Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (45 page)

“Not at all.” He stood up, too, and said, “Actually, I’m going to be giving a lecture at the institute on these subjects in a couple of weeks. If you’d like to come . . .”

I noted down the time and place, but I knew I would not be there. It was three months to the day since John Martindale, Helga, and I had climbed the rock face and walked behind the waterfall. Time—my time—was short. I had to head south again.

The flight to Argentina was uneventful. Comodoro Rivadavia was the same as always. Now I am sitting in Alberto McShane’s bar, drinking one last beer (all that my digestion today will permit) and waiting for the pilot. McShane did not recognize me, but the armadillo did. It trundled to my table, and sat looking up at me.
Where’s my friend John Martindale
, it was saying.

Where indeed? I will tell you soon. The plane is ready. We are going to Trapalanda.

It will take all my strength, but I think I can do it. I have added equipment that will help me to cross that icy field of boulders and ascend the rock face. It is September. The weather will be warmer, and the going easier. If I close my eyes I can see the portal now, behind the waterfall, its black depths and shimmering blue streaks rushing away toward the vanishing point.

Thirty-five years. That is what the portal owes me. It sucked them out of my body as I struggled back against the gravity gradient. Maybe it is impossible to get them back. I don’t know. My young mathematician friend insisted that time is infinitely fluid, with no more constraints on movement through it than there are on travel through space. I don’t know, but I want my thirty-five years. If I die in the attempt, I will be losing little.

I am terrified of that open gate, with its alien twisting of the world’s geometry. I am more afraid of it than I have ever been of anything. Last time I failed, and I could not go through it. But I will go through it now.

This time I have something more than Martindale’s scientific curiosity to drive me on. It is not thoughts of danger or death that fill my mind as I sit here. I have that final image of Helga, reaching out and taking John Martindale’s hand in hers. Reaching out, to grasp his hand, voluntarily. I love Helga, I am sure of that, but I cannot make sense of my other emotions; fear, jealousy, resentment, hope, excitement. She was
touching
him. Did she do it because she wanted to go through the portal, wanted it so much that every fear was insignificant? Or had she, after thirty years, finally found someone whom she could touch without cringing and loathing?

The pilot has arrived. My glass is empty. Tomorrow I will know.

Afterword to “Trapalanda”

John Kenyon Martindale is a major character in this story. John Kenyon Martindale
Sanderson
is my father-in-law, Sandy, the father of my late wife, Sarah (“Georgia on My Mind” is really about Sarah). Sandy lives in Walton-on-Thames, near London. He is eighty-eight years old, and eats, drinks, walks, and laughs like someone half his age. He is what I want to be at that age. He has been reading science fiction since the 1920s, he hung around with the Bloomsbury set, and he knew H. G. Wells. (Irrelevant side note: Wells was very popular with women, even though he was not handsome and had a funny voice. Sandy asked a couple of ladies why they found Wells so attractive. They said, “He has a really interesting smell.”)

Anyway, this story was written for Sandy, even though it was not dedicated to him. Unfortunately, when he read it he didn’t like it. He thought that the narrator had a diseased mind. I didn’t tell him it was really me.

Ah, well. He loved “Beyond the Golden Road.” I’ll have to settle for that.

Obsolete Skill

I had been a lifelong agnostic. So when the hammer blow to the chest came at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, I knew it was the end of everything.

I had just enough time to put the pan back on the stove, curse my own stupidity—those pains in the left arm and chest were clear enough signs of heart trouble, but who likes to visit doctors?—then I was falling toward the floor and the lights were going out. Goodbye, world.

It was a big surprise to drift back to consciousness and find that the world was apparently still there. CPR? But then who could have saved me? I had been alone in the house, with the alarm system on and no visitors expected. It occurred to me that I didn’t merely feel pleased to be alive, like any man who has survived a massive heart attack; I felt
good
. Weak and feeble, sure—but healthy, if you can imagine that combination.

