Georgia on My Mind and Other Places by Charles Sheffield Page A

walking the twenty paces from his rooms to Derli’s.
    She was looking better, leaning back on a broad divan covered with a beige cloth that complemented the color of her hair. Gilden realized that his voyeurs needed to be slightly recalibrated. On their imagers the hair and divan had not quite matched.
    “I wondered if you would come. I was going to give you another half hour.” She patted the seat beside her. “I thought you might be afraid of Valmar.”
    I was going to give you another half-hour. And then what?
    “I am.” Gilden remained standing. “I mean, I am afraid of him.”
    “You came anyway.”
    “He’s miles away.”
    “I see.” Derli gave a little shrug. “I guess you would know, Arrin, if anyone would. No point in taking a risk, is there?”
    The tone was a criticism, far more than the words. Gilden sat down at her side. “I told you earlier that I was making slow progress. But that’s not true anymore. I think I know a way into the Sigil ship—not with an actual voyeur, nothing as direct as that. But a way to send in a probe signal.”
    “You told me earlier that the ship was impenetrable.”
    “The hull is. But I realized that there had to be some way to get rid of generated internal heat. It’s going out through the ship’s support legs, diffused deep into the surface of Lucidar itself.”
    “And you can get a probe in the same way?”
    “Nothing material. But I can send in my own signals that way, use high-frequency modulated phonons—ultrasonic packets—if I have to.”
    “It sounds difficult.”
    “I’ve done it before. Give me a few days.”
    “I’m a patient woman.” She turned to face him. “You came here to tell me that?”
    “Yes.” It was a lie. The Teller would have picked it up at once. “And to ask you something.”
    “Ah!” Derli leaned far back on the divan. “That’s more like it. Ask me, Arrin. I’m waiting.”
    “You say that you love Lucidar, and hate the idea of leaving it. But you are not a condemned criminal, like me. What’s to stop you staying here after the work on the Sigil is over?”
    “You don’t know?” She abandoned her languorous pose and sat straight up. “You really don’t?”
    “If I knew, I would not ask.”
    “Lean toward me, and give me your hand.”
    Gilden did so, and allowed her to guide his hand to a place on her head just behind where the thick amber hair was parted.
    “Feel that?” She set his index finger on a spot where the skin of the skull was slightly rough. “That’s scar tissue, over the implant. Valmar knows the code. If I refuse to return to Earth or do something disloyal to the Mentor, he will activate it.”
    Gilden was still touching her head, feeling the delicate bones of the skull. “What would it do?”
    “I don’t know. I’m not supposed to know. Uncertainty is part of the control. Maybe the top of my head would be blown off. Maybe I’d be in permanent agony. Maybe I’d just become a drooling idiot or a nymphomaniac for the rest of my life. I’ve seen all those and worse.” She took Gilden’s hand in hers, and again guided it. This time to a place on his own skull. “You, too, Arrin. Anyone gets it who leaves Earth and works directly for the Mentor.”
    “Even Valmar?” Gilden fingered with awful fascination the unnoticed small patch of scar tissue on his own head.
    “Of course. Lucidar might subvert him, too. The difference is, Valmar controls you and me, but some other person controls him.”
    “He owns us!”
    “Not all of us, Arrin. Some of our actions are our own.” Derli was pulling him toward her, at the same time as she sank back on the divan. Gilden struggled free of her arms, stood up, and stared down at her. He was trembling.
    “You don’t want me?” A smile would have made it intolerable. But Derli looked hurt and sorrowful, like an abandoned child. Gilden groaned, turned, and blundered out of the room and the building, out into the evening gusts of Lucidar’s spring. He