The Fountains of Youth (18 page)

I was too numb to engage in long-distance argument and too flabbergasted by the seeming outrageousness of his position to find a ready counter to his claims, but I couldn’t help voicing the most alarming of the possibilities that sprang to mind.

“Did you fall into that crevasse
deliberately!”
I wanted to know. “Once there, did you actually set out to acquire frostbitten fingers?”

“No,” he said, “that would have been perverse, not to say foolish. But the wise man always tries to turn crises into opportunities. The
whole man
will always refuse to insulate himself entirely from alarms and misfortunes and will always try to draw benefit from them when they steal upon him.” The last sentence sounded suspiciously like a quote, but its source was as unfamiliar to me as the source of my quote had been to him.

“Well,” I said, “I only hope the other person who was hurt sees things your way. I’d hate to think that there were two of us getting no fun at all out of our suffering.”

“He does,” Ziru Majumdar assured me. “We’re neighbors out on
Hallett. Ours is quite a progressive community, you know—except that you don’t know, being such a hermit. But you are writing a
History of Death
, aren’t you, Mortimer? We rather hoped that you might prove to be a kindred spirit. Perhaps you will, once we’ve had the chance to get to know one another a little better.”

“Perhaps I will,” I said, in a voice steeped in deep archaic ice. Somehow, the fact that he had heard of me even though we’d never met didn’t please me at all.

Z
iru Majumdar was right about the side effects of semi-anesthetization, if nothing else. During the four days that I was immobilized I continually drifted in and out of sleep and was never quite sure when my most vivid dreams thrust themselves into consciousness whether I was passively living the experiences in VE or actively conjuring them up from the depths of my unconscious.

Members of the New Human Race are generally thought to dream far less frequently and far less vividly than their forebears, but the average diminution in REM sleep time is only 30 percent. The fact that we rarely become conscious that we are dreaming, and always forget our dreams even if we wake into them, has more to do with the efficiency of our IT than the actual loss of dream sleep. It’s widely believed that the actual diminution in REM sleep is due to the fact that our adventures in VE have taken over some of the psychological functions of dreaming, but that’s mere conjecture. The experiments that were supposed to prove the case had to be called off because too many of the subjects refused to continue when they began to suffer various kinds of psychosomatic distress. Had I been one of them, I expect that I’d have been one of the first to cry off.

I had attempted IT-controlled lucid dreaming on several occasions during my first marriage. Jodocus and Eve had been enthusiasts, and Jodocus had even gone so far as to obtain a bootleg suite that allowed him to sample the notorious nanotech-VE experience, some of whose twenty-third- and twenty-fourth-century users were rumored to have died of shock when launched into illusions that were far too convincing. I had not liked the gentler varieties much and had refused to have anything to do with the bootleg. I politely set aside the assurances Jodocus gave me that if I only took time out to practice I would eventually develop the skill necessary to get the most out of my dreaming.

While I lay in that bed in Amundsen City I began to regret that I had not persisted. Had I learned to get along with lucid dreams in Lamu, I might not have been so meekly at their mercy in Amundsen. Even if I
had been able to exercise a degree of control over the contents of my deliria—as Jodocus or Eve would surely have been able to do—I would not have been able to escape them, but they could not have made my imprisonment wretched. As things were, I woke up with a start on several occasions, sometimes crying out as I did so.

Mercifully, I can no longer remember what it was that terrified me so. Dreams leave no objective record even when one’s flesh is stuffed full of monitors and helplessly spread-eagled in a room whose walls have more than the usual ration of eyes and ears. I presume that I relived the Coral Sea Disaster more than once and dived into the waters of the Kwarra a hundred times and more, always hopelessly. I probably met snakes and crocodiles, and leopard-seals. I must have fallen into deep ice-caves, where I writhed in fear of being crushed and watched my fingers and toes swell with frostbite. I may well have taken the plunge into the
real
ultimate wilderness of outer space, where I was doubtless seized by a motion sickness so profound as to make my sufferings aboard
Genesis
seem tame.