Without opening my eyes I groped automatically for my glasses.

“What do you want?” said a disembodied man’s voice a few feet away from me.

“Spectacles.” My eyelids seemed to weigh a ton each.

“They are unnecessary.”

That
was
enough to make me blink my eyes open. I was staring straight up at a blue-painted ceiling, glowing all over with a soft internal lighting. Every detail was visible, down to a little spider-web of sensors over in the corner, and a raft of things like glowing pink buttons right over me. The area that I could see without turning my head held a clutter of other miniaturized electronics, doing I knew not what. Fine lines of violet light crisscrossed the whole field of view.

“Try to relax,” said the voice. “The instruments are monitoring your isotonic responses, and four of them show high readings. Don’t be frightened, there is no danger.”

That was bad—I was supposed to understand something about self-control. I lay back and closed my eyes again.

I must not fear. Fear is the death. Fear is the little-death that brings obliteration.
(Not, it’s not my own prescription—but it works. I’ve never been too proud to borrow.)

“How long has it been?” I said after a few more seconds.

There was a gasping intake of breath from the man next to me. “You know what has happened? Already?”

“I can make a good guess. I died; and now I’m not dead anymore. So somebody took me, and either they transferred my consciousness to a new body, or they froze me, cured me, and woke me up again. I’d guess the second, because it still feels like my own body. Which was it?” I opened my eyes and turned my head, to look at the slightly built man who sat at my bedside.

“Not quite either.” He was staring at me in a puzzled way. “You were frozen, as you say. But the body was given certain desirable modifications before you were allowed to regain consciousness.” He leaned forward. “We have revived many who were cryogenically preserved, but never one who has at once realized what has happened. How did you
know
?”

“Did you ever read my stories?” I looked at his smooth face—yellowish complexion, epicanthic fold on the eyes, black hair. “I guess you didn’t. I’ve written that scenario a dozen times.”

I sat up. As I’d thought, I was as weak as a cup of tea in a Scots’ boardinghouse. “Now you can answer one for me.
How long
?”

“Since you—died?”

I nodded.

“One hundred and ninety-seven and a half years.”

Jesus.
No wonder I felt rested. And weak. I was two hundred and eighty years old. “Nearly two centuries. And my works are still read?”

“Not exactly.” He hesitated. “Reading is no longer necessary. However, certain of your works are still
studied
.”

Better than nothing. Looking at him more closely with my new twenty-twenty eyes I noticed an odd thing about his speech. The words seemed to lag a little behind his facial expressions. That had its own implications. “Studied—but not in English,” I said. “When did the language die out?”

“It did not.” He smiled at me, trying to be nice. “There are still many who speak it. But as you might guess from my appearance it is not my native tongue. My name is Chen, and my native language is a variation of Mandarin Chinese. But of course, most of the editions of your works that have survived are in Japanese.”

Of course. Japanese.
“And you—you are hooked up to a computer that makes the actual translation from your language to English?”

“That is correct.” He saw my satisfied smile. “Again—you wrote of this?”

“A score of times.” I tried to swing my legs over the edge of the bed, but I was too weak to make it. Go steady—I suspected I had plenty of time to regain my strength.

“Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty,” I said. “I’m here, I’m alive, and I never gave any instructions to be put into cryogenic storage. I made a lot of money, but I spent a lot, too. It must have taken a bundle to keep me down at liquid helium temperatures for two centuries. So what the hell is going on? I’m not complaining, but why aren’t I a couple of hundred years dead?”

“It was a plan prepared by a group of your admirers—special admirers, the people who were known as
fans
. They argued that if anyone should be preserved for the future, you should, because you had a unique knowledge of your own times, and a special feeling for times to come. Having thought so much about possible futures, you would be less disturbed by any real future. Without telling you, they arranged for the collection of funds over the years at every one of their meetings—conventions—and placed it into an interest-bearing account pending your demise. When that occurred, you were transferred to the cryogenic vaults and prepared for storage.”

