Proteus Unbound

Chapter 8

Cinnabar Baker had no home, or perhaps she had thirty. Apartments were maintained for her use on every harvester, identical in size, gravity, and furnishings. She traveled constantly and spent at most ten days a year in each one.

She was said to have neither human intimates nor personal belongings. Turpin went with her everywhere, but he was not a possession. He was an old, cross-eyed crow with a big vocabulary and an absence of tail feathers. When he was in a bad mood, which was often, he had the habit of tugging plumage out with his bill.

He was doing that now, and it was an unpleasant sight. Sylvia Fernald found it hard to take her eyes off him. The crow would pause occasionally to glare at her with rheumy, droop-lidded eyes, then go back to his self-destructive preening. He made no attempt to fly; instead, he went waddling back and forth in a piratical roll all over the little round table in front of Sylvia, wings half-open and muttering a bad-tempered parody of human speech. Sylvia tried to ignore Turpin and keep her attention on what Cinnabar Baker was saying. It was not easy. Sylvia had been asleep when the call had come. She bit back a yawn, wondering how it was possible to be so nervous and yet so sleepy.

The latest summons had caught her by surprise, as had the earlier order, a week before, to attend the meeting with Wolf and help to brief him. She worked for Baker, that was undeniable, but the boss of the harvesters had reached down past two intermediate levels of command to get to Fernald and had never offered an explanation.

This new call had been equally casual, as if there were nothing unusual in asking a junior staff member to come to a one-on-one meeting well after midnight. The big woman had been sitting cross-legged in the low-g apartment when Sylvia arrived. She had exchanged the yellow uniform for a billowing cloud of pale-green spun material that left only her head and hands uncovered, and she seemed as fresh and alert as ever.

“Now let’s think a bit more about Behrooz Wolf,” she said, as though continuing a conversation already in progress. “We have Leo Manx’s impressions, of course, and I have now heard from Aybee. But neither one is a close observer of what I might call inner states. You saw as much of Wolf as I did. What sort of man did you find in there?”

Sylvia had expected a discussion of harvester control systems or perhaps of form-change procedures. Her job did not include character assessments, but she could not tell that to Cinnabar Baker. And she was fairly sure that Baker could not be stalled with platitudes.

“Competent but complicated. I don’t think I was ever sure what he was thinking.”

“Nor did I.” Baker smiled like the Gautama and waited.

“He’s obviously intelligent, but we knew that from his reputation. And I don’t just mean for form-change theory. He saw that there were other matters involved here very quickly.”

“Almost too quickly.” Cinnabar Baker did not elaborate. Again she sat and waited.

“And he’s obviously a sensitive type, too. I saw Leo Manx’s reports on Wolf and his relationship to Mary Walton.” (And I can imagine how he felt when she left, Sylvia thought, but I won’t say that to Cinnabar Baker.) “That means he’s still very miserable and thinks he’s not getting much out of life. But he took a lot of interest in what we told him, so I suspect that although he believes he feels things strongly, his intellectual drives are more powerful than his emotional ones. He’s like Aybee; he lives in a thought world more than a sense world. He wouldn’t admit that; maybe he doesn’t even know it. As for his other interests, it’s hard to say anything. How does he spend his time when he’s not at work?”

While she was speaking, Sylvia found herself asking the same question about Cinnabar Baker. The apartment was tiny by Cloud standards, and minimally furnished. The walls were a uniform beige, unrelieved by pictures or other decorations, and there were no personal bits and pieces like the ones that filled Sylvia’s own apartment to overflowing. Cinnabar Baker had a reputation for hard work. On the basis of the evidence, work was all she had.

“Did you find him attractive?” The question was so unexpected that Sylvia was not sure she had heard correctly.

“You mean physically attractive?”

“Exactly.”

“My God, no. He’s absolutely hideous.” Sylvia let that answer sit for a couple of seconds, then felt obliged to add, “I mean, I suppose it’s not his fault. Lots of people from the Inner System probably look like that. And he has an interesting mind, and I think he has a good sense of humor. But he’s revolting-looking, and of course he’s very little, with those short stubby arms. And worst of all, he’s—he’s too—”

“Too?”

“Too hairy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s covered with hair all over him, like an ape, everywhere. Even on—” Sylvia suddenly became aware of how extreme she must sound. “Of course, I suppose he can’t help any of that. Though with form-change equipment available…”

“I’m sorry you find him a little unattractive.” Cinnabar Baker apparently had a great gift for understatement. Reaching out to stroke the back of the crow standing in front of her, she looked down so that her eyes were hidden from Sylvia. “You see, I wish to make an unusual request of you. And since it’s outside the usual range of duties, it has to be no more than an informal request.”

“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

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.”

It was done on impulse, but suddenly it became an experiment. How would she react?

She allowed the contact for maybe half a second. Then she firmly pulled away and with her right hand reached across to press a switch on the side of the instrument. There was a click, and a brief buzz of sound. She waited a moment, then touched the front panel.

Bey stared at her. “You know how it works!”

“I looked at it long enough, while you were lying there. And I knew Aybee would keep it simple—he says he wants his work to be like the Cloudland Navy, designed by a genius to be run by idiots. I know which buttons to press, if that makes me an expert.” She paused, her hand still before the flat front panel. “Would you like to see if you got anything? There’s a playback feature; we could put it up on the display screen.”

It was Bey’s turn for anxiety. He wanted to know, didn’t he? Surely he did, after all those months of worry. But he also felt uneasy, the same subliminal discomfort he had experienced when he learned that Mary was sending him a message from beyond the Moon.

“Well?” Sylvia Fernald was waiting, her long, slender finger poised above a point on the panel.

The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line… Bey sensed himself on the brink of irreversible change, with that waiting finger as its agent. Old Omar the Tentmaker might be warning him. After months of accepting the Dancing Man as a harbinger of madness, perhaps Bey was about to discover darker possibilities. Knowledge might be more dreadful than ignorance.

He was very tired. His head was aching, worse than ever. His mind had turned to mush. And still he sat, unable to speak, unable to nod, and watched that poised digit.

“Well?” Sylvia was becoming impatient. And no wonder. What was wrong with him? He had to understand. Yet he found himself drifting off again into a half-trance, turning his thoughts away from the present…

Bey roused himself. Bad news or not, he had to know.

He sat up, shivered, and nodded. “Run it.”

The screen flickered, went dark, and slowly brightened. There was a splash of sharp images: red men running, dancing, leaping, sitting cross-legged, diving away, all overlaid one on another. Then the multiple exposures faded, and one picture emerged. It was as Bey remembered it, but in terrifying detail. The little man, the sharp-toothed grin, the strutting walk, the backward somersault, the jerky twitch of agile limbs. The voice. It was the same singsong voice, rising at the end of the sentence to frame a not-quite-intelligible question. Bey watched, listened, and was carried away into a dizzying resumption of the past. He reached out to play the sequence again. And again. The fourth time, Sylvia’s hand was there first, pushing him away.

“No more. Not now.” She had seen the expression in his eyes. Bey was far gone in his own fugue.

He sighed. “Aybee did it. He said he would. That was it, you know. Exactly.”

“I know.”

“I have to see it again.” His hand was moving to hers, trying to push her aside. He had no strength in his arm.

“No. Later.” She touched his forehead. As she had suspected, it was hot and sweaty. “Bey, you have to sleep. It’s been too much.”

“I have to see it again. I have to understand it. You see, Sylvia, even now I don’t understand.” His voice was puzzled, a lost voice, but even as he spoke his eyes were closing. In less than thirty seconds he was sound asleep.

He was no threat now. Sylvia watched him for a few minutes. His face was the countenance of the Inner System itself: dark, older, guarded. She reached out and moved him so that he could not see the display. He sighed in his sleep but did not move from his new position.

She reset the audio input so that she alone would receive it and settled down to play the image sequence over and over. It had meant something personal and disturbing to Bey Wolf, but to her it offered different and more practical mysteries. There had been hints to grasp at even in the first viewing.

She solved the first problem after four runs through Bey’s reconstructed memory sequence. After another look at the controls, she made one adjustment and watched with satisfaction what came onto the screen.

The second problem was not so easy. It depended on a dubious recollection from more than a year ago. Sylvia finally asked for help from the data base on the space farm, seven hours travel ahead of them. They sent an image that confirmed her hunch. Then she settled down to wait for Bey to waken, watching his dark-complexioned face, wanting him to rest but willing him to wake. She was itching to tell him.

He slept for almost six hours. As he woke, he at once turned and reached to turn on the display. She gripped his hand in both of hers. “No. Bey, you don’t need to.”

He stared at her uncomprehendingly, still dazed with sleep.

“Watch,” she said. She made the adjustment to Aybee’s equipment and started the playback.

The Red Man appeared, and still he was speaking. But his singsong words were clear. “You can run, you can run, just as fast as you can, but you’ll never get away from the Negentropic Man.” And then, just before he danced away, off at the right side of the screen, he spoke again. “Don’t you worry, don’t you fear, the Negentropic Man is here!”

Bey sat openmouthed. “What did you do?”

“Time reversal, and slowed it down.” She set out to play it through again. “It was obvious. You’d have seen it, once you’d watched it right through—objectively—a few times. The movements didn’t look right, too jerky, and the intonation was wrong for normal speech. Playing it backward, that’s all it took to make the message clear.” She saw Bey’s shake of the head. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s not clear. Not to me. I understand what he’s saying, and maybe Aybee knows how the trick was worked to send me that signal. But what does it mean?”

“Negentropic?”

“That will do for a start. Negentropic. Negative entropy? But that’s just a word.” Bey stood up. He wanted to pace about, but there was not enough space in the cabin to take more than two steps each way. After a moment he sat down again and slapped at his knee in frustration. “Negentropic Why should somebody say he’s the Negentropic Man? Better yet, why would anybody send a message like that to me? I don’t see how a person can have negative entropy—I’m not even sure I understand what entropy is. And I certainly have no idea who’s behind it all.”

“But I do.”

Sylvia’s quiet answer caught Bey off balance. He stared at her. “How can you?”

“I recognized your Dancing Man. I had a suspicion when I first saw him, but I wasn’t sure. While you were asleep I called ahead to tap into the space farm’s data base. And I found I was right.”

“You mean he’s somebody from the Outer System rather than the Inner System? He doesn’t look anything like a Cloudlander.”

“He’s not. And he’s not a Sunhugger, either.” Sylvia was so caught up in her discovery that she forgot to be cautious. She leaned across and gripped Bey’s hands excitedly in hers. “Your Dancing Man isn’t one of us. He lives in the Halo. He’s famous, he’s a rebel, and his name is Black Ransome.”

Chapter 10

“Manx is on the way.” Sylvia floated into the open bubble that looked out to the stars and secured herself next to Bey. “Flying a high-acceleration probe. He’ll be here in twelve hours.”

“He must be keen.” Bey thought for a moment. “And cramped. The hi-probes are emergency equipment—the cabin’s less than six feet across. He won’t have room to turn.”

“He’d better not try—it’s a one-person ship, and Aybee says he’s coming with him.” Sylvia sounded quite cheerful at the thought. If she could survive the forced intimacy of her trip with Bey, she was prepared to let Aybee and Leo Manx suffer through their shorter travel time. “I told him what we found,” she went on. “He can’t wait to see it for himself.”

They were at the space farm and ready to disembark. Bey, accustomed to the formal—and protective—procedures for entry to Inner System ports, was baffled by the absence of quarantine. They had flown to a point near the central hub of the farm and been docked automatically without passing a checkpoint.

“Of course we were checked,” Sylvia said when Bey expressed his surprise. “The computer checked our ship’s ID when we were still hours away.”

“But if the wrong people were inside it—” Bey began. He stopped. Cloudland was so far from the Inner System in awareness of security measures; he could talk to Sylvia forever, but he doubted if she would fully understand him. Was that why a handful of rebels from the Kernel Ring could cause such chaos in the Cloud?

The failure to understand went both ways. Bey had been briefed on the Sagdeyev space farm, but somehow he had reduced it in his mind to a size that he could comprehend. A farm suggested solidity, intensive activity, compact production. The reality was so insubstantial that he felt they had arrived nowhere.

The farm was a monomolecular collection layer two billion kilometers across. Its crop had been seeded hundreds of parsecs away and thousands of years earlier, conceived in the fiery heart of supernovas and blown free by the same explosions. The harvest had drifted through space for millennia, borne on the winds of light pressure, until random galactic airs carried the precious atoms to the Cloud. Most of them would drift on until the end of the universe, but a few would encounter and be held by the electrostatic charge of the collection layer. For them, aggregation could finally begin.

It was slow and selective work. The farm was interested only in the heavy elements, metals and rare earths and noble gases. It winnowed billions of cubic miles of space to find their invisible traces.

The machines that monitored the farms needed no central processing facility. They could carry hundreds of tons of material with them, accumulating steadily until there was enough to ship to the harvesters. The humans, frailer creatures, needed more. At the center of the collection layer sat the habitation bubble, three hundred meters across. In it dwelt the score of people who had made the farm their home. Two of them were dead.

