Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  I blundered out of the room more by feel than sight. Company was the last thing I wanted, but Belinda followed me.

  “You can’t leave it like that,” she said. “What about electrical currents?”

  She wanted to talk. Well, why not? What did it matter? What did anything matter?

  “The electrical currents that are sent to an Adestis unit are a few milliwatts,” I said. “But the ones that are received at the unit, and the magnetic fields they generate, are orders of magnitude smaller than that. They’re minute—and almost exactly the size of the fields and currents within the human brain. When Miriam sent nanodocs into her own brain, they were subject to two different sets of inputs, one arriving fractionally later than the other. In her case that set up a resonance which left both her brain and the nanodocs incapable of functioning normally. She was trapped. Maybe she even knew that she was trapped.

  “In our case it worked differently. Her brain currents interfered with our nanodoc operation, so we lost control, but there was no resonance and no loss of consciousness.

  “All I did was break out of Adestis mode and reset the input currents to the highest level on my unit. When I went back in there was still a disturbance from Miriam, but it was one small enough for me to be able to handle.”

  Belinda was nodding, but she was beginning to stare at the door to the next room. “You know, Tom has to hear this, too.”

  “He’ll hear it. Just now he has other things on his mind.”

  I don’t know how I sounded, but it was enough to earn Belinda Lee’s full attention.

  “What is it with you and Tom? I thought you hadn’t even met until today.”

  “You really don’t know? I’d have expected it to be the talk of the hospital.” And then, when she gaped at me, “Miriam Pearce and Tom Abernathy”—he had opened the door and was walking into the room, but it was too late to stop—“are lovers.”

  “Tom and Miriam Pearce.” Belinda exploded. “Over my dead body—and over his, if it’s ever true.”

  She rushed to his side and grabbed him possessively by the arm. “He’s mine. He’s my lover, and no one else’s.”

  Abernathy must have wondered what he had walked into. Whatever it was, he didn’t care for it. “My God, Belinda! You know what we agreed. Shout it out, so the whole hospital hears you.” He actually blushed when he looked at me, something I had not seen on a mature male for a long time. And then his expression slowly changed, to an odd mixture of satisfaction and defiant pride.

  “It’s his fault.” She was pointing at me. “He told me that you and Miriam Pearce are lovers!”

  “Miriam and me? No way! Honest, Belinda, there’s nothing between us—there never has been.”

  “I hope not. But I know she doesn’t have a man of her own.” Belinda was persuaded. Almost. “And she did say to you, ‘I knew you’d come and save me.’”

  “To me? What a joke that’d be! I was as much use inside her head as a dead duck. She wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to him. She said his name, Clancy, right after you two left. I came out here to get him.”

  “She doesn’t have a man—doesn’t have a lover?” That was me, not Belinda. Shock slows comprehension.

  “Not anymore. She once told me she had some guy, years ago, but he dumped her. Her family did something terrible to him. He wouldn’t see her, didn’t answer phone calls. In the end she just gave up.”

  “I thought a Pearce family member could get absolutely anything.” That was Belinda, too cynical for her years.

  Tom Abernathy patted her arm. With their secret out, his attitude was changing. “Almost anything. Miriam told me that a billionairess can have any man in the world. Except the one she wants.”

  “Does she want you?” Belinda had to be sure. But long-suffering Tom Abernathy was spared the need to offer that reassurance, because again one of the hospital staff came running through from the other room.

  “Dr. Abernathy,” he said. “She’s finally waking up. Really waking up this time.”

  Tom and Belinda hurried away. I followed, more slowly.

  Finally waking up. Really waking up. If only that had happened years ago, before it was too late.

  I walked to the open door. Tom Abernathy was at the bedside. Miriam was sitting up, pale blue eyes wide open and searching. I stood rooted on the threshold. Belinda Lee was coming toward me, suddenly knowing, one hand raised.

  I forgot how to breathe.

  Sleeping Beauty slept for a whole century, and that still worked out fine.

  Perhaps for some things it is never too late.

