Proteus Unbound (21 page)

Wouldn't he? They had been very close, but in the final months she had never known what Paul was thinking or even what he was doing. But surely he would at least
talk
to her—they had been partners for more than three years. On the other hand, if he had become a rebel himself, she ought not to be talking to him, and if she did meet with him, she should not tell anyone she was doing it.

Sylvia wondered and worried and at last settled for a compromise. Since she would be using a Cloudland ship in her travels, someone in government had to know and approve it. But the fewer people who knew, the less the danger that her mission would be leaked to others.

Sylvia looked at her options. Leo Manx was a good man but pedantic in approach and—much more dangerous—apt to gossip. Bey Wolf would not talk, but he would probably try to stop her. Aybee, her first choice, was off who knew where, and all her other close friends in the harvesters would be overwhelmed by the implied responsibility. They would feel a compulsion to tell their superiors—who might then tell anyone.

In the end, Sylvia called Cinnabar Baker directly and asked for a private meeting. If the information were likely to end with Baker, it might as well begin there.

The other woman asked her—typically—to come to her quarters that same day, but at one o'clock in the morning. Sylvia spent the next twelve hours making final preparations for her departure and rehearsing what she was going to say to Baker. But when she finally entered the bare-walled apartment, she forgot about her prepared speech.

Cinnabar Baker looked terrible. She had lost fifty or sixty pounds, and her gray-toned skin was lined and pouchy. From time to time she rubbed at her eyes, wheezed deep in her chest, and produced a rumbling cough. Turpin sat blinking on her shoulder. Each time she coughed, the bedraggled crow provided an impressive imitation of the sound. He must have had plenty of time to practice.

"I know." Baker saw Sylvia's dismay. "Don't tell me I look like hell, and don't worry. It's not permanent. I've been overworking, and everyone here is scared to let me near the form-change machines for a remedial session. The machines are so messed up, people are afraid I'll turn into a pumpkin. What can I do for you? We have ten minutes."

Sylvia jumped into her description of how she had found a trail that should lead to Paul Chu. Half her explanation proved unnecessary—Cinnabar Baker knew more about the relationship with Chu than Sylvia had dreamed. Baker waved her on past that, then listened in a silence broken only by her coughs and hoarse breathing.

At the end of it Baker sniffed and pinched the end of her nose between her fingers. "I've heard your reports, and the ones from Leo Manx. Do you agree with him that the rebels are behind Bey Wolf's problems with the 'Negentropic Man'?"

"I think so."

"You've saved Wolf's life at least once, probably twice. Do you know what the ancient Chinese, back on Earth, used to say if you saved a man from drowning?"

Sylvia shook her head in confusion. Cinnabar Baker had lost her.

"They would say you are then responsible for the welfare of that man for the whole rest of his life. Let me ask you, how much of what you're proposing to do is for the sake of the Outer System? And how much are you doing to help with Wolf's personal problems?" The suggestion floored Sylvia.

She had acted to save Bey on the transit ship and on the space farm without thinking for a moment about her own motives. She would have done as much for anyone. And as for sitting beside the form-change tank while Bey Wolf was in it . . .

"Don't bother to answer that." Cinnabar Baker was moving on. The allotted ten minutes had passed. "Tell me this instead. You're proposing to leave at once. What's the hurry? Why not wait a few more days?"

"More days?" Turpin repeated.

Sylvia shook her head. "I daren't. Paul Chu is at that location to perform a facility conversion, adding a low-g drive—probably to a cometary fragment. That means he'll be working alone except for machines. We'll be able to talk freely. But that will last only another couple of weeks, then he'll be leaving. I don't know where he'll be going next."

"Does he know anything about this?"

"Not a thing. I didn't suggest to
anyone
that I might try to visit him. You're the only person who knows I'm even thinking of it." She saw the slow nod of Cinnabar Baker's head. "You will approve it, then?"

