Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  Puladi, reclining in his wheeled chair, stared impatiently at the swirling, misted surface of the cylinder.

  “How much longer?”

  “I do not know.” Rustum Belur sounded subdued and nervous. In the four days since his arrival he had learned that assistants of Puladi might be valued, but that did not mean they were not expendable. Two men had bungled the arrangements for delivery of the Chronoclast. They had sought to conceal the fact; and they had disappeared.

  I do not wish to see him again, spoken by Puladi to the apparently empty air; and the named individual was seen no more.

  Belur remembered Salino’s advice: “Tell the truth. You may get away with one or two pieces of bad news; but a lie, never. And you should speak only when Puladi demands it.”

  “The flows must stabilize before the cocoon can be safely opened,” Belur went on. “With small objects and short transport times, that takes only a few seconds. But with something this size, and over so long a period—it could be hours, or even days.”

  “Then wait here. Both of you. I have work to do.” Puladi touched the keypad on the chair’s arm, and it swiveled to carry him back to the inner chamber.

  “Me, too, Puladi?” Salino, in his surprise, broke one of his own rules.

  “Naturally. When it is safe to open the cocoon, you will both enter. You, Belur, will confirm the identification. And you, Salino, will check on the medical parameters. I do not expect that we will introduce to our time some source of old disease, but I want to be sure of that before I am exposed. Inform me when your work is complete, and I will return.”

  The gray cylinder remained misted for five hours. When the cloudy swirls dwindled and the surface cleared, Rustum Belur broke the seals with hands almost too nervous to function. He led the way in. Ernesto Salino followed, fingering his diagnostic palette like the beads of a rosary.

  When they came out, an hour later, Belur was so close to collapse that he had to support himself on Salino’s shoulder.

  “I am a dead man,” he said, over and over. “I am a dead man. A dead man. What can I do?”

  “Tell the truth. You can do nothing else.” Salino was worried about guilt by association. He believed that Belur was doomed, but for himself there was a faint gleam of hope. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”

  Puladi’s calm, when he rolled his wheeled chair forward to peer inside the cylinder of the Chronoclast, was as terrifying as any rage. He took a long, thoughtful look at the brown-skinned unconscious figure lying naked within, and turned to Rustum Belur.

  “You told me that you were absolutely sure of the identification.”

  “I thought that I was.” Belur had passed beyond fear to resignation. “I checked scores of times. I fixed the right moment, the right place, the right background. I could not have made a mistake.”

  “And yet you bring me this.” Puladi waved a dismissive hand. “Not a man, but a child. Not the hope of a miracle cure, but a fiasco.”

  “Puladi, I cannot explain it. In all my experiments with the Chronoclast, nothing like this has ever happened before. All I can suggest is that some new phenomenon presents itself when the transport time is very large. We went so far back—more than two thousand years—we were completely beyond all earlier experience…”

  “You are quite sure that this is the wrong one—that he is not much older than he looks? Salino?”

  “No, Puladi. The man that we wanted was in his thirties. I estimate this one’s age at fifteen.”

  “Not a child, then, or a man. A youth. But quite useless to me. You have failed, Belur.”

  Administrator Kelb had appeared from the inner chamber, and Puladi turned to him and pointed at the cylinder of the Chronoclast. “Kelb, get rid of that lump of flesh in there. It is of no value.”

  “Yes, Puladi. And for the rest…” Kelb stared accusingly at Rustum Belur and Ernesto Salino.

  “The youth may not be useless.” Salino spoke rapidly, and wondered if he was being a fool as he did so. When Puladi was angry, no one should draw attention to himself. But now he had gone too far to pull back. As Puladi glared, he went on, “Just as you ordered, I checked his medical parameters. He is healthy, and he will recover consciousness in the next half hour—”

  “He will be gone long before that,” Kelb said softly. “I have my orders.”

