Proteus Unbound (31 page)

He washed ashore to wakefulness, and for a while he lay with his eyes closed, rejecting the world. But he could not block out the sounds. Close to him was a clogged, asthmatic wheeze, the rattling breath of a human being close to death.

After two minutes Bey could stand it no longer. He allowed his eyes to open and at once came fully awake.

Perched on the open door of the form-change tank, no more than six inches from his face, stood Turpin. The crow's head was tilted to one side, and its beady black eyes glared unblinkingly at Bey. It again produced a dreadful groaning wheeze and followed it with a gurgling cough.

That was echoed by a more distant throat clearing. Ten feet beyond Turpin sat Leo Manx, his face angry and reproachful. When he saw that Bey's eyes were open, he nodded. "At last. Good. I will inform the others."

He stood up and hurried out before Bey could ask the first of his dozens of questions.

Perhaps it was just as well. Bey could not speak. He leaned forward in the tank and coughed his lungs clear of dark, clotted phlegm as Turpin shuffled out of the way with a squawk of rage.

By the time he could breathe, Manx was back with Aybee.

Aybee stared at the spotted floor in front of Bey. "You got me here to see that? Gross, Leo. Extremely gross."

Bey ended a final coughing fit. "How long?" he asked. "How long was I—" He ran out of air.

But he already had some idea of the answer. A trip from the Outer System took weeks. If he and Leo were in the same room, a long time had passed. Even before he saw Leo, Bey knew that he had been in the tank for an extended session. He could feel it in the mutability of every cell.

"Thirty-six days." Aybee looked accusingly at Bey. "Sleeping your head off, Wolfman.
And
you missed all the fun."

"You were in desperate shape," Manx said. "The form-change that you did . . . unmonitored . . . most ill advised—"

"I know. I'm supposed to be dead. You caught Ransome?"

"No." Leo Manx was still looking annoyed. "He got clear away. We have no idea where he went, where he is, what he's doing. Naturally, we're still looking."

"Mary?" Bey's wind had gone again, and he was wheezing. He suddenly realized where Turpin had found the inspiration for that tortured breathing.

"She's here." Aybee paused, then caught the next question in Bey's look. "On Ransome's Hole, I mean. We're still on the habitat." He grinned. "Us and more people than I ever wanted to see in my life. Everybody you ever heard of is here."

"Answering our message?"

"Yeah, and another one I sent a bit later. That one pulled 'em here in droves. Sylvia's about ready to go into hiding. Hey, can you walk better than you talk? If so, you can see for yourself why things are running wild."

"I can walk." Bey considered the prospect. "Maybe."

"Then let's do it. You have to see this for yourself."

Bey stood up, almost toppled over, and realized as he did so that he was back in his old Earth shape. "How the devil . . ."

"Mary Walton," Aybee said. "She didn't really know how to do it, but when you collapsed, she grabbed and stuffed you any-old-how into a form-change tank. Set you up short and hairy—the way she knew best. Just in time, too. Sylvia saw the monitors when she got there. Five more minutes, you'd have been fertilizer."

"That's what I feel like." Bey slowly followed Aybee out of the room, allowing his body to drift along in the low gravity. So Mary was there, and so was Sylvia. Between them they had dragged him back from the edge.

He was glad to be alive. But no one else seemed too pleased. "What's making Leo so angry?"

"He was locked up for a week. He blames you." Aybee was leading the way into the central communications area. "Cinnabar's even madder. Sit down there."

Bey looked slowly around. He had sat in this chair before. He remembered coming here with Sylvia and Aybee—just. He must have been far gone.

"Why are they mad?"

"They'll tell you." Aybee was not listening. He was at the console, his long body tight with excitement. "Lock in and hold on to your skull. We're going on-line." He spoke into the vocoder. "RINI connect. Identification: Apollo Belvedere Smith. Reference: Anomalous signal generation, defined in session 302. Query: What is status?"

He turned to Bey. "Takes a few seconds. Far as I can see, that's for encoding and decoding at this end. Their replies are instantaneous. Someday we'll know how."

"
Whose
replies?"

Before Bey could get an answer the screen was filling. The words on it echoed through the lock into Bey's ears.

