"Is the time machine broken, mama?"
"Impossible."
"Then someone is preventing us from leaving."
"The least welcome but the likeliest suggestion. We were unwise not to bring protection."
"The baboons do not travel well."
"It is our misfortune. But we had not expected any life at all at the End of Time." She fingered her ear. "We shall have to rule out metaphysical interference."
"Of course." He had been brought up by the highest standards. There were some things which were not mentioned, nor, better yet, considered, by the polite society of his day. And Snuffles was an aristocrat of boys.
She consulted the chronometer. "We shall remain inside the machine and make regular attempts to return at every hour out of twenty hours. If by then we have failed, we shall consider another plan."
"You are not frightened, mama?"
"Mystified, merely."
Patiently, they settled down to let the first hour pass.
2. An Exploratory Expedition
"Oh, mama!" The eyes of the boy were bright with unusual excitement. "Shall we find monsters?"
"I doubt if it is life, in any true sense, that we witness here, Snuffles. There is only a moral. A lesson for you and for myself."
Streamers of pale red wound themselves around the whispering towers, like pennants about their poles. Gasping, he pointed, but she refused the sight more than a brief glance. "Sensation, only," she said. "The appeal to the infantile imagination is obvious the part of every adult that should properly be suppressed and which should not be encouraged too much in children."
Blue winds blew and the buildings bent before them, crouching and changing shape, grumbling as they passed. Clusters of fragments, bloody marble, yellow-veined granite, lilac-coloured slate, frosted limestone, gathered like insects in the air; fires blazed and growled, and then where the pathway forked they saw human figures and stopped, watching.
It was an arrangement of gallants, all extravagant cloaks and jutted scabbards. It stuck legs and elbows at brave angles so the world should know its excellence and its self-contained beauty, so that the collective bow, upon the passing of a lady's carriage, should be accomplished with a precision of effect, swords raised, like so many tails, behind, heads bent low enough for doffed plumes to trail, and be soiled, upon the pavings.
Calling, she approached the group, but it had vanished, background, carriages and all, before she had taken three paces, to be replaced by exotic palms which forever linked and twisted their leaves and leaned one towards the other, as if in a love dance. She hesitated, thinking that she saw beyond the trees a plaza where stood a familiar old man, her father, but it was a statue, and then it was a pillar, then a fountain, and through the rainbow waters she saw three or four faces which she recognized, fellow children, known before her election to adult status, smiling at her, memories
Queen Sentimentality ruled here, too. The song is her testament there were doubtless thousands of similar examples books, plays, tapes entertainments of every sort. The city reeks of uncontrolled emotionalism. What used to be called Art."
"But we have Art, mama, at home."
"Purified made functional. We have our machine-makers, our builders, our landscapers, our planners, our phrasemakers. Sophisticated and specific, our Art. This all this is coarse. Random fancies have been indulged, potential has been wasted"
"You do not find it in any way attractive?"
"Of course not! My sensibility has long since been mastered. The intellects which left this city as their memorial were corrupt, diseased. Death is implicit in every image you see. As a festering wound will sometimes grow fluorescent, foreshadowing the end, so this city shines. I cannot find putrescence pleasing. By its existence this place denies the point of every effort, every self-sacrifice, every martyrdom of the noble Armatuce in the thousand years of its existence!"
"It is wrong of me, therefore, to like it, eh, mama?"
"Such things attract the immature mind. Children once made up the only audience a senile old man could expect for his silly ravings, so I've heard. The parallel is obvious, but your response is forgivable. The child who would attain adult status among the Armatuce must learn to cultivate the mature view, however. In all you see today, my son, you will discover a multitude of examples of the aberrations which led mankind so close, so many times, to destruction."
"They were evil, then, those people?"
"Unquestionably. Self-Indulgence is the enemy of Self-Interest. Do not the School Slogans say so?"
"And 'Sentimentality Threatens Survival'," quoted the pious lad, who could recall perfectly every one of the Thousand Standard Maxims and several score of the Six Hundred Essential Slogans for Existence (which every child should know before he could even consider becoming an adult).
"Exactly." Her pride in her son helped dispel her qualms, which had been increasing as a herd of monstrous stone reptiles lumbered past in single file while the city chanted, in what was evidently a version of her own tongue, something which seemed to be an involved scientific formula in verse form. But she shivered at the city's next remark: