Proteus Unbound (15 page)

"Dead man," Turpin repeated in a sepulchral whisper. "Dead man." He walked along the back of the chair and peered at Wolf with bright, beady eyes.

"Very well." Baker nodded, but Bey could see the doubt on her face. Was she continuing his own train of thought? If it was improbable that someone was seeking to end Bey's life or destroy his sanity, that person's continued failure was even more improbable. He had been too lucky. And it opened again the question as to why he was worth killing—or worth saving.

In his dog days at the Office of Form Control, Bey had sometimes thought of the detection of illegal forms as a vast game of chess. In that game he was the master player, one who controlled the movement of people and equipment on a giant board that spanned the space from Mercury to Pluto. It was a game that he had never lost.

Now another game was being played, on a much bigger board and with higher stakes. It was a battle over a territory that ranged from the Sun to the edge of the Cloud, one that stretched a quarter of the way to the stars, a new game that was spreading panic and anger and the threat of total war through the whole system. And this time Bey himself was nothing more than a pawn.

CHAPTER 15

A Kerr-Newman black hole, or
kernel,
charged and rotating, is a highly dynamic object. The rotational contribution to its mass-energy can be extracted (or added to) using the Penrose process, and the kernel's own electric charge can be used to hold it in position, or to control its movement from place to place. Thus, such black holes are "live"; they can provide energy to or remove energy from their surroundings, in a controllable way, and they can be placed at any desired location. They are
power kernels.

A
Schwarzschild
black hole is a kernel that is neither charged nor rotating. It is a kernel in a debased and limiting form, a spherically symmetrical object that has lost all electric charge and rotational energy. It is "dead," in the sense that one cannot extract from it in a controllable way any of its mass-energy. Unless it is "spun up" (i.e., given rotational energy using the Penrose process) it is not useful for power production.

The Schwarzschild black hole is not, however, totally inert Like any other kernel, it gives off particles and radiation from its hidden interior according to the Hawking evaporative process, at a rate depending only on its mass (smaller black holes emit more strongly than larger ones). However, the
pattern
of this emission is predictable only in overall statistical terms. All events and processes occurring within a certain region about the center of any black hole, whether of Schwarzschild or Kerr-Newman type, are unknowable. The interior of the black hole within this "event horizon" constitutes, in some sense, a
separate universe
from ours.
—from the 2011 centennial Festschrift volume,
compiled in celebration of John Archibald
Wheeler's one hundredth birthday

Aybee was in trouble. He was smart enough to know it and smart enough to realize he was unlikely to get out in a hurry.

His decision to remain on the ruined farm had been perfectly reasonable. There was too little space for him on the transit ship. Leo and the others were in the competent hands of the ship's emergency medic system, and Aybee himself was not urgently needed back on the harvesters. His offer to help the farmers had been politely—and predictably—refused. While they were maneuvering the habitation bubble back into contact with the collection layer, Aybee had switched to a long-duration suit and gone hunting.

He had two items he particularly wanted to find among the thousands of bits of debris created in the collision. One was the ship he arrived in. It would almost certainly need repairs, but it might be quickest way home when he was ready to leave.

With the help of the suit's microwave sensors he found it in the first twelve hours. It was floating a couple of thousand kilometers from the collection layer, with a small relative velocity. Aybee tagged it with a tracking beacon and went on to the harder part of his search.

The central computer of the farm had been in the direct line of impact. Not even a trace of it was left. But there must have been backup storage for its records. It was in a region of the bubble that had smashed open by the impact but not totally destroyed. Somewhere the mess around the farm Aybee hoped to find the secondary storage cube. It would be small, no bigger than his fist, and he had no illusions about how hard it would be to find it.

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.