“Oh, the Libs and the Mystics aren’t so far wrong,” I said, mischievously. “Agriculture was, at best, an imperfect answer to the predicament of expanding population. What might human beings have become by now, I wonder, if we’d devoted ourselves wholeheartedly to spiritual evolution instead of embracing the crude violence of the plough and the milking machine?”

The most frightening thing of all was that it didn’t seem to cross his mind that I might be joking. He obviously paid more attention to the lunatic fringe TV channels than I did—he heard that kind of stuff all the time, argued with leaden seriousness.

“Well, yes,” he said. “That’s a fair point.”

“It’s just colorful rhetoric,” I told him, with a sigh. “Even the people who indulge in it all the time don’t mean it literally. It’s just a form of play.”

“Think so?” Ziru Majumdar seemed to find this proposition just as novel and just as appealing as the one it was attempting to explain. “Well, perhaps. Having been delirious myself for a while when I was down that hole I’m tempted to take the notion of culture-as-delirium a little more seriously. I can’t be sure whether I was asleep or awake, but I was certainly lost.I don’t know about you, but I always find even the very best VEs a bit flat.I sometimes use illicit psychotropics to give delusion a helping hand, but they don’t really help—they just make me confused and a trifle nauseous.”

Now that he was sounding like Jodocus I felt that I was on safer ground.

“That’s a natural side-effect of the protective efforts of our internal technology,” I told him.

“I know,” he replied. “Nanomachines always do their job a little toowell because of the built-in safety margins. It’s a real problem, existentially speaking. It’s only when our IT reaches the limits of its capacity that it lets really interesting things begin to happen. We need to think again about the standard programs so that we can give ourselves and our children a little more rope. We first-generation New Humans have grown up in cotton wool, thanks to the anxieties of a dying breed. We shouldn’t carry forward their mistakes.”

The tone of the conversation had been light until then, but that disturbed me. “Are you a parent, Ziru?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level—and succeeding quite well, thanks to the anesthetics.

“Not yet,” he said. “Soon, I hope. Cape Hallett’s a good place to rear a child. Challenging environment, progressive community.”

“Yes,” I said, weakly. “I suppose it might be.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how many of my own parents would have agreed with him—and how far they might have been persuaded to go along with his weirder arguments.

THIRTY-THREE

The room in which Ziru Majumdar and I were confined was by no means short of facilities. Three of its walls were equipped with window screens, so that if we cared to turn our heads away from one another we could select entirely different vistas on which to look out. If, on the other hand, we were feeling in a collaborative mood, we could both look straight ahead at some mutually agreed spectacle. The VE hoods with which our bedheads were equipped were basic models, but they were not at all uncomfortable. The only thing that was difficult to understand, in view of all this generous provision, was why Doctor Sung had seen fit to put the two of us together rather than giving us private rooms.

“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 differencefor 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 vividmoments, 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 testourselves 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 rightto 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 zestthere must have been in living in the bad old days. Not that I’m about to take up serious injury as a hobby, you understand. Once in a while is plenty.”

“Yes it is,” I agreed, shifting my now-mobile but furiously itching leg and wishing that nanomachines weren’t so slow to compensate for trifling but annoying sensations. “Once in a while is certainly enough for me. In fact, I for one will be quite content if it never happens again. I don’t think I need any more of the kind of enlightenment which comes from experiences like that. I was at ground zero in the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, you know—my ship was flipped over by the uprush of hot water when the mantle broke through the crust below us.”