Free New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers by Alexei Panshin Page A

disobeyed a sensible dictate, and in time grew up to be something he could understand and approve of. But children, even ones ordered from checklists, simply don’t come that way.
    In a family of conformists, at least one child will turn to cropping his head bald and performing contortionist exercises in the name of sport. In a family of the bizarre, at least one child will long for the security of a billion people who will dress, think, eat, work, and play as he does, and comfort him. There is no way to prevent it. If you will remember, Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. He never did. The parents simply didn’t know what time it was and needed someone to blame things on. And by private report, the Nashuite Emperor finds his second son’s interest in Morovian Agrostology both perplexing and disturbing and has had any number of royal rows with him, during which he has tried to convince the boy to drop his study of grass in favor of more fitting pursuits. And, as might be expected, he has had no luck.
    The results of a twenty-two year study of parent-child relations begun in 914 by the Petenji Institute indicated that in those days there was an eighteen percent chance that a parent would consider that his grown child had turned out badly, and a thirty-seven percent chance that he wouldn’t understand him even if he were willing to accept him. And this says nothing about the ordinary conflicts involved in raising a child. I don’t suppose that six hundred years have changed matters appreciably.
    Poor incompatible families have a greater problem than rich ones. At best, a poor father can send his boor of a son off to work in a field six miles in an opposite direction, ignore him at meal times, and spend his evenings in a different corner. A rich father has a more effective traditional ploy known as the remittance. In essence, a young man is requested to travel—anywhere—and is provided with a reasonable amount of money as long as he stays away from home.
    This may be a happy solution—if the money arrives in the proper place at the proper time.
    * * *
    When Villiers returned to his rooms, Torve the Trog was sitting on the floor making thurb, thurb, thurb noises. His anatomy and fashion of sitting were such that his knees overlapped and his brown furry feet stuck out to the side. They were broad, spatulate things, not at all his most attractive feature. In actual fact, he had little to offer in the way of attractive features. He was large and lumpy and fur-covered, and his head seemed not to be in proper proportion to his body. What he most resembled, in fact, was a six foot tall mammalian toad that by some freak of nature walked upright. The one thing that kept him from being repulsive was his bulgy blue eyes. They were not merely little circles of blue—they were glowing aqua orbs that a medieval king would have been proud to trade a minor daughter for. A minor king might well have made that his major daughter. Even in these more enlightened times, Trog’s Eye Blue has a connotation of appealing warmth.
    The thurb, thurb, thurb noises were High Art. Villiers was not sure of the principles of the art, however, and Torve was unable or unwilling to explain them, but which of the two Villiers was also uncertain. At times he thought it was a matter of rhythm, at times modulation, at times subtle changes in amplitude. In any case, though he might not understand the art form in its own terms, nonetheless he did not find it objectionable. Think of it as the random chirping of a cricket or the wurble of the Fidelian ironworm.
    “ . . . Thurb  . . .”
    Villiers let the door slide shut behind him and began stripping off his clothes.
    “Catch the boot, will you, Torve,” he said.
    The Trog helped him to remove the tightly fit high-heeled boots and Villiers sighed in relief.
    “There are times when I think my feet are spreading. Or perhaps they’re still growing.”
    He lay back on the