“Let’s eat.”
Forrester was able to identify few if any of the foods served him. The textures were sort of Oriental, with crisp things like water chestnuts and gummy things like sukiyaki lending variety to the crunch of lettuce and the plasticity of starches. The flavors were queer but palatable. While they ate he told her about himself—his life as a tech writer, his children, the manner of his death.
“You must have been one of the first to be frozen,” she commented. “1969? That’s only a few years after it began.”
“First on the block,” he agreed. “It was because of the fire company, I guess. We’d just got the new death- reversal truck—gift of our local millionaire, who wanted it around. I didn’t think I’d be the one to christen it.”
He ate a forkful of something like creamed onions in pastry crust and said, “It must have been confusing for Dorothy.”
“Your wife?”
He nodded. “I wonder if there’s any way I can find out about her. What she did. How the children made out. She was young when I was killed. . . . Let’s see. Thirty-three, about. I don’t know if having a husband dead but frozen . . . if she would marry again. . . . Hope she did. I mean—” He broke off, wondering what he did mean.
“Anyway,” he said, “Hara had some records. She lived nearly fifty more years, died in her eighties of the third massive stroke. She’d been partly paralyzed for some time.” He shook his head, trying to visualize small, blonde Dorothy as an ancient, bedridden beldame.
“Had enough?” asked Adne.
He came back to present time, faintly startled. “Dinner? Why, I guess so. It was delicious.” She did something that caused the table to retract itself and stood up. “Come over here and have your coffee. I ordered it specially for you. Would you like some music?”
He started to say, “Not particularly,” but she had already turned on some remote recording equipment. He paused to listen, braced for almost anything, with visions of Bartok and musique concrete. But it turned out to be something very like violins, playing something very like detached, introspective Tchaikovsky.
She sank back against him and she was very warm and fragrant. “We’ll have to find you a place to live,” she said.
He put his arm around her.
“This is a condominium building,” she said thoughtfully, “but I think there might be something. Do you have any preferences?”
“I don’t know enough to have preferences.” He caressed her soft hair.
She said drowsily, “That’s nice.” And in the same tone, a moment later, “But I think I should warn you I’m natural-flow. And this is about M day minus four, so all I want is to be cuddled.” She yawned and touched her mouth with her hand. “Oh! Excuse me.”
Then she caught a glimpse of his face. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, sitting up. “I mean, I could take a pill—Charles, why are you that color?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.”
She said apologetically, “I’m sorry, but I don’t know much about kamikaze ways. If there’s a ritual taboo . . . I’m sorry.”
“No taboo. Just a misunderstanding.” He picked up his glass and held it out to her. “Any more of this stuff around?”
“Charles dear,” she said, stretching, “there’s all you want. And I have an idea.”
“Shoot.”
“I’m going to find you a place to live!” she cried. “You just stay here. Order what you want.” She touched something that he could not see and added, “If you don’t know how, the children will show you while they’re keeping you company.”
What had seemed to be a floor-length mural opened itself and became a doorway. Forrester found himself looking into a bright, gay room where two small children were racing each other around a sort of climbable maze.
“We ate our dinner, Mim,” cried one of them, then saw Forrester and nudged the other. The two looked at him with calm appraisal.
“You don’t mind this, either, do you, Charles dear?” Adne asked. “That’s another thing about being a natural- flow.”
There were two of them, a boy and a girl, about seven and five, Forrester guessed. They accepted him without question. . . .
Or not exactly that, thought Forrester ruefully. There were questions.
“Charles! Did people really smell bad in the old days?”
“Oh, Charles! You rode in automobiles?”
“When the little children had to work in the coal mines, Charles, didn’t they get anything to eat?”
“But what did they play with, Charles? Dolls that didn’t talk?”
He tried his best to answer. “Well, the child-labor time was over when I lived, or almost. And dolls did talk, sort of. Not very intelligently—”
“When did you live, Charles?”
“I was burned to death in 1969—”
