Proteus Unbound

by Charles Sheffield

  Aybee had not bothered with such details as operating instructions. Bey sat in darkness for a while, wondering if he had omitted to switch it on. He was ready to remove the helmet, but he did not want to confront Sylvia's anxious face. If the device operated as advertised, he should be concentrating on the clearest memory he had of the Dancing Man. It was easy to bring into mind that tiny figure, coming into view from the left of the screen . . .

  It was like form-change, but with one difference. The compulsion came from outside, not from within his own will. Bey was still conscious, but he had no control over anything. In his mind, the Dancing Man moved across the screen, paused, and moved again. Dance, pause, adjust, reset, dance. Dance, pause, reset, dance. On it went, again and again, each time so little different from the last that Bey could detect no change. Dance, pause, adjust, reset. He tried to count while the act repeated forever, scores of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times. But he could not hold the number in his head. Dance, pause, adjust, reset. An endless, invariant procession of dancing men capering one by one across his field of view, twisting, turning, shuffling backward out of view. They sawed deeper and deeper into his skull, through the protective meningeal sheath, carving into the tender folds of his brain while he was screaming silently for release.

  At last it came. The cycle was broken—with stunning abruptness—and the helmet was removed. Bey shuddered back to consciousness and found himself staring up at the frightened eyes of Sylvia Fernald.

  "I'm sorry." She reached out to touch his forehead, then instantly jerked her hand back. "I felt sure you were in trouble. You lay there for so long, and then you started to groan. I was afraid you might be in pain. Were things going wrong?"

  Bey put up his hands to cover his eyes. The light had become much too bright, and he had a terrible headache. "I'd say they were, but Aybee might not agree. I think he set the tolerances for convergence of his program too tight. I might have been days trying to reconstruct what I saw. Maybe I never would have gotten there. I could have been in that damned loop forever. Anyway, I'm all right now." He reached out and took her left hand in his, holding it tightly enough that her reflexive jerk did not free it. "I appreciate what you did, Sylvia. I could never have broken out of that on my own."

  It was done on impulse, but suddenly it became an experiment. How would she react?

  She allowed the contact for maybe half a second. Then she firmly pulled away and with her right hand reached across to press a switch on the side of the instrument. There was a click, and a brief buzz of sound. She waited a moment, then touched the front panel.

  Bey stared at her. "You know how it works!"

  "I looked at it long enough, while you were lying there. And I knew Aybee would keep it simple—he says he wants his work to be like the Cloudland Navy, designed by a genius to be run by idiots. I know which buttons to press, if that makes me an expert." She paused, her hand still before the flat front panel. "Would you like to see if you got anything? There's a playback feature; we could put it up on the display screen."

  It was Bey's turn for anxiety. He wanted to know, didn't he? Surely he did, after all those months of worry. But he also felt uneasy, the same subliminal discomfort he had experienced when he learned that Mary was sending him a message from beyond the Moon.

  "Well?" Sylvia Fernald was waiting, her long, slender finger poised above a point on the panel.

  The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line . . . Bey sensed himself on the brink of irreversible change, with that waiting finger as its agent. Old Omar the Tentmaker might be warning him. After months of accepting the Dancing Man as a harbinger of madness, perhaps Bey was about to discover darker possibilities. Knowledge might be more dreadful than ignorance.

  He was very tired. His head was aching, worse than ever. His mind had turned to mush. And still he sat, unable to speak, unable to nod, and watched that poised digit.

  "Well?" Sylvia was becoming impatient. And no wonder. What was wrong with him? He had to understand. Yet he found himself drifting off again into a half-trance, turning his thoughts away from the present . . .

  Bey roused himself. Bad news or not, he had to know.

  He sat up, shivered, and nodded. "Run it."

