Proteus Unbound (14 page)

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."