Proteus Unbound (23 page)

"I know. Sylvia says you're the tops." Bey gulped more wine and watched Andromeda lean forward and lick her hps. Her nipples were pushing against the indigo fabric of her dress. He was even getting excited himself. Maybe the Cloudlanders knew something that Earth people had never learned about the serious business of eating. Bey struggled to keep his mind on the job at hand. "She says the two of you go away back together. You were big buddies until she set up with Paul Chu."

"We were." Andromeda swallowed another lascivious spoonful of soup. "I was very disappointed when that happened. I mean, he was
nothing.
Little, and fat, and full of strange ideas."

Lady, that was me two weeks ago. Bey leaned across, poured a full glass for Andromeda, drank deeply from his own glass, and nodded agreeably. He had not eaten for a long time, and the alcohol was pumping straight through to his bloodstream. Andromeda was beginning to look much more attractive. "I don't know why she started to hang out with him." He leaned forward. "Wasn't he part of some sort of religious group?"

"Not
religion.
Revolution." She gave Bey another knowing look, waited to be sure he was watching, and took a deliberate swallow of wine. Her face was flushed, and her lower lip swollen. "He was into revolution, and borderland politics, and all that rubbish. I don't know how much she told you about the two of them, but they were an item for a long time. I think she still has the hots for him. I don't know what she told you, but in my opinion she hasn't got him out of her system."

"Was she asking about him?" The question was overly direct, but Andromeda was too preoccupied to notice. She was sitting with a forkful of food poised in front of her. Not until Bey fixed his eyes on her again did she slowly place it in her mouth, pull the food free with her white teeth, and chew steadily while he watched. The pulse in the hollow of her throat was throbbing.

"She was asking." Andromeda finally swallowed and put down her fork. "She was asking about him, and I told her how I thought she could get in touch with him."

"You
know
that?"

"I'm fairly sure I do. He was here secretly, but he wanted certain people to be able to reach him. I know who they are."

"And you could tell me?"

"Well, not immediately." Andromeda licked her lips again. "It would take time to find them. But we could look together."

Bey knew what was coming. " 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Andromeda, rough-hew them how we will.' "

"I'm sorry?"

"Shapes our ends." Lord. He had had far too much to drink—but too much for what?

Andromeda laughed. "You're such a
strange
person—not at all the way you look. If you want to search, I can tell you where we should start." She moved closer to Bey. Andromeda had lost all interest in eating. "I have their names and locations—but not with me. Back in my private quarters. We'd have to go there. If you want to."

She paused and looked at him inquiringly.

With a wild surmise. Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Lord, he
was
drunk.

"Well, Bey." She had stopped smiling. "Do you want to?"

" 'Being your slave, what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desire?' "

"What?"

"I mean, let's go. Now. To your place. I want to."

"Mm. Are you
sure
?" She was playing hard to get. "I mean, what about Sylvia?"

" 'I have been faithful to thee Cynara, in my fashion.' " I mean Sylvia. I mean
Mary
, for God's sake.

"What?"

"I mean, I'm quite sure. Can't wait. Let's go." Bey lurched to his feet, clutching the half-full flagon of wine. She was out there somewhere, in the featureless gulf of the Outer System. He was going to find her. If he had to lay his body down to do it, that was part of the game.
Whatever
it took, he was going to find her. But not quite yet.

* * *

Leo Manx stared at him in disbelief. "Let me get this straight. You're leaving tomorrow for these coordinates." He tapped the sheet he was holding. "In the wilderness. And you don't want me to come with you. I'll second that. You don't want to tell the harvester controllers where you're going. All right, if you say so. But what are you hoping to accomplish?"

Leo Manx was a good listener. Bey outlined his ideas. At the wilder moments, Leo muttered to himself but did not interrupt. "How are you proposing to prove all this?" he asked at last.

