Proteus Unbound (22 page)

"When?" They were already in the lock, and there was a hiss of escaping air.

"When we reach our destination. Ten days journey from here."

They were outside, drifting along in a glimmer of starlight. The second machine had stayed behind at the lock, so she was held only by her arms and waist. Sylvia saw a new shape in front of her, a small ellipsoidal object only twenty meters long. It was like no ship she had ever seen. "We can't fly in that." She spoke into her suit radio, offering what should have been for a machine the ultimate threat. "If you make me fly in that, it will
kill
me."

"Not so." The machine sounded shocked, but it did not even pause. "Otherwise, of course, we would never permit it. Ten days will quickly pass. Perhaps when we are on the way you would like to play chess with me? We will be alone."

"I hate chess!"

As Sylvia was carried into the ship, she had a final unhappy thought. She had given Cinnabar Baker the coordinates of this destination and had felt pleased with her foresight. But how much use would that information be wherever she would be in another ten days?

CHAPTER 21

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
—Arthur C. Clarke

Aybee had seen many transit ships during his wanderings through the Outer System. The design was standard. It differed only in detail, depending on whether the fabrication was done at the Vulcan Nexus, whispering its way across the surface of the Sun, or out in the Dry Tortugas, wandering the remote and ill-defined perimeter of the Oort Cloud.

Each transit ship had a thick disk of dense matter on the front end. Each one also had a passenger cabin that could slide backward or forward along the two-hundred-meter central spike jutting out behind the mass plate. The McAndrew vacuum energy drive sat at the plate's outer edge. The whole assembly looked like an axle with only one wheel attached.

It was a shock to be taken by Gudrun to the front of the ship and be shown a smooth, spikeless ellipsoid just twenty meters long.

Aybee stared at it as if he were in the audience at a magic show, waiting for the missing bluebird to appear. "Where's the rest of it?"

"There is no more," Gudrun laughed. She was bubbling with excitement. "I told you, Karl, the surprises are just beginning. This is the ship for our journey. It arrived from headquarters two days ago."

Aybee made a complete circuit of the outside. The ovoid had a smooth glassy hull, polished and unmarked. He could see his own distorted reflection in the convex surface. That alone was sufficient to make it out of place in the dingy and grimy environment of the old cargo ship. It was as new as its surroundings were old. Odder yet, it showed no sign of a drive mechanism. There was nowhere to attach the massive disk that balanced gravity and acceleration, and the clear ports suggested that at least half the internal space was passenger quarters.

As a supposed trainee, Aybee could not tell Gudrun what he was thinking. Either this supposed ship was a total hoax and would go nowhere—or there were whole realms of physics unknown to the best minds in the Inner and Outer Systems.

Instead he asked, "Who built it?"

"Headquarters. It's very new and very fast. The old ships took weeks to get to headquarters—it's over six hundred billion kilometers away. We'll be there in five days!"

"What's the acceleration?"

"That's not relevant. This works on a new principle. They are making more of them, but today there are only a handful of others like this ship."

But there ought to be
none
like it, Aybee reflected. He did the instant mental conversion: five days for six hundred billion kilometers meant about five hundred g's. Then he at once ignored his own answer. The range calculation made sense only if the ship performed like a transit ship, with an acceleration phase, a crossover, and a deceleration. There was no reason for that assumption. If the ship were as new as it seemed, headquarters could be on the other side of the galaxy. Aybee had no idea how it could function. At the moment he did not even know what questions to ask.

"How is it powered?" he said at last. "With a kernel?"

That was fishing. The transit ships used the McAndrew vacuum drive, not kernels.

"No. But apparently it has a low-mass kernel at the center."

Curiouser and curiouser. Even a small kernel weighed a few hundred million tons. Why accelerate that mass if one did not need it?

They went aboard, and Aybee's confusion performed a quantum jump to a higher-level state. The internal living space on the ship was ten times what he had expected. There was too little space for any reasonable power supply, engines, or drive mechanism.

