Proteus Unbound (2 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 3

"I fled him down the nights and down the days,
I fled him down the arches of the years.
I fled him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind . . ."
—Francis Thompson

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're a bit late. I'm not with that office anymore."

"I know that is the case. I heard that you had . . . resigned your position."

"No need to be diplomatic. I was fired."

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

"None from my point of view."

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

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

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

"Widespread? Not just a machine or two?"

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

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

Manx's eyes, startlingly round and hollow in the absence of eyebrows, looked away. "If you are perhaps thinking of Robert Capman . . ."

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

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

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

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

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

"Which is certainly a—a—"

"Lie?"

"Exaggeration. A misrepresentation."

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

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

"Pirated designs?"

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

"Did your own engineers watch the BEC tests?"

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

"No. You'd be wasting your time."

"These forms are extremely strange."

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

"How do you know that without personal observation?"

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