Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  In that same moment he felt a great wave of weariness and tranquillity sweep through him, as though it had transferred instantly along the line of the IV. He yawned—once. The screens on the wall seemed to dance and flicker before his eyes.

  Half a minute later he was gone, down into the deepest slumber of his adult life.

  “I think I am fifteen,” said the voice from the darkness. “But we do not—did not—think of years as you count them, and I cannot be sure.”

  Puladi grunted. The viewing screens were all turned off. He did not have the energy, or maybe it was the desire, to look at them. Three more days had passed, they were deep into the third treatment, and according to Dr. Salino he was physically stronger than he had been for years; but he knew, better than anyone, that the mind controlled the body. He did not feel worse, but he felt different. Diffuse, drifting, disembodied.

  “Before I was brought here,” the voice continued, “I did not know that there could be so many years. We were sure that the world must end, long before two full thousands of years had passed. But it did not. We were wrong about that; about many things.”

  Puladi touched the IV. He had become so used to it, he hardly knew that it was attached to his arm. The strongest link in the world connected him to that slender figure on the bed, unseen in the darkness: the link of blood. Blood. If one had to choose a single word to stand for the whole of human history, could there be a better one? Bloodlines, blood feuds, blood money, blood sports, blood oaths, blood ties. Royal blood. Blue blood. Hot blood. Bad blood. Written in blood.

  “Do you?” said an insistent voice.

  “Do I what?” While Puladi drifted far away, the other must have gone on talking.

  “Remember. What you were like, when you yourself were fifteen years old.”

  Puladi sighed. “Yes, indeed. Like it was yesterday. Closer than yesterday.”

  “You were not—afraid?”

  “Not the slightest bit. That was the year that I realized I had unique genius; the time when I discovered the data banks.” Puladi sat up straighter, buoyed by memory. “It was bliss. Everything that I needed came to me so easily, it was as though I had already known it. While others plodded and staggered from one data level to another, I was a light-foot dancer, making great leaps that no one else had ever dreamed possible. By the time that I was sixteen, I could access anything: the most secret files, the most hidden code, the deepest data layers. No one else even suspected what I was doing. They were like blind people, in a world where I alone was sighted. And all the data banks were interlocked! I realized then that I could own everything. In another five years, I did.”

  “And it made you happy?”

  “Of course. Whatever I wanted was mine—is mine.”

  “Except good health.”

  “I have not given up the hope of that. Though you were a great disappointment to me.”

  “My blood?”

  Puladi decided that he must have said that word aloud, at some point in his musings. “Your blood is fine. But I did not bring you two thousand years and more, just for your blood. I thought I was bringing someone else, someone with the power to cure me.”

  “A healer. I understand.” The youth was silent for a few moments, and when he spoke again his voice was wistful and reflective. “There was a time, just two of my years ago, when I thought that I might be a great healer. People told me that I had the gift, and I felt it move within me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I saw a vision. I became afraid. I made a choice. But you, if you were healed, would you then hope to live forever?”

  “Let’s just say, for a long, long time.”

  “But you would live hated, for all those years. And who would want to live hated? Puladi, even your assistants do not love you, though they pretend love. They hate you, too. I can feel it in them.”

  “Of course they do. But they obey.”

  “But if they hate you, why don’t they do something?”

  “Carrion crows will not tear at living flesh. They await my death, when the time will come for them to fight among themselves.”

  “How can they rule, without your knowledge of the data banks?”

  “Because they expect to inherit my monitoring and control system. World control would be impossible without it, but it becomes easy with it. The genius, you see, lies in setting up the system, far more than in operating it.”

  “When you die, I expect that I will die, too. They hate me also.”

  “A shrewd and accurate observation.” Puladi smiled in the darkness. “They hate you, because they know that your visits here prolong my life.”

  “Administrator Kelb pretends otherwise. He suggests that I am brought here at night only for your sexual pleasures. Why do you permit such talk?”

  “Kelb’s time will come—soon. Anyway, in my condition perhaps I feel flattered. You would not understand that. You are too young to have had lovers.”

  The bed next to Puladi creaked, at some violent movement.

  “That is not true! I am fifteen years old. I am a man, and I have had women—many, many women!—since I was thirteen.”

  “My apologies. Perhaps you would like a woman tomorrow? Or ten women, or a hundred, or a thousand? I am Puladi, and I own the world. Make your request. If it is not unreasonable, I will grant it.”

  There was silence from the bed. When it finally came, the voice sounded flat and empty. “Dr. Salino told me never to lie to you. But I did. I have not had lots of women. In truth, I have never had any woman, although most youths of my age have known them.”

  “There are lies and lies. Forget it. My offer still stands. Make your request. Do you want a hundred women?”

  “No.” There was a sigh. “I do not want even one. But I do have a request. I want to visit the laboratory of Professor Rustum Belur. I want to see the Chronoclast, the machine that brought me here.”

  Dr. Salino was in a difficult position. He dared not argue openly with Puladi, no matter how strongly he disagreed with him. All he could do was battle Kelb—who already resented and hated the physician, for his guaranteed round-the-clock access to his master.