"I'm going to bring one back. A live one." Bey was white-faced, exhausted, and somewhere between stoned and hung over. Four days of wine, drugs, and Andromeda Diconis was not an experience for the fainthearted. They had wandered the harvester together from one end to the other. Andromeda believed in stimulation rather than sleep. If he survived, Bey wanted to see her again. He had to know where she got her energy. "But if I don't make it back," he went on, "there has to be at least one person who knows exactly where I'm heading and what I think is going on. That's you."

"But how am I ever going to persuade Cinnabar Baker that what you're doing makes sense?"

"You don't start with Cinnabar. You
end
with her, and only if I don't come back and there's absolutely no other alternative. I told you the danger. Did you do what I asked you to?"

"As much as I could. Have you ever tried to brief your boss without telling her what's going on?"

"A hundred times. It's the first rule of self-preservation. Do you have them in a safe place?"

"The coordinates? Sure I do. But you realize those coordinates are almost certainly
not
the location of Ransome's Hole? They're too far out of the Kernel Ring."

"I know. But they're the only starting point I have, and I feel sure Sylvia went there. I'm leaving now. If everything goes to hell, you know what to do. Give me thirty days, then if you don't hear from me, assume I'm dead and gone."

He was ready to go, but Leo Manx stopped him. "Bey, you tell me you need thirty days before I panic, and you're not frantic now about Aybee. So why don't you give as much breathing room to Sylvia? Maybe she's working her own agenda. You could ruin it for her."

Leo deserved an answer, but Bey did not have one. All he had was that small voice again, whispering in his ear. It said that Aybee might be fine, and Bey might be fine, but Sylvia was in trouble. Or was it telling him that he owed more to her than he did to Aybee, and so he had to worry more about her?

Bey could not turn off that voice, but he could sometimes see through its strategies. He was in a hurry to leave, but not perhaps for the obvious reason. If he found Sylvia, she might lead him to Paul Chu. And Paul Chu might lead to Black Ransome. And Black Ransome was the Negentropic Man, that grinning, dancing figure who had driven Bey near insanity and forced him to leave Earth.
That
was who Bey was after. Wasn't it?

Maybe.
The inner voice insisted on the last word. You want to get even with Black Ransome, I can believe that. And you want to solve the mystery of the kernels, which begins and ends with Black Ransome. But aren't we conveniently forgetting one other little thing? If you find Black Ransome at the end of the trail, who else may you find with him? And what will gallant Bey Wolf do then?

CHAPTER 23

"Time to worry, time to fear,
The Negentropic Man is here."
—crèche song of the Halley Harvester

Aybee Smith was a helpless prisoner, boxed up in a ship with a woman who would not talk to him, racing toward an unknown destination, heading for a meeting with people who were sworn enemies of everything that Aybee's civilization stood for.

Any logical person would have been worried sick about his future. And logic ruled Aybee's whole life. He loved logic; he lived by logic. And yet he did not give any of those worries a single thought. He was busy with something far more important.

The ship was a treasure box of mysteries. Beginning with the puzzle of the drive mechanism—no high-density balancing plate and no acceleration forces—he had listed twenty-seven devices that required some new technology or, beyond mere technology, some new physical principle!

With a mental clock ticking always in his mind—five days! too little time!—Aybee had forgone the luxury of sleep or rest. No matter what they did to him at his destination, he could sleep when he arrived there; at the moment the exploration of the ship was his only goal.

Gudrun appeared from her locked quarters only for a few minutes twice a day, when she found it necessary to use the ship's single galley. Aybee was eating randomly, snatching food when he could bear the interruption to his work. He and Gudrun met in the galley only once. She avoided his eyes and did not speak. He did not even notice. A new insight had occurred to him, a possible basis for the ship's garbage disposal unit, which somehow removed the mass from the ship but did not eject it to open space.

While she prepared her meal and fled, he sat motionless and gaped at the blank wall. Aybee worked in his head. He transcribed results only when everything was complete. So far he had written nothing.