  The screen flickered, went dark, and slowly brightened. There was a splash of sharp images: red men running, dancing, leaping, sitting cross-legged, diving away, all overlaid one on another. Then the multiple exposures faded, and one picture emerged. It was as Bey remembered it, but in terrifying detail. The little man, the sharp-toothed grin, the strutting walk, the backward somersault, the jerky twitch of agile limbs. The voice. It was the same singsong voice, rising at the end of the sentence to frame a not-quite-intelligible question. Bey watched, listened, and was carried away into a dizzying resumption of the past. He reached out to play the sequence again. And again. The fourth time, Sylvia's hand was there first, pushing him away.

  "No more. Not now." She had seen the expression in his eyes. Bey was far gone in his own fugue.

  He sighed. "Aybee did it. He said he would. That was it, you know. Exactly."

  "I know."

  "I have to see it again." His hand was moving to hers, trying to push her aside. He had no strength in his arm.

  "No. Later." She touched his forehead. As she had suspected, it was hot and sweaty. "Bey, you have to sleep. It's been too much."

  "I have to see it again. I have to understand it. You see, Sylvia, even now I don't understand." His voice was puzzled, a lost voice, but even as he spoke his eyes were closing. In less than thirty seconds he was sound asleep.

  He was no threat now. Sylvia watched him for a few minutes. His face was the countenance of the Inner System itself: dark, older, guarded. She reached out and moved him so that he could not see the display. He sighed in his sleep but did not move from his new position.

  She reset the audio input so that she alone would receive it and settled down to play the image sequence over and over. It had meant something personal and disturbing to Bey Wolf, but to her it offered different and more practical mysteries. There had been hints to grasp at even in the first viewing.

  She solved the first problem after four runs through Bey's reconstructed memory sequence. After another look at the controls, she made one adjustment and watched with satisfaction what came onto the screen.

  The second problem was not so easy. It depended on a dubious recollection from more than a year ago. Sylvia finally asked for help from the data base on the space farm, seven hours travel ahead of them. They sent an image that confirmed her hunch. Then she settled down to wait for Bey to waken, watching his dark-complexioned face, wanting him to rest but willing him to wake. She was itching to tell him.

  * * *

  He slept for almost six hours. As he woke, he at once turned and reached to turn on the display. She gripped his hand in both of hers. "No. Bey, you don't need to."

  He stared at her uncomprehendingly, still dazed with sleep.

  "Watch," she said. She made the adjustment to Aybee's equipment and started the playback.

  The Red Man appeared, and still he was speaking. But his singsong words were clear. "You can run, you can run, just as fast as you can, but you'll never get away from the Negentropic Man." And then, just before he danced away, off at the right side of the screen, he spoke again. "Don't you worry, don't you fear, the Negentropic Man is here!"

  Bey sat openmouthed. "What did you do?"

  "Time reversal, and slowed it down." She set out to play it through again. "It was obvious. You'd have seen it, once you'd watched it right through—objectively—a few times. The movements didn't look right, too jerky, and the intonation was wrong for normal speech. Playing it backward, that's all it took to make the message clear." She saw Bey's shake of the head. "What's wrong?"

  "It's not clear. Not to me. I understand what he's saying, and maybe Aybee knows how the trick was worked to send me that si
gnal. But what does it mean?"

  "Negentropic?"

  "That will do for a start. Negentropic. Negative entropy? But that's just a word." Bey stood up. He wanted to pace about, but there was not enough space in the cabin to take more than two steps each way. After a moment he sat down again and slapped at his knee in frustration. "Negentropic Why should somebody say he's the Negentropic Man? Better yet, why would anybody send a message like that to me? I don't see how a person can have negative entropy—I'm not even sure I understand what entropy is. And I certainly have no idea who's behind it all."

  "But I do."

  Sylvia's quiet answer caught Bey off balance. He stared at her. "How can you?"

  "I recognized your Dancing Man. I had a suspicion when I first saw him, but I wasn't sure. While you were asleep I called ahead to tap into the space farm's data base. And I found I was right."

  "You mean he's somebody from the Outer System rather than the Inner System? He doesn't look anything like a Cloudlander."

