Mack Reynolds - After Utopia

“So what happens is, you speak into the mike telling all you know about what you want, as you did about Hasan Ben Sabbah and his gardens, and when you drop off into your dream, the computers take over.”

Tracy shook his head in wonderment, as he had been doing so often these past few days.

They had passed over the Straits of Hercules and now the pilot took over manual controls again.

Tracy indicated the hover craft. “How do these things work? Sooner or later, I’ll have to know.”

“Oh, they’re quite simple and quite safe, Tracy,” Edmonds said. “You could hardly have an accident if you wanted to. In case of danger, the computers take over immediately, even if you’re on manual control.” He pointed out the method of starting up, the lift lever, the accelerator, what amounted to a brake.

Tracy said, “How about this automatic stuff?”

“That’s simplest. “You first dial the coordinates of your destination and the computers, once again, take over.”

“Yeah,” Tracy said. “But suppose you don’t know the coordinates of your destination?”

“Then you simply dial Information and ask for them. I usually like to land and take off manually, but there’s no real need of it, I shouldn’t think. The hover craft would have landed at exactly the point before the garage where we took off from the Stein house. There’s a landing pad there. If there is no automated landing pad where you wish to go, you must switch over to manual and land yourself.”

They were approaching the Stein home and now whisked in to a landing. They went on into the living room and found Betty Stein, wrapped up in a night robe with a drink handy to her on a cocktail table, watching the life-size tri-di screen which took up the greater part of one wall. She flicked the set off when they entered.

She looked at Tracy, bit of mockery in her eyes. “Well,” she said. “And did you have fun?”

“Yes,” he told her.

And what impressed you most about out decadent modern society?” she said.

“The Dream Palaces.”

Jo Edmonds yawned and said, “I’m off to sleep. Has the academician already gone?”

“Yes. He took off early.” She looked back to Tracy. “He suggested that you pop into bed as soon as you returned, as well. He’s still afraid that you’ll overestimate your strength. And, if my guess is correct, you probably now feel something like a wet washcloth.”

Edmonds, still yawning, drifted off, but Tracy went over to the bar and dialed himself a nightcap.

He came back with it to sit across from her and said, “I do. But I can’t understand why. If it didn’t really happen, why should I feel tired?”

Her voice still mocking, she said, “How many orgasms did you have?”

He looked at her sourly. “At least six, over a period of two hours time.”

“What a man,” she said. “Well, the truth is that though your body wasn’t really in action, psychologistically the experience happened to you and you feel as tired as you should.”

He sipped his drink, then said, “This fascinates me. Look, why do people bother with such things as narcotics, group sex, small-time sadism, and gladiator fights, not to speak of gourmet restaurants? Group sex? I had more group sex in that two hours than ordinarily I could have gone through in a week. And with the most beautiful broads possible. I was even equipped with a super-sized tool, a bigger one than I have in the ordinary world. Sadism? Why bother with a bit of whipping each other? Why not go back to the original, the works of the Marquis de Sade? From what Jo told me, the dream you have doesn’t have to have any resemblance to reality, it can be strictly fiction. Gourmet food? Why not go back to the days of Nero and sit in on some of his banquets, instead of eating live shrimp?”

She nodded at the validity of his question and said, “The Dream Palaces have only been going for about five years. They are taking over tremendously. The Pleasure Centers are having a time building them fast enough, even with modern means of construction. They’re always packed. But some people haven’t got onto the hang of them as yet, to the point of being able to milk the possibilities completely.”

He took another pull at his drink and said, “I can’t see why these programmed dreams should be all bad. They’d be a wonderful method of education. Why, an anthropologist could go back to Neolithic times and study the Stone Age. A historian could take in at first hand the siege of Troy.”

She said, “All the information that would be available to such scholars is in the data banks. You can’t get more in a dream than is in those banks.”

‘“Sure,” he said doggedly, “but it’s the way in which you acquire it. You see, you participate in it. That’s a far cry from just reading about it on an autoteacher screen.”

“I’ve heard the point made before,” she admitted, “and it has a certain amount of validity for some people. I knew one fellow who started off dreaming he was Columbus first sighting land. It must have been quite a thrill. But that’s how the addicts start; soon they go on to more stupendous things. I knew another fellow who first became an Eskimo, hunting seal and walrus, building igloos and that sort of thing. Within a month, he was being Napoleon at Waterloo and defeating Wellington… somewhat of a switch on history. That so intrigued him that he fought all of Napoleon’s battles, one by one, and from there went on to battles that had never happened. Among other things, he had our little corporal invading North America and conquering the United States, and Canada to boot. What he’s dreaming up now, God only knows. I haven’t seen him for six months. He spends eight hours out of the twenty-four in programmed dreams. He is in real life just long enough to eat, get minimum exercise, get some true sleep, and then he’s back to his dreams. He used to be a notable scholar.”

Tracy said, “What happens to those who didn’t even start off being scholars? The ordinary man or woman in the street?”

She said in disgust, “I had one male friend… he used to be a lover of mine… who set off to bed every famous beautiful woman in history. He started with Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, wound his way up to Cleopatra and Messalina and then onward to such notables as Agnes Sorel, Madam Du Barry, Catherine the Great, Madame Pompadour, Nell Gwen, and on and on. Finally, he ran out of names of the most beautiful women he knew of and began studying up on the subject. He went down the list, reading all he could find in the data banks on famous courtesans, prostitutes and such. One by one he bedded them all. Then he got into fictional characters. You’ll never believe this, he even took on Minnie Ha Ha, the Indian princess girl friend of Hiawatha.”

“He must have had a time for himself,” Tracy laughed, finishing his drink.

“That’s right,” she said bitterly. “But he no longer had time or desire for real women. He was no longer my lover, nor anyone else’s in the real world.”

“Yeah,” Tracy said, standing. “I got the implications when you were telling me the story. There must be quite an impact on the birth rate.”

“Birth rate,” she said, still bitterly. “What birth rate?”

He had been about to leave, but now he came to a halt. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that the birth rate has been falling off to the vanishing point. It’s not just that our most potent men spend so much time living it up in harems in Turkey or Araby, but we women aren’t exactly immune. There are those among us who would rather spend a night with Hercules or Paul Bunyon than with a truly live, breathing, normal man.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s not the all of it. The Dream Palaces are only one factor. Who in this hedonistic world of ours wants to go through the trouble of childbirth and raising a child? A decreasing number. Frankly, I have no special desire in that direction myself. And I’m comparatively conservative.”