  “—but the important thing is his blood.” Salino blundered on. “It is the same rare group as your own, Puladi, and it matches you far more closely at every physiological and chemical level than anything that we have available in the banks. If we used him—in direct coupling, vein to vein and with a very slow transfer rate—it would be much better than what I have been able to do.”

  It seemed at first as though Puladi had not been listening. He was eyeing Rustum Belur. “And you, Professor. If you failed to bring me what I needed, is there a future here for you? I think not.” He stared up to the ceiling, while Rustum Belur wailed in hopeless fear.

  And Puladi smiled, a skeletal show of teeth in the jaundiced face. “No future here. So you can return to Calcutta, Professor. Go to your institute, and tell them all of Puladi’s great mercy. You failed me, but who knows? Perhaps I will find some future use for you, and for the Chronoclast.”

  Kelb grunted in surprise, while Belur gasped and fell to his knees. Puladi ignored both of them. He swiveled his chair to face Ernesto Salino. “You talk of blood transfer at a very slow rate. Hours?”

  “Many hours. It is best done overnight.”

  “Very good. We will begin tomorrow.” Puladi touched his armrest keypad, and the wheeled chair started for the inner chamber. “But I have no desire to converse with him,” he said over his shoulder, “even if that were possible. Before you bring him to me, sedate him; and keep him sedated as long as he is with me.”

  At three in the morning, Puladi was wide awake. That was not unusual. Easy sleep was a rare prize, denied him since his youth. What was unusual was the feeling of uneasiness that possessed his mind, as he wandered around the world and checked its status through his remote mobile monitors.

  The miniature cameras returned sounds and images from a thousand places, logical and illogical sites for possible dissent or insurrection: homes and bars and hotels and restaurants, freezing log cabins and tall tents and stifling squat mud huts, churches and chapels and synagogues, hospitals and prisons and asylums and refuge shelters, on and under land and sea, in the air and out in the vacuum of space.

  Puladi performed this surveillance nightly, rarely visiting the same place twice, always alert for the tiny anomalies that spoke to him—and only to him—of civil unrest.

  Everywhere was calm. Nowhere could he find anything unusual. Out of habit, he culled a couple of hundred troublesome cases, giving oral instructions to the guards as to who should be taken and where they could be found. Two hundred was nothing, compared with any night during a time of major purge. Yet his jaundiced skin still prickled with a sense of trouble. He checked the temperature of the room. It was exactly as usual; still the sweat ran down his neck, and was clammy on his face and hands. He could find no easy position on the piled cushions and pillows.

  Maybe it was the effect of the change in medical treatment. Or maybe it was the simple presence of another person, even an unconscious one, in his sleeping quarters.

  Puladi glanced at his own arm, following the narrow tube of the perfusion IV across to the bed mounted next to his wheeled chair. The other end of the IV was attached to a slim brown arm. The metered flow was invisible, but every second a drop of new blood was pumped across to enter Puladi’s body.

  He activated a ceiling light, and shone it on the face of the youth. The boy’s nose was sharp, his lips thin. They were parted to show a gleam of white teeth. The eyelids flickered, even as Puladi watched, and there was the faint murmur of an exhalation through the open mouth.

  The stimulus, surely, of the brighter light. The youth was soundly sedated, and he had not moved since the bed was wheeled in. But
the face showed a peace that Puladi envied.

  He dimmed the overhead light, turned off the bank of displays that covered the wall, and watched the sleeping face. When had he known such tranquillity, such content? He could not remember a time, ever. He gazed, and brooded on the distant past. Finally, without knowing it, he fell asleep.

  He was still sleeping, to Salino’s amazement, when the doctor checked the telemetry signals from Puladi’s body at eight the next morning.

  Puladi never slept so late! Terrified, Salino reviewed all the monitored outputs.

  They were fine—better than fine, almost unbelievable. Puladi had been losing weight steadily, fifty grams a day, for months, while his ion balances oscillated randomly and his liver chemistry moved farther and farther away from acceptable levels. Today he was a hundred grams heavier, and all his functions showed a slight but definite improvement.

