Secrets; I Tried To Keep Us Together, You Were Busy Keeping Secrets

Falls The Shadow

The last thing Edmund sees before the lance takes him full in the chest is the glint in his opponent's eyes behind the visor. He should have been concentrating on his own lance-tip, guiding it onto its target in the split second before the riders pass. But he has always been more interested in the techniques of the joust than in its outcome. What makes a participant successful? Quick reactions? Absence of fear? An unusual ability to concentrate?

A few seconds later, Arthur was already standing over him, grinning.

"You're not getting any better," he said. "That's eight in a row."

"Good on you!" Edmund said hoarsely, shaking his head. He felt in mild shock, and in pain from psychosomatic bruising. He pulled himself up, brushing aside the headpiece.

"Why do you think that is?" he asked.

"Easy," Arthur replied. "You're half-hearted - or scared, if you don't mind my saying so."

"And you're not scared?" said Edmund.

"Why should I be?" Arthur answered. "It's only a simulation."

And that, thought Edmund, was the problem. How could one really understand the subtleties of jousting - or of real combat, if it came to that - when those taking part knew there was absolutely no danger of their being hurt or killed? You needed a programme that made simulations feel absolutely real - which completely removed awareness of their being simulations.

Edmund's work as a psycho-historian had led him to the same conclusion on several occasions. When he had been researching the plague years in medieval Europe, volunteers had played the parts of barons, burghers, monks and peasants in complex and convincing multi-participant simulations - the processing power of the equipment at his disposal was awesome. A random selection of the cast was programmed to become infected with Yersina pestis, almost all then dying.

The participants had been monitored within the simulation, and interviewed afterwards. Yet it had been impossible to improve on the written records of how people actually perceived their situations at the time. Those taking part were only too well aware that they had not contracted the plague and were not dying; also that the end of the world was not at hand, that disease was not a punishment for sin, and that the Jews were innocent. However good the simulations, every participant had an innate defence mechanism against illusions that seemed to threaten their lives.

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Edmund had put out feelers to various software houses in the hope that one of them would have made a helpful breakthrough in countering what he had come to think of as the "awareness problem". None had. Indeed he was given to understand that he was asking for something which conflicted with established ethical standards: entirely removing the ability to tell what was real risked creating lasting psychoses. After a number of futile runs with various unsatisfactory products, Edmund was ready to abandon the whole approach.

Sitting at the small work-station he shared with Arthur Bradley in the School's simulation lab, he looked unhappily down the rows of recliners, each with its fold-over isolation pod and wired-in headset. Use of the costly facility was strictly rationed. It had taken years of preparation, followed by months of negotiation, to get his project approved. Had all that time been wasted?

Almost from the first, he had decided to participate in the simulations himself. Besides being able to observe the test subjects directly within each scenario, it had given him the opportunity to tackle, personally, the awareness problem. And, to some extent, he had succeeded. In the jousts with Arthur, he had actually begun to feel - or at least simulate the feeling of - fear. That, as Arthur had pointed out, was why he was losing. But finding a way to generate the ability in others had proved beyond him.