Proteus Unbound

Chapter 18

Bey Wolf had inherited a good stubborn streak from his German father and a subtle and suspicious mind from his Persian mother. Both parts of the combination were needed now. He was stuck in the middle of a rank impossibility.

He had analyzed defective form-change runs. They ranged from minor flaws too subtle to be detected in outward appearance to grotesque end forms that could never have survived in any environment known to Bey. Every one was different, but in one way all were alike. The ferret routines he had introduced into the purposive form-change programs confirmed that there had been systematic modifications to whole sections of code; they pointed always to the same impossible blind alley. The changes were no accident. They were so complicated that they had to have been generated by a computer—but in a place where no computer capability existed on the harvester.

He swore and grumbled and grunted to himself. His work had gone on obsessively for several days, broken only by hurried meals and occasional naps. He had not washed or changed his clothes. He was surrounded by empty disposable plates and cups, listings, diagnostic trace routines, system flow diagrams, and his own scribbled notes and questions. Paper was everywhere, sprawling across the floor and over every available surface.

Bey was totally frustrated and oddly content. No one on the harvester could help him, and he did not want help. He wanted to solve it himself. He did not admit it, but intense concentration was also a form of therapy. He wanted to keep the disturbing thought of Mary Walton’s visitation out of his head.

Sylvia Fernald had stopped by a couple of times in the first day of work. She had watched his efforts sympathetically, spoken to him, and left when it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. On the third day Leo Manx had also appeared. He came to the door of the room several times, stared in disgust at the mess, and hobbled away. The wounds he had received on the space farm were not yet fully healed, but he was in no apparent discomfort.

When Leo came by for the fourth time, he stayed, standing silent in the doorway and puzzling over a blue folder he had brought with him. Bey Wolf ignored him until a final and irrefutable statistical analysis came back on the display screen. At that point he swore at length, switched off the unit, and turned to the other man.

“That does it. I know exactly what happened—and I’ve no idea how.”

Manx looked up from his own musings. “If you’ve discovered anything useful, you’re making more progress than I am. What have you found? Cinnabar Baker will want to know.”

Wolf waved his arm at the sea of listings covering the floor around them. “I have output trace listings of everything. Do you know how the harvester computer system works?”

Manx frowned at the question. “Well, I feel sure it’s a straightforward distributed system. There’s computing capacity and major storage in a couple of hundred nodes located at different points in the harvester, and local storage with limited compute power at a few hundred more. Everything is tied together through a fiber communications system. It’s exactly like the integrated computer system on the other harvesters—or in your own Office of Form Control, back on Earth.”

“My ex-office. So there’s nothing unusual about the arrangement?”

“Of course not.” Manx had stepped gingerly into the middle of the paper jungle and was carefully collecting the listings into neat piles. “Bey, you must have known all this days ago—you couldn’t generate these message traces without knowing.”

“I thought I did.” Wolf grabbed an elaborate schematic. “The general structure is shown here. I took this, and I began to search for places in the system where spurious coding sequences could be introduced to modify the form-change programs. Watch now.”

He switched on the wall-size display screen. “I’ve color-coded this. You need to know what they mean. The blue network is the overall connection plan for the distributed computer system. The red nodes show where we have data storage; green ones show computer elements. Purple dots are sensors—data collection points for the computer system. Orange dots are form-change tanks. They have some of their own storage and computer power, but they rely on the master system for some data and computation. Understood?”

“Perfectly. I hope there’s a point to all this.”

“There is. Just watch. I spent days working it out. You’re going to see my ferret routines, chasing down all the places where false code might have come into the system. We’ll do just one case now, for a form-change anomaly they had in the resource control office of this harvester. Watch the moving yellow tracer.” Bey entered the command and leaned back in his chair.

For a moment or two the display was static. Then a fine yellow line appeared at one of the orange dots and crawled across the screen. It reached a green node and divided there, then two yellow daughter traces continued on their way to a red element of the schematic.

“Picking up data from two different banks,” Bey said. “That happens a lot.”

The yellow lines crept onward, reaching new computer nodes, sometimes branching, sometimes terminating there. After thirty seconds a complete tree structure had been established, starting at a single form-change tank and spreading across half the screen.

“That’s one complete form-change operation,” Bey said.

“It’s too complicated. I can’t follow all that structure.”

“Nor could I, without help. The central controller used whatever computer power happened to be available—that’s why you see so many green nodes in use. It’s a horrible mess. Now, I’m going to add the other hundred and fifty-six cases, all at once. You’d expect the picture to become even worse, impossibly complicated.”

“It’s impossibly complicated already.”

“I agree. But it simplifies. Watch.” Bey entered a new command. The whole screen lit up with a tracery of moving yellow lines. They each began at a form-change tank and branched and zigzagged across the display. Thirty seconds later the screen steadied. Leo Manx shook his head. Lines were everywhere, a tangled mass of knotted interconnections, convoluted and horribly interwoven.

“I hope you don’t expect me to read anything useful out of that.”

“With a little help you will.” Bey was busy again at the terminal. “I agree it still looks like a gigantic mess. So I wrote another program to help sort it out. I asked for a statistical analysis of the places where each branching set ended. That would tell me how often the form changes were using a particular data storage bank, or a particular computer. If one storage area or computer was receiving unusually heavy use, that would be a good place to do some troubleshooting. Take a look at what I found. The program flags every terminating node that occurs more than two sigma away from the mean for all nodes.”

A couple of dozen points on the screen began to blink. Leo Manx stared at them blankly. “Very interesting,” he said after a few seconds.

“You’re wrong. It is interesting—once you look at those nodes more closely.” Bey stood up and went to the wall display. “Some end at computer elements; some end at data banks. Very reasonable. But what about this one?” He was pointing at a flashing purple point on the screen.

“What about it?”

“Leo, remember the color code. Purple. That means it’s a sensor—a place that collects data for the computer system.”

“That’s not surprising. There are sensors on each form-change tank.”

“True. Not surprising—if this were a sensor associated with a form-change tank. It would be collecting physical readings from the tank and using them in the programs. But this sensor should have nothing to do with a form-change process. And every form-change anomaly has a branch that ends there. That sensor was involved every single time we had a form-change problem.”

Manx had stood up and was craning to see the blinking point next to Bey’s finger. “I don’t know which sensor that is. Are you sure it’s not a form-change monitor?”

“I checked it a dozen times. It’s not. So I decided that it had to be a signal coming from outside the harvester, maybe something we were picking up on beamed data from an external antenna. It’s not that, either.”

“Don’t keep telling me what it isn’t.” Leo Manx was losing his usual courtly politeness. “We have to check this directly. Which sensor is it?”

“I’ll tell you, but you’re not going to like the answer.” Bey tapped the display. “That sensor is inside the harvester, but it’s in the hardest place of all to check. It monitors the radiation level from the harvester’s kernel, and that means it’s sitting where we can’t get at it. Inside the kernel shields.”

Leo was shaking his head. “You’re suggesting that somebody put a computer and a data storage unit in there? It couldn’t happen. Nothing but hardened sensors can operate inside the shields—even the remote-handling machines that manipulate the kernels don’t have programs.”

“I know. But I’m convinced there’s something there, inside the shield. Some information source, some chaos generator for the form-change process. It’s the ‘negentropic’ influence again—spurious information that’s the source of disruption for the whole system.”

“But the other problems we’ve had were nothing to do with form-change!”

“We’ve gone past form-change now, Leo. Form-change just happens to be highly sensitive to signal control sequences. Problems show up there first. But what I’ve found takes us into kernel control theory, and that’s a different game. I don’t know enough about Kerr-Newman black holes to decide what’s going on. That’s why I’ve been waiting for Aybee to get back from the Sagdeyev space farm.”

“Then you might have to wait a long time. He’s not there.”

“But he’s on the way back, isn’t he?”

“I’m afraid not.” Leo Manx retreated to a cleared area of the floor and sat down cross-legged. “Before I came here I was with Cinnabar Baker. She’d just had a report from a repair and maintenance crew who had reached the farm. Apparently it’s totally deserted. No farmers, no Aybee.”

“More mechanical trouble?”

“No signs of that. The bubble was halfway repaired, reasonably habitable. But deserted. It was just as though everyone had decided to down tools at the same time and leave. We have no idea why they went or where they went. Or even how they went. Baker says that no transit vessel was missing. All they took with them were their suits. There was no sign of new violence.”

“So it could be worse. Aybee’s probably safe. And he’s a survival type.” Bey left the screen and flopped down untidily on a pile of output listings. He was almost at home in his new body, but the odd center of mass offered occasional surprises. “But it’s very bad for me. I don’t know who else to ask.”

“We have other experts on the kernels.”

“Not like Aybee. I need somebody who thinks around corners.” Suddenly Wolf’s labors were catching up with him. He was exhausted.

“And so do I.” For the first time, Leo Manx held up his own blue folder. “That’s why I came to you. You’ve got your problems, I’ve got mine. Aybee got me started on this before we left the farm. I need him as much as you do. But he told me to talk to you if he wasn’t there—I don’t know if you cherish the notion, but Aybee suggests that you and he think about things the same way.”

“He’s wrong.” Bey made no attempt to take the proffered folder. He was still staring moodily at the display screen. “Aybee’s smarter than I am, but he makes me feel a thousand years old. I don’t have his childlike faith. If I can’t solve my own problems, I’m sure I can’t solve anybody else’s.”

It was a dismissive comment; at that point Leo Manx was supposed to stand up and leave. Instead he inched forward along the floor and placed the folder open on Bey’s knees.

“The Negentropic Man,” he said. Bey looked down at him, then shook his head.

“Where he came from,” Manx went on. “What he means. Aybee listed four ways of thinking about entropy: thermodynamic entropy, statistical mechanics entropy, information theory entropy, and kernel entropy. But he couldn’t suggest which meaning was appropriate.”

“Nor can I.”

“That’s all right. I don’t want to ask you about that.” Manx lifted one sheet from the folder. “Aybee suggested that if we want to make progress we ought to examine the exact time when your hallucinations occurred. I’ve made a list of everything that you told me when we were in transit from the Inner System. Now I’d like to make sure it’s complete.”

Bey stared gloomily at the list. He knew what Leo was doing: exactly what he would have done himself with a reluctant partner. Bait him with something he was interested in, reel him in slowly, and hope that after a few minutes he could be dragged far enough to be useful.

Well, what the hell. It was a game two could play, and Bey had gone as far as he could in the form-change tracking without allowing time for his ideas to sort themselves out.

“You only want to hear about my seeing the Negentropic Man? You know that Sylvia is sure he’s Black Ransome?”

“I know. We have only her word for it. Isn’t the Negentropic Man the only person you saw in your hallucinations?”

“He was, until a few days ago.” Wolf did not look up. He was not sure he wanted to tell anyone at all about Mary’s strange visit. It felt remote and improbable. Even the day after it happened, he had become half-convinced that he had dreamed the whole episode. “I saw Mary Walton,” he said at last. “After I came out of the change tank.”

“You mean—saw her in person?”

“No. A recorded message, left in my sleeping quarters.”

“And you didn’t tell Sylvia or Cinnabar Baker?”

“No.” Bey hesitated for a moment, evaluating the risk. He decided that he had to trust somebody—they could not all be spies. “Leo, I had a reason why I didn’t talk about this. We have an information leak here. We arrived from the space farm just a few weeks ago. No one knew we were coming; no one even knew we had survived the ‘accident’ there. No messages were sent out from here after we arrived, saying we were here. I know, because I checked the message center myself. And yet, as soon as I went to my sleeping quarters, a planted recorded message from Mary Walton was waiting for me. Leo, until I was taken to those quarters, I didn’t know myself where I would be sleeping.”

“So that’s why you didn’t talk about it to me, or Sylvia Fernald, or Cinnabar Baker?” Manx was full of unfocused energy that made his arms and legs jerk like a puppet’s. “Bey, I know you’re not used to Outer System ways, and I know where you’re heading. But it’s crazy. Those are terribly serious charges that you’re making, and it’s just as well you told this only to me. I can absolutely assure you that Sylvia and Cinnabar are not providing information leaks.”

“Not intentional ones, maybe. But think back, Leo. Somebody seemed to know we were going to the farm almost before we set out. Somebody knew we were here the moment we arrived.”

“Then it must be somebody on the harvester staff.”

“On two different harvesters? We left the Opik Harvester; we came back here to the Marsden Harvester. Are you suggesting that there are two leaks, both close to Cinnabar Baker, one on each harvester?”

“Then who? I hope you don’t think that I—”

“There’s an old Earth saying: ‘Everyone’s suspect but me and thee; and I’m none too sure of thee.’ I thought about you. But I don’t see how it could be. When we arrived here you were in pretty bad shape, and you went straight to the tank for remedial form-change work. You weren’t conscious until after this happened.”

“Your faith in me is touching. I wonder why you’re telling me now.”

The bait was taken. Time to reel in the line. Slowly. “Because I need your help, Leo. And I want your word that you won’t pass this on to anyone, unless we’ve discussed it first. And I mean anyone.”

“Not Sylvia? Not even Baker?”

