Knowing all that helped a little… though only a little.
I just hope that when I’m finally ready, Tony or someone like him will be ready for me.
She turned away from the refinery towers — slowly decomposing into gravelly sediment — without even seeing them, and took one last turn between an aisle of willows to hurry the rest of the way home.
Many houses in the area had columns and porticos more reminiscent of old movies than real history, but the effect was particularly anachronistic at Six Oaks. At first squint you might think you were looking at a miniature version of Tara, but satellite dishes and a forest of bristling antennas quickly dispelled any sense of antebellum charm. And while other families maintained rooftop photocells and supplementary water heaters, few kept enough to dispense entirely with the parish power grid.
After all, though, this was Daisy McClennon’s “island,” where self-sufficiency meant more than a trendy fad or even good citizenship, but had over the years become a militant faith. And Claire was fast turning into an apostate.
Unlike the neighbors, chez McClennon had no account with any of the local food-testing services. Why bother, when you grew amaranth and pejibaye palm fruit and marama beans and lentils in your own little horticultural paradise… a glassed-in wonder of nutritional productivity that Claire’s mother had designed herself? It had been purchased with inherited money, but of late Daisy seemed to expect Claire to maintain it single-handedly.
Not much longer though, Daisy. Six months more and I’m gone.
Probably, her mother would barely notice when she left. Daisy’d just hire on some oath-pledged refugee, or one of those Han or Nihonese college kids who kept passing through these days, taking a year off working their way around the world from zep passage to zep passage in the latest Asian fad. If so, Daisy was due for a surprise. No modern, self-indulgent Nihonese kid- would work as hard as Daisy expected for just room and board and electric.
“Aw, hell,” Claire sighed on catching sight of the wind generator. Speaking of electric, those limp vanes meant current would be rationed again. And guess who had top priority around here?
Claire made her rounds with rapid efficiency, starting at the methane pit, where she checked fluid levels in the crap digester. It was supposed to be “zero maintenance,” but that guarantee was by now a bitter joke. I’ll bet my rich cousins never have to do chores, she thought with halfhearted crankiness. Alas, even Logan agreed with her mother on one thing: that “hard work builds character.” So even if she had been able to live with her father, it wouldn’t have been that much easier. And to be honest, she had met her relatives in the McClennon clan. Horrible, stuck-up creatures, living off wealth neither they nor their parents ever had a hand in creating. None of them would be hurt by a little honest labor, for sure.
Still, there’s got to be a middle ground. Claire grunted as she fought to clear a drip-irrigator in the main greenhouse, blowing down one nozzle till spots swam before her eyes. Maybe I just wish Daisy’d do her share around here.
At least the bee zapper was working. For years their hives had been under seige by Africanized swarms, seeking to take over as they had everywhere else in the area, ruining all the once-profitable apiaries in the parish. Chemicals and spray parasites did no good. But a few weeks ago Claire had found a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who’d discovered that the African strain beat their wings faster than the tame European variety. Burrowing into archaic TwenCen military technology, he had adapted sensor-scanner designs from an old, defunct project called “Star Wars.” Now Claire and a few thousand others were testing his design and reporting weekly results to a network solutions SIG.
Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with hundreds of tiny; flaming embers. The next morning, ash smudges were all that remained of the vicious invaders within line of sight. But her own honeybees were untouched. Now she looked forward to a sweet profit and her first stingless summer.
Perfect timing, she thought ironically. Just as I’m about to move away.
Before going inside, there was one last chore to do.
Claire clambered down to the little creek behind the house, to check on Sybil and Clyde.
The piebald gloats bleated at her. They had finished eating all the water hyacinths within reach along that stretch of bank, so she readjusted their tethers to bring them near another weed-clogged area. Without such creatures, every waterway in the South would be choked with rank tropical opportunists by now, flourishing unstoppably for lack of natural controls.
Some neighbors made pets of their channel-clearing gloats, or the other type bred specially to eat kudzu vines. Claire liked animals, but she didn’t want to feel any ties here, so she kept this relationship strictly businesslike. Anyway, what was the point in trying to maintain every tiny canal, as if canals weren’t mortal like everything else?
The Mississippi’s coming anyway, she thought, looking out toward the land she both loved and longed to leave behind. You better get used to the idea, Atchafalaya. You’re gonna know greatness, whether you like it or not.
After adjusting Clyde’s protective goggles, Claire brushed at his speckled coat. “What’s this? Some sort of mange?” The gloat bleated irritably as puffs of dry fur floated from its patchy side. “All right. All right. I’ll look into it.” Sighing, Claire took a sample and patted the creatures, who were soon munching exotic weeds again, contentedly.
Echoes of gunfire and rocking explosions rattled the walls as she passed her mother’s suite of rooms. Music blared — the strains of some oldtime movie Daisy was condensing for a Net entertainment group. Though she perpetually proclaimed contempt for the industry, Daisy’s expertise at compressing oldtime flicks was legendary. Skillfully, she could pack ninety tedious minutes into a crisp forty or less, speeding the languid pace of classics like The Terminator or Deliverance to suit the time-devouring appetites of modern viewers.
Or, for others wanting more out of a particular film, Daisy McClennon would expand the original… adding material from film archives or even computer-generated extrapolations. It brought in a steady income that allowed her to contemptuously spurn the despised family trust fund.
Most of the time.
Besides, a career working on the Net had one more advantage — the occupation lacked any obvious impact on the real environment of the Earth.
“Tread lightly on our world’s toes” went the motto of one of Daisy’s eco-freak organizations, the sort whose members didn’t take off their shoes inside their houses, but instead removed them before going outside. That particular group had as their totem emblem a fierce Chinese dragon, curled and snarling, representing an angry, violated eco-sphere fed up with swarming, pestilential humanity. The same reptilian icon stretched above the hearth of the main sitting room, Daisy’s favorite part of the villa, but one seldom visited anymore by Claire.
Hell, she was too damn busy maintaining the rest of it! Claire cursed roundly when she saw that Daisy had neglected even to empty the trash, supposedly on her own list of chores. Not content with the normal five recycling bins, her mother insisted this house have twelve. And three mulch piles. Then there were the soap maker, the yoghurt maker, the midget brewery…
Claire thought of a recent stylish trend among her peers. Oh, I’d make a swell Settler. I can grow herbal medicines, make my own paper, grind ink from bark and lamp black… and fix the water pump’s gaskets myself, since mother hates buying parts from Earth-raping manufacturers.