Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (17 page)

The body of the nanodoc, shell-like back and eight multipurpose legs, was
my
body. I had no other. As I gyrated in the brain
sulcus
along with Tom and Belinda and a couple of hundred other units, I turned off every input sensor.

I
imagined
an alien body, a body nothing like my own. A strange body with a well-defined head and slender neck, with two legs, with two jointed arms that ended in delicate manipulators. When the imagined body image was complete I took those two phantom arms and moved them to the sides of the head, just above a strange pair of external hearing organs.

I grasped. And lifted. And reeled with vertigo, as the whole
Adestis
telemetry headset that maintained my link with the nanodoc ripped away from my skull.

I leaned forward and placed my forehead on the bench in front of me. Of all the warnings that I gave to attendants in
Adestis
control rooms, none was stronger than this:
Never
, in any circumstances, rupture the electronic union between player and simulacrum.

Hospital staff were hurrying across to me. I waved them away. The nausea would pass, and I had work to do. I understood what had happened to Miriam. I knew what had happened to me, and what was happening now to Tom Abernathy and Belinda Lee. Unless I was too slow and stupid, I could end it.

The control system for
Adestis
, and for all its applications such as the nanodocs, has built-in safeguards. I opened the main cabinet, found the right circuits, and inhibited them. I turned the electronic gain for my own unit far past the danger point. Then I went back to my seat.

“Tell the technicians with Dr. Pearce to watch for us coming out,” I said. “Maybe fifteen minutes from now.”

And cross your fingers.

I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and crammed the control headset back on.

The pain and dizziness of returning were even worse than going out. I was again a nanodoc, but the overloaded input circuits were a great discordant shout inside my head. Every move that I wanted to make produced a result ten times as violent as I intended. I allowed myself half a minute of practice, learning a revised protocol. The interference that had kept me helpless before was still there—I could feel a pulling to one side—but now it was a nuisance rather than a danger.

First I steered myself across to Belinda Lee’s nanodoc. As I suspected, her loss of control included loss of signals. She could not talk to me, and she probably could not hear me. I simply took her by the legs on one side, and dragged her across to where Tom Abernathy was drifting around in endless circles. I linked the two units together, right four legs to left four legs, and locked them.

After that it was a purely mechanical task. I proceeded steadily along the brain fissure, systematically catching the nanodocs and linking them by four of their legs to the next unit in the train. The final result was itself something like a very long and narrow centipede, with over two hundred body segments. When I was sure that I had captured every nanodoc I positioned myself at the head of the file, attached four legs to Belinda’s free limbs, and looked for the way out.

I had seen it as too simple.
Follow the direction of the blood.
But we were in one of the major
sulci
, where in a healthy human there must be no blood. (As I learned later, blood cells in the cerebrospinal fluid is one sign of major problems in the brain.)

Where were the signposts? I pondered that, as our caravan of nanodoc units set out through one of the most complex objects in the universe: the human brain. We went on forever, through regions corresponding to nothing that Tom Abernathy had described to me. Finally I came across the rubbery wall of a major blood vessel.

Artery or vein? The former would merely carry us back into the brain. The latter would mean we were on our way out.

I entered, and pulled the whole train through after me. But still I did not know where we were heading, until the channel in which we rode joined another of rather greater width. Then I could relax. We were descending the tree, all of whose branches would merge into the broad trunk of the jugular.

I knew it when we at last entered that great vein; knew it when we were removed from the body, all at once, in the swirl of suction from a syringe.

The return to our own bodies under technician control was—as it should be—steady and gentle. I blinked awake, and found Tom Abernathy already conscious and staring at me.

I grinned. He looked away.

My hatred of him had dissolved after shared danger. Apparently his disdain for me persisted. I glanced the other way, at Belinda Lee. And found that she, like Tom Abernathy, would not meet my eye.

“We did it,” I said. I couldn’t stop smiling. “They’re all out. I bet Miriam recovers consciousness in just a few minutes.”

“
We
didn’t do anything,” Belinda said. “
You
did it all. I was useless.”

