Only two people had been onstage at the time: the romantic leads, tenor and soprano, both members of the Cosmic Christ. According to the script, a shot from an arquebus was supposed to interrupt their tender scene. The arquebus was a medieval weapon, and nobody in Papa’s Pride, or for that matter back on Old Earth at the time of Liftaway, had ever heard one fired, so the company’s backstage crew were using the same sound effect as for a standard loud gunshot. At first Sister Harriet thought they had tried something different this time, and made a quick mental note to tell them, “Too soon—wait for ‘I spake but to try thee—’ and tone it down some, we don’t want the audience thinking the ship’s shielding just failed and let a chunk of space debris crash through.”
But it turned out not to have been the planned sound effect. It had been that heavy ladder falling, catching Steve Davis right on the temple and, they’d thought, knocking Bob Lozinski out, too. Sister Harriet had been genuinely surprised when the scans showed Lozinski with no sign of concussion, leaving his coma a mystery.
“If I’d only cast Steve as Point,” Sister Harriet kept repeating. “He wanted Jack Point—he’d played it back in ship years three to five—there isn’t any reason Point shouldn’t have a few gray hairs—but I wanted to try it with a younger man this time…especially after giving Bunthorne to Steve last year—they’d both read for it, Steve and Bob…if Steve had just been standing a little farther back—the lieutenant goes on a few minutes before Point and Shadbolt—he might’ve still been alive.”
“And whoever else you had playing his role might’ve died instead,” Chandra tried pointing out.
“Maybe…maybe not…” The sister gave a shaky smile. “It’s really futile, after all, the ‘might have been’ game.”
* * * *
All that had been before Chandra’s chat with Osborne. Now, Chandra having shared with the nurse and Antique Terra director what Deuteronomy Osborne had had to say, Misaki told Sister Harriet, “So you see, if Deuces is right, it wouldn’t have made any difference what part you’d had Steve playing.”
Sister Harriet sighed. “At least he would have gone out in a role he really liked. He didn’t enjoy playing the lieutenant nearly as much.”
“Maybe not the role,” said Chandra, “but he was still doing the kind of work he liked, and that’s maybe the best any of us can hope for at the moment of death.”
“Unless it’s going into deep sleep as a future colony treasure,” Misaki remarked.
“Even if,” Chandra replied. “Even if deep sleep and revival works, a person still has to die sometime, sooner or later. Meanwhile. If there’s anything solid beneath Osborne’s theory, and if it’s even half as big as he’s afraid, we’d better do everything we can to find out what it is.… I think it might be time to risk trying that last download from Old Earth.”
“‘That last download’?” asked Sister Harriet. At almost the same instant, Misaki said, “Dr. Falcon, are you sure?”
* * * *
As nearly as they understood it, it was a refinement on the old method of sharing virtual realities, but whether for recreational, or therapeutic, or psychoanalytic purposes, or some combination of all three, they hadn’t entirely figured out. By the time Old Earth uploaded this one to them, thought patterns back there seemed to have morphed and fluxed almost beyond recognition.
Of course, for two or more participants to share a virtual reality had already been popular before Liftaway, and was standard recreational procedure in the uptown and downtown getaway pods of Papa’s Pride: the hope of keeping morale balanced was worth the power it took to run the equipment. But these were preprogrammed virtual realities, chiefly from computer files of Old Earth sites and sights: the Louvre, Bayreuth, the Grand Canyon. Also specific historical recreations of the Crystal Palace, the original ancient Grecian Olympics, the Battle of Gettysburg, and so on. And of course it was popular for people to create their own made-up worlds and share them with other people…once they were created and filed. What the last download from Old Earth seemed to provide was a modification allowing new auto-fictional reality to be molded from one user’s mind, then one or more other people to experience and actually lend input while it was actually being created—a sort of simulation of that elusive wisp, the shared sleep-dream. It had been a philosophical and scientific daydream for so long, it was only surprising they had taken so much time developing it, back on Old Earth where power supplies were less strictly conserved.
The modifications of the virtual reality equipment in Papa’s Pride looked feasible, and Dr. Falcon thought they had effected them well enough. And the directions for building the virtual reality from one person’s brain and opening it for another brain’s input seemed as nearly straightforward as anything could seem in downloads from Old Earth by this time, when the language at the uploading end had morphed and fluxed even more, perhaps, than the thought patterns, and the people uploading had had to translate into the language that had become almost as archaic as Linear B to the people back on Old Earth.
Chandra had even tested it, once, with Dr. Omar Tarkindar, who had been her lover for a brief time before his laying to sleep with premature symptoms of Riker’s syndrome. They had shared a visit to the Mahabharata, and it had worked quite well. But they had had no motive beyond testing the process, seeing how well it worked for them. Chandra had not had the equipment out since. Power was too precious in Papa’s Pride.
She had thought about it, wondered if it might offer enough potential for boosting morale over and beyond what the standard virtual realities provided to be worth the risk of magnifying and spreading grimmer kinds of fantasizing…but time was precious, too, even on a long, long journey through galactic light-years, and the pair of virtual-sensory kits with their specially modified modems had stayed unused in a box in medical research storage.
Dr. Chandra Falcon led the way to get them out now.
Chapter 2
Building a Fantasy
“This really should have his conscious input,” Chandra mused. Too bad that getting him back to consciousness was one of their goals. “The next best thing, I suppose, will be to adapt some sort of guided meditation technique.”
“Why don’t you built a world to start with,” Misaki wanted to know, “and bring him into yours.”
“I already considered that. Whether our first goal is to bring him out of coma or find out what he knows, I think our likeliest starting point is in his imagination rather than mine. I’d also like some kind of non-threatening world, I think. As non-threatening as possible.”
“He likes light theater of all kinds,” Sister Harriet suggested, “but Gilbert and Sullivan has always been his first love.”
“Sounds like an idea.” Chandra nodded. “But—your present show, the one in rehearsal when all this happened—that’s the grim one of the series, isn’t it? Heavier mood, unhappy ending?”
Harriet nodded. “For Jack Point, at least. The character Bob was playing.”
“I want to aim for the lighter mood of the others. We can try playing music from H.M.S. Pinafore or The Pirates of Penzance.”
“How about Pineapple Poll?” the director suggested. “A ballet made up of bits from all the operas, a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan sampler.”
“Worth a try.” No need to ask whether shipnet had it. Shipnet had everything available to Old Earth’s internet at the time of Liftaway and everything downloaded over the years they could still get reliable downloads. Text, graphics, and sound, even virtual 3-D.
“What kind of input do you plan to supply in this world?” asked Misaki.
Chandra smiled. “For one thing, I plan to use Dr. Charles ‘Chuck’ Falcon.”
“Charles?” Harriet