Forrester did not know what to expect but was pleasantly ready for anything.
What he got was indeed a kiss. It was disconcerting. No kissing lips were visible. There was a hint of perfumed breath, then a pressure on his lips—warm and soft, moist and sweet.
Startled, he touched his mouth. “How the devil did you do that?” he shouted.
“Sensory stimulation through the tactile net, Man Forrester. Will you receive Taiko Hironibi?”
“Well,” said Forrester, “frankly, I don’t know. Oh, hell. I guess so. Send him in. . . . Wait a minute. Shouldn’t I get dressed first?”
“Do you wish other clothing, Man Forrester?”
“Don’t confuse me. Just hold on a minute,” he said, rattled and angry. He thought for a minute. “I don’t know who this Hirowatsis is—”
“Taiko Hironibi, Man Forrester. Male, dendritic Confucian—”
“Cut that out!” Forrester was breathing hard. Abruptly the joymaker in his hand hissed and sprayed him with something that felt damp for a second, then dissipated.
Forrester felt himself relaxing. He appreciated the tranquilizing spray, without quite liking the idea of having a machine prescribe and dispense it.
“Oh, God,” he said, “what do I care who he is? Go ahead. Send him in. And get a move on with my breakfast, will you?”
“You’ll do!” cried Taiko Hironibi. “The greatest! What a cranial index! You look—cripes, I don’t know what to call it—you look like a brain. But a swinger.”
Charles Forrester, gravely and cheerfully, indicated a seat with his hand. “Sit down. I don’t know what you want but I’m willing to talk about it. You’re the damnedest looking Japanese I ever saw.”
“Really?” The man looked disconcerted. He also looked quite non-Japanese: crew-cut golden hair, blue eyes. “They change you around so,” he said apologetically. “Maybe I used to look different. Say! Did I get here first?”
“You got here before my breakfast, even.”
“Great! That’s really great. Now, here’s the thing. We’re all messed up here, you have to get that straight right away. The people are sheep. They know they’re being expropriated, but do they do anything about it? Sweat, no, they sit back and enjoy it. That’s what we’re for in the Ned Lud Society. I don’t know your politics, Charley—”
“I used to be a Democrat, mostly.”
“—Well, you can forget that. It doesn’t matter. I’m registered Arcadian myself, of course, but a lot of the guys are Trimmers, maybe—” he winked— “maybe even something a little worse, you know? We’re all in this together. Affects everybody. If you raise your kids with machines you’re bound to have machine-lovers growing up, right? Now—”
“Hey!” said Forrester, looking at his wall. At a point as near as he could remember to be just about where the bed had disappeared, a sphincter was opening again. It disgorged a table set for two, one side bearing his breakfast, the other a complete setting but no food.
“Ah, breakfast,” said Taiko Hironibi. He opened a pouch in the kiltlike affair he wore and took out a small capped bowl, a plastic box that turned out to contain something like crackers, and a globe, which, when squeezed, poured a hot, watery, greenish tea into the cup at his place. “Care for a pickled plum?” he asked politely, removing the cap from the bowl.
Forrester shook his head. Chairs had appeared beside the table, and he slid into the one placed before the ham and eggs.
Next to the steaming plate was a small crystal tray containing a capsule and a scrap of golden paper on which was written:
I don’t know much about that champagne wine. Take this if you have a hungover.
Hara
To the best of Forrester’s knowledge he didn’t have a hangover, but the capsule looked too good to waste. He swallowed it with some of the orange juice and at once felt even more relaxed. If that were possible. He felt positively affectionate toward the blond Japanese, now decorously nibbling at a dark, withered object.
It crossed Forrester’s mind that the capsule, plus what the joymaker had sprayed him with, might add up to something larger than he was ready for. He felt almost giddy. Better guard against that, he thought, and demanded as unpleasantly as he could, “Who sent you here?”
“Why—the contact was Adne Bensen.”
“Don’t know her,” snapped Forrester, trying not to grin.