“Especially not Baker. Can’t you see that if we’re logical, her office is the only place where the leaks can start? Don’t tell her anything, unless it’s at a meeting that I’ve arranged, in a place I arrange. I think we should talk to Sylvia and see how she responds to the idea of a spy in our group. Will you come with me, right now, and do it?”

“Under one condition.” Manx took back his blue folder and looked at it in a puzzled way. Somehow the whole conversation had headed off in an unintended direction.

“Anything reasonable.”

“Then you take a shower first. I don’t want Sylvia or anyone else we meet to think that smell is coming from me.”

“Is this the Leo Manx who dragged me out of Old City? All right. If you insist. Let’s go.”

Later, Bey would describe the shower as a wasted effort. As soon as he was scrubbed clean and dressed in clean clothing to Leo Manx’s satisfaction, they headed for Sylvia’s quarters.

But she was not there. No one knew where she was or when she would be back. Twelve hours earlier, Sylvia Fernald had requisitioned a high-g transit ship. She had headed inward, toward the edge of the Halo, traveling fast and traveling alone. She had told no one her mission, and no one on the harvester seemed to know her destination.

Chapter 19

The training schedule was rigorous but reasonable. Four hours of theory in the morning, a food break at which all the trainees were expected to eat together and discuss what they had learned, four hours of practical work in the afternoon, and then the evening free, but with enough reading, interactive education sessions, and quizzes to fill at least another six hours before sleeping.

The program was scheduled to continue for seven weeks. Aybee kept his head down for the first couple of days, watched what the others were doing, and tried to fall nicely in the middle of the group when it came to tests and answering questions. That was not so easy. The rest of the trainees were a miserable, mismatched set who had apparently been dragged in from random sources. In Aybee’s not so humble opinion, none of them had the least idea of any kind of science, and a couple of them acted positively half-witted. They offered bizarre answers to the simplest mathematical questions—Aybee could not figure out how they came up with such odd replies.

On the third day he made his first request. He was not used to eating food with other people; it would be a lot less of a strain if he were allowed to take the midday break alone. Could he get permission?

Gudrun looked doubtful, but she agreed. There were twenty-four trainees, and Aybee’s absence would not make much difference to the discussions. “Remember, Karl,” she added. “If you hurt your progress because you can’t talk to others while what you’ve learned is fresh in your mind, you’ll have no one but yourself to blame. If the reason you’re doing this is that you find the work difficult and you’re embarrassed to talk with the others, come and see me. I’ll arrange personal coaching for you.”

Aybee/Karl nodded politely. He had gained an hour. The morning classes so far had covered routine general relativity material three centuries old, and he did not need to discuss that with anyone. More than that, he did not want to. The big danger was that he would reveal how much he knew about the subject.

The evening work was a joke. He did not need to do the reading, and he could handle all the rest of the assignments in the middle of the day. His next request to Gudrun was a little more risky. He handed in a perfect test, which he was usually careful to avoid doing, and went to see Gudrun that afternoon.

She beamed as he came in the door. “Well! Smart Karl. You don’t seem to be harmed by missing the midday sessions.”

“Hope not.” Aybee had the horrible feeling that he was her favorite trainee. She always looked at him in a special way. “But I’m not used to high gravity. Not like the farm. I sleep bad here. Wake up a lot in the middle of the night. If I’m all done with my work an’ that happens, could I look around the ship?”

He saw the danger signs. Her smile vanished, and she was staring at him suspiciously. “Look at what in the ship, Karl?”

“Dunno. Whatever.” He waved his arm vaguely around them. “Power supplies, maintenance shops. Anything.”

“Oh, that shouldn’t be a problem. But only if you still do well enough in your training. Let’s see how you perform in the next few days.”

She was not worried about security—she was worried that he would take too much time wandering around and flunk! Aybee made fewer deliberate mistakes on the tests, and three days later he had his permission. He was fascinated to see what was off-limits: armories, main drives, and the areas where the suits and transit ships were kept. It made good sense for them to keep him out of there until they were absolutely sure about his loyalties. It was also no big loss. So long as they were steaming along to nowhere. Aybee did not like the idea of leaving the ship until he knew exactly where he was.

There was one big unexpected freedom. He would be allowed to go to the kernels and do what he liked there. Gudrun must have decided that he was not interested in suicide by fiddling with a power kernel and blowing up the whole ship. It also tended to confirm what she had said at their first meeting. When the training course was over, he would be working with the kernels.

The first night he had permission to wander, he could not use it. A formal evening meeting was scheduled for all the trainees. After a special dinner that Aybee did not eat, they were subjected to a four-hour session of live and recorded speeches, slogans, and arm waving.

Gudrun stood up and offered her version of system history. Between the millstones of the Inner and Outer Systems, the inhabitants of the Halo had been crushed for over a century. The Kernel Ring was a borderland, a dangerous region of scattered high-density bodies. As a result, all the travelers from Sunhugger territory bypassed it on their journeys outward. They were quite willing to exploit its energy supplies, but none of the wealth generated from the Kernel Ring’s resources was ever returned to it. That was unjust and intolerable. Finally, it was going to change. The balance of power had shifted. The Halo had a born leader, and the revolution had begun.

Jason came next, and he was worse: The Outer System is composed of oppressive tyrants! The Inner System is decadent! It supports an idle and growing population by the efforts of our people! Both federations deserve to fall! You are all part of a great reform that will achieve those ends—and soon!

Aybee hid his yawns, but he noticed that the other trainees were lapping it up. Gudrun, Jason, and the handful of other permanent crew of the ship knew how to whip up enthusiasm. They had enough for everybody. Gudrun stood up again for another statement. A special announcement would be made on the ship in a few days, reporting an event that was truly extraordinary. All training would be interrupted when it happened, and everyone would have two days free. The group cheered.

Aybee cheered as loudly as anyone and wondered if propaganda had a cumulative effect. If so, he would have to find a way to escape before his own brain was softened.

Escape seemed harder and harder. All the access points to suits, transit ships, and weapons were guarded not by humans, which would have been bad, but by machines, Roguards that did not sleep, could not be distracted, and could not be persuaded.

Aybee decided that he needed a radically new approach. The next night, he set out to prowl the ship.

He had no illusions about the size of the task that faced him. The ship was small compared with the central sphere of a harvester, but it was still huge. With a length of two kilometers and a diameter of six hundred meters, the ship he was on had enough internal volume to house a couple of million Earth people—or one or two space farmers. Podders and the rebels of the Kernel Ring sat somewhere between those two extremes, but Aybee could not guess at the ship’s internal structure from the limited regions he had seen in training.

Fortunately, he did not need to. Overall ship schematics were held in a central data bank, and he had been studying them in the evenings for over a week. There were half a dozen blank spots in the plans, which he assumed corresponded to regions of special privacy, but all the rest of the ship was there.

As an experiment, he headed outward toward the surface. The ship had been built to carry cargo, and so all the internal bulkheads and corridors were a later addition. The whole habitat interior had an unfinished and neglected look. Mildewed partitions were warped and grimy, and at central communications nodes, masses of cables and fiber lines festooned the walls and ceilings.

Aybee wandered on, committing everything he saw to memory. If the need ever arose, he wanted to be able to run through the ship blindfolded.

No one questioned him; no one stopped him. In a few minutes he was at an observation port, peering through the outer shell of the hull to the stars beyond. He could tell from the positions of the constellations that the ship was heading Sunward, but that was all he was able to deduce. He watched quietly for ten minutes. There were no signs of other man-made vessels out there or of natural bodies of the Outer System.

When he finally moved on, easing his way along the hull toward the nearest air lock, a Roguard appeared at his side before he had gone fifty meters. It seemed to ignore him, but it moved as he did and did not respond to his questions and commands. Twenty meters before he reached the lock, it passed silently in front of him and extended a broad polymer net to block his path.

Aybee did not try to talk to it. The machine was too stupid for logic. Instead, he turned to head away from the surface. When he was forty meters from the ship’s hull, the machine dropped behind. He turned to look and saw it disappearing through a service aperture. Aybee did not go back. If he did, he was sure that it or its sister Roguard would be there again to balk his progress toward the air locks. Instead he headed down the gravity gradient for the nearest kernel, two hundred meters away.

In the corridors he encountered a couple of dozen maintenance machines and three humans. The machines offered him friendly greetings. The humans, each two feet shorter than Aybee, said not a word. They hardly looked at him, and they seemed preoccupied with their own worries.

Was it his trainee’s uniform, which made him so much lower in status than anyone else on the ship that they would not even talk to him? If so, that was fine with Aybee. He traveled on along a dirty passageway coated with the grime of a decade’s neglect. Somehow the controller of the cleaning machines seemed to have lost the narrow alley from its memory.

He passed down a narrow final stair just wide enough for his skinny body, and he was there. The shielded kernel was not the one that had been removed from the space farm. It was a monster. Even at the outer shield’s thirty-meter radius, Aybee judged that he was standing in a field of over a twentieth of a g. That put the kernel mass at nearly eight billion tons. It must have been found near the middle of the Zirkelloch, the circular singularity that formed the center of the Kernel Ring.

That did not mean it was particularly useful as a controllable power source. If it were a slowly rotating kernel, approximately a Schwarzschild black hole, it was useless for anything except raw heat.

Was this one rotating?

Aybee fixed his eyes on one point on the ceiling and crouched low. No doubt about it, the kernel was both massive and rotating extremely rapidly. He could feel the inertial dragging as the kernel’s spin rotated the reference frame along with it, tilting the local vertical.

He turned his attention to the controls. Most of them were already familiar to him. There were a dozen superconducting electromagnets holding the charged kernel firmly at the center of its spherical shields. They appeared standard, no different from systems Aybee had seen in dozens of other energy-generation facilities.

There was the energy-extraction mechanism itself, clearly identifiable by its plasma injection units. The system was unusually finely calibrated, allowing far smaller changes to the kernel’s rotational energy than any that Aybee had seen before, but that was an easy technological refinement, within the power of any kernel user. It was not clear why anyone would want to do it.

The first sign of real oddity came in the sensor leads. They were ten times as big as Aybee had expected, suggesting a high signal-carrying capacity, and they ran to a substantial computer sitting right on the outer shield. A computer to do what?

Inside the shield, the spinning black hole of the kernel was sending out a seething stream of radiation and particles. That random energy emission was a nuisance, and the shields were a necessity to reflect it back on itself. At the same time, the sensors monitoring the outward flood within the shields allowed the mass, charge, and angular momentum of the kernel to be measured to one part in a trillion.

Aybee crouched on the dull black surface of the outer shield, staring at the computer and its connecting cables for a long time. He would have loved to follow those optic bundles a meter or so farther, beyond the shields. It was impossible. There were hatches for robot access, but he would not have survived a moment inside the shields.

He stood up, puzzled, and stared thoughtfully at the sensor leads for a few minutes. When he finally wandered through the corridors back to his own quarters, his head was whirling with ideas and conjectures. He had theories but no way to test them. What he needed was a long spell of quiet thought.

What he found when he arrived at his room was Gudrun. She was sitting on his bed. She had abandoned her silver-blue uniform and badged cap for a brief black exercise suit and purple skin makeup. Gudrun nodded at him and patted the bed next to her.

Aybee eyed her uneasily and remained standing. “I was just taking a look around.”

“I know. Sit down, Karl.”

He placed himself at the far end of the bed. “I’m doing all right, aren’t I?” He cleared his throat. “I mean, no problem with my work.”

“Just the opposite.” She inched along closer to him. “Karl, you’ve been doing well, but I’m convinced you could do a lot better. Some of your answers on the tests are so concise and clear, they’re better than anything in the training manuals. I’m using them as reference material. Where do you get them from?”

Aybee swore internally and shrugged. “Dunno. I just write what I think of.”

“If you can think that way consistently, there’s more in your future than a job as a maintenance engineer. I want to do something special with you.”

“What do you mean?” Aybee did not like the look in her eye. “I want to take you to meet the big boss—the head of the whole revolution and movement. We have his orders to sift for unusual potential and report it to headquarters.” She misread his concern. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t send you there alone. We’d go together, just you and me, on one of the special high-acceleration transit ships. I’d be your sponsor.”

“When?” The training course had five more weeks to run.

“In a couple of days. Jason and the other assistants can handle the training course easily enough. It’s five days travel from here to headquarters in the new ship, but we wouldn’t waste the time. You have a lot to learn. I’d give you personal coaching and special training.” Gudrun had moved Aybee all the way to the end of the bed, and he could not retreat farther. Her golden-brown eyes were gleaming. She took his hands in hers and stared at him possessively. “And we still haven’t done that form-change, have we? The one that we talked about when you signed on. You’re still too tall for comfort. We’ll work on that. There might be some spare time for a form-change on the journey, too. I want to make you look more like one of us—less like a Cloudlander.” She squeezed his hands. “What do you say, Karl? It’s a one-time opportunity.”

Five days confined to a high-g transit cabin with Gudrun. Five days of “personal coaching” and “special training.” What did that include? He had horrible suspicions. Aybee avoided her gaze, but she was very close. Everywhere he looked he saw nothing but bare flesh, plump thighs, arms and shoulders and breasts.

“Well, Karl, what do you say?” She was whispering, close to his cheek.

Aybee closed his eyes in horror. Do I have a choice?