In the back of his mind Aybee had already decided that a new and first-rate intellect must have arisen in the rebel communities of the Kernel Ring. That was the only way to explain something as radically different as the new ship. But once inside and looking around, he was forced to drop even that idea. Too many things were new and unfamiliar. Out of a dozen different internal systems, he could identify and explain maybe half of them. And those few hinted at something that Aybee had been groping his way toward for the past four years, a new landscape just beyond the horizon.

Aybee had a clear image of current science, of its peaks and valleys and gray clouded areas where theory failed. Technology advanced constantly, but it depended on models of the physical world that were often centuries old. It advanced by ignoring the foggy regions, those places where deep understanding had not been achieved and where the subtle paradoxes lurked. Aybee had charted those anomalies. It was shocking to find the misty curtain suddenly blown aside and a new world stepping forth in full-blown glory.

Gudrun had no such worries. She sat down confidently at the control board and began to follow the simple sequence of instructions provided by the panel's prompting. The new ship did not seem to amaze her, but Aybee recalled the description of the Outer System Navy: a system designed by a genius to be run by idiots. And when he thought of the level of genius needed to come up with a whole system so different from anything he had ever seen, his skin crawled with excitement.

Five days. That was how long he would have to explore everything and find out how it all worked. Aybee had been dreading so long a trip with Gudrun, but now he wished that the travel duration were double. His usable time would almost certainly be much less than five days. Gudrun would insist on talking—or worse—for part of it, and she also wanted him in a form-change tank, wasting more precious hours.

Even while she was finishing the command sequence to move them out of the cargo hulk and on their way, Aybee was thinking hard. What he needed was a complete reversal of roles: Gudrun absent and Aybee free to explore the ship. How could he manage it?

Cinnabar Baker would have solved that problem in a moment. With stakes so high, Gudrun had to be out of action for the duration of the journey. One blow would do it; then the disposal of a corpse or the confinement of an injured body to the medical unit.

Aybee had plenty of brainpower. The idea that Gudrun could be killed or injured occurred to him at once. She had finished the control sequence and had moved to the communications unit. As she crouched before the panel with the headset shielding any of his actions, he picked up a heavy data storage case and moved to stand directly behind her. It would take only a moment, a single strike to the unprotected skull.

Now!

Aybee stared the possibility full in the face—and blinked. For the first time in his life he was forced to face one of his own limitations: He was not particularly fond of Gudrun, but regardless of logic and motivation he could not harm her physically.

He put down the case and stared at her in total frustration. At the same moment, she swiveled around in her chair to look up into his face. Her expression was curious, somewhere between cold and startled. Aybee could visualize a five-dimensional knotted manifold and manipulate its topology in his head, but he could not read that human countenance. If he had, he would have recognized a look of fear.

"I've been in touch with headquarters," Gudrun said after a few moments. "I said we'll be on our way any moment now."

Aybee nodded. It hardly seemed like a universe-shattering revelation.

"And I'm afraid we can't do the things we'd planned," she hurried on. "There have been changes. I have urgent work to do on the journey, so you'll have to occupy yourself as best you can. Don't come in here."

Without another word she went through to the aft part of the cabin and slid the door closed. Any child could see that something had happened to upset her very much.

But if Aybee was a child, he was the little boy who had suddenly been given the run of the candy store. He stared after Gudrun for all of ten seconds, until he heard a high-pitched whirring from somewhere beneath his feet. A new mechanism had come into operation.

Aybee felt no acceleration, but he suspected he might be hearing the drive. It was easy enough to test the idea. The McAndrew propulsion system produced a faint sparkle of eldritch light as high-speed particles collided with the occasional hydrogen atoms of free space. He went across to the port and peered out.

And gasped. There was no pinpoint twinkle of drive interactions. Instead, the whole starfield had been replaced by a tangled rainbow of color, rippling across his field of view.