“You don’t?” Taiko stopped eating, dismayed. “Sweat, man, she told me you’d be—”
“Doesn’t matter,” cried Forrester, and prepared for the killing question he had been saving. “Just tell me this. What’s the advantage of my joining your society?”
The blond man was clearly disgruntled. “Listen, I’m not begging you. We got something good here. You want in, come in. You want out, go—”
“No, don’t give me an argument. Just answer the question.” Forrester managed to light a cigarette, puffed smoke in Taiko’s face. “For instance,” he said, “would it be money that’s involved?”
“Well, sure. Everybody needs money, right? But that’s not the only thing—”
Forrester said, politely but severely, restraining the impulse to giggle, “You know, I had an idea it would be like that.” His two tranquilizers, plus what was still in his system from the previous night, were adding up to something very close to a roaring drunk, he noticed. With some pride. How manly of him, he thought, to keep his wits so clear when he was so smashed.
“You act like I’m trying to take advantage of you,” Taiko said angrily. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you see that the machines are depriving us of our natural human birthright? to be miserable if we want to, to make mistakes, to forget things? Don’t you see that we Luddites want to smash the machines and give the world back to people? I mean, not counting the necessary machines, of course.”
“Sure I see,” agreed Forrester, standing up and swaying slightly. “Well, thanks. You better be going now, Hironibi. I’ll think over what you said, and maybe we can get together some time. But don’t you call me. Let me call you.” And he bowed Taiko to the door and watched it close behind him, keeping his face relaxed until the Japanese was gone.
Then Forrester bent over and howled with laughter. “Con man!” he shouted. “He thinks I’m an easy mark! Ah, the troubles of the rich—always somebody trying to swindle you out of it!”
“I do not understand, Man Forrester,” said the joymaker. “Are you addressing me?”
“Not in this life,” Forrester told the machine, still chuckling. He was filled with a growing pride. He might look like a country cousin, he thought, but there went one sharper who had got no farther than first base.
He wondered who this Adne Bensen was who had fingered him for the swindler and sent him an electronic kiss. If she kissed in person the way she kissed through sensory stimulation of the tactile net, she might be worth knowing. And no problem, either. If Taiko was the worst this century could turn up, Forrester thought with pleasure and joy, his quarter of a million dollars was safe!
Twenty minutes later he found his way to the street level of the building, not without arguments from his joymaker. “Man Forrester,” it said, sounding almost aggrieved, “it is better to take a taxi! Do not walk. The guaranties do not apply to provocation and contributory negligence.”
“Shut up for a minute, will you?” Forrester managed to get the door open and looked out.
The city of 2527 A.D. was very large, very fast-moving, and very noisy. Forrester was standing in a sort of driveway. A clump of ethereal, thirty-foot-high ferns in front of him partially masked a twelve-lane highway packed to its margins with high-speed traffic moving in both directions. Occasionally a vehicle would cut in to the entrance to his building, pause before him for a moment, and then move on. Taxis? Forrester wondered. If so, he was giving them no encouragement.
“Man Forrester,” said the joymaker, “I have summoned death-reversal equipment, but it will not arrive for several minutes. I must warn you, the costs may be challenged under the bonding regulations.”
“Oh, shut up.” It seemed to be a warm day, and Forrester was perhaps still slightly befuddled; the temptation to walk was irresistible. All questions could be deferred. Should be deferred, he told himself. Obviously his first task was to get himself oriented. And—he prided himself on this—he had been something of a cosmopolitan, back in those days before his death, equally at home in San Francisco or Rome as in New York or Chicago. And he had always made time to stroll around a city.
He would stroll through this one now. Joymakers be damned, thought Charles Forrester; he right-faced, hooked the joymaker to his belt, and set off along a narrow pedestrian walk.
There were very few walkers. It didn’t do to make snap judgments, Forrester thought, but these people seemed soft. Perhaps they could afford to be. No doubt someone like himself, he mused soberly, seemed like a hairy troglodyte, crude, savage, flint-axed.