“Don’t expect them to meet us,” Sylvia said as their ship docked at the outer edge of the bubble. “In fact, don’t be surprised if we don’t meet anyone in all our stay here. The farmers avoid strangers, and that includes me as well as you. They know we’re here, and they appreciate our help. They just don’t want to see us.”

“Suppose we need to talk with them about the form-change problems?”

“We’ll probably do what they do themselves—use a communications link.” Sylvia led the way to the bubble interior, meandering along silent corridors that spiraled down through the concentric shells of the bubble. Everywhere was deserted, without even maintenance equipment. If Sylvia had not told Bey that there were people there, he would have believed the farm to be derelict.

Sylvia was heading for the kernel at the center of the bubble, but on their way they passed an area that was clearly an automated kitchen. Bey realized that he had not eaten since they left the harvester. During the whole trip to the farm he had been either unconscious or too preoccupied to consider food. He paused.

“Once we get to the form-change tanks we’ll be in for a long session. Can we grab something here?”

He was starving. He headed for the dispensing equipment without waiting for her answer and placed an order. He did not bother to study the menu. Food in the Cloud was nothing like Earth fare, and he did not much care what he was given. When his dishes appeared, he went across to the seating area and waited for Sylvia.

She was a long time coming. When she finally arrived, she sat angled away from him. Her tray held a modest amount of food and a large beaker of straw-colored fluid. She stared at the liquid for a long time, then finally took a little sip, grimaced, and swallowed.

“Is it bad?” Bey lifted up a piece of food and sniffed it suspiciously. It looked like bread and smelled like bread. “Maybe we worked the machine wrong.”

“No.” Sylvia turned and gave an apologetic shake of her head. “The food is fine. The drink, too. But I’ve not eaten a meal with someone else for years. It’s not a law or anything, but we don’t do it, you know, except with a partner. Go ahead and eat, and please excuse my rudeness. I’ll be used to this in a minute.”

Not just hairy and unpopular; his habits were disgusting, too. Bey put down the bread he was holding. “I’m the one who should apologize. I knew Cloudland customs, but Leo Manx and I ate together all the time on the way to the Outer System. I didn’t even think of it here.”

“Leo was specially conditioned for the assignment. But really, it will be all right. It will. Watch me.” She speared a yellow cube on her fork, squinted down at it in front of her nose, and put it stoically into her mouth. She chewed for a long time before she finally swallowed. “See! I did it.”

After a moment Bey began to eat his own food. “Is it all right if we talk while we eat? Or would that be too much?”

“Of course. I would prefer it.”

Bey nodded. So would he. The food was pretty terrible, bland and flavorless. Good thing I couldn’t order the meal I’d really have enjoyed, he thought to himself. Come to Earth, Sylvia, and let me introduce you to a broiled lobster. “I wanted to ask you about Ransome,” he said after a minute of silent chewing.

“I don’t know all that much.”

“But you knew enough to recognize him. Back in the Inner System, most people don’t even believe there is a Black Ransome. And Leo Manx told me that he’s a mystery figure. If he’s such an unknown quantity, I don’t see how you could possibly have recognized him.”

“Ah.” Sylvia stopped eating and laid down her fork. She had managed only three small mouthfuls. “I wondered when you would get around to that. Did Leo tell you about my background?”

“A little.”

“Paul Chu?”

“He did mention that. But only to say that you and Chu used to be partners, and he disappeared on a trip to the Kernel Ring. His ship was attacked, and he was taken prisoner.”

“That’s the official version, and I don’t dispute it. But I don’t believe it.” Sylvia paused. She was not sure she wanted to talk about her personal history with Bey Wolf. She would rather talk than eat, but he might misunderstand her reasons.

“Paul and I lived together for nearly three years,” she went on. “Most people who knew us thought it was permanent—I’m sure Leo thought that. But it wasn’t. We argued like hell, all the time. If Paul were around now, I don’t think we would be together.”

“I heard from Leo Manx that you were planning to have children.”

“No. That’s Leo’s wishful thinking. He’s such a sympathetic type, he likes to think the best of people. He may have heard Paul and me talk about having children, a long time ago—but even when we were splitting up, we never disagreed in public.”

“Why did you fight?”

“Not what you might think. Not sex. Politics. I’m sure you suspect I’m not friendly to Earth and the Inner System. I’m not. I believe that you are like parasites—and not even smart ones. You’ve failed the first test of a successful parasite: moderation. You wiped out parts of your own habitat—the passenger pigeon and the dodo and the whale and the gorilla and the elephant. Thanks to you, half the species on Earth have become extinct in less than a thousand years. Humans may be next.”

“I agree, and I’m as sorry about it as you are.” Bey looked at her earnest face. She was angry, but that made her an easier companion. The cold, wary Sylvia was more difficult to deal with. “You sound pretty extreme about it.”

“Extreme! Me? Bey Wolf, you don’t understand. I’m a moderate. Everyone in the Cloud feels the way I do about Earth and the Inner System. We learn it when we’re little children. But most of us would never do anything to harm the people of the Inner System. It’s just a few fanatics who want to go a lot further than general dislike. Paul was one. He hated the Inner System and everything you stand for. One year before he disappeared, he joined an extremist group that talked seriously about starting a war between the Inner and Outer Systems. Paul told me their ideas and asked me to join. I told him they were all crazy.”

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

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

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

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

“Did you actually meet Ransome?”

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

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

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

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

“Maybe he hopes to recruit you, too.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is that?”

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

“You’re from Earth. Are you saying I’m crazy?”

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

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

“He certainly is.”

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

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

Chapter 11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve checked the code, line by line,” Bey went on. “And I’m convinced that the local programs here are working fine. It means that the problem has to be over in the main computer.”

“Or in the communications lines,” Aybee said.

“No.” Bey shook his head, and suddenly felt his exhaustion. “Redundant transmission should correct for electronic noise in the signal. Even if that somehow weren’t working, thermal noise or outside interference would give random errors. What we’re seeing here is definitely not random change. It was closely calculated.”

“But that makes it murder,” Leo Manx protested.

Aybee gave him a fierce grin. “I guess that’s exactly what the Wolfman is saying. And in that case, we’ll have to meet with the farmers.” He waved aside Sylvia’s objection. “Don’t tell me, Fern; I know they won’t want to do it. But for murder, they don’t have a choice. You real sure about this, Wolf?”

“Positive.”

“I mean, you wouldn’t like me to check your results?”

“I’d love you to—or at least, I’d like to see you try. If you were really lucky and smart, that would take you about a month.” Bey shook his head. “Aybee, it’s not a question of your ability—but I know this stuff, inside and out. Believe me, it would take you a week just to rule out impossible combinations of the main variables. We don’t have time for that. I’ll take your first suggestion. Let’s go meet with the farmers. Right now.”

“Hey, what about your Negentropic Man? That’s what me and Leo came here for, not to look at dead things that make you puke.”

“Plenty of time to look at that, too. We can do it while Sylvia talks to the farmers.” The interaction with Aybee was a fight with sharp weapons. The other was aggressive—and smart.

“More time than you think,” Leo added. “The farmers may not agree to meet with you, Mr. Wolf.”

“They have to,” Aybee insisted.

“With us, they have to,” Sylvia said. “They might be able to refuse to meet somebody from the Inner System, and get away with it.”

“Then don’t tell ’em where he’s from.” Aybee sounded impatient. “You and Leo can sort that out. The Wolfman and me need to see the stuff from inside his skull. Right? Let’s get at it.”

Chapter 12

“The Neg-en-trop-ic Man.” Aybee dissected the word, saying it slowly and thoughtfully. “And there he goes.”

He pressed the button. For the tenth time, the grinning figure in red danced away across the screen and waved his good-bye.

“Any ideas?” When it was not form-change theory, Bey was ready to admit that Aybee had the better chance of deciding what was going on. Sylvia might return at any moment, and Bey wanted to have a lot of his thinking done before he encountered a farmer.

“Too many ideas.” Aybee scowled at him. “It’s not a well-posed problem.”

“You don’t think he means what he says? That he’s a man with negative entropy.”

“I’m sure he isn’t. For a start, negative entropy has no physical meaning.” Aybee made a rude noise at the display and turned it off. “ ‘Negentropic’ just refers to something that decreases the entropy of a system. So a Negentropic Man ought to be a man who reduces entropy.”

“But what exactly is entropy?” Leo Manx had been listening carefully while the conversation made less and less sense to him. “Remember, I’m supposed to send a report back to Cinnabar Baker. I can’t send her your gibberish about negentropy. She’d jump all over us.”

“Hey, is it my fault if you’re a dummy?” Aybee looked down his nose at Leo. “I’ll give you a bunch of entropy definitions. You can pick any one you like. And don’t blame me if you’re wrong, because I sure as hell don’t know how the word is being used here. Oldest use: entropy in thermodynamics. Entropy change was defined as the change in the heat in a system, divided by its temperature. Can a process involving heat transfer be run backward? If not, the entropy of the system must increase. Rudolph Clausius knew that nearly four hundred years ago. He pointed out that entropy tends to go on increasing in any closed system. If the universe is a closed system, its entropy must increase. So then the universe is running down to a state of maximum disorganization, and we’ll all end up in uniform-temperature soup.”

“But we’re talking about a man here, not a universe.”

“I know that, Leo. Hold on a minute, I’m getting there. Remember, this is complicated stuff. We don’t want to make it so easy it’s meaningless. Einstein said it right: Things should be as simple as possible—but not simpler. Maybe our Negentropic Man has something to do with thermodynamic entropy, maybe not. Entropy number two: Ludwig Boltzmann found a statistical definition of entropy in terms of the number of possible states of the atoms and molecules of a system. He showed that it produced the same value as the thermodynamic one, provided the system has a whole lot of possible states.”

“How do we decide which definition we want?”

“We can’t—not yet. We keep going, then we’ll play pick and choose. Entropy number three: in information theory. Fifty years after Boltzmann, Claude Shannon wanted to know how much information a message channel could carry. He found it depended on a particular mathematical expression. The formula was the same as Boltzmann’s entropy formula, except for a sign change, so Shannon called the thing he calculated the entropy of the transmitted signal. That confused the hell out of people. The information-theory entropy is a maximum when the information carried is as much as you can get with a given channel.”

“Aybee, you’re not helping. Three forms of entropy—and not one of them intelligible. Why don’t people use clearly defined terms?”

“Hey, I understand them fine. We’re lucky there’s only four to pick from. Do you have any idea how many different things the word ‘conjugate’ can mean in mathematics? One more to go. Kernels have entropy. Even a nonrotating kernel—a Schwarzschild black hole—has an entropy. Two hundred and fifty years ago, Jakob Bekenstein pointed out that the area of a kernel’s event horizon can be exactly equated to an entropy for the black hole.”

“But we have to pick one of your four definitions! Aybee, how can we possibly do it? They’re all totally different.”

“No. They sound it, but they all tie together through the right mathematics. The mathematics of ensembles, it’s called. As for deciding which one we ought to be thinking about… don’t ask me. Spin a coin. Thermodynamic entropy, statistical mechanics entropy, information theory entropy, kernel horizon entropy—which one is Wolfman’s buddy talking about? We don’t know. But there’s more. Before you spin that coin, let me give you the other half of it. You see, the universe moves to higher values of thermodynamic entropy—that’s Clausius, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But life—any life, from us to bacteria and single-celled plants—is different—”

Aybee was interrupted as Sylvia Fernald hurried into the room, grabbed his arm, and began to pull him at once toward the door. “They’ll meet with us,” she said. “But we have to do it right this minute, before they change their minds. Come on.”

She led the way for Aybee and Leo, leaving Bey floundering along behind. The others were expert at moving in low gravity. He still rolled and yawed and missed handholds. He reached the chamber half a minute after the others and looked around for the elusive farmers.

The room was dark and divided in two by a wall of ribbed black glass. As Bey stepped forward, dim ceiling lights came on and the glass wall lightened to full transparency. On the other side of the partition, shrouded in white garments that left only dark pairs of eyes, two human figures became visible.

“Five minutes,” a deep, whispering voice said. Cowls were pushed back to reveal smooth skulls and nervous skeletal faces. “We promised at most five minutes.”

“Did you see your people in the form-change tanks?” Bey asked at once.

“I did,” the taller figure said. The deep voice was expressionless. “I found them.”

“Were they alive?”

“Already dead. According to the temperature monitors, already cold. They must have been dead for at least a day.”

“And no emergency signal was sent from the tanks?”

“Nothing. All indicators showed normal.”

“Has anything like this happened before? Something maybe less extreme?”

There was a pause while the two farmers turned to look at each other. “Tell them,” the second figure said. It was a woman.

“I think we must.” The man turned back to Bey. “We had noticed some peculiarities. Nothing serious, nothing that was not corrected on a second attempt with the form-change equipment. We considered calling for help, but after a vote we decided against the intrusion. Our colleagues who died took part in and approved of the decision.”

“You know when the problem began,” Bey said rapidly. The two farmers were beginning to move about uneasily. “Can you relate it to anything else that happened here on the farm? Any visitor? Any change in procedures?”

