Kit looked at his pop, uncomprehending. His father went back into the living room. Kit followed.

Where the TV normally would have shown a channel number, the screen was now displaying the number 0000566478. The picture seemed to be of a piece of furniture that looked rather like a set of chrome parallel bars. From the bars hung a creature with quite a few tentacles and manystalky eyes, which werenot in the usual places. The creature was talking fast and loud in a voice like a fire engine s siren, while waving around a large, shiny object that might have been an eggbeater, except that, in Kit s experience, eggbeaters didn t usually have pulse lasers built into them. Characters flashed on the screen, both in the Speech and in other languages. Kit stood and looked at this with complete astonishment. His father, next to him, was doing the same.

 You didn t hack into that new pay-per-view system, did you   his father said.  I don t want the cops in here.

 No way,  Kit said, picking up the remote and looking at it accusingly. The remote sat there in his hand as undemonstratively as any genuinely inanimate object might  except that Kit was less certain than ever that there reallywere any such things as inanimate objects.

He shook the remote to see if anything rattled. Nothing did.  I told you to behave,  he said in the Speech.

 But not likewhat  the remote said in a sanctimonious tone.

His father was still watching the creature on the parallel bars, which pointed the laser eggbeater at what looked like a nearby abstract sculpture. This vanished in a flare of actinic green light, leaving Kit uneasily wondering what kind of sculpture screamed.  Nice special effects,  Kit s father said, though he sounded a little dubious. Almost too realistic.

 It s not special effects,Pop ,  Kit said.  It s some other planet s cable.  He hit the reveal control on the remote, but nothing was revealed except, at the bottom of the screen, many more strings of characters flashing on and off in various colors.  Shoppingchannel, looks like.  Kit handed the remote back to his father.