The Green Futures of Tycho

by William Sleator

  The future, on the other hand, was new, uncharted territory.

  He had often wondered what he would be when he grew up. His brothers and sister had always known, and were devoting their childhoods to preparing for their careers. That situation had only exaggerated Tycho’s vagueness about his own vocation. But recently he had come to realize that what they called “wishy-washy” might really just be an interest in a wide variety of subjects. There were so many fascinating things in the world, so much to choose from. What was his choice going to be?

  Something about this new adventure gnawed at him, but he pushed it aside. After all, he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, like interacting with the past, which might have unexpected effects on the present. What harm could a little peek at the future do? How could he change anything there? And it would be so much fun! What would buildings look like then, and cars? What kind of clothes would people wear? What would airplanes be like, and television?

  Only twenty-five minutes had gone by, but he couldn’t wait any longer. Slowly, slowly he slipped down the stairs, pausing to wait and listen at every creak. He heard the faint jingle of a bedspring, a delicate snore. But no voices, no lights, no footsteps.

  He leapt across the backyard, free in the moonlight. He was traveling too far this time to hide in the bushes—they might have grown so much that there would be no room for him. He crouched behind the oak tree instead. Again he checked the dials. In twenty years he would be thirty-one, certainly old enough for something interesting to have happened to him. But twenty years was still not so far away that everything would be completely alien. The outfit he had picked—sneakers, blue jeans, and a T-shirt—had been an unobtrusive way to dress for decades, as far as he could tell from old pictures. It was likely that in twenty years the same clothes would not be noticeably old-fashioned.

  If Bobby and Judy had moved, he would have a serious problem trying to find himself. But he was pretty sure that they would still be here. They loved this house, regarded it as their permanent home, were settled and happy in it, and had not nearly finished paying for it yet. And if they had moved, and he couldn’t find out what had happened to him, then he could just come back, with no harm done.

  Then what was gnawing at him?

  Nerves, he told himself, because his last adventure had not worked out exactly as he expected. He was more experienced now. This time nothing would go wrong.

  He pressed down on the green end and felt faint.

  And jumped into the future, twenty years and twelve hours exactly.

  9

  THE SUN WENT ON LIKE A LIGHT, AND TYCHO squeezed his eyes shut against the sudden brilliance. Impatiently he waited while they adjusted, then opened them slowly.

  The bushes had grown, luxuriantly. He would have been impaled if he had been standing there. He stood back to look up at the oak tree, taller now, and casting a wider shadow over the lawn. There was even a vegetable garden, which someone had evidently just planted, larger than the one he had started twenty years before.

  Then he caught sight of the house and had his first shock. It had always been a rather rakish yellow, but now it was a dark, respectable green. He didn’t like it. Still, there were probably no children living here anymore. Perhaps dark green was an appropriate color for two elderly people.

  After making sure no one was nearby, he stepped out from behind the tree. He had calculated carefully before he set the dials, and knew that this day in this year was a Monday. Bobby and Judy, in their early sixties now, would probably be at work. They were not the types for retirement.

  As he moved toward the house, he caught a glimpse of a strange green bubblelike thing in the yard next door. He would have liked to go and look at it, but didn’t want to risk getting caught by anyone and having to run away before he completed his mission. Later on he might have a chance.

  He pulled open the back door, luckily still unlocked, and listened. He heard nothing. He pressed the doorbell—if anyone came to answer it, he could hide, and see who it was, and then come back later. He waited, but no one came. He stepped into the kitchen.

  His first impression was metallic. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, and the appliances—if you could call them that—were all of the same material, something that looked like silvery gray metal. The whole room, in fact, seemed to be made in one piece. The table and chairs, counters, cabinets, sink, stove, and refrigerator all grew out of the floor and walls with no sharp corners, only gentle curves flowing from one shape to the next.

  It was like being on the inside of a sculpture. He even had the feeling that he was not allowed to touch any part of it—and so naturally he could not keep his hands off. The egg-shaped thing that must be the refrigerator had no handle and no observable door on it. How did one open it? He ran his hand over the surface, which was silken and pleasantly warm, not like metal at all. Nothing happened. He tried again, with more pressure. The surface yielded like a balloon filled with water, there was a gentle pop, and the whole front of the thing swung toward him. Inside, too, it was all molded curves. He recognized apples and carrots and lettuce, but there were also oddly shaped containers holding unfamiliar substances. He dipped his finger into something blue and fluffy and tasted it. An intense flavor of plums and raspberries and subtle spices exploded inside his mouth. The stuff was delicious! He took another taste, then stepped away. Quietly the door sealed itself.

  The rest of the house was not as spectacular as the kitchen. There was no doubt that Bobby and Judy still lived here, for the rugs and furniture were for the most part the same. They had been slightly shabby then, and they were slightly shabbier now. There were a couple of weird things that were probably lamps, and the houseplants in the sun-room were mostly unfamiliar, with huge improbable blossoms in rainbow colors. There was no television, but there was a five-foot-square gray screen, hung like a painting on the living room wall, that was probably the television of the future. He could see no controls, and after stroking the thing for several minutes with no results, Tycho gave up. He still had to find out what had happened to himself, after all. He went upstairs.