There was another pause—precious seconds of interview time slipping away. “The problems began six months ago,” the woman said. “There have been no visitors to the farm in more than a year. New form-change equipment was delivered to us at that time, but it performed perfectly for many months.”

“How about unusual events? Did anything odd happen six months ago?”

“Nothing,” the man answered. “There were automated deliveries to us, but that is usual. There were cargo shipments from here to the harvester, as always.”

“And there were—” the woman began.

“No,” the man interrupted. He reached out a hand, shielding the woman’s eyes from the four visitors but being careful not to touch her.

“I must tell. Two of us are dead because we valued privacy above their lives. It must not happen again.” The woman moved so that she could see Bey. Her voice was shaking. “Six months ago, some of us began to see things when we were out on the farm. Apparitions. Things that could not be real.”

The glass partition was beginning to darken, the lights to fade. “What were they?” Bey asked.

“Many things. Five days ago I saw a woman, many kilometers high and dressed all in red. She had long brown hair. Her clothes were the clothes of Old Earth, and she carried a basket. She was striding across the collection layer in ten-kilometers paces. She wore a white peaked bonnet, and beneath it her face was the face of a madwoman.”

“A white bonnet and scarlet dress?” Wolf jerked upright and reached out a hand. The partition was almost black. The ceiling lights were dim glows of red.

“No more,” the white-garbed man said. His voice had risen in pitch and volume. “Our records will be available to you. You can see what came to the farm during the last year, what was sent from it. You can read what our people saw. But there can be no more direct contact. Good luck.”

“One more question,” Bey said. He was moving urgently toward the black glass. “It’s terribly important.”

But the room was dark again. There was no sound from the other side of the wall.

When the deadly strike came, each visitor to the Sagdeyev farm was in a different part of the habitation bubble. Officially, it was to allow them to eat alone. In practice, each had deliberately sought privacy.

Bey had been dumbstruck by the farmer’s last words, to the point where he was hardly thinking at all. A brown-haired female, dressed in scarlet, carrying a basket and with a white bonnet on her head—that was his Mary, Mary Walton, exactly as she had looked in The Duchess of Malfi. Bey had seen it in live performance five times and in recording another dozen.

A coincidence of dress? If so, it was too improbable a coincidence for him to accept. But if anyone were to see such visions of Mary, it surely ought to have been Bey himself—not some reclusive farmer, someone who had no idea what she was looking at. Bey sat with his head buzzing, too perplexed to feel hungry or thirsty. Somewhere on the periphery of his mind he knew that one of Aybee’s comments on entropy was vitally important. Those ideas had to be integrated with the appearance of the Negentropic Man and with elements of Bey’s own knowledge of form-change theory. But that synthesis had to wait until thoughts of Mary no longer obsessed him. The temptation to seek her was growing, even though his idea that she was tied to events on the farm was probably self-deluding.

Aybee Smith had not noticed that Bey was off in his own world, but it did not take him long to realize that talking to Bey at the moment was a waste of time. Aybee went off to a terminal and tested the farmer’s offer. The final promise had been genuine; all the farm records had been made available to the visitors. Aybee set out to make a chronology of every external interaction recorded in the previous year and then to correlate that with the hallucinations and the anomalies in form-change performance. There were many hundreds of entries, but Aybee had lots of time. He never slept much, and if necessary he would plug along at the job for the next twenty-four hours. Like Bey, he relished intellectual challenge more than anything else in the world. He felt alert, fresh, excited, and confident.

Leo Manx felt none of those things. He had been awake for two full days. He had hoped to sleep on the trip to the farm, but Aybee had insisted on coming along, and then had hardly stopped talking through the whole journey. The hi-probe quarters were too cramped to hide away in, and Aybee had been too loud to ignore. He had gone on and on about signal processing and signal encoding until Leo was mentally numb. Bey’s hallucinations, according to Aybee, must have been single-frame inserts, patched into a general signal but coded specifically to Wolf’s personal psychological profile and comlink. No one else would notice the signal, even if he or she was watching the same channel as Bey. And it would be simple to make the single-frame inserts self-erasing, so even if Wolf tried to play them back on a recording, there would be no sign of them.

Now, at a time when Leo would have welcomed a nap, he could not get Aybee’s latest comments out of his head. He rubbed at his aching temples and stared at the notes he had made.

“The entropy of the whole universe is increasing,” Aybee had said. “But that doesn’t mean that the entropy of everything in it must be increasing. In fact, life has the opposite effect. It increases regular structure—nonrandom phenomena—at the expense of disorder. Life is always negentropic. It reduces the entropy of everything that it comes into contact with. So everybody, and everything living, is negentropic in that sense.”

“But the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the one you were quoting earlier—”

“Says that entropy tends to a maximum in a closed, isolated system. It tells you nothing about open systems, ones that exchange energy with others. That’s us. We don’t live in isolation. The Sun and the stars are constant sources of energy, and every living thing in the Solar System uses energy to create order at the expense of disorder. In the thermodynamic sense, you and me and the Wolfman and Fern are all negentropic.”

“How about the other meanings of entropy? Do they make more sense for a Negentropic Man?”

“Considered in terms of information theory, the information in a message decreases when the entropy of the signal becomes less. A noisy communications channel is negentropic so far as the signal is concerned. If that’s what the Negentropic Man does, we’re not seeing signs of it. The reported random error rate for signals received in the Inner and Outer Systems doesn’t seem to have changed at all. If it did, people would be getting jumbled, gibberish messages all the time. And if that had happened, I would have heard about it.”

“And your fourth form of entropy?”

“That’s associated with the power kernels. Any black hole has a temperature, an entropy, a mass, and maybe an electrical charge. If it’s a kernel, a Kerr-Newman black hole, it also has rotational energy and a magnetic moment. And that’s all it can have—no other physical variables are permitted. A kernel sends out random particles and radiation according to a process and a formula discovered a couple of centuries ago. What it emits only depends on the kernel’s mass, charge, and spin. For a small black hole—billion-ton, say—the emitted energy is up in the gigawatt range. That’s what the kernel shields are for, to stop that radiation. The entropy depends on the mass of the black hole, but I think we can rule out this one. If Wolf’s Negentropic Man were dealing with kernels, he’d have to be a superman. Nobody could live for a second inside the shields. All you find in there are sensors, data links, and spin-up/spin-down equipment for energy storage and generation. Here.” He had thrust a data cube into Manx’s hand. “What I’ve been saying is all basic stuff. You’ll find it explained here.”

Leo had taken the cube. Sitting alone in an outer chamber of the habitation bubble, he had played it through twice. It was beginning to make some sense, considered as a set of abstract statements. But it had little to do with the capering man who had haunted Behrooz Wolf. Manx peered at the cube, closed his eyes for a moment or two, and was asleep before he knew he was near to it. All thoughts of entropy vanished. He dreamed that he was far from here, again on Earth, again roaming the old Chehel-sotun temple in Isfahan. But this time he was in free-fall, unhampered by that crushing gravity. He could not have chosen a more welcome dream.

Sylvia Fernald had the greatest need for total privacy. She was talking to Cinnabar Baker through a hyperbeam link. It was voice-only, hugely expensive to operate, and there was still an annoying thirty-second line delay before a reply could be received.

“You must return to the harvester,” Baker was saying. “All of you, and at once. There are developments here that dwarf the space farm’s problems. How soon can you leave?”

“I’ll have to go and tell the others.” Sylvia replied immediately, but she could imagine Baker at the other end, chafing at the transmission delay. “So far as Leo and I are concerned, we can leave at once. But Aybee and Wolf are reviewing the farm’s data bases. That may take a while.”

There was a pause that felt more like half an hour than half a minute. “You can’t wait for that.” It was the voice of command. “When you get back here, you’ll understand why. Leave now, as soon as you can. I’ll explain when you get here. One more thing. Have you been able to get closer to Wolf?”

“Not in the way you mean.” But somehow I got turned on watching him eating, Sylvia recalled. Would you call that progress? Fortunately it was a voice-only link. Sylvia was sure her face would have betrayed her—if her voice was not already doing that. “I’ll see what happens on the way back,” she said. “But I’m not optimistic. I’m sure he finds me as revolting to look at as I find him. And Leo told me Wolf is still infatuated with a woman he left on Earth.”

There was a final annoying delay. “He didn’t leave her on Earth,” Cinnabar Baker said at last. “She left him, to run off with somebody from the Halo. Big difference. Keep trying. Link ends.”

New problems on the harvester, Sylvia thought. What’s happening to the Solar System? It’s one damned thing after another.

She hurried out of the room. She was heading for Bey’s quarters in the higher-gravity region of the habitation bubble when the impact occurred.

Chapter 13

No recording instruments on the Sagdeyev space farm survived the impact. The whole encounter had to be deduced from other evidence.

The object hit the southern hemisphere of the habitation bubble, close to the pole. It was a jagged brown chunk of the primitive solar nebula, mostly ammonia and water ice, and it massed about eighty million tons. With a relative velocity of a kilometer a second, it smashed clear through the bubble and emerged from the side of the northern hemisphere. It also missed by thirty meters a collision with the shields of the power kernel and so failed to assure the immediate death of all humans on the farm.

The momentum that the impact transferred to the habitation bubble did three things. It broke the bubble loose from the farm’s billion-kilometer collection layer. It left the bubble with a new velocity vector and a new orbit, sharply inclined to its old one. And it set the bubble spinning around the central power kernel as it caromed away into space.

Two thousand machines were left behind on the detached collection layer. After the first confusion they managed very well. The smarter ones herded the others into tight little groups, then settled down to wait for instructions or rescue. Whether that took place in one day or in one century made little difference. The smart machines knew enough to keep things under control for a long time. Not one of the two thousand was damaged.

The humans on the farm were less lucky. Four of the farmers were in chambers on the direct path of the intruding body. They died at once. Two others were left in airless rooms and could not reach suits. The rest of the farmers followed the standard emergency procedure and were into the lifeboats and clear of the bubble in less than a minute.

The visitors from the harvester were both more and less fortunate. Their chambers were not on the main line of the collision, and the impact was felt at first as no more than a short-lived and violent jerk of acceleration. Leo Manx, Sylvia Fernald, and Aybee Smith did not know the emergency routines specific to the farm, but they had been trained to react defensively. High acceleration of a habitation unit equaled disaster. They did not wait to see if the integrity of the bubble’s outer hulls had been breached. As soon as they picked themselves up after the first shock of collision, they headed for the survival suits. They could live in them for at least twenty-four hours. Aybee had a mild concussion. Leo had five cracked ribs and a broken leg, but his deep-space training allowed him to override the pain until he was safe in his suit.

Bey Wolf was in much deeper trouble. His room was closest to the line of destruction. Worse than that, he lacked the right reflexes. He knew there had been a major accident, but he had to attempt by thought what the others did by instinct.

He had been thrown headfirst and hard against the communications terminal. Drops of blood from deep cuts on his cheek and forehead were already drifting across the room when he came to full consciousness. His head was ringing, and he was nauseated. He wiped at his face with his shirt and staggered to the door. It was closed. Beyond it he heard a hiss of air, and he could feel the draft at the door’s edge.

The sliding partition was tight-fitting but not airtight. He had maybe a couple of minutes before the pressure dropped too low to be breathable. Just as bad, a faint plume of green gas was seeping into the room, and the slightest trace was enough to start him coughing. Wall refrigeration pipes must have ruptured. He might choke before he died of lack of air.

Suits. Where the devil were they kept? Bey hauled himself across to the storage units on the other side of the room. He jerked them open, one after another. Everything from chess boards to toothbrushes spilled out. No suit.

He caught another whiff of gas, coughed horribly, and mopped again at his bleeding face. What now? Where else might a suit be kept? Don’t panic. Think!

He realized that if the data terminal were still working, it could tell him what he needed to know in a couple of seconds. He was moving across to it when the knock came on the door.

The sound was so unexpected that for a moment he did not react at all. Then he had a terrible thought. If someone out there in a suit were to try to come in…

“Don’t touch the door!” he shouted, but already his voice sounded fainter in the thinning air. Asphyxiation, not poison gas, would get him. He was aware of pain in his ears and the cramping agony of trapped gas being forced out of his intestines.

“Bey?” The cry from outside was muffled. It was Sylvia. “Bey, can you hear me?”

“Yes. Don’t open the door.”

“I know. Do you have a suit?”

“Can’t find it.”

“By the data terminal. In the footlocker.”

He did not waste air replying. The suit was there, but he had to fight his way into it. He was growing dizzy, panting uselessly. He got his legs and arms in and pulled the suit up around his shoulders. But the helmet was too much. He concentrated all his attention on the smooth head unit and managed to place it roughly in position. But he could not seal it. Anoxia was winning. The room was turning dark. At the edge of unconsciousness, Bey realized how much he wanted to live.

He was fighting the seals—and losing—when there was a crash behind him and a rush of escaping air. His lungs collapsed as the pressure dropped to zero. When Sylvia arrived at his side he was almost unconscious, still groping single-mindedly at the helmet. She slapped it into position and turned the valve. The rush of air inside the suit began.

