Proteus Unbound (11 page)

"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

"I know more than Apollo
For oft when he lies sleeping,
I see the stars at bloody wars,
In the wounded welkin weeping."
—Tom o' Bedlam's song

"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.