Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [27]
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“You and another group member went off into your own private world. That’s good. That’s what’s supposed to happen. Let me tell you, it doesn’t always. The software gives you access to a vast multisensual library, all the sexual fantasy ever committed to media. But you and your partner, or partners, have to customise the information and use it to create and maintain what we call the consensual perceptual plenum. Success in holding a shared dreamland together is a knack. It depends on something in the neural make-up that no one has yet fully analysed. Some have it, some don’t. You two are really in sync.”
“That’s exactly what I’m complaining about—”
“You think he’s damaging the pocket universe you two built up. But he isn’t, not from his character’s point of view. It’s part of Lessingham’s thing, to be conscious that he’s in a fantasy world.”
She started, accusingly. “I don’t want to know his name.”
“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t tell you. ‘Lessingham’ is the name of his virtuality persona. I’m surprised you don’t recognise it. He’s a character from a series of classic fantasy novels by E. R. Eddison…. In Eddison’s glorious cosmos ‘Lessingham’ is a splendidly endowed English gentleman, who visits fantastic realms of ultra-masculine adventure as a lucid dreamer: though an actor in the drama, he is partly conscious of another existence, while the characters around him are more or less explicitly puppets of the dream…”
He sounded as if he was quoting from a reference book. He probably was: reading from an autocue that had popped up in the lenses of those doctorish hornrims. She knew that the old-fashioned trappings were there to reassure her. She rather despised them: but it was like the virtuality itself. The buttons were pushed, the mechanism responded. She was reassured.
Of course she knew the Eddison stories. She recalled “Lessingham” perfectly: the tall, strong, handsome, cultured millionaire jock who has magic journeys to another world, where he is a tall, strong, handsome cultured jock in Elizabethan costume, with a big sword. The whole thing was an absolutely typical male power-fantasy, she thought, without rancour. Fantasy means never having to say you’re sorry. The women in those books, she remembered, were drenched in sex, but they had no part in the action. They stayed at home being princesses, occasionally allowing the millionaire jocks to get them into bed. She could understand why “Lessingham” would be interested in “Sonja”… for a change.
“You think he goosed you, psychically. What do you expect? You can’t dress the way ‘Sonja’ dresses, and hope to be treated like the Queen of the May.”
Dr Hamilton was only doing his job. He was supposed to be provocative, so they could react against him. That was his excuse, anyway… On the contrary, she thought. “Sonja” dresses the way she does because she can dress anyway she likes. “Sonja” doesn’t have to hope for respect, and she doesn’t have to demand it. She just gets it. “It’s dominance display,” she said, enjoying the theft of his jargon. “Females do that too, you know. The way ‘Sonja’ dresses is not an invitation. It’s a warning. Or a challenge, to anyone who can measure up.”
He laughed, but he sounded irritated. “Frankly, I’m amazed that you two work together. I’d have expected “Lessingham” to go for an ultrafeminine—”
“I am…‘Sonja’ is ultrafeminine. Isn’t a tigress feminine?”
“Well, okay. But I guess you’ve found out his little weakness. He likes to be a teeny bit in control, even when he’s letting his hair down in dreamland.”
She remembered the secret mockery lurking in those blue eyes. “That’s the problem. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want either of us to be in control.”
“I can’t interfere with his persona. So, it’s up to you. Do you want to carry on?”
“Something works,” she muttered. She was unwilling to admit that there’d been no one else, in the