Proteus Unbound (24 page)

The ship had docked on the perimeter of a structure that was no more than a minor way station, a long skeletal framework of struts with clamps to hold ships in position and massive tanks for fusion fuels. The group moved to a little pinnace propelled by a high-thrust mirror-matter engine. Their real destination was a few kilometers Sunward, a dull darkness whose size and shape could be assessed only from stray glints of sunlight splintering off external ports and antennas.

The body was roughly spherical, perhaps five kilometers across. Aybee stared at it with the greatest interest. If he were unworried, it was not because he was confident of his own fate. He was simply unable to drag his mind away from the new physical universe suggested by the ship he had arrived in. And if he had any emotion, it was anticipation; whatever he had seen in transit, there would be greater marvels here, where the transit ship had been built.

Aybee did a quick analysis. The sphere ahead might be a source of ships, but it was not itself a ship. It was also the size and shape of a cargo hulk, but it was not being used for cargo. There was no signs of a drive mechanism, and there could be none, since the delicate spikes and silvery filaments of exterior antennae were incompatible with accelerated motion. No stronger than tinsel, they would be crushed and deformed by the slightest of body forces.

It could be a colony, like the Outer System's free drifters, or it might be a converted factory, originally dedicated to the production of a particular line of goods.

Aybee abandoned speculation. They were moving to a huge airlock built into the hull's convex surface, and already several of the party had their hands ready to break suit seals. Aybee waited. If anyone attempted to breathe vacuum, he would not be the first. He was amused to note that Gudrun had positioned herself as far away from him as possible, at the opposite side of the lock. The escort had apparently formed their own conclusions about Aybee's threat to them. No one held a gun at the ready, and half of them did not even bother to look at him.

The inner lock opened. The group moved quietly forward into a large, bare chamber with a flat floor and a local gravity field that varied irregularly from one point to the next. To Aybee, that suggested the resultant vector from many kernels scattered through the interior of the body, each adding its own field component.

The man in front halted and turned around. At his gesture, Aybee removed his own suit with the rest. For the first time he could assess their physical appearance. Most of them had the short, stocky build that he associated with the Inner System and the Kernel Ring, but two were long and lean, as much Cloudlanders as anyone Aybee had ever seen. They were probably not recent arrivals, either, since they were not dressed in Outer System style; their arms and legs stuck wildly out of clothes far too small for them.

Gudrun was staring at him in fear and horror. Aybee felt tempted to go across, wiggle his fingers in his ears, and see if she screamed. What was she expecting? Someone to appear in a puff of smoke and carry her off to hell?

Instead he nodded amiably to the others in the group. "Well." They all stared at him. "You got me. What happens now?"

"That depends on you." The speaker was a black-haired man with dark skin and a thickset build. Aybee recognized the voice as the one that had been ordering him around. "I was told to get you here, that's all. If Gudrun is right"—the man spoke as someone who already knew her well—"then you're in trouble. We don't like spies here. If you're innocent, you'll have to prove it."

"Guilty until proved innocent. Nice. Where's here?"

Several of the men stirred uneasily at Aybee's question. "Got a bit of nerve, haven't you?" the stocky man commented. "What did you tell him, Gudrun?"

"Nothing." She was defensive. "At least, not very much. I thought until we were on the ship that he was just a new trainee that we captured on the Sagdeyev space farm. How was I supposed to know he's a Cloudland spy?"

That produced another reaction from the rest of them, and a couple of guns were again pointed at Aybee.

"I don't think you want to believe this," he said. "But I'm not a spy, and I've never been one."

"He's lying!" Gudrun's face was flushed with anger. "He even gave me a false name. He says he's Karl Lyman, but his real name is Smith—Apollo Belvedere Smith."

That shocked Aybee more than he wanted to admit. He could see how he might have revealed by his actions that he was not from the space farm or that another farmer might have said he was not part of that group. But how could anyone know his real name? Unless he had taken to talking in his sleep, he had never mentioned his name since the accident back on the farm.

