Proteus Unbound (8 page)

"If I can do anything to help you, naturally I will." The day has been crazy so far, she reflected. Let's see if it can get any stranger.

"Good. You know that you will be working closely with Behrooz Wolf, and traveling with him?"

"That's the plan."

"I want you to seek a relationship with him. A very close relationship."

"You mean—you want me to—Surely you don't want me to—" Turpin chose that moment to give a long, gurgling laugh like water flowing away down a drain, and Sylvia could not finish the sentence.

"I mean a psychological attachment," Baker said calmly. "And, if possible, even a physical attachment. And I'll tell you why. Wolf was one of twenty-seven people we considered contacting to help us. He's the only one left, so we tend to say to ourselves, hey, he was really lucky. Maybe he
was
lucky. But maybe there's more than luck involved. Maybe Wolf knows more than he admits, and maybe there's a good reason why he didn't get wiped out with the rest. And some reason why he agreed to come here, after first refusing. If so, I need to know all that. Pillow talk is better than truth drugs. If you could get close to him, persuade him to confide in you—"

"I can't do it!" Sylvia had not listened to anything past Baker's first sentence. "It's totally out of the question. I'm willing to do most things, but that's too much to ask
anybody
. And anyway," she added, reaching for a second reason, "I'm sure it's mutual. He'd never want to look twice at me."

"Maybe." Baker stopped stroking Turpin's back and fixed cool blue eyes on Sylvia. "But maybe not."

"You've seen what Snugger women are like. Short and brown, all fat and hips and breasts. He must think we're hideous. My God, I'm a foot taller than he is, if I'm an inch. And miles too skinny for Earth taste. And anyway—"

"Anyway," Turpin said suddenly. "Anyway, anyway, in for a penny-way." He took off with an excited flapping of black wings, flew up and around in a lurching spiral, and landed leering on Cinnabar Baker's shoulder.

"You underestimate the effects of prolonged personal interaction," Baker was saying. She smiled. "In other words, talking leads to touching. And beauty is easy. A few hours in a form-change tank—not that I'm suggesting this, you understand—and you could be Wolf's ideal of beauty."

"Never. I'm sorry, but I won't even consider it. That's final." Sylvia stood up. She had to leave as soon as possible, before Cinnabar Baker could try again to talk her into something.

And so much for her own career as a control specialist—her now-blighted career. It had been ruined in the past five minutes.

The last thought was the bitterest of all. When the original summons had come from Cinnabar Baker, Sylvia had been flattered and excited. The quality of her work must have singled her out for special attention. She would be assigned to the visitor from the Inner System because she had unusual competence in form-change and systems work.

Now it was clear that her professional skills had nothing to do with it. Her role was that of convenient female, a lure set out to catch Bey Wolf. And now that she had refused? Cinnabar Baker might say she did not hold it against her, but she would. Sylvia's career was in tatters.

"Please excuse me now." She looked at Baker, found no words, and headed blindly for the door.

Cinnabar Baker watched her leave. As expected, Sylvia Fernald had refused—vehemently. But the idea had been planted. Now Sylvia would be unable to meet and work with Behrooz Wolf, without also evaluating him at some level as a prospective partner. And that was all Baker had hoped to achieve.

"Hormones are everything, Turpin," she said to the bird on her shoulder. "Brains are nice, and looks are nice, and logic's even nicer; but hormones run the show. For everyone, even for me and you. But we never know it. I hope I wasn't too hard on Sylvia. Let's see if she'll change her mind when she knows him better."

The night's work was far from over. Humming softly to herself, Cinnabar Baker bent over the desktop communications unit and reviewed the official statement she had prepared warning the Inner System about their interference in Outer System affairs. It would do. There were a couple of key words that could have been stronger—"demand" instead of "request," and "intolerable" was better than "impermissible"—but they were easily fixed.

She approved the statement for release. Then she entered coded mode and requested a dedicated circuit for new, real-time communication. There was a moment's delay pending approval of heliocentric coordinates outside the usual network. That was cleared, using Baker's own authorization. The scrambling codes were assigned. Finally, on the outermost structures of the harvester, the half-kilometer antenna turned its focused hyperbeam toward a destination deep in the Halo.