I couldn’t see it that way. But her reaction seemed too strong to be pure wounded ego.

“I couldn’t have done anything without your help,” I said. “Hey, without you two I’d never even have found my way
into
the brain.”

“You don’t understand.” Tom Abernathy’s face was pale, and his voice was as sour as Belinda’s. “I know how she feels, even if you don’t. Because I’m the same. We’re not like you, with your crazy
Adestis
heroics. I wasn’t just useless and helpless in there, I was
scared
when I lost nanodoc control. Too frightened even to follow what you were doing. Too terrified to
try
to help Miriam.”

I laughed. Not with humor. The irony of Clancy Fletcher as heroic savior for Miriam Pearce was too much to take.

“It’s not courage,” I said. “It’s only experience.”

And then, when they stared at me with no comprehension, it all spilled out. I had bottled it up for too long, and it
hurt
to talk. But I could feel no worse about myself no matter what they knew, and perhaps a knowledge of other cowardice would help them to deal with what they thought of as their own failure.

“But there’s a bright side,” I said as I concluded. “If I hadn’t failed Miriam then, I would never have experimented later with forced interruption of
Adestis
mode. And we’d still be inside Miriam’s brain.

“I’ve never told anyone this before. But now you understand why she won’t talk to me after she recovers consciousness.”

They had listened to my outpourings in an oddly silent setting. As soon as they were sure that we were all right the nanodoc technicians had hurried off to the next room, where Miriam Pearce was reported to be showing a change of condition. The only sound in the room where we sat was the occasional soft beep of nanodoc monitors, reporting inactive status.

“I’m sorry to hear all that.” Tom Abernathy’s sincerity was real. Rumpled and sweaty, he was no longer the elegant physician with the polished bedside manner. “Miriam won’t talk to you?”

He ought to know that, if anyone did.

“Not for years.”

“Strange. Doesn’t sound like the Miriam Pearce that I know.”

“Nor me,” said Belinda. “She’s nice to everybody. But when are you going to tell us what was going on in there? I try to pass myself off as somebody who knows nanodocs, and I can’t even
understand
what you did, let alone do it myself.”

“It was no big deal. It all depends on one simple fact. As soon as you know that, you’ll be able to work everything else out for yourself. The key factor is
interference effects
. The electrical currents that control an
Adestis
module—including a nanodoc—”

I was interrupted, by a technician hurrying through from the next room.

“Dr. Abernathy. We think Dr. Pearce is waking up.”

I was first through the door. Miriam’s condition was clearly different—she was stirring restlessly on the bed—but her eyes were closed. Before I could get to the bedside Tom Abernathy had pushed me aside and was checking the monitors.

“Looks a hell of a lot better.” He leaned right over Miriam, and was inches from her face when her eyes flickered open.

“I knew you would.” The faint thread of sound would not have been heard, had not everyone in the room frozen to absolute stillness. “I knew you’d come and save me.”

Her mouth and eyes were smiling up—at Tom Abernathy. Then the smile faded, she sighed, and her eyes closed again in total weariness.

I blundered out of the room more by feel than sight. Company was the last thing I wanted, but Belinda followed me.

“You can’t leave it like that,” she said. “What
about
electrical currents?”

She wanted to talk. Well, why not? What did it matter? What did anything matter?

“The electrical currents that are
sent
to an
Adestis
unit are a few milliwatts,” I said. “But the ones that are received at the unit, and the magnetic fields they generate, are orders of magnitude smaller than that. They’re minute—and almost exactly the size of the fields and currents within the human brain. When Miriam sent nanodocs
into her own brain
, they were subject to two different sets of inputs, one arriving fractionally later than the other. In her case that set up a resonance which left both her brain and the nanodocs incapable of functioning normally. She was trapped. Maybe she even knew that she was trapped.

“In our case it worked differently. Her brain currents
interfered
with our nanodoc operation, so we lost control, but there was no resonance and no loss of consciousness.

“All I did was break out of
Adestis
mode and reset the input currents to the highest level on my unit. When I went back in there was still a disturbance from Miriam, but it was one small enough for me to be able to handle.”

