The Dragon Man by Brian Stableford Page A

send them tumbling across the sky.
    For the first time in her life, Sara was struck by the sensation that this particular virtual world was actually more real than the actual one. She was old enough to know that the sensation was subjective, arising as much from the particular way she was paying attention as the cleverness of Father Lemuel’s cocoon and the temporary IT, but did make her wonder why she never attended to her actual surroundings with as much intensity...and the answer, she realized, was that her actual surroundings were too familiar, that she had no choice but to take them for granted because that was the essence of her relationship with them. This was different; it had a dramatic quality that actuality could only produce in circumstances so extreme as to be terrifying. Only a virtual world could offer this special kind of vividness without anything but the most superficial, graceful and entertaining sense of threat. This was a purer kind of excitement than any available outside a cocoon.
    Was that, she wondered, why people like Father Lemuel found themselves spending more and more time in virtual worlds, less and less in the real one. And what kind of virtual worlds did Father Lemuel live in, anyhow? Did he also ride dragons, or did he have better things to do?
    It was, of course, impossible to ask. She was old enough now to know where the most significant taboos of adult life were set out, and to steer well clear of any violation.
    Then the dragon began to descend again. It was, she had to suppose, a long way from home—much further than she was. Perhaps it would pick up another rider before it set off on the journey—or perhaps, for now, it had earned a rest.
    “How was it?” Father Lemuel asked, when Sara emerged from the cocoon, stumbling as she readjusted to the drag of actual gravity.
    “It was great,” she said, trying hard to sound suitably enthusiastic, so that Father Lemuel would think that his money had been well-spent. Actually, she felt dazed and disconcerted, not yet ready to evaluate the experience accurately.
    Father Lemuel nodded, understandingly. “But not so very much different from watching them through a picture window?” he suggested. “Not quite as gripping as climbing the hometree.”
    Sara looked up at her oldest father with a slight frown, but she didn’t say anything. She wondered exactly how good he was at following the train of her thought.
    “It was different,” she assured him. “The new IT made it feel much more real.”
    “It’s new to you,” Father Lemuel observed, implying that it was far from new to him. “You’ll get used to it.” Obviously, her parents—one of them, at least—were not as innocent in the ways of “entertainment IT” as Sara had assumed.
    “If you get used to it...,” she began, before the suspicion that she might be asking a forbidden question made her pause.
    Father Lemuel didn’t seem to mind the personal nature of the implicit enquiry. “Why do I spend so much of my time in virtual worlds, if the experience is always inferior?” he finished for her. “Some people argue that it ought not to be reckoned inferior just because it’s different, but that isn’t really the point. All VW addicts point out there’s an awful lot you can do in the virtual world that you wouldn’t attempt to do in the real world because it would be too dangerous—but that isn’t really the point either. You already understand that the real purpose of synthesized experience is to open up opportunities that have no parallel in the real world. Dragonriding is only the first step. In a VW you can reduce yourself to the size of an insect or a bacterium, ride a spacecraft through the solar system and beyond, etcetera, etcetera...and you can visit hypothetical worlds very different from ours, where everything—including the laws of physics—has been altered, not according to anyone’s constructive imagination but by manipulating the generative code. Do