Proteus Unbound

by Charles Sheffield

  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 thro
ugh 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

  "Mary, Mary, quite contrary

  How does your garden grow?

  With spinor fields, and kernel shields,

  And pretty men all in a row."

  —crèche song of the Opik Harvester

  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.