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I’d suffered slightly from both the ailments he named. I was still awkwardly vulnerable to any psychosomatic condition that was readily available. My sensitivity had, however, served to make me so careful that I never looked upon the all-pervasive winter snows without a protective mask, and I had programed my household sloth to draw the blinds against the eternal days of late December and early January. An uneasy mind can sometimes be an advantage.
“It wasn’t your fault, Mister Majumdar,” I graciously insisted. “I suppose I must have been a little overconfident myself, or I’d never have slipped and fallen when the fracture became a collapse. One bound is all it would have required to take me clear. At least they were able to pull me out in a matter of minutes; you must have lain at the bottom of that crevasse for the better part of two days.”
“Very nearly,” he admitted. “At first I assumed that I could get out myself—when I found that I could not I took it for granted that the robots would cope. Who would ever have thought I’d need to summon human help in this day and age?”
“It might have been better if you’d lost consciousness sooner,” I pointed out.
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “I never like to trust these matters entirely to the judgment of machine intelligence. I’m not one of these people who’s so afraid of circumstance that they program their IT to black them out at the first sign of physical stress and consign their fate to the dutiful care of their telephone answering machines.”
“Neither am I,” I said, wondering if I were being subtly insulted, “but there are times when consciousness and courage increase our danger.”
“But they also enhance our experience,” Majumdar countered, with what seemed to me to be remarkable eagerness. “While I was waiting for real help to arrive I came round several times. At least, I think I did. The problem with being half-anesthetized is that it makes one very prone to hallucination. If I had been deeply asleep, it would be as if the whole affair never happened. One should remember these things properly, don’t you think? How else can we regard our experiences as complete? It was jolly cold, though. I had a thermosuit over my suitskin, but I’d have been much better in a reinforced costume like yours. My clothes were doing their absolute best to keep me warm, but the first law of thermodynamics doesn’t give you much slack when you’re at the bottom of a cleft, lying in the permafrost. I’ve got authentic frostbite in my toes, you know. Imagine that! Authentic frostbite.”
I tried to imagine it, but it wasn’t easy. He could hardly be in pain, so it was difficult to conjure up any notion of what it might feel like to have necrotized toes. It was equally difficult to figure out why he considered the possession of necrotized toes to be a kind of privilege and why he felt the need to tell me about it in such a salesmanlike ma
I could understand his apparent excitement, to some degree. We live such careful and ordered lives that the occasional minicatastrophe has considerable compensations. Mister Majumdar’s accident would give him something to talk about, something with which to make himself seem a little bit more interesting—but that wasn’t what he meant when he rattled on about making his experience more complete. He seemed to think that the frostbite might be interesting in itselfrather than as a mere datum that he could trot out at VE parties—but with my brain suspended in treacle and no left leg, I was in no condition to involve myself in mysteries.
My doctor, whose name was Ayesha Sung, reckoned that it would take a week for the crushed tissues in my leg to regenerate the bones and sinews.
“You’ll have to be immobilized for at least four days,” she told me, sternly. “The cell masses have to be returned to quasi-blastular i
She knew full well that I wasn’t a ballet dancer. She could easily have picked a less derisive example—skier, maybe, or climber.
“You were very lucky,” she added. “If you’d fallen headfirst, you’d be dead.”
“Fortunately,” I told her, unable to resist the temptation to be sarcastic, “I was standing on my feet when the ground gave way. I was in a hurry to rescue poor Mister Majumdar, so I hadn’t given the possibility of standing on my head much thought.”
“Very amusing,” she said, coldly. “If I offered a discount on my fee for a helpful attitude, you’d just have lost yours. You should try to be more like Mister Majumdar. All experience enriches us as it transforms us.”
“Thanks a lot, Mister Majumdar,” I said, when she’d gone.
“Call me Ziru,” was his only reply.
“Mortimer,” I offered in return, figuring that he could shorten it when he’d demonstrated a little more camaraderie. Then I repented, remembering that we were going to be together for several days and that it was at least thirty years since I’d last spent such a long time in the actual company of another human being. “You aren’t reallyenjoying having frostbite, are you?” I asked by way of making conversation. “You haveprogramed your IT to cut out the pain, I suppose.”
“Of course,” he said. “But cutting out pain isn’t just a practical issue, is it? It’s not just a straightforward matter of leaving the warning flash in place and then obliterating the rest.”
“Isn’t it?” I queried, having always thought that it was. Given that good IT is a far better monitor of internal damage than pain ever was, it had always seemed to me entirely reasonable that technologically sophisticated humans, old and new alike, should reserve pain responses to the triggering of withdrawal reflexes.
“Certainly not,” Majumdar said. “The fact that we don’t needpain any longer to inform us that all is not well within our internal being—a job for which it was always ludicrously ill-fitted—it doesn’t follow that it’s entirely useless and ought to be discarded. It’s a resource, which ought to be carefully explored, if only for aesthetic reasons.”
“Aesthetic reasons?” I echoed, in frank astonishment. “Co
“If that’s what you want to call it,” he replied, loftily. “But I’m not talking about anything as crude as trying to find a paradoxical pleasure in pain. What I’m talking about is taking care to learn what pain as painhas to teach us about who and what we are—and, more importantly, who and what we were.”
“The empire of fear hath the greatest of all despots set at its head,” I quoted, “whose name is Death, and his consort is named Pain.”
“Who said that?” Majumdar wanted to know—but not enough to wait for the answer. “A mortal, of course. We live in a different world now. Anyway, pain was always the handmaiden of life, whatever mortals thought. Uncontrolled suffering makes life unbearable, but controllable suffering— obedientpain—merely gives it an edge. When you take the trouble to get to know obedient pain, you discover that there are many different kinds. There’s a whole spectrum of neglected aesthetic experience in the multitudinous facets of disease and injury.”
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?”