She had missed a couple of debates and her income had dropped to a trickle as the parliament noticed her absence. Her coalition would disenfranchise her if she didn’t get back to it. She partitioned her mind and went to work on three different cases. Three times twenty minutes work, their ETA to Malik’s estate, was nothing to be sneezed at. The husband hadn’t earned anything since retiring at the Hague-approved age of sixty-nine. He’d gone on and on about his continually surprising survival and the benefits (to everyone, of course) of his retirement for so long that the family had finally given in. Everyone in the house, except the husband, had regretted it even though occasionally one of his old intellectual properties was licensed and earned the house a pittance. A few years ago the Granny had set up the accounts to copy the house balances to him every week but she was sure he never as much as scanned them. She didn’t want to give him the opportunity to pull out the mortality tables again and “prove” he should be dead and therefore couldn’t be expected to work. Sometimes she agreed with him.
He leant over, whispered something about her mother, but she really didn’t want to hear it. His skin was coming up all blotchy. He hadn’t been outside in months. Since Vienna, the snob. The scrambling among the rocks on the Aberdonian Isles didn’t count, she thought, ignoring what the house wanted to tell her. Instead she had the house run a virus/phage/bacteria scan and add a light antiviral to his blood. He hardly ever checked himself. She didn’t think he would notice. She really was over-reliant on the house.
There was a ghost of a note from the house and she traced it back until she could open it. “Sarah,” her mother said. She erased it. If she survived this visit to Bute there’d be time enough for reconciliation with the bitch afterward.
The farmers had done well. They’d only lost one of their number to the haggises and the others were already building a replacement. They’d found a mutation in a mink which, crossed into the local sheep, would move the sheep closer to the Hague’s Machine-Manufactured Protein status. In the meantime, she began negotiations with a couple of food processor factories to see who would take the meat during the pre-approval status. She sold short on the sheep and dog harvest and made twenty days of house expenses. The rest of the meat was frozen and shipped—some for revivification, most for butchering—back to one of the smaller combines in the NorthEast Kingdom. She hadn’t done so well on seeds, but she hadn’t expected to.
The Somalis had isodomed Mount Stuart, an estate south of disappeared Rothesay. Once under the dome, the driver slalomed lazily through a minefield and stopped outside a huge sandstone house. When she stopped, she motioned for the Granny and the husband to get out, then drove around the back of the house.
The children were trying to call.
The Granny thought there was a generation shock, rather than a gap, between those who had lived through the famines and those who came after. The children weren’t convinced of death yet. Despite their mothers’ deaths and being surrounded by death and memorials, mortality was only an intellectual construct. Disappearances still a rumor.
“Sarah.” The whisper again from her mother.
She asked the house to check itself, herself, the baby, the children, the husband, and anything else it could think of to see where her mother’s ghost was hiding. The footstool. The coffee machine. Maybe her mother was in the damn dog. That could complicate matters with Malik.
A quiet, middle-aged woman met them at the back door and led them through a marble-columned hall to a large, almost empty room. The Granny’s house was pointing out details, the tops of some of the columns were unfinished. The door hinges shone and were decorated with vines, oaks, acorns. The room was built using the Golden Ratio. The Granny took the husband’s arm, pointed to the hinges. He shook his head, impatiently. He was listening to the house, too.
Malik was sitting by a wood fire. He’d let his hair grow white. He reminded her of someone and she decided it was his younger self. Her head ached and she was happy to sit down. The husband was admiring the prospect from the window. Twat, she thought fondly.
“Is there peace?” Malik said—the traditional greeting.
“There is peace and there is milk,” the Granny said.
The two of them had always smelled right to one another, she thought. Maybe that’s all it was. But she worried that she couldn’t read Malik’s mood. Maybe he knew something. Maybe it was the something she knew she didn’t want to know.
She cut her connections to the Hague, pulled all of her intellectual tendrils back in. Dealing with Malik would take all of her.
“Someone I know,” she said, “has a little problem.”
The husband was fiddling with the window, seeing if he could open it. He was never satisfied with where he was.
Neither of the two men said anything. The Granny tried to think when she had last been in a room with two men.
“My friend has,” she said, “a little box that she would like to lose for a while.”
“A box,” said Malik.
“Twenty-two hundred kilos of various inert alloyed metals coated in stone and impervious to most physical hacks.”
“Little,” said Malik. This time there was a flash of humor.
At just the wrong time, the baby broadcast to all and sundry that she wanted out. Now.
Little shit, the Granny thought.
The house forwarded a message from the wives: “The baby, your baby, the baby!” The house wanted to send a vehicle out to bring the Granny and the husband back. She shut off their feed. Malik demanded her full attention. But so did the baby. And the baby had a hold of her hormones. She ran through mantras of curses. Picked up her pi calculation (thirty thousand figures along, she found it very restful to concentrate on). Her bladder twinged. She hated her body.
“Sarah,” Malik said. For a moment she thought it was her mother’s ghost and ignored him.
Malik’s parents had flown into Glasgow and taken the UK citizenship virus before he was born. He liked the heat here, but he missed a country he had never known. He’d liked the Granny from the start because she embodied the feelings of alienation he wasn’t allowed to have.
“I know people who could store this trifle,” he said. “But these people are curious about the future. They are interested in new children. They would be grateful to talk to a house that traveled so much. Fascinated to access such a house’s seed databases. Or they might prefer percentages of such various things as mink gene proceeds. Good dogs. Perhaps even a partnership.” He looked at her, openly speculative.