Proteus Unbound (10 page)

"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."

"We have people back on Earth who feel the same, but the other way around. They hate the idea that the Cloud controls food supplies. They want to crush Cloudland and control the Outer System. But they're all mad, both sides. If we went to war with you or cut off communications, it would be like men and women refusing to have anything to do with each other. We could do it, but our species would die out in a generation."

"Paul said it wouldn't work like that. After the collapse of the Inner System, there could be a new start for everyone. But it would need a group that was all ready for the takeover, with its own strong leader. He showed me a secret piece of recruiting material. I decided that the whole thing was crazy, and the leader—Ransome—was craziest of all. But apparently he's terribly plausible and charismatic. Paul thought Ransome was wonderful. He said that Black Ransome had a secret weapon, something that made sure he would win, even if he didn't have many followers. I could see that people were following Ransome's ideas, even though they were wild."

Sylvia had pushed her own plate away from her, but she was watching intensely as Bey continued eating. He found it disconcerting. There were odd undercurrents flowing beneath the conversation, a sense that he was performing some old, disgusting, and perversely erotic rite, when all he was doing was eating a dreary piece of synthetic protein.

"But then Paul disappeared," Sylvia added at last. "And I feel sure he didn't die, and he wasn't captured. He's somewhere in the Halo. Probably in the Kernel Ring—he's an energy specialist. I think he's working for Ransome. But I never found out what that 'secret weapon' might be."

"Did you actually meet Ransome?"

"Not in person. But I saw his video image when he called with a message for Paul. He's your Dancing Man, I'm quite sure of it."

"If he's the Dancing Man, I'll never forget him. It's burned into my brain, exactly what he looks like and sounds like. Do you know a way to reach him?"

"Not directly. He hides away in the Halo, but he has more and more influence all through the Outer System." Sylvia had taken another sip from her beaker. She was peering at Bey's moving jaws, her gray eyes glistening.

He stopped eating. "I believe what you've told me, Sylvia, but it doesn't explain anything. I can accept the idea of Ransome as the leader of an organized terrorist group. I can even see how influential he might become in the Cloud. But I can't see why he would appear on a crazy message to
me
."

"Maybe he hopes to recruit you, too."

"That's ridiculous. For one thing, you don't recruit people by sending messages that drive them crazy and that they can't understand. For another, he has no idea who I am."

"Cinnabar Baker told me you are very famous—the top form-change theorist in the Inner and Outer Systems."

"That isn't enough to make anyone
famous
. Sylvia, Earth has lots of form-change specialists. I'm just one of them. You have to remember there are five hundred times as many people in the Inner System as there are out here."

"I know. If I had my way, we'd stay like that. Paul and I argued about this, too. He said the Cloud is underpopulated. I feel it's just right. We don't
need
more people. I don't think I could stand to live in the Inner System.

"Ransome probably feels the same way. Out here, he's a big bogeyman who's trying to start a war. He steals ships, he has a secret weapon, he kills people.

"But to some, like Paul Chu, he's a hero. Paul says Ransome started out as a Podder. He tried to do development deals with the Inner and Outer Systems, and he only became a renegade when he was betrayed by both."

"Maybe he's good, and maybe he's bad. He's certainly famous here. But back on Earth he's just a bedtime story that people tell to their children. A lonely, mysterious outlaw, Captain Black Ransome, flying the Halo in a creaking, battered ship, solar sails tattered and decaying. He drifts silent and powers down whenever there's a danger of discovery. He steals power, supplies, and volatiles wherever he can find them. He's the space version of the Flying Dutchman."

"Who is that?"

"An Earth legend. A man who sails Earth's oceans, endlessly seeking redemption. Deep water is his home. He never finds a landfall. He's not quite real, but he's very romantic. That's the way we think of Ransome, a combined myth and outlaw. If you suggested to someone from Earth that Ransome was trying to recruit me—a Sunhugger, a planet man who's only happy at the bottom of twenty miles of atmosphere—they'd say, well, they'd say that you were losing it. Crazy."

"
You're
from Earth. Are you saying I'm crazy?"

Bey sighed. "Not crazy. Maybe a little strange and unpredictable. Come on, Sylvia, let's get moving. I want to see the farm's form-change systems before Aybee and Leo arrive."

"I hope you'll find something. You know, Aybee looked at the failed form-changes on the harvesters. He got nowhere, and he's awful smart."

"He certainly is."

"And he'll see this as a sort of contest, just the two of you. Do you think you can handle him?"

"I'll bet on it." Bey had finished eating. "I learned something a long time ago. My first boss wasn't a good scientist, and he had dozens of political fights with bright young people from the general coordinators' office. They were mostly right, but he won, every time. I asked him how he did it. He pointed out the sign on his office wall." Bey allowed Sylvia to steer him out of the galley. " 'Old age and treachery will defeat youth and skill,' he told me. It's one of the world's great truths. Aybee happens to be on the wrong side of the inequality."

