Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  “Is chaos different from freedom? I think not. I must go back.”

  The impossibility of that statement no longer mattered to Puladi. He writhed in his padded chair. “No. I need you. Earth needs you. Never before have I found anyone that I would trust as my successor. You are not like Kelb and the others, here for what they hope to gain. You would be a force for good. Stay, become my adopted son—and rule the world, as your dream foretold. It will all be yours.”

  This time it was the thin brown hand that reached out, and gripped Puladi’s.

  “You tempt me, but it is not to be. I must go back.”

  “Back in time? You cannot.” Puladi said what he no longer believed. “It is physically impossible. Rustum Belur told you so.”

  “Perhaps. But speak the truth, Puladi. You do not think that it is impossible. You think that I can do it.”

  “No. I do not think you can do it.” The touch of the thin hand had turned Puladi’s insides to bubbling lava, and suddenly he was filled with an overwhelming knowledge. “I do not think you can go back, I know you can.” He gripped hard, fingers quivering. “But if you must go, heal me first. Please, before you leave.”

  There was a creak from the bed, and the clear brown eyes were inches from Puladi’s face. Hands gripped both of his.

  “That is not necessary. You are already healed. All that remains is the fear. Before the night has ended, that too will disappear.”

  “Do not leave me. Please.”

  “I must. But we will meet again…if you choose. That I promise.” He was standing up, moving away. “It is farewell, Puladi, but it need not be goodbye.”

  The alarm sounded, and Salino came awake in one great spasm of nerves.

  Puladi’s monitors! One hour ago they had all shown normal life signs. Now they were jumping all over the screens, out of control, values beyond any range that he had ever seen before. No man could live long with those vital functions.

  He scurried across the long space between the inner and outer chambers at a speed dangerously close to triggering the automatic protection system.

  The chamber door was open! He ran inside.

  Puladi was sitting in his wheeled chair. The IV hung uselessly from his arm. He lolled back like a soft dummy. But he was busy. He was engaged on some intricate manipulation of the keypads in his chair. While Salino watched, a bank of directories appeared, then flickered away one by one in a strange nested chain reaction.

  “Puladi—what happened to you? What are you doing?” Salino stared around the room. “Where is he?”

  “One question at a time.” Puladi’s dry voice was the faintest whisper. His face was gray and rigid, only the eyes holding life. “Answer number one: I am dying. Number two: I am dismantling the world control system. Number three: he has gone, back where he came from. And I advise you to go somewhere, too, Dr. Salino, while there is still time. I estimate that you have maybe one half hour, before Kelb and friends arrive here.”

  “I have done nothing to harm them.”

  Puladi keyed in a new sequence. Five more screens flickered and died. “You are close to me; that is enough. They will certainly kill you.”

  “You are my patient. I cannot leave.”

  “I am your patient no longer. I rely on other hands than yours. Go, doctor. I command it.”

  Salino hesitated, nodded, turned, and ran for the door. On its threshold he spun around and came back to the chair.

  “Puladi, let me take you with me! I can hide you. I can save you from them.”

  The chin in the gray mask was setting to its final rigid position. Puladi’s words could barely be understood.

  “You are a good man, Salino. But it is not necessary to save me. I am saved. Go now, and save yourself.”

  The final screens were blinking out as Salino ran. One by one they showed a brief scatter-plot of color, then turned to uniform gray. One picture popped back into existence for a few seconds, a calm wilderness of primeval forest. It revealed no evidence of human activity, no sign even of human existence.

  Then it too streaked and flickered on the screen. A moment later it was gone. The overhead lights faded. Only the murmur of a laboring life-support system disturbed the room’s silence.

  Puladi waited. It was dark, he was alone, and his face was too set to show any expression. No one would ever know that he wanted to smile.