At any rate, I had nightmares, and they were bad.

Mister Majumdar was not in the least sympathetic. To him, fear—like pain and misery—were merely parts of life’s rich tapestry, to be welcomed with fascination and savored to the full.

“I like nightmares,” he told me. “They’re so wonderfully piquant. I wish I had more of them, but it’s not the same if they’re deliberately induced. Synthetic fear is as unsatisfactory as synthetic pain and synthetic pleasure. That’s why no VE sex is ever quite as good as the best fleshsex, no matter how cleverly it’s programmed. It’s
undeserved”

Personally, I had always felt that no fleshsex was ever quite as good as any half-way competent VE sex, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell Ziru Majumdar that. I wasn’t even going to take issue with the curious notion that virtual experience was somehow “undeserved,” although it seemed to me that even amateurs worked hard enough on the personalizations of their sex programs to take much fuller credit for the quality of the experience than they ever could in haphazard coition with an actual partner.

“How’s your frostbite?” I asked, thinking that it would redirect his obsession to safer ground.

“I’ve blanked it,” he confessed, with a small embarrassed laugh. “It’s a rather crude and unfurnished sensation—a mere ache, with no real personality.”

He sounded like a wine snob criticizing a poor vintage.

“It’s good to know that I haven’t missed much,” I said, drily.

“According to the newstapes,” he said, presumably because it was he who now felt a need to shift the conversational ground, “it’s only a matter of time before the whole biosphere gets frostbite. Unless we can somehow see to it that the sun gets stirred up again.”

He was referring to recent press releases by scrupulous students of the sunspot cycle, who had proposed that the virtual disappearance of Sol’s blemishes signaled the advent of a new Ice Age. As a historian, I was unimpressed by the quality of the evidence that purported to show that past “little Ice Ages” had been correlated with periods of unusual solar inactivity, but the world at large seemed to be unimpressed for quite different reasons. Given that Antarctica was becoming such a fashionable place to live, few people saw any cause for anxiety in the prospect of glaciers slowly extending across the Northern Hemisphere. It was more likely to raise real estate prices on the steppes than lower them.

“We can take it,” I said, cheerfully. “Anyhow, it’s better to accept it than start messing about with the sun. Continental engineering is one thing, but I don’t think our fusion techs are quite ready to move up to the big one—not until they’ve practiced a bit with Próxima Centauri and Barnard, at least. You and I have nothing to worry about. We like ice—why else would we live on the shore of the Ross Sea?”

“Right,” he said. He seemed glad to find something on which we could agree, but he was the kind of man who couldn’t resist tempting fate. “Not that I have any sympathy for Gaean Liberationists and Mystics, of course,” he added, with a blithe disregard for the possibility that I might.

Gaean extremism was discovering new extremes with every decade that passed, buoyed by the idea that the human race was now so securely established throughout the solar system that we ought to return the entire Earth to “fallow ground” by refusing to issue any further child licenses. According to the latest Gaean Lib avant garde, the recent interglacial
periods were simply Gaea’s fevers, the birth of civilization had been a morbid symptom of the planet’s sickness and human culture was a mere delirium that could and should be replaced by a much healthier noosphere based in the elusive protosentience of dolphins, cephalopods, and mysterious species yet to come.

“Oh, the Libs and the Mystics aren’t so far wrong,” I said, mischievously. “Agriculture was, at best, an imperfect answer to the predicament of expanding population. What might human beings have become by now, I wonder, if we’d devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to spiritual evolution instead of embracing the crude violence of the plough and the milking machine?”

The most frightening thing of all was that it didn’t seem to cross his mind that I might be joking. He obviously paid more attention to the lunatic fringe TV channels than I did—he heard that kind of stuff all the time, argued with leaden seriousness.

“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s a fair point.”

“It’s just colorful rhetoric,” I told him, with a sigh. “Even the people who indulge in it all the time don’t mean it literally. It’s just a form of play.”

