Proteus Unbound (29 page)

Finally he glanced across to Sylvia and nodded. "Ready as I'll ever be. Where's the message?"

"I put it into a restricted access bank for safety—so no one can take a peek by accident."

"Right idea. Password?"

" 'LUCKY.' "

"Yeah. Let's hope." Aybee entered the final call sequence and sat back in his chair. There was a moment's pause, then a flicker of lights across the full display. He nodded. "Okay. We're in business. Now the fun starts—people are being bounced off com circuits all over the habitat."

"Will they know the command came from here?"

"Dunno. Probably. I couldn't see any way to stop it, but I did my best to make 'em freeze. I slapped Ransome's name on everything, so it looks like he's the one grabbing circuits." He stood up. "Keep your eye on that readout. If it goes to zero, yell. It means I'll have to take over. We'll be all done when it hits two eighty. Then we can release the channels."

"What are you going to do?"

"Still don't know. Bey said lie low, but we don't want to just sit here. We need to be useful." Aybee went to the door, opened it a fraction, and peered out. At once he drew back and allowed the door to close.

"What's wrong?"

"Guys outside. Four of 'em."

"Heading this way?"

"No. Not even looking. Just standing there. Bey's doing, for a bet. He sent 'em here to stop anybody getting
in.
But it means we're stuck." Aybee stared around the communications center, then walked across to a horizontal trapdoor set in the curved floor. He lifted it and peered through.

"That won't help." Sylvia had followed his actions. "There's only a kernel down there. The door just gives access to the outside of the shields. You won't be able to get out that way."

"I know. I just want to take a look. I've been itching to get close to a live kernel ever since I arrived here." He paused with the trapdoor half-open. "How's that counter?"

"Up to one seventy."

"Going smooth. Let me take a little peek here." Aybee lay down with his head through the opening of the trapdoor. "It's a live one, all right. Whopping cable for the sensors. Big junction box, too—just like it was on the space farm's kernel." He craned farther into the opening, wriggling his body forward across the floor until only his hips and legs were visible to Sylvia. "
And
its own computer console." His voice was muffled. "Seems like there's a direct link from the kernel sensors to the habitat's central computer. Now, why do that, unless . . ." Another eighteen inches of Aybee disappeared through the trapdoor.

The count in front of Sylvia had been climbing steadily. It finally reached 280 and froze there, lights blinking softly. A message complete indicator flashed on. She released all the com circuits and walked across to the trapdoor. She tapped Aybee on the thigh.

"What's up?" His body twisted around so he could look at her.

"Nothing bad, but we're all done with the message. If you want to go down there, you'll find it easier feet first." She waited as he turned, then followed him down the narrow ladder until they were both standing on the outer shield of a kernel. Sylvia stared down at the black, polished surface.

"How do you know this is an active kernel?"

Aybee pointed. "There's the control unit for angular momentum. I've checked a bunch of 'em these last couple of weeks. Most of them aren't connected to spin-up/spin-down systems, so they're not ready as energy sources or energy storage. Matter of fact, I'm not sure just what they
are
doing." He paused. "This is a live one, though. Hooked up and active and ready to roll."

The kernel's control panel was a compact unit sitting on the curved shield surface. Aybee squatted down by it. "So far, so good. Want first crack at it?"

"I wouldn't know where to start. But if you know a way to tell what's inside the shields, you can check what Bey suggested to me when we were working on the message. He thinks there's some new form-change product in there, something that can survive near a kernel. He tried to scan the shield interior back on the Marsden Harvester, looking for something unusual, but he didn't find a thing. He wasn't sure he was doing it right, though. Leo Manx told him to ask you, because this is your line of work. But you were off having fun on the space farm."

"Yeah. Had a great time there. Real pleasure trip." Aybee was already at the control panel, staring vacantly at its complicated console. "This layout's a strange one for a power kernel console. Too many functions.
And
it's directly linked with the habitat's central computer."

"Can you scan the interior?"

"Dunno." Aybee listed the control function menu and studied it for a few seconds. "Guess I can. Only thing inside the kernel shield—apart from the kernel—should be the radiation monitors. I'll use them to do an interior scan and output it to the screen. We'll pick up an image of anything inside the shields. But I'll bet my butt that we don't find anything in there."