  Afterword to “The Fifteenth Station of the Cross”

  On April 5th, 1992, I was spending a Sunday afternoon as I love to, loafing and reading and talking. I picked up a Harlan Ellison collection, Deathbird Stories, and read a story in it called “Corpse.” I found it quite baffling. I passed it along to the person at the other end of the couch, who read it in turn, shook her head, and asked me, “What does it mean?”

  I said, “I don’t know—but look at this bit.”

  And I pointed out a couple of sentences in the middle, that read, “…the years from twelve to thirty during which nothing was heard of Jesus of Nazareth. They are known as the ‘lost’ years of Jesus.”

  “I know exactly where Jesus was, and what he was doing,” I said.

  I still had to write it out, which took me until the following Sunday; but at that very moment I had this story.

  Trapalanda

  JOHN KENYON MARTINDALE seldom did things the usual way. Until a first-class return air ticket and a check for $10,000 arrived at my home in Lausanne I did not know he existed. The enclosed note said only: “For consulting services of Klaus Jacobi in New York, June 6th—7th.” It was typed on his letterhead and initialed, JKM. The check was drawn on the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C. The tickets were for Geneva-New York on June 5th, with an open return.

  I did not need work. I did not need money. I had no particular interest in New York, and a transatlantic telephone call to John Kenyon Martindale revealed only that he was out of town until June 5th. Why would I bother with him? It is easy to forget what killed the cat.

  The limousine that met me at Kennedy Airport drove to a stone mansion on the East River, with a garden that went right down to the water’s edge. An old woman with the nose, chin, and hairy moles of a storybook witch opened the door. She took me upstairs to the fourth floor, while my baggage disappeared under the house with the limousine. The mansion was amazingly quiet. The elevator made no noise at all, and when we stepped out of it the deeply carpeted floors of the corridor were matched by walls thick with oriental tapestries. I was not used to so much silence. When I was ushered into a long, shadowed conservatory filled with flowering plants and found myself in the presence of a man and woman, I wanted to shout. Instead I stared.

  Shirley Martindale was a brunette, with black hair, thick eyebrows, and a flawless, creamy skin. She was no more than five feet three, but full-figured and strongly built. In normal company she would have been a center of attention; with John Kenyon Martindale present, she was ignored.

  He was of medium height and slender build, with a wide, smiling mouth. His hair was thin and wheat-colored, combed straight back from his face. Any other expression he might have had was invisible. From an inch below his eyes to two inches above them, a flat, black shield extended across his whole face. Within that curved strip of darkness colored shadows moved, little darting points and glints of light that flared red and green and electric blue. They were hypnotic, moving in patterns that could be followed but never quite predicted, and they drew and held the attention. They were so striking that it took me a few moments to realize that John Kenyon Martindale must be blind.

  He did not act like a person without sight. When I came into the room he at once came forward and confidently shook my hand. His grip was firm, and surprisingly strong for so slight a man.

  “A long trip,” he said, when the introductions were complete. “May I offer a little refreshment?”

  Although the witch was still standing in the room, waiting, he mixed the drinks himself, cracking ice, selecting bottles, and pouring the correct measures slowly but without
error. When he handed a glass to me and smilingly said “There! How’s that?” I glanced at Shirley Martindale and replied, “It’s fine; but before we start the toasts I’d like to learn what we are toasting. Why am I here?”

  “No messing about, eh? You are very direct. Very Swiss—even though you are not one.” He turned his head to his wife, and the little lights twinkled behind the black mask. “What did I tell you, Shirley? This is the man.” And then to me. “You are here to make a million dollars. Is that enough reason?”

  “No. Mr. Martindale, it is not. It was not money that brought me here. I have enough money.”

  “Then perhaps you are here to become a Swiss citizen. Is that a better offer?”

  “Yes. If you can pay in advance.” Already I had an idea what John Martindale wanted of me. I am not psychic, but I can read and see. The inner wall of the conservatory was papered with maps of South America.

  “Let us say, I will pay half in advance. You will receive five hundred thousand dollars in your account before we leave. The remainder, and the Swiss citizenship papers, will be waiting when we return from Patagonia.”