He took a deep breath. Look at it this way, Apollo Belvedere Smith: You go to headquarters and the chances of finding out if your ideas are right are a hell of a lot better there than they are here. Whatever happens on the journey, you can handle it. So say yes quick, before you decide you can’t stand the idea.

He nodded, eyes still closed. “It sounds… wonderful.”

He felt Gudrun’s hand on his thigh. “I’ll make sure that it is,” she said. “We’ll leave tomorrow. I’ll put a form-change tank and size-reduction programs on the ship, too. You can use them as much as you want to. But you’d better get some rest now, Karl. You need your rest.”

“Yeah.” Aybee swallowed. “I think I do.”

She was moving slowly away from him. He could breathe again. He looked at her red lips and half-open mouth. She seemed ready to eat him.

Just make sure the form-change tank and size-reduction program is there, Gudrun, he thought. I’ll use ’em, all right. In fact, if this trip is anything like I imagine, I’ll use ’em over and over. I’m going to arrive at headquarters as a two-foot midget.

Chapter 20

Sylvia Fernald had agonized over the decision for a long time. Who should be told what she was planning to do, and how much should they be told?

On the one hand, her attempt to contact Paul Chu was in no sense an official mission. She had not been ordered to do it or even asked to think about it. On the other hand, Bey Wolf and Aybee Smith believed that the rebels were behind the technical malfunctions in the Inner and Outer Systems, and they agreed with Cinnabar Baker that the rebels’ end objective might be to instigate an all-out war between the other two parties. If that were the case, and if Paul were part of the rebel group, a dialog with him was supremely important. Sylvia knew of no one else who might be able to open that dialog. Paul had always been secretive and mistrustful, but he would talk to Sylvia.

Wouldn’t he? They had been very close, but in the final months she had never known what Paul was thinking or even what he was doing. But surely he would at least talk to her—they had been partners for more than three years. On the other hand, if he had become a rebel himself, she ought not to be talking to him, and if she did meet with him, she should not tell anyone she was doing it.

Sylvia wondered and worried and at last settled for a compromise. Since she would be using a Cloudland ship in her travels, someone in government had to know and approve it. But the fewer people who knew, the less the danger that her mission would be leaked to others.

Sylvia looked at her options. Leo Manx was a good man but pedantic in approach and—much more dangerous—apt to gossip. Bey Wolf would not talk, but he would probably try to stop her. Aybee, her first choice, was off who knew where, and all her other close friends in the harvesters would be overwhelmed by the implied responsibility. They would feel a compulsion to tell their superiors—who might then tell anyone.

In the end, Sylvia called Cinnabar Baker directly and asked for a private meeting. If the information were likely to end with Baker, it might as well begin there.

The other woman asked her—typically—to come to her quarters that same day, but at one o’clock in the morning. Sylvia spent the next twelve hours making final preparations for her departure and rehearsing what she was going to say to Baker. But when she finally entered the bare-walled apartment, she forgot about her prepared speech.

Cinnabar Baker looked terrible. She had lost fifty or sixty pounds, and her gray-toned skin was lined and pouchy. From time to time she rubbed at her eyes, wheezed deep in her chest, and produced a rumbling cough. Turpin sat blinking on her shoulder. Each time she coughed, the bedraggled crow provided an impressive imitation of the sound. He must have had plenty of time to practice.

“I know.” Baker saw Sylvia’s dismay. “Don’t tell me I look like hell, and don’t worry. It’s not permanent. I’ve been overworking, and everyone here is scared to let me near the form-change machines for a remedial session. The machines are so messed up, people are afraid I’ll turn into a pumpkin. What can I do for you? We have ten minutes.”

Sylvia jumped into her description of how she had found a trail that should lead to Paul Chu. Half her explanation proved unnecessary—Cinnabar Baker knew more about the relationship with Chu than Sylvia had dreamed. Baker waved her on past that, then listened in a silence broken only by her coughs and hoarse breathing.

At the end of it Baker sniffed and pinched the end of her nose between her fingers. “I’ve heard your reports, and the ones from Leo Manx. Do you agree with him that the rebels are behind Bey Wolf’s problems with the ‘Negentropic Man’?”

“I think so.”

“You’ve saved Wolf’s life at least once, probably twice. Do you know what the ancient Chinese, back on Earth, used to say if you saved a man from drowning?”

Sylvia shook her head in confusion. Cinnabar Baker had lost her.

“They would say you are then responsible for the welfare of that man for the whole rest of his life. Let me ask you, how much of what you’re proposing to do is for the sake of the Outer System? And how much are you doing to help with Wolf’s personal problems?” The suggestion floored Sylvia.

She had acted to save Bey on the transit ship and on the space farm without thinking for a moment about her own motives. She would have done as much for anyone. And as for sitting beside the form-change tank while Bey Wolf was in it…

“Don’t bother to answer that.” Cinnabar Baker was moving on. The allotted ten minutes had passed. “Tell me this instead. You’re proposing to leave at once. What’s the hurry? Why not wait a few more days?”

“More days?” Turpin repeated.

Sylvia shook her head. “I daren’t. Paul Chu is at that location to perform a facility conversion, adding a low-g drive—probably to a cometary fragment. That means he’ll be working alone except for machines. We’ll be able to talk freely. But that will last only another couple of weeks, then he’ll be leaving. I don’t know where he’ll be going next.”

“Does he know anything about this?”

“Not a thing. I didn’t suggest to anyone that I might try to visit him. You’re the only person who knows I’m even thinking of it.” She saw the slow nod of Cinnabar Baker’s head. “You will approve it, then?”

Baker grunted. “Fernald, I never did like Paul Chu. I remember him, and I don’t believe he’ll do one thing to help you.” She held up her hand. “But before you begin to argue, let me tell you I’m going to approve your request. You ought to have this job for a day. You’d approve anything that might give you a toehold on our problems. The Cloud’s technology is all going to hell, people daren’t go near the form-change machines, we’ve been receiving communications from some of the other harvesters that suggest the populations there have all gone crazy, and I just had a report from the other side of the Cloud about a bad accident on another of the space farms. To top that off, one of our inbound cargo ships was destroyed yesterday, and the Sunhuggers are blaming us for it—saying we blew up one of our own vessels!”

She sighed. “All right. You’ve heard enough of that. Of course I’ll approve it. Go do it, and use my authority if you need it to get your ship. But one other thing,” she added as Sylvia stood up. “This has to be a two-way street. You won’t tell anyone where you’re going. And I won’t tell anyone, not even the Inner Council, what you are trying to do. If you get into hot water, I’ll have to disown you. I’ll even deny that you had my permission for a transit ship. We have a firm policy, you see: We don’t deal with the rebels in any circumstances. Understood?”

Sylvia bit her lip, then nodded. “All right.”

Cinnabar Baker reached out and took her hand in an unexpected gesture. “We never had a meeting tonight, Fernald, and you leave by the other exit. I have another group of people waiting outside. Good luck, and good hunting. You’ll be a long way from home.”

“From home,” Turpin echoed hoarsely. The crow wagged his head. “Way from home.”

That had been eight days earlier. Eight days of silence and solitude. Sylvia had maintained strict communications blackout all through the journey, even when the ship’s drive was inactive and it was easy to send or receive signals.

But as she slowed to approach her final destination, the rendezvous only a few minutes away, her nervousness increased. The urge to send some kind of message back to Cinnabar Baker grew stronger. Sylvia had been provided with an ephemeris for a body in an orbit skirting the outer part of the Kernel Ring; she was told that Paul Chu should be there. But the positional data had come with an admonition to strict secrecy—and nothing else. She had not been told the nature of the object to which she was traveling, or whether it was large or small, man-made or natural, a colony or a military base. She had assumed a cometary fragment—why else would he be installing an add-on drive unit—but suppose that was wrong?

Well, she would know soon enough. At last the body was visible. From a distance of five kilometers it was like an irregular, granular egg, shining by internal lights. Sylvia turned the high-magnification sensors onto it. She was confused, and her nervousness had increased. The object was about three hundred meters long, too small to be a harvester, a colony, or a cargo ship, and the wrong shape for a transit vessel. That fit with the idea of a small comet nucleus, still rich in volatiles. Yet the pattern of ports and lights implied an inhabited body, and two docking ports and air locks were clearly visible on the surface.

If it were a natural body, then it was one that had already seen some internal tunneling and modifications. The newly installed drive unit was easily recognized, gleaming at the thicker end of the lumpy body.

Delay would not help, and she had not come so far for nothing. Sylvia was already in her suit. She allowed the transit ship to dock itself gently against the bigger port, opened the cabin, and went straight to the lock.

It was open, contrary to standard safety regulations. And the inner lock was open, too, which meant that the interior of the body was airless. If Paul Chu were inside, he was wearing a suit or he was a corpse. Sylvia noticed how loud her own breathing sounded in the helmet. She set her suit receiver to perform a frequency sweep and passed on through the inner air lock.

The first chamber had been carved from the water ice and carbon dioxide ice of the cometary interior, and it was clearly intended as a workshop and equipment-maintenance facility. There were plenty of signs that it had been recently inhabited, with cutting torches still attached to their fuel bottles in a tool shop chamber and an electrical generator in standby mode. Three or four construction machines were waiting patiently against one of the walls. Sylvia regarded them with irritation. They were obsolete models by Cloud standards. If they had been made just a little bit smarter, she could have asked them what was going on. As it was, they had been designed with a specialized vocabulary and understood nothing but mechanical construction tasks. If no one came along to give instructions, they would wait contentedly for a million years.

She passed on through a sliding partition, deeper into the interior. The scan on received signals had produced nothing, so she switched to an all-frequency broadcast. “Paul Chu. This is Sylvia.” Her suit repeated the message automatically, over and over, and listened for any reply.

She had reached the temporary living quarters built by the machines near the center of the body. He was not there, but she saw many signs of his recent occupancy. That was definitely his computer link, the one he had used for ten years. No Cloudlander, no matter how long he was away from the Outer System, would ever leave metal objects strewn so casually around unless he knew he would be coming back soon or had been forced to leave in a great hurry.

Or dead, her mind said insistently.

She pushed away the thought. Perhaps Paul was somewhere on the other side of the body, or perhaps he had been temporarily called away.

But called away to what? And to where? She had seen no sign of other bodies in her approach, and her suit radio had an effective range of many thousands of kilometers.

The suppose that he did not want to meet her and was hiding away to avoid an encounter? That thought rejected itself. How could he be hiding when he had no idea that she was even coming? He thought she was back in the Outer System.

Almost against her will, Sylvia set out to explore the desolate interior. Sometime, far in the past, it had been a human home for a long period. There were kitchens, bedrooms, even chambers set up for entertainment and exercise. Those rooms held harnesses, stretch bars, and workout machines, each with dials to measure effort level and progress. But over all the equipment and instruments lay a thin layer of sublimed ice. No one had touched anything there for years, maybe for decades.

In less than half an hour she was convinced that there was no one anywhere on the hollowed-out comet. She was alone. And only a few moments later she felt a strange vibration beneath her feet and sensed a slight pressure on the front of her suit. She knew at once what was happening. The air locks had been closed on the body’s surface, and the interior was filling with air.

She set off, hurriedly retracing her steps toward the lock through which she had first entered. When she was halfway there a flicker of movement appeared at the end of a corridor.

“Paul?” She paused, her hand on the wall of the corridor. “Paul Chu? Is that you, Paul? Who is there?”

The corridor supported a full atmosphere, and her voice went echoing along the narrow passageway. There was no reply, but suddenly a little machine came scuttling into view and moved toward her. Ten feet away it paused. Sylvia was thrilled to see it. Unlike the others she had seen, this one she recognized as a very advanced model, one that was scarcely out of the development labs. It was a GA machine, a general assistance model that would perform hundreds of tasks with vocal direction and little human supervision. It if had to, it could fly her home in her own transit ship.

“What’s been happening here?” She advanced on it confidently. No machine would harm her—no machine could harm her, except by accident. “Where are the people? Is Paul Chu here?”

It said nothing. The arrays of detectors on the front of the machine had tilted her way, and there was no doubt that it was aware of her presence. But when she was within a couple of paces, it began to back away. A second machine of the same design had appeared at the end of the corridor and advanced to stand next to the first.

“Come on.” Sylvia was becoming impatient. “I want answers. Don’t pretend you can’t understand me, I know you’re a lot too smart for that. What’s been going on in this place?”

From a circular aperture at its base, the second machine suddenly extruded a pair of long, rubbery arms. Before Sylvia could retreat, they had moved forward to circle her ankles.

“Hey! Let got of me!”

It took no notice, and then arms from the first machine came forward to wrap around her forearms and waist. She was gently lifted off her feet and held in midair. Both machines moved in unison along the corridor, holding Sylvia as delicately but firmly as an armed bomb.

“There is no problem.” The first machine finally spoke in a voice that Sylvia recognized at once. It sounded just like Paul Chu. “We will be going on a journey. You will be quite safe. One moment.”

While Sylvia struggled as hard as she could, yet another pair of arms appeared to check the closure of her suit helmet.

“What do you mean, a journey? Damn you, let go of me. Take me to see Paul Chu. I order you to release me.”

