The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [61]
Mercifully, I can no longer remember what it was that terrified me so. Dreams leave no objective record even when one’s flesh is stuffed full of monitors and helplessly spread-eagled in a room whose walls have more than the usual ration of eyes and ears. I presume that I relived the Coral Sea Disaster more than once and dived into the waters of the Kwarra a hundred times and more, always hopelessly. I probably met snakes and crocodiles, and leopard-seals. I must have fallen into deep ice-caves, where I writhed in fear of being crushed and watched my fingers and toes swell with frostbite. I may well have taken the plunge into the real ultimate wilderness of outer space, where I was doubtless seized by a motion sickness so profound as to make my sufferings aboard Genesis seem tame.
At any rate, I had nightmares, and they were bad.
Mister Majumdar was not in the least sympathetic. To him, fear—like pain and misery—were merely parts of life’s rich tapestry, to be welcomed with fascination and savored to the full.
“I like nightmares,” he told me. “They’re so wonderfully piquant. I wish I had more of them, but it’s not the same if they’re deliberately induced. Synthetic fear is as unsatisfactory as synthetic pain and synthetic pleasure. That’s why no VE sex is ever quite as good as the best fleshsex, no matter how cleverly it’s programmed. It’s undeserved”
Personally, I had always felt that no fleshsex was ever quite as good as any half-way competent VE sex, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell Ziru Majumdar that. I wasn’t even going to take issue with the curious notion that virtual experience was somehow “undeserved,” although it seemed to me that even amateurs worked hard enough on the personalizations of their sex programs to take much fuller credit for the quality of the experience than they ever could in haphazard coition with an actual partner.
“How’s your frostbite?” I asked, thinking that it would redirect his obsession to safer ground.
“I’ve blanked it,” he confessed, with a small embarrassed laugh. “It’s a rather crude and unfurnished sensation—a mere ache, with no real personality.”
He sounded like a wine snob criticizing a poor vintage.
“It’s good to know that I haven’t missed much,” I said, drily.
“According to the newstapes,” he said, presumably because it was he who now felt a need to shift the conversational ground, “it’s only a matter of time before the whole biosphere gets frostbite. Unless we can somehow see to it that the sun gets stirred up again.”
He was referring to recent press releases by scrupulous students of the sunspot cycle, who had proposed that the virtual disappearance of Sol’s blemishes signaled the advent of a new Ice Age. As a historian, I was unimpressed by the quality of the evidence that purported to show that past “little Ice Ages” had been correlated with periods of unusual solar inactivity, but the world at large seemed to be unimpressed for quite different reasons. Given that Antarctica was becoming such a fashionable place to live, few people saw any cause for anxiety in the prospect of glaciers slowly extending across the Northern Hemisphere. It was more likely to raise real estate prices on the steppes than lower them.
“We can take it,” I said, cheerfully. “Anyhow, it’s better to accept it than start messing about with the sun. Continental engineering is one thing, but I don’t think our fusion techs are quite ready to move up to the big one—not until they’ve practiced a bit with Próxima Centauri and Barnard, at least. You and I have nothing to worry about. We like ice—why else would we live on the shore of the Ross Sea?”
“Right,” he said. He seemed glad to find something on which we could agree, but he was the kind of man who couldn’t resist tempting fate. “Not that I have any sympathy for Gaean Liberationists and Mystics,