He turned on the display and set the interior monitors to perform a slow scan within the innermost kernel shield. The kernel itself, pouring out gigawatts of radiation and particles, appeared as a tiny, intense point of light on the monitor. The triple shields, reflecting back that sleet of energy, showed on the same monitor as a softer continuous glow.

They both stared at the screen, waiting in vain for any anomalous pattern. When the scan had finished, Sylvia shook her head. "That does Bey in. He was sure there had to be something inside. What now?"

"We gotta use pure logic." Aybee was back at the controls. "One: There's an information source inside the kernel shields. Two: There's nothing inside the shield but the kernel. Therefore—nice clean syllogism—
the kernel must be the information source.
I've been skirting that for weeks, wondering if I'm off my head—but no one would let me get near a kernel and find out!"

"Aybee, let's not get too ridiculous. A kernel is a
power
source. It isn't an
information
source. And how can there be anything inside a kernel? It's only billionths of a centimeter across. And even if there were anything inside, it couldn't ever get a message out. A kernel is a black hole!"

Aybee was shaking his head and changing the scale on the output display. He had zoomed in to the area around the kernel itself. "Come off it, Sylv. Black holes stopped being black in the 1970s, two hundred and fifty years ago! Hell, you know that—why else do you need shields? You know black holes pump out particles and radiation. Every kernel has its own radiation temperature and its own entropy. Maybe its own
signal
."

"But it's too small! You couldn't possibly pack a signal generator in such a tiny volume."

"We don't know how much space there is
inside,
or what the inside of a kernel is like—no idea at all. The interior has its own geometry, its own space-time signature, probably its own physical laws. Hell, people have been saying for centuries that the inside of a black hole is a 'separate universe,' but we never bother to think through the
implication
of that. If the inside of each kernel is a separate universe,
anything
could be in there—including somebody capable of communication."

"Somebody? You mean something
alive?
How did it get in there?"

"Hey, you'd better define life for me. If you mean something capable of generating nonrandom signals, then, yeah, I mean
alive.
As for how it got there—it's been in there all along."

"But
how?
And what could something inside a kernel possibly want to say?"

"One question at a time, Sylv. Do you want to find out what's going on, or do you want to run a debate? Remember, thermodynamics only tells what's happening on
average
for a kernel's radiation. It doesn't say what gets emitted at any particular moment—so let's take a look at this." Aybee turned on a second screen. "We don't see a thing when we just monitor the total radiation output of the kernel, because the average level is so high. But I can display the time variation of the radiation—the deviation from the average. See that fluctuation? Now, it could be a
signal
. Information, coming from the kernel—from nowhere. Just what Bey was looking for, as bad inputs to the form-change process. And I'll bet this could be responsible for breakdown of communications all through the system. Don't forget there are active kernels in all the important places, everywhere from the harvesters to the space farms. It could be the cause of the snake wrapped around the Kernel Ring, the giant woman walking across the space farm collector, flaming blue swords, giant red space hounds—you name it."

Sylvia was studying the rise and fall of the radiation pattern. "But it doesn't
look
like a signal. It's like pure noise."

"A perfectly efficient signal looks like noise—until you know the rules." Aybee was tracing the circuits leading from the kernel monitors. "Before the signal can be interpreted, it needs to be
decoded.
And that's where the computer systems must come in. See, this signal is fed as an input data stream to the computer—the central computer for Ransome's Hole. Let's have a look at what the computer thinks it is seeing. It starts by—uh oh." He was staring at a new signal on the screen.

"What's wrong?"

"Bad news for Bey." The alert signal vanished and was replaced by a flashing message. "While I was playing with the com system, I took a precaution. I set up a priority interrupt for information about Ransome." Aybee was frowning at the screen. "According to this, Ransome is in two places at once on the habitat. I asked for positional fixes, but all I get as an answer is 'No Defined Location.' Bey might run into the real Ransome."

"Can you do anything about it?"

"Not one thing. We don't even know where he is."

"Then we have to keep going." Sylvia was more intrigued than she had realized. "Let's find out what we've got here. What's the next step?"

