Well, she thought, he already had the dog so perhaps that didn’t count?
“You had a dog, didn’t you, dear?” said the husband.
The Granny wasn’t surprised. The husband was the conversational equivalent of a natural disaster. How had men survived themselves?
Malik’s gaze went to the fireplace as he spoke to someone outside the room. The door opened and another of those quiet women brought in the dog the Granny thought of as her own.
“Here boy, here!” the husband said and the dog strained on its leash. Malik nodded. The woman said a word and the dog ran to Malik. The woman stationed herself by the door, slipped out of the conversation and into the background. The Granny was impressed.
“If we were to rebuild Rothesay,” said the husband, “I’d like to work on the Winter Gardens. See if there’s anything left of the gene bank at the old genealogy center.”
“There may be vaults not on the public plans,” the Granny agreed.
Now the baby was talking to her in undertime. She signaled to Malik to join the conversation with the baby while the three of them, the Granny, Malik, and the husband, continued discussing the possibility of rebuilding Rothesay out loud.
“We’re very interested in the child,” Malik said underneath. “And your choice to carry it in vitro.”
The Granny showed him a gene chart to ensure Malik knew the baby was a girl and that the husband was the father. Malik gave a microscopic shake of his head.
“There are so few children born on the island,” he said. “Yours looks to have a number of enhancements not available the last time there was a birth here.”
The island Somalis wanted to make sure they were at the top of their game when and if they next had children. Also, he said, they had discovered the baby looking through their defense systems—which were supposed to be freestanding and unconnected so they were strongly interested in knowing how it had achieved that.
“How she achieved that,” said the Granny.
“She,” agreed Malik. His castle was prying at her house, using the husband and the Granny as entry points. She put the house on lockdown and cleaned up the husband’s i/o ports. Later she’d get the husband back in some way for leaving himself so wide open. Maybe later she’d apologize and maybe she wouldn’t and either way she wouldn’t mind when he disappeared to sulk. He deserved it if he couldn’t keep his own head clean.
The Granny and the baby had a conversation below her and Malik’s.
“What were you doing in there?” the Granny asked.
“Who isn’t curious?” the baby said. “No,” she said at the same time on yet another level, “I don’t want a name yet.”
“Besides, their systems are wide open. Relatively.”
“I wish you’d told me,” the Granny said.
“You’d only have worried.”
The Granny dropped the conversations with the baby. Malik and the husband were extrapolating near-future population growth versus potential carbon loading and possible weather consequences.
“Listen,” she said, under, to Malik. “You number crunchers are just repeating old work and the baby says I don’t have all day. Besides we don’t need to be here for you to do this.”
“I’m enjoying your husband’s way of thinking. He’s smart. For a scientist. Brainstorming is different in person.”
“He’s not so bad. Better with the past than the present.”
The baby kicked, said, “It’s time!”
“Maybe we can talk more,” the Granny said to Malik.
“My house is always open,” Malik said, sending her a pass to get her by the haggises.
The Granny called the house for a car.
“The baby belongs with her mothers,” the Granny said to Malik, under. Malik said nothing. Neither did the baby.
“We’ve got to go,” she said out loud and the husband surprised them both with a smile. She let it go. He rarely needed to know what was really going on.
What Malik wanted, herself and the baby, was impossible, the Granny thought. But no more improbable than her needing a quiet place to inter her mother. Temporarily, she had told the husband. Permanently, she thought. She was pleased to see her little wheeled buggy at the castle gate. Once she and the husband were in, though, the car netted them to their gel-seats and rocketed over the hill to the house. At least the house had moved into a more sheltered position. The last thing she noticed before she passed out—drugs, G-forces, the baby’s insistent pushing; she didn’t know which—was the last of the hunter-farmers returning to the house from the hills. She noted they were pulling good loads and was checking on their productivity index and then she was gone.
When the Granny woke she asked about her mother before her baby. The house told the Granny her mother had Von Neumann ghosted herself. It had discovered two hundred (and counting) uploaded iterations of her mother’s personality which dated from many years before her mother’s death up until only a day or two before it. The Granny must realize, the house said, that there was no absolute method to ensure her mother would remain dead. It might, the house suggested, be better to allow her mother to reconnect with the body in the basement before her mother did something unspeakably illegal and messy.
“Say what you mean,” the Granny told the house. But she knew of the opportunities, the bodies for sale, the possibilities of stored clones. She wouldn’t give the order to disinter. Instead she changed the quarklocks from strangeness to charm, knowing this wouldn’t hold her mother back for long. Looked into hiring a charterjet to take her mother’s body somewhere far away from here. The arrival point was a problem.
The Granny had been ignoring her newborn, her worn out body, and the mumbling people surrounding them both—the efficacy of the house’s drugs was not to be sneezed at. So much for plans. So much for peace and quiet.
The baby was crying outside of her and all the while peppering her with questions: Where was her grandmother? Why was the world cold? Who were all these people? Why did her stomach ache? These cloths were constricting, rough!
Everything merged into the baby’s wail. The Granny was trying to open her eyes to see the baby, her own girl. She struggled to stay awake, to stop the torrent of wives spinning around her, the incoherent pleased roar of the husband. But they’d all be there when she woke. She could escape many things; she couldn’t escape her damn family.
The house listed possible new locations. Flashed images of its best angles in sunny climes, sailing the East Anglian sea. She ignored it.
She opened her eyes. The children, in full painted regalia, were at the end of her bed looking after the baby. The husband was there, too, cooing at the baby. The baby was ignoring the husband. The Granny could hear her discussing, underneath, memorable security systems with Malik.
If the Granny just didn’t look at her family, maybe they’d ignore her? She checked the house schedule. Wasn’t it one of the other wives’ turn at embodiment by now?
The wives had been leaving her alone with the baby. It was nearing Lenkya’s time to reach back into a body and they all wanted to be with her. It was a time of mixed feelings. They loved embodiment but they also enjoyed disembodiment—circuitry-situationalism, as named by Gray—slipping through the house seams, gliding out to ride the farmers, looking after the children.
The wives had seen her querying the house schedule. “We’re not the mother, the new mother,” they said. “We are lost here too. We would love to shepherd the children, the lovely children. But we cannot, cannot. The child, the baby, the little one demands your body, you. You.”