"
Is
that your name?" one of the tall, thin escorts asked. "Because if it is, then, man, you're in deep trouble." He turned to the rest of them without waiting to hear Aybee's answer. "There's an Apollo Belvedere Smith who works for Outer System headquarters. High up, staff position. So if this is him, he's definitely a spy, and we have to—"

"I tell you, I'm not a spy." Aybee cut him off before the other man could finish. "I'm a
scientist
—"

"He's lying!" Gudrun shouted. "He's no scientist. He lied to me."

"He did," said a quiet new voice from behind the group. "And yet, oddly enough, he is not lying now. He is telling the exact truth."

Everyone spun around. A small, lightly built man had stepped into the chamber through its open inner door. He was dressed in a tight-fitting suit of rusty black, and on his head he wore a peaked cap of the same sable tone. His face was fine-boned and pale, with an odd little smile on the thin hps, but that expression was belied and dominated by the eyes. There was no smile there, only a dark and piercing look that demanded and held attention.

Aybee found his attention drawn to those eyes. It took an amazing effort to look away. He heard Gudrun gasp. She, at least, had not been expecting the new arrival. But she had to be less surprised than Aybee himself. For although the dress was quite different and the teeth no longer incongruously blackened, Aybee recognized the man standing in front of them. It was the Negentropic Man, just as he had danced and capered through Bey Wolf's tormented memories.

The newcomer stepped forward, and the others moved aside to make a corridor. Right in front of Aybee, the man stopped and looked up. Aybee was a head and a half taller. The thin grin widened.

"As you said, Apollo Belvedere Smith, there was no lie. You are a scientist, and Cinnabar Baker thinks you are the best in the system." He held out his hand. "Let me welcome you here, and let me introduce myself."

"That's not necessary." Aybee took the outstretched hand and decided it was time to do more than just deny everything. He had to establish independence. "I know where I am. This is Ransome's Hole. And you are Black Ransome."

If Aybee had expected a shocked response, he was disappointed. The other man frowned just a little and gave Aybee's hand a dry, firm shake. "I'm Ransome, true enough. Some call me Black Ransome, although that is not my name. And some call this Ransome's Hole, too, though I would never do so." The smile returned, warm and embracing. "I'm going to welcome you here, whether you want it or not. You've come a long way, and we must talk. You may be very valuable to us. Come on."

Aybee had apparently been switched in status from prisoner and spy to welcome guest. Gudrun gasped, but there was no murmur of dissent from anyone. The force of Ransome's personality was too strong to brook argument. Instead, the group of people moved to leave a clear path to the door. He turned and left, confident that Aybee would follow.

That annoyed Aybee. So Ransome was to lead, and he was supposed to trot along behind like some pet animal? No way.

He left the chamber just behind Ransome and tagged along until they were out of sight of the other group. But then he paused and looked around. Ransome went on, almost out of sight in the curving corridor, heading deeper into the sphere along a spiral path whose field in less than fifty meters fluctuated from almost zero g to a thirtieth of Earth gravity. The floor turned in the same space through 180 degrees. In any other structure, Aybee would have known just how to interpret that. The path must wind its way past two shielded kernels, one below the "floor," the other, forty meters farther on, above the "ceiling"—which had become the floor.

That was the only logical explanation, but Aybee's new experiences on the transit ship had taught him to mistrust preconceived ideas. He slowed his pace and hunted backward and forward, seeking a point of maximum field in the corridor floor. If he were now close to a kernel, he would feel an inertial dragging.

He went down on his hands and knees and put his head close to the floor, moving it slowly about. While he was in that position he saw a pair of black-clad legs standing a few feet in front of him.

"If you're going to travel all the way like that," Ransome's calm voice said, "it will take you a long time and I won't wait. I'll send one of the machines back here to show you the way. It is a kernel down there, you know. What else did you think it might be?"

Aybee stood up. He was still young enough to hate looking like a fool more than anything in the world. For the rest of the journey through the interior of Ransome's Hole he trudged grumpily along right behind Ransome.