She bent to look into the faceplate. Bey’s face was a mottled nightmare of fresh red blood and cyanotic blue skin. As she watched, the oxygen-starved look faded. The chest of the suit gave a series of shuddering heaves. Alive. Sylvia grabbed Bey’s suited arm and began to drag him. She had come at once, as soon as her suit was on, and she did not know the cause of the problem. Another crash or explosion might happen at any moment. Like any Cloudlander, she fled for the safety of open space.

The exit wound of the colliding chunk provided the widest and easiest way out. Sylvia and Bey accompanied a mass of flotsam, flying out into space with the last puff of internal air from the bubble.

Bey was unconscious. Sylvia, shaking with exhaustion, held him tightly and looked around them. The collection layer of the farm had been left far behind. The surviving farmers had moved their lifeboat close to the shattered bubble, and half a dozen of them were preparing to reenter through an air lock. They had a clear duty toward their missing fellows: rescue or space burial.

Sylvia could see the ship that she and Bey had arrived on. It floated a few kilometers clear of the bubble, apparently undamaged, its warning beacons a red glow against the stars. She was not sure that she had the strength to get there. She set out, dragging Bey along with her. When she was nearly there she saw a suited figure jetting across to help her. It was Aybee.

“Leo?” she asked.

“Inside. Banged up, but not too bad.” Aybee took over and hauled Bey along behind him. “How’s with the Wolfman here?”

“Hurt some.” She was shivering. “He should be all right. Where’s our other ship?”

Aybee waved his arm through a wide circle. “You tell me. The beacon’s not working. I don’t know how we’ll ever find it.”

As he passed Bey through the lock, Sylvia took a last look around. There was no sign of the ship Aybee had arrived in. It was lost somewhere in the darkness, indistinguishable from a million other pieces of stellar flotsam.

She collapsed as she stepped out of the air lock. In the past twenty minutes she had forced her body all the way to its physical limits. Any more help for Bey Wolf would have to come from someone else.

Bey woke up three times.

Pain was the first stimulus. Someone was hurting his face, stabbing again and again at his cheek and forehead. “A bit crude,” a voice said. “But it’ll do. Couple more stitches, I’ll be all done. You’re a mess. You hearing me, Wolfman? No beauty prizes for you.” The sharp pain came again, followed by a wash of icy fluid across his face. Bey grunted in protest and drifted back to unconsciousness.

The second time was more alarming. And more painful. He woke and tried to touch his throbbing left cheek. He could not do it. Something had him firmly held, unable to move. He began to struggle, to pull randomly against his restraints. He was too confused and dizzy to analyze what was happening or why, but he fought like an animal, straining as hard as he could. It was futile. He was working against straps designed to hold a human body secure under a ten-g acceleration. Exhausted after just a few seconds, he lapsed again into unquiet sleep.

Pain and consciousness came faster the third time, and with them—at last—vision. He was lying with his eyes open, staring at a woman’s face. It was only inches away from him, pale and still. There was a tracery of blue veins on the temples and the violet-black smudge of deadly fatigue below the closed eyes. He studied it, puzzled by its familiarity. Who was she? That rounded brow was well known to him. He tried to lift his arm to touch the delicate skull and the fine red hair. He could not do it. They were strapped side by side, lying on a single narrow bunk and securely held in position.

As he placed his fingers on the release mechanism of his harness, awareness returned. And with it, fear. He remembered. Violent impact. The panicky hunt for a suit. The fight for air. Sylvia’s appearance at his side just as that fight was lost.

He had a vague, surrealistic memory then of the nightmare ride through space, stars blurred points through a bloodstained visor.

“Sylvia!” She did not move.

Bey struggled free and sat up. He was again on the transit ship, and the McAndrew drive was on. They were moving with an indicated acceleration of a couple of hundred g’s. He was lying in the same bunk with Sylvia Fernald. On the other bunk, strapped in and wrapped like a cocoon from neck to ankles, lay Leo Manx. As Bey straightened up, Leo’s eyes rolled toward him.

“Where’s Aybee?” Bey asked.

“I don’t know. But the last time I saw him he was all right.” Leo turned his head slowly and gingerly. “It is Sylvia I have been worrying about. I cannot move, and I cannot see her monitors. How is she?”

Bey scanned the condition sensors, supplementing that with his own touch to her cheek and forehead. “Out cold, but everything shows normal. What happened to her? And to you, too? And where’s Aybee? And where are we heading?”

“Mr. Wolf, I am sure you can ask more questions than I can answer.” Leo Manx’s silky voice was gruff. He was either in much pain or terribly ill at ease. “I’ll do my best. Sylvia Fernald made a supreme physical effort when she saved you, but it was too much for her. She collapsed as she reached the ship. At my suggestion and with the medical system’s concurrence, Aybee extended her natural period of unconsciousness. She should sleep until we are close to the Marsden Harvester—our planned destination, where we should now find Cinnabar Baker. What was not my suggestion—” Leo Manx grimaced with displeasure and then with pain. “—was the idea that I would be bound here like an Egyptian mummy, unable to release myself. If you would be kind enough to free the harness…”

“What happened to you?”

“Broken ribs and broken legs. Aybee exceeded his duties and his authority when he anesthetized me and then did this.”

Bey moved to examine the telesensors for Leo Manx, spent a few seconds with the displays, and shook his head. “Sorry. The monitors agree with Aybee. You stay like that until it tells me something different. You should not move.”

“Mr. Wolf, I assure you that I am quite able to—”

“Don’t take my word for it. Try a deep breath.” Bey watched as Manx tentatively inhaled and gasped with pain. “Case closed. What about Aybee?”

Manx rolled his eyes toward the tiny console crowded against the cabin wall. Everything on the transit ships was a third the usual size. “It was my expectation that he would be with us on this ship. Clearly, he is not. But according to the signal there, a message is waiting for us. I have been looking at the indicator for some time, but unfortunately I cannot reach it.”

Bey went across to turn on the unit. As he did so he saw his own reflection in the display screen. Whatever Aybee’s talents, plastic surgery was not one of them. Bey’s face and forehead were crisscrossed with crude, ugly stitches, and the skin on his left cheek had been pulled down so far that the red socket of his eye was exposed. There was no chance that such a mess would heal cleanly. He would have to use one of the Cloudland form-change tanks. He switched on the set.

Aybee’s image showed no sign of either excitement or injury. He scowled out of the display like a bad-tempered baby. “I don’t know which of you will be watching this, but hi. If it’s you, Leo, I didn’t lie to you. I intended to come along as well. But the ship was awful crowded once I had you in your bunks, and with those ribs I knew you wouldn’t enjoy anybody cuddling up close to you, the way Sylv and the Wolfman were doing last time I saw ’em. So.” He shrugged. “I had to change my mind. And I haven’t found any trace of the other ship. I’ll look again, but if I’m delayed getting back there, don’t be surprised. Here’s a few things for you to chew on. First, the female farmer we talked to. She’s dead. We’ll never get any more about that woman she saw walking on the collection layer. Second, the farm can be saved, but the data banks are shot. So you should drop the idea that we can correlate the form-change problems with events on the farm and the collection layer. I was doing that when the bubble was hit, and I’ll tell you the only thing I’d noticed. The form-changes starting to go wrong coincided with a doubling of energy use on the farm. That fact’s for Wolf—you there, Wolfman?—and I hope you can make more out of it than I can. Bet you can’t, though. Here’s my last thought, and it’s for anybody who wants it. From all I can tell, the bubble was hit by a Cloud fragment, one that was traveling unusually fast and from an unusual direction. Bad luck, you say? Except that the farm had sky-scanning sensors, and the bubble had a standard response system. That fragment ought to have been given a little laser nudge when it was millions of kilometers away, and missed us by a nice margin.”

He smiled from the screen, a humorless grin. “Now, I know what you’re thinking, Leo. It’s old paranoid Aybee, at it again. But try it on the Wolfman—he thinks more the way I do. And while he worries that, here’s one more thing for you. The equipment that protected the farm from space junk is the same type as we use on all the harvesters. Foolproof, triple-tested, infallible. If the farm can get hit, so can anything else. Nice thought, eh? Sweet dreams, you three. Think entropy.”

The screen blanked. As it did so, the system alert inside the ship’s cabin sounded its warning beep. They were close to crossover, the place where the ship rotated through 180 degrees, and they changed from acceleration to deceleration. For that thirty-second period, they needed to be strapped in.

Bey headed for the bunk, lying down again alongside Sylvia. As he did so, Leo Manx gave a gasp of irritation. “Mr. Wolf! Don’t let it do that.”

A spray syringe was creeping out of its holder above Manx and quietly positioning itself close to his neck.

Bey paused from his strapping in and checked the monitors. “Don’t worry. It’s only an anesthetic. Apparently the robodoc thinks you’re being too active.”

“But I have no wish to go to sleep, Mr. Wolf. Stop it!”

“Sorry. Can’t disobey doctor’s orders.” Bey lay back on the narrow bunk, squashed up next to Sylvia Fernald. He watched as the spray mist passed painlessly through Leo Manx’s skin and the other man fell asleep in mid-protest.

Bey liked Leo and enjoyed talking to him. But at the moment he needed time to chew on what Aybee had said. If he had been allowed one guess as to something that might correlate with the deaths in the form-change tanks, he would have picked sabotage—something in the software on the farm’s central computer complex. That fit the idea that feedback information was being tampered with or supplied incorrectly. What he would never have picked in a hundred guesses was the farm’s total energy load. In fact, he could see no way that it could be involved.

He felt fully awake. His aches and pains were unpleasant, and there was a disturbing buzzing in his ears. But he could stand that. He lay back in the bunk, ready for a long, intense session of thought. By the time he saw the anesthetic syringe at his neck it was too late.

“Hey! No. I don’t need—” Like Leo Manx, Bey fell asleep in mid-protest.

Bey had checked Sylvia’s condition and Leo Manx’s, but not his own. He believed he was doing fine. The transit ship’s computer disagreed. It knew that Wolf should have been safely asleep and resting, but it also understood that he was unlikely to obey a computer command. The machine had waited for crossover, knowing that Wolf would then have to return to his bunk. Then, satisfied once more with the physical condition of all three passengers, the computer turned to other matters. At its direction the speeding ship passed through crossover point and raced on for the second half of its journey to the Marsden Harvester.

The computer was justly proud of its performance. It encountered hardware problems so seldom that the automatic error-correcting codes were called on only a couple of times a year. Error checking and correction were completely automatic. No human realized it, but the ship’s rate of signal-error generation was less than a thousandth of that of the computers on the Marsden Harvester—and less than a millionth of the rate for the now-destroyed computer on the Sagdeyev space farm.

Chapter 14

Conflict between the Inner and Outer Systems was a battle between a cat and a kestrel, between a lion and an eagle. Each could hurt the other—perhaps fatally. But neither could possess the other’s territory, or rationally want to do so. Fifty million people might annihilate twenty billion, but they could never subjugate them. No sane Cloudlander desired to live crowded into the Sun and the inner planets. And despite their enormous superiority in numbers, twenty billion could never control the sparse and infinitely dispersed inhabitants of the Cloud, constantly drifting outward, always farther from the Sun. No member of the United Space Federation could stand the cold, open space of the Cloud.

War was senseless. And yet war came creeping steadily closer. Its presence could be seen and felt—in the angry faces of people on the harvesters, in the hoarding of food supplies and metals, in the false confidence and self-righteousness of the government speeches, and in the tense warning notes that flew between the Inner and Outer Systems.

Cinnabar Baker felt it better than anyone. She was officially responsible for the operation and maintenance of the harvesters, but that position carried an additional duty as head of system security. It made Baker, the Most junior of the three people who ruled the Cloud, also the most powerful.

A couple of thousand staff members on her payroll sent back official reports from locations in the Cloud. Twice that number, scattered through the Inner System and the Halo, provided Baker’s unofficial information network. If someone sneezed on Ceres and that sneeze might mean bad news for the Cloud, Cinnabar Baker wanted to know about it.

Bey Wolf had watched the big woman in action and asked himself: What makes Cinnabar run? The easy answer was the official one. She worked enormously hard directing the harvesters, and that work gave her satisfaction. But the innermost depth of Cinnabar Baker, the invisible place where the ego is so delicate that a feather’s touch will bruise it, lay elsewhere. She loved and cherished her secret security operation. The network was her eyes and ears. She would do anything to keep it in place. Yet even that was not her secret pride. When word drifted in through the grapevine of an impending disaster at the Sagdeyev space farm, she could not compromise her sources. There might be a chain of a dozen informants involved, each with his own unreliability quotient and each with his own cover. Everyone had to be protected. No details had been available, no statement of how or when an “accident” might be expected. Cinnabar Baker had a choice: she could ignore the rumblings of her own intelligence net, or she could recall Leo Manx and the others from important work.

She had chosen to send that urgent recall message, but the news of the farm’s destruction had not yet reached her. The farmers were too reclusive a group to offer frequent messages. Silence was not significant. She had no way of knowing that they were struggling to devise a makeshift communications link from the remains of the old one.

