Proteus Unbound (5 page)

CHAPTER 6

"Entropy is missing information."
—Ludwig Boltzmann

"Entropy is information."
—Norbert Wiener

"Entropy is leftovers."
—Apollo Belvedere Smith

One quarter of the way to the edge of the Oort Cloud; that did not sound too far. Call it twenty-six thousand astronomical units and it became more substantial. Call it four trillion kilometers; it was then an inconceivable number, but no more than a number.

To appreciate the distance from Earth to the Opik Harvester, it was necessary to have direct sensory inputs. Bey Wolf looked back the way they had come and searched for the Sun.

There it was. But it was the Sun diminished, Sol with no discernible disk, Sol dwindled to the bright, brittle point of Venus on a frosty Earth night.

"The element of fire is quite put out. The sun is lost, and earth, and no man's wit, can well direct him where to look for it." Bey, still staring back the way they had come, took no comfort from the old words and longed for the cozy familiarity of the Inner System. At his side, Leo Manx was looking the other way, scanning the starfield ahead.

"Eh-hey! There we are! Ten more minutes, we'll be home." The Cloudlander had already shed his loose travel suit in favor of a pale yellow one-piece. His hairless arms and legs stuck out from it like the limbs of a gigantic and excited cricket. "There, Mr. Wolf. See it now? The harvester!"

He spoke as of a first sighting, but he had already pointed out the Opik Harvester to Bey an hour before, as a dark spot occulting a tiny patch of stars. But as the clumsy bulk drifted closer, glimmering with feeble surface lights, his excitement was increasing.

Bey followed the pointing finger. For eyes conditioned by the constraints of gravity, the shape of the harvester was difficult to comprehend. A dozen spheres clustered loosely to form a central grouping, but their coupling was done by the invisible bonds of electromagnetic fields, and the configuration constantly changed. Long, curving arms cantilevered away from the central nexus, reaching out to bridge a gulf that had no end. The final silver girders and antennae of those arms grew gradually thinner and less substantial, fading so slowly into void that their terminal points could not be seen.

According to Leo Manx, the big middle sphere was roughly twenty miles across. Bey could not verify that. It was impossible to gain any sense of scale from the harvester's main features. The whole structure had been built by self-replicating machines of widely differing sizes and had been designed to be run by them. Humans had been late arrivals, occupying the harvesters only when the final step of life-support systems had been added.

The ship's McAndrew drive had been switched off two hours earlier, ending the signal silence introduced by the ionized plasma that propelled it. The communications unit had at once begun to scroll and chatter, urging Wolf and Manx to join a meeting that was already in progress.

Manx, happy to be back in "decent" gravity, watched Wolf's clumsy movements for a few seconds as they disembarked, then grabbed him by the arm. "Hold tight. You can practice later." He towed a weightless Bey along a succession of identical corridors, all unoccupied and showing no signs of human presence.

"Almost ninety thousand people," Manx said in reply to Wolf's question. "The harvester is a major population center of the Outer System. About ten million service machines, I imagine, though no one keeps count. They make whatever new ones they decide they need; it has been that way since the first ones were sent here from the Inner System. I've sometimes wondered what the machines would have done if people had never arrived in the Cloud. Would they have eventually downed tools and quit, or would they have found some other justification for continuing to modify the Cloud? If there were no humans to use the biological products of the harvesters, would the machines have found it necessary to invent us?"

To Bey's relief, they had reached a region of noticeable gravity. He was not too keen on the other implications of that—a shielded kernel had to be somewhere near, and that much pent energy made him uncomfortable. But it was nice to have an up and a down again, even if it was only a twentieth of a g. He followed Leo Manx through a final door and into a long room with a curved floor.

Three Cloudlanders were sitting at a little round table, each dressed uniformly in a lemon-colored one-piece suit.

