tutoring. Chloe was plugged into a robominer way down in the mid-Atlantic trench. Dieter had a DO NOT DISTURB sign posted.
Rick went back to the screen, activated the camera, and called a doctor.
The doctor was a little slow coming on screen, but at least she didn’t put Rick on hold. The ID code on the screen told him that her name was Maura Jauregy. She looked overdue for a rejuve, but Rick found that slightly comforting. Wrinkles—provided that they were subtly understated—still seemed to him to be somehow emblematic of wisdom.
“I’m Richard Reece,” said Rick, though he knew that the doctor’s screen would already be displaying his name and address. “I think our house has a problem, but the lar keeps flashing an ALL CLEAR signal. The symptoms aren’t extreme—a few wallflowers that look as if they’re sick, and discolored bathwater—but they’re in the nursery, and we can’t take any chances with the baby.”
Dr. Jauregy could see the baby, because Rick was holding him up to the camera, and she nodded to indicate that she understood.
“I’m activating my diagnostic AI now, Mr. Reece,” she said. “Can you lower the drawbridge to let it in?”
Rick punched out the codes that would open the house’s systems to interrogation and investigation by the doctor’s specialist software. He watched her face while she studied a datascreen to the left of camera. She had an old-fashioned professional frown, which was really quite charming.
“Mmm…,” she said, speculatively. Then she looked straight at camera again. “Could you help me out, Mr. Reece? Can you remove a few petals from the affected flower, and a cupful of water from the bath? Place them in two separate sections of the dispenser-unit. No need to activate any analysis-programs; I’ll use my own.”
He did as he had been asked, and then politely placed himself in front of the camera again, so that he and the doctor could look at one another. Her professional frown gradually deepened, until it seemed to Rick to be positively funereal.
“Very odd,” she said, after a while. “Very odd indeed.”
“The nursery systems were only installed a couple of months ago,” said Rick, knowing that his input was probably unnecessary but feeling that he ought to make an effort to help out. “We didn’t have our own womb put in; we collected Steven after delivery. The wood and the wallflowers are dextro-rotatory—they’re supposed to be non-metabolizable by all feral organisms and fully immune to all natural pathogens.”
“Of course, of course,” said Dr. Jauregy, contemplatively. “The trouble is that so much progress has been made recently in dextro-rotatory organics that there’s an awful lot of dr-DNA floating around. It might be something that got into it at the manufacturer’s and lay dormant. On the other hand, it might be something else. Exactly what though.…”
“You don’t know what it is, then?” said Rick, feebly.
“Not yet,” agreed the doctor, obviously choosing her words very carefully. “There’s a slim possibility that the root of the trouble isn’t organic at all. It might be a fault in your electronics, at the silicon/biochip interface. If something in the software were interfering with the nutritional upkeep of your organics, that would account for the fact that your lar won’t recognize that anything’s amiss. You’ve definitely got bugs of some kind rattling around in the walls, but it might not be easy to figure out exactly what they are. Are any members of your household professionally involved in cutting-edge biotech?”
“No,” said Rick. “We’re just ordinary people. No intellectuals here.”
“It’s probably something very minor,” the doctor said. “But it will need investigating. I’ll have to come over.”
“In person?” said Rick, in astonishment. He had never known a doctor to make a house call before—although he supposed, on reflection, that doctors who specialized in the diseases of houses probably had to do it fairly frequently.
“It makes it easier to prod and poke about,” said Dr. Jauregy, “and although it might well be something utterly trivial, it’s got my AI thoroughly confused. I’ll pick up a robocab and be with you in two hours or so. I’ll leave my systems hooked up, if you don’t mind—feel free to call the cabscreen if anything else comes up.”
“No problem,” said Rick.
“I don’t suppose…,” the doctor began, and then paused.
“What?” asked Rick.
“Have any of you any enemies?” she asked, trying to imply by her manner that she naturally assumed that the answer would be “no,” but that she felt obliged to check it out just in case.
“You think someone might be doing this deliberately?” said Rick, utterly horrified by the thought. “You think someone might be trying to poison our house?”
“I doubt it,” she said with a slight sigh, perhaps also doubting her own wisdom in having asked the question. “As I said, it’s probably something utterly trivial. Two hours, then.” And then, having deftly planted the seed of an awful anxiety, she switched off.
* * * *
Chloe was still mentally lost in the ocean-depths, even though her body was peacefully slumped into an armchair in her cubby-hole. Dieter, though he probably wasn’t working at all, still had his systems programd to post DO NOT DISTURB messages in response to all inquiries. As soon as Rosa had finished her tutorial, though, she responded to Rick’s appeal for someone to talk to.
“Of course we don’t have any enemies,” she said, when he’d recounted the whole of his conversation with the doctor. “Who could possibly want to hurt our house—our nursery? It’s probably an innate fault in the system, which is only just beginning to show up. Have you checked the rest of the house?”
“All except the cellar,” said Rick. “But I wouldn’t know what to look for, would I?”
The house’s systems were arranged in the conventional fashion. The inorganic parts of its brain were in the attic-space under the roof; the pump controlling its various circulatory systems was in the cupboard under the stairs. Rick had opened both cubby-holes to look in, but there had been nothing visibly amiss. He hadn’t gone down into the cellar mainly because he didn’t much like the cellar, which was cramped and crowded. All the waste-recycling systems were down there; so were the knotted roots whose growing-points extended deep into the ungantzed substratum on which the foundations were built, scavenging for minerals and water. The lighting down there was minimal; it was the only part of the house that was actually gloomy.
“It has to be the new systems,” said Rosa, as though trying to convince herself. “It’s not right, though—it’s not as if we cut any corners cost-wise. Those nursery-fittings were the best we could afford. It’s not right.”
“It might be because they’re state-of-the-art that all the bugs haven’t been ironed out yet,” Rick suggested. “New technologies always have teething problems—just like babies.”
She didn’t seem to be listening. “You don’t suppose Dieter brought something back on his boots when he came back from Africa, do you?” she said. “He was carer last week, wasn’t he?”
“He was in the middle of the Kalahari desert,” said Rick. “That’s the last place in the world where you might pick up a bug capable of metabolizing dextro-rotatory proteins.”
“He came back on a plane,” she countered, combatively. “Planes these days are full of dr stuff.”
Rick couldn’t help thinking that Rosa wasn’t being as supportive as she might have been, and he felt let down. It was strictly taboo to love one of one’s co-spouses significantly more than the others, lest one be thought guilty of singling, but Rick always felt particularly vulnerable with Rosa. She wasn’t as good-looking as Chloe or Nicola, but there was something about her that always made his heart feel as if it might melt, and he didn’t like it when she was annoyed with him.