Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov [34]
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
7
ARCADIA
Arcadia Darell declaimed firmly into the mouthpiece of her Transcriber:
“The Future of Seldon’s Plan, by A. Darell” and then thought darkly that some day when she was a great writer, she would write all her masterpieces under the pseudonym of Arkady. Just Arkady. No last name at all.
“A. Darell” would be just the sort of thing that she would have to put on all her themes for her class in Composition and Rhetoric—so tasteless. All the other kids had to do it, too, except for Olynthus Dam, because the class laughed so when he did it the first time. And “Arcadia” was a little girl’s name, wished on her because her great-grandmother had been called that; her parents just had no imagination at all.
Now that she was two days past fourteen, you’d think they’d recognize the simple fact of adulthood and call her Arkady. Her lips tightened as she thought of her father looking up from his book-viewer just long enough to say, “But if you’re going to pretend you’re nineteen, Arcadia, what will you do when you’re twenty-five and all the boys think you’re thirty?”
From where she sprawled across the arms and into the hollow of her own special armchair, she could see the mirror on her dresser. Her foot was a little in the way because her house slipper kept twirling about her big toe, so she pulled it in and sat up with an unnatural straightness to her neck that she felt sure, somehow, lengthened it a full two inches into slim regality.
For a moment, she considered her face thoughtfully—too fat. She opened her jaws half an inch behind closed lips, and caught the resultant trace of unnatural gauntness at every angle. She licked her lips with a quick touch of tongue and let them pout a bit in moist softness. Then she let her eyelids droop in a weary, worldly way— Oh, golly if only her cheeks weren’t that silly pink.
She tried putting her fingers to the outer corners of her eyes and tilting the lids a bit to get that mysterious exotic languor of the women of the inner star systems, but her hands were in the way and she couldn’t see her face very well.
Then she lifted her chin, caught herself at a half-profile, and with her eyes a little strained from looking out the corner and her neck muscles faintly aching, she said, in a voice one octave below its natural pitch, “Really, father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what some silly old boys think, you just—”
And then she remembered that she still had the transmitter open in her hand and said, drearily, “Oh, golly,” and shut it off.
The faintly violet paper with the peach margin line on the left had upon it the following:
THE FUTURE OF SELDON’S PLAN
“Really, father, if you think it makes a particle of difference to me what some silly old boys think, you just
“Oh, golly.”
She pulled the sheet out of the machine with annoyance and another clicked neatly into place.
But her face smoothed out of its vexation, nevertheless, and her wide, little mouth stretched into a self-satisfied smile. She sniffed at the paper delicately. Just right. Just that proper touch of elegance and charm. And the penmanship was just the last word.
The machine had been delivered two days ago on her first adult birthday. She had said, “But father, everybody—just everybody in the class who has the slightest pretensions to being anybody has one. Nobody but some old drips would use key machines—”
The salesman had said, “There is no other model as compact on the one hand and as adaptable on the other. It will spell and punctuate correctly according to the sense of the sentence. Naturally, it is a great aid to education since it encourages the user to employ careful enunciation and breathing in order to make sure of the correct spelling, to say nothing of demanding a proper and elegant delivery for correct punctuation.”
Even then her father had tried to get one geared for typeprint as if she were some dried-up, old-maid teacher.
But when it was delivered, it was the model she wanted—obtained perhaps with a little more