Baker had the habit of returning to her office after the evening meal, clearing her desk, and starting in again to work as though it were the dawn of a new day. She had arrived at the Marsden Harvester only that morning, but now, at an hour when most humans were settling in for their three or four hours of sleep, she was beginning to sieve through the mass of printouts of the day’s incoming messages.

She had three types of informant. There were the ones she had carefully planted over the years, reliable Cloudlanders who knew what she needed and who understood how to screen important information from rumors and rubbish. Baker took any inputs from them seriously.

The paid informants were another matter. Loyal to no one, they tended to send her any old garbage, hoping that it might somehow be worth money. Their input had to be looked at hard, and almost everything was discarded or given little weight.

Then there were the revolutionaries. Small groups within the Inner System were working for the overthrow of their own government, and they were willing to form alliances with the Outer System in order to do it. They provided information free, and would be outraged at any suggestion of payment. Cinnabar Baker worked with them and used their input. But she had no illusions about their value. Most of her informants on Earth or Mars preached the overthrow of the United Space Federation, but they would never live in the Cloud or the Halo. Worse than that, they saw every event through the distorting lens of their own paranoia.

Cinnabar Baker had inspected Bey Wolf very carefully during their first meeting. Wolf’s reputation for intelligence and insight was extremely high. But Leo Manx had told of a self-destructive, hallucinating man, obsessed with a former lover. That fit the pattern of an Inner System paranoid, one who might someday be converted to form part of her recruited group of unpaid informants.

She had dropped that thought in the first fifteen minutes of their meeting. Wolf was too strong and too skeptical, too cold and analytical. He could not be manipulated in the usual ways.

But there were also unusual ways. At the end of that first meeting Cinnabar Baker had set a high-priority trace on the whereabouts of Mary Walton. So far, she had two things. The first was a recent poor-quality photograph of Mary Walton standing with her arm around the waist of a stern-faced man. Even in that faded image, his eyes were the commanding orbs of a fanatic, blazing out of the picture. Scribbled on the back of the photograph were the coordinates of a location in the Kernel Ring, accompanied by a question mark.

Those coordinate strings had been noted as a place for future investigation, but not as a high-priority item. Baker had no idea how she might use any information on Mary Walton, but patience and foresight were two of her main strengths. She would never admit she was willing to work with anyone and anything to achieve her goals, but she would have found it hard to name a group she would reject.

That night there were ninety messages for her review. Half of them had come from official news reports, the rest from her own network. With Turpin crooning on her shoulder, his black head bobbing or tucked away under one shabby wing, she set to work.

Outer System first—she was not naive enough to believe that informants were needed only for the Inner System and the Halo. Most messages were simple statements of production or equipment problems. She skimmed through them, doing no more than confirm that the pattern of the past year was still present. The Outer System was going to hell. Navigation systems were failing, cargo transit vessels from the Inner System did not arrive, power systems were unstable or running close to failure, harvesters failed their quality control tests, communications were suffering inexplicable glitches, and cargo packages that dropped Solward from the Cloud were disappearing on the way. Aybee had done an analysis for her and had confirmed what she knew instinctively. What they were seeing was far outside the limits of statistical reasonableness.

In the mind of most of the Cloud’s population, that left only one possibility: sabotage. And as the only instigator, the Inner System. Cinnabar Baker did not agree at all. She had her own ideas as to what was going on and who was causing the trouble.

“But it’s how, Turpin. How can Ransome affect all the control systems? That’s the problem, and no one can help me with that.”

The crow made a rattling noise like a set of bone dice being shaken and stared at the sheets of paper with its head to one side. “It’s a bugger,” it said solemnly.

“Indeed it is.” Baker turned to the reports on the Inner System. The profile there had been slower to develop, lagging the pattern in the Cloud by a year or two. Now it was unmistakable to anyone who had watched events closely in both regions. It was the same story of inexplicable failure. Transit ships were disappearing, massive food shipments were failing to arrive on schedule, and power supplies had become unreliable.

And the Inner System was reacting in a predictable way. They were blaming the Outer System. There was anger, and talk of sabotage, and threats of reprisals.

Cinnabar Baker could identify three people in the whole system who knew that the Inner and Outer Systems were not sabotaging each other. She was one. Her counterpart in the Inner System, a man whom she respected enormously but whom she had never met, was another. The third was the person who was causing all the trouble.

More and more, the lines of evidence converged on the Kernel Ring and on the shadowy no-man’s-land of Ransome’s Hole. She was feeling her way toward its location, but her informants in the Ring had a habit of cutting off contact without warning. She had lost half a dozen in a few months. Her adversary seemed to know everything she did as soon as she made up her mind to do it. She had looked unsuccessfully for the leak in her operations. She continued her efforts, assembling fragments, pulsing her web of informants, but she was still a long way from a set of coordinates for Ransome’s Hole.

And when she had them, what then? It was not clear that a direct attack would succeed or, if it did, that the sabotage would cease. Baker sighed and rubbed the poll of Turpin, who was still quietly watching her flip the pages.

“Come on, crow. We’ve earned a break.” She set down the listings and wandered off toward the door, the bird still gripping her shoulder. It was the middle of the quiet period, and every rational person was asleep. Baker met no one as she padded barefoot along half a mile of silent corridor.

As she opened the crèche door, the sounds began. Forty babies were crying, fifty more gulping and grunting as they were fed by the machines. Three hundred others were sleeping peacefully. The solitary human attendant was lying down at the end of the room, eyes closed.

Cinnabar Baker did not wake him. She did not want conversation. When she arrived at any harvester, an unheralded visit to its crèches was a high priority. To her, it was the heart of the world. She had never found a habitat where things were going well in the crèche and badly elsewhere.

She watched and listened for twenty minutes, walking along the aisles and occasionally picking up and holding one of the babies. They ranged in age from two days to two months. One newborn had been placed in a form-change tank for remedial work on a deformed limb. Baker peered in through the transparent port and checked the progress of the change. It was normal. She made a mental note to return in three days to make sure the outcome was satisfactory.

She checked the instruction monitors above each crib, noting the frequency and duration of the parents’ visits. Finally she was satisfied. She stole away, rejuvenated, ready for hours more of tedious work.

The government of the Inner System knew Cinnabar Baker as a powerful, formidable woman. They would have been little comforted to know that she happened to be sterile. She was still the biggest threat to their independence and way of life.

Perhaps they were right. But if so, it was only because she could sense full-scale war looming closer and closer. Cinnabar Baker saw herself as the secret mother of the whole system. Her children could not be allowed to fight each other, to kill each other. She would prevent that—even if the whole system had to be under her control before she could stop them.

To an inhabitant of Earth, all the harvesters were the same. They were remote, identical food factories, run by soulless machines and populated by a thin sprinkling of people.

Bey was beginning to learn the truth. Each harvester was different, as different as the separate planets and asteroids of the Inner System.

It had begun the moment they left the first air lock. He had been swathed from head to foot in flowing hospital robes that left only his eyes showing, strapped to a stretcher, and maneuvered swiftly inward from the surface. The sounds began in the first interior corridor. The Opik Harvester had been eerily quiet, but this habitat was filled with music, lush instrumental pieces that had not been heard on Earth for centuries. Each concentric set of chambers blended harmoniously into the next, even though the same work was never played in both.

Bey looked for the source of the music. It was invisible, projectors hidden behind the luxuriant green plants that climbed restlessly over walls and ceiling. He recognized them. They were an adaptation, a variant on the free-space vacuum vines popular in the Asteroid Belt.

And then there were the people. The ones he had met on the other harvester had been furious—angry at the Inner System in general and at Bey in particular. They had resented his presence enough to want to fight him.

The Marsden Harvester’s population did not show rage. They stank with fear. The people he saw as he was hurried through the corridors gave him not a second look. They were afraid, preoccupied with other matters, and most surprising of all, many of them were sick or deformed.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sylvia said after they had moved past a group of agitated people. “This is the oldest of the harvesters, and usually it’s the most peaceful. They’re all scared.”

“They look terrible.”

“They do.” She turned to face him. “And so do you. Those cuts on your face are bleeding again. I’d take you right to the form-change tanks with Leo, but Cinnabar Baker wants to see you first.”

“It’s mutual.” Bey had been brooding over one fact since he had woken in the transit ship. According to Sylvia, it was Cinnabar Baker’s order for an emergency departure from the space farm that had given Sylvia enough lead time to save them. “I have a question for Baker.”

They had left the clean, open corridors of the harvester’s periphery and were plunging on toward the center of the main sphere. The region they were in had been built before mastery of construction without metals had been fully achieved. The vines were absent, and the chambers were shabby past hope of disguise. The walls sagged inward, the floor was wrinkled and blackened, and hairlike outgrowths of hydrocarbon filament blurred the clean outline of lighting units and ventilators. To Bey it was oddly comforting. It reminded him of Earth’s familiar run-down cities.

Cinnabar Baker’s apartment was the one point of constancy. It was identical to the bland chambers she had occupied before, with plain furniture and drab beige walls. Turpin was perched on the back of a chair, as dusty and disheveled-looking as ever. The crow greeted the newcomers with a sinister muttering.

“Don’t mind Turpin. He’s been in a bad mood since we got here.” Baker took a hard look at Sylvia, then at Bey’s mangled face. She gestured to the gray chairs. “Ten minutes, Mr. Wolf, that’s all I need. Then we’ll get you to a form-change tank for remedial treatment—if you still want to go there.”

“More problems?”

“And worse ones. Did you meet any people as you came here?”

“Dozens of them.”

“So you know how they look. Do you know what’s wrong with them?”

Bey shrugged. “Obviously, they’re not using the form-change tanks. And some of the people I saw appeared old. They need treatment—soon.”

“You didn’t see the worst cases. The population of this harvester has the highest average age of any group in the Outer System.”

“Then you have an emergency. Some of the people I saw won’t last more than a couple of weeks. Why won’t they use the tanks?”

“They’re afraid to.” Baker passed a card across to Bey. “Those are the statistics for the performance of form-change equipment on this harvester. I headed here as soon as I saw the figures. We’re facing a ten percent failure rate—many of them leading to death. Some of the units are going wrong three-quarters of the time, and the results are hideous. People won’t go near a tank, and it’s hard to blame them.” She frowned at Bey. “Mr. Wolf, why are you smiling? There is nothing funny in this.”

“Sorry.” What Bey was feeling was not humor. It was relief. “If I was smiling, it’s because I can finally do something to justify my presence.”

“Do you know what’s wrong?”

“Not yet. But I will in a few days.”

Both women were staring at him in perplexity. He realized that a smile on his stitched and battered face must be a gruesome sight.

“What we faced before were intermittent faults,” he went on. “One in a million faults. That kind are almost impossible to track down. You can set up test procedures and observe for years, but you may never run across anything wrong while you’re actually watching. Now we’re in a different situation. I can set up monitors on a few tanks and be sure I’ll find something on at least one of them in a reasonable time. Give me a day or two.”

“Can you correct the problem?” Baker’s face showed her own relief. “I know it’s early to ask that, but we need to tell people something.”

“If I can find it, I can fix it. And I’m pretty sure I’ll find it.”

“How?” Sylvia looked at Baker. “I don’t want to be the pessimist, but we have to know how he does it. Bey has to go into a form-change tank himself in a little while.”

She was worried about him. Bey Wolf’s surprise was genuine. He had lived with form-change equipment for so long, it had never occurred to him that someday he might die with it. In that one area he was completely confident. “I’ll tell you just what I’m going to do. It’s no big mystery, and once you understand it, you can do it, too. I’m sure the form-change problems are software, not hardware—we established that on the space farm. We’ll use a diagnostic program that exits the form-change program after every major step and performs a status check. When we find a software inconsistency, we run a ferret routine to trace it back to the block of instructions that produced it.”

“Is it easy?”

“It’s routine. It’s exactly what BEC does when they are testing a radically new form. I’ll show you how it’s done. But before we do that”—Sylvia was standing up—“I have a request.”

Cinnabar Baker nodded politely. Bey knew that she would have preferred him to get right down to work on the form-change process.

“You sent Sylvia an urgent message telling us all to leave the farm,” he said. “Why did you do that? If it was just to get me back here to look at form-change problems, why drag Aybee and Leo Manx back, too? They still had things to do on the farm.”

“Mr. Wolf, if you ever tire of the Inner System, there is a position for you in the Cloud.” Cinnabar Baker nodded slowly. “You are very astute. I had a warning—a tip-off—that something bad was going to happen to the farm. The farmers themselves would ignore any request to leave, but it would have been criminal to leave the four of you there without warning.”

“You were told that we were all in danger?”

“No. I was warned on your behalf, specifically. It was my conclusion that you were all at risk.”

“Who told you? I suppose that you have a network of your own—people who serve as your informants, pass on to you rumors and gossip.”

Sylvia looked uneasy at his comment, but Baker nodded again, her manner relaxed. “I do. Naturally, it is not something that we advertise.”

“Does it work both ways—to spread information and questions through the system as well as collecting answers?”

“Only too well.” Baker paused for a moment, looking around. “It may be happening now. I am not the only one who uses informers. Secret information leaks from my office so quickly that others often seem to know it before my own staff.”