  Except for the fact that it was unrecognizably neat and looked as though it hadn’t been used in years, his own room was basically unchanged. Ludwig’s, Tamara’s, and Leonardo’s rooms were also much as they had been. The information, as Tycho had expected, came from Bobby and Judy’s study.

  There was a picture of the two of them on a dresser. They were white-haired, but very tan and holding tennis racquets. Obviously they were still as healthy as ever. Judy still handled her correspondence from the same old desk, but she did have a new typewriter. There were no keys, only a flat slanted panel with letters and numbers printed on it. A half inch of paper protruded from a slit at the top of the panel. He touched the letter a, and even before his finger had made full contact with the panel, there was a silvery flash almost too quick to see, and a was printed on the paper. It was amazing! Without thinking, Tycho typed out a message. What appeared on the paper was:

  Dfer Jyudhy;kI loike 1/2ypour nrew

  typowreityer¢@///lpove 7 Tychio

  The thing worked fast, but it certainly was easy to make mistakes on it.

  He smiled at the thought of Judy’s reaction to the message. But the smile faded quickly. She wouldn’t think it was cute. She would think that someone had broken into the house and gone through her possessions. As a result, she might very well start keeping the door locked. The locks were probably different now, and his old key from twenty years ago wouldn’t work. He would never be able to get back in here again. And sometime he might really need to get back in here; it might be terribly important. He mustn’t lock himself out. He pulled at the paper but it wouldn’t move. It was too tough to tear. He searched the panel and finally guessed that the strange symbol in the lower right corner might possibly resemble a pair of scissors. He touched it. The strip of paper neatly detached itself and fell into a little rack behind the slit, while another piece of paper appeared in its pla
ce. Tycho shoved the message into his pocket.

  The best thing would be to find a letter from himself. In case he hadn’t written, he could find out where he lived from an address book—though an address alone wouldn’t tell him very much about himself, especially if he lived in another city and couldn’t go visit the place. A letter would be the best. He would have to remember to write to Judy when he grew up. If he kept reminding himself, and remembering from now on, then there would certainly have to be a letter here somewhere.

  There was. She still used the same cubbyhole for storing letters received, and in a moment Tycho came across an envelope with T. Tithonus scrawled in the corner. He pulled it out, then sank back in the desk chair, suddenly feeling frightened. Now that he was on the verge, he wasn’t sure he really did want to know what was going to happen to him. What if it was something horrible? It might be better just to put the letter back and get out of here.

  But he was too curious. He braced himself as if he were opening his report card, and pulled the letter out. His handwriting was worse than ever, in thick green, and the message was brief:

  Hey Ma,

  Thought you might get a wriggle

  out of the new stationery. Keep

  your fingers crossed. See you soon.

  Love, T.

  That didn’t tell him much, but the stationery did. LUNAR ENTERTAINMENTS, INC. it said in silvery green letters at the top of the sheet. Underneath that was a brief list of names and titles, including Tycho Tithonus, Artistic Engineer. The address below the names, amazingly enough, was in the same city.

  Tycho let the piece of paper slip out of his hand. Artistic Engineer, Lunar Entertainments. What could it mean? It certainly sounded interesting. Perhaps he should go visit the place and find out what it was all about.

  But how would he get in? What excuse would he use? What if someone recognized him? What if he recognized himself? It would be safer just to stay here and poke around some more, and then go back to his own time and go to bed.

  But he couldn’t resist. LUNAR ENTERTAINMENTS was too seductive to pass up. And he knew that if he didn’t go now, he would have to come back some other time and find out what it meant. So it might as well be now. He put the letter carefully back, and in a moment was downstairs and out the front door.

  The street had not changed much in twenty years. The lawns were patchy and overgrown, and many of the houses in need of repairs, he noticed. The strangest thing about the cars was how tiny they were. They were not streamlined and futuristic, but rather like square little boxes on wheels. They all gleamed, as though they had been recently waxed, and were painted strange pale pastel tones of pink and lavender and green. But if he squinted, the street seemed almost the same. Except … the trees! That was the major difference. Many of the trees were gone. So many, in fact, that the street no longer seemed shady and inviting.

  He forgot about the trees when he left his own neighborhood. At the first major intersection, he hopped on a bus that looked like a fat transparent light bulb and headed downtown. He wondered briefly how much a bus ride would cost these days, but then noticed that no one seemed to be paying. So he sat down on the amazingly comfortable padded bench, and gawked like a country boy on his first visit to the city. He certainly didn’t have to worry about looking old-fashioned or out of place. There was an incredible diversity in the style of dress. No one paid any attention to the girl across from him, who wore a bikini top, a floor-length fur skirt, and had a pink crew cut. The man beside her wore a long hooded robe of bright red satin, and the woman behind him had on a tunic that could have come from ancient Greece. Next to Tycho sat a young man with a two-foot-long blond braid, who had nothing on but a loincloth. There were other people in beads and leather and silk. Tycho felt comfortably inconspicuous.

