Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  Logic must tell them, as it tells me, that they will find absolutely nothing. Luke and Louisa Derwent are a century dead, deep beneath the icy waters of the Drake Passage. With them, if the machine ever existed, lie the rusting remnants of Louisa’s Analytical Engine. The Heteromorphs, if they were ever on South Georgia Island, are long gone.

  I know all that. So does Bill. But win or lose, Bill and I are going. So are all the others.

  And win or lose, I know one other thing. After we, and our converging, energetic, curious, ingenious, sympathetic horde, are finished, South Georgia will never be the same.

  This is for Garry Tee—who is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Auckland;

  —who is a mathematician, computer specialist, and historian of science;

  —who discovered parts of Babbage’s Difference Machine in Dunedin, New Zealand;

  —who programmed the DEUCE computer in the late 1950s, and has been a colleague and friend since that time;

  —who is no more Bill Rigley than I am the narrator of this story.

  Charles Sheffield, December 31, 1991.

  Afterword to “Georgia on My Mind”

  This is the way that stories really get written. In December, 1991, I had lunch in New York with Stan Schmidt and Tina Lee of Analog magazine. Stan said he could use a good novelette about 10,000 words long. Since I had eaten lunch at his expense, I more or less promised him one and even gave him a title, “Georgia on My Mind.” Then I had to write the story.

  It came out as a strange mixture of autobiography and fiction. I felt when writing as though I was inventing very little. Almost every name is that of a real person. “Gene” in the story is Professor Gene Golub of Stanford, an old friend and for my money the world’s best numerical analyst. Marvin Minsky is probably the world’s top authority on Artificial Intelligence. Danny Hillis is Chief Scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation and the designer of the Connection Machine, and I was indeed introduced to him by Marvin Minsky in Pasadena at the Neptune flyby, just as the story says. “Bill Wrigley” is Garry Tee, who discovered bits of Babbage’s Difference Machine in Dunedin, New Zealand; however, his physical appearance in the story matches that of another mathematician, Charles Broyden. The sf writers in the story are of course all real. DEUCE was an early and intractable digital computer, dear to the hearts of anyone who programmed it. Although the narrator of the story is not the same as its author, the two in this case are too close for comfort.

  I finished the story on December 31st, 1991. It came out as 17,000 words, not 10,000. On the strength of that, I could claim that Stan Schmidt still owes me 7/10 of a lunch. On the other hand, since the story won the 1993 Nebula Award for Best Novelette, maybe I owe him one.

  That is where this Afterword was supposed to end, but I have to say one other thing. Writing parts of this story caused me much personal pain and misery, what Kipling refers to as “the joy of an old wound waking.” It is a depressing thought that internal bleeding may be the price of an honest story.