The Fountains of Youth - Brian Stableford [63]
“It was a purely clinical judgment,” she told me, when I eventually asked. “Actual human contact aids recovery from injury. It’s a psychosomatic effect, but it’s quite real. If it turns out that patients can’t stand the company we select for them we shuffle them around—and if, after three tries, it turns out that we’ve stumbled on one of those rare curmudgeons for whom hell really is other people, we isolate the poor misfortunate. It’s nice and normal people like you and Mister Majumdar who maintain my confidence in human nature and the published literature. You’re both doing very well.”
I honestly couldn’t tell if she was telling me a pack of lies, perhaps to cover up the fact that the hospital was so overcrowded with accident victims that they were forced to put two patients in rooms intended for one until their busy shamirs could add an extra story or hollow out an extra set of basements. I was very careful to keep my skepticism to myself. I didn’t dare use the bedhead VE apparatus to check up on the alleged literature, just in case my usage was being monitored—for purely clinical reasons, of course.
“I think she’s right,” Ziru Majumdar said, when Doctor Sung had left the room in the wake of this conversation. “We are doing well, and I think the fact that we’ve been forced to get to know one another has helped. You live alone, and I live in a little enclave of like-minded souls. I presume that we both select our virtual acquaintances on the grounds of congeniality. We live in a world in which it’s very easy to cultivate pleasant acquaintance, and the only occasions when we risk the effects of difference for long periods of time are during marriages, especially marriages contracted for parenthood, when we actively seek diversity for the child’s sake. It’s good for us, once now and again, to be forced into the company of others at random. You and I are not alike, Mortimer, but I have enjoyed our conversations and I think I have obtained some profit from our time together. I hope that you feel the same.”
Did I?
I wasn’t at all sure, although I suspected that my skeptical attitude to the doctor’s story might be symptomatic of the fact that I didn’t really want to believe that my confinement with Mister Majumdar had any clinical benefits. I couldn’t say that out loud, of course, so I assured him that he was a very interesting person and that I felt myself to be richer for having had the benefit of his points of view.
Not unnaturally, he took that as permission to prattle on at even greater length, expanding on his personal philosophy.
“I think we might have to go to the very brink of extinction to reach the cutting edge of experience,” he told me, presenting the notion as if it were a wonderful and hard-won discovery, made while he was trapped in the crevasse, not knowing whether the rescuers would get to him in time. “You can learn a lot about life, and about yourself, in extreme situations. They’re the really vivid moments, the moments of real life. We’re so safe nowadays that most of what we do hardly counts as living at all.”
I tried to object to that, but he overrode my objection, pressing on relentlessly.
“We exist,” he said, indisputably, before going on to less obvious assertions “we work, we play, but we don’t really test ourselves to see what we’re really made of. If we don’t try ourselves out, how will we know what we’re really capable of and what kinds of experiences we need to maximize our enjoyment of life? I’m from the Reunited States, where we have a strong sense of history and a strong sense of purpose; we learn in the cradle that we have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but we grow up with protective IT so powerful that it circumscribes our liberty, operating on the assumption that the pursuit of happiness has to be conducted in comfort. You’re a historian, I know, and a historian of death to boot, but even you can have no idea of the zest there must have been in living in the bad old days. Not that I’m about to take up serious injury as