Free The John Varley Reader by John Varley Page A

booklet said was true—and he might as well believe it—it would hurt and he would not wake up. He pinched himself anyway. It hurt.
    If he understood this right, everything around him was the product of his imagination. Somewhere, a woman was sitting at a computer input and talking to him in normal language, which came to his brain in the form of electron pulses it could not cope with and so edited into forms he was conversant with. He was analogizing like mad. He wondered if he had caught it from the teacher, if analogies were contagious.
    â€œWhat the hell’s wrong with a simple voice from the air?” he wondered aloud. He got no response, and was rather glad. He’d had enough mysteriousness for now. And on second thought, a voice from the air would probably scare the pants off him.
    He decided his brain must know what it was doing. After all, the hand startled him but he hadn’t panicked. He could see it, and he trusted his visual sense more than he did voices from the air, a classical sign of insanity if ever there was one.
    He got up and went to the wall. The letters of fire were gone, but the black smudge of the erasure was still there. He sniffed it: carbon. He fingered the rough paper of the pamphlet, tore off a corner, put it in his mouth and chewed it. It tasted like paper.
    He sat down and filled out the coupon and tossed it to the mailtube.
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Fingal didn’t get angry about it until he was at the office. He was an easygoing person, slow to boil. But he finally reached a point where he had to say something.
    Everything had been so normal he wanted to laugh. All his friends and acquaintances were there, doing exactly what he would have expected them to be doing. What amazed and bemused him was the number and variety of spear carriers, minor players in this internal soap opera. The extras that his mind had cooked up to people the crowded corridors, like the man he didn’t know who had bumped into him on the tube to work, apologized, and disappeared, presumably back into the bowels of his imagination.
    There was nothing he could do to vent his anger but test the whole absurd setup. There was doubt lingering in his mind that the whole morning had been a fugue, a temporary lapse into dreamland. Maybe he’d never gone to Kenya, after all, and his mind was playing tricks on him. To get him there, or keep him away? He didn’t know, but he could worry about that if the test failed.
    He stood up at his desk terminal, which was in the third column of the fifteenth row of other identical desks, each with its diligent worker. He held up his hands and whistled. Everyone looked up.
    â€œI don’t believe in you,” he screeched. He picked up a stack of tapes on his desk and hurled them at Felicia Nahum at the desk next to his. Felicia was a good friend of his, and she registered the proper shock until the tapes hit her. Then she melted. He looked around the room and saw that everything had stopped like a freeze-frame in a motion picture.
    He sat down and drummed his fingers on his desk top. His heart was pounding and his face was flushed. For an awful moment he had thought he was wrong. He began to calm down, glancing up every few seconds to be sure the world really had stopped.
    In three minutes he was in a cold sweat. What the hell had he proved? That this morning had been real, or that he really was crazy? It dawned on him that he would never be able to test the assumptions under which he lived.
    A line of print flashed across his terminal.
    â€œBut when could you ever do so, Mr. Fingal?”
    â€œMs. Joachim?” he shouted, looking around him. “Where are you? I’m afraid.”
    â€œYou mustn’t be,” the terminal printed. “Calm yourself. You have a strong sense of reality, remember? Think about this: even before today, how could you be sure the world you saw was not the result of catatonic delusions? Do you see what I mean? The question