“Think so?” Ziru Majumdar seemed to find this proposition just as novel and just as appealing as the one it was attempting to explain. “Well, perhaps. Having been delirious myself for a while when I was down that hole I’m tempted to take the notion of culture-as-delirium a little more seriously. I can’t be sure whether I was asleep or awake, but I was certainly
lost.
I don’t know about you, but I always find even the very best VEs a bit
flat.
I sometimes use illicit psychotropics to give delusion a helping hand, but they don’t really help—they just make me confused and a trifle nauseous.”

Now that he was sounding like Jodocus I felt that I was on safer ground.

“That’s a natural side-effect of the protective efforts of our internal technology,” I told him.

“I know,” he replied. “Nanomachines always do their job a little
too
well because of the built-in safety margins. It’s a real problem, existentially speaking. It’s only when our IT reaches the limits of its capacity that it lets really interesting things begin to happen. We need to think
again about the standard programs so that we can give ourselves and our children a little more rope. We first-generation New Humans have grown up in cotton wool, thanks to the anxieties of a dying breed. We shouldn’t carry forward their mistakes.”

The tone of the conversation had been light until then, but that disturbed me. “Are you a parent, Ziru?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level—and succeeding quite well, thanks to the anesthetics.

“Not yet,” he said. “Soon, I hope. Cape Hallett’s a good place to rear a child. Challenging environment, progressive community.”

“Yes,” I said, weakly. “I suppose it might be.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how many of my own parents would have agreed with him—and how far they might have been persuaded to go along with his weirder arguments.

T
he room in which Ziru Majumdar and I were confined was by no means short of facilities. Three of its walls were equipped with window screens, so that if we cared to turn our heads away from one another we could select entirely different vistas on which to look out. If, on the other hand, we were feeling in a collaborative mood, we could both look straight ahead at some mutually agreed spectacle. The VE hoods with which our bedheads were equipped were basic models, but they were not at all uncomfortable. The only thing that was difficult to understand, in view of all this generous provision, was why Doctor Sung had seen fit to put the two of us together rather than giving us private rooms.

“It was a purely clinical judgment,” she told me, when I eventually asked. “Actual human contact aids recovery from injury. It’s a psychosomatic effect, but it’s quite real. If it turns out that patients can’t stand the company we select for them we shuffle them around—and if, after three tries, it turns out that we’ve stumbled on one of those rare curmudgeons for whom hell really is other people, we isolate the poor misfortunate. It’s nice and normal people like you and Mister Majumdar who maintain my confidence in human nature and the published literature. You’re both doing
very well.”

I honestly couldn’t tell if she was telling me a pack of lies, perhaps to cover up the fact that the hospital was so overcrowded with accident victims that they were forced to put two patients in rooms intended for one until their busy shamirs could add an extra story or hollow out an extra set of basements. I was very careful to keep my skepticism to myself. I didn’t dare use the bedhead VE apparatus to check up on the alleged literature, just in case my usage was being monitored—for purely clinical reasons, of course.

“I think she’s right,” Ziru Majumdar said, when Doctor Sung had left the room in the wake of this conversation. “We are doing well, and I think the fact that we’ve been forced to get to know one another has helped.
You live alone, and I live in a little enclave of like-minded souls. I presume that we both select our virtual acquaintances on the grounds of congeniality. We live in a world in which it’s very easy to cultivate pleasant acquaintance, and the only occasions when we risk the effects of
difference
for long periods of time are during marriages, especially marriages contracted for parenthood, when we actively seek diversity for the child’s sake. It’s good for us, once now and again, to be forced into the company of others at random. You and I are not alike, Mortimer, but I have enjoyed our conversations and I think I have obtained some profit from our time together. I hope that you feel the same.”

Did I?

I wasn’t at all sure, although I suspected that my skeptical attitude to the doctor’s story might be symptomatic of the fact that I didn’t really want to believe that my confinement with Mister Majumdar had any clinical benefits. I couldn’t say that out loud, of course, so I assured him that he was a very interesting person and that I felt myself to be richer for having had the benefit of his points of view.