Proteus Unbound

by Charles Sheffield

  With so much debris of all shapes and sizes, the only hope of identification was through the data cube's reflectance spectrum. He selected the spectral signature for a data cube, set up a spatial survey for it, and settled down to wait. While the scan was being performed, he finaly had time to look around.

  And to gasp.

  If he had been less busy, he might have noticed it hours earlier. A dark oblong stretched across a quarter of the sky, hiding the bright starfield. He cut in his low-light sensors and saw it at once as a massive cargo craft, drifting closer with unlit ports and with its drive off. It was the type used to carry food shipments from the Cloud to the Inner System, a low-acceleration ellipsoidal hull over a kilometer long and six hundred meters across. It felt close enough to touch.

  Aybee did not consider for one moment that it might be a rescue vessel. The approaching shape was too dark and lifeless. He floated himself across to a tangle of ruined cabin furniture and set himself in the middle of it.

  The hulk approached within two hundred meters of the battered habitation bubble. A dark port opened, and a file of suited figures emerged. Their suits were bulky, ending in a characteristic flared and massive lower section. That solid base contained low- and high-thrust jets; power supply; food, air, and water recycling systems; medical facilities; exercise units; and communications equipment. At the wearer's command, the flared bottom would open out to a thin-walled twenty-meter sphere, or couple with one or more other suits to form a common living volume.

  Only one group used suits like that. Podders!

  But these were Podders many billions of kilometers away from their usual haunts in the Halo. They were entering the dimly lit habitation bubble, passing to the interior through the gaping hole near the south pole. The bubble was on emergency power, but it was still far brighter than the dark cargo ship.

  What was it doing here? It was inconceivable to Aybee that anything valuable was left on the farm, even including the machines and metals on the collection layer. And the Podders were showing no interest in those.

  While he watched, another port in the cargo vessel began to dilate. It was huge, an opening nearly forty meters across in the end of the ship nearest the bubble. He stared at it, waiting for something to emerge.

  It was completely free of the ship before he knew it was there, and then he did not see it. All he saw was a circling array of electromagnets. At their center sat a moving sphere of blackness, drifting slowly under their control toward the habitation bubble.

  It was a kernel, totally shielded by electromagnetic baffles. At the center of that dark sphere sat a tiny, billion-ton Kerr-Newman black hole, its fierce sleet of radiation and particles balked and turned back on itself by the triple shields. The kernel had been halted. It hovered, stationary with respect to the bubble, and waited. The bubble's own main port was opening. Finally a second sphere of aching black emerged from the gaping port, its position controlled by surrounding electromagnets.

  Aybee watched in amazement as the two drifting spheres changed places. The shielded kernel from the farm finally vanished into the cargo hull, and after a few minutes the new kernel was jockeyed into place by the bubble's port. It was nudged on down into the interior.

  Aybee was bursting with curiosity. He nestled down into the tangle of space junk surrounding him and inched the whole assembly gently forward until he could see into the bubble's open port. He peered out through the mess of shattered furniture.

  The kernel was replacing the one that had been removed. Avbee had noted the status of the farm's power kernel when he and Leo Manx had arrived. It had abundant rotational energy and was nowhere near depletion. There was no sense in replacing it—unless the Podders needed power and were swapping the kernel from the bubble for a dead one from their cargo ship.

  It was a simple matter to test that idea. One look at the new kernel's optical scalars would tell Aybee what was happening, and that was a one-minute job if carried out next to its outer shield.

  The port was closing, and one by one the Podders were leaving. As the final suited figure disappeared silently into the cargo hulk, Aybee headed for the bubble.

  That was the exact point where Bey Wolf would have put his hand on Aybee's shoulder, told him to wait a moment, and asked a basic question. Where were the farmers? But Bey was billions of kilometers away. Aybee left his shelter of ramshackle cabin furniture and headed into the bubble along the gaping exit wound of the earlier impact.

