Age Of The Pussyfoot Part 9

"But it's all just tapes now," explained the boy helpfully.

"Show him!" crowed the girl excitedly. "Mira Ceti! Please, Tunt, you promised!"

The boy shrugged, c.o.c.ked an eye thoughtfully at Forrester, then leaned forward. He spoke into his junior joymaker and touched a b.u.t.ton on his teaching desk.

At once the cluttered children's room disappeared, and they were surrounded by a wall of hot swirling gray and incandescent orange. It cleared. . . .

And at once Forrester and the two children were seated in the bridge of a s.p.a.ceship. The toys were gone, the furnishings replaced by bright metal instruments and flickering, whistling gauges. And outside crystal panels surged the devastating chromosphere of a sun.

Forrester shrank back instinctively from the heat before he realized that there was none. It was illusion. But it was perfect.

"By G.o.d!" he cried admiringly. "How does that work?"

"Sweat, I don't know," scoffed the boy. "That's ninth-phase stuff. Ask your joymaker."

"Well, machine? How about it?"

The calm voice of the joymaker replied at once. "The phenomenon you are currently inspecting, Man Forrester, is a photic projection on a vibratory curtain. An interference effect produces a virtual image on the surface of an optical sphere with the nexus of yourself and your companions as its geometric center. This particular construct is an edited and simplified reproduction of scansion of a Sirian exploration vessel in a stellar atmosphere, to wit-"

"That's enough," interrupted Forrester. "I liked the kid's answer better."

But the boy said tautly, "Knock it off, Charles. We're starting! See, there's this Sirian high-thermal scout vessel, and we're about to run into it."

A harsh male voice rasped, "Tractor ship Gimmel! Your wingmate has an engine dysfunction! Prepare to lock, grapple, and evacuate crew!"

"Are!" cried the boy. "Start search procedures, Tunt! Keep a watch, Charles!" His hands flashed over the keyboard-it had not been there a moment before, but it was operative; when he energized a circuit, their make-believe ship responded. He put it through a turn; the "virtual" sunship heeled sharply and sped through fountains of flaming gas.

Forrester could not repress his admiration at the perfection of the illusion. Everything was there, everything but the heat and the feeling of motion-and, gazing at the images around him, Forrester could almost feel the surge and shudder of their ship as it responded to the boy's touch at the controls. Clearly, they were part of a squadron on some adventurous, unspecified mission. Forrester saw nothing that resembled a Sirian; he saw nothing at all, in fact, but the serpents and coils of gas through which they hurtled. But he was conscious of illusory vessels around them. A spatter of command signals came through the speaker as other "ships" talked back and forth. A panel showed their position in plan and elevation as they swam through the stripped-atom gases of Mira Ceti's ocean of fire. Forrester ventured to say, "Uh, Tunt. What am I supposed to be doing again?"

"Just use your eyes!" the boy hissed, his attention riveted to the controls. "Don't mix me up, man!" But his sister was shrieking, "I see it! I see it, Tunt! Look over there!"

"Oh, sweat," he groaned in despair. "Will you ever learn to make a report?"

She gulped. "I mean, wingmate sighted, vector oh, seven, oh, I guess. Depression-um-not much."

"Prepare to grapple!" roared the boy.

Through the incandescent swirl a fat slug of a ship appeared, vanished, and appeared again. It was black against the blinding brilliance of its surroundings. Black on its metal skin, black in its ports, black even at the tail where a rocket exhaust discharged dark gases into the brightness around them. The rocket cut off as a labored voice gasped through the speaker, "Hurry it up, Gimmel! We can't hold out much longer!"

They jockeyed close to the stranded "ship," buffeted this way and that by the force of the flaming gas. Forrester stared open-mouthed. There was the ship, derelict and helpless. And beyond it, swimming faintly toward them through the chromosphere, something that was bright even in this explosion of radiation, something that loomed enormous and fearsome. . . .

"Holy G.o.d," he cried, "it's a Sirian!"

And the whole picture shivered and winked away.

They were back in the children's room. For a moment Forrester was almost blind; then his strained optic centers began to register again. He saw the view-walls, the furnishings, the children's familiar faces. The expedition was over.

"Fun?" demanded the girl, jumping up and down. "Wasn't it, Charles? Wasn't it fun?"

