Proteus Unbound

Chapter 1

They found Behrooz Wolf on the lowest levels of Old City, in a filthy room whose better days were far in the past.

In the doorway, Leo Manx paused. He looked at the sweating, moldy walls and cobwebbed ceiling, gagged at the rank smell, and retreated a step. The floor of the room was covered with old wrappers and scraps of food. The man behind pushed on through. He was grinning for the first time since they had met. “There’s a breath of Old Earth for you. Still sure you want him?”

“I have to have him, Colonel. Orders from the top.” Manx tried to breathe shallowly as he moved forward. He knew Hamming was goading him, as everyone had done since he had arrived on Earth and explained what he wanted. Manx ignored Hamming; the mission was too important to let small issues get in the way.

The furnishings were minimal: a single bed, a food tap, a sanitary unit, and one padded chair. As Manx moved farther inside, the stink became stronger; it was definitely coming from the man slumped in that chair. Bald, sunken-eyed, and filthy, he stared straight ahead at the life-size holograph of a smiling blond woman that covered most of one spotted and water-stained wall. The lower part of the holograph displayed a verse of poetry in letters three inches high.

Ignoring both the man and the ’graph, Colonel Hamming crouched to inspect a little metal box on the floor next to the chair. Plaited braids of multicolored wires ran from the box to the electrodes on the seated man’s scalp. Hamming peered at the settings, his nose just a couple of inches away from the control knobs.

“You’re in luck. It’s so-so, a medium setting.”

Manx stared at the seated man’s lined, grimy neck. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning he’s been emptying his bladder and his bowels when he needs to, and maybe he ate something now and again, so he shouldn’t need surgery or emergency care. But he won’t have bothered with much else.”

“So I see.” Leo Manx examined the man with more disgust than curiosity, knowing that in a few more minutes he might have to touch that greasy, mottled skin. “I thought Dream Machines were illegal.”

“Yeah. So’s cheating on taxes. All right, Doc, tell me when you’re ready. When I turn this off, he may get nasty. Violent. Losing all his nice dream reinforcement. I’ve got a shot ready.”

“Don’t you want to check that we have the right man before we begin? I mean, I’ve seen pictures of Behrooz Wolf, and this—he’s—well…”

The security man was grinning again. “Not quite up to your expectations? Don’t forget Wolf is seventy-three years old. You’ve probably only seen pictures when he’s on a conditioning program. We’ll check the chromosome ID if you like, but I’ll vouch for him without that. It’s not the first time, you know. He did this three other times, before he was kicked out as head of the Office of Form Control. He always comes here, and he always looks pretty much like this. Never quite so far gone before. When he still had his official position, we came and got him earlier. Can’t let a government bureaucrat die on the job.”

“You mean this time, if I hadn’t asked to find him…”

“You, or someone else.” Hamming shrugged. “I don’t know how you Cloudlanders do it,” he said, contempt in his voice, “but here on Earth a free citizen can die any damn way he chooses. Get ready, now—I’m pulling the plug. We’ll go cold turkey.”

Manx hovered impotently near as the security officer flipped four switches in quick succession, then ripped taped electrodes from the bald scalp. There was no sound from the biofeedback unit, but the man in the chair shivered, gasped, and suddenly sat upright. He stared wildly around him.

“Wolf. Behrooz Wolf,” Manx said urgently. “I must talk—”

“Grab his other arm,” Hamming ordered. “He’s going to pop.”

The man was already on his feet, glaring about with bloodshot eyes. Before Leo Manx could act, Behrooz Wolf had spun around to pull free and was feebly reaching for him with scrawny, taloned hands. The security officer was ready. He fired the injection instantly into Wolf’s neck and watched calmly as the scarecrow figure froze in its tracks. Hamming waved a hand in front of Wolf’s face and nodded as the eyes moved to follow it.

“Good enough. He’s still conscious. But he has no volition; he’ll do what we tell him.” Hamming was already turning to pack away the cables in the compact biofeedback kit. “Let’s get him aloft and dump him into his own form-control unit before he starts to get lively again.”

Manx could not take his eyes away from the frozen tormented face. Behrooz Wolf was still glaring at the hologram, not interested in anything else. “Do you think that the form-control unit will work? He has to want it to. He seems to want to die.”

“We’ll have to wait and see. Hell, you can’t make somebody want to live. You’ll know in a few hours. Carry the feedback unit, would you?” Hamming took Wolf’s arm and began to walk him toward the door. “Oops. Mustn’t forget her. It’s the first thing he’ll want if he makes it through the form-control operation.” He detoured to the wall and pointed to the verse. “That’s the way Wolf was feeling. And here—” He poked the projection of the woman in her bare navel. “—is the reason for it.”

Manx read the verse below the picture.

“Gloomy thoughts. What does it mean?”

“Damned if I know. Wolf was always a nut for old-fashioned things—poetry, plays, history, useless crap like that. He must have thought the poem applied to him.”

“That’s terrible. He must have loved her very much to break down like this when he lost her.”

“Yeah.” Hamming had switched off the projection unit and put the cube into his pocket. He shrugged. “It’s odd. I knew her, and she wasn’t much of a looker. Good in bed, I guess.”

“How long ago did she die?”

“Die? You mean Mary there?” Hamming had taken hold of Wolf’s arm again and was leading him firmly out of the room. He gave a coarse, loud laugh. “Who mentioned dying? Mary Walton is alive and well. Didn’t you know? She dumped him! Buggered off to Cloudland with one of your lot, some guy she met on a lunar cruise. Me, I’d have said good riddance to her, but he took it different. Come on, let’s get Wolf up to his tank. I’ve had enough stink for today.”

Chapter 2

They would not go away. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to taste, to touch, or to feel. Nothing. And yet there were the voices, whispering, prompting, nudging, cajoling, commanding.

That way. It was a generalized murmur. That’s where you are going.

“No. I don’t want to change.” He struggled, unable to move or speak as he tried to identify the source of the sounds. The argument had been going on inside him forever, and he was losing. The voices were invading him micrometer by micrometer.

This way. This way. Change. They were ignoring his wish to rest, pulling him, pushing him, twisting him, turning him inside out. He could feel them in every cell, growing stronger and more confident. Change. A trillion voices merged. Blood rushed through clogged arteries, organic detergents washing the dry, inelastic skin, the weak, flabby muscles, and the old, tired sinews. Change. Liver and spleen and kidneys and testicles, ion balances on a roller coaster, local temperatures anomalously high or low—too high, too low. He was dying… Change. The delicate balance of endocrine glands: testes and thyroid and adrenals and pancreas and pituitary. All disturbed, homeostasis lost, desperately seeking a new equilibrium. Change. Change. CHANGE.

He cried out, a silent scream. “Leave me alone.” The intruders ran wild in every cell. He was helpless, fainting, fading before the assault of a chemical army.

CHANGE. All over his body: fluctuations in thermodynamic potentials, in kinetic reaction rates, hormonal levels; energy rushing to dormant follicles, sloughing old tissues, redefining organic functions, thrusting along capillaries. A ferment of cellular renewal boiled within the changing skin. CHANGE. Solvents along sluggish veins and arteries, the sluice of plaquey deposits, the whirl of fats and cholesterol… CHANGE. Liver, spleen, kidneys, prostate, heart, lungs, brain… CHANGE. Fires along nerves, synapses sparking erratically, spasms of motor control, floods of neurotransmitters, flickering lightnings of pain, crashing thunderstorms of sensation, signals flying from reticular network to cerebral cortex to hypothalamus to dorsal ganglia. A clash of arms at the blood-brain barrier… CHANGE. SYNTHESIZE. ACCOMMODATE.

And then, suddenly, all voices merged to one voice and faded, weakening, withdrawing, drifting down in volume. He could hear it clearly. He listened to the murmur of that dying voice and at last recognized it. Knew it. Knew it exactly. It was the mechanical echo of his own soul whispering final commands through the computer link: his physical profile, amplified a billionfold, transformed in the biofeedback equipment to a set of chemical and physiological instructions, and fed back as final commands.

The tide was ebbing. The changes shivered to a halt. In that moment, senses returned. He heard the surge of external pumps and felt the wash of amniotic fluids as they drained from his naked body. The tank tilted, and the front cracked open, exposing his skin to cold air. There was a sting of withdrawn catheters at groin and nape of neck and a slackening of retaining straps.

He felt a growing pain in his chest and a terrible need for air. As the pertussive reflex took over, he coughed violently, expelling gelatinous fluid from his lungs and taking in a first ecstatic, agonizing breath. Its cold burn inside him was simultaneous with the sudden full opening of the tank. Harsh white light hit his unready retinas.

He shivered, threw up his forearm to protect his eyes, and sagged back in the padded seat. For five minutes he moved only to lean forward and cough up residual sputum. Finally he summoned his strength, stood up, and stepped out of the tank. He staggered forward two steps, caught his balance, and stood swaying. As soon as he was sure of his own stability he reached for the towel that hung ready by the tank, wrapped it around his waist, and turned back to the form-change tank itself. Another moment to gather his will, then he gripped the door and swung it firmly closed.

It was a final, ritual step, his first choice after the unspoken decision to live. He was rejecting the idea of tranquilizing drugs to ease the rigors of transition. Instead he walked across the room to a full-length mirror and stared hard at his own reflection.

The glass showed a nearly naked man about thirty years old, dark-haired and dark-eyed, of medium height and build. The new skin on his body still bore a babyish sheen, though it was pale and wrinkled from long immersion. Soon it would smooth and mature to deep ivory. The face that peered back at him was thin-nosed and thin-mouthed, with a cynical downward turn to the red lips and thoughtful, cautious eyes.