CHAPTER 11

"Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."
—William Shakespeare: Ariel's song,
The Tempest

Behrooz Wolf was four trillion kilometers from home, floating uncomfortably in free-fall in the territory of people who hated him, surrounded by a silence so total that it hurt his ears. In that environment, the familiar technology of form-change was his lifeline.

Sylvia had led him to a chamber containing four change tanks. Two of them were empty. The others contained the bodies of two dead farmers. At Wolfs request, they had been left untouched by their fellows until he arrived at the farm. He and Sylvia went at once to the transparent ports and peered in.

She took one look and turned away. Bey heard the sound of retching. He ignored it. He had seen too many illegal and unsuccessful form-change experiments to allow them to affect his stomach. He had work to do.

He rotated the two bodies using remote-handling equipment and examined their anomalies with the tank's internal sensors. Both had originally been male, and according to the tanks' settings both had been using the same program. The intended end point was a form with thickened epidermis, lowered metabolic rate, and eyes protected by translucent nictitating membranes. The men had been preparing for an extended mission outside, away from the farm's main bubble. According to Sylvia, such missions were absolutely routine, and the form-change program that went with them had been used a thousand times.

Bey would not take her word for it. He intended to go over that program instruction by instruction. But first he wanted to localize the problem area, and the only evidence for that was the end products in the tanks.

He studied the two corpses. Both men had experienced significant mass reduction—not called for by the program. The limbs had atrophied to stumps, and each torso had curled forward to leave the overgrown head close to the swollen abdomen. Death had come when cramped and shrunken lungs would no longer permit breathing.

"Did you ever see forms like that before?" Sylvia asked softly. She had herself under control and was hovering just behind him.

He shook his head but did not speak. It would take a long time to explain that the final form was close to irrelevant. His diagnosis of program malfunctions was based on more subtle pointers: the presence of hypertrophied fingernails and toenails on the flipperlike appendages, the disappearance of eyelids, the milky, pearl-like luster of the membrane-covered eyes, the severe scoliosis of the spinal column. To someone familiar with form-change, they were signposts pointing to certain sections of program code.

Bey began to call program sections for review. His task was in principle very simple. The BEC computers used in purposive form-change converted a human's intended form to a series of biofeedback commands that the brain would employ to direct change at the cellular level. Human and computer, working interactively, remolded the body until the intended form and actual form were identical, and then the process ended. The chemical and physiological changes were continuously monitored, and any malfunction would halt the process and set emergency flags. The process could fail catastrophically in two ways: if the human in the tank did not wish to live, or if there were a major software problem.

Bey could rule out the idea of suicide—it always resulted in death without any physical change except biological aging. That seemed to leave nothing but software failure, but he could see one other complication: the equipment had not been provided by BEC. It was a hardware clone, and the programs that went with it were pirated versions. There could be hardware/software mismatches, something that only BEC guaranteed against. His job with this setup would be ten times as hard.

He began to examine a new section of code. Behind him, he was vaguely aware that Sylvia was leaving the room. That was a relief. She could not help, and she was a potential distraction.

Line by line he followed the programmed interaction, tracking physical parameters (temperature, pulse rate, skin conductivity) and system variables (nutrient rates, ambient gas profile, electrical stimuli). He did not check those parameters against any equipment performance specifications. He did not need to. The region of stability was well mapped, and over the years he had learned the limits of tolerable excursion from standard values. All the programs in use as they were swapped in and out of the computer provided their own audit trail, together with chemical readings and brain activity indexes. Reading and interpreting them was somewhere between an art and a science. It was something he had been doing for two-thirds of his life.

He sat there for six hours in a total trance. If anyone had asked him if he were enjoying himself, he could not have given a truthful answer. He was not happy, he was not sad. All he knew was that there was nothing in life that he would rather be doing. And when he found the first anomalies and began to piece together a picture, he could not have described the thrill. He had been provided with a precious broken ornament shattered into a thousand pieces. He had to recreate it. As he fitted those fragments together, one by one, tentatively and painstakingly, he sensed the skeletal outline of a total pattern. That was exhilarating. But no matter what he did, the picture remained tantalizingly incomplete. And that was unbearably frustrating. Not all of the pieces had been provided. Parts of the code were not in the system at all.

He was roused by the sound of Sylvia Fernald's voice. She had entered the room with Aybee Smith and Leo Manx in tow. Bey turned and addressed his question to all three of them. "These form-change tanks aren't completely self-contained, the way the BEC units would be and should be. Where's the rest of the computation done?"

"That must be in the main computer system for the farm," said Aybee at once. "It's a lot less expensive to do some of the analysis there. BEC and the other manufacturers rip you off bad. They overcharge you ten times for storage in their units. Is there a problem to use distributed computing? We do it a lot."

"It
shouldn't
be a problem. On the other hand . . ." Bey gestured into the port of the form-change tank. Aybee came close and stared in, frowning, for thirty seconds. Leo Manx could not take more than one horrified glance.