  Afterword to “Deep Safari”

  Nature is not cruel. Animals merely do what they have to do to ensure their food supply and the perpetuation of the species. If we see them as cruel, it is only because humans are capable of conscious cruelty. We apply our own perspective and imagine that animals, like humans, are able to know of—even perhaps enjoy—the pain that they are inflicting on another living being.

  Right. That’s the rational side of me taken care of. The irrational side, which rules half my days and all my nights, is convinced that the world of spiders and ants and centipedes is more bloodthirsty and somehow infinitely more cruel than the world of humans, elephants, and tigers. It may be no more than word association. Anything smaller than a shrew is going to be a cold-blooded animal, and that adjective carries two meanings.

  At any rate and for whatever reason, while I can imagine facing a lion or a bear and hoping to survive the encounter, the very idea of tackling a praying mantis or a spider as tall as I am reduces me to a quivering jelly. Which is obviously why I have been led to write about such microcombat in this story and in the novel The Mind Pool, where the game of Adestis is also played.

  One other small point for anyone curious about the name of the game: Adestis is simply Latin for You are present.

  Beyond the Golden Road

  THE WISE MEN in the court of the Great Khan say that Life and Death are the two great arcs of the world. Close to each other at birth, they move apart in middle life, and in old age they converge again and finally meet.

  I am too young to be a sage, and I do not question the words of wise men and great philosophers. But when we finally stumbled across the merchant caravan in the wastes of the Tarim Desert, I knew that the arcs of Life and Death for me, a young man, stood no more than a fingernail apart.

  We had been walking for six days, the last two without water. According to the soldier Ahmes, the desert should have been no more than four days travel wide. Long since we ought to have emerged from its eastern margin and found the Ghadi oasis. Instead we were dying under a late-October sun.

  Ahmes was not a man to understand guilt. He strode on, still strong and erect, still carrying his curved Damascene sword and leather shield. A gray-black layer of dust covered his cheeks and caked around his lips, but his face was as cheerful as ever. He was sucking on a smooth pebble, and now and again he would turn to us and smile his mysterious crinkle-eyed grin of white teeth.

  I had carried most of our baggage, and all of the water for as long as we had water. Now I was staggering, close to collapse. Johannes, who does feel guilt—much too acutely—knew how near I was to giving up. He had an arm around me, half-carrying me forward, while he whispered encouraging words. “A little farther, Dari,” he said, “it cannot be more than another hour or two. We have come too far, you and I, to be stopped now.” And then, when I was near weeping with pain and thirst and weariness, “I am sorry I brought you here. But courage, little Dari. This too shall pass.”

  He liked Ahmes. He had trusted him since we first met in the freezing heights of the Hindu Kush, winding our way east through the high snowy passes and glittering glaciers. Ahmes had led us then on a supposed shortcut, one that left us lost and shivering on a mountainside, in air so thin and clear and cold that the midday sky looked purple-black, and the leaves of the flowering plants were as brittle as dried tea. We had been lucky to survive that day,
and had done it only by taking a hair-raising slide down three thousand feet of a blind snow-slope. It could have ended in a precipice. The luck of Ahmes, it ended in soft snow and, just below, a pleasant valley.

  Johannes believed him even now, when we had been led so far astray that our lives were again in terrible danger. He could not see past that bluff, cheerful exterior to the bloody, reckless warrior inside. But I knew Ahmes. I had seen men like him all my life, ever since I was a mewling baby.

  And now Ahmes was going to be the death of us all.

  I leaned my head against Johannes’s shoulder. He would always be kind to me, but he would not listen, would not think of me as a man. I was still “little Dari,” even though I had grown half a head since we set out from Acre more than a year ago. He had never taken me seriously, and now there could never be a chance for such a thing.

  “Eh-hey!” The shout broke into my thoughts. Ahmes had been walking twenty paces ahead, and now he turned to grin at us in triumph. “There we are. Straight ahead.”

