Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Read online

  Which was also a last resort. Strange. Abernathy had analyzed the problem to the point where it was obvious what had to be done. But he could not or would not take that next step.

  “Are there more of the nanodocs—the same size as the ones that are missing?”

  “There are several sets of them, in all important respects identical.”

  “That’s good. Is there a staff cafeteria in the building?”

  “What?”

  “I must have something to eat, because I don’t know how long this might take. And then I’ll need to practice with your nanodocs for a few hours, to make sure I have the feel for these particular models. Then I’m going into Dr. Pearce.”

  I took a last look at Miriam, willing her to wake as I started for the door. Given a choice, I certainly didn’t want to have to go in. I wanted to go home, and go to bed. Preferably with Miriam.

  “You can’t do that!” Abernathy had lost his smooth self-control. “You are not a physician. You are an Adestis employee. Just because you have a bit of experience with your stupid little toys doesn’t mean you can handle nanodocs! This is very specialized equipment, very complex. It takes months to learn.”

  “I’ve had months. In fact, I’ve had years.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice as I walked from the room. I’m sure I failed. “While I’m gone, Dr. Abernathy, I suggest that you check the name of the patent holder for the first microsurgery developments. The name of the original holder, I mean—the idiot who had all the patents, until the Pearce family broke them and acquired the rights for themselves. And while you’re at it, check who was the creator, founder, and hundred percent owner of Adestis, before it was bankrupted and taken over.”

  Whatever I had done to Miriam, her family had paid back in full.

  The food in the cafeteria was ridiculously overpriced at seven dollars. I know it cost that, because I had left home without money or any form of credit, and I had to sign what amounted to a personal IOU with the manager for the contents of my tray.

  But that’s all I do know about the food, or the cafeteria. I must have eaten, but I don’t remember it.

  I was almost finished when Thomas Abernathy marched in and sat down opposite me. He had with him an attractive, dark-haired woman in her early twenties, who gave me a tentative smile as she sat down.

  Abernathy took the document that he was holding and pushed it across the table toward me.

  “This is a hospital, Mr. Fletcher, not a carnival.” He was struggling to be polite, but hardly succeeding. “It isn’t ‘anything goes’ here. We have strict rules, which every one of us has to obey.”

  I glanced at the paper. I had an idea what it might say.

  “All right. So I’m not ‘authorized personnel’ for the use of the nanodoc equipment. Who is?”

  “I have some experience. Dr. Pearce, of course. And Miss Lee, who is a specialist in nanodoc operations.” He nodded his head at the woman sitting next to him.

  She held out her hand but glanced at Tom Abernathy for approval before she spoke. “Belinda Lee. When Dr. Abernathy said you were here, I told him that I’d just love to meet you. You don’t know it, but you and Adestis are putting me through medical school.”

  I let that opening pass. She was being as sociable as she knew how, but we didn’t have time for it.

  “You could make me authorized personnel if you wanted to, Dr. Abernathy. It is under your jurisdiction.”

  “There’s no reason for me to do so. I now agree with you, Mr. Fletcher, interior exploration of Dr. Pearce by nanodocs is a logical and urgent step. Miss Lee and I will make that exploration. I also admit your experience with remotely controlled microsurgical equipment”—so he had checked on me, at least a little. What else had he found out?—“but we do not need you. Also, we cannot afford the time needed to train you.”

  “I have to disagree. You need me, even if you don’t want me. You’ll be making use of hospital equipment. This whole place runs on Pearce support. If I call Everett Halston he’ll contact the Board of Trustees. You’ll have an injunction slapped on you against using nanodoc equipment, one that will take weeks to break.”

  The last trace of bedside manner vanished. “You idiot, are you trying to kill Miriam? You are the one who suggested we have to go in and find out what happened to the nanodoc units inside her.”

  “We must do that. We can do that. As a team. You, I, and if you like Miss Lee. If you authorize me to use the equipment, I’ll bless the exercise at once with Everett Halston.”