  It was the new blood, it had to be, so close in its properties to Puladi’s own. The temptation to wake the ruler, to tell him the good news at once, was strong, but Salino knew better. Sleep, easy natural sleep, was better for Puladi than any medication.

  The physician waited impatiently by the telemetry unit, until there were clear signs from Puladi’s breathing and eye movement patterns that the ruler was waking. At that point he hurried to the inner chamber and rapped on the metal panel. It slid open. As he went in he said, “Puladi, I have good news—”

  “You do not need to say it.” Puladi smiled, close to laughing aloud. “I feel it. For the first time in years, I am hungry. What can I eat?”

  “Anything that you like—in small amounts. Your stomach is not used to real meals.” Salino was busy, unhooking the IV and checking the sleeping body on the bed. He glanced at the in situ monitors, and nodded his approval.

  “He is all right?” Puladi asked. His smile had vanished, and he showed a hint of anxiety.

  “He is fine—young, and strong, and healthy. You took only half a liter of his blood, in ten hours. It will be safe to repeat that, three days from now.”

  “When will he waken?”

  “As soon as I provide the appropriate stimulant.” Salino was preparing to wheel the bed out of the chamber. “I assume that you are willing to allow him to be awake, when he is not with you?”

  “More than that.” Puladi raised himself on his mound of cushions, and stared again at the face of the youth. “I’ve changed my mind about sedation. It’s not much to my taste, to be connected to a human vegetable all through the night. Does he have intelligence?”

  “Normal, so far as I can tell.”

  “Then next time, there will be no need to bring him here unconscious.”

  “But you will not be able to talk to each other. He was awake for a while yesterday, and no one understood a word that he said—naturally, he speaks only the crude babble of his time and place.”

  “That’s exactly what language teaching machines are for. I’ll instruct Kelb to make one available to you, something with a maximum modern vocabulary. I don’t want you to fry his brain, but I do want him able to talk and listen, next time you bring him here.”

  “Very good.” Salino pushed the bed in front of him, but at the door of the chamber he paused and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “Puladi, it would be easy to lie to you.”

  “At your peril. What is it?”

  “I do not want to give you false hopes. The new blood has produced a great improvement, but it will surely be only temporary. The prognosis is much the same.”

  “How long?”

  “Maybe it has increased from one month, to four.”

  “Then keep working on it, Dr. Salino. For your sake as much as mine.” And, when the other man stared at him in perplexity, “How many days do you think you will have left, when I am gone? Take a look at Kelb, at Mavermine, at Jaworsky, at any of the Administrators who can’t wait for me to die. Someone will win in the battle for the succession. But whoever it is, do you think that you will become his physician, as you are mine? Or is it more likely that you will be snuffed out like a candle, as someone who was close to me?”

  Puladi laughed. He was feeling too well to take anything very seriously—a dangerous mood, as he recognized. “Keep me, alive, doctor. I can get along without you. But you will not get along without me.”

  When the bed was wheeled in three days later, Puladi stared at it and turned on Salino.

  “What the devil are you doing? I told you that this time he was not to be sedated.”

  “He is not sedated.” Salino was pushing the wheeled bed, and he had no hands free. But he shrugged, to express his own amazement. “He is asleep. He fell asleep as I was bringing him here.”

  “Knowing that he was on his way to me? Incredible! Wake him up. At once.”

  But the slim figure on the bed was already stirring. He yawned hugely, to show the tip of a pink tongue and splendid, even teeth. He sat up and stared all around him.

  Puladi saw that his eyes, open at last, were a clear and startling brown, with hints of amber at the inner edge of the irises. The expression on the face was different, too, the placidity of sleep exchanged for an alert confidence.

  “Hook us up for the night, Salino,” Puladi said, and to the young man on the bed next to him. “Can you understand me yet? Do you know who I am?”

  “I can under-stand you.” The reply was clear and quick, with only a slight hesitancy on the longest word. “You are Puladi.”

