Harry Turtledove - The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

He waited again, maybe to let us deny it. If he’d kept on waiting for that, he’d have had a long wait He saw as much himself and smiled, exposing a formidable mouthful of yellowish teeth. “Virtuous reality, my friends, lets us simulate the best of the world; it creates a plane neither fully of This Side nor of the Other, whereon, for example, a wounded spirit may meet and communicate with us while not having to return fully to the locus of its misfortune.”

“How do we go about reaching this, uh, virtuous reality?”

I asked.

“Madame Ruth and I shall be your guides.” Cholmondeley smiled again, even more toothily than before. “If you will just come over to the table there, sit around it, and place a helmet over your head—”

The prospect did not fill me with enthusiasm, but I went over to the table anyhow. As I sat down on one of the hard Constabulary Department chairs, Madame Ruth said, “Once you put on your helmet, take the hands of the people to either side of you. We’ll need an accomplished circle to access virtuous reality.”

I reached for the helmet nearest me. It was heavier than I’d expected; maybe the weight lay in those ridiculous earpieces. I slipped it on. It seemed to conform to my face. I’d expected to be blind; I hadn’t expected to be deaf as well.

But the helmet seemed to suck away all my senses, leaving me a void waiting to be filled.

Distantly, I remembered what Madame Ruth had told us to do. I was sitting between Brother Vahan and Nigel Cholmondeley. I made myself reach out to take their hands, though I could hardly tell if my own were moving.

I found Brother Vahan’s hand first His grip was warm and strong; it helped remind me I still needed to get hold of Cholmondeley. I fought against the apathy the helmet imposed on me. At last, after what seemed a very long time, my fingers brushed his. His bones were thin, delicate, almost birdlike; I was afraid I’d hurt him if I put any pressure on them.

Then I waited another long-seeming while. I’d expected things to start happening as soon as my hands joined my neighbors’, but it didn’t work that way. I still lingered, my senses vitiated by the helmet. After a while, I began to wonder whether I was still touching the abbot and the channeler.

I thought so, but it was hard to be sure.

All at once, color and sound and touch and all my other senses came flooding back. I found out later that that was the instant in which the last two of us finally took each other’s hands, completing the circle, as Madame Ruth had said. At the time, I was just relieved to return to… well, where had I returned to?

Wherever it was, it wasn’t dingy old Interrogation Room Two. It was a garden, the most beautiful I’d ever seen. Colors seemed brighter than life, sounds clearer and sweeter, smells as sharp and informative as if they came through a cat’s nose instead of my own.

“Welcome, friends, to the world of virtuous reality,” Nigel Cholmondeley said. Suddenly I could see him, though he hadn’t been there a moment before. He still looked like himself, but somehow he was handsome now instead of horsefaced.

This will be a new experience for you, so look around,”

Madame Ruth chimed in. She too appeared when she spoke.

The big city had vanished from her accent, as had the cap from her tooth, and I saw that about sixty percent of the rest other had disappeared, too. She was still Madame Ruth, as Cholmondeley was still Cholmondeley, but now she looked good.

“Amazing,” Legate Kawaguchi murmured softly, which made him spring into view. While remaining himself, he also looked like a recruiting poster for the Angels City Constabulary Department no cynicism was left on his face, and no tiredness, either.

This is—remarkable,” I said. I presume that let me become visible to the others, but not to myself: as far as I could tell, I remained a disembodied viewpoint Too bad; I would have liked finding out what an idealized version of me looked like.

“Let us proceed,” Brother Vahan said. Now I saw him, too.

“He doesn’t look any different!” I exclaimed, which was true: the abbot remained a careworn man in a dark robe.

Nigel Cholmondeley spoke with enormous respect “In virtuous reality, only those who are themselves trufy virtuous before the experience have their seeming unchanged during it” Suddenly I wondered how much I’d altered to my companions in this strange place. Maybe I didn’t want to be idealized after all.

Then all such petty concerns faded into insignificance.

You see, I saw a serpent in the garden, and—I don’t quite know how to explain this, but it’s true—the serpent wasn’t crawling on its belly. This isn’t just a garden,” I said, awe in my voice as the realization crashed over me. This is The Garden.”

“That’s right—very good.” Madame Ruth sounded pleased I’d caught on so fast “Virtuous reality has translated you to a simulacrum of the place mankind enjoyed before the Original Sin, while we were truly virtuous ourselves.”

“I am not sure I approve,” Brother Vahan said heavily.

“The theological implications are—troubling.”

“It’s only a thaumaturgical simulation, a symbol, if you will,” Cholmondeley assure him. “We don’t pretend otherwise. The test of a symbol is its utility, and we have found this one to be of enormous value. On that basis, will you bear with us?”

“On that basis, yes,” the abbot said, but if he was happy about it, he concealed the fact very well.

“Good. Without the willing consent of the participants, the simulation is all too likely to break down, which would precipitate us back into the mundane world where, sadly, virtue is less manifest,” Cholmondeley said. “And, as I said, virtuous reality can be valuable—as you see.” He pointed.

Coming through the trees was Erasmus. In the strange space of virtuous reality, the scriptorium spirit seemed as real and solid as any of the rest of us—more real and solid than I seemed to myself. Brother Vahan made a choked noise and ran toward the spirit. Erasmus ran toward the abbot, too; they embraced.

“I can feel him!” Brother Vahan exclaimed. Finding his old friend palpable seemed to wipe away his reservations about virtuous reality at a stroke.

While Brother Vahan greeted Erasmus, I took a longer look at the trees from which the scriptorium spirit had emerged. I recognized some of them; orange and lemon, pomegranate and date palm. But others were strange to me, both in appearance and in the scents that wafted from their fruits and flowers to my nose.

I wondered if the Tree of Knowledge grew in this version of the Garden, and what would happen if I tasted of it. Haw to ask that serpent, I thought but when I looked around for if it was gone. Just as well, I suppose.

“I grieve that you were wounded,” Brother Vahan was saying. We all gathered around him and Erasmus. The abbot went on, “Never in my worst nightmare did I imagine evil being so bold as to assail our peaceful monastery.”

“Nor I,” Erasmus answered mournfully. I’d never heard him speak till that moment on This Side, he’d manifested himself only with written words on the ground glass. His apparent voice perfectly fit his studious appearance and the spectacles he affected: it was dry, serious, on the pedantic side. If you imagine Michael Manstein as a scriptorium spirit you’re dose.

“Are you in pain now?” Brother Vahan asked anxiously.

“No. Pain, I think, is impermissible in this remarkable place.” Erasmus peered from one of us to the next. “I recognize here Inspector Fisher of the Environmental Perfection Agency, and this other gentleman’s semblance is also somehow familiar to me, although I do not know his name.”