That had to work. No machine could hold a human against her will, unless it was to save a life.

“We cannot do that.” The voice was suitably regretful and apologetic. “We cannot set you free; not yet. But we can take you to Paul Chu’s present location. Maybe you will see him there.”

“When?” They were already in the lock, and there was a hiss of escaping air.

“When we reach our destination. Ten days journey from here.”

They were outside, drifting along in a glimmer of starlight. The second machine had stayed behind at the lock, so she was held only by her arms and waist. Sylvia saw a new shape in front of her, a small ellipsoidal object only twenty meters long. It was like no ship she had ever seen. “We can’t fly in that.” She spoke into her suit radio, offering what should have been for a machine the ultimate threat. “If you make me fly in that, it will kill me.”

“Not so.” The machine sounded shocked, but it did not even pause. “Otherwise, of course, we would never permit it. Ten days will quickly pass. Perhaps when we are on the way you would like to play chess with me? We will be alone.”

“I hate chess!”

As Sylvia was carried into the ship, she had a final unhappy thought. She had given Cinnabar Baker the coordinates of this destination and had felt pleased with her foresight. But how much use would that information be wherever she would be in another ten days?

Chapter 21

Aybee had seen many transit ships during his wanderings through the Outer System. The design was standard. It differed only in detail, depending on whether the fabrication was done at the Vulcan Nexus, whispering its way across the surface of the Sun, or out in the Dry Tortugas, wandering the remote and ill-defined perimeter of the Oort Cloud.

Each transit ship had a thick disk of dense matter on the front end. Each one also had a passenger cabin that could slide backward or forward along the two-hundred-meter central spike jutting out behind the mass plate. The McAndrew vacuum energy drive sat at the plate’s outer edge. The whole assembly looked like an axle with only one wheel attached.

It was a shock to be taken by Gudrun to the front of the ship and be shown a smooth, spikeless ellipsoid just twenty meters long.

Aybee stared at it as if he were in the audience at a magic show, waiting for the missing bluebird to appear. “Where’s the rest of it?”

“There is no more,” Gudrun laughed. She was bubbling with excitement. “I told you, Karl, the surprises are just beginning. This is the ship for our journey. It arrived from headquarters two days ago.”

Aybee made a complete circuit of the outside. The ovoid had a smooth glassy hull, polished and unmarked. He could see his own distorted reflection in the convex surface. That alone was sufficient to make it out of place in the dingy and grimy environment of the old cargo ship. It was as new as its surroundings were old. Odder yet, it showed no sign of a drive mechanism. There was nowhere to attach the massive disk that balanced gravity and acceleration, and the clear ports suggested that at least half the internal space was passenger quarters.

As a supposed trainee, Aybee could not tell Gudrun what he was thinking. Either this supposed ship was a total hoax and would go nowhere—or there were whole realms of physics unknown to the best minds in the Inner and Outer Systems.

Instead he asked, “Who built it?”

“Headquarters. It’s very new and very fast. The old ships took weeks to get to headquarters—it’s over six hundred billion kilometers away. We’ll be there in five days!”

“What’s the acceleration?”

“That’s not relevant. This works on a new principle. They are making more of them, but today there are only a handful of others like this ship.”

But there ought to be none like it, Aybee reflected. He did the instant mental conversion: five days for six hundred billion kilometers meant about five hundred g’s. Then he at once ignored his own answer. The range calculation made sense only if the ship performed like a transit ship, with an acceleration phase, a crossover, and a deceleration. There was no reason for that assumption. If the ship were as new as it seemed, headquarters could be on the other side of the galaxy. Aybee had no idea how it could function. At the moment he did not even know what questions to ask.

“How is it powered?” he said at last. “With a kernel?”

That was fishing. The transit ships used the McAndrew vacuum drive, not kernels.

“No. But apparently it has a low-mass kernel at the center.”

Curiouser and curiouser. Even a small kernel weighed a few hundred million tons. Why accelerate that mass if one did not need it?

They went aboard, and Aybee’s confusion performed a quantum jump to a higher-level state. The internal living space on the ship was ten times what he had expected. There was too little space for any reasonable power supply, engines, or drive mechanism.

In the back of his mind Aybee had already decided that a new and first-rate intellect must have arisen in the rebel communities of the Kernel Ring. That was the only way to explain something as radically different as the new ship. But once inside and looking around, he was forced to drop even that idea. Too many things were new and unfamiliar. Out of a dozen different internal systems, he could identify and explain maybe half of them. And those few hinted at something that Aybee had been groping his way toward for the past four years, a new landscape just beyond the horizon.

Aybee had a clear image of current science, of its peaks and valleys and gray clouded areas where theory failed. Technology advanced constantly, but it depended on models of the physical world that were often centuries old. It advanced by ignoring the foggy regions, those places where deep understanding had not been achieved and where the subtle paradoxes lurked. Aybee had charted those anomalies. It was shocking to find the misty curtain suddenly blown aside and a new world stepping forth in full-blown glory.

Gudrun had no such worries. She sat down confidently at the control board and began to follow the simple sequence of instructions provided by the panel’s prompting. The new ship did not seem to amaze her, but Aybee recalled the description of the Outer System Navy: a system designed by a genius to be run by idiots. And when he thought of the level of genius needed to come up with a whole system so different from anything he had ever seen, his skin crawled with excitement.

Five days. That was how long he would have to explore everything and find out how it all worked. Aybee had been dreading so long a trip with Gudrun, but now he wished that the travel duration were double. His usable time would almost certainly be much less than five days. Gudrun would insist on talking—or worse—for part of it, and she also wanted him in a form-change tank, wasting more precious hours.

Even while she was finishing the command sequence to move them out of the cargo hulk and on their way, Aybee was thinking hard. What he needed was a complete reversal of roles: Gudrun absent and Aybee free to explore the ship. How could he manage it?

Cinnabar Baker would have solved that problem in a moment. With stakes so high, Gudrun had to be out of action for the duration of the journey. One blow would do it; then the disposal of a corpse or the confinement of an injured body to the medical unit.

Aybee had plenty of brainpower. The idea that Gudrun could be killed or injured occurred to him at once. She had finished the control sequence and had moved to the communications unit. As she crouched before the panel with the headset shielding any of his actions, he picked up a heavy data storage case and moved to stand directly behind her. It would take only a moment, a single strike to the unprotected skull.

Now!

Aybee stared the possibility full in the face—and blinked. For the first time in his life he was forced to face one of his own limitations: He was not particularly fond of Gudrun, but regardless of logic and motivation he could not harm her physically.

He put down the case and stared at her in total frustration. At the same moment, she swiveled around in her chair to look up into his face. Her expression was curious, somewhere between cold and startled. Aybee could visualize a five-dimensional knotted manifold and manipulate its topology in his head, but he could not read that human countenance. If he had, he would have recognized a look of fear.

“I’ve been in touch with headquarters,” Gudrun said after a few moments. “I said we’ll be on our way any moment now.”

Aybee nodded. It hardly seemed like a universe-shattering revelation.

“And I’m afraid we can’t do the things we’d planned,” she hurried on. “There have been changes. I have urgent work to do on the journey, so you’ll have to occupy yourself as best you can. Don’t come in here.”

Without another word she went through to the aft part of the cabin and slid the door closed. Any child could see that something had happened to upset her very much.

But if Aybee was a child, he was the little boy who had suddenly been given the run of the candy store. He stared after Gudrun for all of ten seconds, until he heard a high-pitched whirring from somewhere beneath his feet. A new mechanism had come into operation.

Aybee felt no acceleration, but he suspected he might be hearing the drive. It was easy enough to test the idea. The McAndrew propulsion system produced a faint sparkle of eldritch light as high-speed particles collided with the occasional hydrogen atoms of free space. He went across to the port and peered out.

And gasped. There was no pinpoint twinkle of drive interactions. Instead, the whole starfield had been replaced by a tangled rainbow of color, rippling across his field of view.

From that moment, Aybee forgot all about Gudrun for many hours.

Chapter 22

Behrooz Wolf claimed to have no conscience. He denied having brains. What he had in place of both, he said, was a little voice that whispered in his ear, urging him to take actions that his natural indolence discouraged.

That voice was interfering with his work. What he wanted to do was solve the mystery of the demon of form-change, that impossible chimera that could live in the radiative inferno inside a kernel shield and send a stream of misdirection through the computer system to the rest of the harvester. And if it could do it to form-change, he realized, it could do it to everything else. It was the key to wholesale delusions and impossible sensor messages. Even the Negentropic Man himself, and Mary’s visitation, and failed mass detection systems. Something had allowed that cometary fragment to crash undetected into the Sagdeyev space farm.

That was what he wanted to do: to work on technical problems. So why was he wandering the interior of the Marsden Harvester seeking a woman whose last name he had not at first remembered?

It could only be the dreams; persistent, chaotic images that came in the middle of deep sleep. He saw flashes of Mary in indescribable danger and of vague menace creeping toward her. He heard cries of fear and pleas for help.

Or was it Sylvia that he saw? The visions blurred and faded, one face flowing to another, as he watched. And were they dreams, or were they messages, like the first one he had received from Mary? When he woke he was never sure what he had experienced. All that remained was the feeling of urgency.

Bey wandered on. He was looking for Andromeda, but Andromeda who? Leo Manx had never heard of her. Bey went to the central data bank and asked for a complete listing of all the Andromedas—Diconis, that was the name he had been groping for, but the computer offered only a general location within the harvester. She was a woman with no permanent partner and no particular job. Bey started with the dining area where they had met and widened his sphere of search from there.

His new form had a stamina level inferior to that of his Earth body. After seven hours of roaming the harvester’s corridors, asking for a woman everyone seemed to know and no one was able to locate, he was wilting. He needed food. He gave up his search, headed for the nearest dining area—and found Andromeda Diconis.

He dropped the idea of food and filled a jug with purple-red wine when he saw her. He did not expect to enjoy the meeting—So why am I doing it? he asked himself. She was alone, dressed in a cleverly cut garment that suggested body curves where there were none. He had to hurry, since she was carrying a tray of food and about to enter a dining cubicle. He grabbed his jug and a cup, hurried that way, and crowded in after her.

She gave him a first amazed stare, then a gasp of pleased recognition. “Why—Behrooz. What a nice surprise.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“But I’m about to eat.” She gestured to the tray in front of her. “You’ll have to wait until I’ve finished. Unless—” Her face turned pink, but her eyes were gleaming before they looked away from his. “Unless you were thinking of staying here while I do it.”

“Sure. Here, we’ll share this.” Bey placed the wine on the table between them and heard her gasp. He might be getting into more than he realized.

Andromeda was looking around, checking that no one else had seen Bey enter the cubicle. “Wait a minute.” Her voice was breathless, and she quickly set the table controls to make all the walls opaque. “There—if you are sure you really want to?”

“I do. I’m sure.” Bey picked up the flagon and poured wine. He did not think Andromeda was a woman who did favors for nothing. Who was it who had said that Paris was worth a mass? One of the Henrys. Well, Sylvia was worth more than that. According to his estimates, she had saved his life at least twice. And she had sat for days by the tank when he had gone into form-change to make sure nothing bad happened there. Sylvia was worth it, whatever it took. Bey followed his instincts, picked up his cup of wine, and drained it.

Andromeda had taken a spoonful of a clear soup, but she was hesitating with it poised in front of her mouth, watching him drink. Bey stared right at her, not letting her off the hook. After a moment she gave a little shiver, pursed her lips, and sipped in a determined way. She swallowed, blushed, and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m like this all the time. I mean, I’m really a very respectable woman.”

“I know. Sylvia says you’re the tops.” Bey gulped more wine and watched Andromeda lean forward and lick her hps. Her nipples were pushing against the indigo fabric of her dress. He was even getting excited himself. Maybe the Cloudlanders knew something that Earth people had never learned about the serious business of eating. Bey struggled to keep his mind on the job at hand. “She says the two of you go away back together. You were big buddies until she set up with Paul Chu.”

“We were.” Andromeda swallowed another lascivious spoonful of soup. “I was very disappointed when that happened. I mean, he was nothing. Little, and fat, and full of strange ideas.”

Lady, that was me two weeks ago. Bey leaned across, poured a full glass for Andromeda, drank deeply from his own glass, and nodded agreeably. He had not eaten for a long time, and the alcohol was pumping straight through to his bloodstream. Andromeda was beginning to look much more attractive. “I don’t know why she started to hang out with him.” He leaned forward. “Wasn’t he part of some sort of religious group?”

“Not religion. Revolution.” She gave Bey another knowing look, waited to be sure he was watching, and took a deliberate swallow of wine. Her face was flushed, and her lower lip swollen. “He was into revolution, and borderland politics, and all that rubbish. I don’t know how much she told you about the two of them, but they were an item for a long time. I think she still has the hots for him. I don’t know what she told you, but in my opinion she hasn’t got him out of her system.”

“Was she asking about him?” The question was overly direct, but Andromeda was too preoccupied to notice. She was sitting with a forkful of food poised in front of her. Not until Bey fixed his eyes on her again did she slowly place it in her mouth, pull the food free with her white teeth, and chew steadily while he watched. The pulse in the hollow of her throat was throbbing.