He examined himself critically, working his jaw, lifting an eyelid with a forefinger to inspect the clear, healthy white around the brown iris, peering inside his mouth at his teeth and tongue, and finally rubbing his fingers along his renewed hairline. He flexed his shoulders, inflated his chest to the full, moved his neck in an experimental roll back and forth, and sighed.

“And here we are again. But why bother?” He spoke very softly to his reflection. “ ‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty. In form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god. The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.’ ”

“Very good, Mr. Wolf,” said a silky and precise voice from the communications device in the corner of the room. “The Bard wrote it, and perhaps he believed it. But do you?”

Bey Wolf turned slowly and cautiously. The unit was showing no visual signal. He stepped across and turned on its video and recorder. “You did not let me finish that quotation. It goes on, ‘Man delights me not, no, nor woman neither.’ And let me point out that this is my private apartment. Who are you, and how the devil did you get my personal comcode?”

“I brought you there.” The voice was unembarrassed. “I helped to carry you up out of Old City—for that, you may thank me or curse me. I set you up in that form-change tank. And I stayed, long enough to turn on your communications unit and note its access code.” The screen flickered, and a man’s image appeared. “I do not want to intrude on your privacy, and you will note that I was not receiving visual signals until you just activated that channel. I am sure you are still feeling fragile, but I must talk with you as soon as you are recovered. My name is Leo Manx. I am a member of the Outer System Federation.”

“I can tell that much by looking at you. What do you want?”

“That cannot be discussed over public channels. If I could return to your apartment, or if you would agree to visit me at the embassy—my time is yours. I came all the way from the Outer Cloud, specifically to seek you. Perhaps you could join me for dinner—if you feel able to eat, so soon after so full a treatment.”

Behrooz Wolf stared at the other man. Leo Manx had the piebald look of the fourth-generation Cloudlander, brown freckles on a chalk-white hairless skin. His build was thin and angular, with overlong arms and bowed, skinny legs. “I can eat,” he said at last. “Provided it’s Earth food—none of your rotten Cloud synthetics.”

“Very well,” Manx replied without hesitation, but there was a sudden half-humorous twist of the mouth and the flicker of an eyelid. Like any Cloudlander, Manx would be disgusted by the thought of food made from anything beyond single-celled organisms. Bey Wolf had insisted on an Earth meal more to gauge Manx’s seriousness of purpose than anything else. But now, on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, he decided that he rather liked Leo Manx. Nobody could be all bad who recognized Shakespeare.

“Why not?” he said. “I’ll come and see you. I’ve nothing better to do, and I haven’t been outside for a long time.”

“Then I await your convenience.” Manx nodded and disappeared from the screen.

Wolf consulted his internal clock. Until that moment he had had no idea what time it was—or what day or month it was. Midafternoon. If he left in the next half hour he could be at the embassy before the evening shower. He skimmed his accumulated mail and messages but found nothing worth worrying about. Better face it: since he had been fired by Form Control, he had become a nonentity. He dressed quickly and dropped ten floors to street level. There he worked his way over to the fastest slideway, threading his way easily through the crowds and staring around him as he went.

A BEC catalog must have been issued since he had fled underground in Old City. The new forms were already appearing on the streets: squarer shoulders, more prominent genitals, and deeper-set eyes for the men; a fuller-bosomed, long-waisted look in the women. As usual, BEC had chosen the styles with great care. They were different enough to be noticeable but close enough to the previous year’s fashions for the form-change programs to be just within the average person’s price range.

As head of the Office of Form Control—former head, he reminded himself—Bey Wolf considered himself above the whims of fashion. He wore his natural form, with minor remedial changes. That made him a rarity. More and more, the people on the slideways all looked the same as one another. It was—soothing? No. Boring. After a few minutes he keyed in his implant to receive the communication channels.

He had a lot of news to catch up on. With his retreat to Old City and his subsequent spell in the form-change tank, he had missed a minor political battle over optimal population levels, the BEC release of a spectacular new avian form, a revised species preservation act that applied to all of Earth, impeachment of the head of the United Space Federation on charges of corruption, and a heated new exchange of insults between the governments of the Inner System and the Outer System concerning energy rights in the Kernel Ring.

He had also, though this was not news, missed seventy-five days of a perfect summer. But why count time when he no longer had a job? The purposive feedback process could do no more than respond to his will so there was no doubt that he wanted to live, deep inside. But for what?

“How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable…” And at that very moment, before the familiar words could complete themselves in his mind, the madness began again. The slideways and the scene from the news broadcasts darkened as another image was overlaid on them.

The Dancing Man. He was back. Dressed in a scarlet, skintight suit, he came capering across Bey’s field of vision. He danced backward with jerky, doll-like movements of his arms and legs. There was curious music in the background, atonal yet tonal, and the man was singing in a tuneful, alien manner that sounded like Chinese. In the middle of the overlain field of view, he paused and grinned out directly at Bey. His teeth were black and filed to points, and his face was as red as his suit. He spoke again, seeming to ask a question, then waved, turned, and danced backward out of the field of view.

Bey shivered and put his hand to his head. He had heard Hamming’s words underneath Old City, but the colonel had been wrong. Mary’s loss had been desperately painful; he thought of her every day, and he would carry her holograph with him always. But something else had driven him over the edge to seek the solace of the Dream Machine: conviction of his own growing insanity.

Since the Dancing Man had first appeared, he had checked every possible source of the signal. No one else could see it—even when he or she was viewing the same channel as Bey. Every test for outside signal had proved negative. He had mimicked the Dancing Man’s speech, all that he could remember of it, and had been told by specialists in linguistics and semiotics that it corresponded to no known language. Worst of all, when Wolf went into recording mode, the signal vanished. It was never there to be played back. Physicians and psychiatrists were unanimous: the signal was generated within Bey’s own head. He was suffering “perceptual disturbance” of a “severe and progressive form, intractable and with a strong negative prognosis.”

In other words, he was going crazy. And no one could do a damned thing about it. And it was getting worse. At first no more than a scarlet spot on the scene’s horizon, the Dancing Man was getting steadily closer.

And the ultimate irony: as long as he and Mary had lived together, he had been concerned with her sanity, her mental stability! He had been the impervious rock against which the tides of insanity would break in vain.

Wolf saw that he had reached his destination, the deep-delved embassy of the Outer System. He fled for the express elevators—“…then will I headlong run into the Earth; Earth gape. Oh, no, it will not harbor me…”—and plunged down, down, down, rejecting his own frantic thoughts and seeking the cool caverns of underground sanctuary.

Chapter 3

The average surface temperature of real estate in the Outer System was minus two hundred and fourteen degrees Celsius: fifty-nine degrees above absolute zero, where oxygen was a liquid and nitrogen a solid. The mean surface gravity of that same real estate was one four-hundredth of a g. Mean solar radiation was 1.2 microwatts per square meter, weaker than starlight, a billionth as intense as the Sun’s energy received by the Earth.

Faced with those facts, the designers of the Earth Embassy for the Outer System had a choice: Should they locate the embassy off-Earth and face extensive transportation costs to and from the surface for all embassy interactions? Or should they accept an Earth environment uncomfortable and highly unnatural to the ambassador and staff? Since the designers were unlikely to visit Earth themselves, they naturally took the cheaper option. The embassy that Bey Wolf was visiting sat five hundred feet underground, where temperature, noise, and radiation could all be controlled.

Gravity was another matter. He dropped with stomach-wrenching suddenness through the upper levels. As he did so his surroundings became darker, quieter, and colder. Every surface was soundproofed. At four hundred feet the hush became so unnatural and disturbing that Bey found himself listening hard to nothing. He decided he did not like it. Humans made noise; humans clattered and banged and yelled. Total silence was inhuman.

Leo Manx was waiting for him in a room so cold that Bey could see his own breath in the air. The Cloudlander remained upright long enough to shake Bey’s hand and gesture him to a seat, then sank with a sigh of relief into the depths of a water chair that folded itself around his thin body. The head that was left sticking out smiled apologetically. “I used a form-change program to adapt me to Earth gravity before I left the Outer System.” His shrug emerged as a ripple of the chair’s black outer plastic. “I don’t think it was quite right.”

A piece of your lousy software, by the sound of it, Bey thought. But he merely nodded and waited.

Manx sat silent for a few moments and then said abruptly, “My visit to Earth, you know, is for a very specific reason. To see you and to ask for your help—as the head of the Office of Form Control and Earth’s leading expert on form-change theory and practice.”

“You’re a bit late. I’m not with that office anymore.”

“I know that is the case. I heard that you had… resigned your position.”

“No need to be diplomatic. I was fired.”

The pale head bobbed. “In truth, I knew that also. You may be surprised to learn that from our point of view, your dismissal offers advantages.”

“None from my point of view.”

“It is my task to convince you otherwise.” Leo Manx stretched upward, his thin neck and hairless head craning like a turtle from the black supporting oval of the chair. “To do so, I must request your silence about what I am to tell you.”

“Suppose I refuse to go along with that?” Wolf saw the other man’s discomfort. “Oh, hell, get on with it. I’ve spent my whole career not talking about things. I can do it for a while longer.”

“Thank you. You will not regret it.” Manx subsided in the chair. “Mr. Wolf, there has arisen in the Outer System a problem so serious that all knowledge of it is given only on a need-to-know basis. In a few words, there has been a widespread breakdown in the performance of form-change equipment, to the point where the process is being undertaken only in cases of emergency, such as my own visit to Earth.”

