The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [44]
Father Aubrey joked about Father Lemuel too, saying that he was nowadays too far adrift in the virtual multiverse to notice anything that happened in mere meatspace even if it were “handed to him on a plate”. The point of the remark was that Father Lemuel hadn’t seen a plate for a month or more, having been perfectly content to take all his nourishment intravenously within his cocoon. Sara didn’t think the joke was very funny, because she often worried about whether Father Lemuel was really safe when he spent such long periods in his cocoon. Father Aubrey and Father Stephen both liked telling scary stories about people who died in their cocoons and weren’t discovered for months—although Mother Quilla assured her that it couldn’t happen nowadays, because even the artificial idiots that passed for artificial intelligences in hometrees far less sophisticated than theirs could react immediately and effectively to medical emergencies.
When Sara repeated this assurance back to Father Aubrey and Father Stephen while they were in the garden one evening, they retaliated by telling her that modern smartsuits had now become so smart that they could walk around for days or weeks after the people inside them were dead. Father Stephen told her that such zombies were regularly to be found in attendance at junk swaps, offering the moon on a stick to any charlatan who claimed to have a ready-made elixir of life. That was far too tall a story to obtain an instant’s credence from Sara, but she couldn’t help wondering whether it might come true one day in the not-too-distant future.
“Of course,” Father Aubrey added, changing tack yet again when he saw that Sara wasn’t fooled, “Lem’s smartsuit is specially programmed to make sure nothing happens to his body while, as he quaintly insists on putting it, his spirit is on the Other Side, so....”
“He doesn’t say any such thing,” Sara said, cutting the new horror story off before it had a chance to become silly. “Father Lemuel’s a real explorer. And he makes new virtual universes, too. You shouldn’t say nasty things about him when he put so much money into the hometree.”
Father Aubrey had the grace to laugh at that, and apologize, but Father Stephen frowned as he jabbed his trowel into the soil of the herb garden. Weeding was a task he always performed with a slight attitude of disgust, even when Father Aubrey—who was the herb garden’s designer and principal apologist—was actually present. “Lem’s got no right to go on to you about how much he put into the hometree,” Father Stephen said. “We all put in our fair share. You never see Lem out here, getting his hands and knees dirty. We all worked for a living until we took time out, and I still go into the ManLiv factory three days a week. We can’t all do our jobs in Virtual Space—someone has to tend to the sharp end. No matter how smart your software is, you need machines to carry them out, and machines need engineers. Real engineers.”
“We all get our hands dirty now and again, Steve,” Aubrey said, soothingly. “Even if some of us are a bit reluctant to kneel down in the dirt. You need to be more careful with that trowel—you’ll injure the roots of the rosemary. Sara wasn’t accusing us of not doing our share, were you, Sara?”
“No,” Sara said. “I just didn’t like you being nasty about Father Lemuel.”
“You don’t have to take his side because you think he got you the vote in house meetings, and your precious rose,” Father Stephen said. “Everyone who casts a vote does it with the best of intentions.”
“Sara knows that, Steve,” Father Aubrey told him, speaking even more gently. “And she knows who takes her to junk meets, in spite of having to work three days a week, and who used to give her good stuff from his collection so that she could swap it for dragons.”
That did the trick. Father Stephen got up from his kneeling position and drew himself up to his full height—as he always did when he wanted to seem impressive, although Sara suspected