“She was asking.” Andromeda finally swallowed and put down her fork. “She was asking about him, and I told her how I thought she could get in touch with him.”

“You know that?”

“I’m fairly sure I do. He was here secretly, but he wanted certain people to be able to reach him. I know who they are.”

“And you could tell me?”

“Well, not immediately.” Andromeda licked her lips again. “It would take time to find them. But we could look together.”

Bey knew what was coming. “ ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Andromeda, rough-hew them how we will.’ ”

“I’m sorry?”

“Shapes our ends.” Lord. He had had far too much to drink—but too much for what?

Andromeda laughed. “You’re such a strange person—not at all the way you look. If you want to search, I can tell you where we should start.” She moved closer to Bey. Andromeda had lost all interest in eating. “I have their names and locations—but not with me. Back in my private quarters. We’d have to go there. If you want to.”

She paused and looked at him inquiringly.

With a wild surmise. Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Lord, he was drunk.

“Well, Bey.” She had stopped smiling. “Do you want to?”

“ ‘Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?’ ”

“What?”

“I mean, let’s go. Now. To your place. I want to.”

“Mm. Are you sure?” She was playing hard to get. “I mean, what about Sylvia?”

“ ‘I have been faithful to thee Cynara, in my fashion.’ ” I mean Sylvia. I mean Mary, for God’s sake.

“What?”

“I mean, I’m quite sure. Can’t wait. Let’s go.” Bey lurched to his feet, clutching the half-full flagon of wine. She was out there somewhere, in the featureless gulf of the Outer System. He was going to find her. If he had to lay his body down to do it, that was part of the game. Whatever it took, he was going to find her. But not quite yet.

Leo Manx stared at him in disbelief. “Let me get this straight. You’re leaving tomorrow for these coordinates.” He tapped the sheet he was holding. “In the wilderness. And you don’t want me to come with you. I’ll second that. You don’t want to tell the harvester controllers where you’re going. All right, if you say so. But what are you hoping to accomplish?”

Leo Manx was a good listener. Bey outlined his ideas. At the wilder moments, Leo muttered to himself but did not interrupt. “How are you proposing to prove all this?” he asked at last.

“I’m going to bring one back. A live one.” Bey was white-faced, exhausted, and somewhere between stoned and hung over. Four days of wine, drugs, and Andromeda Diconis was not an experience for the fainthearted. They had wandered the harvester together from one end to the other. Andromeda believed in stimulation rather than sleep. If he survived, Bey wanted to see her again. He had to know where she got her energy. “But if I don’t make it back,” he went on, “there has to be at least one person who knows exactly where I’m heading and what I think is going on. That’s you.”

“But how am I ever going to persuade Cinnabar Baker that what you’re doing makes sense?”

“You don’t start with Cinnabar. You end with her, and only if I don’t come back and there’s absolutely no other alternative. I told you the danger. Did you do what I asked you to?”

“As much as I could. Have you ever tried to brief your boss without telling her what’s going on?”

“A hundred times. It’s the first rule of self-preservation. Do you have them in a safe place?”

“The coordinates? Sure I do. But you realize those coordinates are almost certainly not the location of Ransome’s Hole? They’re too far out of the Kernel Ring.”

“I know. But they’re the only starting point I have, and I feel sure Sylvia went there. I’m leaving now. If everything goes to hell, you know what to do. Give me thirty days, then if you don’t hear from me, assume I’m dead and gone.”

He was ready to go, but Leo Manx stopped him. “Bey, you tell me you need thirty days before I panic, and you’re not frantic now about Aybee. So why don’t you give as much breathing room to Sylvia? Maybe she’s working her own agenda. You could ruin it for her.”

Leo deserved an answer, but Bey did not have one. All he had was that small voice again, whispering in his ear. It said that Aybee might be fine, and Bey might be fine, but Sylvia was in trouble. Or was it telling him that he owed more to her than he did to Aybee, and so he had to worry more about her?

Bey could not turn off that voice, but he could sometimes see through its strategies. He was in a hurry to leave, but not perhaps for the obvious reason. If he found Sylvia, she might lead him to Paul Chu. And Paul Chu might lead to Black Ransome. And Black Ransome was the Negentropic Man, that grinning, dancing figure who had driven Bey near insanity and forced him to leave Earth. That was who Bey was after. Wasn’t it?

Maybe. The inner voice insisted on the last word. You want to get even with Black Ransome, I can believe that. And you want to solve the mystery of the kernels, which begins and ends with Black Ransome. But aren’t we conveniently forgetting one other little thing? If you find Black Ransome at the end of the trail, who else may you find with him? And what will gallant Bey Wolf do then?

Chapter 23

Aybee Smith was a helpless prisoner, boxed up in a ship with a woman who would not talk to him, racing toward an unknown destination, heading for a meeting with people who were sworn enemies of everything that Aybee’s civilization stood for.

Any logical person would have been worried sick about his future. And logic ruled Aybee’s whole life. He loved logic; he lived by logic. And yet he did not give any of those worries a single thought. He was busy with something far more important.

The ship was a treasure box of mysteries. Beginning with the puzzle of the drive mechanism—no high-density balancing plate and no acceleration forces—he had listed twenty-seven devices that required some new technology or, beyond mere technology, some new physical principle!

With a mental clock ticking always in his mind—five days! too little time!—Aybee had forgone the luxury of sleep or rest. No matter what they did to him at his destination, he could sleep when he arrived there; at the moment the exploration of the ship was his only goal.

Gudrun appeared from her locked quarters only for a few minutes twice a day, when she found it necessary to use the ship’s single galley. Aybee was eating randomly, snatching food when he could bear the interruption to his work. He and Gudrun met in the galley only once. She avoided his eyes and did not speak. He did not even notice. A new insight had occurred to him, a possible basis for the ship’s garbage disposal unit, which somehow removed the mass from the ship but did not eject it to open space.

While she prepared her meal and fled, he sat motionless and gaped at the blank wall. Aybee worked in his head. He transcribed results only when everything was complete. So far he had written nothing.

He had performed a taxonomy of those twenty-seven anomalies, placing them neatly into four major categories. Thus:

(1) Inertial versus gravitational mass: Half a dozen devices on the ship, including all its positional and navigation systems, could be explained very well in one simple theory—if Aybee were willing to abandon the principle of equivalence. He was not. He would give up his virginity first.

(2) Heat into motion: Another set of devices on the ship made sense only if heat could be converted perfectly to other forms of mechanical energy; in other words, if Aybee were willing to give up the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Negentropic Man again! In a closed system—and what was more closed than the ship?—Aybee was asked to admit an entity that would decrease entropy. He remembered Maxwell’s Demon, that tiny imp who was supposed to sit in a container sorting molecules. The fast-moving ones would be allowed to pass in one direction, the slow-moving molecules in the opposite one. Maxwell’s Demon had been introduced in 1874, but Szilard had banished it completely in 1928. Hadn’t he?

Aybee was not sure anymore. But he certainly did not want to give up the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Eddington’s words were graven in his memory:

“The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations, then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

Aybee agreed with that. Wholeheartedly.

(3) Force-field aberrations: By the end of the third day Aybee had devised an alternative theory that explained how the drive might work, but it involved the introduction of a new type of force similar to the ancient and long-discredited concept of “hypercharge.” Aybee shrank from such ad hoc leaps into darkness. “Hypotheses nonfingo”—“I don’t make new assumptions.” If that had been good enough for Isaac Newton, it was good enough for Aybee.

(4) Information from nothing. All the rest of the ship would work fine—if only it were possible to create infonnation from random noise! Chaos to signal, that was all Aybee needed. The ship’s communication system seemed to depend on that impossible capability. Could he accept it? Aybee knew exactly where it would lead him, and he did not like it. He would again need a way in which entropy could be decreased. It was the Negentropic Man popping up again in a different but equally unappetizing form. Aybee hated the whole idea.

Five days flew by. The approach to their destination was an irritating distraction but finally a necessary one. Aybee would not stop thinking about the physical problems—he could not stop thinking—but at least he would have an obligatory break from it.

One hour before arrival, Gudrun appeared grim-faced from her cabin and moved at once to the communications terminal. She was wearing a spacesuit, and it was clear that she was very nervous. But her feelings were not obvious enough to break through Aybee’s shield of obsessions. He went on working until the very moment when the ship docked and the lock began to open. Then it was not Gudrun’s voice that brought him out of his reverie; it was the clatter of metal from within the lock itself.

“There he is!” Gudrun had run to the opening and squeezed through it. She turned to point back inside. “That’s Karl Lyman. Be careful—he’s dangerous!”

The air lock on the ship, like its passenger quarters, was far bigger than on an ordinary transit vessel. Aybee stared into it and saw to his amazement that it was crammed with armed men, all in full space attire and squeezed tightly together. There were eight or nine of them; to a Cloudlander, that many people in one place was a major gathering. Gudrun had pushed into their midst. As he watched, all the weapons lifted to point straight at him.

“Into your suit,” an uncompromising voice said. “If you have an explanation, you can give it later.”

It was not a time to argue. One shot from any of those weapons would pierce the average hull. Aybee had a suit on and was ready to go in less than thirty seconds. He nodded as he closed the final seal. The outer lock opened, and air hissed out into vacuum. One of the guns lifted and gestured. “Outside.”

One step behind Gudrun, Aybee moved on through the lock. It had been three days since he last looked out of an observation port, and he stared around with keen interest. The strange rainbow aurora had vanished, presumably disappearing when the drive went off, and the familiar starfield was all around. The Sun was visible off to his right, noticeably more brilliant than it had been when the journey had begun. Aybee made a quick assessment of its apparent magnitude and decided that they were somewhere on the outer edge of the Kernel Ring.

The ship had docked on the perimeter of a structure that was no more than a minor way station, a long skeletal framework of struts with clamps to hold ships in position and massive tanks for fusion fuels. The group moved to a little pinnace propelled by a high-thrust mirror-matter engine. Their real destination was a few kilometers Sunward, a dull darkness whose size and shape could be assessed only from stray glints of sunlight splintering off external ports and antennas.

The body was roughly spherical, perhaps five kilometers across. Aybee stared at it with the greatest interest. If he were unworried, it was not because he was confident of his own fate. He was simply unable to drag his mind away from the new physical universe suggested by the ship he had arrived in. And if he had any emotion, it was anticipation; whatever he had seen in transit, there would be greater marvels here, where the transit ship had been built.

Aybee did a quick analysis. The sphere ahead might be a source of ships, but it was not itself a ship. It was also the size and shape of a cargo hulk, but it was not being used for cargo. There was no signs of a drive mechanism, and there could be none, since the delicate spikes and silvery filaments of exterior antennae were incompatible with accelerated motion. No stronger than tinsel, they would be crushed and deformed by the slightest of body forces.

It could be a colony, like the Outer System’s free drifters, or it might be a converted factory, originally dedicated to the production of a particular line of goods.

Aybee abandoned speculation. They were moving to a huge airlock built into the hull’s convex surface, and already several of the party had their hands ready to break suit seals. Aybee waited. If anyone attempted to breathe vacuum, he would not be the first. He was amused to note that Gudrun had positioned herself as far away from him as possible, at the opposite side of the lock. The escort had apparently formed their own conclusions about Aybee’s threat to them. No one held a gun at the ready, and half of them did not even bother to look at him.

The inner lock opened. The group moved quietly forward into a large, bare chamber with a flat floor and a local gravity field that varied irregularly from one point to the next. To Aybee, that suggested the resultant vector from many kernels scattered through the interior of the body, each adding its own field component.

The man in front halted and turned around. At his gesture, Aybee removed his own suit with the rest. For the first time he could assess their physical appearance. Most of them had the short, stocky build that he associated with the Inner System and the Kernel Ring, but two were long and lean, as much Cloudlanders as anyone Aybee had ever seen. They were probably not recent arrivals, either, since they were not dressed in Outer System style; their arms and legs stuck wildly out of clothes far too small for them.

Gudrun was staring at him in fear and horror. Aybee felt tempted to go across, wiggle his fingers in his ears, and see if she screamed. What was she expecting? Someone to appear in a puff of smoke and carry her off to hell?

Instead he nodded amiably to the others in the group. “Well.” They all stared at him. “You got me. What happens now?”

“That depends on you.” The speaker was a black-haired man with dark skin and a thickset build. Aybee recognized the voice as the one that had been ordering him around. “I was told to get you here, that’s all. If Gudrun is right”—the man spoke as someone who already knew her well—“then you’re in trouble. We don’t like spies here. If you’re innocent, you’ll have to prove it.”

“Guilty until proved innocent. Nice. Where’s here?”

Several of the men stirred uneasily at Aybee’s question. “Got a bit of nerve, haven’t you?” the stocky man commented. “What did you tell him, Gudrun?”

“Nothing.” She was defensive. “At least, not very much. I thought until we were on the ship that he was just a new trainee that we captured on the Sagdeyev space farm. How was I supposed to know he’s a Cloudland spy?”

That produced another reaction from the rest of them, and a couple of guns were again pointed at Aybee.

“I don’t think you want to believe this,” he said. “But I’m not a spy, and I’ve never been one.”

