Georgia On My Mind and Other Places

by Charles Sheffield

  21 September, 1855. Glory to Almighty God, and let me pray that I never again have doubts. L. and I have wondered, so many times, about our decision to come here. We have never regretted it, but we have asked if it was done for selfish reasons. Now, at last, it is clear that we are fulfilling a higher purpose.

  Yesterday I returned from my latest journey to Macquarie Island. They were there! The “cold-loving people,” just as my native friends assured me. In truth, they find the weather of the island too warm in all but the southern winter months of May to August, and were almost ready to depart again when our ship made landfall. For they are migrant visitors, and spend the bulk of the year in a more remote location.

  The natives term them “people,” and I must do the same, for although they do not hold the remotest outward aspect of humans, they are without doubt intelligent. They are able to speak to the natives, with the aid of a box that they carry from place to place. They possess amazing tools, able to fabricate the necessities of life with great speed. According to my native translators, although they have their more permanent base elsewhere in this hemisphere, they come originally from “far, far off.” This to the Maori natives means from far across the seas, although I am less sure of this conclusion. And they have wonderful powers in medical matters. The Maori natives swear that one of their own number, so close to death from gangrenous wounds that death was no more than a day away, was brought to full recovery within hours. Another woman was held, frozen but alive, for a whole winter, until she could be treated and restored to health by the wonderful medical treatment brought from their permanent home by the “cold-loving people” (for whom in truth it is now incumbent upon me to find a better name). I should add that they are friendly, and readily humored me in my desire to make detailed drawings of their form. They asked me through my Maori interpreter to speak English, and assured me that upon my next visit they would be able to talk to me in my own language.

  All this is fascinating. But it pales to nothing beside the one central question: Do these beings possess immortal souls? We are in no position to make a final decision on such a matter, but L. and I agree that in our actions we must assume that the answer is yes. For if we are in a position to bring to Christ even one of these beings who would otherwise have died unblessed, then it is our clear duty to do so.

  It was a digression from the whole subject of the Analytical Engine, one so odd that I sat and stared at the page for a long time. And the next entry, with its great outburst of emotion, seemed to take me even farther afield.

  Dear J.G., I have the worst news in the world. How can I tell you this—L.’s old disease is returned, and, alas, much worse than before. She said nothing to me, but yesterday I discovered bright blood on her handkerchief, and such evidence she could not deny. At my insistence she has visited a physician, and the prognosis is desperate indeed. She is amazingly calm about the future, but I cannot remain so sanguine. Pray for her, my dear friend, as I pray constantly.

  The letter was dated 25 September, just a few days after his return from his travels. Immediately following, as though Luke could not contain his thoughts, the diary ran on:

  Louisa insists what I cannot believe: that her disease is no more than God’s just punishment, paid for the sin of both of us. Her calm and courage are beyond belief. She is delighted that I remain well, and she seems resigned to the prospect of her death as I can never be resigned. But what can I do? What? I cannot sit idly, and watch her slow decline. Except that it will not be slow. Six months, no more.

  His travels among the colony of the “cold-loving people” were forgotten. The Analytical Engine was of no interest to him. But that brief diary entry told me a great deal. I pulled out the picture of Luke and Louisa Derwent, and was staring at it when Bill emerged rumple-haired from the bedroom.

  This time, I was the one desperate to talk. “I know! I know why they came all the way to New Zealand.”

  He stared, at me and at the picture I was holding. “How can you?”

  “We ought to have seen it last night. Remember the family tree in the Bible? It showed they’re half brother and half sister. And this.” I held the painting out toward him.

  He rubbed his eyes, and peered at it. “I saw. What about it?”

  “Bill, it’s a wedding picture. See the bouquet, and the ring on her finger? They couldn’t possibly have married back in England, the scandal would have been too great. But here, where nobody knew them, they could make a fresh start and live as man and wife.”

  He was glancing across to the open ledger, and nodding. “Damn it, you’re right. It explains everything. Their sin, he said. You got to that?”

  “I was just there.”

  “Then you’re almost at the end. Read the last few pages, then let’s head down to Big House for breakfast. We can talk on the way.”

  He turned and disappeared back into the bedroom. I riffled through the ledger. As he said, I was close to the place where the entries gave way to blank pages.

  There was just one more letter, to the same far-off friend. It was dated 6 October, 1855, and it was calm, even clinical.

  Dear J.G., L. and I will in a few days be embarking upon a long journey to a distant island, where dwell a certain pagan native people; these are the Heteromorphs (to employ L.’s preferred term for them, since they are very different in appearance from other men, although apparently sharing our rational powers). To these beings we greatly wish to carry the blessings of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. It will be a dangerous voyage. Therefore, if you hear nothing from us within four years, please dispose of our estate according to my earlier instructions. I hope that this is not my last letter to you; however, should that prove to be the case, be assured that we talk of you constantly, and you are always in our thoughts. In the shared love of our Savior, L.D.

  It was followed by the scribbled personal notes.