  He finally managed to tear his eyes away from the people to look at the city outside the transparent walls of the bus. The style of architecture was as diverse as the style of dress. The gleaming spires and transparent domes of science fiction were there, as he had imagined. But there were also multicolored Greek temples, half-timbered houses, medieval stone towers. He passed a skyscraper he remembered, a blank mirrored rectangle. Now a gigantic thatched roof was perched jauntily on top of it, bringing it up to date.

  The familiar building reminded him to think about where he was going. He got off the bus at the next stop and wandered dizzily for several blocks. It was like being at a costume party in an amusement park designed by a madman. He had to keep reminding himself not to stare too much, and to concentrate on finding the address.

  The building he found looked like a gigantic perfume bottle made out of green crystal. Gargoyles of apes and toads squatted grinning over the entrance. The door was a twenty-foot transparent disc that revolved constantly. The people streaming in and out did not seem afraid that they might enter at the wrong moment and be crushed when it swung shut, so after watching for a while and trying to get the rhythm of it, Tycho hurried safely through.

  Green transparent tubes were ranged around the main hall, and inside them lighted bubbles floated up and up until the tubes curved away or disappeared in a green haze high above. Glowing letters in the wall indicated the destination of each tube, and after a brief search, Tycho found the one marked LUNAR ENTERTAINMENTS. He approached the tube with some trepidation. A round door opened automatically and he stepped inside. And then he was in his own little egg-shaped capsule being silently wafted upward.

  It deposited him in a circular reception room. The walls and ceiling were covered by an incredibly realistic photomural of a barren rocky landscape and a black sky with bright stars. Above the center of the room hung a perfect replica of the earth, four feet in diameter, glowing green and blue, and wreathed in clouds. A woman sat enclosed in a circular desk below it. She wore a skintight silver suit and had a silver crew cut that looked more like metal than human hair. Her eyebrows and fingernails and lips were also silver. Tycho approached her cautiously, gripping the egg in his pocket in case he should decide to run away. What was he going to say to her?

  Then she looked up at him. “You’re late,” she said crisply, glancing at the calendar on the desk.

  “Late?” said Tycho, baffled. How could they be expecting him?

  “Well you did come for the performance, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure,” Tycho said.

  “Well, Mr. Tithonus has already started his introductory talk, but the actual transmission hasn’t started yet. Just try to be quiet when you go in, will you?” She looked him over and almost smiled. “I do love that little boy look,” she said. “No wonder everyone’s doing it. And I must say, you do have the figure for it. Where did you ever find those pants?”

  “Oh,” said Tycho. “Um, thank you. I got them … it’s a place called Army Surplus.”

  “Army Surplus,” she said. “Quaint. I’ll have to remember that. You can go right in now.”

  She touched a panel on the desk, and an opening appeared in the wall behind her, just wide enough for Tycho to squeeze through. Within was a small, dark auditorium, with steeply banked rows of seats facing a carpeted, brightly lit platform with a large screen behind it. Tycho found an empty seat in the back row without attracting any attention.

  The man on the platform, dressed in Space Age silver like the receptionist, was clearly himself. For a few minutes, Tycho was too absorbed in just looking at him to pay any attention to what he was saying. He was disappointed, though he tried not to admit it. The man was paunchy and out of shape in the skintight suit, not in the least like the astronaut he was obviously intended to resemble. His grown-up but familiar features looked tired and a bit puffy, and he spoke through a fixed, artificial smile. He paced and fiddled nervously with something in his hand, probably a control device for the lights and the screen. Tycho wished he would put it down.

  “ … this brief description of some of the technical problems, only to help you appreciate more fully what you are about to see. It’s exp
ensive enough to build video stages on the earth. On the moon, the cost becomes positively, well … astronomical.” He chuckled at his own joke and then waited for the audience to laugh, but there was no response. “Uh … not only does everything have to be shuttled up there at enormous expense, but it all has to be built in a vacuum, . everything airtight. As for the dancers, well, of course they have all been trained on the earth. We can’t just bring them to the moon, have them perform, and bring them back. They have to live there for months and months, practicing, getting used to dancing at one-sixth gravity, before we can even think of broadcasting anything. As you know, accommodations on the moon are tight, and terribly expensive. It’s been a monumental investment, and unfortunately some of that is reflected in the prices we are charging for the syndication and rental of our shows. We know there has been some comment on our high rates.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably and passed the thing he was holding from one hand to the other. “Therefore, we felt it was important for potential distributors and sponsors to understand why we are forced to charge so much.

  “However, what you are about to see is so spectacular, so unique, that we are sure you will find it well worth the extra expense. There has never before been anything like this, in the whole history of entertainment. Weighing one-sixth of what they do on earth gives our performers, well, totally unlimited freedom and control over their bodies. But enough said. I know you’re all impatient, so we’ll go right ahead with it now. We’ll start with something classical, a kind of introduction to this new art form. Then we’ll go on to more contemporary pieces. I’ll make a few explanatory comments as we go along. And remember, this is a live transmission from the moon. There are no special effects. Thank you.”