“Well?” Sylvia Fernald was waiting, her long, slender finger poised above a point on the panel.
The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit, shall lure it back to cancel half a line… Bey sensed himself on the brink of irreversible change, with that waiting finger as its agent. Old Omar the Tentmaker might be warning him. After months of accepting the Dancing Man as a harbinger of madness, perhaps Bey was about to discover darker possibilities. Knowledge might be more dreadful than ignorance.
He was very tired. His head was aching, worse than ever. His mind had turned to mush. And still he sat, unable to speak, unable to nod, and watched that poised digit.
“Well?” Sylvia was becoming impatient. And no wonder. What was wrong with him? He had to understand. Yet he found himself drifting off again into a half-trance, turning his thoughts away from the present…
Bey roused himself. Bad news or not, he had to know.
He sat up, shivered, and nodded. “Run it.”
The screen flickered, went dark, and slowly brightened. There was a splash of sharp images: red men running, dancing, leaping, sitting cross-legged, diving away, all overlaid one on another. Then the multiple exposures faded, and one picture emerged. It was as Bey remembered it, but in terrifying detail. The little man, the sharp-toothed grin, the strutting walk, the backward somersault, the jerky twitch of agile limbs. The voice. It was the same singsong voice, rising at the end of the sentence to frame a not-quite-intelligible question. Bey watched, listened, and was carried away into a dizzying resumption of the past. He reached out to play the sequence again. And again. The fourth time, Sylvia’s hand was there first, pushing him away.
“No more. Not now.” She had seen the expression in his eyes. Bey was far gone in his own fugue.
He sighed. “Aybee did it. He said he would. That was it, you know. Exactly.”
“I know.”
“I have to see it again.” His hand was moving to hers, trying to push her aside. He had no strength in his arm.
“No. Later.” She touched his forehead. As she had suspected, it was hot and sweaty. “Bey, you have to sleep. It’s been too much.”
“I have to see it again. I have to understand it. You see, Sylvia, even now I don’t understand.” His voice was puzzled, a lost voice, but even as he spoke his eyes were closing. In less than thirty seconds he was sound asleep.
He was no threat now. Sylvia watched him for a few minutes. His face was the countenance of the Inner System itself: dark, older, guarded. She reached out and moved him so that he could not see the display. He sighed in his sleep but did not move from his new position.
She reset the audio input so that she alone would receive it and settled down to play the image sequence over and over. It had meant something personal and disturbing to Bey Wolf, but to her it offered different and more practical mysteries. There had been hints to grasp at even in the first viewing.
She solved the first problem after four runs through Bey’s reconstructed memory sequence. After another look at the controls, she made one adjustment and watched with satisfaction what came onto the screen.
The second problem was not so easy. It depended on a dubious recollection from more than a year ago. Sylvia finally asked for help from the data base on the space farm, seven hours travel ahead of them. They sent an image that confirmed her hunch. Then she settled down to wait for Bey to waken, watching his dark-complexioned face, wanting him to rest but willing him to wake. She was itching to tell him.
He slept for almost six hours. As he woke, he at once turned and reached to turn on the display. She gripped his hand in both of hers. “No. Bey, you don’t need to.”
He stared at her uncomprehendingly, still dazed with sleep.
“Watch,” she said. She made the adjustment to Aybee’s equipment and started the playback.
The Red Man appeared, and still he was speaking. But his singsong words were clear. “You can run, you can run, just as fast as you can, but you’ll never get away from the Negentropic Man.” And then, just before he danced away, off at the right side of the screen, he spoke again. “Don’t you worry, don’t you fear, the Negentropic Man is here!”
Bey sat openmouthed. “What did you do?”
“Time reversal, and slowed it down.” She set out to play it through again. “It was obvious. You’d have seen it, once you’d watched it right through—objectively—a few times. The movements didn’t look right, too jerky, and the intonation was wrong for normal speech. Playing it backward, that’s all it took to make the message clear.” She saw Bey’s shake of the head. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not clear. Not to me. I understand what he’s saying, and maybe Aybee knows how the trick was worked to send me that signal. But what does it mean?”
“Negentropic?”
“That will do for a start. Negentropic. Negative entropy? But that’s just a word.” Bey stood up. He wanted to pace about, but there was not enough space in the cabin to take more than two steps each way. After a moment he sat down again and slapped at his knee in frustration. “Negentropic Why should somebody say he’s the Negentropic Man? Better yet, why would anybody send a message like that to me? I don’t see how a person can have negative entropy—I’m not even sure I understand what entropy is. And I certainly have no idea who’s behind it all.”
“But I do.”
Sylvia’s quiet answer caught Bey off balance. He stared at her. “How can you?”
“I recognized your Dancing Man. I had a suspicion when I first saw him, but I wasn’t sure. While you were asleep I called ahead to tap into the space farm’s data base. And I found I was right.”
“You mean he’s somebody from the Outer System rather than the Inner System? He doesn’t look anything like a Cloudlander.”
“He’s not. And he’s not a Sunhugger, either.” Sylvia was so caught up in her discovery that she forgot to be cautious. She leaned across and gripped Bey’s hands excitedly in hers. “Your Dancing Man isn’t one of us. He lives in the Halo. He’s famous, he’s a rebel, and his name is Black Ransome.”
Chapter 10
“Manx is on the way.” Sylvia floated into the open bubble that looked out to the stars and secured herself next to Bey. “Flying a high-acceleration probe. He’ll be here in twelve hours.”
“He must be keen.” Bey thought for a moment. “And cramped. The hi-probes are emergency equipment—the cabin’s less than six feet across. He won’t have room to turn.”
“He’d better not try—it’s a one-person ship, and Aybee says he’s coming with him.” Sylvia sounded quite cheerful at the thought. If she could survive the forced intimacy of her trip with Bey, she was prepared to let Aybee and Leo Manx suffer through their shorter travel time. “I told him what we found,” she went on. “He can’t wait to see it for himself.”
They were at the space farm and ready to disembark. Bey, accustomed to the formal—and protective—procedures for entry to Inner System ports, was baffled by the absence of quarantine. They had flown to a point near the central hub of the farm and been docked automatically without passing a checkpoint.
“Of course we were checked,” Sylvia said when Bey expressed his surprise. “The computer checked our ship’s ID when we were still hours away.”