“He’s lying!” Gudrun’s face was flushed with anger. “He even gave me a false name. He says he’s Karl Lyman, but his real name is Smith—Apollo Belvedere Smith.”

That shocked Aybee more than he wanted to admit. He could see how he might have revealed by his actions that he was not from the space farm or that another farmer might have said he was not part of that group. But how could anyone know his real name? Unless he had taken to talking in his sleep, he had never mentioned his name since the accident back on the farm.

“Is that your name?” one of the tall, thin escorts asked. “Because if it is, then, man, you’re in deep trouble.” He turned to the rest of them without waiting to hear Aybee’s answer. “There’s an Apollo Belvedere Smith who works for Outer System headquarters. High up, staff position. So if this is him, he’s definitely a spy, and we have to—”

“I tell you, I’m not a spy.” Aybee cut him off before the other man could finish. “I’m a scientist—”

“He’s lying!” Gudrun shouted. “He’s no scientist. He lied to me.”

“He did,” said a quiet new voice from behind the group. “And yet, oddly enough, he is not lying now. He is telling the exact truth.”

Everyone spun around. A small, lightly built man had stepped into the chamber through its open inner door. He was dressed in a tight-fitting suit of rusty black, and on his head he wore a peaked cap of the same sable tone. His face was fine-boned and pale, with an odd little smile on the thin hps, but that expression was belied and dominated by the eyes. There was no smile there, only a dark and piercing look that demanded and held attention.

Aybee found his attention drawn to those eyes. It took an amazing effort to look away. He heard Gudrun gasp. She, at least, had not been expecting the new arrival. But she had to be less surprised than Aybee himself. For although the dress was quite different and the teeth no longer incongruously blackened, Aybee recognized the man standing in front of them. It was the Negentropic Man, just as he had danced and capered through Bey Wolf’s tormented memories.

The newcomer stepped forward, and the others moved aside to make a corridor. Right in front of Aybee, the man stopped and looked up. Aybee was a head and a half taller. The thin grin widened.

“As you said, Apollo Belvedere Smith, there was no lie. You are a scientist, and Cinnabar Baker thinks you are the best in the system.” He held out his hand. “Let me welcome you here, and let me introduce myself.”

“That’s not necessary.” Aybee took the outstretched hand and decided it was time to do more than just deny everything. He had to establish independence. “I know where I am. This is Ransome’s Hole. And you are Black Ransome.”

If Aybee had expected a shocked response, he was disappointed. The other man frowned just a little and gave Aybee’s hand a dry, firm shake. “I’m Ransome, true enough. Some call me Black Ransome, although that is not my name. And some call this Ransome’s Hole, too, though I would never do so.” The smile returned, warm and embracing. “I’m going to welcome you here, whether you want it or not. You’ve come a long way, and we must talk. You may be very valuable to us. Come on.”

Aybee had apparently been switched in status from prisoner and spy to welcome guest. Gudrun gasped, but there was no murmur of dissent from anyone. The force of Ransome’s personality was too strong to brook argument. Instead, the group of people moved to leave a clear path to the door. He turned and left, confident that Aybee would follow.

That annoyed Aybee. So Ransome was to lead, and he was supposed to trot along behind like some pet animal? No way.

He left the chamber just behind Ransome and tagged along until they were out of sight of the other group. But then he paused and looked around. Ransome went on, almost out of sight in the curving corridor, heading deeper into the sphere along a spiral path whose field in less than fifty meters fluctuated from almost zero g to a thirtieth of Earth gravity. The floor turned in the same space through 180 degrees. In any other structure, Aybee would have known just how to interpret that. The path must wind its way past two shielded kernels, one below the “floor,” the other, forty meters farther on, above the “ceiling”—which had become the floor.

That was the only logical explanation, but Aybee’s new experiences on the transit ship had taught him to mistrust preconceived ideas. He slowed his pace and hunted backward and forward, seeking a point of maximum field in the corridor floor. If he were now close to a kernel, he would feel an inertial dragging.

He went down on his hands and knees and put his head close to the floor, moving it slowly about. While he was in that position he saw a pair of black-clad legs standing a few feet in front of him.

“If you’re going to travel all the way like that,” Ransome’s calm voice said, “it will take you a long time and I won’t wait. I’ll send one of the machines back here to show you the way. It is a kernel down there, you know. What else did you think it might be?”

Aybee stood up. He was still young enough to hate looking like a fool more than anything in the world. For the rest of the journey through the interior of Ransome’s Hole he trudged grumpily along right behind Ransome.

In a few minutes they came to the end of the corridor and passed through into a great hemispherical chamber, furnished to a level of luxury that Aybee had never seen. Glittering silver sculptures of human and animal figures were everywhere. The domed ceiling housed a huge sprinkler system, able to deliver anything from a fine mist of rain to a total deluge. Fruit trees and flowering vines, trained in elaborate espaliers along walls and trellises, grew beneath in disciplined variety. At the center of the chamber stood its most spectacular feature. A forty-meter globe of greenish water was held in position by the gravitational field of the kernel at its center, and brilliantly colored fish were swimming within it. Fronds of weed and branched coral grew down on the kernel’s outer shield, and an external lighting system created ever-varying patterns of light and dark within the clouded interior.

Aybee goggled. No one had anything like that in the Outer System, not even the three general coordinators.

Ransome had caught his expression. The shorter man shrugged. “Not for me, Aybee Smith. That isn’t my taste at all.” He sounded amused and tolerant, far from the fanatical rebel promised by his reputation. The ogre of the Kernel Ring was easy company, lulling one to relax and listen to him.

“But sometimes you have to do these things, don’t you?” Ransome went on. “For the sake of the less scientific. Stick around here for a while, and you’ll see worse. Maybe you should think of this as my version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.”

The what of what? Aybee decided to look it up when he had a chance. Meanwhile, he could not help changing his mind about Black Ransome. The man was treating him like an equal rather than a prisoner, and given Ransome’s reputation and authority, that had to be flattering.

“Now, this is my own taste,” Ransome said. “A person can really work here.” He led the way through a gleaming door of white metal, on into a sparsely furnished room about eight meters by six. A long desk, half-covered with random piles of data cubes, stood against one wall. Half a dozen displays were mounted above it on plain beige walls that carried unobtrusive light fixtures, the biggest holograph projectors Aybee had ever seen, and no decorations of any kind. Elaborate computer consoles were built into the surface of the desk itself.

Ransome sat down on one of the three easy chairs and gestured to another one. Now that they had arrived, he seemed in no mood to speak. There was a long, uncomfortable pause, with Aybee standing waiting and Ransome staring blank-eyed at the wall.

At last Aybee tucked himself into a chair. They had been made for Ransome’s convenience, not for a tall Cloudlander, and his knees came up near his chin. “So I blew it,” he said. The personal failure had been troubling him since they had first reached Ransome’s Hole. “Mind telling me how?”

Ransome raised dark eyebrows questioningly, but still he did not speak.

“I mean, my name,” Aybee added. “Gudrun knew it, and you knew it. But I told her I was Karl Lyman when she found me on the space farm, and nobody did a chromosomal ID check on me. You shouldn’t have had any idea I was lying. So I must have done something dumb. I’d just like to know what it was.”

Ransome shook his head. “You demean yourself, Aybee Smith. It was not your failure. Watch.” He nodded to one of the displays and played briefly with the miniature console set into the arm of his chair.

The screen glowed. Aybee had half expected to see the result of some unsuspected test conducted on the space farm or perhaps on the dark cargo hulk. Instead, a color image appeared. It was Sylvia Fernald, seen full face. After the flicker of a fast audio search, her image steadied and began to speak.

“We thought Aybee would have been here long ago,” she was saying. “Now it looks as though he was captured along with the others. Do you have any idea where they were taken?”

“Not yet.” The voice was Cinnabar Baker’s, and as the field of view on the display scrolled across and down, Aybee realized that he had to be viewing the scene through her eyes.

“I hope he has the sense to lie low until we can trace him,” Sylvia said from outside the field of view.

“If we ever can,” Baker said. “We have no clues so far. If he’s still alive—we’re not sure of that—he could have been taken anywhere in the system.” The screen showed the main display in Baker’s own office. It held a listing of the names and physical descriptions of all personnel of the space farm, plus Aybee’s own personal data.

“You know Aybee,” Sylvia said. She appeared again in the picture. “If he is alive, he’ll be looking for a chance to get away—”

“As I’m sure you were,” Ransome said. He cut off the display, and Sylvia vanished. “But once we knew you had not left the Sagdeyev farm with the others, we could identify you from your description and take special precautions.”

Aybee was still staring at the blank screen. “That was in Baker’s private apartment. It was seen through her own eyes!”

“Indeed.” Ransome leaned back comfortably in his chair. “Aybee Smith, you are surprised. You should not be. My resources for the collection of information through the whole system—even within the coordinator’s private apartment—are unmatched. Cinnabar Baker keeps no secrets from me. I know every word that is said, in every one of her meetings. If you want more proof of that, I can easily provide it. I have been aware of your own existence and of your potential for more than three years. Had I realized that you were with Behrooz Wolf on the space farm, I would have prevented the accident there.”

“Could you have stopped it?”

“With ease. I controlled the whole destiny of the Sagdeyev farm, from form-change units to matter detection systems. But before we come to something so specific, let us be general. You are a young man, and you are fascinated by science. Let me ask you, do you have equal interest in politics?”

The tone in Ransome’s voice was still casual and detached, but Aybee detected a heightened level of interest. He shook his head. “Politics isn’t for me. I leave that sort of stuff to people like Baker.”

“Ah. To be young. You will change as you grow older. If you do not know politics, do you know the theory of dissipative systems far from equihbrium?”

“I know all the classical work, Onsager and Prigogine and Helmut. And I’ve followed what Borsten has been doing on iterated function spaces in the past few years.” The abrupt turn in the conversation was baffling, but Aybee was on familiar ground. Maybe they were going to talk about science at last.

“In that case you will readily follow what I am about to tell you, even if you at first have trouble accepting it.” Ransome’s eyes were like magnets, drawing Aybee’s attention against his will. “I can demonstrate to you that the whole civilization of the Solar System is on the brink of massive change—total and irreversible change. I know this, and soon everyone will know it. In the language of dissipative systems, we now stand at a bifurcation point, at a singular moment on the time line. As you know, this bifurcation implies an instability. In such situations, the future of a large system can be controlled by small forces. I have such a force at my disposal—the same force that guarantees we occupy a singular point in time. But before the new system can emerge, the old order must crumble and fade. The process has begun; you have seen the signs, in the general breakdown of the Outer System. From its ruins, we will create the new order. Today’s divisions into Inner System, Halo, and Outer System will disappear. There will be a central government, a single point of power and control. It will be here, under my control. My office will become the center of the Solar System.” He leaned forward toward Aybee, eyes dark and hypnotic. “The program to accomplish this is well advanced. But in certain scientific areas I need help. You are well equipped to provide it, and I can guarantee that you will find the work totally fascinating. And think of the prospect. You will help to define the future! You will help to create the future. What could compare with that?”

He paused and looked at Aybee expectantly. His voice had never risen a decibel, always completely thoughtful and reasonable. But in terms of its persuasive power, it was like a triumphant shout.

Aybee struggled to resist the feeling of enthusiasm and well-being that was flooding through him. He had always been a loner, never one to join any movement, and some small corner of his brain was fighting back. But it was a small corner—most of him was in there cheering for Ransome.

He forced himself to think again about his journey to Ransome’s Hole. He wanted to hear about the new scientific advances that had made the little ovoid ship possible. If Ransome were the genius behind those developments, Aybee had to hear the theory—all the theory. Instead he was listening to a man talk about politics. Was it conceivable that the scientific genius and the would-be emperor were the same person? Aybee knew very well the sacrifices and the demands on time and energy called for by great scientific advances. He was prepared to meet those demands, but could anyone combine such a life with an attempt to take over the Solar System? Surely not.

Aybee felt the flood of enthusiasm giving way to rational thought. He knew it was no time to argue with Ransome. Instead he nodded slowly. “What you are telling me is fascinating. I’d like to hear more.”

He was not surprised when Ransome accepted his apparent conversion. The other man projected so powerfully, he was probably amazed by anyone who did not become his follower on first exposure.

Ransome stood up, so warm and friendly and convincing that Aybee began to have second thoughts about his motives. “You have much to learn, Aybee Smith. To the few thousand people already devoted to my cause—yes, we are still spread that thin—I am their only scientific expert. They see me as their prophet, and as the source of all the new technology. But there is a limit to what one man can do, and I have no more than scratched the surface of the possible. That has been enough to allow us to begin the reorganization of the system. You will help me to take our work much farther. When you are ready, we will go to the laboratories. You can begin work there as soon as you like. The faculties are the finest that we can provide.”

He paused and frowned. “Of course,” he added mildly, “there are certain precautions taken for such sensitive work. As you will appreciate, it would be intolerable if word of our plans and discoveries were to leak prematurely to the Inner or the Outer System.” He smiled. “The monitor systems are automatic, and beyond my control. Attempted escape would unfortunately and inevitably lead to your capture, perhaps to your death. Now. Shall we proceed?”