“That’s fine. I want something spread as widely as possible, and I want it spread as a rumor.”

“It can be done. What is it, Mr. Wolf?”

“I want you to get out the word that I was killed in the accident on the Sagdeyev space farm.”

“Easy enough to do. But why do you want it?”

“Protective paranoia. Someone was after me when I was on Earth, trying to drive me crazy. I think they were still after me on the farm—it’s a self-indulgent idea that someone would arrange to destroy the whole farm just to get me. But I believe it, and I think you do. If they know I’m here and still working for you, they’ll keep trying. The safest person is a dead man.”

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

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

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

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

Chapter 15

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

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

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

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

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

With so much debris of all shapes and sizes, the only hope of identification was through the data cube’s reflectance spectrum. He selected the spectral signature for a data cube, set up a spatial survey for it, and settled down to wait. While the scan was being performed, he finaly had time to look around.

And to gasp.

If he had been less busy, he might have noticed it hours earlier. A dark oblong stretched across a quarter of the sky, hiding the bright starfield. He cut in his low-light sensors and saw it at once as a massive cargo craft, drifting closer with unlit ports and with its drive off. It was the type used to carry food shipments from the Cloud to the Inner System, a low-acceleration ellipsoidal hull over a kilometer long and six hundred meters across. It felt close enough to touch.

Aybee did not consider for one moment that it might be a rescue vessel. The approaching shape was too dark and lifeless. He floated himself across to a tangle of ruined cabin furniture and set himself in the middle of it.

The hulk approached within two hundred meters of the battered habitation bubble. A dark port opened, and a file of suited figures emerged. Their suits were bulky, ending in a characteristic flared and massive lower section. That solid base contained low- and high-thrust jets; power supply; food, air, and water recycling systems; medical facilities; exercise units; and communications equipment. At the wearer’s command, the flared bottom would open out to a thin-walled twenty-meter sphere, or couple with one or more other suits to form a common living volume.

Only one group used suits like that. Podders!

But these were Podders many billions of kilometers away from their usual haunts in the Halo. They were entering the dimly lit habitation bubble, passing to the interior through the gaping hole near the south pole. The bubble was on emergency power, but it was still far brighter than the dark cargo ship.

What was it doing here? It was inconceivable to Aybee that anything valuable was left on the farm, even including the machines and metals on the collection layer. And the Podders were showing no interest in those.

While he watched, another port in the cargo vessel began to dilate. It was huge, an opening nearly forty meters across in the end of the ship nearest the bubble. He stared at it, waiting for something to emerge.

It was completely free of the ship before he knew it was there, and then he did not see it. All he saw was a circling array of electromagnets. At their center sat a moving sphere of blackness, drifting slowly under their control toward the habitation bubble.

It was a kernel, totally shielded by electromagnetic baffles. At the center of that dark sphere sat a tiny, billion-ton Kerr-Newman black hole, its fierce sleet of radiation and particles balked and turned back on itself by the triple shields. The kernel had been halted. It hovered, stationary with respect to the bubble, and waited. The bubble’s own main port was opening. Finally a second sphere of aching black emerged from the gaping port, its position controlled by surrounding electromagnets.

Aybee watched in amazement as the two drifting spheres changed places. The shielded kernel from the farm finally vanished into the cargo hull, and after a few minutes the new kernel was jockeyed into place by the bubble’s port. It was nudged on down into the interior.

Aybee was bursting with curiosity. He nestled down into the tangle of space junk surrounding him and inched the whole assembly gently forward until he could see into the bubble’s open port. He peered out through the mess of shattered furniture.

The kernel was replacing the one that had been removed. Avbee had noted the status of the farm’s power kernel when he and Leo Manx had arrived. It had abundant rotational energy and was nowhere near depletion. There was no sense in replacing it—unless the Podders needed power and were swapping the kernel from the bubble for a dead one from their cargo ship.

It was a simple matter to test that idea. One look at the new kernel’s optical scalars would tell Aybee what was happening, and that was a one-minute job if carried out next to its outer shield.

The port was closing, and one by one the Podders were leaving. As the final suited figure disappeared silently into the cargo hulk, Aybee headed for the bubble.

That was the exact point where Bey Wolf would have put his hand on Aybee’s shoulder, told him to wait a moment, and asked a basic question. Where were the farmers? But Bey was billions of kilometers away. Aybee left his shelter of ramshackle cabin furniture and headed into the bubble along the gaping exit wound of the earlier impact.

The farmers and their servant machines had accomplished wonders. Already the bubble’s interior had been cleared of broken fittings. Makeshift bulkheads had stabilized the atmosphere of the interior and set up a new system of corridors that provided access to the habitable part of the bubble.

Aybee drifted down toward the bubble’s center, where he found that the new kernel had been established in place of the original one. It had plenty of available energy—according to Aybee’s recollection, almost exactly as much as the old one. The mystery was greater than ever. Why swap two identical kernels for each other?

He headed up a narrow stairway that would take him away from the kernel and toward the bubble’s outer surface. At that moment he learned that the Podders had not left permanently. Three of them waited in a tight group by an exit duct, while a fourth was leading a group of three farmers out of the bubble at gunpoint.

Aybee ducked back into the shelter of the stairway and reviewed his options. He could wait, hoping that the Podders were finally done and were all leaving. Or he could take more positive action, heading out through the entrance wound created by the impact of the ice fragment.

The disadvantages of both ideas were easy to catalog. His hiding place was completely exposed to anyone who wandered by, and the way down to the kernel was a dead end. If the Podders wanted to be sure they had all the farmers, they would not overlook the surface of the kernel shields. On the other hand, he had no idea what might be waiting in the other direction. The Podders had first entered the bubble there, and some of them could be there again.

Bey Wolf would have waited. He was a great believer in putting off decisions, which he dignified as “keeping open all his options.”

Aybee could not do that; he had too nervous a nature. After at most a minute he was hugging the side of the tunnel and creeping away toward the surface of the bubble. He was careful to look at the way ahead and turn every few seconds to make sure that he was safely out of sight of the four Podders behind him. He was doing that at the exact moment when a fifth Podder, also looking the other way, emerged from a narrow gap in the wall and ran right into him.

The suited figure did not bother to speak. He waved the gun he was holding at Aybee and gestured him forward.

Aybee could take a hint. He nodded and moved off along the tunnel toward the outer surface. The radio silence he had been observing earlier seemed pointless. Aybee scanned for the frequency the Podders were using and turned his suit to transmission.

“What are you going to do with me?”

The figure behind him grunted with surprise. Aybee realized it was a woman. “I thought you people didn’t talk to anybody,” she said. “None of your buddies said a word.”

She thinks I’m a farmer, thought Aybee. But if I play that part too well, she won’t tell me anything.

He grunted. “We don’t talk much. But this is an emergency.”

“Don’t talk much and don’t listen much, either.” The Podder sounded disgusted. “I’m not going through all that spiel again. Do as you’re told, and don’t give us any trouble, and you’ll be well treated. If you start cutting up, you’ll find you’re six to a cell.”

The ultimate threat for a farmer. Aybee did not like the sound of it too much himself—he still had memories of the cramped trip to the Sagdeyev space farm with Leo Manx.

“Where are you taking me?”

“Are you deaf? Wait a minute.” She moved around in front of Aybee and peered in through his faceplate. “I haven’t seen you before. We didn’t get you the first time through. Where were you?”

“Outside.”

“And you came back in?” The Podder gestured him forward again. “Well, now I’ve seen everything. You were safe out in space, and you came back in. How dumb can you get?”

Aybee had three good reasons not to answer. First, he assumed it was a rhetorical question. Second, he had to agree in this case with the Podder’s implied comment on his brains. He had been safe outside, where all he needed to do was wait for the Podder’s ship to go away. Then he could have spent the next month inside the bubble, if that was what he felt like doing.

And third, he did not need to fish for more information about the Podders’ immediate plans for him. He could guess them. They were close to the great hulk of the cargo ship, and a hatch was gaping open. With the woman close behind, Aybee drifted into the gloomy interior. He wondered how long it would be before anyone on the harvesters even noticed he was missing.

Chapter 16

Every emergence was different.

Bey came out of this one dry-mouthed, wobble-legged, and furious. He knew the form-change process better than anyone. He could tell when parameters had been changed from their original settings, even when he was the subject, and this time he knew he had been through a lot more than simple tissue restoration.

The door of the tank sprang open, and he looked out. Sylvia Fernald was sitting by the control board, staring at him.

He roared with rage, a horrible squeal of unfamiliar vocal cords. “What the hell have you been doing to me?” The ionic balance of his body was still adjusting, and the chemical rush of anger was strong enough to propel him forward out of the tank in one movement. “Don’t try to lie. You’ve been meddling and you know it.”

“You call it meddling when somebody tries to help you?” She stood her ground. “I’ve just saved you. You’d have been cut to bits as soon as people in the harvester knew you were here. No one from Earth is safe now.”

“I can look after myself.” Bey tried to gesture in anger, but his fist would not close. His body felt terrible, a bad size, a distorted shape. “A form-change like that—you could have killed me.”

“I studied the change very carefully. It’s a standard type of form for the Outer System.”

“I didn’t need a change.”

“Wrong/ You need a change. More than a change—you need a damned keeper. I’ve had it with you, and I don’t care what Baker wants.” Sylvia stood up. “You’re an idiot, Bey Wolf, you know that? You come out here, an Earther, and you think you’re God’s gift to the Cloud.” She gripped him hard by the arm and pulled him along the room. He stumbled after her, still too weak to put up more than token resistance. She halted by the door at the end of the room. “Take a look there. What do you see?”

Bey found himself in front of a full-length mirror. He was facing a nightmare, naked and thin as a skeleton, tall and stooped as a praying mantis. All the muscles had gone from his arms and legs, leaving ugly tendons and sticks of bone that ended in taloned hands and feet. His rib cage jutted like a dry wooden frame under tautly stretched parchment. The hair was gone from his head and body, and his browless eyes glared demented out of hollow sockets. His hairless genitals looked vulnerable and ridiculous. He stood frozen, his skull-head mouth gaping open.

“What do you see?” She had gone on shouting at him, but he had not even heard her. “What do you see?”

“You did this to me!” He shook his arm loose. “You’re insane. You’ve turned me into a monster. I’ve got to get back in the tank, make this right again.”

“No!” She stood in front of him, blocking his movement, and he realized how tall he had become. They were suddenly eye to eye. “It’s time you learned something, Behrooz Wolf—if you’re still able to learn anything at all. I don’t know what you see, but I’ll tell you what I see, and it’s the way everyone thinks in the Outer System.”

She stepped back and swept him from head to toe with a searing glare. As his anger had calmed, hers had grown. “I see a passable-looking man for the first time since I met you. A man I would be pleased to know, a man whose company I might even enjoy. Not a damned monkey. Not a squat, hairy toad. Not a hirsute, jowly, Sun-sucking midget that no normal woman would be seen dead with. And yes, I did it to you. And no, I’m not sorry I did it. I sat by that damned tank for a hundred straight hours to make sure nothing was going wrong with the change I keyed in. And yes, I knew what I was doing. And no, I don’t expect you to appreciate it. You’re too graceless, too selfish, too self-obsessed, too wrapped up in your self-superior idea that anything from the Inner System has to be good and right.” She was screaming at him. “So damn you, Bey Wolf. If you want to get back into that tank, go ahead. I won’t stop you. And I won’t interfere when the people on the harvester grab you and spill your guts.”

Bey’s body chemistry change was complete, and his condition was stabilizing. He was beginning to feel almost normal, but he also knew that the mood swings might be far from over. He stared fascinated at his image in the mirror and shook his head. “I look like a form-change failure. Those legs—you actually programmed for those legs?”

“They’re great legs.”

“They’re revolting. Look at them! Too short, too white, too bowed.” He turned to face her. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You think I should thank you for this.”

“You should go down on your knees and kiss my hand. My God, I was doing you a favor.” She had stopped shouting at him. “You’re supposed to have brains. Use them. You asked Cinnabar Baker to announce that you had been killed on the space farm so you could explore the problem without people knowing who you were. How well would that have held up when people saw you? You had to change. I suppose you thought that you’d blend right in with the rest of us, with your ridiculous Earth body.”

“All right. But why didn’t you warn me?”

“Would you have agreed to this body if I had?”

“Never.” Now that he was not angry, Bey was feeling a bit guilty. She had sat by the tank for days, looking after him, and he could see how pale and tired she was. “But do you blame me for feeling that way? Would you have let me change you so you look like an Earthwoman?”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“Well, then. But I’ll admit it, you’re right about one thing, and I want to apologize for shouting at you. It’s an odd thought, but in this stick-insect body I will be less noticeable here.” Bey took another look at his reflection and grabbed for a robe by the door. It was suitably long and full—when he had it on he could see nothing but his hands and head. “That’s better. I’d rather not see myself. But I still wish in some ways I could get back in the tank. I don’t seem to be done.”

“Are you feeling sick?”

“Not exactly. But I’m certainly feeling a bit Plantagenetish.”

“A bit what?”

