Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  One more step would have taken me outside again to safety, clear of the aperture and its persistent, tugging field. But as I was poised to take that step, Helga acted. She closed her eyes and took a long, trembling step forward. I could see her mouth moving, almost as though in prayer. And then the action I could not believe: she leaned forward to grasp convulsively at John Martindale’s outstretched hand.

  I heard her gasp, and saw her shiver. Then she was taking another step forward. And another.

  “Helga!” I changed my direction and blundered after her along that endless tunnel. “This way. I’ll get us out.”

  “No.” She had taken another shivering step, and she was still clutching Martindale’s hand. “No, Klaus.” Her voice was breathless. “He’s right. This is the biggest adventure ever. It’s worth everything.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” said a hollow, booming voice. It was Martindale, and now all I could see of him was a shimmering silhouette. The man had been replaced by a sparkling outline. “Come on, Klaus. It’s almost here.”

  The tugging force was stronger, pulling on every cell of my body. I looked at Helga, a shining outline now like John Martindale. They were dwindling, vanishing. They were gone. I wearily turned around and tried to walk back the way we had come. Tons of weight hung on me, wreathed themselves around every limb. I was trying to drag the whole world up an endless hill. I forced my legs to take one small step, then another. It was impossible to see if I was making progress. I was surrounded by that roaring silent pattern of rushing blue lines, all going in the opposite direction from me, every one doing its best to drag me back.

  I inched along. Finally I could see the white of the waterfall ahead. It was growing in size, but at the same time it was losing definition. My eyes ached. By the time I took the final step and fell on my face on the stone floor of the cave, the waterfall was no more than a milky haze and a sound of rushing water.

  Owen Davies saved my life, what there is of it. I did my part to help him. I wanted to live when I woke up, and weak as I was, and half-blind, I managed to crawl down that steep rock face. I was dragging myself over the icy boulders when he found me. My clothes were shredding, falling off my body, and I was shivering and weeping from cold and fear. He wrapped me in his own jacket and helped me back to the aircraft.

  Then he went off to look for John Martindale and Helga. He never came back. I do not know to this day if he found and entered the portal, or if he came to grief somewhere on the way.

  I spent two days in the aircraft, knowing that I was too sick and my eyes were too bad to dream of flying anywhere. My front teeth had all gone, and I ate porridge or biscuits soaked in tea. Three more days, and I began to realize that if I did not fly myself, I was not going anywhere. On the seventh day I managed a faltering, incompetent takeoff and flew northeast, peering at the instruments with my newly purblind eyes. I made a crash landing at Comodoro Rivadavia, was dragged from the wreckage, and flown to a hospital in Bahía Blanca. They did what they could for me, which was not too much. By that time I was beginning to have some faint idea what had happened to my body, and as soon as the hospital was willing to release me I took a flight to Buenos Aires, and went on at once to Geneva’s Lakeside Hospital. They removed the cataracts from my eyes. Three weeks later I could see again without that filmy mist over everything.

  Before I left the hospital I insisted on a complete physical. Thanks to John Martindale’s half-million dollar deposit, money was not going to be a problem. The doctor who went over the results with me was about thirty years old, a Viennese Jew who had been practicing for only a couple of years. He looked oddly similar to one of my cousins at that age. “Well, Mr. Jacobi,” he said (after a quick look at his dossier to make sure of my name), “there are no organic abnormalities, no cardiovascular problems, only slight circulation problems. You have some osteoarthritis in your hips and your knees. I’m delighted to be able to tell you that you are in excellent overall health for your age.”

  “If you didn’t know,” I said, “how old would you think I am?”

  He looked again at his crib sheet, but found no help there. I had deliberately left out my age at the place where the hospital entry form required it. “Well,” he said. He was going to humor me. “Seventy-six?”

  “Spot on,” I said.

  I had the feeling that he had knocked a couple of years off his estimate, just to make me feel good. So let’s say my biological age was seventy-eight or seventy-nine. When I flew with John Martindale to Buenos Aires, I had been one month short of my forty-fourth birthday.

  At that point I flew to New York, and went to John Kenyon Martindale’s house. I met with Shirley—briefly. She did not recognize me, and I did not try to identify myself. I gave my name as Owen Davies. In John’s absence, I said, I was interested in contacting some of the mathematician friends that he had told me I would like to meet. Could she remember the names of any of them, so I could call them even before John came back? She looked bored, but she came back with a telephone book and produced three names. One was in San Francisco, one was in Boston, and the third was here in New York, at the Courant Institute.

  He was in his middle twenties, a fit-looking curly haired man with bright blue eyes and a big smile. The thing that astonished him about my visit, I think, was not the subject matter. It was the fact that I made the visit. He found it astonishing that a spavined antique like me would come to his office to ask about this sort of topic in theoretical physics.

  “What you are suggesting is not just permitted in today’s view of space and time, Mr. Davies,” he said. “It’s absolutely required. You can’t do something to space—such as making an instantaneous link between two places, as you have been suggesting—without at the same time having profound effects on time. Space and time are really a single entity. Distances and elapsed times are intimately related, like two sides of the same coin.”