Baker grunted. "Fernald, I never did like Paul Chu. I remember him, and I don't believe he'll do one thing to help you." She held up her hand. "But before you begin to argue, let me tell you I'm going to approve your request. You ought to have this job for a day. You'd approve
anything
that might give you a toehold on our problems. The Cloud's technology is all going to hell, people daren't go near the form-change machines, we've been receiving communications from some of the other harvesters that suggest the populations there have all gone crazy, and I just had a report from the other side of the Cloud about a bad accident on another of the space farms. To top that off, one of our inbound cargo ships was destroyed yesterday, and the Sunhuggers are blaming
us
for it—saying we blew up one of our own vessels!"

She sighed. "All right. You've heard enough of that. Of course I'll approve it. Go do it, and use my authority if you need it to get your ship. But one other thing," she added as Sylvia stood up. "This has to be a two-way street. You won't tell anyone where you're going. And I won't tell anyone, not even the Inner Council, what you are trying to do. If you get into hot water, I'll have to disown you. I'll even deny that you had my permission for a transit ship. We have a firm policy, you see: We don't deal with the rebels in any circumstances. Understood?"

Sylvia bit her lip, then nodded. "All right."

Cinnabar Baker reached out and took her hand in an unexpected gesture. "We never had a meeting tonight, Fernald, and you leave by the other exit. I have another group of people waiting outside. Good luck, and good hunting. You'll be a long way from home."

"From home," Turpin echoed hoarsely. The crow wagged his head. "Way from home."

That had been eight days earlier. Eight days of silence and solitude. Sylvia had maintained strict communications blackout all through the journey, even when the ship's drive was inactive and it was easy to send or receive signals.

But as she slowed to approach her final destination, the rendezvous only a few minutes away, her nervousness increased. The urge to send some kind of message back to Cinnabar Baker grew stronger. Sylvia had been provided with an ephemeris for a body in an orbit skirting the outer part of the Kernel Ring; she was told that Paul Chu should be there. But the positional data had come with an admonition to strict secrecy—and nothing else. She had not been told the nature of the object to which she was traveling, or whether it was large or small, man-made or natural, a colony or a military base. She had
assumed
a cometary fragment—why else would he be installing an add-on drive unit—but suppose that was wrong?

Well, she would know soon enough. At last the body was visible. From a distance of five kilometers it was like an irregular, granular egg, shining by internal lights. Sylvia turned the high-magnification sensors onto it. She was confused, and her nervousness had increased. The object was about three hundred meters long, too small to be a harvester, a colony, or a cargo ship, and the wrong shape for a transit vessel. That fit with the idea of a small comet nucleus, still rich in volatiles. Yet the pattern of ports and lights implied an inhabited body, and two docking ports and air locks were clearly visible on the surface.

If it were a natural body, then it was one that had already seen some internal tunneling and modifications. The newly installed drive unit was easily recognized, gleaming at the thicker end of the lumpy body.

Delay would not help, and she had not come so far for nothing. Sylvia was already in her suit. She allowed the transit ship to dock itself gently against the bigger port, opened the cabin, and went straight to the lock.

It was open, contrary to standard safety regulations. And the
inner
lock was open, too, which meant that the interior of the body was airless. If Paul Chu were inside, he was wearing a suit or he was a corpse. Sylvia noticed how loud her own breathing sounded in the helmet. She set her suit receiver to perform a frequency sweep and passed on through the inner air lock.

The first chamber had been carved from the water ice and carbon dioxide ice of the cometary interior, and it was clearly intended as a workshop and equipment-maintenance facility. There were plenty of signs that it had been recently inhabited, with cutting torches still attached to their fuel bottles in a tool shop chamber and an electrical generator in standby mode. Three or four construction machines were waiting patiently against one of the walls. Sylvia regarded them with irritation. They were obsolete models by Cloud standards. If they had been made just a little bit smarter, she could have asked them what was going on. As it was, they had been designed with a specialized vocabulary and understood nothing but mechanical construction tasks. If no one came along to give instructions, they would wait contentedly for a million years.