CHAPTER 9

"You can run, you can run, just as fast as you can,
You'll never get away from the Negentropic Man."
—crèche song of the Hoyle Harvester

Cloudland ships were easy to recognize: hydrocarbon hulls, bracing struts of carbon fiber, transparent polymer ports.

Necessity and nature had set the rules. The bodies of the Oort Cloud provided a limited construction kit, little but the first eight elements of the periodic table. Metals were in particularly short supply. Rather than dragging them up the gravity gradient from the Inner System, the Cloudlander fabricating machines had learned to improvise. Less than one-tenth of a percent of the ship that would carry Bey Wolf and Sylvia Fernald to the Sagdeyev space farm was metal, and that fraction would be reduced again in the new models.

Wolf was trying to hold a conversation with Sylvia Fernald as they prepared to leave, but it was difficult going. Two days earlier she had been friendly and at ease with him. He had known it, and so had she. They were strangers, but they had hit it off together in the first few minutes, comfortable with each other's work style and attitude. He had been pleased at the prospect of working with Fernald—Sylvia, she had asked him to call her that before the first informal planning meeting ended. But today . . .

Today he had been wringing words out of her, one by one. "This looks as though it will only hold two people. What about Leo Manx, Sylvia? I thought he was planning to come with us."

"He changed his mind." Her voice was expressionless. She was staring at the fine black hairs on his forearms and refusing to look him in the eye.

Was
that
it? His appearance? When he had arrived at the Opik Harvester, Bey had been wearing the long-sleeved, long-legged style of the Inner System. Today he had adopted the scanty uniform of the Cloud-landers, and his physical differences were more apparent. The widespread use of form-change equipment had allowed Earth people to get used to pretty much anything. But the people he had seen on the harvester were all very similar, limited thin or fat variations on a single body type.

She had turned to check fuel and supply status and was bending low over the panel. He moved closer to her, reaching out a muscular arm and stealthily comparing it with her pale, smooth limb. She sensed he was near her and spun around.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing." Bey wondered why he sounded guilty and why her cheeks were flushed. If she stayed that jumpy for the whole trip, it was going to be an unpleasant twenty-four hours. The one accommodation shortage in Cloudland was found in their transit vessels. The McAndrew drive was fine, but the inertial and gravitational forces were balanced only in a small region on the ship's main axis. Bey and Sylvia would share that space, a cylindrical cabin about seven feet across. Standoffishness would be hard. Sylvia herself was close to seven feet tall.

They were making final preparations for departure, running a countdown together with awkward formality, when Aybee hurried in.

"Good. Thought mebbe I'd missed you."

"Four minutes more, you would have." Sylvia did a poor job of hiding her relief. "Are you coming with us?"

"No way." Aybee looked around the little cabin in disgust. "I need
space
, room to shine. You'd have to fold me double to get me in here. It'll be cozy enough with just you and the Wolfman."

The tense atmosphere went right by him. He was swinging a square satchel up from his side and opening the clasps. "Talked to old Leo again, and this time we got the problem right. First time, he asked me, How can you track down an input video signal that nobody else can see? I said, Hey, I'll tell you five ways to do that, but I can't tell you which one's being used without more information."

"Three minutes," Bey said. "Or we'll have to start over with a new countdown."

"Loads of time." Aybee pulled from the satchel a thin rectangular box, a head-covering helmet, and a whole snake's nest of wires and electrodes. "Today, the Leo-man tells me we had the problem wrong. He don't care
how
the signal gets in your head, he just wants to
see
it, know what it is drives you crazy. Different deal, right? Lot easier, because who cares if the signal came from outside or if you made up the whole thing? The
memory
of it's tucked away somewhere in there." He gestured at Bey's head. "So this gadget can pull it out for us."

Bey eyed the device without enthusiasm. It had a random and unfinished look. "You want me to put that thing over my head? How am I supposed to breathe?"

"Same as usual, in an' then out. There's air passages for that. Hey, loosen up. If I wanted to kill you, there's easier ways."