From that moment, Aybee forgot all about Gudrun for many hours.

CHAPTER 22

"I often wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell."
—Omar Khayyam

Behrooz Wolf claimed to have no conscience. He denied having brains. What he had in place of both, he said, was a little voice that whispered in his ear, urging him to take actions that his natural indolence discouraged.

That voice was interfering with his work. What he
wanted
to do was solve the mystery of the demon of form-change, that impossible chimera that could live in the radiative inferno inside a kernel shield and send a stream of misdirection through the computer system to the rest of the harvester. And if it could do it to form-change, he realized, it could do it to everything else. It was the key to wholesale delusions and impossible sensor messages. Even the Negentropic Man himself, and Mary's visitation, and failed mass detection systems.
Something
had allowed that cometary fragment to crash undetected into the Sagdeyev space farm.

That was what he
wanted
to do: to work on technical problems. So why was he wandering the interior of the Marsden Harvester seeking a woman whose last name he had not at first remembered?

It could only be the dreams; persistent, chaotic images that came in the middle of deep sleep. He saw flashes of Mary in indescribable danger and of vague menace creeping toward her. He heard cries of fear and pleas for help.

Or was it
Sylvia
that he saw? The visions blurred and faded, one face flowing to another, as he watched. And were they dreams, or were they messages, like the first one he had received from Mary? When he woke he was never sure what he had experienced. All that remained was the feeling of urgency.

Bey wandered on. He was looking for Andromeda, but Andromeda who? Leo Manx had never heard of her. Bey went to the central data bank and asked for a complete listing of all the Andromedas—Diconis, that was the name he had been groping for, but the computer offered only a general location within the harvester. She was a woman with no permanent partner and no particular job. Bey started with the dining area where they had met and widened his sphere of search from there.

His new form had a stamina level inferior to that of his Earth body. After seven hours of roaming the harvester's corridors, asking for a woman everyone seemed to know and no one was able to locate, he was wilting. He needed food. He gave up his search, headed for the nearest dining area—and found Andromeda Diconis.

He dropped the idea of food and filled a jug with purple-red wine when he saw her. He did not expect to enjoy the meeting—So why am I doing it? he asked himself. She was alone, dressed in a cleverly cut garment that suggested body curves where there were none. He had to hurry, since she was carrying a tray of food and about to enter a dining cubicle. He grabbed his jug and a cup, hurried that way, and crowded in after her.

She gave him a first amazed stare, then a gasp of pleased recognition. "Why—Behrooz. What a nice surprise."

"I have to talk to you."

"But I'm about to eat." She gestured to the tray in front of her. "You'll have to wait until I've finished. Unless—" Her face turned pink, but her eyes were gleaming before they looked away from his. "Unless you were thinking of staying here while I do it."

"Sure. Here, we'll share this." Bey placed the wine on the table between them and heard her gasp. He might be getting into more than he realized.

Andromeda was looking around, checking that no one else had seen Bey enter the cubicle. "Wait a minute." Her voice was breathless, and she quickly set the table controls to make all the walls opaque. "There—if you are sure you really want to?"

"I do. I'm sure." Bey picked up the flagon and poured wine. He did not think Andromeda was a woman who did favors for nothing. Who was it who had said that Paris was worth a mass? One of the Henrys. Well, Sylvia was worth more than that. According to his estimates, she had saved his life at least twice. And she had sat for days by the tank when he had gone into form-change to make sure nothing bad happened there. Sylvia was worth it, whatever it took. Bey followed his instincts, picked up his cup of wine, and drained it.

Andromeda had taken a spoonful of a clear soup, but she was hesitating with it poised in front of her mouth, watching him drink. Bey stared right at her, not letting her off the hook. After a moment she gave a little shiver, pursed her lips, and sipped in a determined way. She swallowed, blushed, and said, "I hope you don't think I'm like this all the time. I mean, I'm really a very respectable woman."