She passed on through a sliding partition, deeper into the interior. The scan on received signals had produced nothing, so she switched to an all-frequency broadcast. "Paul Chu. This is Sylvia." Her suit repeated the message automatically, over and over, and listened for any reply.

She had reached the temporary living quarters built by the machines near the center of the body. He was not there, but she saw many signs of his recent occupancy. That was definitely his computer link, the one he had used for ten years. No Cloudlander, no matter how long he was away from the Outer System, would ever leave metal objects strewn so casually around unless he knew he would be coming back soon or had been forced to leave in a great hurry.

Or dead,
her mind said insistently.

She pushed away the thought. Perhaps Paul was somewhere on the other side of the body, or perhaps he had been temporarily called away.

But called away to what? And to where? She had seen no sign of other bodies in her approach, and her suit radio had an effective range of many thousands of kilometers.

The suppose that he did not
want
to meet her and was hiding away to avoid an encounter? That thought rejected itself. How could he be hiding when he had no idea that she was even coming? He thought she was back in the Outer System.

Almost against her will, Sylvia set out to explore the desolate interior. Sometime, far in the past, it had been a human home for a long period. There were kitchens, bedrooms, even chambers set up for entertainment and exercise. Those rooms held harnesses, stretch bars, and workout machines, each with dials to measure effort level and progress. But over all the equipment and instruments lay a thin layer of sublimed ice. No one had touched anything there for years, maybe for decades.

In less than half an hour she was convinced that there was no one anywhere on the hollowed-out comet. She was alone. And only a few moments later she felt a strange vibration beneath her feet and sensed a slight pressure on the front of her suit. She knew at once what was happening. The air locks had been closed on the body's surface, and the interior was filling with air.

She set off, hurriedly retracing her steps toward the lock through which she had first entered. When she was halfway there a flicker of movement appeared at the end of a corridor.

"Paul?" She paused, her hand on the wall of the corridor. "Paul Chu? Is that you, Paul? Who is there?"

The corridor supported a full atmosphere, and her voice went echoing along the narrow passageway. There was no reply, but suddenly a little machine came scuttling into view and moved toward her. Ten feet away it paused. Sylvia was thrilled to see it. Unlike the others she had seen, this one she recognized as a very advanced model, one that was scarcely out of the development labs. It was a GA machine, a general assistance model that would perform hundreds of tasks with vocal direction and little human supervision. It if had to, it could fly her home in her own transit ship.

"What's been happening here?" She advanced on it confidently. No machine would harm her—no machine
could
harm her, except by accident. "Where are the people? Is Paul Chu here?"

It said nothing. The arrays of detectors on the front of the machine had tilted her way, and there was no doubt that it was aware of her presence. But when she was within a couple of paces, it began to back away. A second machine of the same design had appeared at the end of the corridor and advanced to stand next to the first.

"Come on." Sylvia was becoming impatient. "I want answers. Don't pretend you can't understand me, I know you're a lot too smart for that. What's been going on in this place?"

From a circular aperture at its base, the second machine suddenly extruded a pair of long, rubbery arms. Before Sylvia could retreat, they had moved forward to circle her ankles.

"Hey! Let got of me!"

It took no notice, and then arms from the first machine came forward to wrap around her forearms and waist. She was gently lifted off her feet and held in midair. Both machines moved in unison along the corridor, holding Sylvia as delicately but firmly as an armed bomb.

"There is no problem." The first machine finally spoke in a voice that Sylvia recognized at once. It sounded just like Paul Chu. "We will be going on a journey. You will be quite safe. One moment."

While Sylvia struggled as hard as she could, yet another pair of arms appeared to check the closure of her suit helmet.

"What do you mean, a journey? Damn you, let go of me. Take me to see Paul Chu.
I order you to release me.
"

That
had
to work. No machine could hold a human against her will, unless it was to save a life.

"We cannot do that." The voice was suitably regretful and apologetic. "We cannot set you free; not yet. But we can take you to Paul Chu's present location. Maybe you will see him there."