  I may be able to deceive Louisa, and the world, but I do not deceive myself. God forgive me, when I confess that the conversion of the Heteromorphs is not my main goal. For while the message of Christ might wait until they return to their winter base on Macquarie Island, other matters cannot wait. My poor Louisa. Six months, at most. Already she is weakening, and the hectic blush sits on her cheek. Next May would be too late. I must take Louisa now, and pray that the Maori report of powerful Heteromorph medical skills is not mere fable.

  We will carry with us the word of Christ. Louisa is filled with confidence that this is enough for every purpose, while I, rank apostate, am possessed by doubts. Suppose that they remain, rejecting divine truth, a nation of traders? I know exactly what I want from them. But what do I have to offer in return?

  Perhaps this is truly a miracle of God’s bounty. For I can provide what no man has ever seen before, a marvel for this and every age: Louisa’s great Engine, which, in insensate mechanic operation, appears to mimic the thought of rational, breathing beings. This, surely, must be of inestimable value and interest, to any beings, no matter how advanced.

  Then came a final entry, the writing of a man in frantic haste.

  Louisa has at last completed the transformations of the information that I received from the Heteromorphs. We finally have the precise destination, and leave tomorrow on the morning tide. We are amply provisioned, and our native crew is ready and far more confident than I. Like Rabelais, “Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être.” God grant that I find it.

  I go to seek a great perhaps. I shivered, stood up, and went through to the bedroom, where Bill was pulling on a sweater.

  “The Analytical Engine. They took it with them when they left.”

  “I agree.” His expression was a strange blend of satisfaction and frustration. “But now tell me this. Where did they go?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “We have to. Take a look at this.” Bill headed past me to the kitchen, his arms still halfway into the sleeves. He picked up the folder of drawings that we had brought from the crawl space. “You’ve hardly
glanced at these, but I’ve spent as much time on them as on the letters. Here.”

  He passed me a pen-and-ink drawing that showed one of the creatures seen from the front. There was an abundance of spindly legs—I counted fourteen, plus four thin, whiskery antennae—and what I took to be two pairs of eyes on delicate protruding eyestalks.

  Those were the obvious features. What took the closer second look were the little pouches on each side of the body, not part of the animal and apparently strapped in position. Held in four of the legs was a straight object with numbers marked along its length.

  “That’s a scale bar,” said Bill, when I touched a finger to it. “If it’s accurate, and I’ve no reason to think Luke Derwent would have drawn it wrong, his ‘Heteromorphs’ were about three feet tall.”

  “And those side pouches are for tools.”

  “Tools, food, communications equipment—they could be anything. See, now, why I told you I thought for the past couple of weeks I was going mad? To have this hanging in front of me, and have no idea how to handle it.”

  “That place he mentioned. Macquarie Island?”

  “Real enough. About seven hundred miles south and west of here. But I can promise you, there’s nothing there relating to this. It’s too small, and it’s been visited too often. Anything like the Heteromorphs would have been reported, over and over. And it’s not where Derwent said he was going. He was heading somewhere else, to their more permanent base. Wherever that was.” Bill’s eyes were gleaming, and his mouth was quivering. He had been living with this for too long, and now he was walking the edge. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re heading down to Big House, so Annie can feed us. And we’re going to talk this through.” I took his arm. “Come on.”

  The cold morning air cut into us as soon as we stepped outside the door. As I had hoped, it braced Bill and brought him down.

  “Maybe we’ve gone as far as we can go,” he said, in a quieter voice. “Maybe we ought to go public with everything, and just tell the world what we’ve found.”

  “We could. But it wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because when you get right down to it, we haven’t found anything. Bill, if it hadn’t been you who sent me that letter and package of stuff, do you know what I would have said?”

  “Yeah. Here’s another damned kook.”

  “Or a fraud. I realized something else when I was reading those letters. If Jim and Annie Trevelyan had found everything in the crawl space, and shipped it to Christchurch, it would have been plausible. You can tell in a minute they know nothing about Babbage, or computers, or programming. But if you wanted two people who could have engineered a big fat hoax, you’d have to go a long way to find someone better qualified than the two of us. People would say, ah, they’re computer nuts, and they’re science history nuts, and they planned a fake to fool everybody.”

  “But we didn’t!”

  “Who knows that, Bill, other than me and you? We have nothing to show. What do we do, stand up and say, oh, yes, there really was an Analytical Engine, but it was taken away to show to these aliens? And unfortunately we don’t know where they are, either.”

  Bill sighed. “Right on. We’d be better off saying it was stolen by fairies.”

  We had reached Big House. When we went inside, Annie Trevelyan took one look at our faces and said, “Ay, you’ve had bad news then.” And as we sat down at the table and she began to serve hotcakes and sausage, “Well, no matter what it is, remember this: you are both young, and you’ve got your health. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.”

  It only seemed like it. But I think we both realized that Annie Trevelyan was smarter than both of us.

  “I’ll say it again,” said Bill, after a moment or two. “What do we do now?”

  “We have breakfast, and then we go back to Little House, and we go over everything, together. Maybe we’re missing something.”

  “Yeah. So far, it’s a month of my life.” But Bill was starting to dig in to a pile of beef sausage, and that was a good sign. He and I are both normally what Annie called “good eaters,” and others, less kind, would call gluttons.

