The little girl shrieked, “For witchcraft?”
“Oh, no. No, that was hundreds of years earlier, too.” Charles tried not to laugh. “You see, houses used to catch on fire in those days—”
“The Shoggo fire!” shouted the boy. “Mrs. Leary’s cow and the earthquake!”
“Well—something like that. Anyway, there were men whose job it was to put the fires out, and I was one of them. Only then I got caught and died there.”
“Mim drowned once,” the little girl bragged. “We haven’t died at all.”
“You were sick once, though,” said the boy seriously. “You could have died. I heard Mim talking to the medoc.”
Forrester said, “Are you children in school?”
They looked at him, then at each other.
“I mean, are you old enough to start lessons?”
The boy said, “Well, sure, Charles. Tunt ought to be doing hers right now, as a matter of fact.”
“So should you! Mim said—”
“We have to be polite to the guest, Tunt!” The boy said to Charles, “Is there anything we can get you? Something to eat? Drink? Watch a program? Sex-stim? Although I guess you ought to know,” he said apologetically, “that Mim’s natural-flow and—”
“Yes, yes, I know about that,” Forrester said hastily, and thought, Sweet God!
But when in Rome, he thought, it was what the Romans did that counted, and he resolved to do his best. He resolved it earnestly.
It was like being at a party. You got there at ten o’clock, with your collar too tight, and a little grouchy at being rushed and your starched shirt front still damp where the kids had splashed it as you supervised their bedtime tooth-brushing. And your host was old Sam, who’d been such a drag; and his wife Myra was in one of her nouveau- riche moods, showing off the new dishwasher; and the conversation started out about politics, which was Sam’s most offensive side. . . .
But then you had the second drink. And then the third. Faces grew brighter. You began to feel more at ease. The whole bunch laughed at one of your jokes. The music on the stack of records changed to something you could dance to. You began to catch the rhythm of the party. . . .
Oh, I’ll try, vowed Forrester, joining the children in a sort of board game played against their own joymakers. I’ll catch the mood of this age if it kills me. Again.
Six
Up betimes, and set out to conquer a world. The home that Adne found for him was fascinating—walls that made closets as he needed them, windows that were not windows but something like television screens—but Forrester resolutely spent no time exploring its marvels. After a disturbed night’s sleep he was up and out, testing his new world and learning to cope with it. The children were marvelous. He begged the loan of them from Adne, and they were his guides. They took him to the offices of the Nineteenth Chromatic Trust, where a portly old Ebenezer Scrooge gravely examined Forrester’s check, painstakingly showed him how to draw against it, severely supervised his signing the necessary documents to open an account, and only at the end revealed himself by saying, “Man Forrester, good day.” They took him to a Titanian restaurant for lunch, a lark for them, but for him a shattering test of nerve, since the Titanians ate only live food, and he was barely able to cope with an aspic that writhed and rustled in his spoon. They showed him their playschool, where for three hours a week they competed and plotted with their peers (their lessons were learned at home, via their child-modified joymakers), and Forrester found himself playing London Bridge Is Falling Down with fourteen children and one other adult, symbolically acting out the ritual murder and entombment in the bridge’s foundations that the nursery rhyme celebrated. They took him to where the poor people lived, with half-fearful giggles and injunctions against speaking to anyone, and Forrester found himself out of pocket change, having given it all away to pale, mumbling creatures with hard-luck stories about Sol-burn on Mercury and freezer insurance firms that had gone bankrupt. They took him to a park—indoors, underground—where the landscaping was topologically grotesque and a purling stream flowed through a hill’s base and up the other side, and where ducks and frogs and a feathery sort of Venusian fish ate morsels of food the children tossed them. They took him to a museum where animated, enlarged cells underwent mitosis with a plop like a cow lifting her foot from a bog, and a re-created Tyrannosaurus rex coughed and barked and thumped its feet clangorously, its orange eyes glaring straight at Forrester. They showed him all their treasures and pleasures. But they did not show him a factory, or an office building, or a store of any size. For it did not seem that any of these existed any more. They showed him all around Shoggo until their joymakers chided them, and Forrester’s own said severely, “Man Forrester! The children must be returned for their naps. And you really must receive your messages.”
The children looked at him with woe. “Ah, well,” said Forrester, “we’ll do it again another day. How do we get home from here?”
“A cab,” said the girl doubtfully, but the boy shouted, “Walk! We can walk! I know where we are—ten minutes will do it. Ask your joymaker if you don’t believe me.”
“I believe you,” said Forrester.
“Then this way, Charles. Come on, Tunt.” And the boy led off between two towering buildings on the margin of a grassy strip, where huge hovercraft swished by at enormous speeds.
The joymaker complained, “Man Forrester, I have dichotomous instructions. Please resolve them.”
“Oh, God,” said Forrester, tired and irritable. “What’s your trouble now?”
“You have instructed me to hold messages, but I have several that are high priority and urgent. Please reaffirm holding order, stipulating a time limit if possible, or receive them now.”
The boy giggled. “You know why, Charles?” he demanded. “It tickles them when they’re holding messages. It’s like if you have to go to the bathroom.”
The joymaker said, “The analogue is inexact, Man Forrester. However, please allow me to discharge my