  “We? Who are ‘we’?”

  “You and I. Other guides if you need them. We will be going through difficult country, though I understand that you know it better than anyone.”

  I looked at Shirley Martindale, and she shook her head decisively. “Not me, Klaus. Not for one million dollars, not for ten million dollars. This is all John’s baby.”

  “Then my answer must be no.” I sipped the best pisco sour I had tasted since I was last in Peru, and wondered where he had learned the technique. “Mr. Martindale, I retired four years ago to Switzerland. Since then I have not set foot in Argentina, even though I still carry those citizenship papers. If you want someone to lead you through the echter Rand of Patagonia, there must now be a dozen others more qualified than I. But that is beside the point. Even when I was in my best condition, even when I was so young and cocky that I thought nothing could kill me or touch me—even then I would have refused to lead a blind man to the high places that you display on your walls. With your wife’s presence and her assistance to you for personal matters, it might barely be possible. Without her—have you any idea at all what conditions are like there?”

  “Better than most people.” He leaned forward. “Mr. Jacobi, let us perform a little test. Take something from your pocket, and hold it up in front of you. Something that should be completely unfamiliar to me.”

  I hate games, and this smacked of one; but there was something infinitely persuasive about that thin, smiling man. What did I have in my pocket? I reached in, felt my wallet, and slipped out a photograph. I did not look at it, and I was not sure myself what I had selected. I held it between thumb and forefinger, a few feet away from Martindale’s intent face.

  “Hold it very steady,” he said. Then, while the points of light twinkled and shivered, “It is a picture, a photograph of a woman. It is your assistant, Helga Korein. Correct?”

  I turned it to me. It was a portrait of Helga, smiling into the camera. “You apparently know far more about me than I know of you. However, you are not quite correct. It is a picture of my wife, Helga Jacobi. I married her four years ago, when I retired. You are not blind?”

  “Legally, I am completely blind and have been since my twenty-second year, when I was foolish enough to drive a racing car into a retaining wall.” Martindale tapped the black shield. “Without this, I can see nothing. With it, I am neither blind nor seeing. I receive charge-coupled diode inputs directly to my optic nerves, and I interpret them. I see neither at the wavelengths nor with the resolution provided by the human eye, nor is what I reconstruct anything like the images that I remember from the time before I became blind; but I see. On another occasion I will be happy to tell you all that I know about the technology. What you need to know tonight is that I will be able to pull my own weight on any journey. I can give you that assurance. And now I ask again: will you do it?”

  It was, of course, curiosity that killed the cat. Martindale had given me almost no information as to where he wanted to go, or when, or why. But something was driving John Martindale, and I wanted to hear what it was.

  I nodded my head, convinced now that he would see my movement. “We certainly need to talk in detail; but for the moment let us use that fine old legal phrase, and say there is agreement in principle.”

  There is agreement in principle. With that sentence, I destroyed my life.

  Shirley Martindale came to my room that night. I was not surprised. John Martindale’s surrogate vision was a miracle of technology, but it had certain limitations. The device could not resolve the fleeting look in a woman’s eye, or the millimeter jut to a lower lip. I had caught the signal in the first minute.

  We did not speak until it was done and we were lying side by side in my bed. I knew it was not finished. She had not relaxed against me. I waited. “There is more than he told you,” she said at last.

  I nodded. “There is always more. But he was quite right about that place. I have felt it myself, many times.”

  As South America narrows from the great equatorial swell of the Amazon Basin, the land becomes colder and more broken. The great spine of the Andean Cordillera loses height as one travels south. Ranges that tower to twenty-three thousand feet in the tropics dwindle to a modest twelve thousand. The land is shared between Argentina and Chile, and along their border, beginning with the chill depths of Lago Buenos Aires (sixty miles long, ten miles wide; bigger than anything in Switzerland), a great chain of mountain lakes straddles the frontier, all the way south to Tierra del Fuego and the flowering Chilean city of Punta Arenas.

