“Good. You know that you will be working closely with Behrooz Wolf, and traveling with him?”
“That’s the plan.”
“I want you to seek a relationship with him. A very close relationship.”
“You mean—you want me to—Surely you don’t want me to—” Turpin chose that moment to give a long, gurgling laugh like water flowing away down a drain, and Sylvia could not finish the sentence.
“I mean a psychological attachment,” Baker said calmly. “And, if possible, even a physical attachment. And I’ll tell you why. Wolf was one of twenty-seven people we considered contacting to help us. He’s the only one left, so we tend to say to ourselves, hey, he was really lucky. Maybe he was lucky. But maybe there’s more than luck involved. Maybe Wolf knows more than he admits, and maybe there’s a good reason why he didn’t get wiped out with the rest. And some reason why he agreed to come here, after first refusing. If so, I need to know all that. Pillow talk is better than truth drugs. If you could get close to him, persuade him to confide in you—”
“I can’t do it!” Sylvia had not listened to anything past Baker’s first sentence. “It’s totally out of the question. I’m willing to do most things, but that’s too much to ask anybody. And anyway,” she added, reaching for a second reason, “I’m sure it’s mutual. He’d never want to look twice at me.”
“Maybe.” Baker stopped stroking Turpin’s back and fixed cool blue eyes on Sylvia. “But maybe not.”
“You’ve seen what Snugger women are like. Short and brown, all fat and hips and breasts. He must think we’re hideous. My God, I’m a foot taller than he is, if I’m an inch. And miles too skinny for Earth taste. And anyway—”
“Anyway,” Turpin said suddenly. “Anyway, anyway, in for a penny-way.” He took off with an excited flapping of black wings, flew up and around in a lurching spiral, and landed leering on Cinnabar Baker’s shoulder.
“You underestimate the effects of prolonged personal interaction,” Baker was saying. She smiled. “In other words, talking leads to touching. And beauty is easy. A few hours in a form-change tank—not that I’m suggesting this, you understand—and you could be Wolf’s ideal of beauty.”
“Never. I’m sorry, but I won’t even consider it. That’s final.” Sylvia stood up. She had to leave as soon as possible, before Cinnabar Baker could try again to talk her into something.
And so much for her own career as a control specialist—her now-blighted career. It had been ruined in the past five minutes.
The last thought was the bitterest of all. When the original summons had come from Cinnabar Baker, Sylvia had been flattered and excited. The quality of her work must have singled her out for special attention. She would be assigned to the visitor from the Inner System because she had unusual competence in form-change and systems work.
Now it was clear that her professional skills had nothing to do with it. Her role was that of convenient female, a lure set out to catch Bey Wolf. And now that she had refused? Cinnabar Baker might say she did not hold it against her, but she would. Sylvia’s career was in tatters.
“Please excuse me now.” She looked at Baker, found no words, and headed blindly for the door.
Cinnabar Baker watched her leave. As expected, Sylvia Fernald had refused—vehemently. But the idea had been planted. Now Sylvia would be unable to meet and work with Behrooz Wolf, without also evaluating him at some level as a prospective partner. And that was all Baker had hoped to achieve.
“Hormones are everything, Turpin,” she said to the bird on her shoulder. “Brains are nice, and looks are nice, and logic’s even nicer; but hormones run the show. For everyone, even for me and you. But we never know it. I hope I wasn’t too hard on Sylvia. Let’s see if she’ll change her mind when she knows him better.”
The night’s work was far from over. Humming softly to herself, Cinnabar Baker bent over the desktop communications unit and reviewed the official statement she had prepared warning the Inner System about their interference in Outer System affairs. It would do. There were a couple of key words that could have been stronger—“demand” instead of “request,” and “intolerable” was better than “impermissible”—but they were easily fixed.
She approved the statement for release. Then she entered coded mode and requested a dedicated circuit for new, real-time communication. There was a moment’s delay pending approval of heliocentric coordinates outside the usual network. That was cleared, using Baker’s own authorization. The scrambling codes were assigned. Finally, on the outermost structures of the harvester, the half-kilometer antenna turned its focused hyperbeam toward a destination deep in the Halo.
Chapter 9
“You can run, you can run, just as fast as you can,
You’ll never get away from the Negentropic Man.”
Cloudland ships were easy to recognize: hydrocarbon hulls, bracing struts of carbon fiber, transparent polymer ports.
Necessity and nature had set the rules. The bodies of the Oort Cloud provided a limited construction kit, little but the first eight elements of the periodic table. Metals were in particularly short supply. Rather than dragging them up the gravity gradient from the Inner System, the Cloudlander fabricating machines had learned to improvise. Less than one-tenth of a percent of the ship that would carry Bey Wolf and Sylvia Fernald to the Sagdeyev space farm was metal, and that fraction would be reduced again in the new models.
Wolf was trying to hold a conversation with Sylvia Fernald as they prepared to leave, but it was difficult going. Two days earlier she had been friendly and at ease with him. He had known it, and so had she. They were strangers, but they had hit it off together in the first few minutes, comfortable with each other’s work style and attitude. He had been pleased at the prospect of working with Fernald—Sylvia, she had asked him to call her that before the first informal planning meeting ended. But today…
Today he had been wringing words out of her, one by one. “This looks as though it will only hold two people. What about Leo Manx, Sylvia? I thought he was planning to come with us.”
“He changed his mind.” Her voice was expressionless. She was staring at the fine black hairs on his forearms and refusing to look him in the eye.
Was that it? His appearance? When he had arrived at the Opik Harvester, Bey had been wearing the long-sleeved, long-legged style of the Inner System. Today he had adopted the scanty uniform of the Cloud-landers, and his physical differences were more apparent. The widespread use of form-change equipment had allowed Earth people to get used to pretty much anything. But the people he had seen on the harvester were all very similar, limited thin or fat variations on a single body type.
She had turned to check fuel and supply status and was bending low over the panel. He moved closer to her, reaching out a muscular arm and stealthily comparing it with her pale, smooth limb. She sensed he was near her and spun around.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.” Bey wondered why he sounded guilty and why her cheeks were flushed. If she stayed that jumpy for the whole trip, it was going to be an unpleasant twenty-four hours. The one accommodation shortage in Cloudland was found in their transit vessels. The McAndrew drive was fine, but the inertial and gravitational forces were balanced only in a small region on the ship’s main axis. Bey and Sylvia would share that space, a cylindrical cabin about seven feet across. Standoffishness would be hard. Sylvia herself was close to seven feet tall.