Wolf at once recognized the woman facing him. Given the frequency with which she appeared on Earth newscasts, it would be hard not to do so. Cinnabar Baker was one of the three most powerful people in the Outer System and a scathing critic of everything that happened closer to the Sun than the inner edge of the Cloud. Her cheerful appearance belied her reputation. There was presumably the thin, gravity-intolerant skeleton of the Cloudlander within her, but in Baker's case it was well covered. She was a vast, smiling woman, maybe two hundred kilos in mass, with flawless, pale skin. Her hair was thin and close-cropped, revealing the contours of a well-shaped and delicate-looking skull. The clear eyes and fine skin tone gave evidence of regular use of form-change equipment.

She stood up and held out a chubby, dimpled hand. "Welcome to the Outer System. I am Cinnabar Baker. I'm responsible for the operation of all the harvesters, including this one. Let me express my appreciation that you agreed to come here, and allow me to introduce you to some of my staff. Sylvia Fernald." She gestured at the woman on her left. "In charge of all software development and control theory in the Outer System. Next to her, Apollo Belvedere Smith—Aybee for short and for preference—my top science adviser and general gadfly. Leo Manx, senior psych administrator and Inner System specialist, you know already—probably all too well after your trip together from the Inner System."

"Behrooz Wolf," Bey muttered. It hardly seemed necessary. They knew who he was. How many hairy strangers were there on the harvester, a foot and a half shorter than everyone else and with four times the muscles? Bey greeted the others, making his instinctive and immediate assessment of their ages, original appearance, and major form-changes. There were anomalies, points to be thought about later, particularly in the case of Apollo Belvedere Smith, who was extra-tall, rail-thin, and glowering angrily at Wolf for no discernible reason. But for the moment Bey was pondering a more substantial question.

Cinnabar Baker was there with three of the Cloud's scientists, technicians, and administrators, all apparently tops in their fields. They had been summoned to worry a technical problem of malfunctioning form-change equipment. Wolf had come to know and like Leo Manx, with his quirky sense of humor and his shared interest in Earth history and literature. He felt that a perfect choice had been made: Manx was just the right combination of seniority, experience, and intellect to work with Bey on form-change questions. But the others? It made more sense for Bey and Leo Manx to go straight to work. Why a top science adviser? Most of all, why Cinnabar Baker? She was far more senior than the problem justified.

Bey felt the stir of an old feeling, something that had been dormant for too long within him: suspicion, and with it, the frisson of powerful curiosity.

"Sylvia Fernald and Leo Manx will be your principal day-to-day contacts," Baker was saying. "If you find it necessary to travel through the system, one or both of them will accompany you. Aybee usually travels with me, and I have to be all over the place, but you will have first call. Any time you require him, he's at your service. That's enough, Aybee," she put in as the man across the table grunted his disapproval. "I told you the rules." She turned back to Wolf. "Tell us what you need to know about our form-change programs, Mr. Wolf, and we will do our best to provide it."

Wolf sat down between Leo Manx and Aybee Smith. He wanted to see more of the harvester, but that could wait. It was time for a direct approach. "Naturally, I would like an overview of the problem you've been having with form-change equipment and programs. But that's not my first priority."

They were staring at him in surprise.

"I'd like to know what's going on here," he continued. "I don't think I have been given the full story. There are factors that have not been described to me." He caught Cinnabar Baker's quick look at Leo Manx and the other's tiny shake of the head. "I must know what they are."

Apollo Belvedere Smith gave a grunt of approval. "Hey. I didn't want to bring you here, but mebbe you can do something useful, after all." He turned to Baker. "Was I right, or was I right? He cottoned. I guess I should brief the Wolfman."

Cinnabar Baker shook her head. "You'll go too fast and leave too much out."

"Naw. If he's smart as he needs to be, he'll follow."

"Maybe. But it's still no. You can impress him with your brilliance later. I want Fernald to brief him. But before we begin—" She stared straight at Bey, and he saw past the fat, friendly exterior. Cinnabar Baker was a person with drive to match her bulk, a woman who made up her mind in a hurry. "I won't ask you to pledge secrecy when you go back home, Behrooz Wolf," she went on. "Just don't talk about this while you're around here. We want to minimize alarm—panic, if you prefer that word. Now I'm starting to sound mysterious. Go on, Fernald, let's have it. Tell him what's been happening."

"Everything?"

"The whole story."