  And there it was. The luck of Ahmes. A rising streak of dust on the next sandy ridge. Within that dust as we topped our own dune I could see the line of camels and ponies, walking nose to tail along the high line of the hard sand. Five minutes later I had my face buried in a juicy section of hendevane—watermelon. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

  I swallowed cool red pulp, ran the cold, sticky rind across my forehead, and looked up. Ahmes was chattering with half a dozen of the merchants while Johannes, less fluent, did his best to follow the babble. I had been coaching him for a year, but his ear was blind and he did not have my gift for languages. As Ahmes talked now of the desert crossing, just as though we had planned everything this way, Johannes was nodding. Was it worth pointing out to him, one more time, that the advice of Ahmes had been hopelessly wrong, that we had found no oasis where he promised, and that the encounter with this caravan was nothing but the act of a kind Fate?

  Useless. Johannes thought and spoke nothing but good of anyone. Except himself.

  I did not want to hear the lies and boasting of Ahmes. I finished the slice of melon and began to wander back along the broken line of the halted caravan. And there, in the middle of a group of soldiers who each looked even bigger and stronger than Ahmes, I had my first sight of her.

  The witch-woman.

  At the time she seemed no more than a girl, sitting on the most beautiful little pony that I had ever seen. Can I confess it, that my interest was drawn first to that darling horse, dappled dark-brown and black, with a flowing white mane? I coveted that pony.

  She sat upright on its back, muffled in a dark blue cloak from feet to eyes. Those eyes were wide, with irises the color of honey, and eyebrows thick and black above them. From her bearing I took her for a fully mature woman, perhaps the senior wife of one of the merchants. Only when I looked closer could I see that she was not so old. Fifteen or so, and my senior by only two years.

  She urged her pony forward along the line toward the head of the caravan. When she arrived there she stood staring at Johannes, and ignoring Ahmes. That was unusual. Ahmes was tall and broad and loud, the dominant figure in most groups.

  “Who is that?” I spoke to one of the foot soldiers, a man wearing fronded leather leggings, and pointed to the woman. I had spoken in Turkic, but I was ready to try with Pushtu and Persian and Arabic if that did not work.

  He understood me all right, and so did his companions. They all roared with laughter.

  “Eyes off her, little warrior,” the man said. “She is forbidden fruit. Kings-meat, reserved for the Emperor himself. Anyone who touches her will find he’s two balls short. You don’t want to lose ’em, do you, before you’ve had a chance to use ’em?”

  He was burly and bearded, but his eyes were good-humored and they took the roughness from his words. And he had told me something of supreme importance. If the woman were intended as a bride or concubine of the Emperor, then the caravan must be bound for Karakorum itself and the court of the Great Khan. That was many days travel away, but by staying with them, we would reach our own destination. We were luckier than we had realized.

  It was late afternoon, and our arrival had provided a sufficient reason for the traveling merchants to stop for the day. The girl came riding slowly back along the line, and the soldier next to me saw my look.

  “All right, little warrior, go and talk to her if you want to. Talk is certainly permitted.” He laughed, but he was not laughing at me. “We are here to protect her, but not from talk. And we will protect you, too, if you need it. Go.”

  I did not need to approach her. She was heading straight for me. When the pony and I were nose to nose she stopped and pulled the veil of the chador from the lower half of her face. I saw a straight nose with flared nostrils, a lower lip full enough to be new-stung by a honeybee from the thyme fields of the Elburz Mountains, and a skin as pale and clear as their first-fallen snow. Kings-meat, indeed.

  “Dar-i,” she said, and it was the first sign that she was a witch-woman. How did she know my name? “Dari, the caravan is stopping now. When we eat the evening meal, I want to talk to you.”

  Her accent was strange, her voice deep, and I could only just understand her. She was not from this part of the world, but we had enough common language to talk freely. Before I did more than nod she had swung around and was heading down the line. I was left looking at the pony’s swaying haunches. And then Johannes was calling me from the head of the line, needing help to converse with the merchants.

  I sighed. How would he have managed without me, if I had died out there in the desert? How had he managed, in his many years before we ever met?