Belinda was nodding, but she was beginning to stare at the door to the next room. “You know, Tom has to hear this, too.”

“He’ll hear it. Just now he has other things on his mind.”

I don’t know how I sounded, but it was enough to earn Belinda Lee’s full attention.

“What
is it
with you and Tom? I thought you hadn’t even met until today.”

“You really don’t know? I’d have expected it to be the talk of the hospital.” And then, when she gaped at me, “Miriam Pearce and Tom Abernathy”—he had opened the door and was walking into the room, but it was too late to stop—“are lovers.”

“
Tom
and Miriam Pearce.” Belinda exploded. “Over my dead body—and over his, if it’s ever true.”

She rushed to his side and grabbed him possessively by the arm. “He’s
mine
. He’s
my
lover, and no one else’s.”

Abernathy must have wondered what he had walked into. Whatever it was, he didn’t care for it. “My God, Belinda! You know what we agreed. Shout it out, so the whole hospital hears you.” He actually blushed when he looked at me, something I had not seen on a mature male for a long time. And then his expression slowly changed, to an odd mixture of satisfaction and defiant pride.

“It’s
his
fault.” She was pointing at me. “He told me that you and Miriam Pearce are lovers!”

“Miriam and
me
? No way! Honest, Belinda, there’s nothing between us—there never has been.”

“I hope not. But I know she doesn’t have a man of her own.” Belinda was persuaded. Almost. “And she did say to you, ‘I knew you’d come and save me.’”

“To
me
? What a joke that’d be! I was as much use inside her head as a dead duck. She wasn’t talking to me, she was talking to
him
. She said his name, Clancy, right after you two left. I came out here to get him.”

“She
doesn’t
have a man—doesn’t have a lover?” That was me, not Belinda. Shock slows comprehension.

“Not anymore. She once told me she had some guy, years ago, but he dumped her. Her family did something terrible to him. He wouldn’t see her, didn’t answer phone calls. In the end she just gave up.”

“I thought a Pearce family member could get absolutely anything.” That was Belinda, too cynical for her years.

Tom Abernathy patted her arm. With their secret out, his attitude was changing. “Almost anything. Miriam told me that a billionairess can have any man in the world. Except the one she wants.”

“Does she want
you
?” Belinda had to be sure. But long-suffering Tom Abernathy was spared the need to offer that reassurance, because again one of the hospital staff came running through from the other room.

“Dr. Abernathy,” he said. “She’s finally waking up.
Really
waking up this time.”

Tom and Belinda hurried away. I followed, more slowly.

Finally waking up.
Really
waking up. If only that had happened years ago, before it was too late.

I walked to the open door. Tom Abernathy was at the bedside. Miriam was sitting up, pale blue eyes wide open and searching. I stood rooted on the threshold. Belinda Lee was coming toward me, suddenly knowing, one hand raised.

I forgot how to breathe.

Sleeping Beauty slept for a whole century, and that still worked out fine.

Perhaps for some things it is never too late.

Afterword to “Deep Safari”

Nature is not cruel. Animals merely do what they have to do to ensure their food supply and the perpetuation of the species. If we
see
them as cruel, it is only because humans are capable of conscious cruelty. We apply our own perspective and imagine that animals, like humans, are able to know of—even perhaps enjoy—the pain that they are inflicting on another living being.

Right. That’s the rational side of me taken care of. The irrational side, which rules half my days and all my nights, is convinced that the world of spiders and ants and centipedes is more bloodthirsty and somehow infinitely more
cruel
than the world of humans, elephants, and tigers. It may be no more than word association. Anything smaller than a shrew is going to be a
cold-blooded
animal, and that adjective carries two meanings.

At any rate and for whatever reason, while I can imagine facing a lion or a bear and hoping to survive the encounter, the very idea of tackling a praying mantis or a spider as tall as I am reduces me to a quivering jelly. Which is obviously why I have been led to write about such microcombat in this story and in the novel
The Mind Pool
, where the game of
Adestis
is also played.