But her brother was staring disgustedly at a readout on his desk. "Tunt," he grumbled, "you should know better. Don't you see the tally? We were late locking up. There was a crew of three there, and two of them are scored dead . . . and we never even got to see the Sirian at all. Just him."

"I'm sorry, Tunt. I'll look better next time," the little girl said repentantly.

"Oh, it's not you." He glared past her at Forrester and said bitterly, "They set the norms for a three-person mission. As if he was any help."

Thoughtfully Forrester picked up the mace of his joymaker, selected a b.u.t.ton, pointed it at the base of his skull just behind the ear, and squirted. He was not sure he had picked the right joy-juice for the occasion; what he wanted was something that would make him tranquil, happy, and smart. What he got was more like a euphoric, but it would serve.

He said humbly, "I'm sorry I messed it up for you."

"Not your fault. Should have known better than to take you, anyway."

"But I wish we'd seen the Sirian," said the little girl wistfully.

"I think I did. A big bright ship? Coming toward us?"

The boy revived. "Really? Well, maybe that's not so bad, then. You hear that, monitor?" He listened to what was, to Forrester, an inaudible voice from his teaching machine, then grinned. "We got a tentative conditional," he said happily. "Take it again next week, Tunt. For record."

"Oh, wonderful!"

Forrester cleared his throat. "Would you mind telling me exactly what it was we just did?" he asked.

The boy put on his patient expression. "It was a simulated mission against the Sirian exploring party in the chromosphere of Mira Ceti. I thought you knew that. Basically a real observation, but with the contact between our ships and theirs variably emended."

"Oh. Uh-huh."

The boy looked quizzically at him. He said, "The thing is, Charles, we get graded on these simulations. But it's all right; it didn't hurt us."

"Sure." Forrester could feel the beginnings of an idea a.s.serting themselves. No doubt it was the spray from the joymaker, but . . . "Could you do the same trick with some other things about the Sirians? So I could get a better look at them? Maybe the original encounter, for instance?"

"Neg." The boy glared at his sister. "It's Tunt's fault, of course. She cried when the Sirians got killed. We have to wait to take the prebriefing over when we're older."

The little girl hung her head. "I was sad," she said defensively. "But there's other things we can do, Charles. Would you like to see the coconut on the Moon?"

"The what?"

"Oh, sweat. We'll just show you." The boy scratched his ear thoughtfully, then spoke to his junior joymaker. The view-walls clouded again.

"It's supposed to be another artifact like the one the Sirians were searching for in Mira Ceti's atmosphere," he said over his shoulder, manipulating his teaching machine as he spoke. "Don't know much about it, really. It's not Sirian. It's also not ours. n.o.body knows whose they are, really, but there are lots of them around-and the Sirians don't seem to know any more about them than we do. They're old. And this is the nearest one."

The view-walls cleared to show the lunar Farside. They were near the terminator line, with crystalline white peaks and craters before them, the jet black of a lunar night to one side. They were looking down into the shallow cup of a crater, where figures were moving.

"This is just tape," the boy said. "No partic.i.p.ation. Just look as long's you want to."

There was a clump of pressure huts in the crater. Perhaps they were laboratories, perhaps housing for the scientists or for those who were studying the "artifact" in the center of the screen-or who had been studying it once, perhaps, and had given it up.

It did indeed look like a coconut. As much as it looked like anything.

It was s.h.a.ggy and rather egg-shaped. Its tendrils of-whatever they were-were not organic, Forrester thought. They were almost gla.s.sy in their brightness, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in a spray of color. By the scale of the huts, the thing appeared to be about the size of a locomotive.

"It's empty, Charles," volunteered the girl. "They all are."

"But what are they?"

The girl giggled. "If you find out, tell us. They'll make us twelfth-phase for sure!"

But the boy said kindly, "Now you know as much as anybody does."

"But the Sirians must-"

"Oh, no, Charles. The Sirians are late arrivals. Like us. And that thing's been there, just the way it is now, for no less than a couple gigayears." He switched off the scene. "Well," he said brightly. "Anything else you want to know?"

There was indeed. But Forrester had grasped the fact that the more he got to know, the more he was going to realize how little that knowledge was.

