Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (4 page)

“Jim?”

“Dr. Wollaston.”

“So it’s
Jim
, is it. And how long has that been going on?” He narrowed his eyes and peered up at her slyly. “Well, you tell
Jim
that I agree with you. I’m going backward, and I can prove it. And according to Feynman that means the electrons in my brain are positrons. I’ve got a
positronic brain.
Get it?” He laughed again, slapping his skinny hands on the bedsheets. “Positronic brain. I’m a robot!”

“Colin, I’m getting the nurse. Right now.” Julia had already pressed the button, but no one had appeared.

“In a minute. And you know
how
I can prove it? I can prove it because I feel absolutely wonderful.”

His face had filled again with that strange bliss. He reached out and held her hand. “Remember how it felt when you were four years old, and you woke up in the morning, and you knew it was your birthday? That’s how it used to be, all the time for all of us. But ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: immature forms pass through the evolutionary stages of their ancestors. And that applies to
feelings
as well as bodies. Little kids feel the way all the animals
used
to feel, a long time ago. That’s the way I am when I’m there. Fantastic, marvelous. And the farther I go, the better it gets. You looked at my pictures. If I’ve been going back, how far did I get?”

Julia hesitated. She was torn. Half of her wanted to believe her brother, to see more of those marvelously detailed drawings and to analyze them. The other half told her she was dealing with a mind already hopelessly twisted by disease.

“Your last picture shows the period of the earliest dinosaurs. They’re all thecodonts, nothing that most people would recognize. The fossil record is very spotty there. We don’t know nearly as much about them as we’d like to.”

“And what would be next—going backward, I mean?”

“The Permian. No dinosaurs. And at this end of the Permian, over ninety percent of all the lifeforms on earth died off. We don’t know why.”

He was nodding. “The barrier. I can feel it, you know, when I’m trying to jump. I went through one, when all the dinosaurs died off. This one is bigger. I’ve been trying to fight my way through. I’m nearly there, but it’s taking every bit of energy I have.”

“Col, anything that tires you or upsets you is
bad
. You need rest. Why are you climbing imaginary walls?”

“You don’t know the feeling. If I could jump all the way back, right to the first spark of life, I bet the intensity of life force and joy would be just about too much to stand. I’m going there, Julie. Across the barrier, into the Permian, all the way to the beginning. And I’m never coming back.
Never
.”

As though on cue, the thin body arched up from the bed, arms flailing. The mouth widened to a rictus of infernal torment and breath came hoarse and loud. Julia cried out, just as the nurse appeared. Wollaston was right behind her.

“Grand mal.”
He was bending over Colin, grabbing at a rubber spatula and pushing it into the mouth just as the teeth clenched down. “Hold this, nurse, we don’t want him swallowing his tongue.”

But the spasm ended as quickly as it had started. Colin Trantham lay totally at ease, his breath slow and easy. His face smoothed, and the fixed grin faded. In its place came a look of infinite calm and blissful peace.

“Dr. Wollaston!” The nurse was watching the monitors, her hand on Colin’s pulse. “Dr. Wollaston, we have arrhythmia. Becoming fainter.”

Wollaston had the hypodermic with its six-inch needle in his hand, the syringe already filled. It was poised above Colin Trantham’s chest when he caught Julia’s eye.

She shook her head. “No, Jim. Please. Not for one month more pain.”

He hesitated, finally nodded, and stepped away from the bed.

“Dr. Wollaston.” The nurse looked up, sensing that she had missed something important but not sure what. She was still holding Colin Trantham’s wrist. “I can’t help him. He’s going, doctor. He’s going.”

Julia Trantham moved to grip her brother’s other hand in both of hers.

“He is,” she said. “He’s going.” She leaned forward, to stare down into open eyes that still sparkled with a surprised joy. “He’s going. And I’d give anything to know where.”

Afterword to “The Feynman Saltation”

Anthony Trollope said, “A genius must wait for inspiration. I am not a genius, so I write every day.”

I am not a genius, and I don’t write every day, either, but there is one guaranteed way to get a story from me. You
ask
me for one, on some specialized subject, and my brain juices start to flow at once.