  "He's not. And he's not a Sunhugger, either." Sylvia was so caught up in her discovery that she forgot to be cautious. She leaned across and gripped Bey's hands excitedly in hers. "Your Dancing Man isn't one of us. He lives in the Halo. He's famous, he's a rebel, and his name is Black Ransome."

  CHAPTER 10

  "Manx is on the way." Sylvia floated into the open bubble that looked out to the stars and secured herself next to Bey. "Flying a high-acceleration probe. He'll be here in twelve hours."

  "He must be keen." Bey thought for a moment. "And cramped. The hi-probes are emergency equipment—the cabin's less than six feet across. He won't have room to turn."

  "He'd better not try—it's a one-person ship, and Aybee says he's coming with him." Sylvia sounded quite cheerful at the thought. If she could survive the forced intimacy of her trip with Bey, she was prepared to let Aybee and Leo Manx suffer through their shorter travel time. "I told him what we found," she went on. "He can't wait to see it for himself."

  They were at the space farm and ready to disembark. Bey, accustomed to the formal—and protective—procedures for entry to Inner System ports, was baffled by the absence of quarantine. They had flown to a point near the central hub of the farm and been docked automatically without passing a checkpoint.

  "Of course we were checked," Sylvia said when Bey expressed his surprise. "The computer checked our ship's ID when we were still hours away."

  "But if the wrong people were inside it—" Bey began. He stopped. Cloudland was so far from the Inner System in awareness of security measures; he could talk to Sylvia forever, but he doubted if she would fully understand him. Was that why a handful of rebels from the Kernel Ring could cause such chaos in the Cloud?

  The failure to understand went both ways. Bey had been briefed on the Sagdeyev space farm, but somehow he had reduced it in his mind to a size that he could comprehend. A farm suggested solidity, intensive activity, compact production. The reality was so insubstantial that he felt they had arrived nowhere.

  The farm was a monomolecular collection layer two billion kilometers across. Its crop had been seeded hundreds of parsecs away and thousands of years earlier, conceived in the fiery heart of supernovas and blown free by the same explosions. The harvest had drifted through space for millennia, borne on the winds of light pressure, until random galactic airs carried the precious atoms to the Cloud. Most of them would drift on until the end of the universe, but a few would encounter and be held by the electrostatic charge of the collection layer. For them, aggregation could finally begin.

  It was slow and selective work. The farm was interested only in the heavy elements, metals and rare earths and noble gases. It winnowed billions of cubic miles of space to find their invisible traces.

  The machines that monitored the farms needed no central processing facility. They could carry hundreds of tons of material with them, accumulating steadily until there was enough to ship to the harvesters. The humans, frailer creatures, needed more. At the center of the collection layer sat the habitation bubble, three hundred meters across. In it dwelt the score of people who had made the farm their home. Two of them were dead.

  "Don't expect them to meet us," Sylvia said as their ship docked at the outer edge of the bubble. "In fact, don't be surprised if we don't meet anyone in all our stay here. The farmers avoid strangers, and that includes me as well as you. They know we're here, and they appreciate our help. They just don't want to see us."

  "Suppose we need to talk with them about the form-change problems?"

  "We'll probably do what they do themselves—use a communications link." Sylvia led the way to the bubble interior, meandering along silent corridors that spiraled down through the concentric shells of the bubble. Everywhere was deserted, without even maintenance equipment. If Sylvia had not told Bey that there were people there, he would have believed the farm to be derelict.

  Sylvia was heading for the kernel at the center of the bubble, but on their way they passed an area that was clearly an automated kitchen. Bey realized that he had not eaten since they left the harvester. During the whole trip to the farm he had been either unconscious or too preoccupied to consider food. He paused.

  "Once we get to the form-change tanks we'll be in for a long session. Can we grab something here?"

  He was starving. He headed for the dispensing equipment without waiting for her answer and placed an order. He did not bother to study the menu. Food in the Cloud was nothing like Earth fare, and he did not much care what he was given. When his dishes appeared, he went across to the seating area and waited for Sylvia.