“Widespread? Not just a machine or two?”

“Hundreds of machines, with rates of malfunction that have been growing rapidly. A year ago, we could point to two or three cases of gross error in results. Today, we have case histories of thousands.”

“Then it has to be a general software problem. You don’t want me for that. There are others who know more and can give you better guidance.”

Manx’s eyes, startlingly round and hollow in the absence of eyebrows, looked away. “If you are perhaps thinking of Robert Capman…”

“I would, but he’s on a long-term stellar mission. My suggestion is BEC themselves. Why not call them in? They’ll be as keen to sort this out as you are.” Bey tried for an innocent expression. It was as good a way as any of testing the honesty of the Cloudlander.

Manx looked pained. “We already approached the Biological Equipment Corporation. They sent a team of experts, who reviewed everything we could show them and declared that they could find no evidence of any problem. Unfortunately, we are not convinced that they conducted as thorough a review as one might wish. There has been a long-term disagreement with BEC as to the proper amount of royalties the Outer System is accruing for the use of BEC’s form-change hardware and software systems—”

“They say you stole their ideas, ignored their patents, and infringed their copyrights.”

“Well, that is a little crudely put—but, yes, you have the gist of their argument.” Manx smiled ruefully. “I see that our own security is less than we are inclined to believe.”

“In a case like that it is. BEC will tell anyone on Earth who’ll listen that the Outer System is robbing them blind.”

“Which is certainly a—a—”

“Lie?”

“Exaggeration. A misrepresentation.”

“You don’t need to persuade me. I don’t like monopolies, either, and BEC has one for the Inner System. But you said they did a review of ‘everything we could show them.’ Like to be more explicit?”

There was a raising of nonexistent eyebrows. “You are a very perceptive man. There were a number of units that we could not and did not show to the BEC team.”

“Pirated designs?”

“The Outer System prefers to think of them as independent developments. However, I believe it would have made little difference. The anomalous behavior occurs with rather greater frequency in BEC’s own equipment. Yet they insist that everything is working perfectly.”

“Did your own engineers watch the BEC tests?”

“Yes. As BEC said, no anomalies were observed. As soon as they left, new peculiar forms were again produced.” Manx began to push away the enfolding arms of the chair. “If you would be interested to see some of those forms, I have images here with me.”

“No. You’d be wasting your time.”

“These forms are extremely strange.”

“Dr. Manx, odd forms don’t do anything for me. I’ve seen so many of those over the years, I doubt if you could surprise me.” Bey stood up. “I accept that you have a nasty problem, but it’s not one that would justify dragging me partway to Alpha Centauri. I lost my job, but I still like Earth. And I doubt if I could do anything to help you.”

“How do you know that without personal observation?”

“I’ve been around form control for a long time. As I said at the beginning, you have a software problem. The fact that BEC’s team couldn’t find it—or chose not to—makes no difference. Call ’em again, ask for Maria Sun. If anyone can solve it for you, she can.”

Manx stood up, too. “Mr. Wolf, it is my opinion that you underestimate both yourself and the difficulty of this problem. But I cannot change your mind about that, here on Earth. Rather, allow me to introduce a new variable into the equation. While you were on the way here I asked for and read a copy of your dossier from the Office of Form Control. It is something that I ought to have done earlier. I learned more of your personal circumstances.”

“You found out I’m going crazy.”

“You are sick. If you know anything of the Outer System, you may know that we are advanced in the treatment of mental illness. That happens to be my own field. If you would agree to travel back with me—merely to observe the phenomena for yourself, for no more than a few days—I will devote my best efforts to your personal problem.”

“Sorry. It’s still negative.” Bey headed for the door, but Leo Manx made a great effort and was there first.

“One more point, Mr. Wolf. And please excuse this importuning. You lived with Mary Walton for seven years. Is it possible that your reluctance to visit the Outer System arises from a fear that you may be obliged to interact with her there?”

Bey eased past the other man, trying not to touch him. “You’re a conscientious and persistent man, Dr. Manx. I don’t resent that—I respect you for it. I can’t answer your question. Maybe I’m afraid I would meet Mary again. But in any case, I still refuse. Tell your superiors that I am honored to be considered.”

“Yes, of course. But if by chance you should change your mind,” Manx called after Bey as he headed for the elevator, “I will be here on Earth for two more days! Call me, at any hour.”

But Wolf was already out of earshot. The final question about Mary had gotten to him more than it should have. Was he over her or wasn’t he? Would he turn down a potentially fascinating problem simply because he might be forced to see Mary with the man she had chosen over him?

He was oblivious to the high-acceleration ride to the surface, oblivious to the evening crowds that pushed at him on the slideways. Manx’s offer of dinner had never been realized, but in any case Bey had lost his appetite. He skipped dangerously across from high-speed to low-speed track, exited the slideway, and hurried up to his apartment He grabbed a projection cube at random from the file—they were all of Mary, it made little difference—and sat down to view it.

Predictably, it was one he hated to watch but also one he had viewed again and again. Mary in an amateur musical, dressed in a long gown, bonnet, and parasol, singing in the sweet, artificial little voice of a young girl. “Let him go, let him tarry, let him sink or let him swim. He doesn’t care for me, and I don’t care for him. He can go and find another, that I hope he will enjoy, for I’m going to marry a far nicer boy.”

Bey felt his heart wither inside him as he watched. Nothing of her had faded; it hurt as much as ever. He was reaching to cut the cube when Mary Walton’s demure figure rippled and darkened. A new scene was overlaid on the old and familiar one.

The Dancing Man, twisting and tumbling across the image, red-clad limbs akimbo. He paused in the middle, nodded at Bey, and made a singsong questioning little speech that could almost be understood. Then he was away, skating backward into the distance, head bobbing and hands waving cheerfully.

The Dancing Man—even here! In the middle of a sequence that Bey had recorded personally four years earlier. How could anyone possibly change that recording? Bey set the projection again to the beginning and forced himself to watch it through again. This time there was no Dancing Man. It was Mary all the way, to that intolerable final line when she set her parasol over her shoulder and waved good-bye.

Bey watched to the bitter end. Then he went across to the communications unit and called Leo Manx.

Chapter 4

“There is one other thing you ought to decide before we embark.” Leo Manx was inspecting both his traveling companion and Bey Wolf’s luggage.

“Namely?”

“Do you want to spend time in a form-change tank on the way out to the Cloud? If so, we must make sure that the programs are available.”

“You mean, switch to something more like your own form, for physical comfort?” Wolf shook his head. “I like this form, and I know it tolerates low gravity and cold pretty well.”

“That was not the reason for my suggestion.” Manx took Bey Wolf’s little traveling case and floated it one-handed across the cabin to secure it in the cargo hold. “My concern is with the response you may receive from Outer System citizens. It will be apparent to them that you are from Earth, or at least from the Inner System. The two federations are not at war—”

“Yet.”

“But we are certainly locked in an economic struggle over rights to the Kernel Ring. There have been skirmishes in the Halo. If you remain in your present form, I foresee some unpleasantness and rudeness when we arrive. You will hear yourself called a Snugger—a Sunhugger Imperialist; there will undoubtedly be sly remarks about your hairy skin.”

“Same as you’ve been getting when people here call you a bare-faced Cloudlander?” The other man’s reaction was no more than a moment’s twitch of the lip, but Bey was used to reading subtle signals. “Dr. Manx, if you got by on Earth without any major form-change, I can do the same in the Outer System. I’m used to criticism and sneaky comments.”

“It was quite different in my case. I knew I would be here only for a little while, until you accepted or rejected our plea.” Manx caught Wolf’s expression and realized he had made a mistake. “Of course, you have agreed to stay with us only long enough for a preliminary evaluation of the problem. I realize that. But I was hoping, if you find the situation intriguing enough, that you might prolong your stay. Not only for our sakes; for yours. If one has never visited the Outer System, there are many things to see and do.”

“No sales pitch. If you’re wrong, it’s not worth it. If you’re right, I can use a program when we get there.”

“That is true.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

Manx gestured out the port. Bey suddenly realized that they were not waiting. Earth had disappeared, and they were already passing the Moon. The McAndrew inertialess drive had been switched on while they were talking, and they were accelerating away from the Sun at more than a hundred g’s.

“Twelve days to crossover point, then another twelve to the Opik Harvester,” Manx said. “It is not the nearest harvester to Sol, but it has a large number of form-change units on it. I have discussed our destination with my superiors, and we agree that it is a good place to begin.”

“How far out?”

“Twenty-six thousand a.u.—about four trillion kilometers.”

Manx called a stylized three-dimensional figure onto the display screen. It was a representation of Sol-space geometry. Even with a logarithmic radial scale, the graphic occupied one full wall of the cabin. The Inner System, comprising everything out to Persephone, was crowded within a Sun-centered sphere of ten billion kilometers radius. The Halo reached out two hundred times as far, a diffuse torus within which the Kernel Ring sat as a well-defined narrow annulus. The Oort Cloud, home for the Outer System, was a vast sprawling spherical region, approaching the Halo on its inner limit but seven times as large as its outer edge, stretching a third of the way to the nearest star.

Manx pointed to a cluster of color-coded habitats in the Outer System and to the arrowed flight path that extended to them from the Earth-Moon environment. “The Opik Harvester is fairly near the inner edge of the Cloud, but a safe distance from the Kernel Ring. No danger of trouble from there. As you can see from our trajectory, we’ll be flying rather close to the Ring itself in about nine days.” He gave Bey a sideways glance. “I thought you might be personally interested in taking a look at that.”