  Salino flourished the medical records at the Administrator. “It was working, and all the evidence suggested to me that it would continue to work. There had been minor recent abnormalities, but conditions were stable for the first time in more than a year. Why did you take the risk?”

  “What risk?” Kelb was quite ready to argue Puladi’s case for him.

  “How do I know what risk?” Salino looked to Puladi for support, and found none. “Suppose that the boy becomes sick, because of the different food in India—too sick for us to continue treatment when he returns? Suppose that he is killed in a transportation accident? Suppose that his return is delayed? Didn’t you consider all those possibilities?”

  “Naturally.” Kelb’s leonine face was smug. “And after assessing all factors, it was Puladi’s own decision that the boy should go to Calcutta. Are you questioning his wisdom?”

  Yes. The fatal word was on the tip of Salino’s tongue. But before he could say it and damn himself totally, Puladi finally spoke.

  “Dr. Salino, all the risks that you mention are real, but they are risks to me more than to anyone. And most of them are already in the past. He has visited Belur’s lab and seen the Chronoclast, and he is on his way back here. So now you wonder why I allowed him to do it—I can see the question in your face. The answer is simple: I was taking your advice. You told me that worry and stress change the chemical balance of the blood. Correct?”

  “That is so.”

  “And the ‘minor recent abnormalities’ that you mentioned. They were in the blood being transferred to me. In its chemistry. True or false?”

  “True.”

  “So would you like to know what was causing it? Near the end of the last treatment sessions, he told me that the desire to go back to his own time had been growing on him, to the point where it was an obsession. I
agreed to let him visit Belur and the Chronoclast, for one simple reason: I wanted him to know that a return to his own time is absolutely impossible. I spoke to him a few hours ago. He is at last convinced. And he will be here tonight, in time for the next treatment. All right?”

  Salino nodded, grudgingly satisfied.

  He would have been amazed by Puladi’s own unvoiced question to himself: Why had he really agreed to the visit to Calcutta? He did not know. And following that came the odd realization, of how much he was looking forward to the coming nighttime session.

  Ten hours later, Puladi was questioning the wisdom of his decision. The visit to the Chronoclast had on the face of it achieved just what he wanted. And yet something else had happened. He could read it on the countenance of the youth who lay on the bed next to his wheelchair. There were smudges of exhaustion beneath the clear brown eyes, and the mouth was more tightly drawn than before.

  A boy had gone to Calcutta, and a man had returned.

  “Did you see Rustum Belur himself?”

  “For a few minutes.” The tense mouth relaxed to a quick smile. “Did you know, Puladi, that he admires you greatly? He described you as a kind and generous man.”

  “Then he is indeed a rarity. I spared his life, that is all. On an impulse. One man, among many. I do not know how many.” Puladi realized that he truly did not. The purges and the culling had gone on for so long, day after day and year after year. “Would you believe millions? Maybe ten million?”

  He was talking of matters about which he never talked; but the other did not seem shocked.

  “No, I would not believe it.” The brown eyes met Puladi’s own, in a way that no man’s had ever done. “I might believe fifty million. When you give an order to the guards, Kelb and Mavermine and Jaworsky compete in their zeal to make sure that it is carried out thoroughly. But you spared Belur, he said, when Kelb would cheerfully have destroyed him. And he said that you had every reason to have him killed. The Chronoclast was not working as he had promised. He knows the problem now.”

  Puladi felt a quiver of hope, and dismissed it at once as quite irrational. If Rustum Belur had found a way to access the future, the news would have come to him that same day. “What was wrong with the Chronoclast?”

  “Nothing, in terms of its function. But he told you of a slight uncertainty in the transport time, which might give an hour or two of error over a couple of years. He did not know it at the time, but that error grows for longer intervals—what is the word for it—quadratically?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “So the final error can be large.”

  “And to use the Chronoclast to return something or someone to the past—”

  “—is quite impossible. Just as you said.”

  “You are disappointed.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do not be.” Puladi’s voice was gentle. “You see, even if it had been possible, I could never let you go. You are my lifeline.”

  “I know. But I thought, if you were dead…” He turned his head away, and closed his eyes.

  Puladi turned away also, to stare at the bank of displays. If I were dead, you would soon be dead, too. I may be your tormentor, but I am also your protector. Kelb dare not touch you, or anyone, as long as I am alive.

  And after that?

  It was something he seldom considered, but maybe it was time to think about it. He recalled one of their late night exchanges:

  “I was hoping for a miracle cure.”

  “And if you had found it, what then? No one lives forever.”

  “No. But maybe thirty years more, instead of a few months…”

  “One month, or thirty years. There is no difference. It is how you live, not how long you live, that matters.”

  Words of wisdom. From a child.

  And now, again, tonight. One dead, or fifty million. It is not how many you kill, but that you kill.

  And he had done it all to preserve—what?

  The screens in front of Puladi were restlessly active. All the displays were under his control. When he did not give direct instructions they would operate from preexisting programs, scanning for high-activity areas and recording anything that the algorithms considered significant. They were designed to report every doubtful case, leaving it to Puladi himself to evaluate later the need for action. More often than not he rejected their suggestions as unnecessary.