  He grabbed the paper, stood up, and rushed out of the cafeteria without another word. Belinda Lee gave me an unhappy and puzzled look before she followed him. Why was I being so unreasonable?

  I carried on with the meal. I was unreasonable because I sensed possible dangers that Abernathy could not. He lacked the right experience. He would agree to my participation—he had no choice—but it was not an auspicious beginning to a safari when team members were so divided and suspicious at the outset. Teams were supposed to cooperate totally.

  On the other hand, I had been on an expedition where the team members had started out as close and loving and trusting as humans could get, and that one had ended in bitterness, disappointment, and heartbreak.

  Maybe this time the process would work the other way round.

  Belinda Lee was my instructor for the nanodoc units. Perhaps Tom Abernathy would not spend more time with me than he was obliged to; but to be more charitable, he also had two important tasks to perform.

  First, a set of nanodocs had to be tuned to Miriam’s individual body chemistry. Otherwise her immune system would be triggered at our entry and we would be attacked by every leukocyte that we encountered. Although they couldn’t damage the nanodocs, they could certainly impede them.

  As a second and trickier assignment, Tom Abernathy had to decide our access route into Miriam’s brain. He and the neurological specialists had already decided our destination. Although the sleep state of humans and animals is controlled by an area at the rear of the brain known as the reticular formation, Miriam’s responses to stimuli had them convinced that her troubles did not lie there. The problem was in the cerebral hemispheres. But to the tiny nanodocs, those hemispheres were like buildings a mile on each side. Where specifically should we be heading?

  I was glad I did not have that responsibility. My own worries were quite enough.

  Two hours had been allocated by the hospital for my training session, but it was clear in the first five minutes that they had been far too generous. True, two hours was less than half the training time that I insisted on before anyone could take part in Adestis, and in that case the simulacra were far more human in appearance than the hospital nanodocs. But for most team members the training session was a first exposure to microoperation. Familiarity with the shape of their remote analogues was reassuring to them.

  In fact, the proportions of a human are quite wrong for optimum performance of anything less than half an inch tall. Holding to the human shape in some ways makes things harder. As the size of an organism decreases, the importance of gravity as a controlling force becomes less and less, while wind and vibration and terrain roughness are increasingly dominant. Six legs become much better than two. At the smallest scale, the Brownian motion forces of individual molecular collisions have to be taken into account. Learning to gauge and allow for those changes is far more important than worrying about actual body shape.

  On the other hand, as soon as I had seen the latest nanodocs I could not agree with Miriam and Thomas Abernathy that quantum effects might be important. Wispy and evanescent as the tiny currents might be that control the simulacra, they were still orders of magnitude too big to be affected by quantum fluctuations.

  There was certainly an unanticipated problem with the new nanodocs. I certainly had no idea what it might be. But it was not what Miriam and Tom Abernathy suspected.

  As soon as Belinda Lee had watched me work a team of nanodocs for a few minut
es—each one a little bloated disk a few tens of micrometers long, with half a dozen legs/scrapers/knives along each side—she took off her telemetry coupler and leaned back in her seat. She waited patiently until I emerged from remote-control mode.

  “You ought to be teaching me, you know.” She was a different person when Tom Abernathy was not around. “How on earth did you make them zip backward so fast, and still know where they were going? I’m supposed to be our expert, and I can’t do that. The optical sensors won’t turn up and over the back.”

  “No. They will turn downward, though, and scan underneath the body. You don’t have enough experience looking between your legs and running backward.”

  She offered me an owlish look. Belinda Lee thought I was poking fun at her. I was and I wasn’t. I had never done what I suggested in my own body, but I had done it a hundred times with Adestis simulacra of all shapes and sizes. As I said, the hunter simulacra are all humanoid; but I had been both hunter and hunted, because we run hunts with remote-controlled simulated prey as well as with the real thing.