Bey was learning. Leo Manx’s omissions—rarely accidental—were more informative than his speeches. Manx was too self-conscious or diplomatic to say some things himself. He preferred to leave logical loopholes, then answer questions.

“I have never been near the Kernel Ring,” Bey said. “I assume you know that.”

“Your background summary says as much.”

“Then it should also show that I know little about Kerr-Newman black holes and even less about how we use the kernels themselves as energy sources.”

“That is indeed the case.” The reply was polite and noncommittal. Bey would have to dig deeper.

“So what makes you think I have any personal interest at all in looking at the Kernel Ring? Do you think you see a connection with my—other problems?” Damn it, the habit was catching. He was getting as indirect as Manx. “I mean, with my hallucinations.”

Instead of answering at once, Manx sat for a few moments, thinking. “That depends on the cause of those hallucinations,” he said at last. “I hope that we will explore that subject together on this journey, when we have plenty of time. But answer me one question, if you will. When did your problems begin? Was it before or after Mary Walton left you.”

“Long after. Four months after.”

“In that case, I do not believe that the Kernel Ring is connected with your hallucinations.”

It was like pulling teeth. “But the Ring is connected with Mary?”

“Possibly. Probably.” Manx was getting there; Bey could see the decision reflected in the expression on the other man’s face. “Mr. Wolf, I deduce that in addition to knowing little about the Kernel Ring, you also are unfamiliar with customs in the Outer System. According to Colonel Hamming, whom I did not find to be a particularly sensitive person—”

“He’s an asshole.”

“A felicitous description. He told me Mary Walton left to ‘run off to Cloudland with one of you guys,’ and the inference was that he was referring to a person from the Outer System, one that she met on a lunar cruise. Is that your own understanding of the situation?”

“It is.”

“Did you ever meet this person?”

“Not a person. A man. No, I didn’t meet him. If I had, I’d probably have tried to cut him in two.”

“So you are unfamiliar with his appearance? Now, if you will permit me a more personal question. You knew Mary Walton better than anyone else. Was she a woman impressed by appearances? How a person looked? Whether he was handsome?”

“I guess so.” More stalling! Bey cursed his own reluctance to give straight answers. “Yes, she was. Too impressed. Looks mattered to Mary.”

“Very well. You know what men from the Outer System look like. I suspect that I am a fairly typical example, and although I am quite happy with my own appearance—” Manx looked admiringly at his skinny body and bowed legs. “—I know that I am far from the standards of beauty currently popular on Earth.”

“That’s irrelevant. Handsomeness is easy; all it takes is a little while in a form-change tank.”

“Very true. If person wishes to make such a change. I certainly did not, and you had a similar reaction when it came to modifying your own appearance to match an Outer System form. However, there is a more important point here. Although the man Mary Walton ran off with could have picked an appearance that appealed to her, he would have had to do so in advance of meeting with her on that lunar cruise.”

“I see where you’re heading. You are questioning that he was from the Outer System?”

“More than that. Mr. Wolf, our citizens do not indulge in lunar cruises. To us, it would have as much attraction as a tour of Old City would offer the average Earth person.”

“But some people might do it. Just to be different.”

“They might.” Manx looked away, refusing to meet Bey’s eyes again. “But they did not. I have rather more information than I have so far revealed to you. Before I left our Earth Embassy, I checked all our visitors to Earth-Moon space for the previous four years. There was no one from the Outer System who went on a lunar cruise. Whoever Mary Walton met, he was not from our federation.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“With no more than a speculation. I have of course no direct evidence—”

“Talk, man! I can stand it.”

“I do not think you will find your Mary in the Cloud, even if you plan to look for her there. The most likely person to have offered a false identification and to be interested in Earth-Moon space as a possible source of energy needs would be a renegade.”

“You mean a rebel? An inhabitant of the Kernel Ring?”

“Precisely. The inhabitants of the Ring practice a curious coexistence. Rebel outposts are scattered here and there through its whole volume, side by side with peaceful settlers, energy prospectors, and free-space Podder colonies. The Ring admits every form of oddity, every human shape attainable by the form-change equipment. You should look there.”

“For someone who works in the high-gravity environment around shielded kernels. Someone whose unmodified appearance is more like mine than yours.”

“You follow my thoughts admirably.” Manx moved the cursor on the display to delineate the annulus of the Kernel Ring. “Here. To conclude, it is my opinion that Mary Walton is not to be found anywhere in the Outer System. She is here. In the Halo, almost certainly somewhere in the Kernel Ring itself.”

“Shacked up with a damned outlaw.”

“I’m afraid so. A dangerous man, Mr. Wolf, who recognizes the sovereignty of neither my federation nor your own. A man who would not hesitate to kill either of us. Mr. Wolf! Do you hear me?”

Bey was no longer listening. As Manx moved the cursor across the display, a familiar figure had appeared on top of it. He was sitting cross-legged, riding the little blue arrow and waving jauntily out at the two men. His song sounded a little different but was still just beyond comprehension.

The scarlet suit was brighter than ever. The expression on his grinning face was more than usually smug. Forget that hope, it said. It takes a lot more than a move to the Outer System to get rid of the Dancing Man.

Chapter 5

At the end of the seventh day Manx began to push for a different approach. He had switched off his recorder and was glaring impatiently at Bey Wolf.

“I suppose you imagine that you are cooperating with me? You are not. I ask you for a full, detailed account of your relationship with Mary Walton, something I must have if I am to help you end your hallucinations. What do I get?” He tapped the recorder. “Monosyllables. Two- or three-sentence descriptions of complex interactions. Evasion. Obfuscation. Equivocation. Deliberately or not, you are prevaricating.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t like to talk about emotional matters. Particularly those emotional matters.”

“Of course you don’t. No one does, unless they have quite different mental problems. But if there’s to be any progress you have to give me information. Detail. As much of it as you can. I perceive that you will not do so with simple question-and-answer techniques.”

“So we’re stuck?” Bey sounded more relieved than upset.

“No, we are not. With your permission, I want to put you into an enhanced recall status.”

“That’s illegal.”

“Not in the Outer System. We have no statutes against self-incrimination.”

“Barbaric.”

“Perhaps we have less need of them. Stop trying to change the subject by inciting an argument. Will you allow me to induce an enhanced recall state, or will you not?”

Wolf looked at him warily. “For how long?”

“If I could tell you that, I might find it unnecessary. A couple of days, maybe more.”

“Then I’ll miss the transit of the Kernel Ring you want me to see.” It was a weak argument, and Bey knew it. Leo Manx was slow but persistent, like the turtle he sometimes resembled, and he would not give up easily.

“That crossing will occur tomorrow. Is it agreed, then? After we complete the transit, we will move to enhanced recall technique. If the idea still makes you uncomfortable, we can begin with direct reporting, then proceed to stimulated and dream sequences.”

Bey nodded. At best it felt like a stay of execution.

The transit of the Kernel Ring was an anticlimax. Even with the highest magnification the ship’s sensors could provide, the Halo was no more than a scattering of misty dots of light. The unshielded kernels themselves gave off large amounts of energy, gigawatts for even the most massive and least active, but they radiated at wavelengths too short for the human eye to see. The shielded kernels were, by design, invisible. It was difficult to imagine people living in that emptiness, still less that it was the home of ruthless pirates, savages who might come boiling up from the darkness to take over cargo or passenger ships as they made their out-of-ecliptic transit from the Inner System to Cloudland. Least of all could Bey imagine Mary, his lively, cosmopolitan Mary, enduring that waste of nothingness.

“You see with an Earthman’s distorting perspective,” Manx said in answer to Bey’s skeptical reaction. “To you, the Halo is nearly empty. To me, or to anyone from the Outer System, it is packed with life and energy.”

“You use an odd definition of ‘packed.’ ”

“Do the calculation for yourself. There are millions or billions of people living in the Halo—we have no idea how many, since there is no central government there. Compare it with the Outer System. We are about fifty million people, and we know that we are grossly underpopulated. We will be for centuries. Naturally, we crowd together, most of us close to the harvesters, but were it not for the help of our self-reproducing machines, we could not exist. If we spread out evenly, each person in the Outer System would have a region sixty times as big as the whole of your Inner System to move around in. By comparison, the Halo is packed. It teems with life. Much too crowded for us.”

Current accommodation allotment on Earth: one hundred cubic meters per person. Bey thought of that and wondered why the Outer and Inner Systems were arguing over rights to the Kernel Ring. From what Manx was saying, there was no way that the average Cloudlander would ever be comfortable with the “cramped” life-style in the Ring and no way that the average Earth dweller would be able to accept so much empty, frightening space.

“The argument is over energy, but surely there are more than enough kernels for everyone?”

“I wonder about that myself,” Manx said. “And there is an element of presumption that leaves me uncomfortable. Both the Inner System and the Outer System governments assume that they could, if they wished, displace the present rulers of the Kernel Ring. I am not sure that is the case. Have you heard of a leader called Ransome, and of Ransome’s Hole?”

“Black Ransome? According to Earth’s newscasts, he’s just fiction.”

“If they believe that, they have never left Earth. I know of a half dozen prospectors working the Halo who have lost cargo to Black Ransome. Some have lost ships, also. It is a reasonable speculation that some have lost their lives, too, and are in no position to report anything. At any rate, true or not, the Outer System seethes with rumors about Ransome. Ships found empty and gutted, cargoes taken, crew and passengers ejected to empty space.”

“If he’s such a problem, why don’t you send a force in to take care of him?”