No sinus headache, no postnasal drip. No buzzing in the left ear. I shrugged my shoulders, and there was no arthritic twinge from my left side. Somebody had done a good job on me.

“Thanks, fans. I don’t know I deserve it, considering what I’ve said about you over the years. What comes next?”

“First, it is necessary that you recuperate and gain strength. That will take a few days. You will stay here for that period, since we do not wish you to experience too much cultural shock.”

He frowned, and leaned forward to stare at me. I felt sure there were a dozen sensors peering out through his almond eyes. “Are you feeling all right?” he said.

“Just fine.”

“I wondered, because you seem almost
too
calm. To arrive here, far in your future, and to know suddenly that all your friends and fellow-writers are dead . . . it must be most upsetting.”

“Chen, I was
old
. Hell, most of my friends and the writers that I knew well were already dead before I died.”
(And I was glad to see most of ’em go, the two-faced bastards.)

He nodded thoughtfully, and his face again went blank for a split second. “I do not have your reference system to work with. But of course, in your day eighty-two years
was
old. Very well. When you are fully recovered from the awakening, we have a number of people who would like to talk to you—historians, and students of twentieth-century literature. The authorship of many works from your time is left in doubt, particularly because of the translation change, to and from the Japanese. The original titles have often been lost.” He paused, as though listening inside his head for a second. “It is not easy to identify your output, even with the best references. For example, were you the author of a work named
Tales of New Space
?”

“Sure was.”

“
Spaceship Troopers
?”

“Right.”

“And
The Nine Worlds Saga
?”

“Yup.”

“
The Nude Sun?
And
Timeskip
?”

“Sure.”

“How about
Nine Princes in Aspic
?”

I shook my head. “Not me. Try farther along the alphabet.” God, I felt good. “Listen, these people who want to talk to me—didn’t your records tell you that I wouldn’t do interviews?”

“They do show that—but there is some contradiction. One of your biographies—”

“How many of them are there?”

“Ten.” He paused at my grunt. “You are surprised?”

“I’d hoped for more. But carry on.”

“The interviews. You did give interviews. One of your biographies states quite unambiguously that on a visit to Rome you agreed to meet with a certain important person there who was a keen reader of your works. Is that not true?”

“It’s true enough. But I always thought of that particular meeting as an
audience
with me more than an interview. I don’t do interviews. Can’t they ask somebody else?” A thought struck me. “Hey, just how many other writers from my time were frozen—I mean,
science fiction
writers.” (The only sort that were worth diddly-squat.)

“Only two.”

“Then who was the other? Surely not that boring old windbag—”

“No.”

Big relief—and a stir of excitement, too. He named the only woman science fiction writer I’d ever felt really attracted to. Sure, it made sense, her fans would have done the same for her as mine did for me. Let’s hope she died young.

“She was of course born quite a few years later than you,” Chen went on. “But the scholars of today know that she had read your works, and they assert that her books very clearly draw in some ways from you. There is a part of you in her.”

But not the part of me I’d like.
One problem with this renovated body, it had the hormones flowing as I’d not felt them flow in thirty years. “I feel flattered,” I said. “Perhaps she and I can meet when I am fully recovered.”

“It can be arranged, though there are subtle questions to be asked of her—the social conventions have changed much since your day. A meeting cannot be assured.” Chen sat up a little straighter. “You will probably also be wondering what your role will be in this ‘brave new world’ to which you have awakened.”

“Naturally.” As a matter of fact, up to that point I hadn’t given it a thought. I was going to be a
writer
, wasn’t I? What else was there to do?

“Then I am afraid that I bring you bad news. When you were frozen, your admirers did it with the full confidence that your abilities would find unique recognition here in the future. You were widely regarded as one of the most learned men of your time, a person whose knowledge seemed almost boundless, in many diverse fields. Some suggested that you knew more than any other living human.”

Some suggested!
Was Chen trying to get me irritated? “They were just being kind to me,” I said modestly.