  “And the line-vortex generator?” I said. I had told him far less about this, mainly because all I knew of it had been told to us by John Martindale.

  “Well, if the generator in some sense approximated an infinitely long, rapidly rotating cylinder, then yes. General relativity insists that very peculiar things would happen there. There could be global causality violations—‘before’ and ‘after’ getting confused, cause and effect becoming mixed up, that sort of thing. God knows what time and space look like near the line singularity itself. But don’t misunderstand me. Before any of these things could happen, you would have to be dealing with a huge system, something many times as massive as the sun.”

  I resisted the urge to tell him he was wrong. Apparently he did not accept John Martindale’s unshakable confidence in the idea that with better technology came increase in capability and decrease in size. I stood up and leaned on my cane. My left hip was a little dodgy and became tired if I walked too far. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Not at all.” He stood up, too, and said, “Actually, I’m going to be giving a lecture at the institute on these subjects in a couple of weeks. If you’d like to come…”

  I noted down the time and place, but I knew I would not be there. It was three months to the day since John Martindale, Helga, and I had climbed the rock face and walked behind the waterfall. Time—my time—was short. I had to head south again.

  The flight to Argentina was uneventful. Comodoro Rivadavia was the same as always. Now I am sitting in Alberto McShane’s bar, drinking one last beer (all that my digestion today will permit) and waiting for the pilot. McShane did not recognize me, but the armadillo did. It trundled to my table, and sat looking up at me. Where’s my friend John Martindale, it was saying.

  Where indeed? I will tell you soon. The plane is ready. We are going to Trapalanda.

  It will take all my strength, but I think I can do it. I have added equipment that will help me to cross that icy field of boulders and ascend the rock face. It is September. The weather will be warmer, and the going easier. If I close my eyes I can se
e the portal now, behind the waterfall, its black depths and shimmering blue streaks rushing away toward the vanishing point.

  Thirty-five years. That is what the portal owes me. It sucked them out of my body as I struggled back against the gravity gradient. Maybe it is impossible to get them back. I don’t know. My young mathematician friend insisted that time is infinitely fluid, with no more constraints on movement through it than there are on travel through space. I don’t know, but I want my thirty-five years. If I die in the attempt, I will be losing little.

  I am terrified of that open gate, with its alien twisting of the world’s geometry. I am more afraid of it than I have ever been of anything. Last time I failed, and I could not go through it. But I will go through it now.

  This time I have something more than Martindale’s scientific curiosity to drive me on. It is not thoughts of danger or death that fill my mind as I sit here. I have that final image of Helga, reaching out and taking John Martindale’s hand in hers. Reaching out, to grasp his hand, voluntarily. I love Helga, I am sure of that, but I cannot make sense of my other emotions; fear, jealousy, resentment, hope, excitement. She was touching him. Did she do it because she wanted to go through the portal, wanted it so much that every fear was insignificant? Or had she, after thirty years, finally found someone whom she could touch without cringing and loathing?

  The pilot has arrived. My glass is empty. Tomorrow I will know.

  Afterword to “Trapalanda”

  John Kenyon Martindale is a major character in this story. John Kenyon Martindale Sanderson is my father-in-law, Sandy, the father of my late wife, Sarah (“Georgia on My Mind” is really about Sarah). Sandy lives in Walton-on-Thames, near London. He is eighty-eight years old, and eats, drinks, walks, and laughs like someone half his age. He is what I want to be at that age. He has been reading science fiction since the 1920s, he hung around with the Bloomsbury set, and he knew H. G. Wells. (Irrelevant side note: Wells was very popular with women, even though he was not handsome and had a funny voice. Sandy asked a couple of ladies why they found Wells so attractive. They said, “He has a really interesting smell.”)

  Anyway, this story was written for Sandy, even though it was not dedicated to him. Unfortunately, when he read it he didn’t like it. He thought that the narrator had a diseased mind. I didn’t tell him it was really me.

  Ah, well. He loved “Beyond the Golden Road.” I’ll have to settle for that.

  Obsolete Skill

  I HAD BEEN a lifelong agnostic. So when the hammer blow to the chest came at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, I knew it was the end of everything.

  I had just enough time to put the pan back on the stove, curse my own stupidity—those pains in the left arm and chest were clear enough signs of heart trouble, but who likes to visit doctors?—then I was falling toward the floor and the lights were going out. Goodbye, world.

  It was a big surprise to drift back to consciousness and find that the world was apparently still there. CPR? But then who could have saved me? I had been alone in the house, with the alarm system on and no visitors expected. It occurred to me that I didn’t merely feel pleased to be alive, like any man who has survived a massive heart attack; I felt good. Weak and feeble, sure—but healthy, if you can imagine that combination.

  Without opening my eyes I groped automatically for my glasses.

  “What do you want?” said a disembodied man’s voice a few feet away from me.

  “Spectacles.” My eyelids seemed to weigh a ton each.

  “They are unnecessary.”