Chapter 24

The self-reproducing machines that alone made possible the rapid development of the Oort Cloud had never been so important in the Inner System. Fifteen billion humans were quite self-reproducing enough. Bey Wolf, accustomed all his life to human limits on work habits and energy levels, had not yet made his adjustment. He knew in the abstract what a group of machines could do, but their actual performance still amazed him. And they never seemed to stop work, even when Bey could see nothing useful to be done.

The odd logic of that had been explained by Leo Manx on their original trip out to the Cloud. “It’s actually more economical of resources to keep them working,” he said. “You see, if they’re not working, they’re programmed to make more copies of themselves. And that takes more materials.”

“But why not just switch them off?” Bey asked.

Manx shook his head. “They’re designed for continuous use. If you don’t want them to decline in performance, you have to keep them busy.”

Typical Outer System design philosophy, but Bey was looking at a good example of what Manx had meant. Sylvia Fernald had approached the same destination and found the darkness and silence of a mausoleum. To Bey, near to rendezvous just seven days later, it seemed inevitable that the body had looked then much as it did now, gaudy, bustling with activity, ablaze with internal lights. Half a dozen ships lay in the docks, and the irregular egglike outline of the surface was blurred and softened by a tangle of free-space vines, tilting their silver and black webs to drink in the miser’s dole of radiation from distant Sol. The idea that the whole body had been dark and deserted as recently as two days earlier never occurred to Bey.

Its small size was a surprise. In the Inner System, a few hundred sets of orbital elements covered everything significant. The vast majority of planetoids were uninhabited and likely to remain so, except for mining operators. Travel to any of the interesting destinations took one to a body at least tens of kilometers across, with an associated population center. There would be thousands of people there at minimum, if not the billions of Earth, the hundreds of millions of Mars, or the tens of millions of Europa and Ceres.

That Sylvia would come so far to arrive at a body with a handful of people was perplexing to Bey. However, it might also make his own task easier. He was seeking Sylvia, but beyond that he had another motive. He sought the trail that would lead him onward to the right location in the Kernel Ring and the Negentropic Man himself. Whatever lay there, it was an improbable end point for Sylvia’s travels.

There was little point in trying for an inconspicuous arrival. Space radar systems would have marked his progress and projected his arrival time when he was millions of kilometers away. Bey ignored the manual controls and allowed the docking to proceed automatically. He did not put on a suit. He was not being overconfident, nor was he a fatalist. Any dangers would derive from humanity rather than nature, and they would call for intelligence, not speed or strength.

The lock opened. He drifted through and found himself in the middle of a fairy tale. The interior of the body had been converted to a single chamber hundreds of meters across. Its vaulted walls were painted in red and white and gold, and vast murals reached up to the domed ceiling. Unencumbered by gravity, needle spires and slender minarets rose bright from the outer surface next to Bey, and lacy filaments arched between them.

He looked instinctively for signs of a kernel and headed for it right across the central chamber. No matter that he had spent much of the past week brooding on the impossible possibility of a demon inside a kernel shield, some indestructible, pachydermous, and unimaginable end product of infinite form-change that would bask and bathe in the radiation sleet within the shields. Never mind that thought. There would be a local gravity field near a kernel, and he yearned for it, even if it were a weak one—Earth habits died hard.

As he approached the outer kernel shield he was struck by a shocking thought. In his fascination at the sights within the lock, he had missed a central mystery. He could see almost the whole of the body’s interior, and although a dozen machines were visible, there was no sign of another human being. Had he come all that way on a wild chase that would end on a deserted pleasure sphere? He knew such things existed, created as the hideaways of wealthy and reclusive individuals of the Outer System. They were maintained by their service machines, patiently awaiting the arrival of their owners, and for ninety-nine days out of a hundred they were uninhabited. If no one at all was there, his journey would have been a complete waste of time and effort.

Down on the kernel’s shield Bey saw another oddity. Amid a riot of free-growing plants, a little bower had been created using a woven thicket of plaited vegetation to form a living roof and walls. The sight gave him an irrational shiver of premonition along his spine.

“Sylvia?” His voice was unsteady. Logically, he had no idea what came next, but the dark recesses of his hindbrain knew it already. He floated on down toward the kernel’s shield. “Sylvia,” he repeated. “Are you there?”

A sudden giggle came from the inside of the bower, and a curly-haired head peeked out past the tangled leaves. “Bey? Oh, my word. What have you done to yourself?” The laugh came again, this time full-throated. “ ‘Bottom, thou art translated.’ You’re so long and thin—and no hair! I knew it; you let them put you in one of your horrible form-change machines.” It was Mary, moving out to meet him and filling his arms. “Oh, Bey, you’re here at last. It’s so good to see you again.”

The questions had tumbled through Bey’s head one after another. How had Mary known he was coming? How had anyone known he was coming? That information was supposed to be a close secret. Why was Mary here? Where was Sylvia? Mary had recognized him instantly, despite his changed form, but how had she been able to do that?

He thought everything and at first asked nothing. Mary was a drug that had lost none of its strength. She still ran through his veins. He felt light-headed with unreality.

“Right here,” she was saying. Bey found himself led by the hand into the little bower and seated on a rustic bench fabricated to resemble aged and knotted wood.

It was typical of Mary that she felt no need to explain anything, and just as typical that she wore a costume equally alien to both the Inner and Outer Systems. Her print dress of faded dark purple flowers on a pale gray background belonged to another century. It fit perfectly with the bower and with the woven basket hanging over the end of the bench. She was wearing a hint of flowery perfume, light and fresh. Mary was playing a part—but which one?

“How did you know I was coming here?” Bey forced himself to ask that question, and at the same moment had a suspicion of the answer. He had told Leo Manx to tell no one—but did Leo have that much self-control? All it might have taken was one short conversation with Cinnabar Baker, and for Leo telling Baker was still second nature.

Mary was smiling at him as sunnily and possessively as if they had never parted. He thought for a moment that she had ignored his question, but then she said, “It’s just as well for you that I learned you were heading this way, and better yet that no one else saw the message before I could take care of it. Otherwise you’d have found an armed guard waiting instead of me.” She snuggled against him and laughed when she found that her head touched not his shoulder but halfway down his chest. “Oh, Bey, I’ve been taking good care of you. I changed all the messages that were going to you. If it weren’t for me, you’d have been dead or crazy long since.”

Bey had learned long ago that Mary did not lie. If her answers failed to match the real world, that was only because her perceptions of reality were so often awry. She had been protecting him, or at least she believed she had.

“What happened to Sylvia Fernald? She was supposed to be here.” He was rewarded with a frown of disapproval.

“I know all about her. The two of you have really nothing in common.”

“That’s not true.” Bey half agreed with Mary, but he felt the perverse need to defend Sylvia. “We have lots in common. She’s educated. She saved my life—twice. We get on well together, and she’s a—a nice, kind woman,” he ended lamely.

“ ‘Be she meeker, kinder than, Turtle-dove or pelican, If she be not so to me, What care I how kind she be?’ They used to be your lines, Bey. Have you changed that much?”

“I came here to find her, Mary.”

“I know. And I came here to stop you searching anymore. I know where she is, and she’s safe enough. But you don’t want to go looking for her. It might put you in danger.”

“From whom?”

Mary shook her head. Bey knew exactly what she meant. She would not lie, but she would refuse to speak. They had slipped into the old relationship, just as though Mary had left Earth—and Wolf—no more than an hour before.

“I won’t stop looking,” he went on. “There’s more at stake here than me or Sylvia. The whole system is coming unglued. That has to be stopped.”

She turned her head and looked up into his face. “The same old Bey. Saving the world. You ought to know better. You worked half your life for that stupid Office of Form Control, and what reward did you get at the end? They threw you out, with never even a thank you.”

“They had a good reason.”

“You haven’t changed at all, have you? Still honor and glory and once-more-unto-the-breach, dear friends.” She rubbed her hand across his chest. “Bey, if only you could stop living in the past and the future, and live in the present for a little bit, you’d have so much more fun.”

If anyone in the universe lived in the present, it was Mary. The signal was clear and tempting. Bey heard all his internal voices shouting at once to justify the action: ‘A few hours delay can’t make any difference’… ‘Mary will become your ally, and she can take you straight to Sylvia’… ‘Mary scorned now would be your bitterest enemy’… ‘You’ve been away from each other far too long’… ‘All the time you thought she had forgotten you, she was protecting you’… ‘Live in the present…’

Bey turned and leaned down toward Mary’s waiting face. Her eyes had closed.

’But where has Mary been all this time? And what has she been doing?’ Amid all the clamor of emotions, that single questioning whisper in Bey’s mind was drowned out completely. It did not stand a chance.

A few hours had stretched into a day, and then into two and three. It was a long time before Bey saw a possible approach to the problem.

Mary was immune to all forms of logic. He had known that for years. It was maddening, but it was also part of her charm, and it meant that she would be unmoved by any rational reason for taking Bey back with her to the Kernel Ring and, ultimately, to Black Ransome. Kernel demons and form-change anomalies and Systemwide hallucinations meant nothing to her. Another motive was needed, something that went deeper than logic; Bey had lain awake for hours trying to think of one and had returned again and again to a single question. Why had Mary come to meet him, secretly? She was apparently not trying to capture him, and she had made it clear that she did not intend him to stay with her permanently.

He thought he had the answer. Mary had come for personal reassurance. She knew he had traveled a vast distance in pursuit of Sylvia Fernald. Mary hated to give up any man. The idea that she had been superseded by Sylvia, so that she could no longer move Bey at her whim, was intolerable. She wanted to show that she still owned him and could still control him.

Bey looked at the sleeping form stretched out next to him. So far the demonstration must have been to her satisfaction. Now he had to make use of the same fact.

The most difficult thing was to be casual and convincing enough. Mary did not lie, but she had a sixth sense that told her when others were doing it to her. The best way was to make her feel that any decision was her idea.

Bey dropped the first word while Mary was showing him around the elaborate new gardens that the machines had built under her direction in a single day. It was in answer to Mary’s complaint that he was too bony to lie next to in comfort, and it took the form of a vague comment on his part that the standards of beauty for women were very different in the Inner and Outer Systems.

“For the Cloudlanders, curves are out,” he added. “And yet that doesn’t mean that a Cloudlander will be unattractive to somebody from the Inner System—or that a Sunhugger disgusts somebody from the Cloud.”

Mary had not reacted to the comment, but Bey knew she had registered it. He waited. It was hard to keep his own mental processes under control. Emotion and real affection for Mary were competing with his long-term logical plan, and Bey knew from experience that logic could lose.

Later in the day Mary was studying a recording of one of her own old performances, as Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera. She remarked how good she had looked as a redhead.

Bey agreed enthusiastically. “My favorite hair color. As a matter of fact, naturally red hair—” He paused and went silent. Mary also said nothing. Sylvia had red hair.

They watched the performance together. When Macheath was looking at Polly and Lucy Lockit and singing, “How happy could I be with either, were t’other dear charmer away,” Bey knew that Mary was watching him from the corner of her eye.

She was preoccupied for the rest of the day. Late in the evening she suddenly asked him if he and Sylvia Fernald had been lovers.

“Of course not!” Bey sat up. “You’ve seen her, you know how tall and gawky and strange she is. And she has a longtime partner of her own, back in the Cloud, so she wouldn’t look at anyone else. And did you know when I arrived at the Opik Harvester, she said that I looked like a hairy little monkey? To her, I’m totally hideous…”

Bey went on with his protests just a little too long. He did not need to point out to Mary that his own appearance had changed considerably since the arrival at the harvester, to a form much more pleasing to Sylvia Fernald’s tastes. On matters like this, Mary’s instincts reached a conclusion ten times as fast as any logic.

The next morning Mary was very quiet. At midday she casually announced that she would be returning to the Kernel Ring. If Bey wanted to take the risk, he could accompany her. Did he want to go? If he did, he ought to get ready.

Bey, equally casual, accepted. However, he did not feel satisfied with the way the conversation had gone. He had achieved his objective, but his little inside voice would not keep quiet. Too easy, it said, much too easy. When a difficult goal is achieved with no effort, it’s time to be suspicious. You want to get to the Kernel Ring? Sure—and maybe someone else wants you there, too.

Chapter 25

Bey had been wrong. He might be the only person who would ever know it, but still he hated the idea.

Back on the Sagdeyev space farm he and Aybee Smith had agreed to differ. Aybee felt that a life without surprises was no fun. Bey agreed, but he pointed out that ninety-nine of any hundred conceivable surprises were unpleasant ones. That was why he tried to analyze all outcomes of a situation rather than just the one he liked best. Aybee agreed—in principle—but he pointed out in turn that complete prediction was impossible in anything but abstract theory; the cussedness of the real world promised that the actual outcome would be unanticipated. Bey agreed, but he suggested that any chance of successful prediction was better than no chance. Aybee nodded. Honor was satisfied, and they moved on to other subjects.

Bey truly believed what he had told Aybee. When he had set out to follow Sylvia Fernald into the depths of the Halo, he had foreseen and analyzed four scenarios. One, the search might reach a dead end, and he would return to the harvester. Two, he might find Sylvia, but she would have discovered nothing useful and would already be at her own point of frustration, so they would both go back. Three, Bey might be captured and detained before he found Sylvia or reached Ransome’s Hole. Fourth, he might be captured after he reached the Kernel Ring.

