Proteus Unbound

by Charles Sheffield

  "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

  "Time to worry, time to fear,

  The Negentropic Man is here."

  —crèche song of the Halley Harvester

  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.