Manx waved at the displays. “Find him, and maybe we could do it. His base is as much a mystery as he is. Ransome’s Hole—or maybe it’s really Ransome’s Hold; everything about him is hearsay—is supposed to be somewhere in the Kernel Ring. But where? You’re talking a volume of space thousands of times as big as the whole Inner System. And if we found him, I’m not sure any force that we sent in would win. Ransome’s Hole is supposed to have its own defense system, able to handle anything we could throw at it. And he might have allies. The whole Halo is a melting pot, the place that anyone can flee to if they find civilization intolerable.”

“Or we find them intolerable.” Bey bent to the high-resolution sensors with new interest. Was one of those spots of light, disappearing fast behind the speeding ship, some huge, well-armed base of rebel operations? And what else was down there, hidden in the darkness? Perhaps some lost colony of ancient doctrines, vanished from the rest of the system. “Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.” Who had said that? One of the Victorians.

“Black Ransome,” Bey said, looking up. “Where did he come from, the Inner or the Outer System?”

“We don’t even know that much. He must have plenty of energy, because he never takes the kernels from the ships. But where does he get his food supplies, or his other equipment? We just don’t have answers to those questions.”

The Kernel Ring was fading behind them. Leo Manx turned off the displays. Bey saw that he was holding the polished black cylinder of an enhancement recall unit and smiling in what looked like anticipation.

“And we will find nothing about Ransome here, Mr. Wolf. We are past the region where the ship is in danger of attack. So we can now proceed to possibly more productive work. When you are ready…”

I met her at an open-air historical event, seven years and four months ago, when there was an exhibit of Old Earth animals. It was the first time they showed results of breeding back successfully beyond the Cretaceous, and the big extinct forms had attracted a lot of interest.

I say I met her, but that is at first an overstatement. I was in an overview booth, with half an eye open for illegal forms—not much chance of that; I hadn’t seen one for years—when I saw her, though she was too far away for me to speak to her. But my eye picked her out at once.

No, it’s not that I was attracted to Mary Walton at that point, not at all. I was puzzled by her. I had been in the Office of Form Control for more than half my life, and one thing that I had learned to do, whether I wanted to or not, was to monitor for anomalies. It was an unconscious act with me, and it’s more than half the trick to spotting an illegal form.

In Mary’s case, I knew there was something peculiar, though it certainly wasn’t something illegal.

It was this. As you can see, I choose to hold my own appearance to about age thirty, but that’s unusual on Earth. Most people like to look between twenty and twenty-five, with twenty-two the most popular age. Now, sometimes you will get older people who don’t like that idea. They want to separate themselves from the real youngsters for some activities, and they spend at least part of their time in a form corresponding to age forty or fifty—even more, though people over sixty are very uncommon, unless they have other problems and drop the use of form-change treatments altogether. You saw the results of that when you picked me up in Old City.

Mary Walton was wearing the form of a woman between forty-five and fifty and dressed in the clothing style of a woman of that age, but I could tell from other indicators—eye movement, laughter, body posture—that she was actually a lot younger than she looked. It intrigued me. Why would anyone deliberately choose a form older than her true age?

While I was watching her, we had a minor problem with staffing, and I had to look elsewhere. But as soon as I could, I went to the place where I had last seen her, next to the big enclosure with the gorgosaurus in it. She was still there—trying to climb into the enclosure. If she had succeeded… The animal was carnivorous, four meters tall, two tons in weight.

I arrived just in time to drag her clear. And to arrest her. And then to introduce myself.

She told me she was an actress; she was doing it for publicity. I suppose I knew, right from the first moment, that she was crazy. Insane, hopelessly unaware of reality.

It made no difference. Others will say that Mary was not conventionally attractive, that she deliberately chose to look exotic and a little peculiar. When she was living a part—she didn’t act parts, she lived them—she might form-change to any age and do anything she felt fit the character. Some of them were strange, sometimes disgusting.

As I say, to me it made no difference. From the first moment she looked down at me from the fence, when I had hold of her leg and I was pulling her back by her long gray skirt, I was lost. I was spoiling her publicity plan, but she didn’t look annoyed. She grinned down at me, with her head on one side and that ridiculous round gray hat with a feather in the side of it, and the blond curly hair pushing out underneath it—she was naturally fair, though she preferred parts that made her a brunette. And then she let herself go limp, and she came rolling off the fence in that old-fashioned gray cloth dress and knocked me flat to the ground.

I was smitten even before I got up, and I knew it, but I wouldn’t have done one thing about it. I have never been able to let people know how I feel. I have rationalized that, to the point where it does not usually bother me. Often, I insist it is a virtue. But not this time. I wanted Mary, but Mary was an unattainable prospect.

It wasn’t just my inability to speak. I knew, even if she didn’t, that I was three times her age. That alone should have made the whole thing impossible. Not for Mary. I didn’t realize it at the time, but things like that made no difference at all to her. She was so much in her own world, and that world was so far from reality, that age wasn’t even a variable. When she did find out how old I was, she just said, “Well, that means I’ll have at most fifty years of you, instead of a hundred.”

How do you reply to something like that?

If you are a wise man, you don’t even try. You grab the chance—it only comes once—and make the most of it.

That first day, I began to arrest her. She talked me out of it in about two minutes and took me home to her apartment. I never left.

I had no idea at the time how sick in the head she was. That emerged little by little, as we came closer. Maybe it was a lot more obvious to others than to me. I always had the blinders on—I still do. When an old friend of mine, Park Green, came to visit from the Moon, we went to see one of Mary’s performances. I asked him what he thought of it, and he shook his head and said she was good but he could see the skull beneath the skin. I hated him for that, and I never told Mary; but he was right.

That might have been the thing that limited her as an actress. She could play high drama, or artificial, mannered comedy, or broad farce—she was a wonderful comedienne, but she didn’t much care for those parts. What she could not portray were simple people, because there was nothing simple inside her that she could build on. It limited her. She was always busy, always working, but in the end I know that she was disappointed with her reputation.

You know, I honestly believe that I was good for Mary. In our years together she never had to go for official treatment. There’d be times when she went nonlinear, and when that happened I’d drop everything I was doing and stay with her constantly. And she’d come out of it. But those times became more and more frequent, and more and more severe.

When she suddenly told me, without a day’s notice, that she was going off for a lunar cruise, I was delighted. Mary was always at her best when she had a new environment to learn, something fresh to challenge her. She was becoming more and more upset by crowds—an odd omen for an actress, but I didn’t read it. The Moon would offer plenty of peace and a change of pace.

She went. She called once—to say that she was not coming back; she was heading for the Outer System. And that was all.

I just about came apart.

Four months later the Dancing Man appeared for the first time. And I came apart completely.

Bey lay back in his chair and looked up at Leo Manx. “Well?”

“Good.” Manx was examining his records. “Very good.”

“You have enough?”

“Goodness, no.” Manx was incredulous. “This is a start—the first iteration. Now we can perhaps begin to learn something about you and your relationship with Mary. Give me another couple of days. Then it may be time to worry about your little dancing friend.”

Chapter 6

One quarter of the way to the edge of the Oort Cloud; that did not sound too far. Call it twenty-six thousand astronomical units and it became more substantial. Call it four trillion kilometers; it was then an inconceivable number, but no more than a number.

To appreciate the distance from Earth to the Opik Harvester, it was necessary to have direct sensory inputs. Bey Wolf looked back the way they had come and searched for the Sun.

There it was. But it was the Sun diminished, Sol with no discernible disk, Sol dwindled to the bright, brittle point of Venus on a frosty Earth night.

“The element of fire is quite put out. The sun is lost, and earth, and no man’s wit, can well direct him where to look for it.” Bey, still staring back the way they had come, took no comfort from the old words and longed for the cozy familiarity of the Inner System. At his side, Leo Manx was looking the other way, scanning the starfield ahead.

“Eh-hey! There we are! Ten more minutes, we’ll be home.” The Cloudlander had already shed his loose travel suit in favor of a pale yellow one-piece. His hairless arms and legs stuck out from it like the limbs of a gigantic and excited cricket. “There, Mr. Wolf. See it now? The harvester!”

He spoke as of a first sighting, but he had already pointed out the Opik Harvester to Bey an hour before, as a dark spot occulting a tiny patch of stars. But as the clumsy bulk drifted closer, glimmering with feeble surface lights, his excitement was increasing.

Bey followed the pointing finger. For eyes conditioned by the constraints of gravity, the shape of the harvester was difficult to comprehend. A dozen spheres clustered loosely to form a central grouping, but their coupling was done by the invisible bonds of electromagnetic fields, and the configuration constantly changed. Long, curving arms cantilevered away from the central nexus, reaching out to bridge a gulf that had no end. The final silver girders and antennae of those arms grew gradually thinner and less substantial, fading so slowly into void that their terminal points could not be seen.

According to Leo Manx, the big middle sphere was roughly twenty miles across. Bey could not verify that. It was impossible to gain any sense of scale from the harvester’s main features. The whole structure had been built by self-replicating machines of widely differing sizes and had been designed to be run by them. Humans had been late arrivals, occupying the harvesters only when the final step of life-support systems had been added.

The ship’s McAndrew drive had been switched off two hours earlier, ending the signal silence introduced by the ionized plasma that propelled it. The communications unit had at once begun to scroll and chatter, urging Wolf and Manx to join a meeting that was already in progress.

Manx, happy to be back in “decent” gravity, watched Wolf’s clumsy movements for a few seconds as they disembarked, then grabbed him by the arm. “Hold tight. You can practice later.” He towed a weightless Bey along a succession of identical corridors, all unoccupied and showing no signs of human presence.