  Nataree, her name was. She came from the mountains north of Kabul, far to the west of this eastern desert, and because of her great beauty she had been picked out by the local khan from all the girls of his region, and sent to be a bride for the Great Khan; or to be whatever the Great Khan, in his wisdom, wanted her to be.

  She smiled when she said that last piece, as though it was a joke. I nodded, just as though I understood, and wondered why we were talking at all. I wanted to get back to Johannes, he was not safe without me.

  “Your own journey,” she said at last. “It is also to visit the court of the Great Khan?”

  “That is correct.”

  She was silent for a long time, those honey eyes staring into the distant firelight. We were sitting apart from the other groups, off in the cold and dark that fills the world twenty paces or more from the fires. She ate daintily and little, as though food was nothing to her. At last: “But you have no gifts for the Khan, no wives, no jewels, no new inventions?”

  And now it was my turn to be silent. Our mission was certainly no secret, but it was perhaps better explained to people by Johannes, not by me. But he could not explain to her!—not until he learned to speak her language. And even then, there were things that he might not want said, about his own reasons for being here. On the other hand, what harm could there be in my telling Nataree of the questions we sought to answer? We would look for information from anyone.

  “We are here to learn certain things of the court of the Great Khan,” I said at last. “And we do bring gifts. Gifts of learning.”

  Her eyes glowed with interest. I began to speak, and as I did so I reflected that this at least was not misleading. We brought learning, and no one could doubt Johannes’s fittingness as an ambassador of knowledge and wisdom. I had known it the first time we met, at the house of my master, di Piacenza, the papal legate in Acre.

  I had been there for two years as a house servant, sold from Bactria via Bokhara. When Johannes appeared at the house he was ushered in at once to see the legate. I was there, as usual, to run errands or to bring tea and sweetmeats. I sat at my master’s feet. As Johannes came in I saw this ancient, bent-shouldered man. Then he lifted his head, and something strange and wonderful was revealed. A young man and an old man were living together in one face, with wisdom, knowledge, and love
shining from pale blue eyes. I had never seen such abstract intelligence in a human countenance, coupled with such naivety for worldly affairs.

  “Welcome, Johannes of Magdeburg,” said my master. He spoke of course in Latin, and I had reached the point in my knowledge of that language where I could understand everything that was said. But I had not revealed my progress to M. di Piacenza, not mainly in truth because I sought to deceive him, but because I was thus allowed to be present in many cases where I would otherwise have been excluded. “A good journey from Venice, I trust?” added my master.

  Johannes nodded. So far as he and my master the papal legate were concerned, the proprieties had now been observed and they could get down to business. I never ceased to marvel at the abruptness—the crudity—of the leaders of the Church of Jesus. In my homeland, even relative strangers would chat for a few minutes and drink tea or wine together before they began any work of negotiation. Here, it was hello, hello, now let’s talk business.

  “We have made a list,” said my master, “in cooperation with His Holiness and the advisers in Rome. We have seven reports—rumors, let us call them, pending some confirmation—of strange inventions and discoveries in the regions ruled by the Great Khan, Kublai. We would like to know more about them.” He held out a roll of paper, tied with a bright blue ribbon. “Study these at your leisure as you travel, but let me offer you my own opinions in a few words. First, the Philosophers’ Stone, which can transmute base metals to noble metals.”

  Johannes smiled at once and shook his head.

  My master nodded. “I know. We have seen it on a hundred lists, and it never reveals anything but fraud and deceit. But it was reported by Father de Plano Carpini, the Franciscan, on his travels for His Holiness among the Mongols, and he is an honest man. It should be checked. Let us move on to others of more interest. The Auromancers, the little worms that spin golden thread, they sound at first impossible. Except that silk cloth is surely no myth, and there is good evidence that it is made by a little worm or caterpillar, far off in Cathay. You must check the Auromancers. Myself, I believe they exist. Possession of that secret would be a path to great wealth, but we do not ask that you seek to buy or steal an Auromancer. Only seek the knowledge of truth or falsehood of the story.