Astonishingly enough, it has not really occurred to him before this that a lot of things had been happening to the human race while he was lying deep in the liquid-helium baths of the West Annex Facility. It was like a story in a magazine. You turn a page. Ten years have pa.s.sed; but you know perfectly well that they weren't important; if they were, the author would have told you about them.

But far more than ten years had pa.s.sed. And they were important, all right. And there was no Author to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

Ten.

On the third day of his job, Forrester had been six days out of the freezer. He felt as though it had been a million.

But he was learning. Yes, he told himself-gravely gratulatory-he was doing all his homework, and it was only a question of time until all answers were revealed to him and he took his proper place in this freemasonry of heroes.

Meanwhile, working for the Sirian was not at all disagreeable. The social pressure against his job came only from Adne, and he had seen very little of her since that first day. He missed her; but he had other things on his mind. The Sirian-it had agreed to allow Forrester to think of it as a male, although it did not concur in the diagnosis and would not explain further-was curious, insatiable but patient. When Forrester could not answer questions, it permitted him to take time to look them up. Its orientation, surprisingly enough, was all to the past. It volunteered an explanation for this-well, a sort of explanation. In its view, it said, the present state of any phenomenon was a mere obvious derivative of some prior state; and it was the prior states of mankind that it wanted to know about.

It crossed Forrester's mind that if he were a war captive on a planet of alien enemies, the sort of knowledge that he would try to acquire would have more to do with arms and defense strategies. But he was not a Sirian, and he had decided not to bother trying to think like one. That was obviously beyond his powers. So he answered questions about Madison Avenue ad agencies and the angst that surrounded a World Series, and every day called up his bank to verify that his day's salary had been deposited.

It had finally penetrated to Forrester that money was still money. His quarter of a million dollars would have bought him-and in fact had bought him-something very like a quarter of a million dollars' worth of goods and services, even by twentieth-century standards. It was not the dollar that had been inflated. It was the standard of living.

There were so many things that a dollar could now buy. . . . And he had been buying quant.i.ties of them.

He could even, he discovered, have managed to live out his life on that quarter of a million dollars-just as he could have in 1969-provided he had lived at a 1969 level. No robot servants. No extensive medical services-above all, no use of the freezer facilities and their concomitant organ banks, prostheses, antientropic chemical flushings and so forth. If he had eaten no costly, custom-prepared natural foods, had not traveled, had acquired no expensive gadgets . . . if he had, to be exact, lived exactly the life of a twentieth-century suburban peasant, he could have made it last.

But not now. It was gone now. All gone, except for a few tens of thousands left in the account at the Nineteenth Chromatic, plus what the Sirian paid to his account every day. It was about enough to pay his standard joymaker fees for a couple of weeks, maybe. If he was careful.

But Forrester was resigned to the situation. He didn't mind it particularly-at least, he didn't mind his bankruptcy, since it lay within his power to work and make more money than he had ever dreamed of anyway. What he minded very much was the fact that he had been a joke-he and his quarter of a million dollars. And he minded most of all the fact that Adne had shared in that joke.

Because dimly, like a faint, predawn glow in the desert, he could see the foretaste of a time when Ande could be very important to him.

Was already very important to him, he thought wryly. At least in a potential sort of way. He wondered again what she had meant about that business of choosing a name . . . and why, he suddenly thought, had she not called him?

But what was important to him, Forrester realized, was not necessarily important to anyone else. For now, he was a sort of apprentice to life. For now, he would wait, and work, and learn. For now he would not push his luck.

Forrester had learned modesty, if he had learned nothing else.

Forrester had not yet discovered that, in one particular and quite unpleasant way, he was on his way to becoming the most important man in the world.

What mostly confused Forrester about his Sirian employer was that the creature seemed preoccupied. Forrester even asked his joymaker about it.

"Can you clarify your question, Man Forrester? What is there about the behavior of Alphard Four Zero-zero Trimate that puzzles you?"

"Just call him 'the Sirian,' will you? Anyway, he has a funny way of talking."

"Perhaps that lies in my computation, Man Forrester. The Sirian language is tenseless and quasi-Boolean. I have taken the liberty of translating it into approximately twentieth-century English modes of speech, but if you wish I can give you a more literal rendering or-"

"No, it's not that. He seems to have something on his mind."

