Alice grabbed the blue carrying case and hid the mielophone inside, the better to avoid unwanted questions from the house robot, and set off for Bertha’s. Alice did not set the best of examples in her exit from the house; for starters she went down on the bannisters; secondly she called a taxi, although the distance was all of two blocks; thirdly, while waiting for the car she devoured two ice cream cones from the automatic dispenser beside the entrance.
The vehicle lurched from around the corner, snorted, evacuated the air bag on which it rode and a lay flat on its belly on the concrete. Alice sat down on the white upholstery and, rather than enter Bertha’s address directly, punched out a long and complicated route designed to take her past the swimming pool at the Institute of Time, drop by the Kuntsevsky Botanical Gardens and see how the experimental rideway tests were going at Filevsky Park. Nina had mentioned them yesterday.
It was now eleven o’clock and the streets of Moscow were almost empty. People had gone to kindergarten or university, or to their places of employment. The only people on the streets were grandmothers and robots with baby carriages.
A long bus with a huge hermetic door had stopped in front of the Martian embassy. The Martian tourists inside the bus had donned their breathing helmets to get ready to go out onto the street. One Martian in a helmet stood on the ground and was waiting for the bus’s airlock to open. The embassy itself resembled a huge ball sunk halfway into the Earth. Inside, beneath the dome, the Martians had their own atmosphere and plant life. When Alice had gone to Mars she too had been forced to walk around in a helmet. Only the Martian Mantises did not seem to care which atmosphere they breathed.
A big wedding party was driving down the street in the opposite direction. The cars were decorated with multi-colored ribbons and moved slowly, rocking on their air cushions. The bride was a in a long white dress and on her head she wore a bridal veil; evidently, the bride was one of whose described on the NewsNet trying to revive good traditions, Alice thought.
There were a lot of people in the city pool, despite the newsreader Nina’s warnings that it was too cold to go swimming. Alice thought she might go swimming herself, but the taxi had already turned toward the bridge leading to the Botanical Gardens. At the Gardens Alice stopped the car and glanced into the kiosk at the entrance. A robot with a crown of dandelions on its head handed her a bouquet of lilacs, and Alice placed them beside her on the seat. One five-petaled blossom Alice torn off and ate. For pleasure.
The car drove along a curving avenue bordered on both sides by a thick forest. The taxi slowed and then stopped completely. A herd of small deer from the Altay mountains, called Marals, came out of the forest and, clicking their hooves on the horn-like plastic surface of the road, darted toward the grove of cedars on the other side.
“Won’t they get into the vineyards?” Alice asked the taxi.
“No.” The car answered. “There’s a barrier there.”
One of the Altay deer suddenly raised its head, sniffed the air, and instantly vanished into the thicket.
“What frightened them?” Alice was disappointed. She had wanted to look at the deer for a while longer.
The taxi did not answer; an answer would have been superfluous. Down the road, bent flat over their handle bars, roared a heard of cyclists. They wore such bright, multi-colored t-shirts that they would have left spots in the eyes of the deer.
After that the taxi drove past newly planted rubber trees similar to aspens. Alice asked the machine to stop a moment at a grove of date palms. The grove was bright and quiet. Only squirrels jumped over the ground, searching for shaggy tree trunks filled with last autumn’s dates. A low barrier wound its way along the edge of the grove, a retractable plastic dome which rose to cover the grove the moment the weather turned bad. Alice sat beneath the palms and imagined herself in Africa; the white squirrels were not squirrels, but marmosets or even monkeys. One of the squirrels ran up to her and stood on its hind legs.
“Don’t beg!” Alice remonstrated with the squirrel. “You are a wild, free animal!”
The little animal understood nothing and rubbed his belly with his front paws.
“Now for Filevsky Park.”
The car gave a rumble of disapproval.
“You have something to say?” Alice was surprised.
“I thought that you had forgotten your business.”
“I’m on vacation.” Alice said. “And since when has it become the business of cars to tell people how to behave?”
“My humblest apologies.” The taxi said. “But, first of all, I did not tell you, I merely reminded you, and secondly, in as far as I can judge an organic you are far from being an adult and therefore, in this case, I am acting in the capacity of teacher, that is, ‘in loco parentis.’ Were you a pre-schooler, I would not have taken you anywhere without the express permission or accompaniment of adults.”
Having exhausted itself with such a long tirade the taxi grew silent and said no a single word from then on.
The car entered the green belt. Some time in the past the area had been covered with utterly boring five story apartment buildings; then the apartment buildings were taken down and in their place seventeen story skyscraper needles were erected, each of them provided not only habitation for some thousands of people but were self-contained cities with stores and factories, offices, repair stations, garages, landing stages for flyers, theaters and swimming pools, and clubs. You could live your whole life without venturing outside the arcologies, although Alice thought that would be very boring.
The arcologies stood amid endless fields surrounded by birch groves, fields ideal for hunting wild mushrooms, the spores for which were brought in every year from the north so that people could collect a hundred baskets of mushrooms every day and on the next day the mushrooms had grown up all over again. The wild mushrooms were the pride of the arcology district but were too much for the local people to pick and consume on their own, so they invited friends and relatives to help pick mushrooms near their own houses and even boasted of the quality and quantity.
After the arcologies the taxi came to Filevsky Park.
In a wide meadow about a hundred curiosity seekers were watching a text of the experimental rideway. A technician in a blue jumpsuit was standing between two silverish bands which twisted and turned to head in which ever direction the technician sent them. A microphone hung on the technician’s chest, and he was explaining to the onlookers how the rideway worked.
“If I should want the rode to take me to that large bush over there, I think the command, to the right. And the rideway turns to the right.”
The rideway shot back to its starting point, throwing the technician onto the grass, The crowd broke into laughter. The rideway jumped forward a short ways and stopped. Alice would have liked to have taken a ride on it but the crowd of people waiting in line was so great it would have taken her half the day before her chance came. Alice decided it was better to wait until such rideways were built in all the parks.
On a neighboring field a group of Junior Astronauts from the Voluntary Society for the Support of Astronautics, were in training. The teaching rocket’s airlock was open and the kids were going down to the grass by a line. No doubt they were imagining that the dinoducks from Jupiter had eaten their gangway. Alice went back to the taxi. It was time to go to Bertha’s.
For some time the car drove beneath the monorail tube, the turned toward the bank of the Moscow river and then crossed the old Borodinsky Bridge and onto Smolensk Avenue. The sun had hidden itself behind the clouds; evidently the meteorologists had erred again even in the twenty-first century their auguries required more than a few grains of salt. Under the clouds hung the aerial bicycle traffic controller. The airbike was blue, and the policeman was dressed in blue, and the clouds were bluish as well. Alice immediately thought of the fairy tale of how the traffic cop was the son of the clouds, and if it became hot he would turn to rain.