Daneh translated into her own home with a sigh. A human could live anywhere at any time and some did so, traveling on “walkabout” — actually “apport about” to be technical — with no particular place to call “home.”
Most humans, though, opted for some comfort place, created to their desires. Some, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Walkers, never left their homes their whole lives, opting for scenes and recreations of places they had never been and never would go. Most, like Daneh, simply kept a particular home, or homes, as convenient places to recover from the pace of life.
The main room was all cool tones with comfortable floaters scattered at apparent random. Wallscreens replicated an idealized jungle with colorful parrots flying from tree to tree and an ocean crashing on a perfect white sand beach. Out-of-the-way corners were filled with a riot of flowering, nonpollinating, plants. The room was huge, easily large enough to accommodate a crowd of fifty, but the air currents were such that it was all kept at a pleasantly cool twenty-one degrees with slight breezes and just a hint of the seashore. On one side of the room a huge fireplace dominated the room, a relic, she joked, of her atavistic past.
Daneh was one of the few humans who had a real and distinct knowledge of the location of their home. When she was still attending Faire she had once traveled to Raven’s Mill by ground transportation “to get in the mood.” Since only the great farming plains in the middle of the continent still used ground transportation to any large extent, there were very few roads of any quality. Over the millennia since teleportation and replication had become the norm humans had worked very hard on returning the world to a condition of wilderness, one that replicated as much as possible prehuman, much less preindustrial, conditions. A few high quality roads were maintained by revivalists — the group that Edmund was a part of maintained a stone-paved road from the Atlantis Ocean to the Io River — but in general the few tracks that the Renn people used were just that, dirt tracks through howling wilderness.
Such a wilderness surrounded her own home. The south side of the house faced on a sheer cliff, at the base of which was the Gem River. The sides were cleared back for a few dozen yards giving spectacular views of the forest to the east and west, and there was a large field that once had a couple of ponies and horse gracing it on the north side running along the top of the ridge. But beyond that was miles and miles of virgin forest, rolling hills with no humans to be found. Occasionally, when she looked out at night, she could see a light or two twinkling in the distance. She had neighbors across the valley to the west, she knew that, and a few on the far side of the Gem River. But other than that… nothing.
Sometimes, when she walked out the door and looked at the wilderness surrounding her, it was a bit frightening. Especially after Edmund told her there had once been a major city on the same spot. That once vast armies had battled over the very land her house now stood upon.
So she generally closed her door. And looked at her wallscreens.
She wandered through the room, through an open door — only the faint unnoticed tinkle of a force-screen sectioned off the hallway — and down the short corridor to her daughter’s room.
She knocked at the edge of the door then stuck her head through the opaqued field. At the sight on the other side she had to give a mental growl; no matter how large a space, a teenage female could trash it all.
Rachel’s bedroom was nearly three times as large as the livingroom, with a canopied bed, on a stepped dais, in the exact middle. All of the walls gave on a tropical seascape, giving the impression that the bed was set on the edge of a beach with songbirds in the background and wafting tradewinds blowing through the room.
Surrounding the bed, like truly tasteless gifts laid at the feet of some ancient queen, was the detritus of teenage life. There were dresses and pants and shirts and shorts and data crystals and makeup keys and toys of every conceivable stripe and kind piled in heaps all over the steps and in lower and lower piles all the way to the floor with only a narrow walkway to the door. About the only thing that wasn’t in the heaps was food; Daneh had to draw the line somewhere.
In the middle of the heap, reclined in the midst of the clutter, rolled halfway into a silk caftan, was Azure the house lion. The cat was a bit over a half meter at the shoulder, white except for red-orange highlights on the tips of the ears and in stripes along the shoulder, and had bright blue eyes. It weighed nearly sixty kilos, most of it muscle.
House lions were a popular pet because they fulfilled roles of both cats and dogs. They were nearly as independent as cats, but responded better to training and bonded somewhat like dogs. They also responded to an “alpha-beta” hierarchy so that they could be controlled by reasonable discipline training despite their size. It was good that they could be, because the house lion was a deadly predator. More than once the great cat had presented them with a dead raccoon on the back porch and on one notable occasion it had turned up, badly scratched and with one ear torn away, with a dead bobcat nearly its own size. On other occasions it had gotten into scrapes with coyote packs, generally to the detriment of the coyotes.
The physical genetics of the cat derived from a mix of lion, house cat and leopard, and they had all the enormous strength and hunting guile of the latter. House lions in areas where they were found had been known to take on full grown female leopards and win. It was probable that Azure, who was large for his species, could take on a full grown mountain lion and win. They had heard pumas near the house from time to time and Rachel or Daneh had always been careful to bring Azure into the house lest he run afoul of one of the cats. They, of course, didn’t want to have their pet die in a pointless battle, but what would be even worse in a way would be explaining how their house lion killed a puma to one of the self-appointed Wilderness Rangers.
Azure had been a present from Edmund for Rachel’s fourth birthday and the cat had known immediately who was its “person.” Whenever Rachel was in the house, Azure would not be far away.
Rachel was flipping through a series of holograms that were just too far away for Daneh to see clearly. But she was pretty sure that she knew what they were.
“Hello, dear, how was your day?” Daneh said, wondering which response she would get. Lately Rachel seemed to be changing back and forth between monosyllables, rage, and her normal sunny good nature on some arcane schedule comprehensible only to her and an ancient Babylonian entity. On the other hand, Daneh remembered the same phase in her own life and tried to give her daughter exactly as much slack as she, herself, had been given. None.
“Fine, Mom,” Rachel said, setting the viewer down and waving at her mother to come all the way into the room.
“There’s nothing living in those stacks is there?” Daneh asked, as she edged into the room in mock horror. “I’m afraid a terror bug will come crawling out.”
“Oh, Mother,” Rachel replied wearily.
“Yes, dear, my day was fine,” Daneh replied with a smile. “I completed the fix on Herzer and it looks like it will hold.”
“Is he going to be okay?” Rachel asked. “I… the last time I saw him he looked like a frog that had been pithed!”
“What a pleasant description, dear,” Daneh said balefully. “Herzer has been wrestling with his illness for years. He’s worked hard, exercising and going through thousands of procedures, to try to reduce it. Far harder than you or any of your friends work at anything. And your description of all that sacrifice is ‘he looks like a frog that’s been pithed.’ ”
“I’m sorry Mother,” the girl said. “But he’s the first person I ever met who… twitched.”