He had performed a taxonomy of those twenty-seven anomalies, placing them neatly into four major categories. Thus:

(1) Inertial versus gravitational mass: Half a dozen devices on the ship, including all its positional and navigation systems, could be explained very well in one simple theory—
if
Aybee were willing to abandon the principle of equivalence. He was not. He would give up his virginity first.

(2) Heat into motion: Another set of devices on the ship made sense only if heat could be converted
perfectly
to other forms of mechanical energy; in other words, if Aybee were willing to give up the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The Negentropic Man again! In a closed system—and what was more closed than the ship?—Aybee was asked to admit an entity that would decrease entropy. He remembered Maxwell's Demon, that tiny imp who was supposed to sit in a container sorting molecules. The fast-moving ones would be allowed to pass in one direction, the slow-moving molecules in the opposite one. Maxwell's Demon had been introduced in 1874, but Szilard had banished it completely in 1928. Hadn't he?

Aybee was not sure anymore. But he certainly did not want to give up the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Eddington's words were graven in his memory:

"The law that entropy always increases—the second law of thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations, then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

Aybee agreed with that. Wholeheartedly.

(3) Force-field aberrations: By the end of the third day Aybee had devised an alternative theory that explained how the drive might work, but it involved the introduction of a new type of force similar to the ancient and long-discredited concept of "hypercharge." Aybee shrank from such
ad hoc
leaps into darkness.
"Hypotheses nonfingo"
—"I don't make new assumptions." If that had been good enough for Isaac Newton, it was good enough for Aybee.

(4) Information from nothing. All the rest of the ship would work fine—if only it were possible to create infonnation from random noise! Chaos to signal, that was all Aybee needed. The ship's communication system seemed to
depend
on that impossible capability. Could he accept it? Aybee knew exactly where it would lead him, and he did not like it. He would again need a way in which entropy could be decreased. It was the Negentropic Man popping up again in a different but equally unappetizing form. Aybee hated the whole idea.

Five days flew by. The approach to their destination was an irritating distraction but finally a necessary one. Aybee would not stop thinking about the physical problems—he
could
not stop thinking—but at least he would have an obligatory break from it.

One hour before arrival, Gudrun appeared grim-faced from her cabin and moved at once to the communications terminal. She was wearing a spacesuit, and it was clear that she was very nervous. But her feelings were not obvious enough to break through Aybee's shield of obsessions. He went on working until the very moment when the ship docked and the lock began to open. Then it was not Gudrun's voice that brought him out of his reverie; it was the clatter of metal from within the lock itself.

"There he is!" Gudrun had run to the opening and squeezed through it. She turned to point back inside. "That's Karl Lyman. Be careful—he's dangerous!"

The air lock on the ship, like its passenger quarters, was far bigger than on an ordinary transit vessel. Aybee stared into it and saw to his amazement that it was crammed with armed men, all in full space attire and squeezed tightly together. There were eight or nine of them; to a Cloudlander, that many people in one place was a major gathering. Gudrun had pushed into their midst. As he watched, all the weapons lifted to point straight at him.

"Into your suit," an uncompromising voice said. "If you have an explanation, you can give it later."

It was not a time to argue. One shot from any of those weapons would pierce the average hull. Aybee had a suit on and was ready to go in less than thirty seconds. He nodded as he closed the final seal. The outer lock opened, and air hissed out into vacuum. One of the guns lifted and gestured. "Outside."

One step behind Gudrun, Aybee moved on through the lock. It had been three days since he last looked out of an observation port, and he stared around with keen interest. The strange rainbow aurora had vanished, presumably disappearing when the drive went off, and the familiar starfield was all around. The Sun was visible off to his right, noticeably more brilliant than it had been when the journey had begun. Aybee made a quick assessment of its apparent magnitude and decided that they were somewhere on the outer edge of the Kernel Ring.