THIS ACCESS POINT CONTINUES. ALL OTHER SIGNAL GENERATION TERMINATED
no equivalent.
QUERY: STATUS OF ANGULAR MOMENTUM CHANGES?

"Computer still can't translate times," Aybee said to Bey. "That's what 'no equivalent' probably means. I'm wondering if the Rinis
have
times in our sense. If not, this next bit won't mean much to them, either." He said to the vocoder, "All angular momentum changes for identified kernels will cease in three more days. Query: Can you confirm we have complete list?"

LIST CONFIRMED. REQUEST INFORMATION ON ALL OTHER KERNELS. MASS, CHARGE, ANGULAR MOMENTUM,
no equivalent
LOCATION YOUR REFERENCE FRAME.

"We will provide. Request that the following message be sent to access point 073. Transfer message begins. 'Cinnabar Baker leaving Ransome's Hole in four hours. Expect arrival at Brouwer Harvester nine days from now.' Transfer message ends."

DESIRED TRANSMISSION PERFORMED. REQUEST: CONTINUED TRANSFER SHOULD PROCEED FROM GENERAL DATA BANKS.

"We will provide all the general data banks." Aybee grimaced at Bey. "Want to say anything? No. All right, let's cut it. Request: Session end."

SESSION END.

"Off-line." Aybee turned away from the vocoder, grinning with mad satisfaction.

"What the hell was that all about?" Bey was feeling angry, but he recognized it as one of the mood swings that accompanied emergence from the tanks. "I assume you're willing to tell me."

"Sure. Just a minute." Aybee set up a control sequence. "Got to give them the data—they want the general system data bank sent through. It's a hell of a job. Going to take months." He leaned back. "You had it half-right, you see. The source of spurious information that was screwing up form-change and everything else is inside the kernel shields."

"But not a changed form, the way I thought it had to be?"

"No. It's something inside the kernels themselves. It—or they—sends out the standard radiation stream, but it's modulated to carry messages. It's your source of negative entropy."

Aybee spoke casually, but he could not hide his excitement. From anyone else, Bey would not even have listened. With Aybee, he had to take it seriously. "You know that what you're saying sounds impossible."

"Sure does. That's why it's so interesting. Wolfman, I keep telling the coordinators, but they still can't grasp the importance of this. Nor could Ransome. Even though he was using the Rinis for his own purposes, he missed the real point."

"He was the one who discovered this."

"Not proven. Somebody in the Kernel Ring stumbled across it, but I'll bet it wasn't Ransome himself. They were spinning up and spinning down kernels. Routine stuff, the usual energy storage and extraction. But the things inside one of the kernels could detect the change in angular momentum. They hated it—it affected their inertial reference frames. But they're
smart.
They figured out the cause and modulated the radiation emission in reply—sent a signal, in effect. After that it was a straight programming job at this end, signal encode and decode. The trick was to spot first that it
was
a signal."

"
Inside
the kernel." Bey stared down at the floor. A billion-ton kernel had an event horizon only a few billionths of a nanometer across. The ultimate hidden signal source. "They call themselves Rinis?"

"No. They don't call themselves anything at all, far as I can tell. That's the code name I gave them. The computer answer to anything I asked at first seemed to be R.I.N.I.—'Received Information Not Interpretable'—so I stuck 'em with it. I'm getting better at questions now, though."

"Who are they, Aybee?"

"Can't give you one answer. Everybody asks me, but I say it's too early for that sort of question. Intelligent, sure. Smarter than us, could be. A species, maybe. But it's more like they're a new universe. A whole cosmos. I'm not ready to worry that. I'm still getting my head around a bit of their science. They gave Ransome a bundle of things—new drives, new communications—but there's a lot more than he realized. We're going to get some wild theories out of this."

"They're more advanced than we are?"

"Yeah." Aybee paused. "Or maybe I mean maybe. I don't know how to compare. If I wanted to talk fancy like Leo, I'd say it's like their science is
orthogonal
to ours. They move along a completely different axis of understanding. It's easy to use their ideas, and hell to understand 'em. I'm still having trouble with the basics. Like, are the Rinis a single entity or a finite—or an infinite—number of entities? That sounds weird, but from what I can see of their counting it's based on nondenumerable sets instead of integers."

"They can't be a single entity. There has to be at least three of them."

"Why?"

