He patted her hand indulgently, amused. “No, thanks,” he said, careful not to mention the fact that he was rich—although, he remembered dimly, he had been far less reticent about it at the party the night before. Well, he had made a lot of mistakes at that party—as witness his troubles with the Martian.
“I never asked,” said Adne, putting the things away. “How did you die, Charles?”
“Why,” he said, sitting down again and waiting for her to join him, “I died in a fire. As a matter of fact, I understand I was a hero.”
“Really!” She was impressed.
“I was a volunteer fireman, you know, and there was an apartment fire one night—it was January, very cold, if you stood in the puddles of water you’d freeze to the ground in two minutes—and there was a child in the upper part of the building. And I was the nearest one to the ladder.”
He sipped his drink, admiring its milky golden color. “I forgot my Air-Pak,” he admitted. “The smoke got me. Or the combination did—smoke and heat. And maybe booze, because I’d just come from a party. Hara said I must have inhaled pure flame, because my lungs were burned. My face must have been, too, of course. I mean, you wouldn’t know, but I don’t think I look quite the same as I used to. A little leaner now, and maybe a little younger. And I don’t think my eyes were quite as bright blue.”
She giggled. “Hara can’t help editing. Most people don’t mind a few improvements.”
Dinner arrived as his breakfast had that morning, through a serving door in the wall. Adne excused herself for a moment while the table was setting itself up.
She was gone more than a moment and came back looking amused. “That’s that,” she said without explaining. “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 Bartók and musique concrète. 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—”
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.