treatment of the trouble-spot.
But the screen flashed up: ALL CLEAR.
“How can it be all clear, moron?” he asked, out loud. “It’s supposed to be an eternal bloom, immortal unless picked.”
Unfortunately, the cellular troubleshooter was a low-grade system. As artificial intelligences went, it really was a moron. Rick pressed RETRY, but he knew it wouldn’t get him anywhere. The message stubbornly held its centre-screen ground.
Across the room, Steven let go of the teat and began to exercise his lungs again. He was a light but frequent feeder, and he tended to mop up a lot of air when he ate. The feeding-nook was a clever piece of design, but it wasn’t versatile enough to take care of every need.
Rick hurried over to pick Steven up, and hoisted the naked baby high on to his left shoulder. Then he began walking round and round the cradle, rubbing Steven’s back gently and rhythmically. Inevitably, Steven could not be content with a delicate burp. He brought a few milliliters of milk back with the air, and dribbled it down the back of Rick’s shirt. Rick stripped off the shirt and dropped it into the laundry-port, trying hard not to curse the child.
The next item on Steven’s schedule was his morning bath. He was, of course, clean already—the cradle was fully-equipped for waste-disposal—but the co-parents knew from their assiduous studies how vital it was to maintain a child’s water-familiarity. The household soviet had designed the carer’s routines with that in mind. The baby-bath, like the cradle, was an outgrowth of the nursery wallwood, but it normally stood empty for hygiene’s sake. Rick activated the tear-ducts, and stood cuddling Steven while he waited for it to fill up. Steven was no longer wailing, and there was nothing to distract Rick’s attention from the gentle trickle of water.
Because the bath was dark brown, Rick did not immediately observe that anything was amiss. It wasn’t until there were eight or ten centimeters of liquid in the shallow bowl that he realized that the water was discolored. He dipped his hand in and brought out a little of the liquid, cupped in the palm. It was faintly straw-colored, and it had an odd feel.
He knew then that the problem was serious. A sickly wallflower was one thing, but an unidentified substance in the baby-bath was something else: it was a naked threat to the well-being of the household’s most precious member.
The household had no in-living biotechnician. Three of the co-parents worked in construction and deconstruction, and therefore knew something about house-systems, but Don and Nicola were away on-site somewhere in South America and Dieter was strictly a mud-and-sand gantzer who couldn’t tell left-handed wood from right. Not only was there no expert help on hand, but there was no one in the house who could reasonably be interrupted at work in order to commiserate with him. Rosa—who was in Ed and Ents, like Rick himself—was busy 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
