The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [60]
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.
THIRTY-TWO
Ziru 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