The idea that he would find Mary rather than Sylvia at that first location was so preposterous that it had not been in his thoughts at all.

So Aybee had been right. Bey allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s irritation, then he inspected the ship that Mary had arrived in.

His reaction to it was not so strong as Aybee’s. He had done little space travel, and although he knew that the ship was radically different in appearance from the ones he was used to, he did not realize how much new science had to be in it. He also had many other things on his mind. With Mary at her sunniest, most affectionate, and most demanding, he had little time to worry about spacecraft. She was in a holiday mood. If she thought for a moment that she was taking Bey toward danger, it did not show in her manner.

She complained only at the end, when the ship neared its destination in the central annulus of the Kernel Ring. “We’re crawling. Why do we always have to go so slow when we’re nearly there?”

“Safety requirement,” replied the hollow voice of the ship’s main computer. “Proceed with caution. Danger zone.”

The computer was treating the region with great respect. They were picking their way through the maze of debris, unshielded kernels, and high-density fragments that littered the central part of the Kernel Ring. Those shards were the relics of a catastrophe four billion years earlier, when a toroidal region of space-time had suffered gravitational collapse and spewed high-mass elements toward the Sun. Life on Earth owed its existence to the event, but that was of no interest to the computer. Like Mary, it too lived in the present. Currently this location housed the freaks of the Solar System: collapsed objects invisible to deep radar and massive enough to destroy a ship, side by side with corotating kernel pairs whose signals played havoc with navigation systems.

Bey had never been here before, but he knew the place’s reputation. The Kernel Ring had been left undeveloped for a good reason. A thousand ships had been lost in the early days, before transit vessels to the Outer System learned to fly high above the ecliptic.

Danger, the small voice in his ear said. Danger. Ninety-nine of any hundred conceivable surprises are unpleasant ones. But the shiver in Bey’s spine was not fear. It was excitement. Ransome’s Hole was visible; or, rather, it was invisible, a dark occulting disk against the continuous starfield. And it was big, big enough to contain anything: armies, weapons, factories, cities, monsters and treasures and mysteries unguessed at. Bey stared at nothing and was stirred by emotions he had not felt for years. He was in the past again, pursuing illegal serpent forms into the black depths of Old City. He was eager to begin, wondering if and how he would survive. The same ineffable force was quickening his pulse, drawing him on and tugging him down into danger.

While he was watching, brief flashes of blue-white fire sparked on the black disk. He recognized them. Short-range drive units. Five small vessels were heading out toward them.

Bey glanced at Mary. She frowned and shook her head. “Not my doing.” But she did not seem too surprised.

Within a couple of minutes the five had been joined by others. Surrounded by an escort of a dozen pinnaces, the ship drifted to a docking and attached to a lock. The hatch swung wide, and Bey followed Mary out.

A dozen armed soldiers were waiting, their weapons raised and ready. Two paces to their rear stood a short, black-clad man with folded arms. His face was thin, with prominent bones, a sharp nose, and a trace of a self-confident smile. Bey stared at those piercing eyes, and after a few seconds the unmoving features before him seemed to shift and flow, reassembling themselves like an optical illusion to a different and familiar pattern.

The Dancing Man—the Negentropic Man, without the clownlike scarlet suit and black filed teeth but unmistakably the same in face, body, and movement. Bey shivered. The face and burning eyes brought frightening memories from the edge of death and madness.

“Full house,” the Negentropic Man said. He stepped forward, still flanked by his guards, and nodded approvingly at Wolf. “I am Ransome. I have been curious to meet you for a long time, Mr. Wolf. When a man or woman refuses to commit suicide or to become insane, no matter what the external pressure, that person is of interest to me. And here you are, in my home.” He turned, and his wave took in the whole habitat. “You see how obliging the universe can be. If I had originally set out to lure you here, I might well have failed. But by allowing you to sail freely with the winds of space, you arrive even before I am ready for you.”

Ransome placed his arm possessively around Mary’s waist. She did not resist, but she gave Bey a strange, uncertain look.

“So you have me. What happens now?” said Bey. He had seen eyes like that three times before in a human head, but none of their owners was living.

“For the moment, nothing.” Ransome was disconcertingly at ease. “I have unfinished business with two of your friends, and then a couple of other things to take care of. You will have to bear with your own company for a little while. Later you and I must talk. I feel sure that we are going to be working together.” Ransome gave Bey a dismissive, self-confident little nod and turned to go. Mary followed without a word.

“Mary!” Bey called after her as the guards moved to separate him from them. He received a brief glance in return from lowered brows, then he was being hustled away. The guards escorted him deep into the habitat’s interior and finally stopped at an oval door. They ushered him through without comment and left at once, but as they went a bulky machine took up guard position at the entrance.

How long was the “little while” that he would be on his own? Ransome’s joking tone had suggested that it might be quite some time. Bey turned in the doorway and stepped close to the Roguard. It stood solidly blocking his path.

“Allow me to pass. That is an order.”

“The order cannot be obeyed.” The voice was soft-toned and polite. “Egress is prohibited. You lack authorization.”

“Who has authorization?”

“You do not have authorization to receive information on authorizations.”

Bey retreated. He had not expected a useful answer, so he was not much disappointed. He went to sit at the table in the little dining area and pondered his situation.

Against the initial odds—and suspiciously easily—he had found his way to Ransome’s Hole. He was in the middle of the enemy stronghold, unarmed and surrounded by guards, held prisoner by a probable megalomaniac with the power to destroy the Solar System; he had to decide what to do next.

What could he do?

After a few minutes he stood up and made a leisurely and thorough survey of the living quarters. They were perfectly adequate for a stay of weeks, months, or even years. The walls, floor, and ceiling were white, seamless, and solid. There was a comfortable-looking bed, a large and well-equipped washroom, a full food-production faculty, a small computer with its own recreational and educational data bases, and even a small exercise unit that included simple form-conditioning. Notably absent was any type of communications equipment, audio or video.

Bey went to the little form-conditioning unit, turned it on, and reviewed its capabilities. It was the simplest and cheapest of the commercially packaged form-change systems. The options it offered were minimal. They included monitoring and feedback for standard muscle tone improvements, routines for minor physical repair such as sprains and bruises, and a couple of low-g/high-g conversions modules; that seemed to be all.

Bey opened the cover and checked the telemetry inputs and internal storage. It was a BEC unit, completely self-contained, and the hardware was standard and quite powerful. That meant the weaknesses were in the software. The programs that came with the unit lacked all the more substantial form-change functions—it did not even permit eye adjustments, which Bey had needed for nearsightedness since he was a teenager.

What was he supposed to do when everything began to look fuzzy? Squint, or make himself eyeglasses? He closed the cover of the unit in disgust. On Earth no one had used anything so primitive for over a hundred years.

Bey went once more to the open door and tried to walk directly through it. The waiting Roguard again blocked him. He put his hand onto the machine’s exterior, estimating its strength and sensitivity. It did not move.

“How long will I remain here?”

“That information is unavailable.” There was a pause, then the machine added, “It will be no longer than two years, since the food supply has been set for such a period.”

“Two years! That’s terrific news.”

“Thank you.”

Bey closed the door in the Roguard’s face, went to the bed, and stretched out on it. He should have known better than to waste his time talking. No machine of that type could recognize sarcasm.

He closed his eyes, but he had no thought of sleeping. There was a job to do, and it was a big one. The first step was a rough time estimate. How long would it need for development and testing, and then how long for the process itself to be completed? If the answers came out too high, he might as well relax and forget the whole idea.

Within ten minutes Bey had a first estimate. Five weeks, total, if he worked day and night. That was far too long. He had to cut it somehow by a factor of at least three. It was time for something rough and ready and less than perfection. The logic flow and accompanying condensed code for an alternative approach began to take shape in his head.

The next estimate came out at two weeks. Still too long, and he had taken all the legitimate speed-up steps. It was time for desperate measures. He had to begin accepting higher physical risks.

Bey lay on the bed for another four hours. At last he sat up, ready to start. As he made his last-minute preparations, it occurred to him that he had one unexpected asset. Ironically, the wild card in his favor was the Negentropic Man himself.

In his lectures to the beginning class at the Office of Form Control, Bey Wolf used an analogy:

“Purposive form-change is a process, a tight interaction of life-support machinery and real-time computer code.” The display on the wall behind him provided a flow diagram, bewildering in its complexity. “There’s a typical sample up on the screen—a straightforward one, as a matter of fact. By the time you get out of here, that will seem simple and familiar. But knowing how to read one of those schematics won’t be enough to protect you. To be useful in this office, you have to see beyond the detail, to grasp a whole form-change picture in one swoop.”

The wall display changed to show an old-fashioned map, bright with colors and dotted with fanciful illustrations. “Each form-change is a journey from a defined starting point to a defined end point. But those journeys all cross a part of the great ocean of form-change. Some areas of that ocean have been explored completely, and all commercial form-change programs navigate within that charted region. But beyond the safe waters lies a wilderness, unmapped and unknown. And dangerous. Never forget that.

“Everyone who tries a radically new form-change experiment is embarking on a trip through the unknown. And when you work in this office, you often have to follow the route of the pioneers, across those perilous waters.

“Now, we can’t provide an infallible pilot across that unknown sea. No one can. But what we can do is teach you what to look for. You’ll learn to recognize—and avoid—the shoals and reefs of form-change, the whirlpools and undertows. You’ll always design your programs to follow the safe, smooth trade routes…”

Sound advice.

But the lessons of the classroom had not been designed for desperate emergencies.

Bey sealed the lid of the tank, stared at the control sequences, and prepared for coming agonies. With this degree of uncertainty, anything might happen. He was using change sequences that he had never employed before—never heard of before. They ignored his own teachings, driving an accelerated program that skirted the reefs, risked the whirlpools, and ran the gauntlet of lee shores. It was a guarantee of discomfort and danger, of disaster. He entered the final command.

The first few minutes were filled with the familiar touch of sensors and catheters, followed by the flicker and swirling rainbow of colors and sounds. Biofeedback was beginning, no different from what it had been a thousand times. Soon it would bypass his eyes and ears to establish direct brain contact. A dozen steps flickered by in a few minutes, the standard preliminary tests as the form-change machine confirmed the parameters of his body.

And then… the change.

He sensed a ripple of command, a cold and alien touch through all his being. Strange discomfort touched him—entered him—became a pain that grew as rapidly and irresistibly as a windblown fire, until it burned in every cell. His body shook in surprised agony.

Wrong, totally wrong. Stop it now, while you can.

He thrust away the panic response that rose from the base of his brain. The pain was to be expected, the result of too-rapid change. The shortcuts were wrong, but that was by his own design—shape change achieved by deformation and muscular contraction, not by slow and careful rebuilding of body structure. It was a perversion of true form-change. He tried to stay calm as his body’s core temperature climbed over twenty degrees. Chemical reactions were running at ten times the normal speed, but still he could understand and follow the processes.

And then pain passed a new threshold, and logic failed.

…he was stretched on a rack, seared by internal flames. His body was melting, twitching and writhing against the control straps. A thick layer of mucus squeezed from his skin. Catheter pumps doubled their rate of chemical transfer.

A new change came, more basic and more deadly.

…heart pounding an irregular rhythm. Heart stopping. A moment of supreme agony, heart lifeless, a stone in his chest. Lungs collapsed. Kidneys and bowels and bladder, frozen in their action. Blood congealing.

The form-change machine had taken over completely. Only his brain was left, directing the purposive form-change.

The fatal form-change. The change should take weeks, not days. He had underestimated the pain, misjudged the danger. No one could endure such change-speed. It would kill him.

Heartless, lungless, he could neither groan nor scream. He had made a choice—and he was paying the price. Even with the machine’s help, body parameters were uncontrollable. A dozen times the monitors in the form-change unit flared their warning signs. Chemical concentrations were wildly far from equilibrium, ion balances at fatal levels, synapses firing spastically out of sequence. He had lost awareness of his surroundings. The semiconscious body in the tank shuddered and writhed, enduring rates of adaptation beyond all rational limits.

Slow down. Slow down. Reverse the process. Every organ, every cell screamed for relief. And relief was possible. With purposive form-change, the will of the subject always played a central part. The urge to retreat became irresistible.

Stop now, stop now. The fear was no longer deep in his brain. It was rampant surges of pain and terror, invading every hiding place of will and resolve.

Stop. Stop now. He fought against the urge to end it, but the torment was too great. He was in terminal agony, hearing the whimper of protest from every cell. The limit of endurance had arrived; had passed. Pain intensified, sharpened, rose to levels that defied belief…

No more. Give in, or die.

And as that thought took firm possession of his mind, the pressure eased.

He sagged in the retaining straps of the tank, unable to move. Every nerve of mind and body was aflame. He sucked the pain deep inside him, grinning in triumph. He could hear his heartbeat.

It was over. No matter what came next, he had won this stage. He had the right final form; he knew it without looking. His tortured body had been cast up, twisted and misshapen, on a strange shore—and it was the destination he had chosen!

Bey Wolf had crossed the form-change ocean.