“Almost ninety thousand people,” Manx said in reply to Wolf’s question. “The harvester is a major population center of the Outer System. About ten million service machines, I imagine, though no one keeps count. They make whatever new ones they decide they need; it has been that way since the first ones were sent here from the Inner System. I’ve sometimes wondered what the machines would have done if people had never arrived in the Cloud. Would they have eventually downed tools and quit, or would they have found some other justification for continuing to modify the Cloud? If there were no humans to use the biological products of the harvesters, would the machines have found it necessary to invent us?”

To Bey’s relief, they had reached a region of noticeable gravity. He was not too keen on the other implications of that—a shielded kernel had to be somewhere near, and that much pent energy made him uncomfortable. But it was nice to have an up and a down again, even if it was only a twentieth of a g. He followed Leo Manx through a final door and into a long room with a curved floor.

Three Cloudlanders were sitting at a little round table, each dressed uniformly in a lemon-colored one-piece suit.

Wolf at once recognized the woman facing him. Given the frequency with which she appeared on Earth newscasts, it would be hard not to do so. Cinnabar Baker was one of the three most powerful people in the Outer System and a scathing critic of everything that happened closer to the Sun than the inner edge of the Cloud. Her cheerful appearance belied her reputation. There was presumably the thin, gravity-intolerant skeleton of the Cloudlander within her, but in Baker’s case it was well covered. She was a vast, smiling woman, maybe two hundred kilos in mass, with flawless, pale skin. Her hair was thin and close-cropped, revealing the contours of a well-shaped and delicate-looking skull. The clear eyes and fine skin tone gave evidence of regular use of form-change equipment.

She stood up and held out a chubby, dimpled hand. “Welcome to the Outer System. I am Cinnabar Baker. I’m responsible for the operation of all the harvesters, including this one. Let me express my appreciation that you agreed to come here, and allow me to introduce you to some of my staff. Sylvia Fernald.” She gestured at the woman on her left. “In charge of all software development and control theory in the Outer System. Next to her, Apollo Belvedere Smith—Aybee for short and for preference—my top science adviser and general gadfly. Leo Manx, senior psych administrator and Inner System specialist, you know already—probably all too well after your trip together from the Inner System.”

“Behrooz Wolf,” Bey muttered. It hardly seemed necessary. They knew who he was. How many hairy strangers were there on the harvester, a foot and a half shorter than everyone else and with four times the muscles? Bey greeted the others, making his instinctive and immediate assessment of their ages, original appearance, and major form-changes. There were anomalies, points to be thought about later, particularly in the case of Apollo Belvedere Smith, who was extra-tall, rail-thin, and glowering angrily at Wolf for no discernible reason. But for the moment Bey was pondering a more substantial question.

Cinnabar Baker was there with three of the Cloud’s scientists, technicians, and administrators, all apparently tops in their fields. They had been summoned to worry a technical problem of malfunctioning form-change equipment. Wolf had come to know and like Leo Manx, with his quirky sense of humor and his shared interest in Earth history and literature. He felt that a perfect choice had been made: Manx was just the right combination of seniority, experience, and intellect to work with Bey on form-change questions. But the others? It made more sense for Bey and Leo Manx to go straight to work. Why a top science adviser? Most of all, why Cinnabar Baker? She was far more senior than the problem justified.

Bey felt the stir of an old feeling, something that had been dormant for too long within him: suspicion, and with it, the frisson of powerful curiosity.

“Sylvia Fernald and Leo Manx will be your principal day-to-day contacts,” Baker was saying. “If you find it necessary to travel through the system, one or both of them will accompany you. Aybee usually travels with me, and I have to be all over the place, but you will have first call. Any time you require him, he’s at your service. That’s enough, Aybee,” she put in as the man across the table grunted his disapproval. “I told you the rules.” She turned back to Wolf. “Tell us what you need to know about our form-change programs, Mr. Wolf, and we will do our best to provide it.”

Wolf sat down between Leo Manx and Aybee Smith. He wanted to see more of the harvester, but that could wait. It was time for a direct approach. “Naturally, I would like an overview of the problem you’ve been having with form-change equipment and programs. But that’s not my first priority.”

They were staring at him in surprise.

“I’d like to know what’s going on here,” he continued. “I don’t think I have been given the full story. There are factors that have not been described to me.” He caught Cinnabar Baker’s quick look at Leo Manx and the other’s tiny shake of the head. “I must know what they are.”

Apollo Belvedere Smith gave a grunt of approval. “Hey. I didn’t want to bring you here, but mebbe you can do something useful, after all.” He turned to Baker. “Was I right, or was I right? He cottoned. I guess I should brief the Wolfman.”

Cinnabar Baker shook her head. “You’ll go too fast and leave too much out.”

“Naw. If he’s smart as he needs to be, he’ll follow.”

“Maybe. But it’s still no. You can impress him with your brilliance later. I want Fernald to brief him. But before we begin—” She stared straight at Bey, and he saw past the fat, friendly exterior. Cinnabar Baker was a person with drive to match her bulk, a woman who made up her mind in a hurry. “I won’t ask you to pledge secrecy when you go back home, Behrooz Wolf,” she went on. “Just don’t talk about this while you’re around here. We want to minimize alarm—panic, if you prefer that word. Now I’m starting to sound mysterious. Go on, Fernald, let’s have it. Tell him what’s been happening.”

“Everything?”

“The whole story.”

While they were talking, Bey had taken a closer look at Aybee Smith. His appearance suggested a man in his early twenties, but that of course meant little. Bey listened, looked, integrated posture, speech style, and the exchange between Aybee and Cinnabar Baker, and came up with a surprising conclusion: Apollo Belvedere Smith was a teenager, still under twenty. Yet he was Baker’s top science adviser. Which meant he had to be at least half as smart as he seemed to think he was.

“Background first.” Sylvia Fernald had moved around to face Bey. She was a good and logical briefer, and she began with a summary of what Bey had already heard in fair detail from Leo Manx. Three years earlier there had been problems with form-change processes. Humans emerged from the tanks either with an incorrect final form or in just the same state as when they went in. The problem had not attracted much interest at first, since a repeat of the form-change process would always lead to the desired result.

That had become less true in the past two years. Deviations became more pronounced, and repeat treatments often led to new anomalies. One year earlier the first deaths had occurred in the form-change tanks. Every attempt to trace the problem had failed. And the numbers of deaths and abnormalities were growing exponentially.

Wolf was hearing little that was a surprise, and his main attention was concentrated on the speaker. Sylvia Fernald had chosen neither the walking skeleton of Leo Manx nor the roly-poly bulk of Cinnabar Baker. She was slim but not skinny, and incredibly ugly by Earth standards. She towered over Bey by a foot or more, with a gawky, angular build that seemed all spidery arms and legs. Like Baker, she wore her carroty-red hair short, swept way back from a high, pale forehead. But unlike the others at the table, she had eyebrows, pale sandy arches that emphasized the size and brightness of her deep-set gray eyes and the sharp angle of her thin, jutting nose. Bey ignored the overall unpleasant impression, did his usual summation of variables, and decided she was on the young side of early middle age.

“How many cases, total?” he asked when she paused.

She hesitated and looked at Baker, who nodded. “Tell him.”

“Nearly eighty thousand.”

“My God. That’s more than we’ve had on Earth in a century and a half.”

“I know. And remember, that’s out of a total population of fifty million, not your fifteen billion.”

“And getting worse. Can you provide me with the rates of change?”

Sylvia Fernald nodded after another quick look at Cinnabar Baker. “That’s not the end of it, Mr. Wolf. I’m not an expert on the technology of the Inner System, but here our form-change systems, hardware and software, are the most delicate devices we have. They have to be shielded against interference, and there’s triple redundancy and error checking in every electronic signal.”

Bey nodded. “Same on Earth. I’d be amazed if the procedures and the error-correcting codes are any different. I don’t see how they could be. Form-change won’t tolerate transmission errors. It’s so delicate that an error rate of one bit in ten to the twelfth is enough to show. Nothing else comes close in sensitivity.”

“Not on Earth, perhaps,” Cinnabar Baker said. “But remember, here in the Outer System we are far more dependent on all kinds of feedback control systems. Go on, Fernald. The whole story.”

“Three years ago we had our first problems with form-change processes. That was bad. But two years ago, other things began to go wrong. On a big scale. There are now billions of tons of hydrogen cyanide floating free near the edge of the Halo. The whole product line from the Kuiper Harvester went sour on us. It was supposed to produce aldehydes and alcohols from prebiotic bodies in the Cloud, but the program went wrong, the automatic checks didn’t work, and the first thing we knew was when a crewed surveyor reported anomalous spectral signatures.”

“A year’s production down the drain,” Baker added. “And five years more work before we’ll be able to clean it up.”

“Another harvester is producing the wrong materials,” Sylvia Fernald said. “We caught that early, with no damage. We’re busy now, checking the other thirty. We’ve also had signs of instability in a kernel control system; gigawatts of raw radiation if one of those got away. And oddest of all, nonsense reports have been coming in from our remote monitoring systems. They’re scattered all over the system. Either our communications are generating batches of spurious signals, or space in the Outer System is filled with bizarre… things.”

“Things?”

Aybee Smith produced a humorless laugh. “Yeah. Things. Tell him, Sylv.”

“Visual phenomena.” Sylvia Fernald was clearly uncomfortable with her own words. “Impossible events. I don’t believe in them myself, but the people who report them do.”