"Two minutes," Sylvia Fernald cut in. "Aybee, we should be in our chairs. You have to leave."

"Lots of time. Wolfman, don't you
want
to know how this works? It's dead good. See, you start thinking about what you saw—little red bogeymen, whatever. Those memories are stored away somewhere inside your head, scene-perfect. You never forget anything you experience, no one does, you just can't get at it, not in detail. So this takes your first-cut memory output, feeds it back to you, and asks if it's a perfect match. If not, it iterates the presentation until there
is
a match. My algorithm guarantees convergence. And all the time we're recording what we get. So at the end of a session, we've caught whatever you saw—even what you
thought
you saw, provided there's detail to it." He glared at Wolf, who was packing the flexible helmet away into its case. "Hey, what kind of ungrateful bozo are you? I put a lot of work in that. Aren't you going to try it?"

"Are you saying it may not work?"

"Sure it'll work, sure as my name's Apollo Belvedere Smith."

"Then I'll use it when we're on the way to the farm." Bey pointed at the countdown indicator. "See that? You can look at the results of your work in real time if you don't get out of here in the next forty seconds. The hatch secures automatically thirty seconds before the drive comes on. You coming with us?"

"No way!" Aybee was jumping for the cabin exit. "Call back and tell us what you get. Leo Manx is itchy, too." He was gone, but as the other two were moving to the bunks he poked his head back in. "Hey, Wolfman. Did you really rough up those three people last night before you ran into me?"

Bey was strapped in, clutching Aybee's satchel to his chest. "Just the opposite. I didn't touch them, but one had a go at my ribs; another trod on my foot. I could show you the bruise."

"Don't bother. Yon see one hairy leg, you've seen 'em all. But take a look at the news. They say you attacked them, without any warning. You're getting out of here just in time."

And so was Aybee. The two passengers heard the outer hatch close no more than two seconds before the siren announced that the drive was being engaged.

* * *

Aybee's last-minute delivery proved a blessing. Bey had attempted conversation with Sylvia again once they were on the way, but she was so obviously upset about something that after a few minutes he took out the flexible helmet, attached the electrodes, and placed the set over his head.

Aybee had not bothered with such details as operating instructions. Bey sat in darkness for a while, wondering if he had omitted to switch it on. He was ready to remove the helmet, but he did not want to confront Sylvia's anxious face. If the device operated as advertised, he should be concentrating on the clearest memory he had of the Dancing Man. It was easy to bring into mind that tiny figure, coming into view from the left of the screen . . .

It was like form-change, but with one difference. The compulsion came from outside, not from within his own will. Bey was still conscious, but he had no control over anything. In his mind, the Dancing Man moved across the screen, paused, and moved again.
Dance, pause, adjust, reset, dance. Dance, pause, reset, dance.
On it went, again and again, each time so little different from the last that Bey could detect no change.
Dance, pause, adjust, reset.
He tried to count while the act repeated forever, scores of times, hundreds of times, thousands of times. But he could not hold the number in his head.
Dance, pause, adjust, reset.
An endless, invariant procession of dancing men capering one by one across his field of view, twisting, turning, shuffling backward out of view. They sawed deeper and deeper into his skull, through the protective meningeal sheath, carving into the tender folds of his brain while he was screaming silently for release.

At last it came. The cycle was broken—with stunning abruptness—and the helmet was removed. Bey shuddered back to consciousness and found himself staring up at the frightened eyes of Sylvia Fernald.

"I'm sorry." She reached out to touch his forehead, then instantly jerked her hand back. "I felt sure you were in trouble. You lay there for so long, and then you started to groan. I was afraid you might be in pain. Were things going wrong?"

Bey put up his hands to cover his eyes. The light had become much too bright, and he had a terrible headache. "I'd say they were, but Aybee might not agree. I think he set the tolerances for convergence of his program too tight. I might have been days trying to reconstruct what I saw. Maybe I never would have gotten there. I could have been in that damned loop forever. Anyway, I'm all right now." He reached out and took her left hand in his, holding it tightly enough that her reflexive jerk did not free it. "I appreciate what you did, Sylvia. I could never have broken out of that on my own."