"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 7" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

"It's not supposed to be this way," Elya blurted. Instantly she regretted it. The hard, flat eyes of her
sister-in-law Cassie met hers, and Elya flinched away from that look.
"And how is it supposed to be, Elya?" Cassie said. "Tell me."
"I'm sorry. I only meant that... that no matter how much you loved Vlad, mourning gets... lighter. Not
lighter, but less... withdrawn. Cass, you can't just wall up yourself and the kids in this place! For one
thing, it's not good for them. You'll make them terrified to face real life."
"I hope so," Cassie said, тАЬfor their sake. Now let me show you the rest of the castle."
Cassie was being ironic, Elya thought miserably, but "castle" was still the right word. Fortress, keep,
bastion... Elya hated it. Vlad would have hated it. And now she'd provoked Cassie to exaggerate every
protective, self-sufficient, isolating feature of the multi-million dollar pile that had cost Cass every penny
she had, including the future income from the lucrative patents that had gotten Vlad murdered.
"This is the kitchen," Cassie said. "House, do we have any milk?"
"Yes," said the impersonal voice of the house system. At least Cassie hadn't named it, or given it one
of those annoying visual avatars. The roomscreen remained blank. "There is one carton of soymilk and
one of cow milk on the third shelf."
"It reads the active tags on the cartons," Cassie said. "House, how many of Donnie's allergy pills are
left in the master-bath medicine cabinet?"
"Sixty pills remain," House said, "and three more refills on the prescription."
"Donnie's allergic to ragweed, and it's mid-August," Cassie said.
"Well, he isn't going to smell any ragweed inside this mausoleum," Elya retorted, and immediately
winced at her choice of words. But Cassie didn't react. She walked on through the house, unstoppable,
narrating in that hard, flat voice she had developed since Vlad's death.
"All the appliances communicate with House through narrow-band wireless radio frequencies. House
reaches the Internet the same way. All electricity comes from a generator in the basement, with massive
geothermal feeds and storage capacitors. In fact, there are two generators, one for backup. I'm not
willing to use battery back-up, for the obvious reason."
It wasn't obvious to Elya. She must have looked bewildered because Cassie added, "Batteries can
only back-up for a limited time. Redundant generators are more reliable."
"Oh."
"The only actual cables coming into the house are the VNM fiber-optic cables I need for computing
power. If they cut those, we'll still be fully functional."
If who cuts those? Elya thought, but she already knew the answer. Except that it didn't make sense.
Vlad had been killed by econuts because his work wasтАФhad beenтАФso controversial. Cassie and the
kids weren't likely to be a target now that Vlad was dead. Elya didn't say this. She trailed behind Cassie
through the living room, bedrooms, hallways. Every one had a roomscreen for House, even the hallways,
and multiple sensors in the ceilings to detect and identify intraders. Elya had had to pocket an emitter at
the front door, presumably so House wouldn't... do what? What did it do if there was an intruder? She
was afraid to ask.
"Come downstairs," Cassie said, leading the way through an e-locked door (of course) down a long
flight of steps. "The computer uses three-dimensional laser microprocessors with optical transistors. It
can manage twenty million billion calculations per second."
Startled, Elya said, "What on earth do you need that sort of power for?"
"I'll show you." They approached another door, reinforced steel from the look of it. "Open," Cassie
said, and it swung inward. Elya stared at a windowless, fully equipped genetics lab.
"Oh, no, Cassie... you're not going to work here, too!"
"Yes, I am. I resigned from MedGene last week. I'm a consultant now."
Elya gazed helplessly at the lab, which seemed to be a mixture of shining new equipment plus Vlad's
old stuff from his auxiliary home lab. Vlad's refrigerator and storage cabinet, his centrifuge, were all these
things really used in common between Vlad's work in ecoremediation and Cassie's in medical genetics?
Must be. The old refrigerator had a new dent in its side, probably the result of a badly programmed 'bot