  That was enough to make me blink my eyes open. I was staring straight up at a blue-painted ceiling, glowing all over with a soft internal lighting. Every detail was visible, down to a little spider-web of sensors over in the corner, and a raft of things like glowing pink buttons right over me. The area that I could see without turning my head held a clutter of other miniaturized electronics, doing I knew not what. Fine lines of violet light crisscrossed the whole field of view.

  “Try to relax,” said the voice. “The instruments are monitoring your isotonic responses, and four of them show high readings. Don’t be frightened, there is no danger.”

  That was bad—I was supposed to understand something about self-control. I lay back and closed my eyes again.

  I must not fear. Fear is the death. Fear is the little-death that brings obliteration. (Not, it’s not my own prescription—but it works. I’ve never been too proud to borrow.)

  “How long has it been?” I said after a few more seconds.

  There was a gasping intake of breath from the man next to me. “You know what has happened? Already?”

  “I can make a good guess. I died; and now I’m not dead anymore. So somebody took me, and either they transferred my consciousness to a new body, or they froze me, cured me, and woke me up again. I’d guess the second, because it still feels like my own body. Which was it?” I opened my eyes and turned my head, to look at the slightly built man who sat at my bedside.

  “Not quite either.” He was staring at me in a puzzled way. “You were frozen, as you say. But the body was given certain desirable modifications before you were allowed to regain consciousness.” He leaned forward. “We have revived many who were cryogenically preserved, but never one who has at once realized what has happened. How did you know?”

  “Did you ever read my stories?” I looked at his smooth face—yellowish complexion, epicanthic fold on the eyes, black hair. “I guess you didn’t. I’ve written that scenario a dozen times.”

  I sat up. As I’d thought, I was as weak as a cup of tea in a Scots’ boardinghouse. “Now you can answer one for me. How long?”

  “Since you—died?”

  I nodded.

  “One hundred and ninety-seven and a half years.”

  Jesus. No wonder I felt rested. And weak. I was two hundred and eighty years old. “Nearly two centuries. And my works are still read?”

  “Not exactly.” He hesitated. “Reading is no longer necessary. However, certain of your works are still studied.”

  Better than nothing. Looking at him more closely with my new twenty-twenty eyes I noticed an odd thing about his speech. The words seemed to lag a little behind his facial expressions. That had its own implications. “Studied—but not in English,” I said. “When did the language die out?”

  “It did not.” He smiled at me, trying to be nice. “There are still many who speak it. But as you might guess from my appearance it is not my native tongue. My name is Chen, and my native language is a variation of Mandarin Chinese. But of course, most of the editions of your works that have survived are in Japanese.”

  Of course. Japanese. “And you—you are hooked up to a computer that makes the actual translation from your language to English?”

  “That is correct.” He saw my satisfied smile. “Again—you wrote of this?”

  “A score of times.” I tried to swing my legs over the edge of the bed, but I was too weak to make it. Go steady—I suspected I had plenty of time to regain my strength.

  “Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty,” I said. “I’m here, I’m alive, and I never gave any instructions to be put into cryogenic storage. I made a lot of money, but I spent a lot, too. It must have taken a bundle to keep me down at liquid helium temperatures for two centuries. So what the hell is going on? I’m not complaining, but why aren’t I a couple of hundred years dead?”

  “It was a plan prepared by a group of your admirers—special admirers, the people who were known as fans. They argued that if anyone should be preserved for the future, you should, because you had a unique knowledge of your own times, and a special feeling for times to come. Having thought so much about possible futures, you would be less disturbed by any real future. Without telling you, they arranged for the collection of funds over the years at every one of their meetings—conventions—and placed it into an interest-bearing account pending your demise. When that occurred, you were transferred to the cryogenic vaults and pr
epared for storage.”

  No sinus headache, no postnasal drip. No buzzing in the left ear. I shrugged my shoulders, and there was no arthritic twinge from my left side. Somebody had done a good job on me.

  “Thanks, fans. I don’t know I deserve it, considering what I’ve said about you over the years. What comes next?”

  “First, it is necessary that you recuperate and gain strength. That will take a few days. You will stay here for that period, since we do not wish you to experience too much cultural shock.”

  He frowned, and leaned forward to stare at me. I felt sure there were a dozen sensors peering out through his almond eyes. “Are you feeling all right?” he said.

  “Just fine.”

  “I wondered, because you seem almost too calm. To arrive here, far in your future, and to know suddenly that all your friends and fellow-writers are dead…it must be most upsetting.”

  “Chen, I was old. Hell, most of my friends and the writers that I knew well were already dead before I died.” (And I was glad to see most of ’em go, the two-faced bastards.)

  He nodded thoughtfully, and his face again went blank for a split second. “I do not have your reference system to work with. But of course, in your day eighty-two years was old. Very well. When you are fully recovered from the awakening, we have a number of people who would like to talk to you—historians, and students of twentieth-century literature. The authorship of many works from your time is left in doubt, particularly because of the translation change, to and from the Japanese. The original titles have often been lost.” He paused, as though listening inside his head for a second. “It is not easy to identify your output, even with the best references. For example, were you the author of a work named Tales of New Space?”

  “Sure was.”