“You know. Or if you don’t, you should.” Bey held the robe tight around him, stood up as straight as he was able, and declaimed: “ ‘Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time, into this breathing world scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable, that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.’ Richard the Third. One of my all-time heroes.”

She stared at him. Finally she laughed. “My God, Leo was right. You are insane. You’re worse than Aybee. Totally crazy.”

Bey considered her statement. He was a bit light-headed, definitely that, but it was not his strongest feeling. “More like totally starving. Whatever you did to me, it left me hollow. Can I get some food?”

“We can try. And you’ll have your big test. We’ll see if you can pass—as a Cloudlander. Here, wait a minute.” Bey was all ready to head out of the door. “You’ll never pass in that outfit.”

“You all seem to dress the same. There must be a uniform near.”

“Wrong again.” Sylvia gestured at her own gray suit. “I’m still just the way we came off the ship, but I wouldn’t dream of mixing with other people here like this—or in the old uniform. You seem to think all the harvesters are the same. They’re not alike, any two of them, in either their layout or their people. This harvester is super fashion-conscious. Nobody here would be seen dead in those yellow suits we wore on the Opik Harvester. If we want to be inconspicuous, we have to follow local ways. Come with me. It’s right next door.”

The room she led him to had rack after rack of clothing, all gaudy, varied, and extreme. Bey hesitated, then shrugged. “I’ve no idea. You know how to make me blend in. Pick something.”

Within two minutes she had selected a pair of skintight peacock-blue suits with matching footwear and tall egg-shaped hats. They seemed designed to make Bey look even taller and thinner and were, in his opinion, the most ridiculous outfits he had ever seen.

He stared in disbelief at his reflection. “We can’t go out in public like this. Everyone in the harvester will laugh at us.”

“They won’t even notice. Not in this harvester.”

“But the people we saw as we came in from the ship didn’t look like this.”

“They were maintenance and operations crews. In uniform. You wouldn’t know them if you saw them off duty.”

Bey started for the door, then paused for a last look in the mirror. “Are you sure?”

“Trust me. You look quite handsome.” Sylvia tucked her arm in his and led the way. “Remember, until you get the hang of that body in low g, you let me set the pace. Pretend we’re a couple. Don’t talk much at first, and if you don’t know how to move, just let me drag you along.”

They set off along a mysterious zigzag of corridors and stairways. Bey knew he was lost within one minute; in ten minutes, he knew why the Cloudlanders had picked their preferred forms. He was shaped just right for a low-g environment. He could pivot his top-heavy body around its center of mass and use his long arms to control the direction of his movement, unhindered by excess muscle or fat. Even the air somehow smelled better, but whether that was his new physiology or his imagination he could not tell.

The hall they came to was crowded for a room on a harvester. Bey’s initial worry—that it was too public a first appearance for his new body—vanished when he saw the general behavior. A peculiar sense of panic and excitement filled the air. No one took any notice of Bey and Sylvia. A couple of hundred noisy people were milling around a dais at one end, and as Bey looked at them he felt reassured. He was one of the most conservatively dressed. Pink sequined pantaloons and curved-toe slippers competed and clashed with scarlet tunics and glittering black hose. Earth taste was nonexistent.

At a gesture from Sylvia, Bey slipped into an eating cubicle at the back of the room. Sylvia in the next cubicle was out of sight unless she stood up to look over the partition, and one-way glass in the front wall allowed both of them to see the rest of the hall. Most of the crowd was clustered around a scarecrow of a man with a blue skullcap, a long white robe, and a mask that covered the lower half of his face.

“You have a choice!” He had a muffled, booming voice, echoing from the room’s bare white walls. “I can give you a choice. If you do not like the idea of form-change, if you do not care to face the terror of the tanks, there are other ways. Ancient secrets, the mysteries of Earth’s antiquity, means of treating illness that do not depend on the use of form-change tanks.”

“Nothing good comes from Earth!” The shout came from somewhere in the throng of people.

“From today’s Earth, you are right.” The man on the platform turned to that part of the crowd. “I think we ought to destroy Earth and all the Inner System.” There was a roar of approval from the crowd. “But that does not mean that the knowledge of Old Earth is useless. All our ancestors once lived there! I have learned Earth’s old secrets.”

Bey spoke to Sylvia, busy ordering food in her cubicle from the table server. “What’s he talking about?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing. He said something about knowledge coming from ancient Earth.”

“The distilled wisdom of long-dead ages,” the booming voice was continuing. “Three hundred years ago, the knowledge that I possess was tightly held by a small group of people. When form-change came in, the need for their skills disappeared. They lost their power. Their special learning vanished. But not forever! By intense research, I and my assistants have repossessed those lost skills. We are the New Aesculapians.” He held up two clear bottles, one filled with a cloudy green liquid and the other filled with small white spheres. “Whatever your ailment, we can help you! One of these will be the answer.”

“Oh, my God.” Bey had been chewing on a bland yellow wedge of material that Sylvia had ordered. He almost choked, then spoke with his mouth full. “I never thought I’d see this.”

“What is he offering?”

“Pills and potions. Panaceas. He’s saying he’s a doctor!”

“You mean a—a physician?” Sylvia groped for the old word. “There are no such people in the Cloud.”

“Nor on Earth, anymore—there hasn’t been for two hundred years. I didn’t think there ever would be again, anywhere.” Bey was ecstatic. “Before purposive form-change was developed, there were thousands of them. They were enormously powerful, just like a priesthood. Those clothes and masks he’s wearing were their robes. I wonder he isn’t spouting the Hippocratic oath and writing prescriptions.”

“Writing what?”

“Purchase approval for chemicals. They used to treat diseases with chemicals, you know—and with surgery, too.”

“Surgery. Isn’t that cutting—”

“Right. Cutting people open. Before it was outlawed, they were allowed to do that. I hope he’s not proposing it here.”

The white-coated man was being mobbed by people shouting out their problems. He had been joined by half a dozen acolytes, who were beginning to hand out vials and packages. Sylvia opened the door of her cubicle and stepped out. “I have to tell Cinnabar Baker about this. We can’t allow it.”

“No.” Bey came out quickly to grab her sleeve and restrain her. “First we get samples, have them analyzed. I’ll bet they’re totally harmless. Come on.”

They had not finished eating, but the food and drink had been enough to produce another mood change. Bey was getting a little sleepy and extremely cheerful. He began to make his way toward the center of the crowd. Sylvia caught up with him and pushed in front. “Not you. I’ll do it. I can move easier than you. You stay right there.”

She eeled into the mass of people and returned a couple of minutes later with a bottle in one hand and a packet in the other. She held them up triumphantly, but just before she reached Bey, she halted and her expression changed. She was looking right past him.

“Here comes your real test.” She leaned close and spoke rapidly. “If you pass this one, you’re home free.”

Bey slowly turned. Heading toward them across the room was a smiling woman dressed in a cloudy dress of flaming pink. “Sylvia! I had no idea you were here.”

“I just arrived.” Sylvia squeezed the woman’s hands in both of hers, then stepped back. “Andromeda, this is Behrooz. He’s also visiting the harvester. Bey, this is an old friend of mine, Andromeda Diconis. We studied optimal control theory together, many years ago.”

“Too many. But Sylvia was always better at it than I was. That’s why I’m here, in my boring little job, while Sylvia roves the system.” The woman had taken Bey by the hand and was giving him a head-to-toe stare. Her glittering blue eyes and full mouth held an odd and unreadable expression. “Very nice clothes you have—you both have. Perfectly matched. What are you doing here?”

“Behrooz works on communications equipment,” Sylvia said before Bey could speak. “He’s an expert on it.”

“We can certainly use some of those here. Where are you from, Behrooz?”

“The Opik Harvester.”

“Ah. Such a dull place—I would never want to live there. And you are a communications expert? How impressive.” Andromeda Diconis was still holding Bey’s hand, but it was Sylvia she spoke to next. “I’m sure he is an expert on many things. But my dear Sylvia, whatever happened to your other friend? What was his name, Paul?”

“Paul Chu. I suppose you didn’t hear. He disappeared on a mission to the Halo.”

“Oh, yes, now you mention it, I did hear that. But I thought he came back. Someone here said they’d seen him just a week or two ago. Anyway, we don’t want to talk about him, do we?” Andromeda finally released Bey’s hand and reached up to straighten his collar. Her fingers ran over the hollow of his throat. “Not when you’ve been able to make new friends, Sylvia. And very attractive friends, too. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to stay here and have something to eat. Would you and Behrooz”—Bey earned a dazzling smile—“like to wait for me, and then we can all go to the concert along the corridor?”

Sylvia placed her hand firmly on Bey’s arm. “Not today. We’ve just eaten, and Bey has had a very hard day. He needs to rest now.”

“I’m sure he does. I’m sure you both do. But it’s wonderful to see you again, Sylvia, and I’ll call you tomorrow.” She reached forward and stroked Bey’s forearm. “And I really look forward to seeing you again, Behrooz. Once you’re properly rested.”

Bey tried to smile and nod, but Sylvia was already towing him off toward the exit. He waved to Andromeda Diconis and received a blown kiss in return.

“What’s the hurry?” he asked as soon as they were out of earshot. “Was I making her suspicious?”

“Not in the slightest.” Sylvia’s manner was a mixture of pleasure and irritation. “You passed perfectly. Couldn’t you tell? She’d never have acted that way if she thought for one moment that you were from the Inner System. She’s the perfect Cloudlander, looks down on everything inside the Kernel Ring. But Andromeda was all ready to eat you for breakfast.”

“If I was passing perfectly, why drag me away?” Bey rather liked the idea of being eaten for breakfast by Andromeda.

“Because Andromeda has to think that I’m jealous—the way she would be. She thinks she understands our relationship exactly, and that’s the best thing that could have happened. Andromeda’s a total bitch, but she took you at face value, as a Cloudlander. And she’s the universe’s greatest gossip. Give her a day or two, and everyone will know that I have a new companion, a man from the Opik Harvester.”

“Isn’t that dangerous? They may want to meet me.”

“She’ll tell people that I’m jealous of you and want to keep you all to myself. It’s a perfect reason to let us stay private while you work. But that’s something we’ll worry about tomorrow.”

“Uh uh.” He yawned. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Great word. Great speech. Hmmm.”

Sylvia had noticed the change in Bey since leaving Andromeda Diconis. Another common aftereffect of a long session in the tanks was hitting him. He was on a high but was fast running out of adrenaline and energy. The surprise of waking in a strangely different form and the stimulus of the new surroundings had been enough to give him a lift for the past few hours, but that was fading.

“Come on. Before you fall asleep in the corridors.” His exhaustion had been a convenient excuse to leave Andromeda, but it was true enough. Bey Wolf would need a good rest before he was fit to work on the Marsden Harvester’s form-change problems.

She led him away toward his assigned quarters. Bey did not speak, and by the time they arrived his eyes were closing. Sylvia steered him to a bunk. He was asleep before she could add another word. After a few moments she gently removed the bright blue clothes and the extravagant hat and secured him in the bunk with loose straps. He would become used to low-g sleeping soon enough, but he might be disoriented when he first woke.

He lay flat on his back. Sylvia looked over the sleeping body with approval. “Pretty good job I did with you, Behrooz Wolf, if I say it myself. Andromeda was fascinated, and she’s a connoisseur. ‘Very attractive friends,’ eh? We’ll have to fight to keep her away from you.”

Sylvia frowned, remembering another of Andromeda’s comments. Someone on the harvester had seen Paul Chu recently. Even if it were no more than a bit of gossip, Sylvia needed to follow up on it. Cinnabar Baker had pointed out the problem. When one talked of war and sabotage, all roads seemed to lead to the Kernel Ring; but no roads led to Black Ransome, or to Ransome’s Hole—unless she could track the lead to Paul, and he could provide the pathway.

She started for the door, then paused. She must not go back to the hall too soon. Andromeda had her own ideas about what Sylvia and Bey were doing at the moment, and Sylvia wanted to keep that idea intact.

She forced herself to wait for almost two hours, thinking hard and watching the steady rise and fall of Bey’s bony chest. At last she headed for the concert hall.

The lights had dimmed automatically. Bey lay in darkness, listened to the faint hissing of the air ventilators, and wondered what had wakened him. He was almost in free-fall, floating with only the imperceptible tether of a pair of retaining straps. And he was not ready to wake. He felt groggy with sleep, so tired that it was an impossible effort to open his eyes.

“Bey!” The voice came again. It was no more than a whisper, but it jerked him at once to thrilling wakefulness. It was a sound to rouse Bey from the dead.

He opened his eyes. The projection system in the corner had switched itself on and revealed the interior of a dark room. In the center of that open space, her face illuminated by the faint gleam of a single red spotlight, sat Mary Walton.

“Bey!” The soft call came again.

“Mary. Where are you?”

“Don’t try to answer me, Bey. This message was prerecorded, so I can’t hear what you’re saying. It is triggered when you respond to your name and open your eyes.”