This story began with a letter from Robert Silverberg, asking if I had a dinosaur story for a new book he was editing. I didn’t, and at the time I was not writing anything because I was busy reading deeply about parasitic diseases and cancer treatment. I also know nothing about dinosaurs.

Naturally, I wrote back at once and said yes; I gave him my proposed title, “The Feynman Saltation,” and I started to write. But I could not get my mind far away from the morbid fascinations of glioblastomas and chemotherapy and antimetabolite drugs. If this tale seems to be more about cancer than dinosaurs, you now know why.

The Bee’s Kiss

The moth’s kiss, first!

Kiss me as if you made believe

You were not sure, this eve,

How my face, your flower, had pursed

Its petals up; so, here and there

You brush it, till I grow aware

Who wants me, and wide ope I burst.

* * *

“Your guilt is not in question. Nor, given the outrage of your offense against the Mentor, is your punishment. Yet the past few days have provided anomalies for which a curious mind still asks an explanation. Will you tell?”

The room where Gilden sat was huge, low-ceilinged, dim-lit, and smoky. The face of the Teller seemed to float on the dead air in front of him, pale and thoughtful, and the questioning voice, as always, was gentle and reasonable.

Gilden shook his head the fraction of an inch that the metal brace permitted.
The past few days.
He grasped that phrase and kept his mind focused on it. He could have been sitting in this chair for months or years, drifting in and out of consciousness as the drugs ebbed and surged within his body. But here was a data point.

Or was the Teller lying, for her own inquisitorial purposes? Perhaps it had been a year, five years, ten years since the arrest. Perhaps his location had been changed a score of times. Perhaps, even, he was no longer on Earth, but transported to one of the Linkworlds within the Mentor’s domain.

“You are a clever man.” The Teller, patient to infinity, had waited a full two minutes before speaking again. “You think, so long as you have information of value to the Mentor, or interesting to me, so long will your punishment be delayed. But that is a false conclusion. Permit me to demonstrate.”

Gilden’s forearms were clamped to the arms of the chair. The Teller leaned forward and pressed a blunt cylinder to the upward-facing palm of Gilden’s right hand. The flat disk at its end glowed white-hot. Flesh sizzled and sputtered, black smoke swirled. The stench of charring flesh filled the room.

Gilden screamed and writhed. The pain was unendurable, beyond description or comprehension. Somehow he remained conscious as the disk burned through to the bare bones of his hand. Then, at last, the Teller lifted the cylinder.

“One taste of torment. But observe.” She nodded, to where Gilden’s palm was renewing itself. New flesh pooled eerily into the blackened cavity, new skin crept in to cover it. “We are of course in derived reality. Your body is unmarked. But before you take comfort from that, let me point out the implications. Your condign punishment can continue—and will continue—for many, many years, at the level of pain that you experienced for only a few moments. For although your specific offense is unprecedented, the nature of your punishment is not. Do you recall the name of Ruth el Fiori Skandell, Bloody Ruth, who sabotaged one of the Mentor’s aircars and thereby assassinated two of his lesser sons?”

Gilden grunted, deep in his throat. The Teller took it as a sign of assent, and went on.

“Skandell holds a melancholy record within the Linkworlds. After her sentencing she lived on for sixty-three years, enduring at every moment an agony at least as bad as yours. Virtual punishment is no boon, when pain exceeds reality. Someday, some unfortunate will break Skandell’s record. It could be you, Arrin Gilden. Behold, one more time, the reenactment of your crime.”

The room darkened further. The Teller’s pallid face vanished. Only her persistent voice remained, moving closer to whisper intimately into Gilden’s ear.

“
When,
I know already.
How
, you have been wise enough to describe to me. Now I must know
why
. Why would the world’s leading electronics designer and miniaturist throw away career, bright future, and life itself? What compulsion would lead him to work night and day for a full year, at a level of ingenuity marveled at by all who have studied the process, with a level of risk great enough to intimidate the boldest, to attain such a momentary and apparently trivial gratification? Look again. And tell me
why
.”

