Proteus Unbound (18 page)

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.

PART THREE

CHAPTER 18

"So when this world's compounded union breaks,
Time ends, and to old Chaos all things turn."
—Christopher Marlowe

Bey Wolf had inherited a good stubborn streak from his German father and a subtle and suspicious mind from his Persian mother. Both parts of the combination were needed now. He was stuck in the middle of a rank impossibility.

He had analyzed defective form-change runs. They ranged from minor flaws too subtle to be detected in outward appearance to grotesque end forms that could never have survived in any environment known to Bey. Every one was different, but in one way all were alike. The ferret routines he had introduced into the purposive form-change programs confirmed that there had been systematic modifications to whole sections of code; they pointed always to the same impossible blind alley. The changes were no accident. They were so complicated that they had to have been generated by a computer—but in a place where no computer capability existed on the harvester.

He swore and grumbled and grunted to himself. His work had gone on obsessively for several days, broken only by hurried meals and occasional naps. He had not washed or changed his clothes. He was surrounded by empty disposable plates and cups, listings, diagnostic trace routines, system flow diagrams, and his own scribbled notes and questions. Paper was everywhere, sprawling across the floor and over every available surface.

Bey was totally frustrated and oddly content. No one on the harvester could help him, and he did not want help. He wanted to solve it
himself.
He did not admit it, but intense concentration was also a form of therapy. He wanted to keep the disturbing thought of Mary Walton's visitation out of his head.

Sylvia Fernald had stopped by a couple of times in the first day of work. She had watched his efforts sympathetically, spoken to him, and left when it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. On the third day Leo Manx had also appeared. He came to the door of the room several times, stared in disgust at the mess, and hobbled away. The wounds he had received on the space farm were not yet fully healed, but he was in no apparent discomfort.

When Leo came by for the fourth time, he stayed, standing silent in the doorway and puzzling over a blue folder he had brought with him. Bey Wolf ignored him until a final and irrefutable statistical analysis came back on the display screen. At that point he swore at length, switched off the unit, and turned to the other man.

"That does it. I know exactly
what
happened—and I've no idea how."

Manx looked up from his own musings. "If you've discovered anything useful, you're making more progress than I am. What have you found? Cinnabar Baker will want to know."

Wolf waved his arm at the sea of listings covering the floor around them. "I have output trace listings of everything. Do you know how the harvester computer system works?"

Manx frowned at the question. "Well, I feel sure it's a straightforward distributed system. There's computing capacity and major storage in a couple of hundred nodes located at different points in the harvester, and local storage with limited compute power at a few hundred more. Everything is tied together through a fiber communications system. It's exactly like the integrated computer system on the other harvesters—or in your own Office of Form Control, back on Earth."

"My ex-office. So there's nothing unusual about the arrangement?"

"Of course not." Manx had stepped gingerly into the middle of the paper jungle and was carefully collecting the listings into neat piles. "Bey, you must have known all this days ago—you couldn't generate these message traces without knowing."

"I thought I did." Wolf grabbed an elaborate schematic. "The general structure is shown here. I took this, and I began to search for places in the system where spurious coding sequences could be introduced to modify the form-change programs. Watch now."

He switched on the wall-size display screen. "I've color-coded this. You need to know what they mean. The blue network is the overall connection plan for the distributed computer system. The red nodes show where we have data storage; green ones show computer elements. Purple dots are sensors—data collection points for the computer system. Orange dots are form-change tanks. They have some of their own storage and computer power, but they rely on the master system for some data and computation. Understood?"

"Perfectly. I hope there's a point to all this."

"There is. Just watch. I spent days working it out. You're going to see my ferret routines, chasing down all the places where false code might have come into the system. We'll do just one case now, for a form-change anomaly they had in the resource control office of this harvester. Watch the moving yellow tracer." Bey entered the command and leaned back in his chair.

For a moment or two the display was static. Then a fine yellow line appeared at one of the orange dots and crawled across the screen. It reached a green node and divided there, then two yellow daughter traces continued on their way to a red element of the schematic.

"Picking up data from two different banks," Bey said. "That happens a lot."

The yellow lines crept onward, reaching new computer nodes, sometimes branching, sometimes terminating there. After thirty seconds a complete tree structure had been established, starting at a single form-change tank and spreading across half the screen.

"That's one complete form-change operation," Bey said.

"It's too complicated. I can't follow all that structure."

"Nor could I, without help. The central controller used whatever computer power happened to be available—that's why you see so many green nodes in use. It's a horrible mess. Now, I'm going to add the other hundred and fifty-six cases, all at once. You'd expect the picture to become even worse, impossibly complicated."