She was hauntingly attractive and as crazy-looking as ever. Bey even recognized her outfit. It was the one she had worn when she played Titania, a long russet gown that should have been dowdy but glowed with fairy tints of warm light. He had last seen it locked in a closet of his Earth apartment. Her voice was even more familiar, as wonderful as ever, with smoky, husky tones that made Bey hear sexual overtones even in her comic speeches.

“I don’t want you hurt, Bey,” she went on. “I’ve already saved you many times, back on Earth and on the space farm, but I don’t know how many more times I can do it. You have to stop what you’re doing, leave the harvesters, get back to Earth.”

“How did you know where I am?” Bey responded automatically, forgetting that she could not hear him.

“You are being used, you know, by the Outer System.” She had not paused. “It’s not your problem, but they’ll try and make it yours. The Outer System is going to break down more and more, and if you try to stop it, it will kill you. Say no to Cinnabar Baker, whatever she suggests. When Sylvia Fernald tries to sleep with you—she will, if she hasn’t already—remember that she’s doing it as part of her job. You are nothing to those people.” Mary raised her hand. On her middle finger glowed a huge kernel ruby, the rarest gemstone in the system. “It may be over between us, Bey, but don’t ever forget that I’m fond of you. I saved you when the messages were making all the others die or go mad. Give me credit for that. Goodbye now, and please take care. Sleep well.”

She waved. The projection unit’s image slowly faded, until after twenty seconds Bey could see nothing but the ghostly glimmer of the kernel ruby. Finally that, too, was gone. The sleeping chamber was again in perfect darkness.

Bey was sweating hard, and his heart was pounding. He was filled with a mixture of excitement and amazement. Mary’s final words had been a grim joke—he would not sleep now, not for hours. He loosened the straps that had held him snugly in position and made his way across to the projection unit. It should hold a recorded copy of that whole message.

The recording storage was completely blank. Naturally. Bey was not even surprised anymore. After the Negentropic Man, after the projected images that were filling the Outer System, and Mary’s ability to leave a message for him wherever she apparently chose, no other anomaly of the communications system could be ruled out. It was all impossible.

But one impossibility throbbed in his head harder and harder the longer he thought about it. If Mary knew where he was, then perhaps she could find a way to send a message. But how, in a total region of space so large that the whole Inner System was no more than a dot at its center, had she known where he was?

She had known of his trip to the Sagdeyev space farm. She had learned of his return. She had tracked him to these quarters within a few hours of his arrival there. How? How did she know?

He would never get to sleep. Never, never, never, never, never. With that single word resounding in his head, he went drifting irresistibly toward the slumber of total exhaustion.

And it was in those final moments, swimming down toward new unconsciousness, that Bey had a first inkling as to how Mary knew what was happening so quickly. He tried to catch the thought, to study it; but it was too late.

He was asleep.

Chapter 17

Aybee had a problem. He wanted his captors to think he was from the space farm and not a representative of the Cloud’s central government. On the other hand, he could not afford to meet any other farmers. They would know at once that he was not one of them, and they would have no reason to hide that fact from the Podders. For the moment, at least, he seemed safe. There were plenty of Podders, easily recognized from their suits, visible near the lock of the cargo vessel, but he could see no sign of farmers.

Steered along by the woman behind him, Aybee went drifting on into the interior. From the outside, the ship had been an inert, lifeless hulk, a derelict abandoned in the early days of Cloud colonization. Within, the airless enclosure was filled with activity.

Aybee looked around with a professional eye. They had entered through one of the ship’s forward ports. The outer hull arched away from them, a great curved span of carbon fiber sheet with strengthening beams of hardened polymers. From the inside it seemed much more than six hundred meters wide. There was enough interior space for whole cities, complete with everything from food and power production to swimming pools and game fields. But there were signs that the ship was more than a simple colony.

The first giveaway was the bracing struts and massive electric cables. They ran through the whole interior, and there was no reason to have them unless the ship had to withstand acceleration. Aybee did a quick mental calculation and decided that the mechanical and electromagnetic stiffening was consistent with about a two-g thrust.

That at once told him something else. At two g’s, the ship was over a year’s run away from the Podders’ natural home in the Halo. There had to be some way of moving people and materials faster than that. Aybee looked again around the cluttered and dimly lit cargo shell and saw the expected equipment far away near the outer wall. A high-acceleration ship hung there, its McAndrew drive off. Its design suggested that it would allow up to three hundred g’s before the gravitational and inertial accelerations were in balance. Aybee studied that ship very closely. With it, the Marsden Harvester was only twenty-four hours away.

The second oddity was the presence of transparent internal partitions and numerous internal air locks. Cargo hulls were rarely pressurized, and the Podders had no interest in living within an atmosphere. Their suits were all the air supply they cared to have. So who wanted parts of the ship to be air-filled, and where were they?

Finally, there were the kernels. Aybee could see a dozen places where the local spherical structure implied housings for shielded kernels. That suggested a monstrous power demand. One kernel would be sufficient for normal operations of a volume this size, even if it were a full-scale colony ship. The alternative explanation, that the kernels were being used for some other purpose, made no sense without more data.

Aybee turned back to the woman behind him. Inside the ship, she had put her gun away. “What are you going to do to me?”

“Just keep going. You’ll find out in a few minutes.” She relented. “Don’t worry. We don’t kill people without a good reason.”

But we do kill people with a good reason? Aybee wondered what a good reason was. Trying to escape? Lying about one’s identity? Being a spy for the Outer System government?

They were entering a new section of the ship, passing through an interior lock into an enclosure with opaque walls. Aybee heard the hiss of air and looked questioningly at the woman.

She nodded. “Transition point. Here’s where I leave you. Get out of your suit and go through the inner lock.” She switched to some other transmission frequency, had a conversation that Aybee could not follow as he was removing his suit, and gestured him forward. “Move it unless you like to breathe vacuum. I’ll be exhausting this lock again in thirty seconds.”

Aybee had been worried when he took off his suit, because underneath it he was not dressed like any of the farmers he had seen. But apparently the Podders were no experts on space farm attire; certainly the woman did not give his clothes a second glance. He went on through.

A man and a woman were waiting for him on the other side of the lock, facing him across a curved table.

More mystery. Neither of them had the stunted form and compact build preferred by Podders or the elongated shape of a Cloudlander. Aybee was in about a twentieth of a g field, which suggested that the room had to be close to a kernel. Both the people in front of him appeared comfortable with that, which meant they were not likely to be from the Inner System.

The woman gestured him to a seat opposite her. She had black hair, black skin, and a wary look in her eye. “Leila tells us that you talk,” she said. “Good. That’s a nice change from your buddies.”

Aybee sat down, hunching low in the chair. “All right, so I know how to talk. What happens to me now?”

“That depends on you. I don’t suppose you know any physics?”

“I know a bit.” It was no time to act insulted.

The other two people looked at each other. By this time Aybee had decided what they were. They had the build of Inner System inhabitants but not the Sunhugger look. Both of them hailed from farther out, yet both of them were used to gravity. That meant the Kernel Ring, living in close proximity to shielded kernels.

“We’ll test that in a little while,” the man said. Aybee noticed that he was wearing a kernel ruby in his shoulder epaulet. “D’ you know math, too?”

“Some.” There was a fine line to be walked. Too much knowledge might be as dangerous as too little.

“Then if you know an adequate amount, you’ll have a choice. Either you can go to a Halo development project, a long way from here, and work with no one but a few of the other farmers and a lot of machines. That’s what all your friends will be doing, helping to build a new farm—the Halo is short of metals, too. Or if you’re really willing to work with people, we have a more interesting prospect to offer you.”

“I don’t like the sound of no farm. I’ve had it with farms. Tell me about the other thing.”

“Not yet.” The woman was looking at him suspiciously. “First, we want to hear you talk, and make sure you can say more than a few phrases. You can start by telling us why you’re different from the rest of the farmers. They haven’t said ten words between them.”

That was a nasty question. If he seemed too different from the other farmers, these people would wonder why. If he were too similar, he would be sent out to the edge of nowhere and spend the rest of his life building a collector to sieve stray atoms from nothing.

If you have to lie, make the lies little ones. “I was the interface,” he said at last. “With people from the harvesters. When engineers came to the farm, somebody had to work with them. We all had a psych profile run. I looked like the best choice. So I got special training. I sorta liked it, wanted to do it more. Mebbe even get a job away from the farm.”

The man nodded, but the woman leaned forward and stared Aybee in the eye. Her own eyes, glowing brown with a yellow center to the iris, gave her a feral appearance. She had the dedicated face of a fanatic. “Did you interface with the group that came to the space farm from the Opik Harvester just a couple of days ago?”

“Yeah.” Aybee did not even blink. “They insisted on a face-to-face with us. I met ’em, four of ’em. My special training came in real useful.”

“How long were you with them?”

“Not long. Ten minutes, mebbe. I been wondering what happened to ’em since the impact. Were they all killed?”

“Why do you care?”

“Dunno. Guess I wondered if they were here, too. They’re like me, don’t mind working with other people. Are they here?”

“No. They went back where they came from. We saw their ship leaving.”

Aybee hid his relief. But the woman was suspicious again. “Why do you care about them? Never mind, I’ll accept that you talk. It seems to me maybe you talk a little too well. I don’t know how you could stand it on the space farm.”

“Let’s give him the test,” the man said. “If he’s lying about what he knows, we don’t have to waste more time talking.”

The woman shrugged and slid two sheets of paper across the table to Aybee. “Write your answers right there if you want to,” she said. “Or say them out loud to us. We don’t care.”

“I’d rather write. If you have something I can write with.” Aybee had seen the first page of questions and had a new worry. If the tests were all like this one, he needed time to think. He was being asked things so elementary that he was not sure how much ignorance he should feign. For what those people had in mind, ought he to know Newton’s laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations and the classical definitions of entropy? Almost certainly. But how about Price’s theorem and spinors and Killing vectors? They were on the list, too, along with Newman-Penrose constants and Petrov classification. He had written papers on each of those, but he did not want anyone to suspect that. The questions themselves were also a tantalizing hint as to the work he might be expected to do. He would certainly be working with kernels.

He took the pen they gave him and carefully wrote out his answers. Two wrong out of each ten. That ought to be about right.

Aybee could see the irony of it. For half his life he had been trying to do well on stupid tests; now he had to do just well enough to be accepted but badly enough to be plausible.

He handed back the sheets and for the first time in his life sweated while he waited for test results. The man was reading his answers, and his expression was guarded.

At last the man looked up. “Did you work with the kernel on the space farm?”

“Some. Part of my job—to check power use and rotational state. Learned how to measure the optical scalars. That was all.”

“You’re not afraid to go near a kernel?”

“Not if the shields are in good working order.”

“I’ll second that.” The man flipped the pages casually onto the table. He turned to the woman. “What do you think, Gudrun? It’s your decision.”

She nodded. “Do you work hard?”

At last, a question that Aybee could answer comfortably. “You bet. Harder than anyone I know. Try me.”

“I guess we will. You have to know one more thing before you say yes or no. If you join us, you’ll have a chance to become a full part of our group. We have big plans, but we’re few in numbers. That means wonderful opportunities. But many people do not understand the importance of our goals. Once you join us, you’ll be considered a rebel by the Outer System. Now let me ask you directly. Do you want the assignment?”

“I think so.” Aybee nodded his head slowly. He had to appear interested, but cautious. “The Outer System never did nothing for me. I never asked to be out on the farm. Guess I’d like to know more about your deal, though, before I’m sure.”

“Fair enough.” For the first time the woman smiled and held out her hand. “You’re on for a trial run. I’m Gudrun. This is Jason. What’s your name?”

Spacebooks. What’s my name? Better pick somebody real. Aybee groped for the name of his first instructor in calculus. “Karl Lyman.”

“Welcome to the program, Karl. Are you tired?”

“Nothing special.”

“Then let’s go and eat.” She saw his expression and laughed. “I don’t mean with me. Don’t worry, we know what people are like in the Outer System. You can have your own cubicle; you won’t have to look at anybody taking meals. But I want to find out a bit more about you and tell you what you’ll be doing.” She gave him another look, one of a shared secret. “I liked your answers to that test, and I think maybe you were wasting your time on the farm. You may be able to go a lot farther with us than you realize.”

As they stood up, she moved to his side and looked up at him. “One thing, though. You’re too tall for this place. We don’t even have a bed to fit you. When you’ve started work, Karl, we’ll give you a spell in a form-change tank and cut you down to size.”

Aybee put on a worried frown. “D’ yer think it’s safe? I mean, we’ve had bad trouble with form-change equipment on the farm. Bad stuff coming out of it. Suppose yours don’t work right, either?”

Gudrun and Jason exchanged a quick look. “Don’t worry your head about that,” the man said. “That’s something we can guarantee—absolutely. You’ll have no trouble with our form-change equipment.”

They led the way on into the interior of the ship. Aybee, following close behind, pondered that final remark. Gudrun and Jason, whoever they were working for, had plenty of confidence and conviction. They acted as though they had a direct pipeline to the secrets of the universe. Could they deliver a safe form-change operation, though, where the whole Outer System was failing?

Aybee wondered if he had become an instant convert to their fanaticism. Somehow, he was sure they could deliver what they promised.