  “So how is Adestis putting you through medical school?”

  Belinda Lee seemed really nice, and I didn’t want to upset her. I needed at least one friend at the New Hanover Hospital.

  She laughed, the sort of full-throated laugh I had once heard from Miriam. “I was convinced you didn’t want to hear. I was crushed in the cafeteria when you didn’t ask.”

  “Sorry. I had other things on my mind. What did you have to do with Adestis? I’m sure you’ve never been involved in a hunt. I would have remembered you.”

  She took it for the compliment it was, and dipped her head toward me in acknowledgement. “I had problems when I was a teenager. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, but I’d heard of Adestis and I was fascinated by it. My life’s ambition was to be team leader on an Adestis underwater safari. You know, the Larval Hunt.”

  “I sure do. Scary stuff. They wouldn’t sign off?” You need written parental permission to enter Adestis mode before age twenty-one.

  “Not in a million years, they said. So I did the dutiful daughter bit, went off to college and majored in biology. But I never stopped thinking about Adestis. For my senior thesis I wondered about the possible uses of that sort of technology in medical work. I wrote and asked, and some sweetheart at Adestis headquarters sent me a bale of terrific information. I used it to write probably the longest undergraduate thesis in the college’s history. Of course I had no idea that Dr. Pearce was years and years ahead of me. But my prof knew, and he sent my finished project to her. She called a couple of days later. And here I am.”

  That sounded like Miriam. She recognized the real thing when she saw it. Her first exposure to Adestis had come through a friend at the hospital, a woman who had been on a hunt and regarded it all as a lark. But Miriam didn’t. Before the end of the first training session she was asking me if I knew any way that Adestis control technology could take her clumsy microsurgery tools down in size and up in handling precision.

  That had been the beginning of the patents. And the Adestis expeditions with Miriam. And all the rest.

  I used to think I knew the real thing, too. I recalled that highly detailed and imaginative student inquiry, even if I had not remembered Belinda’s name.

  At the same time, I began to worry. If Belinda Lee had begun to work with Adestis technology only after she graduated, she couldn’t have more than a couple of years experience with simulacra. Also she had never been on a hunt, and therefore probably never been exposed to a dangerous situation. Yet Tom Abernathy had described her as a specialist in nanodoc operation—a specialist, presumably, compared with him. In agreeing that the three of us would go into Miriam, I had burdened myself with two team members lacking the right sort of experience.

  Or was I being paranoid? What made me think that a safari into Miriam might be dangerous? Tom Abernathy and Belinda Lee certainly didn’t think so.

  Maybe that was one reason.

  The other reason was more complex. For this safari, I too would lack the right experience. I had never, in all my years with Adestis, been exposed to a situation where the environment within which my simulacrum would operate was more precious to me than my own survival.

  Our entry into Miriam began with an argument. I wanted to go in with a single nanodoc simulacrum each. Tom Abernathy argued for many more.

  “There are several hundred in Dr. Pearce’s brain. Three simulacra won’t be able to remove them, even if we find them.”

  “I know. Once we understand what’s happening, though, we can introduce more.”

  “But think of the time it will take.”

  He seemed to forget the full day that he had wasted before I came along to force a decision.

  And yet he was right. His way would be quicker. So why wouldn’t I go along with it?

  That was a difficult question. In the end it all came down to instinct. A single simulacrum was easier to control than a group of them, even though a group had more firepower. But firepower against what? The nanodocs were not armed, the way that Adestis hunters had to be armed. Why should they be? I was too used to thinking in terms of a prey, and that didn’t apply in this case.

  Yet I stuck to my position, and overruled Abernathy. We would go with single simulacra, one per person.

  But I also, illogically, wished that my nanodoc unit was equipped with something more powerful than the tiny scalpels and drug injection stings built into its eight legs.

  Destination: Brain.