While they were talking, Bey had taken a closer look at Aybee Smith. His appearance suggested a man in his early twenties, but that of course meant little. Bey listened, looked, integrated posture, speech style, and the exchange between Aybee and Cinnabar Baker, and came up with a surprising conclusion: Apollo Belvedere Smith was a teenager, still under twenty. Yet he was Baker's top science adviser. Which meant he had to be at least half as smart as he seemed to think he was.

"Background first." Sylvia Fernald had moved around to face Bey. She was a good and logical briefer, and she began with a summary of what Bey had already heard in fair detail from Leo Manx. Three years earlier there had been problems with form-change processes. Humans emerged from the tanks either with an incorrect final form or in just the same state as when they went in. The problem had not attracted much interest at first, since a repeat of the form-change process would always lead to the desired result.

That had become less true in the past two years. Deviations became more pronounced, and repeat treatments often led to new anomalies. One year earlier the first deaths had occurred in the form-change tanks. Every attempt to trace the problem had failed. And the numbers of deaths and abnormalities were growing exponentially.

Wolf was hearing little that was a surprise, and his main attention was concentrated on the speaker. Sylvia Fernald had chosen neither the walking skeleton of Leo Manx nor the roly-poly bulk of Cinnabar Baker. She was slim but not skinny, and incredibly ugly by Earth standards. She towered over Bey by a foot or more, with a gawky, angular build that seemed all spidery arms and legs. Like Baker, she wore her carroty-red hair short, swept way back from a high, pale forehead. But unlike the others at the table, she had eyebrows, pale sandy arches that emphasized the size and brightness of her deep-set gray eyes and the sharp angle of her thin, jutting nose. Bey ignored the overall unpleasant impression, did his usual summation of variables, and decided she was on the young side of early middle age.

"How many cases, total?" he asked when she paused.

She hesitated and looked at Baker, who nodded. "Tell him."

"Nearly eighty thousand."

"My God. That's more than we've had on Earth in a century and a half."

"I know. And remember, that's out of a total population of fifty million, not your fifteen billion."

"And getting worse. Can you provide me with the rates of change?"

Sylvia Fernald nodded after another quick look at Cinnabar Baker. "That's not the end of it, Mr. Wolf. I'm not an expert on the technology of the Inner System, but here our form-change systems, hardware and software, are the most delicate devices we have. They have to be shielded against interference, and there's triple redundancy and error checking in every electronic signal."

Bey nodded. "Same on Earth. I'd be amazed if the procedures and the error-correcting codes are any different. I don't see how they could be. Form-change won't tolerate transmission errors. It's so delicate that an error rate of one bit in ten to the twelfth is enough to show. Nothing else comes close in sensitivity."

"Not on Earth, perhaps," Cinnabar Baker said. "But remember, here in the Outer System we are far more dependent on all kinds of feedback control systems. Go on, Fernald. The whole story."

"Three years ago we had our first problems with form-change processes. That was bad. But two years ago, other things began to go wrong. On a big scale. There are now billions of tons of hydrogen cyanide floating free near the edge of the Halo. The whole product line from the Kuiper Harvester went sour on us. It was supposed to produce aldehydes and alcohols from prebiotic bodies in the Cloud, but the program went wrong, the automatic checks didn't work, and the first thing we knew was when a crewed surveyor reported anomalous spectral signatures."

"A year's production down the drain," Baker added. "And five years more work before we'll be able to clean it up."

"Another harvester is producing the wrong materials," Sylvia Fernald said. "We caught that early, with no damage. We're busy now, checking the other thirty. We've also had signs of instability in a kernel control system; gigawatts of raw radiation if one of those got away. And oddest of all, nonsense reports have been coming in from our remote monitoring systems. They're scattered all over the system. Either our communications are generating batches of spurious signals, or space in the Outer System is filled with bizarre . . . things."

"Things?"

Aybee Smith produced a humorless laugh. "Yeah. Things. Tell him, Sylv."

"Visual phenomena." Sylvia Fernald was clearly uncomfortable with her own words. "Impossible events. I don't believe in them myself, but the people who report them do."