The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [58]
After several hours of merciful anesthesis, courtesy of our kindly IT, Ziru Majumdar and I woke up in adjacent beds at the hospital in Amundsen City. I was fully insulated from pain and could not sense my left leg at all, but the extent of the numbness and the depth of the illusory feeling that my brain had been removed from my head and immersed in a vat of treacle assured me that I would not be up and about for some considerable time.
“I’m truly sorry about your leg, Mister Gray,” Majumdar said. “It was very stupid of me to get lost at all, even in the blizzard—and then to walk over the lip of the crevasse… very, very foolish. I’ve lived here for five years, after all; I thought I knew every last ice ridge like the back of my hand. It’s not as if I’ve ever suffered from summer rhapsody or snow blindness.”
I’d suffered slightly from both the ailments he named. I was still awkwardly vulnerable to any psychosomatic condition that was readily available. My sensitivity had, however, served to make me so careful that I never looked upon the all-pervasive winter snows without a protective mask, and I had programed my household sloth to draw the blinds against the eternal days of late December and early January. An uneasy mind can sometimes be an advantage.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mister Majumdar,” I graciously insisted. “I suppose I must have been a little overconfident myself, or I’d never have slipped and fallen when the fracture became a collapse. One bound is all it would have required to take me clear. At least they were able to pull me out in a matter of minutes; you must have lain at the bottom of that crevasse for the better part of two days.”
“Very nearly,” he admitted. “At first I assumed that I could get out myself—when I found that I could not I took it for granted that the robots would cope. Who would ever have thought I’d need to summon human help in this day and age?”
“It might have been better if you’d lost consciousness sooner,” I pointed out.
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “I never like to trust these matters entirely to the judgment of machine intelligence. I’m not one of these people who’s so afraid of circumstance that they program their IT to black them out at the first sign of physical stress and consign their fate to the dutiful care of their telephone answering machines.”
“Neither am I,” I said, wondering if I were being subtly insulted, “but there are times when consciousness and courage increase our danger.”
“But they also enhance our experience,” Majumdar countered, with what seemed to me to be remarkable eagerness. “While I was waiting for real help to arrive I came round several times. At least, I think I did. The problem with being half-anesthetized is that it makes one very prone to hallucination. If I had been deeply asleep, it would be as if the whole affair never happened. One should remember these things properly, don’t you think? How else can we regard our experiences as complete? It was jolly cold, though. I had a thermosuit over my suitskin, but I’d have been much better in a reinforced costume like yours. My clothes were doing their absolute best to keep me warm, but the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t give you much slack when you’re at the bottom of a cleft, lying in the permafrost. I’ve got authentic frostbite in my toes, you know. Imagine that! Authentic frostbite.”
I tried to imagine it, but it wasn’t easy. He could hardly be in pain, so it was difficult to conjure up any notion of what it might feel like to have necrotized toes. It was equally difficult to figure out why he considered the possession of necrotized toes to be a kind of privilege and why he felt the need to tell me about it in such a salesmanlike manner. I wondered what kind of work he did when he wasn’t out memorizing ice ridges.
I could understand his apparent excitement, to some degree. We live such careful and ordered lives that the occasional minicatastrophe