In a few minutes they came to the end of the corridor and passed through into a great hemispherical chamber, furnished to a level of luxury that Aybee had never seen. Glittering silver sculptures of human and animal figures were everywhere. The domed ceiling housed a huge sprinkler system, able to deliver anything from a fine mist of rain to a total deluge. Fruit trees and flowering vines, trained in elaborate espaliers along walls and trellises, grew beneath in disciplined variety. At the center of the chamber stood its most spectacular feature. A forty-meter globe of greenish water was held in position by the gravitational field of the kernel at its center, and brilliantly colored fish were swimming within it. Fronds of weed and branched coral grew down on the kernel's outer shield, and an external lighting system created ever-varying patterns of light and dark within the clouded interior.

Aybee goggled. No one had anything like that in the Outer System, not even the three general coordinators.

Ransome had caught his expression. The shorter man shrugged. "Not for me, Aybee Smith. That isn't my taste at all." He sounded amused and tolerant, far from the fanatical rebel promised by his reputation. The ogre of the Kernel Ring was easy company, lulling one to relax and listen to him.

"But sometimes you have to do these things, don't you?" Ransome went on. "For the sake of the less scientific. Stick around here for a while, and you'll see worse. Maybe you should think of this as my version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon."

The what of what? Aybee decided to look it up when he had a chance. Meanwhile, he could not help changing his mind about Black Ransome. The man was treating him like an equal rather than a prisoner, and given Ransome's reputation and authority, that had to be flattering.

"Now, this
is
my own taste," Ransome said. "A person can really work here." He led the way through a gleaming door of white metal, on into a sparsely furnished room about eight meters by six. A long desk, half-covered with random piles of data cubes, stood against one wall. Half a dozen displays were mounted above it on plain beige walls that carried unobtrusive light fixtures, the biggest holograph projectors Aybee had ever seen, and no decorations of any kind. Elaborate computer consoles were built into the surface of the desk itself.

Ransome sat down on one of the three easy chairs and gestured to another one. Now that they had arrived, he seemed in no mood to speak. There was a long, uncomfortable pause, with Aybee standing waiting and Ransome staring blank-eyed at the wall.

At last Aybee tucked himself into a chair. They had been made for Ransome's convenience, not for a tall Cloudlander, and his knees came up near his chin. "So I blew it," he said. The personal failure had been troubling him since they had first reached Ransome's Hole. "Mind telling me how?"

Ransome raised dark eyebrows questioningly, but still he did not speak.

"I mean, my
name
," Aybee added. "Gudrun knew it, and you knew it. But I told her I was Karl Lyman when she found me on the space farm, and nobody did a chromosomal ID check on me. You shouldn't have had any idea I was lying. So I must have done something dumb. I'd just like to know what it was."

Ransome shook his head. "You demean yourself, Aybee Smith. It was not your failure. Watch." He nodded to one of the displays and played briefly with the miniature console set into the arm of his chair.

The screen glowed. Aybee had half expected to see the result of some unsuspected test conducted on the space farm or perhaps on the dark cargo hulk. Instead, a color image appeared. It was Sylvia Fernald, seen full face. After the flicker of a fast audio search, her image steadied and began to speak.

"We thought Aybee would have been here long ago," she was saying. "Now it looks as though he was captured along with the others. Do you have any idea where they were taken?"

"Not yet." The voice was Cinnabar Baker's, and as the field of view on the display scrolled across and down, Aybee realized that he had to be viewing the scene through her eyes.

"I hope he has the sense to lie low until we can trace him," Sylvia said from outside the field of view.

"If we ever can," Baker said. "We have no clues so far. If he's still alive—we're not sure of that—he could have been taken anywhere in the system." The screen showed the main display in Baker's own office. It held a listing of the names and physical descriptions of all personnel of the space farm, plus Aybee's own personal data.

"You know Aybee," Sylvia said. She appeared again in the picture. "If he is alive, he'll be looking for a chance to get away—"

"As I'm sure you were," Ransome said. He cut off the display, and Sylvia vanished. "But once we knew you had not left the Sagdeyev farm with the others, we could identify you from your description and take special precautions."