“Come on, Sylv—you’re stalling.” Aybee Smith grinned fiercely at Wolf. “How about a space dog—a blood-red hound running across Sagittarius, filling five degrees of the sky? It was reported from Spanish Station, on the other side of the Sun. Would you believe that?”

“No, I wouldn’t.” Wolf looked at Cinnabar Baker, but her face was serious, and she showed no sign of interrupting. “It’s ridiculous.”

“Right. So how about a flaming blue sword, down near the edge of the Halo? Or a rain of blood, sleeting across Orion. Or a great snake, wrapped around the Kernel Ring and swallowing its own tail?”

“How many people reported seeing these?”

“People?” Aybee Smith shook his head in disgust. “Wolfman, people are flaky. They’ll see anything, or say they do. Look at you; you prove my point. You’ve been having visions, but they’re right there inside your skull—no one else sees ’em, right? Right So if it was just people, I’d say the hell with it, they’re all crazy—no offense—and who cares what they say they see. But this is different. These were instrument readings, not people babble. Sensors recorded this stuff. People only saw it later, when they looked at the files. We’re talking serious here, not just crazy. You know what a lot of the people who’ve heard about this say? They don’t say phenomena, they say portents. How do you like that?”

Bey was listening, but half his attention was elsewhere. Again, something was not adding up. It took a few seconds to recognize what it was and turn again to Cinnabar Baker. “This has been going on for years?”

“More than two years. But getting worse, bit by bit. It sounds like nonsense, I know, but with everything else going on, I have to take it seriously.” She paused. “You’re skeptical. I’m not surprised. But believe me, neither Sylvia Fernald nor Aybee is exaggerating or inventing.”

“I do believe you. But I think we’re still both playing games. Let me tell you something you may not care to hear.” Wolf nodded at Leo Manx. “When he asked me to take a look at your form-change problems, I refused. Then an hour later I called him up and agreed. So why did I change my mind? I’m not an idiot, even though you may think I act like one. Well, I left Earth because I knew if I didn’t, I’d be back in Old City in less than a week. I came to a place where I couldn’t do that, even if I wanted to. I was going crazy there—maybe I’m still going crazy.”

“I do not agree.” Leo Manx sounded comfortingly confident.

“We’ll see. Either way, I didn’t feel I was cheating you. Crazy or not, I know form-change theory and practice as well as anyone. So I would get away from Earth, and maybe lose my hallucinations—you can dismiss them as nothing, but I couldn’t. And maybe you would get help with your problem. That would be a fair exchange. Except that you haven’t been honest with me. You’re having trouble with form-change, sure, but now you’re admitting your problem is much more general. All your signals and communications are screwed up. Form-change just happens to be unusually sensitive; signal distortions show up there first.”

“That is probably correct.” Cinnabar Baker was not embarrassed.

“So now let’s look at things from your point of view. I know form-change, but I sure as hell won’t solve your other problems. You ought to have experts in bifurcation theory, in optimal control theory, in signal encoding and error correction, in catastrophe theory. Those are not my fields.”

“I agree.”

“So why don’t you get the right people, people who already know the Outer System?”

“For this reason.” Cinnabar Baker gestured to Aybee Smith, who took a thin card from his pocket and passed it to Bey. “Do you recognize any of those names, Mr. Wolf?”

Bey scanned it briefly, noting his own name halfway down. “I know two-thirds of them. You’re certainly on the right track. The ones from the Inner System are top people. If the ones from here are comparable, you’ve got the best systems talent of the Solar System on that list.”

“I’m glad you agree with Aybee’s judgment. He made the list; it’s good to know he gets something right.” Baker waited for Apollo Smith’s indignant snort, then continued. “We tried to obtain the services of all those people. Every one.”

“And they refused to help? I’m surprised, if you told them what you’ve just told me.”

“No, Mr. Wolf.” The real Cinnabar Baker was showing through, powerful and deadly serious. “They did not refuse. They had no opportunity to do so, because we had no chance to tell them. Of the twenty-seven names on that list, twelve are dead. Seven are hopelessly insane. And seven have disappeared. Our attempts to trace them, assisted when appropriate by officials of the Inner System, have all failed. That makes twenty-six. You, Mr. Wolf, are the twenty-seventh.”

She stood up slowly, a massive and massively determined woman. “And now I am holding nothing back from you. You know what we know, except for the details. Do you agree with my view—that you have special motivation to work on and solve this problem?”

Chapter 7

The builders, caretakers, and first inhabitants of the harvesters worked around the clock, without thought of rest. Bey Wolf was beginning to wonder if the human occupants were expected to follow the same schedule.

When the conference with Cinnabar Baker was over, he had been settled into a huge but pleasant set of rooms complete with form-change unit and extended library access. Leo Manx, who had taken him there, pointed out that the quarters provided a fortieth of a g sleeping environment. He obviously expected Wolf to be delighted. Bey, knowing that the source of the local gravitational field could only be a power kernel no more than thirty meters below his feet, was not pleased. The triple shielding on a Kerr-Newman black hole had never failed—yet—but according to Sylvia Fernald, several in Cloudland had recently come close. At thirty meters, a few gigawatts of hard radiation would not just kill him, it would dissolve him, melt his flesh from his bones before he knew what was happening.

Bey was tired by the journey and the novelty of the harvester, and glutted with new information. He wanted to he down for a while and digest what he had learned, but Leo Manx showed no signs of leaving.

“Sylvia Fernald and Aybee Smith will both be excellent colleagues,” he said. He had stretched himself out on Bey’s bed, just lengthy enough for him, and closed his eyes. “But there are things about them that you should know before we begin. Aybee is extremely able but a little immature.”

The bed was apparently very comfortable. Bey coveted it. “He’s just a kid.”

“Exactly. Nineteen years old, but more knowledgeable and scientifically creative than anyone else in the Outer System. You may rely on him for science, but not for judgment.”

“I’ll remember. What about Sylvia Fernald?”

“She is more mature and also more complex. Her judgment on some of the subjects we discussed today may not be sound.”

“Fifty-five years old?”

Manx lifted his head from the bed to stare at Wolf. “Fifty-six, as I recall. Are you able to do that with anyone?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I’ve had lots of form-change experience. Why is she suspect?”

“You saw the list of names of people who died or disappeared. One of them, Paul Chu, was Sylvia’s consort for many years. I believe they planned to become parents. But he vanished without a trace six months ago on a routine trip to the edge of the Halo.”

“The Halo again.”

“I know. I have had the same thought But without evidence…”

“We’ll have to look for evidence.”

“Certainly.” Manx lay silent, eyes closed, for another minute or two. He sighed. “You know, I was originally very doubtful about my trip to Earth, but it was a very good idea. Before I went, I always suspected that deep inside I was by nature an Earthman. Your history is so fascinating, and Earth is the origin of all the worthwhile cultures and arts. But not until I had made a journey there for myself did I realize that it was not for me. It was not home. This is home.” He patted the bed and lapsed into another and longer silence.

“I think I’ll have a sign made for that far wall,” Bey said at last.

“Indeed?”

“Yes. It will say, ‘If you have nothing to do, please don’t do it here.’ ”

Manx frowned and opened his eyes. “You wish for privacy?”

“I wish for sleep.”

Manx sat up reluctantly. “Very well. Then I will leave. But I must mention one other matter of importance to you. I have completed my analysis of your own difficulties.”

Fatigue changed to a tingle of anticipation. “The hallucinations? You think you can stop them?”

“No. On the contrary, I am sure I cannot. Because I am convinced that what you have been seeing are not the distorted constructs of your brain. They have been imposed from without.”

“That’s impossible. I’ve been in situations where I saw that Red Man, and there were other people watching the same broadcast. They saw nothing. I’ve seen him on a recorded program, too, then played the same program through a second time. He didn’t reappear. And anyway, why would anyone want to make me crazy?”

“I don’t know. However, I believe that if we can answer the first problem, of method, we will have gone far toward answering the second one, of intention. And an induced effect is a technological problem, not a psychological one. That offers us recourse. I propose to present the idea at once to Apollo Smith. If I know Aybee, it will intrigue him.” He levered himself off the bed, sighed, and nodded to Bey. “And so to bed. Sleep well.”

Which, of course, Leo Manx had now made out of the question. Bey turned off the light and lay on the bed, but he no longer felt sleepy. Induced effects, he thought. He had considered that idea when the Dancing Man had first appeared, but he had dropped it for two good reasons: he could not see how it might be done, and he could not imagine why anyone would want to do it.

After five useless minutes, during which he again concluded that he knew of no way to turn Leo Manx’s opinions to useful facts, Bey rose, dumped his clothes into the service hopper, and went through to the shower room. It was sinfully big, the size of a five-person apartment on Earth; no wonder Leo Manx had been crowded there. After a minute of juggling with unfamiliar controls, Bey ran the water as hot as he could stand, then accidentally switched it to an icy downpour. He jumped out of the spray with a scream and turned on the hot air.

As soon as he was dry he realized he had made another mistake. The only clothes offered by the dispenser were more of the pale yellow one-piece suits, too long and too narrow for his body. His own clothes had been eaten by the service hopper, and he could find no sign of shoes anywhere.

Finally he stuffed himself into one of the suits and managed to engage the fasteners. Looking at himself in the mirror was an unwise decision, but he suspected he was already as ugly as he could get by Cloudland standards. Bey left his quarters barefoot and headed along a corridor that spiraled slowly away from the kernel. He had no idea where he was going, but he felt confident that he could find his way home. There was not likely to be another kernel in the interior of the harvester, and as long as he followed the kernel’s gravity gradients “up” and “down,” he could not get lost.

