The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [29]
“I like dragons,” Sara said, defensively.
“So I’ve noticed,” Father Lemuel replied—although, so far as Sara knew, he had never actually come into her room to see the models on her shelves or look through her picture window. “It’s okay to like dragons. The reason I started telling you all that was to explain why you can only go so far with dragons—or any other conventional invention of the imagination. Your own senses—touch as well as sight—have been shaped by millions of years of evolution to deal with the world you walk around in. Even virtual worlds that mimic the actual world as closely as possible can only reproduce an appearance, and your brain is never completely fooled by it. My cocoon is state-of-the-art, but state-of-the-art will never quite catch up with the texture of actuality, even with the aid of clever IT. You’ll never get an adrenalin rush from climbing in a cocoon that’s the same as the one you got from climbing the hometree, because your brain and your body will always know the difference. There are some kinds of experience where it makes very little difference—including school, playing games and chatting to your friends—but whenever an experience is really important to you, or whenever you want an experience to be really important, you’ll be aware of that margin. That’s why so-called VW addicts never really lose touch with reality. Reality is the only place you can get the whole sensation of touch.”
Sara thought about that for a few moments before saying, “I really did enjoy it.”
“I’m glad,” Father Lemuel assured her. “It was new, closer to real experience than you’ve ever been in a Fantasyworld before—but next time, you’ll be more conscious of the difference. And the time after that...well, I suppose I should let you find out on your own. It’s that old parental responsibility coming through again, always making free with the warnings and the sermons. You have to learn from experience to get the full benefit from your senses—all you’re born with is the potential. You’ll notice that more and more as you get older. Maybe we should have created more opportunities for you already, but parental committees always tend to take things slowly. Maybe it was different in the old days—but maybe not. Maybe two parents did just as much worrying as eight, but couldn’t share it out so easily.”
“In the even older days long before the Crash,” Sara said, spotting an opportunity to show off her learning, “most people lived in extended families, not nuclear ones. Our way is a return to normality, if you look at it that way.”
“So they say,” Father Lemuel agreed, although the tone of his voice proclaimed that he didn’t believe it. “People will go a long way in search of arguments that support what they’re doing. It takes a village to raise a child is a slogan that’s been worked to death. Whatever we are, Sara, we’re not a village that’s been somehow collapsed into a single set of rooms and strewn around a fake tree like so many squirrels’ nests, and we’re certainly not a company of grandfathers and maiden aunts who’ve been drafted in to baby-sit—although I can see how it might seem that way to you.”
“There are birds’ nests in the branches,” Sara told him. “Lots of them. And things with lots of legs. It’s not just our hometree.”
“No, it’s not,” Father Lemuel agreed. “And that’s one of the reasons for making some houses look like trees, rather than hiding all their organic systems away in hollow walls, the way they do in town houses. It wasn’t just our Crash—the birds and the bees nearly went the same way as the large mammals. Ecologically speaking, it pays to look after your insects—and your insect-eaters.”
“Is that why you bought a hometree?” Sara asked.
“Not really,” Father Lemuel admitted. “It was more to do with the kind of environment we wanted to provide for you—good for climbing, among other things, although I’m not sure that all of us had given our full consideration to that aspect of