Not, apparently, the posthumans who lived alongside the first few generations of ultrasmart machines.
So how could anyone know for sure, when he woke up to a morning of a day some little way advanced from my own youth, that he hadnt been taken away in his sleep and frozen down, not to be woken up again until the world had gone all the way in
the direction that it had already been going when he went to sleep? Even if he actually remembered being frozen down or thought he did where else could he possibly be but in the maze of uncertainty, incapable any longer of making any final decision as to what might be real and what might be fairy tale?
One thing of which a man of my day could be certain, however, was that if he remembered or thought he remembered two mutually contradictory accounts of an event, then at least one of them must be a damn lie. Statistically speaking, the probability that either of them was true was no more than a quarter. And even if one could not actually remember two mutually contradictory accounts, the possibility that one might at some stage in the future remember another and perhaps another and another and another implied that the probability that anything one perceived after any such awakening was true had to be reckoned less than a half.
Unlike the philosophers of old, therefore, the wise man of the post-VE era would bet on the falsehood every time.
Once a man of my time had fallen asleep, even if he were convinced that he had only fallen asleep for a single night, he could not help waking up in a fairy-tale world where everything was more likely to be false than to be true, more likely to be a tale than a biography, more likely to be a fantasy than a reality, more likely to be part of a lostory than part of a history.
All in all, therefore, I was not much worse off when I awoke on Excelsior, or inside Charity , than anyone in my situation would have been. Yes, I was living in a bizarre fairy tale but as the calculus of probability would have informed me that I was living in a fairy tale anyway, why should I be unduly perturbed by its bizarrerie? Should I not have been grateful? After all, if we are condemned by logic to live our lives as if they were stories, do we not have every reason to hope that the stories will make full use of our imagination? Would we not be within our rights to feel short-changed by fate if the stories in which we found ourselves were as dull and as relentlessly ordinary as the lives we had lived before we fell asleep?
Perhaps we should also hope that the stories in which we find ourselves will have happy endings but Im not so sure of that. Even mortals, once they enter into fairy tales, may hope to become emortal and what is emortality but a qualified immunity from endings of all kinds?
On due reflection and I speak as one who has been through the looking glass and back again more than once I think that people of my time, and maybe imaginative people of every time, should not go into fairy tales looking for endings at all, but should instead be content with the traveling, at least for as long as the traveling takes them to places that they could hardly have imagined before.
I think I would have come to that conclusion much earlier if my head hadnt hurt so much when my memories first became confused, and I feel that I should have arrived at it more rapidly once my head stopped hurting, had I not been so distracted but for what it may be worth, I give it to you now, in the hope that it might add a little extra spice to the rest of my story.
Thirty-Six
In the Forest of Confusion
When I woke up again, the first thing that hit me was the odor. I had faded out in the midst of the most appalling stink imaginable, but I came back into being buoyed up by lovely perfume.
The sense of smell is said to be the most primitive in our armory; it usually bothers us very little, but when it does its appeals are urgent and irresistible. I had talked to my old friend Damon Hart while I was trembling on the brink of Hell, the odor of my own decay dueting with crude pain; all I needed to be delivered to the doorstep of Heaven was the absence of a headache and the symphony of scents comprising a forest in spring. Logic suggests that human beings ought to prefer the odors of a savannah and a cooking fire but there is much in us that is older than the human, let alone the posthuman, and there is something in forests for which nostalgia is written in the fleshy tables of the human heart.
My host understood humans well enough to know that. That was why I woke into a forest. It was a virtual forest I never had the slightest doubt about that but it was an environment in which I felt perfectly at home. It was Arcadia, Eden, and the Earthly Paradise.
I opened my eyes, already knowing that I was going to see trees, and that I was going to find the sight delightful. I did.
That would have been the whole truth, instead of merely the truth, if it hadnt been for the snake. The patches of sky that I could see through