After a few minutes of wandering he found himself in a broad accordion-pleated passage that was pouched and folded like the alimentary canal of some giant beast. That similarity went beyond appearances. Bey knew that the harvesters prowled the Oort Cloud, seeking bodies high in volatiles and complex organic materials. Once found, they were ingested by the comet-sized maw of the harvester for transfer to the interior. They were heated with energy extracted from the power kernel, thawed, and dropped into the internal lake-sized vats, to be stirred and aerated by jets of carbon dioxide and oxygen. In that enzyme-seeded brew, the prebiotic molecules of the fragments—porphyrins, carotenoids, polypeptides, and cellulose—were converted to edible fats, starches, sugars, and proteins.

Bey stood by a viewing port and peered into a bubbling sea of pale yellow-green. Close by him, there was a shudder of moving machinery. A great valve had opened. Hundreds of thousands of tons of broth went streaming along helical cooling tubes, on the way to extraction of water, chlorophylls, and yeasts. This batch was near its final stages. Most of the final product would be compressed, packaged into spaceproof containers, and launched on the long journey to the Inner System. The harvesters fed the population of the Cloud itself, but more important, their products were essential to the survival of everyone closer to the Sun. The same food products were the working capital that funded the outflow of technology and finished goods from the teeming Inner System.

And if there were a war or an embargo? As Bey left that enormous production plant, he could not help wondering what would happen if the supply line failed.

At first, nothing would be noticed at the destination. The payloads were transported to the Inner System at only a fraction of a g acceleration, so they took a long time to get there. There would be food in the pipeline of the delivery system for at least ten years, even if the supply from the harvesters were cut off at once. But then the Inner System would be in real trouble—as much trouble as the Cloud would suffer if the Inner System were one day to cut off the supply of power kernels or refuse to ship out manufactured goods. With such total interdependency of the two groups, any talk of war or of breakdown of commerce between them seemed ludicrous. And yet Bey knew that such talk was growing more and more common, more and more strident.

He had followed the local gravity vector downward and was almost back at his quarters. But the thought of the Kernel Ring led him to keep going, descending a steep staircase that dropped toward the kernel itself. Within fifteen meters he found himself on a black, seamless sphere with no visible entry points. He was standing in a thirtieth of a g field on the first of the three kernel shields. Nothing organic would survive for a millisecond on the other side of it. Twenty meters or less beneath his feet was the kernel itself, a rapidly rotating black hole held in position by its own electric charge. This one would mass a couple of billion tons. It served as the power source for one whole sphere of the harvester. Streams of subnuclear particles passed through the kernel’s ergosphere, slightly slowed the kernel’s rotation, and emerged with their own energy vastly increased.

The power provided by a kernel was large but finite. After maybe twenty years, its angular momentum and rotational energy would be depleted. A “spun-down” black hole with no rotation would continue to radiate according to the Hawking evaporative process, but that energy was far less controlled and useful. It was even a nuisance, since the monitor sensors within the shield needed multiple signal redundancy to assure error-free messages to the outside. A spent kernel was a useless kernel. It had to be “spun up” again to high angular momentum from some other source, or replaced by a new one from the Kernel Ring.

And if the Kernel Ring became inaccessible? Then the Cloudlanders would starve for energy, as surely as the Inner System would starve for lack of Cloudland food supplies. And yet the Kernel Ring was the least controlled part of the whole system, and it was not clear who had the most rights to it. Was it the Podders, the Halo’s migrant spacefarers who lived within their spacesuits? Or maybe it was Black Ransome, waging war against both Cloudlanders and Sunhuggers from the mystery hideaway of Ransome’s Hole.

Bey found the train of thought leading him again to Mary. Was she in the Kernel Ring, as Leo Manx insisted? Or was she to be found somewhere here, in the unthinkably big volume of the Cloud? If so, the Cloud’s central library system might help him locate her. Assuming that he wanted to.

“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part. Nay, I have done, you get no more of me.” Mary’s last message had asked him not to look for her, but in typically Mary terms. She had left an opening for ambiguity. Bey turned to head back for the stairs, thinking that if he started to learn the library access system, he would never get to sleep.

He was so preoccupied with his thoughts that he almost walked into the three strangers.

There were two men and a woman. Wolf had time for no more than a quick look at them—again, no eyebrows, and suddenly that made sense; perspiration would not trickle down foreheads in zero g—then they were advancing on him.

“What the devil are you doing here?” The shorter of the men spoke loudly and angrily. He came close and glared down from his superior height.

“I’m sorry,” Bey began. “I didn’t know the kernel level was restricted territory. I was about to—”

“The kernel level!” The man turned to his companions. “Just like a Snugger, he doesn’t understand what you say to him.”

The woman stepped forward. “We’re not talking about the kernel. You don’t belong on the harvester—or anywhere in our system. You get back to your own stinking kind.”

The other man did not speak, but he stepped to Wolf’s side and jabbed him painfully in the ribs with a bony elbow. At the same moment the woman trod on Bey’s bare instep with a hard-soled shoe.

“Hold it, now—” Bey took a step backward. They were in a low-g field, which favored the Cloudlanders, but Bey was sure that if he had to defend himself he could do it very well. He could break any of those thin limbs between his hands, and their feeble muscles had probably done as much as they could to hurt him. But he did not want to fight back—not when he had no idea who or why. He lifted his arm as though to strike at the man in front of him, then lunged for the staircase instead.

He was all the way up before they had even turned to pursue. At the top he slammed the door in position and raced off along the corridor. On the threshold of his own quarters, he ran into a tall figure coming out. Bey braked as hard as he could, but there was still contact. The man gave a grunt of surprise and went sailing away through the air, bouncing off the wall and then falling face down across the bed.

“Hey! What the hell!”

Bey recognized the complaining voice. It was Apollo Belvedere Smith. He went across and helped him sit up.

Aybee rubbed his midriff. “What’s all that about?”

“I was going to ask you the same. I was running away from three of your people. I’ve no idea who they are, but they tried to start a fight.”

“Oh, yeah. I came here to warn you not to leave your quarters. Close the door, Wolfman, and lock it.”

“Why? What the devil’s going on here?”

“You’re the man they love to hate.” Aybee stood up and began to wander around the room. “You didn’t hear the newscast, right?”

“I’ve been looking at the inside of the harvester.”

“Yeah.” Aybee was still scowling, but that was apparently his natural expression. “You know something? Most people are real idiots.”

“Not true. By definition, most people are average.”

That earned a quick grin. “Y’know what I mean. They’re animals. Last few days there’s been more growling and scowling between government here and government in the Inner System than you’d believe. So in comes news a couple of hours ago from the far side of the Cloud. Bad deal. A whole harvester destroyed, blown apart, thirty thousand people dead. Power plant went blooey. And newsword is that you Sunhuggers did it.”

“Nonsense. The Inner System would never destroy a harvester. We need that food.”

“Hey, I never said I believed it, did I? It’s like I said—people here are dumb. They see somebody looks like you—” Aybee paused to give Bey a detailed inspection, then shook his head and went on “—they hate him. You’re not safe here now.”

“That’s Cinnabar Baker’s problem. If she wants me to be useful, she’ll have to find a way to give me working space.”

The answering grin was even less pleasant than usual. “No worries. You’ll get work space, Wolfman. The other thing on the news is just your line. Form-change foul-ups on the Sagdeyev space farm, a day from here. You and Sylv’ll be heading there, see what you can sort out.”

“You won’t be going?” Bey wanted to know how important the problem was in Cinnabar Baker’s mind.

“Don’t think so. Not ’less you need me. Sylv can handle it. She’s no dummy, and she’s reliable. You’ll like working with her.”

It was probably the highest level of praise that Aybee offered to anyone. Bey nodded. “I have the same feeling. We’ll get on together.”

“Mind you, she’s no good at real science. She comes to me for that.”

“You’re too modest.”

“Mebbe I am.” Aybee was examining Bey with a look of clinical curiosity. “Mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Probably.”

“Do you have hair like that all over? I mean, it must drive you crazy.”

Bey held up his hand to show Aybee the open palm.

“Okay you know what I meant.” Aybee grinned. “You think I’m a smart-ass, don’t you?”

“Not at all. Fifty years ago, I was just like you. Brighter than fusion. I’m amazed how much smarter other people are these days.”

“Senile decay?”

“Hang in for a little while. Your turn will come.”

Aybee scowled. “Hey, Wolfman, don’t say that. That’s too true to be funny. Top mathematicians and physicists do their real stuff before they’re twenty-five. After that they’re just hacking. I’ve only got six years left, then it’s all downhill for the next hundred years. How’s it feel to be real old?”

“I’ll let you know when I am.”

“Sylv says you’re pretty well along—after the meeting she got Manx to let her peek at your personal records. She’s nosy. She tells me you been seeing things, and you don’t know how you could have been fed ’em. And the Manxman thinks I could help. Tell me more.”

“Not tonight, Josephine.”

“Who?”

“Somebody even older than me.” Bey advanced slowly on Aybee. “Shoo. You’re leaving now. I’m going to throw you out—literally, if I have to. Catch me in the morning; I’ll tell you all you want to know about me. Even how I grow hair.”

“Sure.” Aybee headed for the doorway. “I guess old people need lots of sleep.”

“I guess we do.” Wolf closed and locked the door after him. If any more visitors were on their way tonight, they would have to break it down. He sat on the bed and considered Apollo Belvedere Smith.

Aybee was young, arrogant, opinionated, brash, and insensitive.

Bey liked him very much.