  She fed us until we refused another morsel of food, then ushered us out. “Go and get on with it,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll sort it out. I know you will.”

  It was good to have the confidence of at least one person in the world. Stuffed with food, we trudged back up the hill. I felt good, and optimistic. But I think that was because the materials were so new to me. Bill must have stared at them already until his eyes popped out.

  Up at Little House once more, the real work started. We went over the letters and diary again, page by page, date by date, phrase by phrase. Nothing new there, although now that we had seen it once, we could see the evidence again and again of the brother-sister/husband-wife ambivalence.

  The drawings came next. The Heteromorphs were so alien in appearance that we were often guessing as to the function of organs or the small objects that on close inspection appeared to be slung around their bodies or held in one of the numerous claws, but at the end of our analysis we had seen nothing to change our opinions, or add to our knowledge.

  We were left with one more item: the ledger of tables of numbers, written in the hand of Louisa Derwent. Bill opened it at random and we stared at the page in silence.

  “It’s dated October 1855, like all the others,” I said at last. “That’s when they left.”

  “Right. And Luke wrote ‘Louisa has completed the necessary calculations.’” Bill was scowling down at a list of numbers, accusing it of failing to reveal to us its secrets. “Necessary for what?”

  I leaned over his shoulder. There were twenty-odd entries in the table, each a two or three digit number. “Nothing obvious. But it’s reasonable to assume that this has something to do with the journey, because of the date. What else would Louisa have been working on in the last few weeks?”

  “It doesn’t look anything like a navigation guide. But it could be intermediate results. Worksheets.” Bill went back to the first page of the ledger, and the first table. “These could be distances to places they would reach on the way.”

  “They could. Or they could be times, or weights, or angles, or a hundred other things. Even if they are distances, we have no idea what units they are in. They could be miles, or nautical miles, or kilometers, or anything.”

  It sounds as though I was offering destructive criticism, but Bill knew better. Each of us had to play devil’s advocate, cross-checking the other every step of the way, if we were to avoid sloppy thinking and unwarranted assumptions.

  “I’ll accept all that,” he said calmly. “We may have to try and abandon a dozen hypotheses before we’re done. But let’s start making them, and see where they lead. There’s one main assumption, though, that we’ll have to make: these tables were somehow used by Luke and Louisa Derwent to decide how to reach the Heteromorphs. Let’s take it from there, and let’s not lose sight of the only goal we have: we want to find the location of the Heteromorph base.”

  He didn’t need to spell out to me the implications. If we could find the base, maybe the Analytical Engine would still be there. And I didn’t need to spell out to him the other, overwhelming probability: chances were, the Derwents had perished on the journey, and their long-dead bodies lay somewhere on the ocean floor.

  We began to work on the tables, proposing and rejecting interpretations for each one. The work was tedious, time-consuming, and full of blind alleys, but we did not consider giving up. From our point of view, progress of sorts was being made as long as we could think of and test new working assumptions. Real failure came only if we ran out of ideas.

  We stopped for just two things: sleep, and meals at Big House. I think it was the walk up and down the hill, and the hours spent with Jim and Annie Trevelyan, that kept us relatively sane and balanced.

  Five days fled by. We did not have a solution; the information
in the ledger was not enough for that. But we finally, about noon on the sixth day, had a problem.

  A mathematical problem. We had managed, with a frighteningly long list of assumptions and a great deal of work, to reduce our thoughts and calculations to a very unpleasant-looking nonlinear optimization. If it possessed a global maximum, and could be solved for that maximum, it might yield, at least in principle, the location on Earth whose probability of being a destination for the Derwents was maximized.

  Lots of “ifs.” But worse than that, having come this far neither Bill nor I could see a systematic approach to finding a solution. Trial-and-error, even with the fastest computer, would take the rest of our lives. We had been hoping that modern computing skills and vastly increased raw computational power could somehow compensate for all the extra information that Louisa Derwent had available to her and we were lacking. So far, the contest wasn’t even close.

  We finally admitted that, and sat in the kitchen staring at each other.

  “Where’s the nearest phone?” I asked.

  “Dunedin, probably. Why?”

  “We’ve gone as far as we can alone. Now we need expert help.”

  “I hate to agree with you.” Bill stood up. “But I have to. We’re out of our depth. We need the best numerical analyst we can find.”

  “That’s who I’m going to call.”

  “But what will you tell him? What do we tell anyone?”

  “Bits and pieces. As little as I can get away with.” I was pulling on my coat, and picking up the results of our labors. “For the moment, they’ll have to trust us.”

  “They’ll have to be as crazy as we are,” he said.

  The good news was that the people we needed tended to be just that. Bill followed me out.

  We didn’t stop at Dunedin. We went all the way to Christchurch, where Bill could hitch a free ride on the university phone system.

  We found a quiet room, and I called Stanford’s computer science department. I had an old extension, but I reached the man I wanted after a couple of hops—I was a little surprised at that, because as a peripatetic and sociable bachelor he was as often as not in some other continent.