"Because I've seen that many kernels putting out false form-change information."

"That would be true if each kernel were totally separate. We used to think that. Now I'm sure it's wrong. The kernels—at least the kernels involving the Rinis—"

"Isn't that all of them?"

"No. That's why Ransome had to switch kernels on the space farm. He wanted to get one of his special kernels out when it had done its job. But the Rini kernels are connected somehow. What's known by one is known by all of them. At once, no matter how far away. That's what brought so many ships here. I sent a message saying I might have a system for instantaneous communication, across any distance."

"But if they all connect, they're only one object."

"Not to us. We think they're separate objects. But to
them,
their space could still be singly connected. It's like Flatland. To a being living in two dimensions, on a flat floor, each leg of a chair meets the floor separately and must be a separate object. That's the way the kernels seem to us. But in a higher-dimensional world—their world—they are all connected, all parts of one chair."

"But then you shouldn't be able to supply energy and angular momentum to each kernel separately."

"Why not? You can paint one leg of a chair." Aybee turned to Bey. "Hey, I'm glad you're back in circulation. I've been wanting talks like this for weeks, but nobody seems to care. Cinnabar and Leo and the rest of 'em are all too busy running around talking politics and stopping wars, and there's all this really good stuff needs looking at. Do you know how the drive the Rinis gave Ransome works?"

"No. But it can wait until tomorrow." Bey stood up. "I'm tired now. Don't bother to get up. I can make it out of here on my own."

He was being sarcastic. Aybee had shown no sign of moving. In fact, as soon as Bey had said he was leaving, Aybee bad nodded and turned the computer on again.

Bey's feelings were more complicated. Everything that Aybee had said was fascinating, but Bey was getting tired. More than that, he was restless, to the point where sleep was out of the question. Without any conscious plan he set out to follow a familiar path, drifting along the corridors that led from the communications center to Ransome's private quarters.

When he opened the door, he thought that the outer chamber was unoccupied. Then he noticed Sylvia Fernald standing around by the side of the great water globe, staring in at the fish. Next to her was Cinnabar Baker, even thinner than when Bey had last seen her.

They had their backs turned, but Baker somehow sensed his approach and swung around. When she recognized him, she produced a sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. "At last. I've waited a month to be rude to you."

"You and Leo both." Bey was not getting the praise he had expected. You'd think that when somebody nearly killed himself to make sure an important message got out . . . "I guess you weren't the information leak out of the harvesters."

"Of course I wasn't. But I had quite a time proving it. You made it sound as though the only ones who could be leaking information to Ransome were me or Leo—and then you ruled out Leo."

"That's the way it looked. It had to be somebody close to you, and it had to be someone who moved with you from one harvester to another. And Leo and Aybee were away with us on the space farm."

"True."

"So that means—"

But Cinnabar Baker had spun around and was heading for the door. "Figure it out," she said over her shoulder. "Or if you can't, Sylvia can tell you about it."

Bey stared after her. "She is
mad.
I wouldn't want to argue with her when she's like that."

"She's been furious for weeks. I've never seen her so angry. But not at you. At Ransome. He did the unforgivable thing."

"Worse than trying to take over the system?"

"Much worse, if you're Cinnabar Baker." Sylvia sat down on a long bench by the side of the water globe and patted the seat next to her. "Sit down, before you fall down. You look exhausted."

"What did Ransome do?"

"Baker wouldn't have minded as much if he had done it to her, personally. But Ransome's people got hold of
Turpin.
They put an audiovisual tap into his head. Everything the crow saw and heard was transmitted straight to Ransome, and Baker never went anywhere without Turpin—he even slept in her bedroom. She realized what was happening when she saw the viewing angle of some of the shots. Worst of all, the tap hurt, and the feed for it made poor old Turpin nearly blind and deaf. When Baker found that out, she wanted to wring Ransom's neck with her own hands."

"Where is he?"

"We don't know yet. But we'll track him down."

"I'm not sure of that." Bey finally sat down next to Sylvia. He had become used to being tall, and it was disconcerting to find that his head again came only to her shoulder. His hands were feeling numb, and he rubbed them together. "Ransome was clever enough to make a bolt hole for himself. He's still as charismatic as ever, and he'll always be able to draw people to him."