The scene began as the ant-sized voyeur threaded its way toward the Mentor Presumptive’s bedchamber. It crept along precomputed hair-thin curves, following a path where the monitors’ sensing fields did not quite overlap. To learn the position of those curves, Gilden had thwarted a dozen elaborate and ingenious computer security systems. (And now he was not alone in paying for his skill. Twenty guards, if the Teller could be believed, had been sentenced to a lifetime of labor in the ice-world quarries of Decantil, for their failure to detect the voyeur as it insinuated itself into the Mentor Presumptive’s sanctum.)

The Presumptive’s new bride had been drugged during surgery and the elaborate preparations that followed, but before leading her into the bedchamber the physicians had followed instructions. All drugs and sedatives were sluiced from her body. She lay now, dark-skinned, naked, and slightly trembling, on a great circular bed sheeted with blue satin. The Presumptive stood by the bedside. He was humming softly to himself as he removed a belted robe of dark crimson. Beneath it he was naked. The sensors of the voyeur zoomed to take in the Presumptive’s facial expression as he moved rampant onto the bed and gripped the woman’s quivering thighs. There was a long moment, a pause for savoring and anticipation. At the moment of entry the voyeur expanded its field of view to include the woman’s face.

This time the surgeons had done a good job. The afferent nerves linking sex organs and hindbrain had been channeled and enhanced, but not too much. The bride’s ecstasy during lovemaking took her close to the point of death, but after the Mentor Presumptive’s climax she was still alive.

The display changed, turning to show continuing muscle spasms in the bride’s inner thighs. The view moved slowly up her body, to pause at a slack-lipped mouth and at eyes where only a sliver of iris showed between whites and upper lids. At last the display moved again, halting at the Presumptive’s flaring nostrils and full lips.

“You and I have watched this many, many times.” The calm voice of the Teller cut into the recorded sound of the Mentor’s heavy breathing. “Your resting pulse rate is fifty-seven beats a minute. Your current pulse rate is one hundred and sixteen. Would you like to tell me why?”

“I explained.”

“You explained indeed. In response to my stimuli you explained too much. First it was your stated intention to sell copies of this, the recording of a most secret and sacred element of the Mentor Presumptive’s life. But while you have dozens of other illegal recordings in your quarters, there is no evidence that you have ever attempted to sell any one of them—or indeed that you would know how to undertake this or any other illegal enterprise. I reject that explanation. Next you explain that you intended to use the recording to blackmail the Mentor Presumptive, or even the Mentor himself. A preposterous suggestion indeed, since the first hint that such a recording had been made would lead to your arrest and death—as indeed it did and will. You then explained to me that you considered this a final test of technique for your new sensor. If it could penetrate this innermost and highly protected sanctum, it could penetrate anywhere. True, perhaps, but a dangerous notion indeed for anyone who wishes to live. The Empyrium must be able to keep its secrets.

“So I am forced to my own conclusion. You have
explained
, Prisoner Gilden, and explained again and again. But you have not
told
. Tell me now. Why did you do this, and throw away a life most valuable to the Mentor?”

Arrin Gilden stared into darkness. He moved his weary head forward to rest it against the cool metal of the brace.

“Could we have some light?”

“I see no reason why not.”

As the room brightened the Teller’s face slowly appeared a few feet from Gilden’s chair. If this was derived reality, the illusion was perfect. Gilden recognized a dreadful irony. The technology that would doom him to an endless lifetime of torture was the twin of the one that had caught him. No one in the Mentor’s entourage had discovered his tiny voyeur device, or even dreamed of its existence. It was Gilden himself, unable to leave the looped reality offered by the voyeur, who had been discovered. And even that might not have been fatal. Many people suffered from illusion lock. But the equipment in Gilden’s apartment had also been running its external display. Everyone on Earth knew the face of the Mentor Presumptive.

“You have asked me many questions.” Gilden tried for the hundredth time to fathom the unreadable, the expression on the Teller’s face.

“That is my function.”

“I would like to ask you one.”

“That is your privilege.”

“Why are you a Teller? You seem a sincere woman, and a friendly one. Why do you pursue a profession that forces you to inflict torture and death?”

The silence in the room lasted less than a second for Gilden. He knew that for the Teller, with total control over her time rate and his, the interval might be minutes or hours—long enough to consider the answer in detail, and match it to the Telling process.