  For fourteen years, the Argentina-Chile borderland between latitude 46 and 50 South had been my home, roughly from Lago Buenos Aires to Lago Argentina. It had become closer to me than any human, closer even than Helga. The east side of the Andes in this region is a bitter, parched desert, where gale-force winds blow incessantly three hundred and sixty days of the year. They come from the snowbound slopes of the mountains, freezing whatever they touch. I knew the country and I loved it, but Helga had persuaded me that it was not a land to which a man could retire. The buffeting wind was an endless drain, too much for old blood. Better, she said, to leave in early middle age, when a life elsewhere could still be shaped.

  When the time came for us to board the aircraft that would take me away to Buenos Aires and then to Europe, I wanted to throw away my ticket. I am not a sentimental man, but only Helga’s presence allowed me to leave the Kingdom of the Winds.

  Now John Martindale was tempting me to return there, with more than money. At one end of his conservatory-study stood a massive globe, about six feet across. Presumably it dated from the time before he had acquired his artificial eyes, because it differed from all other globes I had ever seen in one important respect; namely, it was a relief globe. Oceans were all smooth surface, while mountain ranges of the world stood out from the surface of the flattened sphere. The degree of relief had been exaggerated, but everything was in proportion. Himalayan and Karakoram ranges projected a few tenths of an inch more than the Rockies and the Andes, and they in turn were a little higher than the Alps or the volcanic ranges of Indonesia.

  When my drink was finished Martindale had walked me across to that globe. He ran his finger down the backbone of the Americas, following the continuous mountain chains from their beginning in Alaska, through the American Rockies, through Central America, and on to the rising Andes and northern Chile. When he finally came to Patagonia his fingers slowed and stopped.

  “Here,” he said. “It begins here.”

  His fingertip was resting on an area very familiar to me. It was right on the Argentina-Chile border, with another of the cold mountain lakes at the center of it. I knew the lake as Lago Pueyrredon, but as usual with bodies of water that straddle the border there was a different name—Lago Cochrane—in use on the Chilean side. The little town of Paso Roballo, where I had
spent a dozen nights in a dozen years, lay just to the northeast.

  If I closed my eyes I could see the whole landscape that lay beneath his finger. To the east it was dry and dusty, sustaining only thornbush and tough grasses on the dark surface of old volcanic flows; westward were the tall flowering grasses and the thicketed forests of redwood, cypress, and Antarctic beech. Even in the springtime of late November there would be snow on the higher ground, with snow-fed lake waters lying black as jet under a Prussian-blue sky.

  I could see all this, but it seemed impossible that John Martindale could do so. His blind skull must hold a different vision.

  “What begins here?” I asked, and wondered again how much he could receive through those arrays of inorganic crystal.

  “The anomalies. This region has weather patterns that defy all logic and all models.”

  “I agree with that, from personal experience. That area has the most curious pattern of winds of any place in the world.” It had been a long flight and a long day, and by this time I was feeling a little weary. I was ready to defer discussion of the weather until tomorrow, and I wanted time to reflect on our “agreement in principle.” I continued, “However, I do not see why those winds should interest you.”

  “I am a meteorologist. Now wait a moment.” His sensor array must have caught something of my expression. “Do not jump to a wrong conclusion. Mine is a perfect profession for a blind man. Who can see the weather? I was ten times as sensitive as a sighted person to winds, to warmth, to changes in humidity and barometric pressure. What I could not see was cloud formations, and those are consequences rather than causes. I could deduce their appearance from other variables. Eight years ago I began to develop my own computer models of weather patterns, analyzing the interaction of snow, winds, and topography. Five years ago I believed that my method was completely general, and completely accurate. Then I studied the Andean system; and in one area—only one—it failed.” He tapped the globe. “Here. Here there are winds with no sustaining source of energy. I can define a circulation pattern and locate a vortex, but I cannot account for its existence.”