  Would Kelb, or Mavermine, or Jaworsky, operate with as much restraint when he was gone? They did not understand the natural dynamics of human activities. If his successor took every report at face value, the world would turn into a sea of blood. And they would not even know how to destroy the system. He had protected against that very danger, so that he alone could disable it.

  Puladi was roused by a whimper from the bed next to him. His companion had fallen asleep. He was dreaming. His dark head shook from side to side, and he was mouthing, “No, no, no.”

  Puladi gathered the long IV tube in one hand and reached across. He took warm brown fingers in his and pressed them gently. The contact sent an electric surge through his whole body.

  “Wake up. Everything’s all right. Come on, wake up, you are having a nightmare, that’s all.”

  It took a few seconds until the brown eyes opened, and Puladi heard a quivering sigh.

  “Oh. I am here.”

  “You are here. You are safe.”

  “I was dreaming. It was happening again. I was afraid.”

  “There is no need for fear. Tell me about it. If you can.”

  “It was the dream again, the one that I hoped was over forever.” He sat up, rubbing at his throat. “It came first when I was twelve years old. I was walking along a little valley between two hills, by the side of a river, through cedars and poplars and ash trees. The stream branched into two parts. The left side went past a little house, and a farmyard, and growing crops. A family was working in the fields, a man and a wife and five sons. And I knew I was that man, bent down with age and toil.

  “But the right branch of the stream rose up toward the hills. I saw a crowd of people on the hillside, calling to me. They shouted that I was their champion, that I would rule the whole world, that I was so strong I could defeat Death itself. I started their way, and they began throwing flowers on the ground, and cheering, and laughing. But when I drew close to them, the stream turned from water to blood. The sun vanished from the sky. Pain came from nowhere, all through my body. I fell to the ground; and I saw grinning Death, standing over me.

  “That was the dream. For a full year it tortured me, over and over. Until finally, one night, I made a great effort. In my dream I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. I did not see the flowers or hear the cheers. I managed to turn around, and struggled back to where the stream divided. I went the other way, up the left-hand branch to the quiet little farm. I stayed there. I became the old man, happy with his wife and his children.

  “And I woke. I never had that dream again. Until tonight. Then it came—but this time you were standing at the division in the stream, telling me that I must not take the peaceful branch. I must follow the other path, through pain and darkness, to fight Death himself.”

  Puladi was still holding that slender brown hand. He patted it reassuringly. “Dreams are dreams, nothing more. I’d hate to tell you my own nightmares. You are safe here. There is no reason at all to be afraid.”

  “But you are here. And you are afraid.”

  “To die? Everyone is afraid to die.”

  “I do not mean that. You are afraid of the world.”

  “Never.” But Puladi found the clear brown eyes boring into his. “Never. Why do you say such a thing?”

  “I talked with Rustum Belur. He could not understand why you spared his life, when it was so easy for you to allow Kelb to take him away and have him killed.”

  “Maybe I have killed enough.”

  “True. And why? Because if they were alive, you would fear what they might do. You did not k
ill Rustum Belur, only because you had no reason to fear him. He could do nothing to harm you.”

  “Nonsense!” But Puladi could not meet those eyes any longer. He stared up at the displays. His free hand, without any thought on his part, began to tap at the keypad in the armrest of his wheeled chair. The screens came to life again.

  This time it was not hidden meeting places, or furtive clusters of people on street corners, or two heads together in a dimly lit bar or quiet coffeehouse. This time Puladi had unconsciously sent his sensors high and far, seeking out the beautiful and the spectacular.

  The screens filled, one by one: a sunlit South American waterfall, Cherun-Meru, dropping three thousand feet amid a mist of droplets and rainbow light; a towering thunderhead, black over the Java Sea, with lightning flickering through its turbulent base. Glittering Antarctic icebergs, calving away from the Ross Ice Shelf; whales, by the score and by the hundred, sounding and surfacing on their Pacific journey from pole to pole; dunes, hundreds of feet high, singing and murmuring their mingsha song to the Taklamakan Desert as the sands cooled and shifted with the setting sun; termite mounds, dotting an arid African plain like an army of ten-foot soldiers frozen in place and cased in brown cement; the taiga of the north, stunted junipers and pines, with the midnight sun hovering on the horizon.

  While those scenes flashed into place, a quiet voice at Puladi’s side spoke to him, or maybe to itself. “But since there is still fear, even here, even for someone who controls the whole world, then there can be fear anywhere. You are right, Puladi. It is wrong that I was so afraid. I must go back. I must take the road through pain and darkness. I must fight Death itself. And maybe I will triumph.”

  Puladi had needed the displays to calm his own thoughts. Now as he watched and listened, an idea flashed through his brain like jagged lightning.

  “No. If I am afraid, it is not for me alone. It is for this. Think what may come after me. The jackals are already gathered, waiting for my death.” Puladi gestured at the wall displays. “Look at Earth, so various, so beautiful. When I am gone, what will happen to it? I have organized the world and forced it to peace. At my death it will fall to chaos.”