“You can’t expect your masturbation fantasies to mesh completely. This is about getting beyond solitary sex. Go with it: where’s the harm? One day you’ll want to face a sexual partner in the real, and then you’ll be well. Meanwhile, you could be passing ‘Lessingham’ in reception—he comes to his meat sessions around your time—and not know it. That’s safety, and you never have to breach it. You two have proved that you can sustain an imaginary world together: it’s almost like being in love. I could argue that lucid dreaming, being in the fantasy world but not of it, is the next big step. Think about that.”
The clinic room had mirrored walls: more deliberate provocation. How much reality can you take?, the reflections asked. But she felt only a vague distaste for the woman she saw, at once hollow-cheeked and bloated, lying in the doctor’s foam couch. He was glancing over her records on his notebook screen: which meant the session was almost up.
“Still no overt sexual contact?”
“I’m not ready…” She stirred restlessly. “Is it a man or a woman?”
“Ah!” smiled Dr. Hamilton, waving a finger at her. “Naughty, naughty—”
He was the one who’d started taunting her, with his hints that the meat—”Lessingham”—might be near. She hated herself for asking a genuine question. It was her rule to give him no entry to her real thoughts. But Dr. Jim knew everything, without being told: every change in her brain chemistry, every effect on her body: sweaty palms, racing heart, damp underwear… The telltales on his damned autocue left her precious little dignity. Why do I subject myself to this? she wondered, disgusted. But in the virtuality she forgot utterly about Dr. Jim. She didn’t care who was watching. She had her brazen-hilted sword. She had the piercing intensity of dusk on the high plains, the snowlight on the mountains; the hard, warm silk of her own perfect limbs. She felt a brief complicity with “Lessingham.” She had a conviction that Dr. Jim didn’t play favorites. He despised all his patients equally… You get your kicks, doctor. But we have the freedom of dreamland.
“Sonja” read cards stuck in phone booths and store windows, in the tired little streets outside the building that housed the clinic. Relaxing massage by clean-shaven young man in Luxurious Surroundings… You can’t expect your fantasies to mesh exactly, the doctor said. But how can it work if two people disagree over something so vital as the difference between control and surrender? Her estranged husband used to say: “why don’t you just do it for me, as a favor. It wouldn’t hurt. Like making someone a cup of coffee…” Offer the steaming cup, turn around and lift my skirts, pull down my underwear. I’m ready. He opens his pants and slides it in, while his thumb is round in front rubbing me… I could enjoy that, thought “Sonja,” remembering the blithe abandon of her dreams. That’s the damned shame. If there were no nonsex consequences, I don’t know that there’s any limit to what I could enjoy… But all her husband had achieved was to make her feel she never wanted to make anyone, man, woman, or child, a cup of coffee ever again… In luxurious surroundings. That’s what I want. Sex without engagement, pleasure without consequences. It’s got to be possible.
She gazed at the cards, feeling uneasily that she’d have to give up this habit. She used to glance at them sidelong, now she’d pause and linger. She was getting desperate. She was lucky there was medically supervised virtuality sex to be had. She would be helpless prey in the wild world of the nets, and she’d never, ever risk trying one of these meat-numbers. And she had no intention of returning to her husband. Let him make his own coffee. She wouldn’t call that getting well. She turned, and caught the eye of a nicely dressed young woman standing next to her. They walked away quickly in opposite directions. Everybody’s having the same dreams…
In the foothills of the mountains, the world became green and sweet. They followed the course of a little river, that sometimes plunged far below their path, tumbling in white flurries in a narrow gorge; and sometimes ran beside them, racing smooth and clear over colored pebbles. Flowers clustered on the banks, birds darted in the thickets of wild rose and honeysuckle. They lead their riding animals and walked at ease: not speaking much. Sometimes the warrior woman’s flank would brush the man’s side: or he would lean for a moment, as if by chance, his hand on her shoulder. Then they would move deliberately apart, but they would smile at each other. Soon. Not yet…
They must be vigilant. The approaches to fortunate Zimiamvia were guarded. They could not expect to reach the pass unopposed. And the nights were haunted still. They made camp at a flat bend of the river, where the crags of the defile drew away, and they could see far up and down their valley. To the north, peaks of diamond and indigo reared above them. Their fire of aromatic wood burned brightly, as the white stars began to blossom.
“No one knows about the long-term effects,” she said. “It can’t be safe. At the least, we’re risking irreversible addiction, they warn you about that. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a cyberspace couch potato.”
“Nobody claims it’s safe. If it was safe, it wouldn’t be so intense.”
Their eyes met. “Sonja’s” barbarian simplicity combined surprisingly well with the man’s more elaborate furnishing. The consensual perceptual plenum was a flawless reality: the sound of the river, the clear silence of the mountain twilight…their two perfect bodies. She turned from him to gaze into the sweet-scented flames. The warrior-woman’s glorious vitality throbbed in her veins. The fire held worlds of its own, liquid furnaces: the sunward surface of Mercury.
“Have you ever been to a place like this in the real?”
He grimaced. “You’re kidding. In the real, I’m not a magic-wielding millionaire.”
Something howled. The bloodstopping cry was repeated. A taint of sickening foulness swept by them. They both shuddered, and drew closer together. “Sonja” knew the scientific explanation for the legendary virtuality-paranoia, the price you paid for the virtual world’s superreal, dreamlike richness. It was all down to heightened neurotransmitter levels, a positive feedback effect, psychic overheating. But the horrors were still horrors.
“The doctor says if we can talk like this, it means we’re getting well.”
He shook his head. “I’m not sick. It’s like you said. Virtuality’s addictive and I’m an addict. I’m getting my drug of choice safely, on prescription. That’s how I see it.”
All this time “Sonja” was in her apartment, lying in a foam couch with a visor over her head. The visor delivered compressed bursts of stimuli to her visual cortex: the other sense perceptions riding piggyback on the visual, triggering a whole complex of neuronal groups; tricking her mind/brain into believing the world of the dream was out there. The brain works like a computer. You cannot “see” a hippopotamus, until your system has retrieved the “hippopotamus” template from memory, and checked it against the incoming. Where does the “real” exist? In a sense this world was as real as the other… But the thought of “Lessingham’s” unknown body disturbed her. If he was too poor to lease good equipment, he might be lying in the clinic now in a grungy public cubicle… cathetered, and so forth: the sordid details.