  She was a long time coming. When she finally arrived, she sat angled away from him. Her tray held a modest amount of food and a large beaker of straw-colored fluid. She stared at the liquid for a long time, then finally took a little sip, grimaced, and swallowed.

  "Is it bad?" Bey lifted up a piece of food and sniffed it suspiciously. It looked like bread and smelled like bread. "Maybe we worked the machine wrong."

  "No." Sylvia turned and gave an apologetic shake of her head. "The food is fine. The drink, too. But I've not eaten a meal with someone else for years. It's not a law or anything, but we don't do it, you know, except with a partner. Go ahead and eat, and please excuse my rudeness. I'll be used to this in a minute."

  Not just hairy and unpopular; his habits were disgusting, too. Bey put down the bread he was holding. "I'm the one who should apologize. I knew Cloudland customs, but Leo Manx and I ate together all the time on the way to the Outer System. I didn't even think of it here."

  "Leo was specially conditioned for the assignment. But really, it will be all right. It will. Watch me." She speared a yellow cube on her fork, squinted down at it in front of her nose, and put it stoically into her mouth. She chewed for a long time before she finally swallowed. "See! I did it."

  After a moment Bey began to eat his own food. "Is it all right if we talk while we eat? Or would that be too much?"

  "Of course. I would prefer it."

  Bey nodded. So would he. The food was pretty terrible, bland and flavorless. Good thing I couldn't order the meal I'd really have enjoyed, he thought to himself. Come to Earth, Sylvia, and let me introduce you to a broiled lobster. "I wanted to ask you about Ransome," he said after a minute of silent chewing.

  "I don't know all that much."

  "But you knew enough to recognize him. Back in the Inner System, most people don't even believe there is a Black Ransome. And Leo Manx told me that he's a mystery figure. If he's such an unknown quantity, I don't see how you could possibly have recognized him."

  "Ah." Sylvia stopped eating and laid down her fork. She had managed only three small mouthfuls. "I wondered when you would get around to that. Did Leo tell you about my background?"

  "A little."

  "Paul Chu?"

  "He did mention that. But only to say that you and Chu used to be partners, and he disappeared on a trip to the Kernel Ring. His ship was attacked, and he was taken prisoner."
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  "That's the official version, and I don't dispute it. But I don't believe it." Sylvia paused. She was not sure she wanted to talk about her personal history with Bey Wolf. She would rather talk than eat, but he might misunderstand her reasons.

  "Paul and I lived together for nearly three years," she went on. "Most people who knew us thought it was permanent—I'm sure Leo thought that. But it wasn't. We argued like hell, all the time. If Paul were around now, I don't think we would be together."

  "I heard from Leo Manx that you were planning to have children."

  "No. That's Leo's wishful thinking. He's such a sympathetic type, he likes to think the best of people. He may have heard Paul and me talk about having children, a long time ago—but even when we were splitting up, we never disagreed in public."

  "Why did you fight?"

  "Not what you might think. Not sex. Politics. I'm sure you suspect I'm not friendly to Earth and the Inner System. I'm not. I believe that you are like parasites—and not even smart ones. You've failed the first test of a successful parasite: moderation. You wiped out parts of your own habitat—the passenger pigeon and the dodo and the whale and the gorilla and the elephant. Thanks to you, half the species on Earth have become extinct in less than a thousand years. Humans may be next."

  "I agree, and I'm as sorry about it as you are." Bey looked at her earnest face. She was angry, but that made her an easier companion. The cold, wary Sylvia was more difficult to deal with. "You sound pretty extreme about it."

  "Extreme! Me? Bey Wolf, you don't understand. I'm a moderate. Everyone in the Cloud feels the way I do about Earth and the Inner System. We learn it when we're little children. But most of us would never do anything to harm the people of the Inner System. It's just a few fanatics who want to go a lot further than general dislike. Paul was one. He hated the Inner System and everything you stand for. One year before he disappeared, he joined an extremist group that talked seriously about starting a war between the Inner and Outer Systems. Paul told me their ideas and asked me to join. I told him they were all crazy."