Sidney's Comet by Brian Herbert

time long before when he had felt the same way.

    Sidney turned sleepily in bed, throwing one arm over a rubber-skinned pleasie-meckie that lay beside him. “Carla,” he whispered in an awakening haze, “I love you, Carla.”
    His eyes popped open, and when he became aware of reality, Sidney cursed at his misfortune. He pushed the meckie away.
    The naked pleasie-meckie had fine-toned muscles like Carla’s, with an aquiline nose and shoulder-length, golden-brown hair.
    Sidney mentoed it to life. Away, he commanded tersely. Return to your station.
    Obediently, the pleasie-meckie rose and dressed quickly in undergarments which lay in disarray on the floor. Then, as Sidney watched, it rolled into the closet and took a standing position to one side. He turned away, stared at the spray-textured ceiling. Sidney heard rustling in the closet for several moments. Then the meckie closed the closet door and Sidney was left alone.
    He stretched and yawned. As usual, it was late morning when he awakened, and Sidney could see synthetic sunlight through the open doorway of the bathroom module. Moments later, he stood naked from the waist up at a grooming machine in the bathroom.
    The tiny modular room was warm and cheerful, with a planter box of plastic marigolds along one wall beneath a sun-lite panel. White synthetic light from the panel warmed his left side.
    Thinking about his strange space dream of the night before and of the haunting, recurring voices, Sidney waited while an electric shaver at the end of a right-handed meckie-arm trimmed the stubble off his face. The U-shaped grooming machine, Sidney’s height overall, peered back at him with its mirror face between seeing-eye meckie-arms on each side. An array of brightly colored buttons above the machine’s sink could be mento- or hand-activated. Gold lettering across the top of the mirror proclaimed: “ UNCLE ROSY LOVES US .”
    Sidney turned his face to one side when the shave was finished, trying to find a better angle in the mirror. This made his ears seem to protrude less, but the pug nose looked worse. He sighed, wondered sadly, Why can’t I be better looking? I’m not even average!
    The meckie-arms took Lemon Delight Shaving Lotion from a dispenser next to the mirror and patted Sidney’s face. The lotion stung; his eyes watered. Sidney always resented mechanical grooming, but held up his arms cooperatively while deodorant spray was pumped all over his pear-shaped torso.
    In the next grooming maneuver, Sidney knew he had to be careful. He watched with trepidation as the left meckie-arm grasped a toothbrush and took on a load of Shiny Bright Toothpaste from a wall dispenser. A smiling picture of President Ogg looked back at Sidney from the dispenser with a message printed across perfectly even, sparkling white teeth: “ VOTE FOR OGG .”
    The toothbrush darted into Sidney’s open mouth and surge-scrubbed every tooth. Several times recently, not paying sufficient attention, Sidney had failed to open his mouth. The disastrous result: sticky white paste rubbed all over his nose and chin. Not this time, he told himself. The meckie finished with an automatic rinse, gargle, face wash and set of Sidney’s curly black hair, all accomplished without strangling, drenching or costing him the loss of any hair.
    After breakfast, Sidney moto-shoed across his small condominium unit to the living room module. This too was a cheerful room, despite the location of Sidney’s unit at the building core where it could not receive natural light. Bright splashes of gold and orange washed furnishings and walls with color. An orange, plastic-encased videodome dominated the room’s center, directly beneath a ceiling-mounted sun-lite panel.
    He rolled past the videodome, pausing in front of a wall decorated with a gold and black checkerboard design. Concentrating upon one of the squares, he mentoed an unseen combination dial and heard the click of tumblers as he projected each number. The