  “That’s a good start. I’m also, so you don’t have any doubts about it, the man who brought you here.”

  “You are the man who is stealing my blood.”

  Dr. Salino flinched. “I told you to show respect!”

  “You also warned me not to lie. Which do you want?”

  “I want—I mean, Puladi wants—I assume Puladi wants—”

  Salino hesitated, while Puladi sighed and said, “Finish connecting us, doctor, and get out of here. Quickly. I know what Puladi wants, a lot better than you’ll ever know.” And to the youth sitting up on the bed, “I’m going to be working for much of the night. You will speak only when you are spoken to.”

  That earned Puladi a cocking of the head and a raising of dark eyebrows. But there was silence as Salino finished his work, made a final check that the remote telemetry system to his own lab was all in order, and at last obtained permission to leave.

  “Take your cues from him,” Puladi said, as Salino left the chamber. “His boss is gone, and her boss is gone, and the two before that are gone.”

  “Gone.” The youth rolled his eyes. “You say gone, but you mean dead.”

  “Quite right. I do mean dead, although I never see it happen. I say the word, and the guards take care of the rest.” Puladi glanced along the line of the IV, then switched his attention to the other’s face. “You’ve only been here a short time, and I suppose you haven’t learned. You should be afraid of me. You’re not. Why aren’t you afraid?”

  “I was afraid, once, of…something. But not anymore. Not of you, not of anything.”

  “We can change that. Kelb and company were supposed to give you a background briefing along with the language. It looks like they didn’t go far enough. How much do you know about me?”

  “That you are Puladi, although that is perhaps not your original name. That you are thirty-nine years old. That you have killed many, many men and women. That you run the world, and have done so for eighteen years.”

  “Not quite. The world has its own power and energy. It runs itself. I control the world, which is a much more delicate business. But the rest is accurate. See those displays?” Puladi pointed a bony finger at the wall. “I can look at anything, anywhere, anytime, no matter how much people may imagine it is hidden. I have sensors that appear as a fly on the wall, a dog’s eye, an open rose, the flame of a candle. And because I can see so much, anyone but a fool must assume that I can see everything. That is the secret of power: information, and the assumption by other
s of complete information.”

  “I think that you are boasting.”

  “Not at all.” But Puladi realized, with a rush of self-awareness that he had not felt for years, that the youth on the bed was perhaps right. Certainly, he had been emphasizing his powers. Why did he have this odd need to show off, and to such a nonentity?

  “Maybe I am boasting—a little. But everything that I have said is true.”

  The lad sniffed. “Then if you are so all-powerful, why are you afraid?”

  Puladi laughed. If Kelb or Mavermine could hear that! “What makes you think that I am afraid? I don’t fear, boy, I am feared. There’s a huge difference. Watch me, now. I’m going to take us on a world tour.”

  He began to work the keypads in the arms of the chair, varying location and scale and point of view like a master organist. There was no way that the youth on the bed could possibly appreciate just how much skill went into manipulating the sensors, or to juggling among complex data banks; but there were views to offer that alone would be enough to astonish. Puladi swooped from salt mining on the shores of the Dead Sea, to telescopes on the highest peaks of the Karakoram range, to the dark abyssal Pacific trench where the semiorganic submersibles winnowed out high-grade metallic nodules.

  Finally he moved to the orbiting monitors that were patiently scanning the surface, inch by inch. He used them to zoom in, so that the view showed the North American continent, narrowed to the central plains, then a sprawling city landscape, and at last to the gold spire on one great building.

  “That’s us.” Puladi froze the display. “We’re sitting inside that building, at this very moment. And if you want to see what’s happening in any particular room, I can show you. Want to take a look?”

  There was no reply. Puladi turned. He saw to his great annoyance that the youth on the bed was sound asleep. How dare he sleep, in the presence of Puladi?

  But how young the boy looked, and how peaceful and relaxed. He had said that he was not afraid—and amazingly, he had been telling the truth. A terrified person could not sleep; Puladi knew that very well.