  The farmers and their servant machines had accomplished wonders. Already the bubble's interior had been cleared of broken fittings. Makeshift bulkheads had stabilized the atmosphere of the interior and set up a new system of corridors that provided access to the habitable part of the bubble.

  Aybee drifted down toward the bubble's center, where he found that the new kernel had been established in place of the original one. It had plenty of available energy—according to Aybee's recollection, almost exactly as much as the old one. The mystery was greater than ever. Why swap two identical kernels for each other?

  He headed up a narrow stairway that would take him away from the kernel and toward the bubble's outer surface. At that moment he learned that the Podders had not left permanently. Three of them waited in a tight group by an exit duct, while a fourth was leading a group of three farmers out of the bubble at gunpoint.

  Aybee ducked back into the shelter of the stairway and reviewed his options. He could wait, hoping that the Podders were finally done and were all leaving. Or he could take more positive action, heading out through the entrance wound created by the impact of the ice fragment.

  The disadvantages of both ideas were easy to catalog. His hiding place was completely exposed to anyone who wandered by, and the way down to the kernel was a dead end. If the Podders wanted to be sure they had all the farmers, they would not overlook the surface of the kernel shields. On the other hand, he had no idea what might be waiting in the other direction. The Podders had first entered the bubble there, and some of them could be there again.

  Bey Wolf would have waited. He was a great believer in putting off decisions, which he dignified as "keeping open all his options."

  Aybee could not do that; he had too nervous a nature. After at most a minute he was hugging the side of the tunnel and creeping away toward the surface of the bubble. He was careful to look at the way ahead and turn every few seconds to make sure that he was safely out of sight of the four Podders behind him. He was doing that at the exact moment when a fifth Podder, also looking the other way, emerged from a narrow gap in the wall and ran right into him.

  * * *

  The suited figure did not bother to speak. He waved the gun he was holding at Aybee and gestured him forward.

  Aybee could take a hint. He nodded and moved off along the tunnel toward the outer surface. The radio silence he had been observing earlier seemed pointless. Aybee scanned for the frequency the Podders were using and turned his suit to transmission.

  "What are you going to do with me?"

  The figure behind him grunted with surprise. Aybee realized it was a woman. "I thought you people didn't talk to anybody," she said. "None of your buddies said a word."

  She thinks I'm a farmer, thought Aybee. But if I play that part too well, she won't tell me anything.

  He grunted. "We don't talk much. But this is an emergency."

  "Don't talk much and don't listen much, either." The Podder sounded disgusted. "I'm not going through all that spiel again. Do as you're told, and don't give us any trouble, and you'll be well treated. If you start cutting up, you'll find you're six to a cell."

  The ultimate threat for a farmer. Aybee did not like the sound of it too much himself—he still had memories of the cramped trip to the Sagdeyev space farm with Leo Manx.

  "Where are you taking me?"

  "Are you deaf? Wait a minute." She moved around in front of Aybee and peered in through his faceplate. "I haven't seen you before. We didn't get you the first time through. Where were you?
"

  "Outside."

  "And you came back in?" The Podder gestured him forward again. "Well, now I've seen everything. You were safe out in space, and you came back in. How dumb can you get?"

  Aybee had three good reasons not to answer. First, he assumed it was a rhetorical question. Second, he had to agree in this case with the Podder's implied comment on his brains. He had been safe outside, where all he needed to do was wait for the Podder's ship to go away. Then he could have spent the next month inside the bubble, if that was what he felt like doing.

  And third, he did not need to fish for more information about the Podders' immediate plans for him. He could guess them. They were close to the great hulk of the cargo ship, and a hatch was gaping open. With the woman close behind, Aybee drifted into the gloomy interior. He wondered how long it would be before anyone on the harvesters even noticed he was missing.

  CHAPTER 16

  "She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe,

  To shrink mine arm up like a withered shrub,

  To make an envious mountain on my back

  Where sits deformity to mock my body;

  To shape my limbs of an unequal size, To disproportion me in every part . . ."