  We had adopted remote-control mode outside Miriam’s body, as soon as the nanodocs were inside the syringe. We remained there for fifteen minutes, long enough to become completely comfortable with our host simulacra.

  By the end of that time I knew my partners much better. Tom Abernathy was confident but clumsy. He might understand the theory, but no matter what he thought he knew about nanodoc control he didn’t have good reflexes or practical experience.

  Belinda Lee was far better, a little nervous but quite at ease in her assumed body. If she ever dropped out of medical school there would be a place for her on the Adestis underwater safaris. (And I’d be more than glad to give up my own involvement in those. The larval animal life of streams and ponds is fierce enough to make a mature insect or arachnid look like nature’s pacifist. Maybe Belinda would change her mind when she saw at firsthand Nature red in mandible and proboscis.)

  We were injected into Miriam’s left carotid artery at neck level, our three nanodoc units at my insistence holding tightly to each other. I did not want us separated until we were well within her brain. Otherwise I at least might never get there.

  As we ascended Miriam’s bloodstream toward the three meninges, the membranes that surround and protect the brain, it occurred to me that my two partners would soon know my own weaknesses. I could handle my nanodoc better than Belinda and far better than Tom, but I was missing something they both had: a good working knowledge of human anatomy or microstructure. Abernathy had given me a lightning briefing, of which I remembered only a fraction. I peered around us. The minute compound eyes of the nanodocs couldn’t see much at all. They delivered a blurry, red-tinged view of surroundings illuminated by the nanodoc’s own pulsed light sources, enough so that I could see that we were being carried along a wide tunnel whose sides were barely visible. All around swam a flotsam of red blood cells, not much smaller than we were, interspersed with the occasional diminutive platelets. Through that swirl a white cell would occasionally come close, extend a testing pseudopod, and then retreat. Tom Abernathy’s preliminary work on the nanodocs was satisfactory. The prowling leukocytes had no great interest in us.

  I knew that the blood also carried an unseen flux of chemical messengers, taking status information from one part of the body to all the rest. Tom Abernathy could probably have explained all that to me, if our nanodocs had been capable of better communication. They were better than most Adestis units, because they did possess a primitive vocal interfac
e; but it was at a bit transfer rate so low that Abernathy, Lee, and I were practically restricted to single word exchanges. We would mostly convey our meaning by stylized gestures.

  Our progress through the internal carotid artery was far slower than I had expected. As we drifted from side to side and occasionally touched a spongy wall, I had time to explore every function of my nanodoc. And to reflect on its present owners.

  Three years ago I was convinced that the Pearce family had acted in direct reprisal for what I had done to Miriam. It took a long time to realize that nothing personal was involved, that anger at the family made no more sense than rage at the gravid Sphex wasp who takes and paralyzes a live grasshopper as feeding ground for its hatching larva.

  I doubt if Miriam herself was aware of what had happened. Through her the Pearces had been alerted to the existence of a highly valuable tidbit, in the form of the Adestis patents. Miriam wanted and needed those for her own medical work, but that was irrelevant. It was the desire to increase assets that controlled group action, and to the family there was nothing more natural than the use of wealth to acquire my patents. They had simply turned on an existing machinery of scientists, lawyers, lobbyists, and political influence. I doubt if any one of them ever suspected that the owner of the patents also happened to be the man who had hurt Miriam. For if she had never talked of me to her present lover, would she have spoken to her family?

  I liked to think that she would not.

  The nanodoc hooked tightly to my four left legs started to tug gently at them. I turned and saw Tom Abernathy’s gesturing digit.

  “Cir-cle—of—Will-is,” said a thin, distorted voice.

  We had reached Checkpoint One. After passing along the internal carotid artery we were through the protective membranes of the dura mater and pia mater and were now at the circulus arteriosus, the “Circle of Willis,” a vascular formation at the base of the brain where all the major feed arteries meet. Abernathy was steering us into the anterior cerebral artery, which would take us into the cerebral cortex.