There was a pause of a second or two. Even Forrester knew enough to remark this occurrence; for the computer facilities to hesitate or search for an answer meant that the problem was something remarkable. But all the joymaker said was, "Can you give me an instance, Man Forrester?"

"Not really. Well, he has me doing some odd things. Is it right for him to want to hypnotize me?"

A pause again. Then the joymaker said, "I cannot say, Man Forrester. But I advise you to be cautious."

Well, cautious he was, Forrester reflected. But he was also puzzled.

The Sirian did not repeat its suggestion about hypnotizing Forrester-"to secure in-depth referents, plus buried traumas of former time"-but it remained hard to figure out. It capriciously had him talking about the twentieth century at one moment, explaining the Arian-Athanasian wars of nearly two millennia before that at another. (Forrester had had to beg time out to research the heresies revolving around the distinction between the words "h.o.m.oousian" and "h.o.m.oiousian"; even so, he never really did get the problem straight.) It kindly volunteered to a.s.sume his joymaker costs as part of his expenses. It refused to allow him to charge as travel expenses a trip to the deepest vaults of Shoggo, where he had been looking up records of the abandoned pressure-dome settlements on Saturn. "Capricious" was the word.

It occurred to Forrester that the Sirian might simply be lonesome. But it rejected his offer to come visit it in its quarters. And, as far as he was able to tell, it showed no interest in the fate of its ten compatriots also in exile on Earth.

"You explain common-law marriage." And, gamely, Forrester tried to describe to a Sirian the drives of s.e.xual impulse and family needs, which had brought about a formal inst.i.tution to regularize irregular conduct. "There exist trading stamps!" boomed the hollow, empty voice; and Forrester did his best to clarify the complexities of retail supermarket sales. "You have or have not violated legislative compulsion programs," stated the Sirian; and that was the most prolonged session of all. Try as he would, Forrester could not seem to get across the idea of a personal ethic-of laws that one did not violate, because they were morally right, and of laws that everyone violated if they possibly could, because they were morally irrelevant.

He found himself feeling sorry for the Sirian. Its homework was even more arduous than his own.

But Forrester's homework could not be neglected. He ordered his joymaker to display the records of the long-range reconnaissance of the Sirian planet.

He had been thinking of the Sirians as a paper tiger, but now he saw fangs. Englobed by fortresses, with fast and mighty vessels of war flitting about like wasps, the whole Sirian system was a vast network of armament. There were a dozen planets in all, two of them in Trojan orbit with Sirius B, the rest normal satellites of the great white star. All were inhabited. All were defended.

Earth's reconnaissance drones had been lucky enough-or unlucky enough-to find themselves observing and taping what seemed to be war games. The Sirians took their war games seriously. Edited and compressed, the records showed a waste of creature and armament that only a ma.s.sive war effort could justify. A hundred of the great ships were damaged, some destroyed. A fleet of them converged on an icy satellite of one of the outlying, planets . . . and the satellite was melted into glowing slag before Forrester's eyes.

There was no more after that. Clearly, the operators of the drones had felt that enough was enough; it was less dangerous to leave the Sirians unwatched than to run the risk of attracting attention with the drones.

Forrester did not again offer to visit the Sirian in its quarters.

On the fifth day of his new life, Forrester arose to the promptings of his bed, ordered a standard low-cost breakfast (it was, as a matter of fact, far tastier than his hand-hewn specials), checked his messages, and started to work.

With some pride in his expertise, he commanded the joymaker to select and mark a course to the buried vastnesses of the American Doc.u.mentation Inst.i.tute. The green-glowing arrows sprang to life at his feet. He followed them out the door, into a sort of elevator cab (but one that moved laterally as well as up and down), out of the cab, into another building, through a foyer clattering with old-fashioned punch-card sorters, into a vault containing some centuries-old records in which his employer had shown a certain interest.

His joymaker said abruptly, "You will inform me about the term 's.p.a.ce race.' "

Forrester took his eyes from the old microfilm viewer. "h.e.l.lo, Sirian Four," he said. "I'm busy looking up the beginnings of the Ned Lud Society, as you asked me. It's pretty interesting, too. Did you know they used to break up computers and-"

"You will discontinue Ned Lud Society research and state motives that led two areas of this planet to complete in reaching the Moon."