Aybee did not answer for a minute or two, then marked a point on the screen with the cursor. "See that trace? It says there's a program on the main computer system, one designed as an interface with this kernel. It ought to be the code/decode algorithm. We can try it. You stay right here, Sylv, and tell me what happens. I'll go to the upper console and execute that module."

Aybee scampered back up the ladder, leaving Sylvia to wonder what they were hoping to accomplish. It was difficult to see how fiddling with kernels could help them escape from Ransome's Hole. But it was hard to stop Aybee when he had the bit between his teeth—and she did not want to stop any more than he did.

The lighting in the kernel shield chamber was poor, and Sylvia was forced to lean close to see the miniature control display. For another minute or two there was nothing to claim her attention. Then she noticed that the spin-up/spin-down mechanism on the kernel had suddenly been brought into action. It was adding and subtracting tiny bursts of angular momentum, far too little to make sense as power supplies.

"Are you doing that?" she called out.

"Doing what?" Aybee's head appeared at the trapdoor.

"Spin up and spin down. But just little changes. Now it's stopped."

"I've been entering a question about kernel operation. But it shouldn't cause kernel spin change." Aybee was suddenly gone again. "How about that?" his voice called from above.

"Yes. It's doing it again. And now I'm seeing a change in the kernel radiation pattern. What's causing it?"

"I'm not sure, but I've got ideas. Hey!" His voice rose half an octave. "Did you just poke something down there? Touch the sensor leads, maybe?"

"I'm nowhere near them."

"Well, I'm getting something wild on the display here. Come up and look at this."

Sylvia hurried up the stairs and went across to Aybee at the console. The display was flickering with random lights. While they watched, it moved suddenly to a distorted pattern of letters. Sylvia gaped as the screen steadied and an intelligible message began to scroll in.

QUERY . . . QUERY . . . QUERY: ARE YOU READY TO RECEIVE?

"Ready," Aybee said. He added softly to Sylvia, "Let's hope we are."

MESSAGE TRANSFER: DEGREE OF TRANSMITTED SIGNAL REDUNDANCY HAS BEEN REDUCED. ENCODING ENTROPY PER UNIT NOW DIFFERENT FROM ALL PREVIOUS RECEIVED COMMUNICATIONS. DEDUCE PRESENCE OF NEW SIGNAL GENERATOR IN SENDING SYSTEM. QUERY: WHO ARE YOU?

Aybee blinked and stared at the panel. After a moment he shrugged. "My name is Aybee Smith." His voice was suddenly husky and uncertain, and there was a moment's pause before the vocoder could make the adaptation and a transcript of his words appeared on the display screen. "I am special assistant to Cinnabar Baker, general coordinator of the Outer System. I have with me Sylvia Fernald, responsible for control systems in the Cloud. Hey, more to the point. Query: Who the hell are
YOU
?"

CHAPTER 28

". . . he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which is the first warning stroke of the triumph of mutability. Like the poisoned Athulf in the Fool's Tragedy, he could have cried, 'Oh, I am changing, changing, fearfully changing.' "
—Dorothy L. Sayers

The interior of Ransome's Hole rerninded Bey of a great cluttered warehouse. Scattered through it, seemingly at random, were hundreds of kernels, each enough to power a structure twice the total size. The minute singularities were distributed through the whole structure, held in position by electromagnetic harnesses and floating within their triple spherical shields.

With no other masses to provide gravity, the kernels defined the whole internal field of the habitat. Corridors curled and twisted, following the local horizontal; free-hanging cables snaked their anfractuous and eye-disturbing paths across open spaces, bending to follow invisible equipotentials. The floor of a corridor could veer through a right angle in a hundred feet and still provide a constant-gravity environment.

In Bey's condition, the journey through the interior was one episode in a surrealistic nightmare. The spiraling geometry around him matched perfectly the reeling condition inside his head. He concentrated his attention on following Aybee's instructions and staggered forward. Fortunately, the interior tunnels were almost deserted. He was beginning to hope that he would reach Ransome's quarters unseen when he saw ahead of him an armed group of four security officers. Two of them were facing his way. There was no way he could avoid their attention, and in any case he knew no other way to his destination.