  —William Shakespeare; Henry VI, Part 3

  Every emergence was different.

  Bey came out of this one dry-mouthed, wobble-legged, and furious. He knew the form-change process better than anyone. He could tell when parameters had been changed from their original settings, even when he was the subject, and this time he knew he had been through a lot more than simple tissue restoration.

  The door of the tank sprang open, and he looked out. Sylvia Fernald was sitting by the control board, staring at him.

  He roared with rage, a horrible squeal of unfamiliar vocal cords. "What the hell have you been doing to me?" The ionic balance of his body was still adjusting, and the chemical rush of anger was strong enough to propel him forward out of the tank in one movement. "Don't try to lie. You've been meddling and you know it."

  "You call it meddling when somebody tries to help you?" She stood her ground. "I've just saved you. You'd have been cut to bits as soon as people in the harvester knew you were here. No one from Earth is safe now."

  "I can look after myself." Bey tried to gesture in anger, but his fist would not close. His body felt terrible, a bad size, a distorted shape. "A form-change like that—you could have killed me."

  "I studied the change very carefully. It's a standard type of form for the Outer System."

  "I didn't need a change."

  "Wrong/ You need a change. More than a change—you need a damned keeper. I've had it with you, and I don't care what Baker wants." Sylvia stood up. "You're an idiot, Bey Wolf, you know that? You come out here, an Earther, and you think you're God's gift to the Cloud." She gripped him hard by the arm and pulled him along the room. He stumbled after her, still too weak to put up more than token resistance. She halted by the door at the end of the room. "Take a look there. What do you see?"

  Bey found himself in front of a full-length mirror. He was facing a nightmare, naked and thin as a skeleton, tall and stooped as a praying mantis. All the muscles had gone from his arms and legs, leaving ugly tendons and sticks of bone that ended in taloned hands and feet. His rib cage jutted like a dry wooden frame under tautly stretched parchment. The hair was gone from his head and body, and his browless eyes glared demented out of hollow sockets. His hairless genitals looked vulnerable and ridiculous. He stood frozen, his skull-head mouth gaping open.

  "What do you see?" She had gone on shouting at him, but he had not even heard her. "What do you see?"

  "You did this to me!" He shook his arm loose. "You're insane. You've turned me into a monster. I've got to get back in the tank, make this right again."

  "No!" She stood in front of him, blocking his movement, and he realized how tall he had become. They were suddenly eye to eye. "It's time you learned something, Behrooz Wolf—if you're still able to learn anything at all. I don't know what you see, but I'll tell you what I see, and it's the way everyone thinks in the Outer System."

  She stepped back and swept him from head to toe with a searing glare. As his anger had calmed, hers had grown. "I see a passable-looking man for the first time since I met you. A man I would be pleased to know, a man whose company I might even enjoy. Not a damned monkey. Not a squat, hairy toad. Not a hirsute, jowly, Sun-sucking midget that no normal woman would be seen dead with. And yes, I did it to you. And no, I'm not sorry I did it. I sat by that damned tank for a hundred straight hours to make sure nothing was going wrong with the change I keyed in. And yes, I knew what I was doing. And no, I don't expect you to appreciate it. You're too graceless, too selfish, too self-obsessed, too wrapped up in your self-superior idea that anything from the Inner System has to be good and right." She was screaming at him. "So damn you, Bey Wolf. If you want to get back into that tank, go ahead. I won't stop you. And I won't interfere when the people on the harvester grab you and spill your guts."

  Bey's body chemistry change was complete, and his condition was stabilizing. He was beginning to feel almost normal, but he also knew that the mood swings might be far from over. He stared fascinated at his image in the mirror and shook his head. "I look like a form-change failure. Those legs—you actually programmed for those legs?"

  "They're great legs."

  "They're revolting. Look at them! Too short, too white, too bowed." He turned to face her. "You're serious, aren't you? You think I should thank you for this."

  "You should go down on your knees and kiss my hand. My God, I was doing you a favor." She had stopped shouting at him. "You're supposed to have brains. Use them. You asked Cinnabar Baker to announce that you had been killed on the space farm so you could explore the problem without people knowing who you were. How well would that have held up when people saw you? You had to change. I suppose you thought that you'd blend right in with the rest of us, with your ridiculous Earth body."

  "All right. But why didn't you warn me?"

  "Would you have agreed to this body if I had?"

  "Never." Now that he was not angry, Bey was feeling a bit guilty. She had sat by the tank for days, looking after him, and he could see how pale and tired she was. "But do you blame me for feeling that way? Would you have let me change you so you look like an Earthwoman?"

  "Don't be disgusting."

  "Well, then. But I'll admit it, you're right about one thing, and I want to apologize for shouting at you. It's an odd thought, but in this stick-insect body I will be less noticeable here." Bey took another look at his reflection and grabbed for a robe by the door. It was suitably long and full—when he had it on he could see nothing but his hands and head. "That's better. I'd rather not see myself. But I still wish in some ways I could get back in the tank. I don't seem to be done."

  "Are you feeling sick?"

  "Not exactly. But I'm certainly feeling a bit Plantagenetish."

  "A bit what?"

  "You know. Or if you don't, you should." Bey held the robe tight around him, stood up as straight as he was able, and declaimed: " 'Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time, into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable, that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.' Richard the Third. One of my all-time heroes."

  She stared at him. Finally she laughed. "My God, Leo was right. You are insane. You're worse than Aybee. Totally crazy."

  Bey considered her statement. He was a bit light-headed, definitely that, but it was not his strongest feeling. "More like totally starving. Whatever you did to me, it left me hollow. Can I get some food?"

  "We can try. And you'll have your big test. We'll see if you can pass—as a Cloudlander. Here, wait a minute." Bey was all ready to head out of the door. "You'll never pass in that outfit."

  "You all seem to dress the same. There must be a uniform near."

  "Wrong again." Sylvia gestured at her own gray suit. "I'm still just the way we came off the s
hip, but I wouldn't dream of mixing with other people here like this—or in the old uniform. You seem to think all the harvesters are the same. They're not alike, any two of them, in either their layout or their people. This harvester is super fashion-conscious. Nobody here would be seen dead in those yellow suits we wore on the Opik Harvester. If we want to be inconspicuous, we have to follow local ways. Come with me. It's right next door."

  The room she led him to had rack after rack of clothing, all gaudy, varied, and extreme. Bey hesitated, then shrugged. "I've no idea. You know how to make me blend in. Pick something."

  Within two minutes she had selected a pair of skintight peacock-blue suits with matching footwear and tall egg-shaped hats. They seemed designed to make Bey look even taller and thinner and were, in his opinion, the most ridiculous outfits he had ever seen.

  He stared in disbelief at his reflection. "We can't go out in public like this. Everyone in the harvester will laugh at us."

  "They won't even notice. Not in this harvester."

  "But the people we saw as we came in from the ship didn't look like this."

  "They were maintenance and operations crews. In uniform. You wouldn't know them if you saw them off duty."

  Bey started for the door, then paused for a last look in the mirror. "Are you sure?"

  "Trust me. You look quite handsome." Sylvia tucked her arm in his and led the way. "Remember, until you get the hang of that body in low g, you let me set the pace. Pretend we're a couple. Don't talk much at first, and if you don't know how to move, just let me drag you along."

  They set off along a mysterious zigzag of corridors and stairways. Bey knew he was lost within one minute; in ten minutes, he knew why the Cloudlanders had picked their preferred forms. He was shaped just right for a low-g environment. He could pivot his top-heavy body around its center of mass and use his long arms to control the direction of his movement, unhindered by excess muscle or fat. Even the air somehow smelled better, but whether that was his new physiology or his imagination he could not tell.